admonish me, rouse me to a sense of my duty. Truth alone is desirable, and lies are despicable.... As I am the guardian of the weak, obey me only so long as I obey the Sheriat [Divine Law]. But if you see that I deviate but in the minutest details from this law, you need obey me no more."[112] In fine, no subsequent distortions could entirely obliterate the fact that primitive Islam was the supreme expression of a freedom-loving folk whose religion must necessarily contain many liberal tendencies. Even the sheriat, or canon law, is, as Professor Lybyer states, "fundamentally democratic and opposed in essence to absolutism."[113] Vambery well summarizes this matter when he writes: "It is not Islam and its doctrines which have devastated the western portion of Asia and brought about the present sad state of things; but it is the tyranny of the Moslem princes, who have wilfully perverted the doctrines of the Prophet, and sought and found maxims in the Koran as a basis for their despotic rule. They have not allowed the faintest suspicion of doubt in matters of religion, and, efficaciously distorting and crushing all liberal principles, they have prevented the dawn of a Moslem Renaissance."[114] In the opening chapter we saw how Oriental despotism reached its evil maximum in the eighteenth century, and how the Mohammedan Revival was not merely a puritan reformation of religion, but was also in part a political protest against the vicious and contemptible tyrants who misruled the Moslem world. This internal movement of political liberalism was soon cross-cut by another political current coming in from the West. Comparing the miserable decrepitude of the Moslem East with Europe's prosperity and vigour, thinking Moslems were beginning to recognize their shortcomings, and they could not avoid the conclusion that their woes were in large part due to their wretched governments. Indeed, a few even of the Moslem princes came to realize that there must be some adoption of Western political methods if their countries were to be saved from destruction. The most notable examples of this new type of Oriental sovereign were Sultan Mahmud II of Turkey and Mehemet Ali of Egypt, both of whom came to power about the beginning of the nineteenth century. Of course none of these reforming princes had the slightest idea of granting their subjects constitutional liberties or of transforming themselves into limited monarchs. They intended to remain absolute, but absolute more in the sense of the "enlightened autocrat" of Europe and less in the sense of the purely Oriental despot. What they wanted were true organs of government--army, civil service, judiciary, etc.--which would function efficiently and semi-automatically as governmental machinery, and not as mere amorphous masses of individuals who had to be continuously prodded and punished by the sovereign in order to get anything done.