But if we hesitate about passing judgment on the reforms we have just set forth, we acknowledge unreservedly, to make amends, that the education of woman is an imperious necessity for the future of Islam.
Education has nothing to do with the above-mentioned customs. It is in agreement with all the principles of the religion, and during the period of Islamic splendour, was lavished on Mussulman femininity whose culture was superior to that of European women in those days.
In the East, education has never disappeared as completely as in some regions of the Maghrib. During a certain number of years, many Mussulman women passed their leisure harem hours in educating themselves, and their new intellectual birth began to be generalised. From education alone the evolution of manners and customs will proceed wherever it will be necessary in the sense and proportions creating the least amount of trouble in the bosom of families.
CONCLUSION
The knots relating to polygamy and the emancipation of woman (the only questions that give a shadow of right to inimical critics of Islam) once cut, Islam will appear to be what it really is: a religion essentially in conformity with the most modern needs and ideas, so much so that an Englishman, Oswald Wirth, was able to write: 'I discovered, one fine day, that I was a Mussulman, without knowing it, like Monsieur Jourdain with his prose.' In like fashion, Goethe, after having studied the principles of the Qur'an, declared: 'If that is Islam, do we not all live in Islam?'
Very soon, no one will venture to give credence to the childish legends perpetuated since the Crusades, and Islam will at last claim to take its place in the van of modern civilisation....
We were writing the concluding lines when suddenly the most formidable conflict ever know in history broke out in Europe, and thousands of Moslem soldiers, descendants of the warriors of Poitiers, immediately invaded the whole of France.
This time, they came not as conquerors, but as friends; as brothers-in-arms, summoned by the Allies to take part in this gigantic struggle on which depends the fate of civilisation. Their traditional heroism has been admired by all. The French soil is riddled by thousands of their graves, thereby they have implanted Islam for ever in the heart of Europe, in the most glorious way; and a strong contingent of the Prophet's disciples is now in European territory.
After such services rendered, it will be churlish to refuse them the freedom of the city, so to speak, that we have already claimed on their behalf. We go further and ask if it is admissible to think that their example, dealing the last blow at the imputations of the past, may give some Europeans food for fresh reflexion?
Undeceived by the failure of integral rationalism, many anxious minds seek new paths. "The modern system of intuition, towards which they hurry, following Bergson, its celebrated defender, represents decided reaction against rationalism, or to be more exact, against the powerlessness of rationalism....