Magic and Religion in North Africa

...was held here, Cheikh Mohammed Soultàn, an official representative of the Egyptian government, read, at this very place where I speak, a paper whose main subject was: "The sharia Islamic religious law is applicable to all times."

What can Muslim science be under such conditions? To tell the truth, Islam is even more favorable to it than the Catholicism of the Middle Ages was; the simplicity of the dogma, the nudity of the legend, the almost complete absence of myth, are of a nature to leave sufficient horizons for reason to speculate. However, this science has remained mediocre; borrowed from the Greeks, without originality, it has not known how to refresh itself at the life-giving sources of observation and experience; and as for scientific philosophy, it is known that the rationalist attempt of the Mu'tazilites an early school of Islamic theology advocating rationalism was stifled by force. Only in our days has European science begun to penetrate the world of the Muslims, but it often clashes with the rigid framework of dogma or the prescriptions of the ritual. In fact, Muslims have generally considered it, until recent times, as a sort of ancilla theologiae handmaid of theology; they valued only its applications to worship: astronomy for the determination of religious dates and prayer times, arithmetic for the calculation of successions according to canonical rules, etc.

As for the Arabic language, I speak of literary Arabic, Quranic Arabic, it is "the Language" par excellence, el lougha the language, compared to which the others are only jargons, even vulgar Arabic. The Quran having been revealed by God and being uncreated, the literary language has a divine character and is immutable. Mr. K. Vollers having wished, at the...