right of private interpretation of the Koran and of the Traditions; third, the prohibition of all forms and ceremonies with which the pure faith has been overlaid in the lapse of centuries; finally-and this is the only part to be regretted in the movement-he reasserted the obligation to wage war upon the infidel. In 1803 Wahhab's successors took the holy cities, and desecrated the sacred mosque at Mecca and the Prophet's tomb at Medina, to save them from the greater desecration, as it seemed to those Puritans of the Desert, involved in the almost Divine honours lavished on them by ignorant or profligate pilgrims.

Here was an act upon the significance of which we may well dwell for a moment, and endeavour, by comparing it with somewhat parallel and betterknown cases, to realise what it must have seemed like then, and what it proves about Mohammedanism now. Imagine the feelings of pious Jews when their most religious king broke into pieces the relic of relics, the memorial of the Divine deliverance and of their desert life, and stigmatised it as a bit of brass! Imagine, if you can, the feelings of the Apostles when it dawned upon them that one of their number, even then, was a traitor in his heart! Imagine, to take a parallel case suggested by Dr. Hunter, Mediæval Christendom, when the news spread that Bourbon's

1 Hunter, p. 59.

cut-throats were installed in the Vatican, and that the head of the Christian Church had been taken captive by a revolted subject of the Church's eldest son! Imagine Luther, when in the fervour of youthful enthusiasm he visited the Rome of the Martyrs and of the Apostles, and found it to be the Rome of the Papacy, the Rome of impostures and indulgences, of the Borgias and the Medici! And we can then picture to ourselves the thrill of horror that must have passed through the orthodox Musalman world when they heard that a sect of reformers, whose one idea of reform was a return to the life and doctrine of the Prophet, had rifled the mosque whose immemorial sanctity the Prophet had himself increased by making it the Kiblah of the world, and had even violated the Prophet's tomb. Imagine, on the other hand, what it must have cost the Wahhabis to have, like Luther, the courage of their convictions, to appear to stultify themselves, to dishonour their Prophet, and all that they might make their religion the spiritual religion that it had once been! And then say if you can, that Mohammedanism has no power of self-reform, and is dying gradually of inanition!

Beaten down at last by the strong arm of Mohammed Ali, Pasha of Egypt in 1812, helped, I regret to say, by Englishmen, the Wahhabis disappeared

temporarily from Arabia,' only to reappear in 1821 in India, under the leadership of the prophet Syed Ahmed; and the despised sect of Wahhabis are now, perhaps, the real ruling spirit of Musalman politics in India, and enjoy the singular honour of having, as much, no doubt, by their gloomy fanaticism as by their moral lives and their missionary zeal, attracted to themselves considerable attention even from their English rulers at home. Puritans of the Puritans of Islam, they are despised and hated by the so-called orthodox Musalmans, as the Lutherans were hated by Leo, and the Covenanters by Claverhouse.

And it must be remembered that Wahhabiism, while it denounces, as I have shown, all the existing forms of Islam, and, in its turn, is denounced by them, has yet done much outside of the sphere of its immediate influence to purify the Faith, and to reform abuses throughout the Musalman world. The Reformation, it has often been observed, did as much good for Europe by the reforms which it drove the nations who rejected it, for very shame, to introduce for themselves, as by what it did directly for those German

For a graphic and not very favourable account of the Wahhabi Empire as it exists now in Arabia, and its seat of Government at Riad, see Palgrave's 'Arabia,' Chap. IX.-XIII. There are one or two passages in this account―e. g., Vol. I. 365-373, 427-437—in which I cannot but think, with all my admiration for Mr. Palgrave's varied powers, that he has not been, even on his own showing elsewhere, altogether fair to Islam as a system.

MOHAMMEDAN REVIVAL.

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peoples who threw off for ever the yoke of Rome. Even so has Wahhabiism compelled many who are anything but Wahhabis to reform the most crying abuses, and so to make the discrepancy between their practice and their creed less glaring than it was before.

The extraordinary phenomena attending the great religious movement called Bâbyism now going on in Persia, the ecstatic martyrdoms and the prodigality of tortures submitted to amidst songs of triumph by women and children, the followers of the 'Bâb,' are well worth the study of all who are interested in the history of religion; and, however we explain the facts, much that I have said of Wahhabiism may, mutatis mutandis, be said of it; and at all events its existence is a standing proof that Persian Mohammedanism possesses so much of vitality as is necessary to adapt an old creed to a new belief.1

When I first wrote the above paragraphs on the power of revival which I conceive to be inherent in Islam, I did not know that my words were at that very time being illustrated in the most striking way, not only in India and Persia and Arabia upon which I then dwelt, but also throughout the Asiatic dominions of the Ottoman Sultans. Since then Mr. Palgrave's most interesting Essays on Eastern Questions'

1 See Gobineau, Les Religions et les Philosophies dans l'Asie Centrale,' p. 141-215.

have come into my hands; and I find in them both evidence to show that there is such a revival, and a graphic account of its leading symptoms,

Secular and denominational schools are everywhere giving place to schools of the most strictly Musalman type. Mosques which were deserted are now crowded with worshippers; mosques which were in ruins are rebuilt. There is a general reaction, not perhaps to be wondered at, against the employment in public offices of the European and the Christian. Wine and spirit shops are closed, for their trade is gone except among the Levantine residents. Even opium and tobacco are becoming luxuries which are not forbidden only, but forsaken.

Add to this, what Mr. Palgrave has also shown, that a new nation is as it were growing up under our eyes in Eastern Anatolia, rich with all the elements of a vigorous national and religious life; and we shall then have reason to believe that though the Ottoman supremacy may pass away, as Khalifs and Sultans, Attabeks and Khans, Padishahs and Moguls, have passed away before them, yet Islam itself is a thing of indestructible vitality, and may thrive the more when rid of the magnificent corruptions and the illusory prestige of the Stambul successors of the Prophet. In truth, Islam has existed for centuries in spite of Oth manli rule, and not because of it; and this the