Note 184 — Chapter VIII · FREETHOUGHT UNDER ISLAM1

In the other British dominions, Mohammedans, though less ready than educated Hindus to accept new ideas, cannot escape the rationalizing influence of European culture. Nor was it left to the British to introduce the rationalistic spirit in Moslem India. At the end of the sixteenth century the eclectic Emperor Akbar,184 himself a devout worshipper of the Sun,185 is found tolerantly comparing all religions,186 depreciating Islam,187 and arriving at such general views on the equivalence of all creeds, and on the improbability of eternal punishment,188 as pass for liberal among Christians in our own day. If such views could be generated by a comparison of the creeds of pre-British India they must needs be encouraged now. The Mohammedan mass is of course still deeply fanatical, and habitually superstitious; but not any more immovably so than the early Saracens. In the eighteenth century arose the fanatical Wahabi sect, which aims at a puritanic restoration of primeval Islam, freed from the accretions of later belief, such as saint-worship; but the movement, though variously estimated, has had small success, and seems destined to extinction.189 Of the traditional seventy-three sects in Islam only four to-day count as orthodox.190