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The Sheikh-ul-Islam is considered the holiest personage in Zendjan and his appearance and demeanor does not in the least belie his reputation; whatever may be his private opinion of himself, he makes far less display of sanctimoniousness than many of the common seyuds, who usually gather their garments about them whenever they pass a Ferenghi in the bazaar, for fear their clothing should become defiled by brushing against him.
The Sheikh-ul-Islam is neglected, and though the Kaiser proclaims a Holy War and calls himself Hadji Mohammed Guilliamo, and says the Hohenzollerns are descended from the Prophet, that seems to have fallen pretty flat. The ordinary man again will answer that Islam in Turkey is becoming a back number, and that Krupp guns are the new gods. Yet I don't know.
The way in which the most important mufti places are filled and above all the position which the head-mufti of the Turkish Empire, the Sheikh-ul-Islam, holds at any particular period, may well serve as a touchstone of the influence of the canonists on public life.
The time is past when the Sultan and the Porte, in framing even the most pressing reform, must first anxiously assure themselves of the position that the hojas, tolbas, softas, the theologians in a word, would take towards it, and of the influence that the Sheikh-ul-Islam could use in opposition to their plans.
The Sheikh-ul-Islam fulfils one's idea of a gentle-bred, worthy-minded old patriarch; he examines the bicycle and listens to the account of my journey with much curiosity and interest, and bestows a flattering mead of praise on the wonderful ingenuity of the Ferenghis as exemplified in my wheel.
Under the tyrannical sway of Sultan Abd-ul-Hamid, the Sheikh-ul-Islam was little more than a tool for him and his palace clique, and for their own reasons, the members of the Committee of Union and Progress, who rule at Constantinople since 1908, made no change in this: each new ministry had its own Sheikh-ul-Islam, who had to be, above everything, a faithful upholder of the constitutional theory held by the Committee.
The Caliph and the Sheikh-ul-Islam of the Moslems, the evangelical preachers of the Russian Baltic provinces, Brahmins in India, subjects of the Negus of Abyssinia, the Jews of western Russia and Poland, as well as those of the Netherlands, the Catholics of Switzerland, Holland and Italy, nay, the Vatican itself, raised their voices in the chorus of the millions who sang hosannah to the Highest.
His own time was almost fulfilled. The following spring a dozen high officials, with the assent of the Sheikh-ul-Islam and the active dissent of no one, took Abdul Aziz from his throne to a prison, wherein two days later he perished, probably by his own hand.
In fact, the firmans of reform now and again issued with so much ostentation have never been looked on by good Moslems as binding, because the chief spiritual functionary, the Sheikh-ul-Islam, whose assent is needed to give validity to laws, has withheld it from those very ordinances. As he has power to depose the Sultan for a lapse of orthodoxy, the result may be imagined.