Page:The young Moslem looks at life (1937).djvu/171

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the West and against secularism, which will take away religion from education, wants modern laws instead of clerical, and hopes to weaken Islam under the name of nationalism. These dangers are threatening Islam in its very foundations and will destroy it in the hearts of the next generation. Moslems disobey their religion, and it may be heard said: "Of what use is it to bring outcastes or others into Islam, when some of the Moslem peoples leave Islam?"

Under the handicap of such political disunity there is no possibility of Islam's being able, even if it so desired, to confront the world with the old seventh century challenge of a holy war against the infidels. This is a bugaboo that is not likely ever to be revived again.

The names of Mirza Ghulam Ahmad and Abdul Hamid stand today as symbols of the challenge of Islam to the world in these modern times. The caliph's great political challenge of Pan-Islamism collapsed with the crumbling of the Ottoman Empire; but the spiritual challenge of Islam as found in the worldwide missionary effort of the Ahmadiya movement of Mirza Ghulam Ahmad is still very much alive. Its significance lies not so much in its achievements for the cause of Islam or in the number of its converts to the faith for these have not been such as to alarm nonMoslems but rather in the fact that it represents the ever present spiritual desire and aspiration of the whole Moslem world to see the faith of Islam triumph. In this fundamentally religious sense the Abode of Islam still looks upon people of other faiths as belonging