ISLAM AND ANIMISM

"This weakness in the face of the supreme enemy of all religious and moral progress bears a bitter penalty. Among animistic peoples, Islam is more and more entangled in the meshes of Animism. The conqueror is, in reality, the conquered. Islam sees the most precious article of its creed, the belief in God, and the most important of its religious acts, the profession of belief, dragged in the mire of animistic thought; only in animistic guise do they gain currency among the common people. Instead of Islam raising the people, it is itself degraded. Islam, far from delivering heathendom from the toils of Animism, is itself deeply involved in them. Animism emerges from its struggle for the soul of a people, modernized it is true, but more powerful than ever, elegantly tricked out and buttressed by theology. Often it is scarcely recognizable in its refined Arabian dress, but it continues as before to sway the people; it has received divine sanction."

Other writers express a still stronger opinion. "Moslem ritual, instead of bringing a man to God," writes Dr. Adriani, "serves as a dragnet for Animism," and evidence confirms this from Celebes, where the Mohammedan is more superstitious even than the heathen. "Islam has exercised quite a different influence upon the heathen from what we should expect. It has not left him as he was, nor has it tempered his Animism. Rather, it has relaid the old animistic foundations of the heathen’s religion and run up a light, artistic superstructure upon it of Moslem customs."

While Moslems profess to believe in one God and repeat His glorious, incommunicable attributes in their daily worship, they everywhere permit this glorious doctrine to be buried under a mass of pagan superstitions borrowed either originally from the demon-worship of the Arabs, the Hindu gods, or the animistic practices of Malaysia and Central Africa.