Islam at the Cross Roads
A BRIEF SURVEY OF THE PRESENT POSITION
AND PROBLEMS OF THE WORLD OF ISLAM
BY
DE LACY O’LEARY, D.D.
Lecturer in Aramaic and Syriac, Bristol University
Author of
Arabic Thought and its Place tn History
A Short History of the Fatimid Khalifate
LONDON:
KEGAN PAUL, TRENCH, TRUBNER & CO. LTD.
NEW YORK: E. P. DUTTON & CO.
1923
8 ISLAM AT THE CROSS ROADS
Islam was faced with conditions which had never
been contemplated and the attempt to reconstruct
t rep
plenty of instances of such fanaticism and forced
conversion, but these do not belong to the early
history of Islam nor to that of the Arabs; those
stories come from the banks of the Niger, from
the Sudan, and from Sumatra, and are connected
with Muslim religious revivals of later days and
dubious orthodoxy.
Of Islam, as of Christianity, it is true that cor-
began with success; the spiritual ideal
ever suffers from the material prosperity acquired
by its maintainers, and it is generally admitted
that when the leadership of Islam passed into the
hands of Mu‘awiya, the chieftain of the wealthy
clan of the ‘Umayyads of the Quraysh tribe who had
settled in Syria, the early Islam of the Prophet and
his companions suffered eclipse. From this period
on, like every other religion, it shows alternating
periods of decadence and reform, which are indeed.
the necessary conditions of the physiological life
of a social The history of Islam may
be divided into three main periods: (#.) In the
first we have a ruling Arab aristocracy, intoxicated
by its sudden accession to wealth, ruling very