ENGLISH MAHOMMEDANS.
ALLEN'S Indian Mail, a little paper which during two generations has endeavoured to record all matters of interest to Englishmen connected in any way with Asia, published on Tuesday, October 27th, the following ex- traordinary paragraph :—" A native gentleman at Hydera- bad has received a letter from Mrs. Cates, the local Secretary of the Liverpool Moslem Society, in which the lady states that there are now in that city no less than twenty-five gentlemen and five ladies who have embraced Islam. Mrs. Cates asks for support to carry on the work of converting the English nation to Mahommedanism ; and the leading moulvies in the city, in response to her appeal, have opened a subscription-list for that object. The President of the Society is Mr. W. N. Quilliam, B.A., a solicitor of Liverpool, who has published a pamphlet entitled The Faith of Islam.' " The majority of our readers will probably disbelieve that statement without much reflection, and we have no knowledge from which either to confirm or disprove it ; but the paper which makes it is most respectable, and is on its own. special ground, and there is no antecedent impossibility in the statement itself. We ourselves pointed out a quarter of a century ago, that as the intercourse of Europe with Asia incessantly advanced, so that the time occupied in transport has been reduced by more than half—the precise figures, counting only the steam period, are as 35 to 17—Asia must and would exercise a grave reflex influence over European thought. She did it in the Crusades, and there is nothing in our mechanical improve- ments to prevent her doing it again. The process has been slower than we expected, but in many departments of art the influence of Asia has been distinctly marked ; it is felt, on the Continent especially, in all philosophic dis- cussion ; and it naturally extends itself by degrees into the domain of theology. A trace of what is really Buddhism is getting visible in much theological speculation, and in all pessimist thought ; while actual Buddhists, people who believe Gautama's ideas to be the best explanation of the mystery of the universe, are numerous in France. and can be talked with in the flesh even in England. We are not talking about the Theosophists, but genuine Buddhists whom Cingalese temples would acknowledge. As most of our readers know, conversions to Judaism have for years been frequent in Germany, Austria, and England, and have not been confined to descendants of the house of Israel ; and it is no matter for surprise, amidst the intellectual anarchy of the hour, that another great Asiatic creed should capture a few Englishmen. The worst active doctrine of Islam, polygamy, though permitted by the Koran, is net enjoined, and can be repudiated, as most Jews repudiate it, not as unlawful, but as not intended to be universal, and as specially unfitted to civilisations in which women rank high ; and the central ideas of Islam are not without a charm for certain minds even among Euro- peans. The key-note of the Faith, the unconditioned sovereignty of God, has been accepted, in theory, by some of the greatest Calvinists, and, indeed, as many think, taints all Calvinism ; while the perfect equality of mankind, on certain conditions, is more completely realised in the Mussulman system than in any other in the world. The Mussulman will, and the Christian will not, marry his daughter to an inferior, say a converted Negro, because all who accept the Faith must be equally the creatures of Allah We confess, when we reflect on the attraction of any successful creed for certain exceptional minds, and remember that a man like Halhed really believed in Hindooism, we are only surprised that Mahommedanism should have caught so few avowed votaries in the West. They must be a little more numerous than appears, for we have heard of a few in most countries ; but they can hardly be so numerous even as the Comtists, or the believers in Joanna Southcote. That is not many, if one reflects that the doctrine is established in great Kingdoms, and is one for which a race like the Arab is willing to accept death, and repeatedly has accepted it wholesale.
It is not likely that the English Mussulmans will ever be numerous. It is not true that Europe instinctively repels the ideas of Asia, for all the successful creeds of earth own an Asiatic origin, and it is historically probable that Asia once made a most singular capture among the European elite. It is a custom in this country to assume that the Templars were the victims of greed and envy, and were suppressed by a sort of burglary ; and no doubt envy and greed had much to do with their fall ; but the Pope who condemned them must have known the truth about them, and modern research seems to demonstrate that even if the Order was, as an Order, unjustly accused, a Secret Society of Nature-worshippers, with ideas entirely Asiatic, had imbedded itself in the great fighting brotherhood, and impressed its worst ideas even on buildings still extant. There is, however, a definite repulsion to Mahommedanism in the European mind which has lasted ages, and has affected the whole course of history, which saved Spain, which prevented the con- version of the European subjects of Turkey—certainly not pious people, and with every inducement to become Mahommedans—and which in our own day renders the European in India who professes Islam a kind of social outcast. It is not only that his sincerity is not believed in ; there is also a repulsion which was not felt towards Halhed, and would not be felt to an Englishman who turned Parsee or Confucian. The source of that repug- nance is hard to trace, for it has been exhibited by people whom polygamy did not offend ; but we suspect it is to be found in Mill's tremendous sentence, and that the European refuses from instinct to accept a God who, on the Mahommedan hypothesis, is not of necessity a good Being. He prefers revolt, as Mill said he himself would. Be that as it may, and we are not writing a treatise, but explaining a reported fact, nobody doubts the repulsion, and the English Mussulmans will probably remain for ever few ; but that by no means destroys the importance of their existence. Every Mussulman is a potential missionary; interested to an almost inconceivable degree in the spread of his faith, and a very few English families who were genuinely Mussulman might directly affect the history of the world. A Mussulman saint and preacher who was also an Englishman, yet not a renegade, but born in the faith, might acquire in many places, and among many of our subject races, almost inconceivable influence. We should be very sorry to see him in India, or among the Zulus, or even in the islands of the West Indies, where some day or other we shall witness the springing up of a most dangerous Mahommedan Church. Islam has an attraction for most dark races which is almost in- calculable—it extends even to China, where the states- men of Pekin delivered their awful blow at the Panthays only just in time—and Islam preached by an English- man would seem to prove its own compatibility with that strength which Asia and Africa see and dread in Europe, and which has made of scores of renegades the trusted statesmen and soldiers of dark dynasties. Such a man might even found a great sect among the negroes of the Southern States of the Union, and change within a few years half the conditions of the race-war always simmering there, it being the first specialty of Mahommedanism that its votaries will always fight for the faith, and while so fighting will cohere in an obedient mass. White mis- sionaries of Mahommedanism would be exceedingly for- midable persons, and that they have never appeared is perhaps the strongest reason for believing that most European conversions to Islam hitherto made, have been dictated by motives other than genuine conviction.
We wonder, if an English Mahommedan sect really arose, and its children, born Mussulmans, petitioned for liberty to be polygamists, " liberty as in India," what the more fanatic Radicals would reply. The question has not come up about Mormonism, for the Mormons are hardly a sect here, and there are none who are at once born Mormons and born Englishmen, and therefore entitled to plead a double claim. Would the extremists plead that religious liberty must always be supreme, or would they put forward their other set of ideas, and argue that, as mono- gamy was for the benefit of the community, monogamy must endure ? We suppose the latter would be the popular contention, as it has been in America, ; but, remembering some discussions on divorce, we cannot be absolutely sure. The Americans have not wives enough for their population, while we have too many ; and they are not bothered with our logical difficulty, that in the most populous bit of the Queen's dominion we allow all laws of marriage, inheritance, and divorce to be regu- lated by the suitor's religious creed. Let us hope that the conversions will never be numerous enough to bring the question within the range of practical politics ; for if the English Mussulmans ever controlled a few seats, we would, in the present temper of parties, answer for nothing. With a great division at hand, and numbers equal, both parties might discover that to be wiser than the Patriarchs was an exhibition of un-Christian self-conceit. The suggestion of such a crisis seems farcical ; but it very nearly occurred in America—may to-morrow, it is asserted, occur exactly in that form in the State of Nevada, where Mormons hold the casting-vote—and would hardly be more surprising than the facts, if they be facts, which we have already quoted from the Indian Mail.
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