In conclusion, I would urge that while it is to Mohammedans themselves that we must look to work out their ultimate regeneration according to the rules of their own law and conscience, Christendom can still do much to influence immediate results. The day of religious hatred between Moslem and Christian as such is, I hope, nearly at an end; and though political strife is unfortunately renewing the old quarrel in North Africa, there is no danger now of its becoming on Europe's part a crusade. Christendom has pretty well abandoned her hopeless task of converting Islam, as Islam has abandoned hers of conquering Europe; and it is surely time that moral sympathy should unite the two great bodies of men who believe in and worship the same God.
England, at least, may afford now to acknowledge Mohammedanism as something not to be merely combated and destroyed, but to be accepted by her and encouraged—accepted as a fact which for good or evil will exist in the world whether she will or no—encouraged because it has in it possibilities of good which she cannot replace by any creed or philosophy of her own. She can do much to help these possibilities, for they depend for the moment on her political action. There is a good cause and a bad in Islam as elsewhere in the world, and though hitherto England's physical help has been given all to evil, it has been through ignorance of the issues at stake; and I am confident that as she learns these, she will acknowledge the wrong she has unconsciously been doing, and repair while there is yet time her error.
In my next and concluding chapter I propose to sketch a policy towards Islam worthy of England's high sense of duty, and conformable to her true interests.
FOOTNOTES:
[16] A remarkable coincidence of prediction, Christian and Mohammedan, has been pointed out to me in Rohrbacher's History of the Church, published in 1845, where by an elaborate calculation based on the Old Testament prophecies he arrives at the conclusion that the Turkish Empire will fall in 1882, the date assigned it also by the Mohammedan prediction quoted in my last chapter—that is to say a.h. 1300.
[17] This claim has been endorsed by Abd el Mutalleb, who is issuing a Resalat rayiyeh, or pastoral letter, this year to the pilgrims in support of Abd el Hamid's Caliphate.