Page:Christiaan Snouck Hurgronje - Mohammedanism (1916).djvu/148

 Rh repute of the Egyptian metropolis has suffered a good deal from the enormous increase of European influence in the land of the Pharaohs; the effects of which have made themselves felt even in the Azhar. Modern programs and methods of instruction have been adopted; and, what is still worse, modernism itself, favoured by the late Muftî Muhammed Abduh, has made its entrance into the sacred lecture-halls, which until a few years ago seemed inaccessible to the slightest deviation from the decrees of the Infallible Agreement of the Community. Strenuous efforts have been made by eminent scholars to liberate Islâm from the chains of the authority of the past ages on the basis of independent interpretation of the Qorân; not in the way of the Wahhâbî reformers, who tried a century before to restore the institutions of Mohammed's time in their original purity, but on the contrary with the object of adapting Islâm by all means in their power to the requirements of modern life.

Official protection of the bold innovators prevented their conservative opponents from casting them out of the Azhar, but the assent to their doctrines was more enthusiastic outside its walls than inside. The ever more numerous adherents of modern thought in Egypt do not generally proceed from the ranks of the Azhar students, nor do they generally care very much in their later life for reforming the methods prevailing there, although they may be inclined to applaud