Three Victorian Travellers by Thomas J. Assad

Author:Thomas J. Assad [Assad, Thomas J.]
Language: eng
Format: epub
Tags: History, General, Europe, Great Britain, Modern, 19th Century
ISBN: 9781317269120
Google: vj-TDAAAQBAJ
Publisher: Routledge
Published: 2016-07-01T16:12:49+00:00

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In this pattern of his ‘mission’ in Eastern lands no small part was played by his more personal struggle. We have seen that the struggle was between supernaturalism and materialism, or between an emotional attraction for Catholicism and a sensuous love of life—or, what is more likely, a combination of both which defies analysis. The struggle was solved temporarily by passionate love for ‘Skittles’ in the early ‘sixties, but by 1876 the struggle was again raging and his correspondence with Meynell was motivated by a desire to regain his faith in Catholicism. It is not difficult, then, to make the analogy between ‘Skittles’ and Arabia: just as his passionate love for ‘Skittles’ had allayed the bitter struggle in 1863, so was the renewal of that struggle temporarily solved in 1878 by his interest in Arabia, ‘a political “first love”, a romance which more and more absorbed me, and determined me to do what I could to help them to preserve their precious gift of independence’ (Secret History, p. 58). This is the background of the pattern of his concern with Islam as a religion, for it developed into a theory of returning the Caliphate to Arabia, a desire to take a personal part in the religious reformation of Islam, a desire to find a hermitage in the desert and, finally, into a permanent turning away from all religions.

We know from The Secret History (p. 89) that in the summer of 1880 he was ‘full of the notion of going to Arabia and heading a movement for the restoration of the Arabian Caliphate. People have been called great who have sacrificed themselves for smaller objects, but in this I feel the satisfaction of knowing it to be a really worthy cause.’ In the following year, as we have seen, he was at Jidda becoming acquainted with Moslem thought, and by 1882 when he published The Future of Islam he had convinced himself that there was the possibility of liberal reform in Islam, He explained in this book that ‘the great difficulty which, as things now stand, besets reform is this: the Sheriat, or written code of law, still stands in orthodox Islam as an unimpeachable authority’. Though ‘an excellent law’, it was not entirely satisfactory on certain points; but he was reasonably certain that a ‘wider and more liberal reading of the law’, would result if Arabian thought once more became supreme in Islam, and that it was even possible, should that happen, that Islam and Christianity might effect a ‘true reconciliation’. He believed that ‘the path of Orthodox Islam is no macadamized road such as the Catholic Church of Christendom has become’ and that there was no ‘office corresponding even remotely with the infallible Papacy’. Tracing its history, he observed that Islam ‘in its institution, and for many centuries after its birth, was eminently a rationalistic creed; and it was through reason as well as faith that it first achieved its spiritual triumphs’. He also noted that when the Arabs

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