ABSTRACT
A n y o n e who has spent a single day in India, is conscious of the omnipresent authority of religion. Even the call of the food vendor on the railway platform, “ Hindu biscuits and Mohammedan tea/5 shows how completely religion controls the most minute details of daily living. It is not surprising therefore, since all religions in India allow so little variation from the established orthodox idea, that Islam accordingly has assumed a restrictive social force, which is far more rigid than in any other country. Further more, the fact that the Moslem community of seventy-seven millions is a minority in a population of three hundred and sixty-three millions, undoubtedly has a very great effect on Moslem thought. The consciousness of being surrounded by a strong, numerically overpowering force like Hinduism (there are over 238,000,000 Hindus in India) has always tended to put the Moslem minority on the defensive.1
