The number of subjects now labelled as Oriental and the increasing development of knowledge concerning each, of these subjects, make it materially impossible for an individual to derive more than a fraction of the advantages offered by a Congress such as that recently held at Leyden. There were no fewer than nine sections (in fact, there should have been ten, a special section for Islamic Art having been eliminated) and over 200 papers were read during the five days that the Congress lasted, some of the sections sitting nearly five hours a day. It was inevitable that keenly interested delegates should again and again have to choose between equally attractive papers, especially where the third section (Central and Near Asia) and the eighth (Islam) were concerned.

Of the five opportunities given me these thirty-nine years for such a talk on such an occasion as this, the present one may well be the last. I have on these occasions considered, in the Buddhist field, Women, the Will, Natural Causation, and the Man as Real. I would now say a few words on that which is, historically speaking, the most central subject of all—the subject which is, by general assent, within and without that religion, the New Word with which it was introduced, the first Mantra recorded as of the Founder of it, the so-called Benares ‘sermon’. For we may talk much about legends of him on the one hand, or about the many ways in which his teaching expanded at later periods, in so-called philosophy and in this and that word-value, obscuring the man-value, but the one thing of chief historical importance is and remains the Mantras he first uttered as teacher, and their significance in the religious history of the there and then. To this I would add, in the pertinent phrase of a recent synoptical narrative, “the meaning which these will have had in the mind of their original author.”

The Fāṭiāmid Khilāfat, which had sprung into existence as the result of the widespread Ismā'ili propaganda at the end of the third century a.h., was at first consolidated on the soil of Northern Africa in the year 297 A.H. During the reign of al Mu'izz billāh, the centre of influence of the Fāṭimid Empire was transferred to Egypt, a change that was responsible for the foundation of Cairo. But the Fāṭimid conception of the state would not be contented merely with sovereignty over Egypt and the surrounding countries. The Fāṭimid movement strove to engulf the whole of the Islamic world and to unite the various small Islamic principalities in one 'Alid kingdom.