Charles T. Paul

“ Mann does not seem to know that the present Baha'l movement, which he hails as the capital proof of his "development" thesis, has openly broken with Islam. Its mystical eclecticism and broad universal ism are utterly irreconcilable with the Koran. Nor can the Panjabic Ahmadiyya movement, whose founder announced himself at once Krishnaite Avatar, Moslem Mahdi and Christian Messiah, be claimed as a purely Islamic way-mark of indigenous culture, despite the anti-Christian declamations of Mirza Ghulam Ahmed. ”

“ The dazzling era of arts, sciences, letters and commerce which reached the zenith of its splendor under the Abbasside Caliphs at Baghdad, brought even Europe to the feet of Saracenic learning, and contributed to the West a precious heritage. But of the culture thus developed and communicated two facts are abundantly confirmed by the latest researches, viz: (i) the Arab conquerors derived and compounded their new civilization largely from the pre-Islamic cultures of India, Persia and Byzantium. ”

“ The modern assassins may wash their hands in innocence! Islam's general ailment, according to Dr. Mann, is not one of corruption but only of ^disruption. The bones are broken but the blood is pure. Islam has not failed because of inherent incompetence or insufficiency to meet progressively the higher needs of man, but because, through no fault of its own, it lost its political solidarity and has been prevented from making "any essential progress for seven centuries" (p. Iio) . ”

“ A man of many faults, conceiving himself to be the chosen of Allah, "a mighty devotee of God and eternity," he confounded the human and the divine by unconsciously yielding to the temptation which Christ withstood with the words, "My kingdom is not of this world." He is finally summed up as "the powerfully stirred man of God who became a politician, or, rather, a genuine Arabian robber-prince"—{ein echt arabischer Raubfiirst) —himself unaware of his spiritual decline (pp. 44-47) . So, in the end, Dr. Mann gives us quite as paradoxical and mysterious a Mohammed as does the Koran itself ”

“ Education, commerce, literature, travel, material exploitation from the West—these are legitimate as bringers of fertile stimulus to indigenous development, but the Gospel is the great hindrance because it is Western! He lauds the mission schools of Turkey, for their "superb and gigantic accomplishments in education," but is in desperate haste to have them superseded by national schools, ere they contaminate the land with Western civilization. Dr. Mann thinks of Christianity in terms of limitation. ”

“ But where indeed does the West begin? Does Dr. Mann not observe that the whole East is astir with Occidental leaven? As to the forms of the future Oriental culture, no one wants them to be Western. But if the Moslem East should be reborn with a Christian soul, would that not be something far transcending the further culture of the obsolescent? Dr. Mann leaves us unconvinced that anything less than the spiritual regeneration which Christ alone can impart, will meet the present need of the Moslem world.
This manual will never serve as a mission study text-book on Islam. ”

“ The five colored maps show the bygone kingdoms of the Caliphate, the shifting boundaries of the Othman dominion from 1359 to 1913, and the parts of the world now religiously occupied by Islam.
A word must be said about the seductiveness of such a book. Overemphasis on the beautiful has its dangers even in historical writing. It is to be feared, an unsophisticated reader would get from Dr. Mann a far too roseate view of what Mohammedan civilization has been and is. ”

“ Mann conceives, to meet the awakening needs of the modern East. Looking backward the sober historian contemplates a series of quick and usually violent aggressions, brilliant up-soarings, and rapid assimilations, followed by equally rapid dissolutions and abysmal collapses. In no case has Islam demonstrated capacity either to originate or to uphold permanently a high type of progressive culture. ”

“ Mann's confidence that Islam can fashion out of "its own spirit and foundations" a modernized culture of emancipation and progress—■ which shall be distinctively Oriental and still essentially Moslem, he rests chiefly on the reform movements with which Islam has bristled since almost its beginnings, and especially upon the newer movements now active in various countries. ”

“ Here the dispassionate historian loses his critical acumen to indulge in theoretical musings, dangerously akin to the ex-Kaiser's flattering compromise when, in 1898, that world-aspiring monarch consorted with the Sultan at Constantinople, linked Pan-Islamism with German propaganda, and, as "Hadji Wilhelm," at Damascus, decked the sepulcher of Saladin with flowers. ”

“ Zwemer's The influence of Animism on Islam, Macmtllian, 1920. civilization, that shall take its place in the modern age. Apparently he is not discouraged by what thirteen centuries have actually brought forth in lands moulded by Koranic tradition; for, hidden and astir in the soil of Islam, he thinks, are the seeds of its own redemption. Islam has shown, he says, a far greater genius of adaptability than has Christianity ”

“ It is pertinent to inquire whether, in the more distant past, there is anything which reasonably nourishes the expectation that the Moslem ethos will yet produce and ensoul a self-evolved civilization, at once progressive and enduring, such as Dr. ”