between the later history of schools which at one time presented so many similar features? Why has Musulman learning stood still in the stage it reached many centuries ago, while Christian learning, developing and transforming itself, has continually advanced? Why has El Azhar actually gone back? Why does it accomplish nothing to-day for the deepening, or widening, or elevating of Musulman thought?

Of racial differences I say nothing, because to discuss these would carry us too far away from our main subject. Their importance is apt to be overrated, and they are often called in to save the trouble of a more careful analysis, being indeed themselves largely due to historical causes, though causes too far back in the past to be capable of full investigation. Here it is the less necessary to discuss them, because many races have gone to make up the Musulman world, and some of these had attained great intellectual distinction before Islam appeared. Nor will I dwell on the tremendous catastrophe which overwhelmed the Musulman peoples of Western Asia in the twelfth, thirteenth, and fourteenth centuries, when many flourishing seats of arts and letters were overwhelmed by a flood of barbarian invaders, first the Seljukian Turks, then the Mongols of Zinghis Khan, then the Ottoman Turks whose rule has lain like a blight upon Asia Minor, Syria, and Irak for the last fourteen generations of men. Before the Seljuks and the Mongols came, philosophy and learning, science and art, had in some favoured spots reached a development surpassing that of contemporary Christian states, a development which in the schools of Irak and of Persia had wandered far from orthodox Musulman traditions, but which certainly showed that Islam is not incompatible with intellectual development. That culture, however, which had adorned the days of the earlier Khalifs, decayed even in Spain and in Barbary, where it was not destroyed by a savage enemy. It was not strong enough to recover itself in Syria, Asia Minor, or

Egypt, and could neither elevate and refine the Turk nor send up fresh shoots from the root of the tree he had cut down. Even in Persia, though Persia remained a national kingdom, preserving its highly cultivated language and its love of poetry, creative power withered away. While therefore giving full credit to the Arabs, Syrians, and Persians of the earlier Musulman centuries. for their achievements, we are still confronted by the fact that the soil which produced that one harvest has never been able to produce another. Scarcely any Musulman writer has for five hundred years made any contribution to the intellectual wealth of the world. Even the Musulman art we admire at Agra and Delhi, at Bijapur and Ahmedabad, was largely the work of European craftsmen. The majestic mosques of Constantinople are imitations of Byzantine buildings. Thus we are forced back upon the question why the Universities of Islam, with all that they represent, have languished and become infertile.

Among the causes to be assigned we may place first of all the greater intellectual freedom which Christianity, even in its darkest days, permitted. The Koran, being taken as an unchangeable and unerring rule of life and thought in all departments, has enslaved men's minds. Even the divergence of different lines of tradition and the varieties of interpretation of its text or of the Traditions, has given no such opening for a stimulative diversity of comment and speculation as the Christian standards, both the Scriptures themselves, the product of different ages and minds, and the writings of the Fathers, secured for Christian theology.

In the second place, the philosophy, theology, and law of Islam have been less affected by external influences than were those of Christian Europe. Greek literature, though a few treatises were translated and studied by some great thinkers, told with no such power upon the general movement of Musulman thought as it did in Europe, and notably in the fifteenth and sixteenth cen

turies; and Greek influence among Muslims, instead of growing, seems to have passed away.

Thirdly, there has been in the Musulman world an absence of the fertilizing contact and invigorating conflict of different nationalities with their diverse gifts and tendencies. Islam is a tremendous denationalizing force. and has done much to reduce the Eastern world to a monotonous uniformity. The Turks seem to be a race intellectually sterile, and like the peoples of North Africa in earlier days, they did not, when they accepted the religion of Arabia, give to its culture any such new form or breathe into it any such new spirit as did the Teutonic races when they embraced the religion and assimilated. the literature of the Roman world. Only the Persians developed in Sufism a really distinct and interesting type of thought and produced a poetry with a character of its own; and the Persians, being Shiites, have been cut off from the main stream of Musulman development, and have themselves for some centuries past presented the symptoms of a decaying race.

Lastly, the identification of Theology and Law has had a baleful influence on the development of both branches of study. Law has become petrified and casuistical. Religion has become definite, positive, frigid, ceremonial. Theology, in swallowing up law, has itself absorbed the qualities of law. Each has infected the other. In El Azhar theology is taught as if it were law, a narrow sort of law, all authority and no principle. Law is taught as if it was theology, an infallible, unerring, and therefore unprogressive theology. Religious precepts are delivered in El Azhar as matters of external behaviour and ceremony. Some of the duties enjoined, such as prayer, are wholesome in themselves; some, such as almsgiving, are laudable in intention, but beneficial in result only when carried out with intelligence and discrimination; some, such as pilgrimage to Mecca, are purely arbitrary. All, however, are dealt with from the outside all become mechanical, and the precise

regulations for performing them quench the spirit which ought to vivify them. The intellect being thus cramped and the soul thus drilled, theology is dwarfed, and its proper development arrested. It is not suffered to create, or to help in the creation of, philosophy: and accordingly in El Azhar, philosophy, in that largest sense in which it is the mother of the sciences, because embodying the method and spirit whence each draws its nutriment, finds no place at all.

We are thus brought back to that general question of the relations of religion and law in the Musulman world from which, in the interest naturally roused by the sight of a University recalling the earlier history of Oxford and Cambridge, I have been led to turn aside.

The identification of religion and law rests upon two principles. One is the recognition by Islam of the Koran as a law divinely revealed, covering the whole sphere of man's thought and action. Being divine it is unerring and unchangeable.

The other is the promulgation of this revelation through a monarch both temporal and spiritual, Muhamad, the Prophet of God.

Since the revealed law is unerring, it cannot be questioned, or improved, or in any wise varied. Hence it becomes to those who live under it what a coat of mail would be to a growing youth. It checks all freedom of development and ultimately arrests growth, the growth both of law and of religion.

Since the revelation comes through a prophet who is also a ruler of men, a king and judge, as well as an inspired guide to salvation, it is conveyed in the form of commands. It is a body of positive rules, covering the whole of the Muslim's conduct towards God and towards his fellow men.

Three results follow of necessity.

Religion tends to become a body of stereotyped observances, of duties which are prescribed in their details, and which may be discharged in an almost me

chanical way. The Faith is to be held, but held as a set of propositions, which need not be accompanied by any emotion except the sense of absolute submission to the Almighty. Faith, therefore, has not the same sense as it has in the New Testament. It is by works, not by faith (save in so far as faith means the acceptance of the truths of God's existence and of the prophetic mission of Muhamad) that a Muslim is saved. There is little room for the opposition of the letter and the spirit, of the law and grace, for religion has been legalized and literalized. Nevertheless there is in many Muslims a vein of earnest piety, and a piety which really affects conduct. Those Westerners who have praised Islam have often admired it for the wrong things. They admire the fierce militant spirit, and the haughty sense of superiority it fosters. They undervalue the stringency with which it enforces certain moral duties, and the genuine, if somewhat narrow piety which it forms in the better characters.

Law becomes a set of dry definite rules instead of a living organism. It is a mass of enactments dictated by God or His mouthpiece, instead of a group of principles, each of which possesses the power of growth and variation. The two motive powers, whether one calls them springs of progress or standards of excellence, which guided the development and made the greatness of Roman Law, the idea of the Law of Nature and the idea of Utility, as an index to the law of nature, are absent. There is no room for them where the divine revelation has once for all been delivered. Reason gets no fair chance, because Authority towers over her. Forbidden to examine the immutable rules, she is reduced to weave a web of casuistry round their application. It is only through the interpretation of the sacred text and of the traditions that the Law can be amended or adapted to the needs of a changing world: and one reason why the Musulman world changes so little is to be found in the unchangeability of its Sacred Law. The difficul