THE VARIETY OF ISLAM.

It is usual to hear of the unchanging rigidity of the Mussulman's religion and yet (the "Spectator " writes) no creed has passed through a stranger variety of phases and developments than Islam, and the differences between some of its sects have been, and still are, so wide that save for a common reverence for Mohammed and the Unity he preached in the Koran it would puzzle one to trace their relation to each other. In one sense, indeed, Islam may be considered rigid. There is an Islam of the Book, a religion founded literally on the Koran and the Suuna or Traditions of the Prophet, as interpreted by a jealously select series of orthodox divines— fathers of the Moslem Church—which has changed but little in history, and is practically the same in all the Colleges of the East. This is Sunni Islam, the doctrine of the "Ulama of Constantinople, Damascus, Cairo, and Lahore—what may be called analogically the old high-and-dry or cathedral creed ; and this is undoubtedly the nearest approach to the religion as taught and understood by its founder. But the simple, austere, faith proclaimed by the camel-driver at Mecca was carried east and west over an empire greater than that of Rome, and in the course of its migration it came into contact with many strange and subtile influences which inevitably modified the conquering creed. It has been cynically said that there are always three forms of a religion—the form believed by the villager, the form professed by the learned, and the original form which nobody believes. In Islam the distinction between the creed of the learned and that of the people is often curiously marked, but this is largely due to opposite causes. In its spread over foreign countries Mohammedanism came into contact with two widely different forces. On the one hand, on leaving Arabia it was brought into touch with those primitive beliefs of other races which we somewhat superciliously classify as folk-lore, but which underlie all formal creeds and modify and react upon them in various incalculable ways. Early gods disguised as local saints, ancient pagan customs coloured with Islamic rites, gradually intruded themselves into the simple cult of Mohammed and Egyptian peasants continued the immemorial festival of Bubastis under the cloak of a moolid of the Seyyid-el-Bedawy. In every part of the Mohammedan world folk-lore— i.e., primitive belief—has hybridised Islam, chiefly among "the vulgar," for whom ancient ritual and what we call superstition have more value than philosophic abstractions. On the other hand the more refined and spiritual minds were subjected to an influence even more penetrating. The mystical spirit, whether permeating Persia in a wave from Buddhist India, or infected in the very soil of Egypt and Syria by the teaching of the neo-platonic school, offered to the imagination a tempting escape from the dry formalism of Arabian Islam. Mysticism, with political and race divisions, and the eternal antagoism between the ideals of a theocracy and of a temporal State Church combined to develop the many strange varieties of Islam which are known under the names of Shitah sects, the fanatical adhesion to the house of Ali, the Sufi mystics, the Assassins of the Crusading epoch, the pantheists of the school of Jalal-ed-din Rumi, the corybantic ecstatics of Barbary , the marabuts of Algiers, the Sanusi missionaries of the Soudau, and the various orders of dervishes who constitute what may be called the Salvation Army of Islam, attacked fresh fields where the orthodox Ulama never ventured, and form the impulse of that extra-ordinary revival of Mohammedan energy in Africa which has been one of the most remarkable religious events of the past century.

The orders of dervishes are among the most interesting and illogical developments of Islam. The word " dervish " (or " darwish ") in Persian means a poor beggar, but the dervish orders are by no means poor, and are in the habit of holding stated audits for the examination of their ample finances. They represent the popular, as opposed to the scholastic, element in Islam yet, while titillating the ignorant with charms and talismans, jugglery, and dances, they have a system of gradual initiation which leads up through carefully regulated stages to a culminating perfection of spiritual adeptness in which it is not easy to distinguish a single trace of the original creed. In the final stage the dervish has been termed a gnostic, a pantheist, and an atheist, according to the writer's point of view ; at least he may be said to be a philosopher, and certainly anything but a Moslem. Yet the dervishes claim to be orthodox they interpret the Koran in their own allegorical fashion, and very ingenious it is; but the Koran is still their Bible, Mohammed their Prophet, and his true representative (no temporal caliph) their Imam or spiritual master. Undoubtedly the Sheykh es-Sanusi, whilst believing in special revelations from God to himself, and holding the mystical doctrines of the Kadiriya dervishes, regarded himself as an orthodox follower of Mohammed, and with his army of missionaries he wrought an extension of Islam such as has not been known since the first triumphant rush of the seventh century :—

" Without shedding blood or calling in the aid of any temporal ruler, by the energy and force of his character he raised up in the Ottoman Empire and its adjacent lands a theocratic system which is almost, if not quite, independent of any political power. His great object was to restore the original Islam and to revive the religious and moral laws of the Prophet. This being the attitude of his mind, he naturally opposed all modern innovations in Turkish rule, and life, and wished to raise an insuperable barrier against Western civilisation and the influence of the Christian Powers in Moslem lands. He had been influenced by the earlier Wahhabi revival, for he followed that sect in its vigorous prohibition of many harmless things. At the same time, with all this stiffness of thought and life, he as the head of the Darwish Order, introduced a mystical element into all that he thought. "

The result of this combination of dervish mysticism and austere orthodoxy in the hands of an able administrator was the foundation of monasteries of the order in Arabia, Egypt Tripoli, Tunis, Algiers, Senegambia, all over the Soudan, and even in the Eastern Archipelago. The Sanusiya claim no fewer than 8,000,000 members of the Order—8,000,000 preaching friars—and the success of their missionary work in Africa has been unique.

The Sanusiya is the most remarkable modern development of dervishism ; but there are 88 religious orders in Islam and most of them are worth study. Mr. Sell, whose "Faith of Islam " is almost a classical text-book of Mohammedan belief in usum populi, has made another interesting contribution in his "Essays on Islam," and his choice of the dervish orders for his principal subject shows his appreciation of their importance in the future of Islam. The essays deal with the Mohammedan mystics the pathetic history of the Bab in Persia, the religious orders, the Khalif Hakim and the Druses, the status of the Zimmiss (or non-Moslem subjects), Islam in China, the Recensions of the Koran, and the Hanifs.

The Sydney Morning Herald 4 December 1901,