Mussulmans can no longer afford to fight each other as of old;
and I know that a reunion of the sects is already an idea with advanced
thinkers. Lastly, the Caliphate would in Arabia be freed from the
incubus of Turkish scholasticism and the stigma of Turkish immorality,
and would have freer scope for what Islam most of all requires, a moral
reformation.
It is surely not beyond the flight of sane imagination to suppose, in
the last overwhelming catastrophe of Constantinople, a council of Ulema
assembling at Mecca, and according to the legal precedent of ancient
days electing a Caliph. The assembly would, without doubt, witness
intrigues of princes and quarrels among schoolmen and appeals to
fanaticism and accusations of infidelity. Money, too, would certainly
play its part there as elsewhere, and perhaps blood might be shed. But
any one who remembers the history of the Christian Church in the
fifteenth century, and the synods which preceded the Council of Basle,
must admit that such accompaniments of intrigue and corruption are no
bar to a legal solution of religious difficulties. It was above all else
the rivalries of Popes and Anti-popes that precipitated the Catholic
Reformation.
FOOTNOTES:
[14] According to Canon Law the Caliph cannot cede any portion of the
lands of Islam except on physical compulsion.
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