is, or may be if he likes, a teacher, and graduation is nothing more
than a certificate of knowledge qualifying a man to teach.
In both, comparatively slender funds, which however increase slowly by
the gifts of private benefactors. The whole establishment of El Azhar
costs about £14,000 sterling a year, rather more than half of which goes
in salaries to the professors, while about £1,600 goes in prizes and
charitable aid to the students. Eight thousand (roughly speaking) are
taught there at a cost of £1 15s. per student. The University of Oxford
and its colleges (taken together) with about three thousand
undergraduate students have an annual revenue of about £333,000[103];
Harvard University in Massachusetts with nearly four thousand students
has £235,000 (of which tuition fees contribute £114,000).
-----
Footnote 103:
Of this sum (which has been arrived at after deducting outgoings on
estates, so that as respects this kind of property it represents net
revenue) £55,000 is the revenue of the University and £278,000 the
revenue of all the Colleges, including fees and room rents.
-----
In both, the greatest freedom for the student. He may study as much or
as little as he pleases, may select what professor he pleases, may live
where he pleases, may stay as long as he pleases, and may be examined or
not as he pleases.
In both, a narrow circle of subjects and practically no choice of
curriculum. El Azhar teaches even fewer branches than did Oxford or
Bologna in the thirteenth century, for in Musulman countries the Koran
has swallowed up other topics more than theology, queen of the sciences,
and the study of the Civil and Canon Laws did in Europe. But a vast
range of matters which are to-day taught in German, in American, and
even in English Universities lie outside both the Trivium and Quadrivium
and the professional faculties as they stood in the Middle Ages.
In both, little separation between teachers and pupils, and a mixture of
students of all ages, from boys of twelve to men of fifty. In Oxford
there is a tradition that marbles used to be played by students on the
steps of the Schools. Why not, when one sees boys of twelve learning to
read the Koran at El Azhar? Oxford may well have been then, like this
mosque now, a school for persons of all ages.
In both, a body of men liable to turbulence, and easily roused by
political passion. A multitude living together without family ties or
regular industrial occupation is prone to fanaticism; and the students
of El Azhar, like the Softas at Constantinople, like the monks of
Alexandria in the days of Cyril and Hypatia, have sometimes raised
tumults; though these would be repressed more savagely here, should they
displease the ruling powers, than were those for which Paris and Oxford
were famous in days when their scholars were fired by religious or
political excitement, and when the movements of public opinion and the
tendencies we now call democratic found through the eager crowd of
university youth their most free and prompt expression.
Finally, in both, a kind of teaching and study which tends to the
development of two aptitudes to the neglect of all others, viz. memory
and dialectic ingenuity. The first business of the student is to know
his text-book, if necessary to know every word of it, together with the
different interpretations every obscure text may bear. His next is to be
prepared to sustain by quick keen argument and subtle distinction either
side of any controverted question which may be proposed for discussion.
As the habit of knowing text-books thoroughly—and the knowledge of
Aristotle and the Corpus Juris possessed by mediaeval logicians and
lawyers was wonderfully exact and minute—made men deferential to
authority and tradition, so the constant practice in oral dialectical
discussion made men quick, keen, fertile, and adroit in argument. The
combination of brilliant acuteness in handling points not yet settled,
with unquestioning acceptance of principles and maxims determined by
authority, is characteristic of Muhamadan Universities even more than it
was of European ones in the Middle Ages, and tended in both to turn men
away from the examination of premises and to cast the blight of
barrenness upon the extraordinary inventiveness and acuteness which the
habit of casuistical discussion develops. And the parallel would
probably have been closer could it have been drawn between the Musulman
Schools, not as they are now, but as they were during the great age in
Bagdad, in Spain and in Egypt, and the schools of Western Europe in the
days of Abelard or Duns Scotus. For El Azhar to-day impresses one as a
University where both thought and teaching are in a state of decline,
where men gnaw the dry bones of dogmas and rules which have come down
from a more creative time.
To what causes shall we ascribe the striking contrast 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 centuries; 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 mechanical 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 Westerns 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 difficulties which European
Powers have found in their efforts—efforts which to be sure have been
neither zealous nor persistent—to obtain reforms in the Ottoman Empire,
are largely due to the fact that the Sacred Law has a higher claim on
Muslim obedience than any civil enactment proceeding from the secular
monarch.
Such a system will obviously give little scope for the development of a
legal profession. Advocacy is unknown in Musulman countries. The parties
conduct their respective cases before the Kadi[104]. They may produce to
him opinions signed by doctors of the law in favour of their respective
contentions, but the only notion the Musulman (_i.e._ the
non-Occidentalized Musulman) can form of an advocate in our sense of the
word is a paid, and presumably false, witness.
-----
Footnote 104:
Whether this system tends to facilitate the bribing of judges, almost
universal in countries ruled by a Musulman monarch, _quaere_.
-----
The community suffers politically. The duty of unquestioning obedience,
and the habit of blind submission to authority, dominate and pervade the
Musulman mind so completely that its only idea of government is
despotism. Nothing approaching to a free ruling assembly, either primary
or representative, has sprung up in a Musulman country; and it would
need almost an intellectual revolution to make such a system acceptable
or workable there[105].
-----
Footnote 105:
I do not mean to suggest that races like those of Arabia, Syria, and
Persia, may not under the contact and stimulus of European literature
and thought again develop an intellectual life of their own. But it
can hardly be a life on the orthodox lines of Islam. The first thing
to be hoped for is that Syria and Asia Minor may get rid of the Turk,
who has never shown himself fit for anything but fighting.
-----
Finally, it is a consequence of the system described that there is an
absolute identity of State and Church. The Church is the State, but it
is a highly secular State, wanting many of the attributes we associate
with the Church. It commands as a matter of course the physical force of
the State, and needs no special anathemas of its own. Its priests, so
far as it can be said to have priests, are lawyers, and its lawyers are
priests, and its students graduate from the University into what is one
and the same profession. As the Church is pre-eminently a militant
Church, born and nursed in war, its head, the Khalif, is also of right
supreme temporal sovereign. The Pope is Emperor, and the Emperor is
Pope. They are not two offices which one man may fill, as the Emperor
Maximilian wished to be chosen Pope. They are one office. And
accordingly when any spiritual pretender arises, claiming to be a
prophet of God, he becomes forthwith, _ex necessitate terminorum_, a
temporal ruler, like the Mahdi of the Sudan at the present moment
(1888). The only exception to this absolute identification of Church and
State (which is of course a fact making most powerfully for despotism)
is to be found in the incompetency of the Khalif to pronounce upon the
interpretation of the sacred law. This attribute of the Pope is lacking.
The spiritual head of the Musulman world, for this purpose, and
therewith also its legal head, is a lawyer, the Sheik-ul-Islam, to whom
it belongs to deliver authoritative interpretations of questions arising
on the law, _i.e._ on the Koran and the Traditions. Such an opinion is
called a Fetwa. Against it even a Khalif cannot act without forfeiting
his right to the obedience of his subjects, so when any Sovereign
claiming to be Khalif wishes to do something of questionable legality,
he takes care to procure beforehand from the Sheik-ul-Islam a fetwa
covering the case. Being in the Khalif’s power, the Sheik rarely
hesitates, yet he is in a measure amenable to the opinion of his own
profession, and might be reluctant to venture too far. So too the
Khalif, though he might depose a recalcitrant Sheik (were such a one
ever to be found), and replace him by a more pliant instrument, must
also have regard to public sentiment, a power always formidable in the
sphere of religion, and the more formidable the more the mind of a
people is removed from the influence of habits properly political, and
is left to be coloured by religious feeling.
Islam owes these features of its religion, its law and its politics to
its source in a divine revelation complete, final, and peremptory. But
it is not the only religion that has a like source. The Musulmans class
three religious communities as Peoples of the Book. The other two are
the Jews and the Christians. Of the Jews I have spoken already. Their
system, as it stood at the time of our Lord’s appearing, resembled in
many points that which Islam subsequently created, though there was
never in it any complete identification of the spiritual and the secular
power, because it had a regular hereditary priesthood, which, though for
a time acting as leader and ruler, had no permanent coercive secular
authority. The Jewish system had, moreover, in the words of the Prophets
and in the Psalms influences complementary to the Mosaic law and the
Traditions, and corrective of any evils which might spring from undue
respect for the latter. Moreover, the historical development of that
system was checked by external conquering forces, which ultimately
deprived it of the chance of becoming a temporal power.
What, however, shall we say of Christianity? Why has the course of its
history been so unlike that of Islam? Why has its origin in a divine
revelation not impressed upon it features like those we have been
considering? I must be content to indicate, without stopping to
describe, a few, and only a few, of the more salient causes.
The Christian revelation as contained in the Old and New Testaments is
not, except as regards sections of the Mosaic law, a series of commands.
It is partly a record of events, partly a body of poems, partly a series
of addresses, discourses, and reflections, speculative, hortatory, or
minatory, and mostly cast in a poetic form, and partly a collection of
precepts. These precepts are all, or nearly all, primarily moral
precepts, which are addressed to the heart and conscience, and they
proceed from teachers who had no compulsive power, so that such
authority as the precepts possess is due only to their intrinsic worth,
or to the belief that they express the Divine will. Especially in the
case of the New Testament (though the same thing is essentially true of
the Prophets) the precepts are directed not so much to the enjoining of
specific right acts fit to be done as to the creation of a spirit and
temper out of which right acts will naturally flow. Had the Pentateuchal
law been taken over bodily into Christianity, things might have been
different, though the other elements of the revelation would have kept
its influence in check. But fortunately among the forces that were at
work in the primitive Church, there were some strongly anti-Judaic, so
any evil that might have been feared from that quarter was averted.
It is impossible to make a code out of the New Testament. The largest
collection of positive precepts, delivered with the most commanding
authority, is that contained in the fifth, sixth, and seventh chapters
of St. Matthew’s Gospel. But these are so far from being laws in the
ordinary sense of the word that no body of Christians has ever yet come
near to obeying them. Indeed hardly any body of Christians has ever
seriously tried to do so. They are obviously addressed to the heart and
intended not so much to prescribe acts as to implant principles of
action.
Similarly the Epistles are either moral exhortations and expositions of
duty or else metaphysical discussions. Neither out of them can any code
be framed which a lawgiver could attempt to enforce. Even on the
external observances of religion and constitution of the Church, so
little is said, and said in such general terms, that Christians have
been occupied during the last four centuries in debating what it was
that the authors of the Epistles meant to enjoin.
After the canonical Scriptures come the Fathers of the Church, whose
writings were at one time universally, and by a large part of
Christendom still are, deemed to enjoy a high measure of authority. They
may be compared to those early Musulman writers from whom the traditions
of Islam descend, or to the early recorders of and commentators on those
traditions. The Fathers, however, did not generally affect to lay down
positive rules, but were occupied with exhortation and discussion.
Neither out of their treatises could a body of law be framed, nor did
any one think of doing this till long after their day. Even then it was
as guides in doctrine and discipline, not as the source of legal rules,
that they were usually cited.
Christianity began its work not only apart from all the organs of
secular power, but in the hope of creating—indeed for a time, in the
confidence that it would create—a new society wherein brotherly love
should replace law.