Rensselaer Republican, Volume 14, Number 14, Rensselaer, Jasper County, 22 December 1881 — The Future of Islam. [ARTICLE]

The Future of Islam.

The Fortnightly Review. The Mussulman peasantry, 'especially of tte Ottoman Empire, are miserable, and they know ttvt they are so, and they look in vain to their religion to protect them, as in former days, against the rulers. They find that all their world is corrupt—that the law is broken daily by those who should enforce the law; that the illegalities of those who ruined them are constantly condoned by a conniving body of the Ulema; that for all practical purposes of justice and mercy religion has abdicated its claim to direct and govern. They have learned, too, by the intercourse with strangers, and in the towns by the newspapers which they now eagerly read, that this has not been always so. and that servitude is not the natural state of man or acquiescence in evil the true position of religion, and they see id all they suffer an outrage inflicted or. the belter law of Islam. I was much struck by hearing the Egyptian peasantry last year attribute the lighter taxes they were then enjoj ing to the Get that the reigning Khedive was a a man who feared God.” At the same time the learned classes are shocked st d alarm ed at the political deciue of I lam and the still greater dangers w inch stare her in the face, and they attribute them to the unchecked wickedness and corruption with jvhich the long rule of Constantinople has pervaded

every class of society, even l>eyond its own territorial borders They complain now that they have been led astray, and believe that the veugence of heaven will over take them if they do not mend they ways In all this, I say, there is nothing of the spirit which once goaded Christians into an examination of the bases on which their belief rested, and of the true nature of the law which tolerated such great borruptlon.