The New World of Islam Part 22

Our survey of the Near and Middle East is at an end. What is the outstanding feature of that survey? It is: Change. The "Immovable East"

has been moved at last--moved to its very depths. The Orient is to-day in full transition, flux, ferment, more sudden and profound than any it has. .h.i.therto known. The world of Islam, mentally and spiritually quiescent for almost a thousand years, is once more astir, once more on the march.

Whither? We do not know. Who would be bold enough to prophesy the outcome of this vast ferment--political, economical, social, religious, and much more besides? All that we may wisely venture is to observe, describe, and a.n.a.lyse the various elements in the great transition.

Yet surely this is much. To view, however empirically, the mighty transformation at work; to group its mult.i.tudinous aspects in some sort of relativity; to follow the red threads of tendency running through the tangled skein, is to gain at least provisional knowledge and acquire capacity to grasp the significance of future developments as they shall successively arise.

"To know is to understand"--and to hope: to hope that this present travail, vast and ill-understood, may be but the birth-pangs of a truly renascent East taking its place in a renascent world.