Everything depends, broadly speaking, on the possibilities of culture-contact. The changes in Persia are traceable to the element of heretical habit which has persisted from pre-Moslem times; future and more scientific development will depend upon the assimilation of European knowledge. In Egypt, before the period of European intervention, freethinking was at a minimum; and though toleration was well developed as regarded Christians and Jews, freethinking Moslems dared not avow themselves. [1183] Latterly rationalism tends to spread in Egypt as in other Moslem countries; even under Mohammed Ali the ruling Turks had begun to exhibit a "remarkable indifference to religion," and had "begun to undermine the foundations of El-Islam"; and so shrewd and dispassionate an observer as Lane expected that the common people would "soon assist in the work," and that "the overthrow of the whole fabric may reasonably be expected to ensue at a period not very remote." [1184] To evolve such a change there will be required a diffusion of culture which is not at all likely to be rapid under any Government; but in any case the ground that is being lost by Islam in Egypt is not being retaken by Christianity. In the other British dominions, Mohammedans, though less ready than educated Hindus to accept new ideas, cannot escape the rationalizing influence of European culture. Nor was it left to the British to introduce the rationalistic spirit in Moslem India. At the end of the sixteenth century the eclectic Emperor Akbar, [1185] himself a devout worshipper of the Sun, [1186] is found tolerantly comparing all religions, [1187] depreciating Islam, [1188] and arriving at such general views on the equivalence of all creeds, and on the improbability of eternal punishment, [1189] as pass for liberal among Christians in our own day. If such views could be generated by a comparison of the creeds of pre-British India they must needs be encouraged now. The Mohammedan mass is of course still deeply fanatical, and habitually superstitious; but not any more immovably so than the early Saracens. In the eighteenth century arose the fanatical Wahabi sect, which aims at a puritanic restoration of primeval Islam, freed from the accretions of later belief, such as saint-worship; but the movement, though variously estimated, has had small success, and seems destined to extinction. [1190] Of the traditional seventy-three sects in Islam only four to-day count as orthodox. [1191]