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; therefore, it has power of itself to become for the Orient a thoroughly up-to-date religion, competent to promote and to satisfy the highest demands of spiritual and social life, and to supply a firm foundation for free, progressive government.
This is an astounding thesis. One's faith is severely strained by such optimism, in view of what has transpired within the past fifteen years in the foremost Moslem state—the land of the Holy Caliphate itself. The attempt of the Young Turks, through the Revolution of 1908, to open the gates of a new dawn for the Ottoman Empire, issued in a night of terror. The ideal of a modern constitutional regime of freedom, enlightenment, justice and tolerance collapsed in a new reign of tyranny and horror unsurpassed in the blood-soaked annals of dethroned despotism. The Committee of Union and Progress was swept into the tides of Pan-Islamism and Pan-Turanianism — slogans which register the supreme corporate aspirations of modern Islamic leadership, but at whose revealed content the world has stood aghast. The terrible reaction was perfectly true to Koranic form, and lies at the door of the Moslem creed. In the blaze of the World War Dr. Mann's idealism must have shriveled to ashes. Will fair blossoms of indigenous culture and progress spring from the newest paths of slaughter, lust and loot, which mark the latest Armenian atrocities, all the way from Trebizond to the Syrian Desert, from the Aegean to the Caspian Sea? In the orthodox and efficient barbarism which, with the name of Allah on its lips, has murdered a million people, regardless of age or sex, shall we find the germs of spontaneous redemption?
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. 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. In so far as it has been a constructive force, its role has been that of stimulator, borrower and transmitter rather than that of creator and sustainer. This is seen by a glance at the times and places of its highest ascendancy. By common consent its fairest fabric was the vast Arabian Empire which, a century after Mohammed's death, extended from the Indus to the Guadalquivir. 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. (2) No sooner had it blossomed into the Golden Age of Mohammedan Literature (754-874 A. D.)—the period illustrated by Harun-al-Rashid—than, through the corruption of succeeding caliphs, so-
