The Kingdom of Egypt 285
are giving place to a cheap materialism and agnosticism
even more rapidly than the native customs and costumes
are being replaced. For the taste of the Egyptian in the
outward things of life seems more reliable and refined
than his taste in its philosophies. As the factory chimney
replaces the minaret, and the steam siren the muezzin,
the charity and chivalry that was born of a common
citizenship in the Islamic State has to be replaced by a
civic conscience and a national self-respect. But this
will be a slow process. For the Egyptian mind is too
composite and too cosmopolitan for such a simple creed
as that of the Turkish poet who sings : " Turkish am I,
Turkish my language, Turkish my land, therefore am I
great/3
Cairo is still the intellectual centre of the modern
Moslem world. Its principal papers circulate from Fez
to Pekin. Some dailies have a circulation of as much as
forty thousand, which is a considerable figure, seeing
that Cairo alone has ninety-six different dailies, and
Alexandria twenty-eight. There are some ninety periodi-
cals published in Egypt, five in Arabic, twelve in
French, eight in Greek, four in English, four in Italian,
three in Armenian, one in Hebrew, and one in Maltese.
The monthly, El Manar, founded by Mohamed Abdu,
is still a leading light to Islamic religious reformers. For
the schools of new thought in the East—both Western
and Eastern—the Egyptian intellect acts as pioneer.
From this fertilising flood of new ideas, turgid and tur-
bulent as it may seem to us, there will grow in due
course refreshing fruits of national literature in prose
and poetry.
Art will, no doubt, revive with the emancipations from
the ancient interdict of Islam and with inspiration from the
ancient inheritance of Pharaonic culture. There is already