A History of Protestant missions in the near East

The Muhammadan World and the Eastern Churches 33
It is difficult for us to realize that orders which effect this
kind of piety should represent the strength of Islam. And
yet to their activity Islam owes its most important progress,
its greatest conquests in the nineteenth century. The scope
of the kadirija is chiefly in Western Sudan, the desire of
the Muhammadan faith among
its adherents being to spread
the heathen nations of Africa. They are to be found as far
south as Sierra Leone and the upper Niger. The fact that a
tribe, as soon as it becomes Muhammadan, is spared by the
slave dealers, has added large populations to Islam.
The tiyaniyah order is
powerful chiefly in Tunis, exercising
its influence as far as Sierra Leone and Timbuctoo. This order
must be chiefly credited with the mighty advance of Islam in
North and East Africa.
At present the most important and powerful order is the
sanussiyah. Founded in 1843 by the Algerian sheikh Sanussi,
and since his death in 1859, led with equal skill by his son, this
order possessed in 1886 one hundred and twenty-one monasteries
and houses of the order and had, counting the lay brethren,
about eight million adherents. In Tripoli its
power is so great
that Turkish authority
is little more than nominal. The order
found a special promoter and adherent in the person of the
Sultan of Wadai, through whose influence the population of
the adjacent district of Ennedi embraced Islam. The monasteries
of the sanussiyah are found as far as Morocco, and
their influence in the interior of Africa, on the upper and
middle Niger,
is on the increase.
" The great aim of Sheikh
Sanussi in his work of reformation is the reestablishment of
the original Islam, as he imagines it,
the reintroduction of the
moral and religious laws and precepts of the Prophet, the renewing
of the purity of the Islamitic faith,
civilization and Christian-
free from the
besmirching influence of European
ity. All the modern innovations in Turkey and Egypt were
hateful to him, and he therefore adopted an Arabic motto for
movements of the body and head, full of hypnotic suggestion, -whereby the saored
formulae pass from one shoulder through the heart to the other side and
wander through various parts of the body " (Mekka II, p. 378),