Note 170 — Chapter VIII · FREETHOUGHT UNDER ISLAM1

Motazilism, so-called, is still heard of in Arabia itself.170 In the Ottoman Empire, indeed, it is little in evidence, standing now as it does for a species of broad-church liberalism, analogous to Christian Unitarianism;171 but in Persia the ancient leaning to rationalism is still common. The old-world pantheism which we have seen conserved in Omar Khayyám gave rise in later centuries to similar developments among the Parsees both in Persia and in India; and from the sixteenth century onwards there are clear traces among them of a number of rationalizing heresies, varying from pantheism and simple deism to atheism and materialism.172 In Persia to-day there are many thinkers of these casts of thought.173 About 1830 a British traveller estimated that, assuming there were between 200,000 and 300,000 Sufis in the country, those figures probably fell greatly short of the number “secretly inclined to infidelity.”174 Whatever be the value of the figures, the statement is substantially confirmed by later observers;175 missionaries reporting independently that in Persia “most of the higher class, of the nobility, and of the learned professions ... are at heart infidels or sceptics.”176 Persian freethought is of course, in large part, the freethought of ignorance, and seems to co-exist with astrological superstition;177 but there is obviously needed only science, culture, and material development to produce, on such a basis, a renascence as remarkable as that of modern Japan.