Islam, by Albert Kinross

Islam, I sometimes think, is being destroyed by its men. The downfall of the Turkish Empire may certainly be ascribed to such an exclusively masculine and emasculated domination.

If the world had stood still, moving neither forward nor backward from, say, 1000 A.D., and had remained so standing forever, Islam would have been as good a religion as any other. But the world has not stood still. The Christian faith, energized by its dynamics and the temperate climates wherein it found expansion and gathered forces at once magnificent and irresistible, has moved the world; has transformed it beyond any vision or dream permitted to the Prophet of the Arabian God.
In the modern world man must cooperate or go under. A religion that ignores the personal existence of an entire sex; that forbids the lending of money, and therefore places its followers outside that whole system of loans and credit upon which, for good or for evil, our modern civilization is based; a religion that is so full of exclusions as to make the murder or robbery of an Unbeliever a matter of little or no account, can hardly hope to survive outside the dark places of the earth. In its own way it is honest, and in that it is pathetic; but the world needs the cotton of the Egyptian, the oils and minerals, the fruits and tobacco, and all the other produce and raw material that God has placed in the countries which are at present occupied by the followers of the Prophet. And it seems to me that if the Mohammedan cannot irrigate and sow and dig and cultivate and mine and bore, under the direction of men of his own faith, then he will have to accept the direction and, with that, the political ascendancy of the despised Christian...
The words Democracy, Parliamentary Government, and Constitutionalism have no real meaning to the ordinary Mohammedan, who regards all government as a thing outside himself, wherein he has no voice. It is the business of a government to govern; and it is his business to be led. That is his way of looking at it. He does not want to vote or waste his time attending meetings; he recognizes that Allah has made certain men whose destiny it is to be Masters, and myriads of other men whose destiny it is to work at their handicraft or to cultivate the soil. The whole thing rests with Allah. If he be ruled by Christians, he does not much mind; and if he be ruled by Moslems, so much the better. He is not a political animal; he has other excitements, spiritual and sensual, which, in his opinion, we Occidentals undervalue. He likes his rulers to be just, and, when injustice becomes unendurable, he rises in his wrath, if he be strong enough, and slays them. A good liar, in the shape of a priest or a political agitator, let us say, can usually convince him of anything, and therefore his own rulers have invariably lopped off the heads of such orators.