to reduce the world to its authority by force of arms, it saw only an enemy whose annihilation was, to its regret, beyond its power. Such an enemy it could no more observe impartially than one modern nation can another upon which it considers it necessary to make war. Everything maintained or invented to the disadvantage of Islâm was greedily absorbed by Europe; the picture which our forefathers in the Middle Ages formed of Mohammed's religion appears to us a malignant caricature. The rare theologians[1] who, before attacking the false faith, tried to form a clear notion of it, were not listened to, and their merits have only become appreciated in our own time. A vigorous combating of the prevalent fictions concerning Islâm would have exposed a scholar to a similar treatment to that which, fifteen years ago, fell to the lot of any Englishman who maintained the cause of the Boers; he would have been as much of an outcast as a modern inhabitant of Mecca who tried to convince his compatriots of the virtues of European policy and social order.
Two and a half centuries ago, a prominent Orientalist,[2] who wrote an exposition of Mohammed's teaching, felt himself obliged to give an
- ↑ See for instance the reference to the exposition of the Paderborn bishop Olovers (1227) in the Paderborn review Theologie und Glaube, Jahrg. iv., p. 535, etc. (Islâm, iv., p. 186); also some of the accounts mentioned in Güterbock, Der Islâm im Lichte der byzantinischen Polemik, etc.
- ↑ J. H. Hottinger, Historia Orientalis, Zürich, 1651 (2d edition 1660).
