Students of
the Sheriat have not inaptly compared the Koranic law to a dead man's
hand, rigid and cold, and only to be loosened when the hand itself shall
have been cut away. It has been asserted that the first rule of
Mohammedan thought has been that change was inadmissible, and
development of religious practice, either to right or left of the narrow
path of mediaeval scholasticism, absolutely precluded. I know this, and I
know, too, that a vast array of learned Mohammedan opinion can be cited
to prove this to be the case, and that very few of the modern Ulema of
any school of divinity would venture openly to impugn its truth. Nor
have I forgotten the repeated failure of attempts made in Turkey within
the last fifty years to gain religious assent to the various legal
innovations decreed by Sultan after Sultan in deference to the will of
Europe, nor the fate which has sometimes overtaken those who were the
advocates of change. I know, according to all rule written and spoken by
the orthodox, that Islam cannot move, and yet in spite of it I answer
with some confidence in the fashion of Galileo, "E pur si muove."
The fact is, Islam does move. A vast change has come upon Mohammedan
thought since its last legal Mujtahed wrote his last legal opinion; and
what was true of orthodox Islam fifty and even twenty years ago is no
longer true now.
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