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In the nineteenth century meeting with the Islamic world, Europe, while sometimes changing its mind, believed it already knew all that was necessary. Thus Western thought frequently engaged, not in a debate with Islam, but in internal debates about Islam.

On the topic of nineteenth-century Africa, these debates focused less on comparative religion that on colonial policy. One of the initiators was Reginald Bosworth Smith, a Harrow schoolmaster who knew no Arabic, had no cross-cultural experience, and was no great theologian.

Nearly all of Smith's writing has a single theme: the responsibilities attached to British imperial power. Patriotism allied to moral earnestness sounds through his work—including his strangely influential Mohammed and Mohammedanism (1874).

His desire is that British power, beneficent in intent, shall be beneficent in reality. To act in the right way is to act in the Christian way, and Britain is a Christian country. Indeed, he declares that Christianity is the birthright of the English.

To this Smith adds a cheerful evolutionism. He arrives at a formulation whereby all religions are moral, rather than theological, in origin. They have come into existence to meet social and national moral needs. They raise humanity gradually toward God.

Following Smith's theory of the origins of religions, one can readily acknowledge that Islam established righteousness at the time of its birth. For instance, while Christians commonly complain of the depressive effect of Islam on women, it can be shown that Muhammad significantly raised the status of women in early Arabia.

But the theory can go further. Islam can still establish righteousness today, whenever it encounters a people at a lower stage of development than itself. Without, therefore, giving up the idea of the superiority of Christianity, and even leaving open the possibility that Muslims will eventually see the need for a higher ethical norm, Islam can be seen as Christianity's ally in the task of raising humanity.

This is not, of course, the vision of missionary Christianity. Smith's vision is that of birthright Christianity, the fortunate inheritance of Britain. As imperial expansion brought British rule to more and more peoples where Islamic influence was already at work or at hand, Smith's book could be read as a tract for the times. The expansion of Islam might actually improve the lot of "native peoples."

That was not to say that Islam was true, and certainly not to say that it had any relevance to Western society. All questions of truth claims could be bypassed; the administrative convenience was that Islam was, or could be, socially elevating.

Smith's views were enthusiastically endorsed by the Afro-West Indian man of letters Edward Wilmot Blyden, who wrote with the authority of one who had been a Christian missionary. He could give Bosworth Smith's argument a new dimension, detailing on the one hand the baleful effects in Africa of a Christianity heavily imbued with Western values, and on the other the blessings already brought to Africa by Islam.

Islam had brought unity instead of tribal division. It had kept foreign influence at bay. It had provided a basis for economic and cultural progress. It had harmed the African psyche less than Christianity had, for Western color prejudice and the imposition of Western cultural norms had confused African Christians and inhibited African artistic expression.

Further, Islam was less materialistic than Christianity. In colonial society an African had little to gain by becoming a Muslim, but everything to gain by connecting with the mission-dominated education system.

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