ceptable to powers who have Mohammedan subjects. But for these subjects the Khalîf is then their true prince, who is temporarily hindered in the exercise of his government, but whose right is acknowledged even by their unbelieving masters.
In yet another respect the canonists need the aid of the temporal rulers. An alert police is counted by them amongst the indispensable means of securing purity of doctrine and life. They count it to the credit of princes and governors that they enforced by violent measures seclusion and veiling of the women, abstinence from drinking, and that they punished by flogging the negligent with regard to fasting or attending public worship. The political decay of Islâm, the increasing number of Mohammedans under foreign rule, appears to them, therefore, doubly dangerous, as they have little faith in the proof of Islâm's spiritual goods against life in a freedom which to them means license.
They find that every political change, in these terrible times, is to the prejudice of Islâm, one Moslim people after another losing its independent existence; and they regard it as equally dangerous that Moslim princes are induced to accommodate their policy and government to new international ideas of individual freedom, which threaten the very life of Islâm. They see the antagonism to all foreign ideas, formerly considered as a virtue by every true Moslim, daily
