The position of the other Muslim sects we have already seen. Of Shi‘ite rulers, there are the Imamites in Persia; scattered Zaydites still in south Arabia and fugitive in Africa; strange secret bodies of Isma‘ilians—Druses, Nusayrites, Assassins—still holding their own in mountain recesses, forgotten by the world; oldest of all, the Sharifs of Morocco, who are Sunnites and antedate all theological differences, holding only by the blood of the Prophet. At Zanzibar, Uman and the Mzab in Algeria are the descendants of the Kharijites. Probably, somewhere or other, there are some fossilized descendants of every sect that has ever arisen, either to trouble the peace of Islam or to save it from scholastic decrepitude and death. Insurrections and heresies have their own uses.
It only remains to make mention of two modern movements which have deeply affected the Islam of to-day. The Pan-Islamic movement, noticed above, strives as much as anything to bring the Muslim world into closer touch with the science and thought of the Christian world, rallying all the Muslim peoples at the same time round the Ottoman Sultan as their spiritual head and holding fast by the kernel of Islam. It is a reform movement whose trend is forward. The other two, to which we now come, are reform movements also, but their trend is backward. They look to the good old days of early Islam and try to restore them.
The first is that of the Wahhabites, so called from Muhammad ibn Abd al-Wahhab (Slave of the Bountiful), its founder, a native of Najd in central Arabia, who died in 1787. His aim was to bring Islam back to its primitive purity and to do away with all the usages and beliefs which had arisen to cloud its absolute monotheism. But attempts at reformation in Islam have never led to anything but the founding of new dynasties. They may begin with a saintly reformer, but in the first or the second generation there is sure to come the conquering disciple; religion and rule go together, and he who meddles with the one must next grasp at the other. The third stage is the extinction of the new dynasty and the vanishing of its party into a more or less secret sect, the vitality of which is again directed into religious channels. The Wahhabites were no exception. Their rule extended from the Persian Gulf to the Red Sea, touched al-Yaman and Hadramawt and included some districts of the Pashalik of Baghdad. That was early in the nineteenth century; but now, after many dynastic changes, the rule of the Wahhabites proper has almost ceased, although the Turks have not gained any new footing in Najd. There, a native Arab dynasty has sprung up which is free from Turkish control in every respect, and has its seat in Ha’il. But the zeal of the Wahhabites gave an impulse to reform in the general body of Muslims which is not yet, by any means, extinct. Especially in India, their views have been widely spread by missionaries, and at one time there was grave fear of a Wahhabite insurrection. But dead parties in Islam seldom rise again, and the life of Wahhabism has passed into the Muslim Church as a whole. Politically it has failed, but the spirit of reform remains and has undoubtedly influenced the second reform movement to which we now come.
BROTHERHOOD OF AS-SANUSI
That is the Brotherhood of as-Sanusi, founded in 1837 by Muhammad ibn Ali as-Sanusi in order to reform and spread the faith. The tendency to organize has always been strong among Orientals, and in Islam itself there have risen, as we have seen, from the earliest times, secret societies for conspiracy and insurrection. But apart from these dubious organizations, religious feeling has also expressed itself in brotherhoods closely corresponding to the monastic orders of Europe, except that they were, and are, self-governing and under no relations but those of sentiment to the head of the Muslim Faith. Rather, these orders of darwishes have been inclined toward heresies of a mystical and pantheistic type more than toward the development and support of the severely scholastic theology of orthodox Islam. This is a side of Muhammadanism with which we shall have to deal in some detail hereafter. In the meantime, it is enough to say that the Brotherhood of as-Sanusi is one of the orders of darwishes, but distinguished from all its predecessors in its severely reforming and puritanic character. It has taken up the task of the Wahhabites and is working out the same problem in a rather different way. Its principles are of the strictest monotheism; all usages and ideas that do not accord with their views of the exact letter of the Qur’an are prohibited. The present head of the Brotherhood, the son of the founder, who himself died in 1859, claims to be the Mahdi and has established a theocratic state at Jarabub, in the eastern Sahara, between Egypt and Tripolis. The mother house of the order is there, and from it missionaries have gone out and established other houses throughout all north Africa and Morocco and far into the interior. The Head himself has of late retreated farther into the desert. There is also an important centre at Mecca, where the pilgrims and the Bedawis are initiated into the order in great numbers. From Mecca these brethren return to their homes all over the Muslim world, and the order is said to be especially popular in the Malay Archipelago.
THE PROBLEM OF THE FUTURE
So there has sprung up in Islam, in tremendous ramifications, an imperium in imperio. All the brethren in all the degrees—for, just as in the monastic orders of Europe, there are active members and lay members—reverence and pay blind obedience to the Head in his inaccessible oasis in the African desert. There he works toward the end, and there can be little doubt what that end will be. Sooner or later Europe—in the first instance, England in Egypt and France in Algeria—will have to face the bursting of this storm. For this Mahdi is different from him of Khartum and the southern Sudan in that he knows how to rule and wait; for years he has gathered arms and munitions, and trained men for the great Jihad. When his plans are ready and his time is come, a new chapter will be opened in the history of Islam, a chapter which will cast into forgetfulness even the recent volcanic outburst in China. It will then be for the Ottoman Sultan of the time to show what he and his Khalifate are worth. He will have to decide whether he will throw in his lot with a Mahdi of the old Islam and the dream of a Muslim millennium, or boldly turn to new things and carry the Successorship and the People of Muhammad to join the civilized world.