We have now brought the history of the Caliphate down to the period
described in the last chapter as one of intellectual torpor for Islam.
It was a lethargy from which there seemed no awakening, and which to
contemporaries, Voltaire among the rest, seemed closely approximating to
the death of unbelief. In spite of Soliman's eternal arrangements, the
temporal power of the house of Othman was wofully diminished, and the
spiritual prestige of the Sultans was gone with Mussulmans. By the
middle of the last century the title of Caliph, even in their own
dominions, was all but forgotten, and the Court of Constantinople was
become a byword for its vice and infidelity. It can therefore be well
imagined that the awakening of religious feeling, which I also described
as having been produced by the Wahhabite movement, especially menaced
the Sultan in his Caliphal pretensions. By the beginning of the present
century the serious world of Islam was already ripening for a change,
and the title of the Caliphate seemed open to whoever should re-invent
and prove himself worthy to wear it. Two men certainly then dreamed of
its acquisition, both men of supreme genius, and holding the elements of
success in their hands.
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