252 A Short History of the Middle East

those in power, effective social reform can be achieved by evolu-
tionary and constitutional means. Palliative five-year-plans and
the like will be drafted and duly pass into law, but how many of
them will be translated into action?

While the masses still hold as unquestioningly as ever to their
traditional Islam, there has been a marked trend towards material-
ism, agnosticism, and atheism among the upper and middle-
classes, especially among their younger members, as a result of
contact with "Western ideas. Many of the young nationalists are
conscious of being Muslims only as apolitical bond with the masses,
and of Islam only as a political rallying-cry against the foreigner.
Between these sceptics and the mass of the population come the
'ulama, the preachers, the graduates of the Muslim seminaries,
whose indurated conservatism of centuries has barely been touched
by more modern ideas. Some beginnings of reform in Al Azhar,
the ancient and well-frequented Muslim university of Cairo, have
been effected in the last fifteen years, but the process is bound to be
very slow. Islam has fallen into such a state of moral, intellectual,
and spiritual catalepsy that it will take many decades, if not cen-
turies, to reanimate the inert hulk; and it is doubtful if outside
forces, whether the impact of the Anglo-American world or that
of Soviet Russia, will give traditional Islam so long a respite.
Nor can it be said that Christianity in the Middle East is in much
better case. It makes virtually no converts from Islam, and is in
fact losing in Egypt hundreds of Copts annually to Islam for poli-
tical reasons. Except in Lebanon it is the religion of a minority,
suspected by the Muslim majority, with some justification, of in-
trigue with one or other European Power, and driven by this very
circumstance to regard its religion as a political instrument rather
than as a way of life.1 While some Christian Arabs are trying to
fuse their religious differences with the Muslims in the crucible of
Arab nationalism, the Muslims, conscious of their own intellectual
inferiority, are slow to give them full confidence. Some Christians
accordingly entertain the idea of concentrating their numbers by
1A vivid picture of the mingled physical fear and intellectual contempt with
which the Lebanese Christians regarded their Muslim rulers before the First
World War is given in Edward Atiyah's An Arab Tells his Story.