القرن التاسع عشر ، رقم ١٨٢، أبريل ١٨٩٢ [ظ‎‎١‎٠‎٩] (٢٤٤/٢٢٣)

708 THE NINETEENTH April
Life and Teachings of Mohammed which appeared in 1873, and it
contains portions of his Personal La 1880;
but so far from being a disadvantage, it is rather a gain to find
that opinions, which were boldly set forth nearly twenty years ago,
still hold good in the mind of so able, conscientious, and acute a
reasoner. For we are not listening to the ingenious elaborations of
a trained theologian of the Azhar, or the rant of an hysterical dervish:
we have here the well-thought-out reasoning of a judge of the High
Court in Bengal, a barrister of English training, and a man of wide
reading and culture. Syed Ameer Ali represents what is best among
educated Mohammedans, and his views are shared by a considerable
body of his brother Indians. The importance of his book, as form
ulating the articles of faith and rehgion professed by the most
enlightened of our Mohammedan fellow-subjects, cannot easily be
overestimated.
The whole point of the book may be stated in a few words. Of
course there are many side-issues treated, some well and some weakly.
There is a well-written outline of the life of the Prophet, in which
very little allowance has to be made for the prepossessions of the
devout Muslim. The serious subjects of controversy in the career of
Mohammed are few, and on most of them we find ourselves entirely
in accord with Ameer Ali, who is not disposed to shirk these diffi
culties when they arise. But any discussion of such questions would
only lead us away from the main position, and it is no less undesirable
in a limited space to join issue with our author when he commits
himself to numerous errors of fact and deduction in his last four
chapters, in which he treats, at second or third hand, and quite in
adequately, of the political, sectarian, literary, scientific, and philo
sophical influence of Islam, in its contact with divers nations. In
these portions of his work Syed Ameer Ali is sometimes ill-informed,
and his want of Arabic scholarship does not provide the remedy; while
his reading of history is unquestionably perverted by the prejudices
of the partisan.
These blemishes, however, in no sense detract from the signal
importance of the book as an exposition of the educated Muslim's
faith. Mistakes in history do not injure the main position, which is
briefly this : the defects, the formalism and narrow dogmatism, of
modern Islam are not essential to the religion of Mohammed, and do
not proceed from the Koran; they are the result of the stereotyping
influence of centuries of conventional theologians, commentators, and
schoolmen, who have substituted the fixed authority of a church in
place of the-exercise of individual judgment. Mohammed created
no priestly class, no caste of Brahmans, no authorised intermediaries
between man and the Creator. All men, in his system, were equal
before Grod, and none need or could approach Him through the offices
of another. Every man, therefore, has the right to use his own