community of Islam may have disputed over the individual to be appointed, but they never doubted that the maintenance of the faith in its purity required a leader, and that it was, therefore, incumbent on men to appoint one. The basis is Ijma, Agreement, not Scripture or tradition from Muhammad or analogy based on these two.

It will be seen from this that the de facto ground to the claim of the Ottoman Sultan is the best. The Muslim community must have a leader; this is the greatest Muslim ruling Muslims; he claims the leadership and holds it. If the English rule were to become Muslim, the Muslims would rally to it. The ground of election amounts to nothing, the nomination to little more, except for antiquarians; the possession of the Prophetic relics is a sentiment that would have weight with the crowd only; no canon lawyer would seriously urge it. The guardianship of the two Harams is precarious. A Turkish reverse in Syria would withdraw every Turkish soldier from Arabia and the great Sharif families of Mecca, all of the blood of the Prophet, would proclaim a Khalifa from among themselves. At present, only the Turkish garrison holds them in check.

But a Khalifa has responsibilities. He absolutely cannot become a constitutional monarch in our sense. He rules under law—divine law—and the people can depose him if he breaks it; but he cannot set up beside himself a constitutional assembly and give it rights against himself. He is the successor of Muhammad and must rule, within limitations, as an absolute monarch. So impossible is the modern Khalifate,

and so gigantic are its responsibilities. The millions of Chinese Muslims look to him and all Muslims of central Asia; the Muslims of India who are not Shi'ite also look to him. So, too, in Africa and wherever in the world the People of Muhammad have gone, their eyes turn to the Bosphorus and the Great Sultan. This is what has been called the modern Pan-Islamic movement; it is a modern fact.

The position of the other Muslim sects we have already seen. Of Shi'ite rulers, there are the Imamites in Persia; scattered Zaydites still in south Arabia and fugitive in Africa; strange secret bodies of Isma'ilians—Druses, Nusayrites, Assassins—still holding their own in mountain recesses, forgotten by the world; oldest of all, the Sharifs of Morocco, who are Sunnites and antedate all theological differences, holding only by the blood of the Prophet. At Zanzibar, Uman and the Mzab in Algeria are the descendants of the Kharijites. Probably, somewhere or other, there are some fossilized descendants of every sect that has ever arisen, either to trouble the peace of Islam or to save it from scholastic decrepitude and death. Insurrections and heresies have their own uses.

It only remains to make mention of two modern movements which have deeply affected the Islam of today. The Pan-Islamic movement, noticed above, strives as much as anything to bring the Muslim world into closer touch with the science and thought of the Christian world, rallying all the Muslim peoples at the same time round the Ottoman Sultan as their spiritual head and holding fast by the kernel of