Page:Christiaan Snouck Hurgronje - Mohammedanism (1916).djvu/111

 104 than under a Mohammedan government. Under English, Dutch, or French rule the ʿulamâs are less interfered with in their teaching, the muftîs in their recommendations, and the qâdhîs in their judgments of questions of marriage and inheritance than in Turkey, where the life of Islâm, as state religion, lies under official control. In indirectly governed "native states" the relation of Mohammedan "Church and State" may much more resemble that in Turkey, and this is sometimes to the advantage of the sovereign ruler. Under the direct government of a modern state, the Mohammedan group is treated as a religious community, whose particular life has just the same claim to independence as that of other denominations. The only justifiable limitation is that the program of the forcible reduction of the world to Mohammedan authority be kept within the scholastic walls as a point of eschatology, and not considered as a body of prescriptions, the execution of which must be prepared.

The extensive political program of Islâm, developed during the first centuries of astounding expansion, has yet not prevented millions of Mohammedans from resigning themselves to reversed conditions in which at the present time many more Mohammedans live under foreign authority than under their own. The acceptance of this change was facilitated by the historical pessimism of Islâm, which makes the mind prepared for every sort of decay, and by the true