been far less stirred by the new era than the Hindus, whom hitherto we
have been chiefly considering. Only a small number of Mahomedans belong
to the professional class, so that modern education and the awakening
have not reached Mahomedans in the same degree as Hindus. Quite
outnumbered also by Hindus, they identify themselves politically with
the British rather than with the Hindus, so that as a body they do not
support the Congress, the great Indian Political Association, and have
no anti-British consciousness. Mahomedan solidarity is strong enough,
but it is religious not national, and so it is only in the religious
sphere that we find the new era telling upon Mahomedans. Two small
religious movements may be noted curiously parallel to the [=A]rya and
Br[=a]hma movements among Hindus, and suggesting the operation of like
influences.

[Sidenote: The Wahabbi movement analogous to [=A]ryaism.]

As the [=A]ryas preach a return to the pure original Hinduism of the
Vedas, the first Mahomedan movement inculcates a return to the pure
original Mahomedanism of the Koran. In particular, it urges a casting
off of the Hindu customs and superstitions that the Indian converts to
Mahomedanism have frequently retained,--the offerings to the dead, for
example. In the first instance, the movement came from a seventeenth
century Arabian sect, the Wahabbis, but the movement reached India only
about the year 1820, and therefore is a feature of the period we are
surveying. The movement belongs specially to Bengal and the United
Provinces north-west of Bengal, and is known by a variety of local
names, Wahabbi and other. Significant, as supporting what has been said
regarding the absence of anti-British feeling among present-day
Mahomedans, is the fact that in the first stages of the Wahabbi
movement, both in Eastern and Western Bengal, the duty of war upon