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. In the desert, the hinterland of Algiers. s theright by numbers and influence to call itself, has main-tained so consistent and successful a resistance to thenatural widening and completer application to life of itsdoctrines? By what authority has it been enabled torepel the liberalising tendency at all points ? What isit that gives to Mohammedan conservatism its tre-mendous consistency and endurance? It pretends tono infallibility, and yet it maintains a unity which, onefancies, it never could have derived from so changeful asource as the human mind, and which gives it anauthoritative air r
. In the desert, the hinterland of Algiers. s theright by numbers and influence to call itself, has main-tained so consistent and successful a resistance to thenatural widening and completer application to life of itsdoctrines? By what authority has it been enabled torepel the liberalising tendency at all points ? What isit that gives to Mohammedan conservatism its tre-mendous consistency and endurance? It pretends tono infallibility, and yet it maintains a unity which, onefancies, it never could have derived from so changeful asource as the human mind, and which gives it anauthoritative air resembling certainly in some degreethe aspect of the Roman Catholic Church. The fact is that if Mohammedanism has not gotinfallibility it has something that, up to a certain point,supplies the place of it. It has, in the desert, a tre-mendous influence, physical only and natural it is true,but permanent and unchanging, to back it up. Thedesert not only conceived and launched the ^Moslemfaith on the world, but it keeps watch and ward over it.
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Keywords: ., bookcentury1900, bookdecade1900, bookpublisherlondo, bookyear1909