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Modern Moslem liberalism, as we have seen, received its first encouragement from the discovery of the old Motazelite literature of nearly a thousand years before. To be sure, Islam had never been quite destitute of liberal minds. Even in its darkest days a few voices had been raised against the prevailing obscurantism.
The great "Motazelite" movement embraced many shades of thought, its radical wing professing religious, political, and social doctrines of a violent revolutionary nature. But this changeful period was superficial and brief. Arab vigour and the Islamic spirit proved unable permanently to leaven the vast inertia of the ancient East.
Standards of dogmatic orthodoxy were established, Motazelites were persecuted and put to death, and by the twelfth century A.D. the last vestiges of Saracenic liberalism were extirpated. The canons of Moslem thought were fixed. All creative activity ceased. The very memory of the great Motazelite doctors faded away. The Moslem mind was closed, not to be re-opened until our own day.
Motazelite voices were heard recalling the democratic days of the Meccan caliphate, when the Commander of the Faithful, instead of being an hereditary monarch, was elected by the people and responsible to public opinion.
Now, however, those memories were revived, and the liberal-minded reformers were delighted to find such striking confirmation of their ideas, both in the writings of the Motazelite doctors and in the sacred texts themselves. The principle that reason and not blind prescription was to be the test opened the door to the possibility of all those reforms which they had most at heart.
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