People who take no active part in missionary work are not competent to dissuade Christian missionaries from continuing their seemingly hopeless labour among Mohammedans, nor to prescribe to them the methods they are to adopt; their full autonomy is to be respected. But all agree that Mohammedans, disinclined as they are to reject their own traditions of thirteen centuries and to adopt a new religious faith, become ever better disposed to associate their intellectual, social, and political life with that of the modern world. Here lies the starting point for two divisions of mankind which for centuries have lived their own lives separately in mutual misunderstanding, from which to pursue their way arm in arm to the greater advantage of both. We must leave it to the Mohammedans themselves to reconcile the new ideas which they want with the old ones with which they cannot dispense; but we can help them in adapting their educational system to modern requirements and give them a good example by rejecting the detestable identification of power and right in politics which lies at the basis of their own canonical law on holy war as well as at the basis of the political practice of modern Western states. This is a work in which we all may collaborate, whatever our own religious conviction may be. The principal condition for a fruitful friendly intercourse of this kind is that we make the Moslim world an object of continual serious investigation in our intellectual centres. Having spent a good deal of my life in seeking for the right method of associating with modern thought the thirty-five millions of Mohammedans whom history has placed under the guardianship of my own country, I could not help drawing some practical conclusions from the lessons of history which I have tried to reduce to their most abridged form. There is no lack of pessimists, whose wisdom has found its poetic form in the words of Kipling: East is East and West is West, And never the twain shall meet. To me, with regard to the Moslim world, these words seem almost a blasphemy. The experience acquired by adapting myself to the peculiarities of Mohammedans, and by daily conversation with them for about twenty years, has impressed me with the firm conviction that between Islâm and the modern world an understanding _is_ to be attained, and that no period has offered a better chance of furthering it than the time in which we are living. To Kipling's poetical despair I think we have a right to prefer the words of a broad-minded modern Hindu writer: "The pity is that men, led astray by adventitious differences, miss the essential resemblances[1]." [Footnote 1: S.M. Mitra, _Anglo-Indian Studies_, London, Longmans, Green & Co., 1913, P. 232.] It would be a great satisfaction to me if my lectures might cause some of my hearers to consider the problem of Islâm as one of the most important of our time, and its solution worthy of their interest and of a claim on their exertion. INDEX