and there to do reverence to their memory and to ask their aid. It was part of that cult of saints which had so overspread and overcome the earlier simplicity of Islam. The most outstanding case in point was, and is, the pilgrimage to the tomb of Muhammad at al-Madina, which has come to be a more or less essential part of the Hajj to the Ka'ba itself. Against all this Ibn Taymiya lifted a voice of emphatic protest. These shrines were in great part false, and when they were genuine the visitation of them was an idolatrous imitation of heathen practices. Equally idolatrous was all invoking of saints or prophets, including Muhammad himself; to God alone should prayer be directed. The clamor raised by this fatwa was tremendous. This was no doctrine of the schools which he had touched, but a bit of concrete religiosity which appealed to everyone. His public life practically ended, and the practices which he had denounced abide to this day. It is a bitter satire on his position that when he died in 726 the populace paid to his relics all these signs of superstitious reverence against which he had protested. He became a saint, malgre lui. His work had been to keep alive the Hanbalite doctrine and pass it on unchanged to modern times. He did not destroy philosophy: it was dead of itself before he came. Nor Sufiism: it is still very much alive. Nor kalam: it still continues in the form to which it had crystallized by his time. But he and his disciples made possible the Wahhabites and the monotheistic revival of our day. The faith of Muhammad himself was not to perish entirely from the earth.

It would now be possible to pass at once to the Wahhabite movement in the latter part of the twelfth century of the Hijra. All the elements for the explanation of it and of the modern situation are in our hands. But there is one figure which stands out so clearly in an otherwise most obscure picture and is so significant for the time, that some account must be taken of it. It is that of ash-Sha'rani, theologian, canonist, and mystic. He was a Cairene and died in 973. The rule of Egypt had passed half a century before to the Ottoman Turks, and they governed by means of a Turkish Pasha. The condition of the people, as we find it sketched by ash-Sha'rani, was a most unhappy one. They were bent down, and especially the peasantry, under a load of taxation. The Turks found it advisable, too, to cultivate the friendship of the canon lawyers and professional theologians in order to maintain their hold upon the people. These canonists, in consequence, were rapidly becoming an official class with official privileges. Further, the process, the beginnings of which we have already seen, by which religious science was narrowed to fiqh, had gone still further. Practically, the two classes of theologians left were the canonists and the mystics. And the mystics had fallen far from their pride of power under the Mamluks. They now were of the poor of the land, a kind of Essenes over against the Pharisees of the schools.

Such, at least, is the picture of his time which ash-Sha'rani gives. How far it is exact must remain uncertain. For, of the many puzzling personalities in Islam, ash-Sha'rani is perhaps for us the most unintelligible.