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 AND RELIGION 119

has for its aim the conversion of that entire section of the population belonging to the depressed classes, some sixty million people. But the fact remains that Moslem missions lack a sufficient motive because there is at the heart of Islam no compelling love for man as man; and without this they cannot and do not provide an adequate social program.

MOSLEM RELIGIOUS INTOLERANCE

If the missionary motive in Islam is inadequate, its conception of freedom of thought is hopeless and its capacity for intolerance is amazing. Heresy hunting within Islam has always existed, and from the time of Al-Hallaj, one of the early Moslem mystics who lived in Baghdad, right down to the present century in Afghanistan, there have been martyrs who have paid with their lives for daring to disagree with orthodoxy. One can understand how these attitudes and the inevitable persecution arising from them might go unchecked through the Middle Ages, for the Christian church was guilty of the same intolerance in that period; but it is hard for us to comprehend how such a condition can exist in this modern age.

The reason for all this, of course, is that quite generally speaking Islam is still under the curse of the spirit of the Middle Ages. It partakes of the spirit of the century of its birth, and part of that spirit is intolerance. In recent years Moslem scholars in Cairo who have attempted to apply Western critical methods to Islamic literature have suffered severe persecution