Page:Christiaan Snouck Hurgronje - Mohammedanism (1916).djvu/61



can hardly imagine a poorer, more miserable population than that of the South-Arabian country Hadramaut. All moral and social progress is there impeded by the continuance of the worst elements of Jâhiliyyah (Arabian paganism), side by side with those of Islâm. A secular nobility is formed by groups of people, who grudge each other their very lives and fight each other according to the rules of retaliation unmitigated by any more humane feelings. The religious nobility is represented by descendants of the Prophet, arduous patrons of a most narrow-minded orthodoxy and of most bigoted fanaticism. In a well-ordered society, making the most of all the means offered by modern technical science, the dry barren soil might be made to yield sufficient harvests to satisfy the wants of its members; but among these inhabitants, paralysed by anarchy, chronic famine prevails. Foreigners wisely avoid this miserable country, and if they did visit it, would not be hospitably received. Hunger forces many Hadramites to emigrate; throughout the centuries we find them in all the