Identifier: storyofafricaits03brow (find matches)
Title: The story of Africa and its explorers
Year: 1892 (1890s)
Authors: Brown, Robert, 1842-1895
Subjects:
Publisher: London : Cassell
Contributing Library: University of Connecticut Libraries
Digitizing Sponsor: Boston Library Consortium Member Libraries

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nduct themselvesin every essential respect like well-bred gentle-men. If the veriest rascals, they do not displaytheir rascality. Yet these people were notmany years ago simply negro savages who livedin dread of the fetish and the fetishman (p. 113),whose only faith was a set of grovelling super-stitions and whose hope of a future life waseither non-existent or vague and shadewj.The teaching of the Koran had formedsemi-civilised nations out of these degradedbarbarians. Once within the pale of Islamall men are, theoretically at least, equal; andthe negro who had lived in daily dread ofbeing captured as a slave by the white-robedtraders, learned that once he became oneof their corelisfionists, The Book forbadehim to be taken as a bondman, whatevermight be the Arab or the Fulahs inter-pretation of the Prophets command. Mo-hammedanism, it is said, and said with truth,does not admit of any great progress. TheKoran is the Alpha and the Omega of thepious Moslem, so that a confused farrago of
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O s 48 114 THE STORY OF AFRICA. three faiths compounded by an epileptic camel-driver 1,300 years ago must be the code of lawsby which men of the nineteenth century haveto govern their daily lives. It is thereforeundeniable that advances in modern civilisa-tion are impossible to Mohammedan peoplewho obey the Koran in its strict integrity.Turkey has progressed, Egypt has growngreater, Persia has taken on the gloss ofEurope, and India has outlived its ancientways, in spite of their faiths; but it must beremembered that the points in which theyhave progressed have been just those thatare inimical to the letter of the Koran. Coun-tries, indeed, like Morocco and the Soudanlook upon Turkey and Egypt as little betterthan lands of the infidel. Mohammedans are also accused of religiousintolerance, expressed in the most brutal^manner to dependents who are not of theirfaith. This religious Jiaivteur, this actual orimplied claim that the members of theirfaith are alone to be chosen, is, however, s

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