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Blyden, the Negro eulogist of Islam in Africa, acknowledges that its "oriental aspect has become largely modified by shaping many of its traditional customs to the milder and more conciliatory disposition of the Negro ... In succeeding a debasing heathenism it has in many respects made compromises, so as occasionally to present a barren, hybrid character". These confessions shatter his contention that Islam has not made "degrading compromise with pagan superstitions". They are confirmed by Lenz, whose experience of Sudanese Muhammadans rests unrivaled

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Blerzey declared that "the Arab despotism vested in white autochthonic races [Berbers], without fusion between the conquering element and the conquered; without destroying the language and manners of the subject; without creating anything durable". Renan affirmed that "on ground none of the best Islam has done as much harm as good. It has stifled everything by its arid and desolating simplicity . . . The essential condition of a diffused civilization is the destruction of Islam. The product of an inferior and meager combination of human elements, its conquests have all been on the average plane. Savage races have been incapable of rising to it. It has not satisfied the peoples who carried in themselves the seeds of a stronger civilization". Freeman charged Muhammadanism with consecrating despotism, polygamy and slavery. Dean Church, whose solidity and wealth of scholarship and soundness of judgment sciolists alone dispute, endorsed the accusation, adding: "It has done this directly in virtue of being a religion, a religious reform*".

These criticisms, it is objected, hold true only of Islam among Mediterranean races, and can not apply to its effect upon the Negro...

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Does not Blyden, who has visited the Muhammadans behind Liberia and Sierra Leone, add: "Muhammadanism counts in its ranks the most energetic and enterprising tribes. It claims as adherents the only people who have any form of civil polity or bond of social organization. Its laws regulate the most powerful kingdoms"? Has not Joseph Thomson, a scientific observer and the humanest, the noblest of African explorers since Livingstone, confessed that Gandu and Sokotu gave him a different impression of Islam on the Niger from the impression he expected? Fetichism with its bat brood had disappeared. Islam had inspired these Negroes. Central Sudan had advanced considerably in material civilization. Zoeller admitted that in outward respects Muhammadanism grafts great improvements on the pagan. Canon Taylor apologized for its sterility and unprogressiveness as due, like those of other oriental religions, to climate and race rather than to creed.

As we see the northern lobe of Africa from the Bight of Benin to Abyssinia, with Muslim fringes in Equatoria, Somalia and Zanguebar, looped to Mecca by the girdle of Islam, it seems at first as if Reclus must be right.* But second sight shows its unity and vastness to appeal not to reason but to imagination. To assert, as did the author of Shall Islam Rule Africa? that this "half of Africa is as Islamic as Persia", is unwittingly to betray a client; it can almost be maintained that Persia's eight million Islamites do not include one real Muslim. If they are Shiites or sectarians, the heterodox and schismatic rivals of Sunnite or orthodox Musulmans. In Africa this other shape of Islam, "if shape it may be called that shape has none, or substance may be called that shadow seems", recalls Milton's picture of death: "What seemed his head the likeness of a kingly crown had on". The supremacy of Sudanese Islam over Negro society is less a reality than a semblance. If material limitations permitted, nearly a hundred tribes could be cited that have accepted Islam only in name when they have not rejected it utterly*. This fact means that the southern line is broken at scores of points. It also means that the strategic centers behind the inner in- trenchments are rotten and sapped. Earth found the Hausa, a Saharo Sudanese folk on the divide between the Chad and Sokotu basins, animated by little zeal. Lenz informs us that the Futa highlander and the Mandingo have adopted Islam in form or not at all. BrunRenaud states that the Bambara and the Yolof themselves are mostly pagans. Bagirmi has merely been inoculated, multitudes of its tribes remaining pagans. Muhammad the Tunisian compared his fellow religionaries among Sudanese pagans to a ring in Saharan sands. In the Nile basin, from Khartum to Wadelai, Felkin and Wilson discovered the populations of Muslim Kordo to have scarcely any religious ideas; the Shilluk and their neighbors are only partly Muhammadan; and other Negroes — the Bari, Bongo, Dinka, Madi and Shuli — remain sheer heathen. If these source regions of the Nile be under Muslim dominance, it is through Africanized Arabs extending their political power.

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Before the appearance of Arabs or Europeans, these Negroes had originated empires and republics possessing complex governmental arrangements. Some at least were not without the elements of true civilization. Whatever Islam may have done for the Negro was in being, not the initial impulse for his advance, but the reinforcement of his native faculties. Even in Sudan it has merely aided, not created, his capacity for progress. But "Islam is a reform which has stifled all other reforms. It has chained every people which has accepted it to a certain stage of moral and political growth". The sterility and unprogressiveness of Negro civilizations, Negro states, are as much due to the paralyzing death grip of Islam as to nature's foreclosure of his intellectual powers when she mortgages the growth of his brain after puberty.

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