In expressing my conviction that Islam is not thus destined yet awhile to perish I believe that I am running counter to much high authority among my countrymen. I know that it is a received opinion with those best qualified to instruct the public that Islam is in its constitution unamenable to change, and by consequence to progressive life, or even, in the face of hostile elements, to prolonged life at all. Students of the Sheriat have not inaptly compared the Koranic law to a dead man's hand, rigid and cold, and only to be loosened when the hand itself shall have been cut away. It has been asserted that the first rule of Mohammedan thought has been that change was inadmissible, and development of religious practice, either to right or left of the narrow path of mediaeval scholasticism, absolutely precluded. I know this, and I know, too, that a vast array of learned Mohammedan opinion can be cited to prove this to be the case, and that very few of the modern Ulema of any school of divinity would venture openly to impugn its truth. Nor have I forgotten the repeated failure of attempts made in Turkey within the last fifty years to gain religious assent to the various legal innovations decreed by Sultan after Sultan in deference to the will of Europe, nor the fate which has sometimes overtaken those who were the advocates of change. I know, according to all rule written and spoken by the orthodox, that Islam cannot move, and yet in spite of it I answer with some confidence in the fashion of Galileo, "E pur si muove." The fact is, Islam does move. A vast change has come upon Mohammedan thought since its last legal Mujtahed wrote his last legal opinion; and what was true of orthodox Islam fifty and even twenty years ago is no longer true now. When Urquhart, the first exponent of Mohammedanism to Englishmen, began his writing, the Hanefite teaching of Constantinople had not begun to be questioned, and he was perfectly justified in citing it as the only rule recognized by the mass of the orthodox. No such thing as a liberal religious party then existed anywhere, and those who broke the law in the name of political reform were breakers of the law and nothing more. Every good man was their enemy, and if any spoke of liberty he was understood as meaning licence. It was not even conceived then that the Sheriat might be legally remodelled. Now, however, and especially within the last ten years, a large section of godly and legal-minded men have ranged themselves on the side of liberal opinion, and serious attempts have been made to reconcile a desire of improvement with unabated loyalty to Islam.