To the greater part of the world represented by this international exhibition of Islâm, as a modern Musulman writer calls it, our modern world, with all its problems, its emotions, its learning and science, hardly exists. On the other hand, the average modern man does not understand much more of the mental life of the two hundred millions to whom the barren Mecca has become the great centre. In former days, other centres were much more important, although Mecca has always been the goal of pilgrimage and the cherished abode of many learned men. Many capitals of Islâm offered the students an easier life and better accommodations for their studies; while in Mecca four months of the year are devoted to the foreign guests of Allah, by attending to whose various needs all Meccans gain their livelihood. For centuries Cairo has stood unrivalled as a seat of Mohammedan learning of every kind; and even now the Uaram of Mecca is not to be compared to the Azhar-mosque as regards the number and the fame of its professors and the variety of branches cultivated. In the last half-century, however, the ancient 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.