THE NEW WORLD OF ISLAM

BY

LOTHROP STODDARD, A.M., Ph.D. (Harv.)

AUTHOR OF: THE RISING TIDE OF COLOUR,

THE STAKES OF THE WAR,

PRESENT DAY EUROPE: ITS NATIONAL STATES OF MIND,

THE TRENCH REVOLUTION IN SAN DOMINGO, ETC.

WITH MAP

SECOND IMPRESSION

LONDON

CHAPMAN AND HALL, Ltd.

1922

Printed in Great Britain by Richard Clay & Sons Limited. Bungay, Suffolk

PREFACE

The entire world of Islam is to-day in profound ferment. From Morocco to China and from Turkestan to the Congo, the 250,000,000 followers of the Prophet Mohammed are stirring to new ideas, new impulses, new aspirations. A gigantic transformation is taking place whose results must affect all mankind.

This transformation was greatly stimulated by the late war. But it began long before. More than a hundred years ago the seeds were sown, and ever since then it has been evolving; at first slowly and obscurely; later more rapidly and perceptibly; until to-day, under the stimulus of Armageddon, it has burst into sudden and startling bloom.

The story of that strange and dramatic evolution I have endeavoured to tell in the following pages. Considering in turn its various aspects—religious, cultural, political, economic, social—I have tried to portray their genesis and development, to analyse their character, and to appraise their potency. While making due allowance for local differentiations, the intimate correlation and underlying unity of the various movements have ever been kept in view.

Although the book deals primarily with the Moslem world, it necessarily includes the non-Moslem Hindu elements of India. The field covered is thus virtually the entire Near and Middle East. The Far East has not been directly considered, but parallel developments there have been noted and should always be kept in mind.

Lothrop Stoddard.

CONTENTS

THE NEW WORLD OF ISLAM

"Das Alte stürzt, es ändert sich die Zeit,
Und neues Leben blüht aus den Ruinen."

Schiller, Wilhelm Tell.

INTRODUCTION

THE DECLINE AND FALL OF THE OLD ISLAMIC WORLD

The rise of Islam is perhaps the most amazing event in human history. Springing from a land and a people alike previously negligible, Islam spread within a century over half the earth, shattering great empires, overthrowing long-established religions, remoulding the souls of races, and building up a whole new world—the world of Islam.

The closer we examine this development the more extraordinary does it appear. The other great religions won their way slowly, by painful struggle, and finally triumphed with the aid of powerful monarchs converted to the new faith. Christianity had its Constantine, Buddhism its Asoka, and Zoroastrianism its Cyrus, each lending to his chosen cult the mighty force of secular authority. Not so Islam. Arising in a desert land sparsely inhabited by a nomad race previously undistinguished in human annals, Islam sallied forth on its great adventure with the slenderest human backing and against the heaviest material odds. Yet Islam triumphed with seemingly miraculous ease, and a couple of generations saw the Fiery Crescent borne victorious from the Pyrenees to the Himalayas and from the deserts of Central Asia to the deserts of Central Africa.

This amazing success was due to a number of contributing factors, chief among them being the character of the Arab race, the nature of Mohammed's teaching, and the general state of the contemporary Eastern world. Undistinguished though the Arabs had hitherto been, they were a people of remarkable potentialities, which were at that moment patently seeking self-realization. For several generations before Mohammed, Arabia had been astir with exuberant vitality. The Arabs had outgrown their ancestral paganism and were instinctively yearning for better things. Athwart this seething ferment of mind and spirit Islam rang like a trumpet-call. Mohammed, an Arab of the Arabs, was the very incarnation of the soul of his race. Preaching a simple, austere monotheism, free from priestcraft or elaborate doctrinal trappings, he tapped the well-springs of religious zeal always present in the Semitic heart. Forgetting the chronic rivalries and blood-feuds which had consumed their energies in internecine strife, and welded into a glowing unity by the fire of their new-found faith, the Arabs poured forth from their deserts to conquer the earth for Allah, the One True God.

Thus Islam, like the resistless breath of the sirocco, the desert wind, swept out of Arabia and encountered—a spiritual vacuum. Those neighbouring Byzantine and Persian Empires, so imposing to the casual eye, were mere dried husks, devoid of real vitality. Their religions were a mockery and a sham. Persia's ancestral cult of Zoroaster had degenerated into "Magism"—a pompous priestcraft, tyrannical and persecuting, hated and secretly despised. As for Eastern Christianity, bedizened with the gewgaws of paganism and bedevilled by the maddening theological speculations of the decadent Greek mind, it had become a repellent caricature of the teachings of Christ. Both Magism and Byzantine Christendom were riven by great heresies which engendered savage persecutions and furious hates. Furthermore, both the Byzantine and Persian Empires were harsh despotisms which crushed their subjects to the dust and killed out all love of country or loyalty to the state. Lastly, the two empires had just fought a terrible war from which they had emerged mutually bled white and utterly exhausted.

Such was the world compelled to face the lava-flood of Islam. The result was inevitable. Once the disciplined strength of the East Roman legions and the Persian cuirassiers had broken before the fiery onslaught of the fanatic sons of the desert, it was all over. There was no patriotic resistance. The down-trodden populations passively accepted new masters, while the numerous heretics actually welcomed the overthrow of persecuting co-religionists whom they hated far worse than their alien conquerors. In a short time most of the subject peoples accepted the new faith, so refreshingly simple compared with their own degenerate cults. The Arabs, in their turn, knew how to consolidate their rule. They were no bloodthirsty savages, bent solely on loot and destruction. On the contrary, they were an innately gifted race, eager to learn and appreciative of the cultural gifts which older civilizations had to bestow. Intermarrying freely and professing a common belief, conquerors and conquered rapidly fused, and from this fusion arose a new civilization—the Saracenic civilization, in which the ancient cultures of Greece, Rome, and Persia were revitalized by Arab vigour and synthesized by the Arab genius and the Islamic spirit. For the first three centuries of its existence (circ. a.d. 650-1000) the realm of Islam was the most civilized and progressive portion of the world. Studded with splendid cities, gracious mosques, and quiet universities where the wisdom of the ancient world was preserved and appreciated, the Moslem East offered a striking contrast to the Christian West, then sunk in the night of the Dark Ages.

However, by the tenth century the Saracenic civilization began to display unmistakable symptoms of decline. This decline was at first gradual. Down to the terrible disasters of the thirteenth century it still displayed vigour and remained ahead of the Christian West. Still, by the year a.d. 1000 its golden age was over. For this there were several reasons. In the first place, that inveterate spirit of faction which has always been the bane of the Arab race soon reappeared once more. Rival clans strove for the headship of Islam, and their quarrels degenerated into bloody civil wars. In this fratricidal strife the fervour of the first days cooled, and saintly men like Abu Bekr and Omar, Islam's first standard-bearers, gave place to worldly minded leaders who regarded their position of "Khalifa"[1] as a means to despotic power and self-glorification. The seat of government was moved to Damascus in Syria, and afterward to Bagdad in Mesopotamia. The reason for this was obvious. In Mecca despotism was impossible. The fierce, free-born Arabs of the desert would tolerate no master, and their innate democracy had been sanctioned by the Prophet, who had explicitly declared that all Believers were brothers. The Meccan caliphate was a theocratic democracy. Abu Bekr and Omar were elected by the people, and held themselves responsible to public opinion, subject to the divine law as revealed by Mohammed in the Koran.

But in Damascus, and still more in Bagdad, things were different. There the pure-blooded Arabs were only a handful among swarms of Syrian and Persian converts and "Neo-Arab" mixed-bloods. These people were filled with traditions of despotism and were quite ready to yield the caliphs obsequious obedience. The caliphs, in their turn, leaned more and more upon these complaisant subjects, drawing from their ranks courtiers, officials, and ultimately soldiers. Shocked and angered, the proud Arabs gradually returned to the desert, while the government fell into the well-worn ruts of traditional Oriental despotism. When the caliphate was moved to Bagdad after the founding of the Abbaside dynasty (a.d. 750), Persian influence became preponderant. The famous Caliph Haroun-al-Rashid, the hero of the Arabian Nights, was a typical Persian monarch, a true successor of Xerxes and Chosroes, and as different from Abu Bekr or Omar as it is possible to conceive. And, in Bagdad, as elsewhere, despotic power was fatal to its possessors. Under its blight the "successors" of Mohammed became capricious tyrants or degenerate harem puppets, whose nerveless hands were wholly incapable of guiding the great Moslem Empire.

The empire, in fact, gradually went to pieces. Shaken by the civil wars, bereft of strong leaders, and deprived of the invigorating amalgam of the unspoiled desert Arabs, political unity could not endure. Everywhere there occurred revivals of suppressed racial or particularist tendencies. The very rapidity of Islam's expansion turned against it, now that the well-springs of that expansion were dried up. Islam had made millions of converts, of many sects and races, but it had digested them very imperfectly. Mohammed had really converted the Arabs, because he merely voiced ideas which were obscurely germinating in Arab minds and appealed to impulses innate in the Arab blood. When, however, Islam was accepted by non-Arab peoples, they instinctively interpreted the Prophet's message according to their particular racial tendencies and cultural backgrounds, the result being that primitive Islam was distorted or perverted. The most extreme example of this was in Persia, where the austere monotheism of Mohammed was transmuted into the elaborate mystical cult known as Shiism, which presently cut the Persians off from full communion with the orthodox Moslem world. The same transmutive tendency appears, in lesser degree, in the saint-worship of the North African Berbers and in the pantheism of the Hindu Moslems—both developments which Mohammed would have unquestionably execrated.

These doctrinal fissures in Islam were paralleled by the disruption of political unity. The first formal split occurred after the accession of the Abbasides. A member of the deposed Ommeyyad family fled to Spain, where he set up a rival caliphate at Cordova, recognized as lawful not only by the Spanish Moslems, but by the Berbers of North Africa. Later on another caliphate was set up in Egypt—the Fatimite caliphate, resting its title on descent from Mohammed's daughter Fatima. As for the Abbaside caliphs of Bagdad, they gradually declined in power, until they became mere puppets in the hands of a new racial element, the Turks.

Before describing that shift of power from Neo-Arab to Turkish hands which was so momentous for the history of the Islamic world, let us first consider the decline in cultural and intellectual vigour that set in concurrently with the disruption of political and religious unity during the later stages of the Neo-Arab period.

The Arabs of Mohammed's day were a fresh, unspoiled people in the full flush of pristine vigour, eager for adventure and inspired by a high ideal. They had their full share of Semitic fanaticism, but, though fanatical, they were not bigoted, that is to say, they possessed, not closed, but open minds. They held firmly to the tenets of their religion, but this religion was extremely simple. The core of Mohammed's teaching was theism plus certain practices. A strict belief in the unity of God, an equally strict belief in the divine mission[2] of Mohammed as set forth in the Koran, and certain clearly defined duties—prayer, ablutions, fasting, almsgiving, and pilgrimage—these, and these alone, constituted the Islam of the Arab conquerors of the Eastern world.

So simple a theology could not seriously fetter the Arab mind, alert, curious, eager to learn, and ready to adjust itself to conditions ampler and more complex than those prevailing in the parched environment of the desert. Now, not only did the Arabs relish the material advantages and luxuries of the more developed societies which they had conquered; they also appreciated the art, literature, science, and ideas of the older civilizations. The effect of these novel stimuli was the remarkable cultural and intellectual flowering which is the glory of Saracenic civilization. For a time thought was relatively free and produced a wealth of original ideas and daring speculations. These were the work not only of Arabs but also of subject Christians, Jews, and Persians, many of them being heretics previously depressed under the iron bands of persecuting Byzantine orthodoxy and Magism.

Gradually, however, this enlightened era passed away. Reactionary forces appeared and gained in strength. The liberals, who are usually known under the general title of "Motazelites," not only clung to the doctrinal simplicity of primitive Islam, but also contended that the test of all things should be reason. On the other hand, the conservative schools of thought asserted that the test should be precedent and authority. These men, many of them converted Christians imbued with the traditions of Byzantine orthodoxy, undertook an immense work of Koranic exegesis, combined with an equally elaborate codification and interpretation of the reputed sayings or "traditions" of Mohammed, as handed down by his immediate disciples and followers. As the result of these labours, there gradually arose a Moslem theology and scholastic philosophy as rigid, elaborate, and dogmatic as that of the mediæval Christian West.

Naturally, the struggle between the fundamentally opposed tendencies of traditionalism and rationalism was long and bitter. Yet the ultimate outcome was almost a foregone conclusion. Everything conspired to favour the triumph of dogma over reason. The whole historic tradition of the East (a tradition largely induced by racial and climatic factors[3]) was toward absolutism. This tradition had been interrupted by the inrush of the wild libertarianism of the desert. But the older tendency presently reasserted itself, stimulated as it was by the political transformation of the caliphate from theocratic, democracy to despotism.

This triumph of absolutism in the field of government in fact assured its eventual triumph in all other fields as well. For, in the long run, despotism can no more tolerate liberty of thought than it can liberty of action. Some of the Damascus caliphs, to be sure, toyed with Motazelism, the Ommeyyads being mainly secular-minded men to whom freethinking was intellectually attractive. But presently the caliphs became aware of liberalism's political implications. The Motazelites did not confine themselves to the realm of pure philosophic speculation. They also trespassed on more dangerous ground. Motazelite voices were heard recalling the democratic days of the Meccan caliphate, when the Commander of the Faithful, instead of being an hereditary monarch, was elected by the people and responsible to public opinion. Some bold spirits even entered into relations with the fierce fanatic sects of inner Arabia, like the Kharijites, who, upholding the old desert freedom, refused to recognize the caliphate and proclaimed theories of advanced republicanism.

The upshot was that the caliphs turned more and more toward the conservative theologians as against the liberals, just as they favoured the monarchist Neo-Arabs in preference to the intractable pure-blooded Arabs of the desert. Under the Abbasides the government came out frankly for religious absolutism. Standards of dogmatic orthodoxy were established, Motazelites were persecuted and put to death, and by the twelfth century a.d. the last vestiges of Saracenic liberalism were extirpated. The canons of Moslem thought were fixed. All creative activity ceased. The very memory of the great Motazelite doctors faded away. The Moslem mind was closed, not to be re-opened until our own day.

By the beginning of the eleventh century the decline of Saracenic civilization had become so pronounced that change was clearly in the air. Having lost their early vigour, the Neo-Arabs were to see their political power pass into other hands. These political heirs of the Neo-Arabs were the Turks. The Turks were a western branch of that congeries of nomadic tribes which, from time immemorial, have roamed over the limitless steppes of eastern and central Asia, and which are known collectively under the titles of "Uralo-Altaic" or "Turanian" peoples. The Arabs had been in contact with the Turkish nomads ever since the Islamic conquest of Persia, when the Moslem generals found the Turks beating restlessly against Persia's north-eastern frontiers. In the caliphate's palmy days the Turks were not feared. In fact, they were presently found to be very useful. A dull-witted folk with few ideas, the Turks could do two things superlatively well—obey orders and fight like devils. In other words, they made ideal mercenary soldiers. The caliphs were delighted, and enlisted ever larger numbers of them for their armies and their body-guards.

This was all very well while the caliphate was strong, but when it grew weak the situation altered. Rising everywhere to positions of authority, the Turkish mercenaries began to act like masters. Opening the eastern frontiers, they let in fresh swarms of their countrymen, who now came, not as individuals, but in tribes or "hordes" under their hereditary chiefs, wandering about at their own sweet will, settling where they pleased, and despoiling or evicting the local inhabitants.

The Turks soon renounced their ancestral paganism for Islam, but Islam made little change in their natures. In judging these Turkish newcomers we must not consider them the same as the present-day Ottoman Turks of Constantinople and Asia Minor. The modern Osmanli are so saturated with European and Near Eastern blood, and have been so leavened by Western and Saracenic ideas, they that are a very different people from their remote immigrant ancestors. Yet, even as it is, the modern Osmanli display enough of those unlovely Turanian traits which characterize the unmodified Turks of central Asia, often called "Turkomans," to distinguish them from their Ottoman kinsfolk to the west.

Now, what was the primitive Turkish nature? First and foremost, it was that of the professional soldier. Discipline was the Turk's watchword. No originality of thought, and but little curiosity. Few ideas ever penetrated the Turk's slow mind, and the few that did penetrate were received as military orders, to be obeyed without question and adhered to without reflection. Such was the being who took over the leadership of Islam from the Saracen's failing grasp.

No greater misfortune could have occurred both for Islam and for the world at large. For Islam it meant the rule of dull-witted bigots under which enlightened progress was impossible. Of course Islam did gain a great accession of warlike strength, but this new power was so wantonly misused as to bring down disastrous repercussions upon Islam itself. The first notable exploits of the immigrant Turkish hordes were their conquest of Asia Minor and their capture of Jerusalem, both events taking place toward the close of the eleventh century[4]. Up to this time Asia Minor had remained part of the Christian world. The original Arab flood of the seventh century, after overrunning Syria, had been stopped by the barrier of the Taurus Mountains; the Byzantine Empire had pulled itself together; and thenceforth, despite border bickerings, the Byzantine-Saracen frontier had remained substantially unaltered. Now, however, the Turks broke the Byzantine barrier, overran Asia Minor, and threatened even Constantinople, the eastern bulwark of Christendom. As for Jerusalem, it had, of course, been in Moslem hands since the Arab conquest of a.d. 637, but the caliph Omar had carefully respected the Christian "Holy Places," and his successors had neither persecuted the local Christians nor maltreated the numerous pilgrims who flocked perennially to Jerusalem from every part of the Christian world. But the Turks changed all this. Avid for loot, and filled with bigoted hatred of the "Misbelievers," they sacked the holy places, persecuted the Christians, and rendered pilgrimage impossible.

The effect of these twin disasters upon Christendom, occurring as they did almost simultaneously, was tremendous. The Christian West, then at the height of its religious fervour, quivered with mingled fear and wrath. Myriads of zealots, like Peter the Hermit, roused all Europe to frenzy. Fanaticism begat fanaticism, and the Christian West poured upon the Moslem East vast hosts of warriors in those extraordinary expeditions, the Crusades.

The Turkish conquest of Islam and its counterblast, the Crusades, were an immense misfortune for the world. They permanently worsened the relations between East and West. In the year a.d. 1000 Christian-Moslem relations were fairly good, and showed every prospect of becoming better. The hatreds engendered by Islam's first irruption were dying away. The frontiers of Islam and Christendom had become apparently fixed, and neither side showed much desire to encroach upon the other. The only serious debatable ground was Spain, where Moslem and Christian were continually at hand-grips; but, after all, Spain was mutually regarded as a frontier episode. Between Islam and Christendom, as a whole, intercourse was becoming steadily more friendly and more frequent. This friendly intercourse, if continued, might ultimately have produced momentous results for human progress. The Moslem world was at that time still well ahead of western Europe in knowledge and culture, but Saracenic civilization was ossifying, whereas the Christian West, despite its ignorance, rudeness, and barbarism, was bursting with lusty life and patently aspiring to better things. Had the nascent amity of East and West in the eleventh century continued to develop, both would have greatly profited. In the West the influence of Saracenic culture, containing, as it did, the ancient learning of Greece and Rome, might have awakened our Renaissance much earlier, while in the East the influence of the mediæval West, with its abounding vigour, might have saved Moslem civilization from the creeping paralysis which was overtaking it.

But it was not to be. In Islam the refined, easygoing Saracen gave place to the bigoted, brutal Turk. Islam became once more aggressive—not, as in its early days, for an ideal, but for sheer blood-lust, plunder, and destruction. Henceforth it was war to the knife between the only possible civilization and the most brutal and hopeless barbarism. Furthermore, this war was destined to last for centuries. The Crusades were merely Western counter-attacks against a Turkish assault on Christendom which continued for six hundred years and was definitely broken only under the walls of Vienna in 1683. Naturally, from these centuries of unrelenting strife furious hatreds and fanaticisms were engendered which still envenom the relations of Islam and Christendom. The atrocities of Mustapha Kemal's Turkish "Nationalists" and the atrocities of the Greek troops in Asia Minor, of which we read in our morning papers, are in no small degree a "carrying on" of the mutual atrocities of Turks and Crusaders in Palestine eight hundred years ago.

With the details of those old wars between Turks and Christians this book has no direct concern. The wars themselves should simply be noted as a chronic barrier between East and West. As for the Moslem East, with its declining Saracenic civilization bowed beneath the brutal Turkish yoke, it was presently exposed to even more terrible misfortunes. These misfortunes were also of Turanian origin. Toward the close of the twelfth century the eastern branches of the Turanian race were welded into a temporary unity by the genius of a mighty chieftain named Jenghiz Khan. Taking the sinister title of "The Inflexible Emperor," this arch-savage started out to loot the world. He first overran northern China, which he hideously ravaged, then turned his devastating course toward the west. Such was the rise of the terrible "Mongols," whose name still stinks in the nostrils of civilized mankind. Carrying with them skilled Chinese engineers using gunpowder for the reduction of fortified cities, Jenghiz Khan and his mounted hosts proved everywhere irresistible. The Mongols were the most appalling barbarians whom the world has ever seen. Their object was not conquest for settlement, not even loot, but in great part a sheer satanic lust for blood and destruction. They revelled in butchering whole populations, destroying cities, laying waste countrysides—and then passing on to fresh fields.

Jenghiz Khan died after a few years of his westward progress, but his successors continued his work with unabated zeal. Both Christendom and Islam were smitten by the Mongol scourge. All eastern Europe was ravaged and re-barbarized, the Russians showing ugly traces of the Mongol imprint to this day. But the woes of Christendom were as nothing to the woes of Islam. The Mongols never penetrated beyond Poland, and western Europe, the seat of Western civilization, was left unscathed. Not so Islam. Pouring down from the north-east, the Mongol hosts whirled like a cyclone over the Moslem world from India to Egypt, pillaging, murdering, and destroying. The nascent civilization of mediæval Persia, just struggling into the light beneath the incubus of Turkish harryings, was stamped flat under the Mongol hoofs, and the Mongols then proceeded to deal with the Moslem culture-centre—Bagdad. Bagdad had declined considerably from the gorgeous days of Haroun-al-Rashid, with its legendary million souls. However, it was still a great city, the seat of the caliphate and the unquestioned centre of Saracenic civilization. The Mongols stormed it (a.d. 1258), butchered its entire population, and literally wiped Bagdad off the face of the earth. And even this was not the worst. Bagdad was the capital of Mesopotamia. This "Land between the Rivers" had, in the very dawn of history, been reclaimed from swamp and desert by the patient labours of half-forgotten peoples who, with infinite toil, built up a marvellous system of irrigation that made Mesopotamia the perennial garden and granary of the world. Ages had passed and Mesopotamia had known many masters, but all these conquerors had respected, even cherished, the irrigation works which were the source of all prosperity. These works the Mongols wantonly, methodically destroyed. The oldest civilization in the world, the cradle of human culture, was hopelessly ruined; at least eight thousand years of continuous human effort went for naught, and Mesopotamia became the noisome land it still remains to-day, parched during the droughts of low water, soaked to fever-stricken marsh in the season of river-floods, tenanted only by a few mongrel fellahs inhabiting wretched mud villages, and cowed by nomad Bedouin browsing their flocks on the sites of ancient fields.

The destruction of Bagdad was a fatal blow to Saracenic civilization, especially in the East. And even before that dreadful disaster it had received a terrible blow in the West. Traversing North Africa in its early days, Islam had taken firm root in Spain, and had so flourished there that Spanish Moslem culture was fully abreast of that in the Moslem East. The capital of Spanish Islam was Cordova, the seat of the Western caliphate, a mighty city, perhaps more wonderful than Bagdad itself. For centuries Spanish Islam lived secure, confining the Christians to the mountainous regions of the north. As Saracen vigour declined, however, the Christians pressed the Moslems southward. In 1213 Spanish Islam was hopelessly broken at the tremendous battle of Las Navas de Tolosa. Thenceforth, for the victorious Christians it was a case of picking up the pieces. Cordova itself soon fell, and with it the glory of Spanish Islam, for the fanatical Christian Spaniards extirpated Saracenic civilization as effectually as the pagan Mongols were at that time doing. To be sure, a remnant of the Spanish Moslems held their ground at Granada, in the extreme south, until the year Columbus discovered America, but this was merely an episode. The Saracen civilization of the West was virtually destroyed.

Meanwhile the Moslem East continued to bleed under the Mongol scourge. Wave after wave of Mongol raiders passed over the land, the last notable invasion being that headed by the famous (or rather infamous) Tamerlane, early in the fifteenth century. By this time the western Mongols had accepted Islam, but that made little difference in their conduct. To show that Tamerlane was a true scion of his ancestor Jenghiz Khan, it may be remarked that his foible was pyramids of human skulls, his prize effort being one of 70,000 erected after the storming of the Persian city of Ispahan. After the cessation of the Mongol incursions, the ravaged and depopulated Moslem East fell under the sway of the Ottoman Turks.

The Ottoman Turks, or "Osmanli," were originally merely one of the many Turkish hordes which entered Asia Minor after the downfall of Byzantine rule. They owed their greatness mainly to a long line of able sultans, who gradually absorbed the neighbouring Turkish tribes and used this consolidated strength for ambitious conquests both to east and west. In 1453 the Osmanli extinguished the old Byzantine Empire by taking Constantinople, and within a century thereafter they had conquered the Moslem East from Persia to Morocco, had subjugated the whole Balkan Peninsula, and had advanced through Hungary to the walls of Vienna. Unlike their Mongol cousins, the Ottoman Turks built up a durable empire. It was a barbarous sort of empire, for the Turks understood very little about culture. The only things they could appreciate were military improvements. These, however, they thoroughly appreciated and kept fully abreast of the times. In their palmy days the Turks had the best artillery and the steadiest infantry in the world, and were the terror of Europe.

Meantime Europe was awakening to true progress and higher civilization. While the Moslem East was sinking under Mongol harryings and Turkish militarism, the Christian West was thrilling to the Renaissance and the discoveries of America and the water route to India. The effect of these discoveries simply cannot be over-estimated. When Columbus and Vasco da Gama made their memorable voyages at the end of the fifteenth century, Western civilization was pent up closely within the restricted bounds of west-central Europe, and was waging a defensive and none-too-hopeful struggle with the forces of Turanian barbarism. Russia lay under the heel of the Mongol Tartars, while the Turks, then in the full flush of their martial vigour, were marching triumphantly up from the south-east and threatening Europe's very heart. So strong were these Turanian barbarians, with Asia, North Africa, and eastern Europe in their grasp, that Western civilization was hard put to it to hold its own. Western civilization was, in fact, fighting with its back to the wall—the wall of a boundless ocean. We can hardly conceive how our mediæval forefathers viewed the ocean. To them it was a numbing, constricting presence; the abode of darkness and horror. No wonder mediæval Europe was static, since it faced on ruthless, aggressive Asia, and backed on nowhere. Then, in the twinkling of an eye, the sea-wall became a highway, and dead-end Europe became mistress of the ocean—and thereby mistress of the world.

The greatest strategic shift of fortune in all human history had taken place. Instead of fronting hopelessly on the fiercest of Asiatics, against whom victory by direct attack seemed impossible, the Europeans could now flank them at will. Furthermore, the balance of resources shifted in Europe's favour. Whole new worlds were unmasked whence Europe could draw limitless wealth to quicken its home life and initiate a progress that would soon place it immeasurably above its once-dreaded Asiatic assailants. What were the resources of the stagnant Moslem East compared with those of the Americas and the Indies? So Western civilization, quickened, energized, progressed with giant strides, shook off its mediæval fetters, grasped the talisman of science, and strode into the light of modern times.

Yet all this left Islam unmoved. Wrapping itself in the tatters of Saracenic civilization, the Moslem East continued to fall behind. Even its military power presently vanished, for the Turk sank into lethargy and ceased to cultivate the art of war. For a time the West, busied with internal conflicts, hesitated to attack the East, so great was the prestige of the Ottoman name. But the crushing defeat of the Turks in their rash attack upon Vienna in 1683 showed the West that the Ottoman Empire was far gone in decrepitude. Thenceforth, the empire was harried mercilessly by Western assaults and was saved from collapse only by the mutual jealousies of Western Powers, quarrelling over the Turkish spoils.

However, not until the nineteenth century did the Moslem world, as a whole, feel the weight of Western attack. Throughout the eighteenth century the West assailed the ends of the Moslem battle-line in eastern Europe and the Indies, but the bulk of Islam, from Morocco to Central Asia, remained almost immune. The Moslem world failed to profit by this respite. Plunged in lethargy, contemptuous of the European "Misbelievers," and accepting defeats as the inscrutable will of Allah, Islam continued to live its old life, neither knowing nor caring to know anything about Western ideas or Western progress.

Such was the decrepit Moslem world which faced nineteenth-century Europe, energized by the Industrial Revolution, armed as never before by modern science and invention which had unlocked nature's secrets and placed hitherto-undreamed-of weapons in its aggressive hands. The result was a foregone conclusion. One by one, the decrepit Moslem states fell before the Western attack, and the whole Islamic world was rapidly partitioned among the European Powers. England took India and Egypt, Russia crossed the Caucasus and mastered Central Asia, France conquered North Africa, while other European nations grasped minor portions of the Moslem heritage. The Great War witnessed the final stage in this process of subjugation. By the terms of the treaties which marked its close, Turkey was extinguished and not a single Mohammedan state retained genuine independence. The subjection of the Moslem world was complete—on paper.

On paper! For, in its very hour of apparent triumph, Western domination was challenged as never before. During those hundred years of Western conquest a mighty internal change had been coming over the Moslem world. The swelling tide of Western aggression had at last moved the "immovable" East. At last Islam became conscious of its decrepitude, and with that consciousness a vast ferment, obscure yet profound, began to leaven the 250,000,000 followers of the Prophet from Morocco to China and from Turkestan to the Congo. The first spark was fittingly struck in the Arabian desert, the cradle of Islam. Here at the opening of the nineteenth century, arose the Wahabi movement for the reform of Islam, which presently kindled the far-flung "Mohammedan Revival," which in its turn begat the movement known as "Pan-Islamism." Furthermore, athwart these essentially internal movements there came pouring a flood of external stimuli from the West—ideas such as parliamentary government, nationalism, scientific education, industrialism, and even ultra-modern concepts like feminism, socialism, Bolshevism. Stirred by the interaction of all these novel forces and spurred by the ceaseless pressure of European aggression, the Moslem world roused more and more to life and action. The Great War was a shock of terrific potency, and to-day Islam is seething with mighty forces fashioning a new Moslem world. What are those forces moulding the Islam of the future? To their analysis and appraisal the body of this book is devoted.

FOOTNOTES:

[1] I. e. "Successor"; anglicized into the word "Caliph."

[2] To be carefully distinguished from divinity. Mohammed not only did not make any pretensions to divinity, but specifically disclaimed any such attributes. He regarded himself as the last of a series of divinely inspired prophets, beginning with Adam and extending through Moses and Jesus to himself, the mouthpiece of God's last and most perfect revelation.

[3] The influence of environment and heredity on human evolution in general and on the history of the East in particular, though of great importance, cannot be treated in a summary such as this. The influence of climatic and other environmental factors has been ably treated by Prof. Ellsworth Huntington in his various works, such as The Pulse of Asia (Boston, 1907); Civilization and Climate (Yale Univ. Press, 1915), and World-Power and Evolution (Yale Univ. Press, 1919). See also Chap. III. in Arminius Vambéry—Der Islam im neunzehnten Jahrhundert. Eine culturgeschichtliche Studie (Leipzig, 1875). For a summary of racial influences in Eastern history, see Madison Grant—The Passing of the Great Race (N.Y., 1916).

[4] The Turkish overrunning of Asia Minor took place after the destruction of the Byzantine army in the great battle of Manzikert, a.d. 1071. The Turks captured Jerusalem in 1076.

CHAPTER I

THE MOHAMMEDAN REVIVAL

By the eighteenth century the Moslem world had sunk to the lowest depth of its decrepitude. Nowhere were there any signs of healthy vigour, everywhere were stagnation and decay. Manners and morals were alike execrable. The last vestiges of Saracenic culture had vanished in a barbarous luxury of the few and an equally barbarous degradation of the multitude. Learning was virtually dead, the few universities which survived fallen into dreary decay and languishing in poverty and neglect. Government had become despotism tempered by anarchy and assassination. Here and there a major despot like the Sultan of Turkey or the Indian "Great Mogul" maintained some semblance of state authority, albeit provincial pashas were for ever striving to erect independent governments based, like their masters', on tyranny and extortion. The pashas, in turn, strove ceaselessly against unruly local chiefs and swarms of brigands who infested the countryside. Beneath this sinister hierarchy groaned the people, robbed, bullied, and ground into the dust. Peasant and townsman had alike lost all incentive to labour or initiative, and both agriculture and trade had fallen to the lowest level compatible with bare survival.

As for religion, it was as decadent as everything else. The austere monotheism of Mohammed had become overlaid with a rank growth of superstition and puerile mysticism. The mosques stood unfrequented and ruinous, deserted by the ignorant multitude, which, decked out in amulets, charms, and rosaries, listened to squalid fakirs or ecstatic dervishes, and went on pilgrimages to the tombs of "holy men," worshipped as saints and "intercessors" with that Allah who had become too remote a being for the direct devotion of these benighted souls. As for the moral precepts of the Koran, they were ignored or defied. Wine-drinking and opium-eating were well-nigh universal, prostitution was rampant, and the most degrading vices flaunted naked and unashamed. Even the holy cities, Mecca and Medina, were sink-holes of iniquity, while the "Hajj," or pilgrimage ordained by the Prophet, had become a scandal through its abuses. In fine: the life had apparently gone out of Islam, leaving naught but a dry husk of soulless ritual and degrading superstition behind. Could Mohammed have returned to earth, he would unquestionably have anathematized his followers as apostates and idolaters.

Yet, in this darkest hour, a voice came crying out of the vast Arabian desert, the cradle of Islam, calling the faithful back to the true path. This puritan reformer, the famous Abd-el-Wahab, kindled a fire which presently spread to the remotest corners of the Moslem world, purging Islam of its sloth and reviving the fervour of olden days. The great Mohammedan Revival had begun.

Mahommed ibn Abd-el-Wahab was born about the year a.d. 1700 in the heart of the Arabian desert, the region known as the Nejd. The Nejd was the one clean spot in the decadent Moslem world. We have already seen how, with the transformation of the caliphate from a theocratic democracy to an Oriental despotism, the free-spirited Arabs had returned scornfully to their deserts. Here they had maintained their wild freedom. Neither caliph nor sultan dared venture far into those vast solitudes of burning sand and choking thirst, where the rash invader was lured to sudden death in a whirl of stabbing spears. The Arabs recognized no master, wandering at will with their flocks and camels, or settled here and there in green oases hidden in the desert's heart. And in the desert they retained their primitive political and religious virtues. The nomad Bedouin lived under the sway of patriarchal "sheiks"; the settled dwellers in the oases usually acknowledged the authority of some leading family. But these rulers possessed the slenderest authority, narrowly circumscribed by well-established custom and a jealous public opinion which they transgressed at their peril. The Turks, to be sure, had managed to acquire a precarious authority over the holy cities and the Red Sea littoral, but the Nejd, the vast interior, was free. And, in religion, as in politics, the desert Arabs kept the faith of their fathers. Scornfully rejecting the corruptions of decadent Islam, they held fast to the simple theology of primitive Islam, so congenial to their Arab natures.

Into this atmosphere of an older and better age, Abd-el-Wahab was born. Displaying from the first a studious and religious bent, he soon acquired a reputation for learning and sanctity. Making the Meccan pilgrimage while still a young man, he studied at Medina and travelled as far as Persia, returning ultimately to the Nejd. He returned burning with holy wrath at what he had seen, and determined to preach a puritan reformation. For years he wandered up and down Arabia, and at last he converted Mahommed, head of the great clan of Saud, the most powerful chieftain in all the Nejd. This gave Abd-el-Wahab both moral prestige and material strength, and he made the most of his opportunities. Gradually, the desert Arabs were welded into a politico-religious unity like that effected by the Prophet. Abd-el-Wahab was, in truth, a faithful counterpart of the first caliphs, Abu Bekr and Omar. When he died in 1787 his disciple, Saud, proved a worthy successor. The new Wahabi state was a close counterpart of the Meccan caliphate. Though possessing great military power, Saud always considered himself responsible to public opinion and never encroached upon the legitimate freedom of his subjects. Government, though stern, was able and just. The Wahabi judges were competent and honest. Robbery, became almost unknown, so well was the public peace maintained. Education was sedulously fostered. Every oasis had its school, while teachers were sent to the Bedouin tribes.

Having consolidated the Nejd, Saud was now ready to undertake the greater task of subduing and purifying the Moslem world. His first objective was of course the holy cities. This objective was attained in the opening years of the nineteenth century. Nothing could stand against the rush of the Wahabi hosts burning with fanatic hatred against the Turks, who were loathed both as apostate Moslems and as usurpers of that supremacy in Islam which all Arabs believed should rest in Arab hands. When Saud died in 1814 he was preparing to invade Syria. It looked for a moment as though the Wahabis were to sweep the East and puritanize all Islam at a blow.

But it was not to be. Unable to stem the Wahabi flood, the Sultan of Turkey called on his powerful vassal, the famous Mehemet Ali. This able Albanian adventurer had by that time made himself master of Egypt. Frankly recognizing the superiority of the West, he had called in numerous European officers who rapidly fashioned a formidable army, composed largely of hard-fighting Albanian highlanders, and disciplined and equipped after European models. Mehemet Ali gladly answered the Sultan's summons, and it soon became clear that even Wahabi fanaticism was no match for European muskets and artillery handled by seasoned veterans. In a short time the holy cities were recaptured and the Wahabis were driven back into the desert. The nascent Wahabi empire had vanished like a mirage. Wahabism's political rôle was ended.[5]

However, Wahabism's spiritual rôle had only just begun. The Nejd remained a focus of puritan zeal whence the new spirit radiated in all directions. Even in the holy cities Wahabism continued to set the religious tone, and the numberless "Hajjis," or pilgrims, who came annually from every part of the Moslem world returned to their homes zealous reformers. Soon the Wahabi leaven began to produce profound disturbances in the most distant quarters. For example, in northern India a Wahabi fanatic, Seyid Ahmed,[6] so roused the Punjabi Mohammedans that he actually built up a theocratic state, and only his chance death prevented a possible Wahabi conquest of northern India. This state was shattered by the Sikhs, about 1830, but when the English conquered the country they had infinite trouble with the smouldering embers of Wahabi feeling, which, in fact, lived on, contributed to the Indian mutiny, and permanently fanaticized Afghanistan and the wild tribes of the Indian North-West Frontier.[7] It was during these years that the famous Seyid Mahommed ben Sennussi came from his Algerian home to Mecca and there imbibed those Wahabi principles which led to the founding of the great Pan-Islamic fraternity that bears his name. Even the Babbist movement in Persia, far removed though it was doctrinally from Wahabi teaching, was indubitably a secondary reflex of the Wahabi urge.[8] In fact, within a generation, the strictly Wahabi movement had broadened into the larger development known as the Mohammedan Revival, and this in turn was developing numerous phases, chief among them being the movement usually termed Pan-Islamism. That movement, particularly on its political side, I shall treat in the next chapter. At present let us examine the other aspects of the Mohammedan Revival, with special reference to its religious and cultural phases.

The Wahabi movement was a strictly puritan reformation. Its aim was the reform of abuses, the abolition of superstitious practices, and a return to primitive Islam. All later accretions—the writings and interpretations of the mediæval theologians, ceremonial or mystical innovations, saint worship, in fact every sort of change, were condemned. The austere monotheism of Mohammed was preached in all its uncompromising simplicity, and the Koran, literally interpreted, was taken as the sole guide for human action. This doctrinal simplification was accompanied by a most rigid code of morals. The prayers, fastings, and other practices enjoined by Mohammed were scrupulously observed. The most austere manner of living was enforced. Silken clothing, rich food, wine, opium, tobacco, coffee, and all other indulgences were sternly proscribed. Even religious architecture was practically tabooed, the Wahabis pulling down the Prophet's tomb at Medina and demolishing the minarets of mosques as godless innovations. The Wahabis were thus, despite their moral earnestness, excessively narrow-minded, and it was very fortunate for Islam that they soon lost their political power and were compelled thenceforth to confine their efforts to moral teaching.

Many critics of Islam point to the Wahabi movement as a proof that Islam is essentially retrograde and innately incapable of evolutionary development. These criticisms, however, appear to be unwarranted. The initial stage of every religious reformation is an uncritical return to the primitive cult. To the religious reformer the only way of salvation is a denial of all subsequent innovations, regardless of their character. Our own Protestant Reformation began in just this way, and Humanists like Erasmus, repelled and disgusted by Protestantism's puritanical narrowness, could see no good in the movement, declaring that it menaced all true culture and merely replaced an infallible Pope by an infallible Bible.

As a matter of fact, the puritan beginnings of the Mohammedan Revival presently broadened along more constructive lines, some of these becoming tinged with undoubted liberalism. The Moslem reformers of the early nineteenth century had not dug very deeply into their religious past before they discovered—Motazelism. We have already reviewed the great struggle which had raged between reason and dogma in Islam's early days, in which dogma had triumphed so completely that the very memory of Motazelism had faded away. Now, however, those memories were revived, and the liberal-minded reformers were delighted to find such striking confirmation of their ideas, both in the writings of the Motazelite doctors and in the sacred texts themselves. The principle that reason and not blind prescription was to be the test opened the door to the possibility of all those reforms which they had most at heart. For example, the reformers found that in the traditional writings Mohammed was reported to have said: "I am no more than a man; when I order you anything respecting religion, receive it; when I order you about the affairs of the world, then I am nothing more than man." And, again, as though foreseeing the day when sweeping changes would be necessary. "Ye are in an age in which, if ye abandon one-tenth of that which is ordered, ye will be ruined. After this, a time will come when he who shall observe one-tenth of what is now ordered will be redeemed."[9]

Before discussing the ideas and efforts of the modern Moslem reformers, it might be well to examine the assertions made by numerous Western critics, that Islam is by its very nature incapable of reform and progressive adaptation to the expansion of human knowledge. Such is the contention not only of Christian polemicists,[10] but also of rationalists like Renan and European administrators of Moslem populations like Lord Cromer. Lord Cromer, in fact, pithily summarizes this critical attitude in his statement: "Islam cannot be reformed; that is to say, reformed Islam is Islam no longer; it is something else."[11]

Now these criticisms, coming as they do from close students of Islam often possessing intimate personal acquaintance with Moslems, deserve respectful consideration. And yet an historical survey of religions, and especially a survey of the thoughts and accomplishments of Moslem reformers during the past century, seem to refute these pessimistic charges.

In the first place, it should be remembered that Islam to-day stands just about where Christendom stood in the fifteenth century, at the beginning of the Reformation. There is the same supremacy of dogma over reason, the same blind adherence to prescription and authority, the same suspicion and hostility to freedom of thought or scientific knowledge. There is no doubt that a study of the Mohammedan sacred texts, particularly of the "sheriat" or canon law, together with a glance over Moslem history for the last thousand years, reveal an attitude on the whole quite incompatible with modern progress and civilization. But was not precisely the same thing true of Christendom at the beginning of the fifteenth century? Compare the sheriat with the Christian canon law. The spirit is the same. Take, for example, the sheriat's prohibition on the lending of money at interest; a prohibition which, if obeyed, renders impossible anything like business or industry in the modern sense. This is the example oftenest cited to prove Islam's innate incompatibility with modern civilization. But the Christian canon law equally forbade interest, and enforced that prohibition so strictly, that for centuries the Jews had a monopoly of business in Europe, while the first Christians who dared to lend money (the Lombards) were regarded almost as heretics, were universally hated, and were frequently persecuted. Again, take the matter of Moslem hostility to freedom of thought and scientific investigation. Can Islam show anything more revolting than that scene in Christian history when, less than three hundred years ago,[12] the great Galileo was haled before the Papal Inquisition and forced, under threat of torture, to recant the damnable heresy that the earth went round the sun?

As a matter of fact, Mohammed reverenced knowledge. His own words are eloquent testimony to that. Here are some of his sayings:

"Seek knowledge, even, if need be, on the borders of China."

"Seek knowledge from the cradle to the grave."

"One word of knowledge is of more value than the reciting of a hundred prayers."

"The ink of sages is more precious than the blood of martyrs."

"One word of wisdom, learned and communicated to a Moslem brother, outweighs the prayers of a whole year."

"Wise men are the successors of the Prophet."

"God has created nothing better than reason."

"In truth, a man may have prayed, fasted, given alms, made pilgrimage, and all other good works; nevertheless, he shall be rewarded only in the measure that he has used his common sense."

These citations (and there are others of the same tenor) prove that the modern Moslem reformers have good scriptural backing for their liberal attitude. Of course I do not imply that the reform movement in Islam, just because it is liberal and progressive, is thereby ipso facto assured of success. History reveals too many melancholy instances to the contrary. Indeed, we have already seen how, in Islam itself, the promising liberal movement of its early days passed utterly away. What history does show, however, is that when the times favour progress, religions are adapted to that progress by being reformed and liberalized. No human society once fairly on the march was ever turned back by a creed. Halted it may be, but if the progressive urge persists, the doctrinal barrier is either surmounted, undermined, flanked, or swept aside. Now there is no possibility that the Moslem world will henceforth lack progressive influences. It is in close contact with Western civilization, and is being increasingly permeated with Western ideas. Islam cannot break away and isolate itself if it would. Everything therefore portends its profound modification. Of course critics like Lord Cromer contend that this modified Islam will be Islam no longer. But why not? If the people continue to call themselves Mohammedans and continue to draw spiritual sustenance from the message of Mohammed, why should they be denied the name? Modern Christianity is certainly vastly different from mediæval Christianity, while among the various Christian churches there exist the widest doctrinal variations. Yet all who consider themselves Christians are considered Christians by all except bigots out of step with the times.

Let us now scrutinize the Moslem reformers, judging them, not by texts and chronicles, but by their words and deeds; since, as one of their number, an Algerian, very pertinently remarks, "men should be judged, not by the letter of their sacred books, but by what they actually do."[13]

Modern Moslem liberalism, as we have seen, received its first encouragement from the discovery of the old Motazelite literature of nearly a thousand years before. To be sure, Islam had never been quite destitute of liberal minds. Even in its darkest days a few voices had been raised against the prevailing obscurantism. For example, in the sixteenth century the celebrated El-Gharani had written: "It is not at all impossible that God may hold in reserve for men of the future perceptions that have not been vouchsafed to the men of the past. Divine munificence never ceases to pour benefits and enlightenment into the hearts of wise men of every age."[14] These isolated voices from Islam's Dark Time helped to encourage the modern reformers, and by the middle of the nineteenth century every Moslem land had its group of forward-looking men. At first their numbers were, of course, insignificant, and of course they drew down upon themselves the anathemas of the fanatic Mollahs[15] and the hatred of the ignorant multitude. The first country where the reformers made their influence definitely felt was in India. Here a group headed by the famous Sir Syed Ahmed Khan started an important liberal movement, founding associations, publishing books and newspapers, and establishing the well-known college of Aligarh. Sir Syed Ahmed is a good type of the early liberal reformers. Conservative in temperament and perfectly orthodox in his theology, he yet denounced the current decadence of Islam with truly Wahabi fervour. He also was frankly appreciative of Western ideas and eager to assimilate the many good things which the West had to offer. As he wrote in 1867: "We must study European scientific works, even though they are not written by Moslems and though we may find in them things contrary to the teachings of the Koran. We should imitate the Arabs of olden days, who did not fear to shake their faith by studying Pythagoras."[16]

This nucleus of Indian Moslem liberals rapidly grew in strength, producing able leaders like Moulvie Cheragh Ali and Syed Amir Ali, whose scholarly works in faultless English are known throughout the world.[17] These men called themselves "Neo-Motazelites" and boldly advocated reforms such as a thorough overhauling of the sheriat and a general modernization of Islam. Their view-point is well set forth by another of their leading figures, S. Khuda Bukhsh. "Nothing was more distant from the Prophet's thought," he writes, "than to fetter the mind or to lay down fixed, immutable, unchanging laws for his followers. The Quran is a book of guidance to the faithful, and not an obstacle in the path, of their social, moral, legal, and intellectual progress." He laments Islam's present backwardness, for he continues: "Modern Islam, with its hierarchy of priesthood, gross fanaticism, appalling ignorance, and superstitious practices is, indeed, a discredit to the Islam of the Prophet Mohammed." He concludes with the following liberal confession of faith: "Is Islam hostile to progress? I will emphatically answer this question in the negative. Islam, stripped of its theology, is a perfectly simple religion. Its cardinal principle is belief in one God and belief in Mohammed as his apostle. The rest is mere accretion, superfluity."[18]

Meanwhile, the liberals were making themselves felt in other parts of the Moslem world. In Turkey liberals actually headed the government during much of the generation between the Crimean War and the despotism of Abdul Hamid,[19] and Turkish liberal ministers like Reshid Pasha and Midhat Pasha made earnest though unavailing efforts to liberalize and modernize the Ottoman Empire. Even the dreadful Hamidian tyranny could not kill Turkish liberalism. It went underground or into exile, and in 1908 put through the revolution which deposed the tyrant and brought the "Young Turks" to power. In Egypt liberalism took firm root, represented by men like Sheikh Mohammed Abdou, Rector of El Azhar University and respected friend of Lord Cromer. Even outlying fragments of Islam like the Russian Tartars awoke to the new spirit and produced liberal-minded, forward-looking men.[20]

The liberal reformers, whom I have been describing, of course form the part of evolutionary progress in Islam. They are in the best sense of the word conservatives, receptive to healthy change, yet maintaining their hereditary poise. Sincerely religious men, they have faith in Islam as a living, moral force, and from it they continue to draw their spiritual sustenance.

There are, however, other groups in the Moslem world who have so far succumbed to Western influences that they have more or less lost touch with both their spiritual and cultural pasts. In all the more civilized portions of the Moslem world, especially in countries long under European control like India, Egypt, and Algeria, there are many Moslems, Western educated and Western culture-veneered, who have drifted into an attitude varying from easygoing religious indifference to avowed agnosticism. From their minds the old Moslem zeal has entirely departed. The Algerian Ismael Hamet well describes the attitude of this class of his fellow-countrymen when he writes: "European scepticism is not without influence upon the Algerian Moslems, who, if they have kept some attachment for the external forms of their religion, usually ignore the unhealthy excesses of the religious sentiment. They do not give up their religion, but they no longer dream of converting all those who do not practise it; they want to hand it on to their children, but they do not worry about other men's salvation. This is not belief; it is not even free thought; but it is lukewarmness."[21]

Beyond these tepid latitudinarians are still other groups of a very different character. Here we find combined the most contradictory sentiments: young men whose brains are seething with radical Western ideas—atheism, socialism, Bolshevism, and what not. Yet, curiously enough, these fanatic radicals tend to join hands with the fanatic reactionaries of Islam in a common hatred of the West. Considering themselves the born leaders (and exploiters) of the ignorant masses, the radicals hunger for political power and rage against that Western domination which vetoes their ambitious pretensions. Hence, they are mostly extreme "Nationalists," while they are also deep in Pan-Islamic reactionary schemes. Indeed, we often witness the strange spectacle of atheists posing as Moslem fanatics and affecting a truly dervish zeal. Mr. Bukhsh well describes this type when he writes: "I know a gentleman, a Mohammedan by profession, who owes his success in life to his faith. Though, outwardly, he conforms to all the precepts of Islam and occasionally stands up in public as the champion and spokesman of his co-religionists; yet, to my utter horror, I found that he held opinions about his religion and its founder which even Voltaire would have rejected with indignation and Gibbon with commiserating contempt."[22]

Later on we shall examine more fully the activities of these gentry in the chapters devoted to Pan-Islamism and Nationalism. What I desire to emphasize here is their pernicious influence on the prospects of a genuine Mohammedan reformation as visualized by the true reformers whom I have described. Their malevolent desire to stir up the fanatic passions of the ignorant masses and their equally malevolent hatred of everything Western except military improvements are revealed by outbursts like the following from the pen of a prominent "Young Turk." "Yes, the Mohammedan religion is in open hostility to all your world of progress. Learn, ye European observers, that a Christian, whatever his position, by the mere fact that he is a Christian, is in our eyes a being devoid of all human dignity. Our reasoning is simple and definitive. We say: the man whose judgment is so perverted as to deny the evidence of the One God and to fabricate gods of different kinds, cannot be other than the most ignoble expression of human stupidity. To speak to him would be a humiliation to our reason and an offence to the grandeur of the Master of the Universe. The worshipper of false gods is a monster of ingratitude; he is the execration of the universe; to combat him, convert him, or annihilate him is the holiest task of the Faithful. These are the eternal commands of our One God. For us there are in this world only Believers and Misbelievers; love, charity, fraternity to Believers; disgust, hatred, and war to Misbelievers. Among Misbelievers, the most odious and criminal are those who, while recognizing God, create Him of earthly parents, give Him a son, a mother; so monstrous an aberration surpasses, in our eyes, all bounds of iniquity; the presence of such miscreants among us is the bane of our existence; their doctrine is a direct insult to the purity of our faith; their contact a pollution for our bodies; any relation with them a torture for our souls.

"While detesting you, we have been studying your political institutions and your military organizations. Besides the new arms which Providence procures for us by your own means, you yourselves have rekindled the inextinguishable faith of our heroic martyrs. Our Young Turks, our Babis, our new fraternities, all are sects in their varied forms, are inspired by the same thought, the same purpose. Toward what end? Christian civilization? Never!"[23]

Such harangues unfortunately find ready hearers among the Moslem masses. Although the liberal reformers are a growing power in Islam, it must not be forgotten that they are as yet only a minority, an élite, below whom lie the ignorant masses, still suffering from the blight of age-long obscurantism, wrapped in admiration of their own world, which they regard as the highest ideal of human existence, and fanatically hating everything outside as wicked, despicable, and deceptive. Even when compelled to admit the superior power of the West, they hate it none the less. They rebel blindly against the spirit of change which is forcing them out of their old ruts, and their anger is still further heightened by that ubiquitous Western domination which is pressing upon them from all sides. Such persons are as clay in the hands of the Pan-Islamic and Nationalist leaders who mould the multitude to their own sinister ends.

Islam is, in fact, to-day torn between the forces of liberal reform and chauvinistic reaction. The liberals are not only the hope of an evolutionary reformation, they are also favoured by the trend of the times, since the Moslem world is being continually permeated by Western progress and must continue to be thus permeated unless Western civilization itself collapses in ruin. Yet, though the ultimate triumph of the liberals appears probable, what delays, what setbacks, what fresh barriers of warfare and fanaticism may not the chauvinist reactionaries bring about! Neither the reform of Islam nor the relations between East and West are free from perils whose ominous possibilities we shall later discuss.

Meanwhile, there remains the hopeful fact that throughout the Moslem world a numerous and powerful minority, composed not merely of Westernized persons but also of orthodox conservatives, are aware of Islam's decadence and are convinced that a thoroughgoing reformation along liberal, progressive lines is at once a practical necessity and a sacred duty. Exactly how this reformation shall be legally effected has not yet been determined, nor is a detailed discussion of technical machinery necessary for our consideration.[24] History teaches us that where the will to reform is vitally present, reformation will somehow or other be accomplished.

One thing is certain: the reforming spirit, in its various manifestations, has already produced profound changes throughout Islam. The Moslem world of to-day is vastly different from the Moslem world of a century ago. The Wahabi leaven has destroyed abuses and has rekindled a purer religious faith. Even its fanatical zeal has not been without moral compensations. The spread of liberal principles and Western progress goes on apace. If there is much to fear for the future, there is also much to hope.

FOOTNOTES:

[5] On the Wahabi movement, see A. Le Chatelier, L'Islam au dix-neuvième Siècle (Paris, 1888); W. G. Palgrave, Essays on Eastern Questions (London, 1872); D. B. Macdonald, Muslim Theology (London, 1903); J. L. Burckhardt, Notes on the Bedouins and Wahabys (2 vols., London, 1831); A. Chodzko, "Le Déisme des Wahhabis," Journal Asiatique, IV., Vol. II., pp. 168 et seq.

[6] Not to be confused with Sir Syed Ahmed of Aligarh, the Indian Moslem liberal of the mid-nineteenth century.

[7] For English alarm at the latent fanaticism of the North Indian Moslems, down through the middle of the nineteenth century, see Sir W. W. Hunter, The Indian Musalmans (London, 1872).

[8] For the Babbist movement, see Clément Huart, La Réligion de Bab (Paris, 1889); Comte Arthur de Gobineau, Trois Ans en Perse (Paris, 1867). A good summary of all these early movements of the Mohammedan revival is found in Le Chatelier, op. cit.

[9] Mishkat-el-Masabih, I., 46, 51.

[10] The best recent examples of this polemical literature are the writings of the Rev. S. M. Zwemer, the well known missionary to the Arabs; especially his Arabia, the Cradle of Islam (Edinburgh, 1900), and The Reproach of Islam (London, 1915). Also see volume entitled The Mohammedan World of To-day, being a collection of the papers read at the Protestant Missionary Conference held at Cairo, Egypt, in 1906.

[11] Cromer, Modern Egypt, Vol. II., p. 229 (London, 1908). For Renan's attitude, see his L'Islamisme et la Science (Paris, 1883).

[12] In the year 1633.

[13] Ismael Hamet, Les Musulmans français du Nord de l'Afrique (Paris, 1906).

[14] Quoted by Dr. Perron in his work L'Islamisme (Paris, 1877).

[15] The Mollahs are the Moslem clergy, though they do not exactly correspond to the clergy of Christendom. Mohammed was averse to anything like a priesthood, and Islam makes no legal provision for an ordained priestly class or caste, as is the case in Christianity, Judaism, Brahmanism, and other religions. Theoretically any Moslem can conduct religious services. As time passed, however, a class of men developed who were learned in Moslem theology and law. These ultimately became practically priests, though theoretically they should be regarded as theological lawyers. There also developed religious orders of dervishes, etc.; but primitive Islam knew nothing of them.

[16] From the article by Léon Cahun in Lavisse et Rambeaud, Histoire Générale, Vol. XII., p. 498. This article gives an excellent general survey of the intellectual development of the Moslem world in the nineteenth century.

[17] Especially his best-known book, The Spirit of Islam (London, 1891).

[18] S. Khuda Bukhsh, Essays: Indian and Islamic, pp. 20, 24, 284. (London, 1912).

[19] 1856 to 1878.

[20] For the liberal movement among the Russian Tartars, see Arminius Vambéry, Western Culture in Eastern Lands (London, 1906).

[21] Ismael Hamet, Les Musulmans français du Nord de l'Afrique, p. 268 (Paris, 1906).

[22] S. Khuda Bukhsh, op. cit., p. 241.

[23] Sheikh Abd-ul-Haak, in Sherif Pasha's organ, Mecheroutiette, of August, 1921. Quoted from A. Servier, Le Nationalisme musulman, Constantine, Algeria, 1913.

[24] For such discussion of legal methods, see W. S. Blunt, The Future of Islam (London, 1882); A. Le Chatelier, L'Islam au dix-neuvième Siècle (Paris, 1888); Dr. Perron, L'Islamisme (Paris, 1877); H. N. Brailsford "Modernism in Islam," The Fortnightly Review, September, 1908; Sir Theodore Morison, "Can Islam be Reformed?" The Nineteenth Century and After, October, 1908; M. Pickthall, "La Morale islamique," Revue Politique Internationale, July, 1916; XX, "L'Islam après la Guerre," Revue de Paris, 15 January, 1916.

CHAPTER II

PAN-ISLAMISM

Like all great movements, the Mohammedan Revival is highly complex. Starting with the simple, puritan protest of Wahabism, it has developed many phases, widely diverse and sometimes almost antithetical. In the previous chapter we examined the phase looking toward an evolutionary reformation of Islam and a genuine assimilation of the progressive spirit as well as the external forms of Western civilization. At the same time we saw that these liberal reformers are as yet only a minority, an élite; while the Moslem masses, still plunged in ignorance and imperfectly awakened from their age-long torpor, are influenced by other leaders of a very different character—men inclined to militant rather than pacific courses, and hostile rather than receptive to the West. These militant forces are, in their turn, complex. They may be grouped roughly under the general concepts known as "Pan-Islamism" and "Nationalism." It is to a consideration of the first of these two concepts, to Pan-Islamism, that this chapter is devoted.

Pan-Islamism, which in its broadest sense is the feeling of solidarity between all "True Believers," is as old as the Prophet, when Mohammed and his few followers were bound together by the tie of faith against their pagan compatriots who sought their destruction. To Mohammed the principle of fraternal solidarity among Moslems was of transcendent importance, and he succeeded in implanting this so deeply in Moslem hearts that thirteen centuries have not sensibly weakened it. The bond between Moslem and Moslem is to-day much stronger than that between Christian and Christian. Of course Moslems fight bitterly among themselves, but these conflicts never quite lose the aspect of family quarrels and tend to be adjourned in presence of infidel aggression. Islam's profound sense of solidarity probably explains in large part its extraordinary hold upon its followers. No other religion has such a grip on its votaries. Islam has won vast territories from Christianity and Brahmanism,[25] and has driven Magism from the face of the earth;[26] yet there has been no single instance where a people, once become Moslem, has ever abandoned the faith. Extirpated they may have been, like the Moors of Spain, but extirpation is not apostasy.

Islam's solidarity is powerfully buttressed by two of its fundamental institutions: the "Hajj," or pilgrimage to Mecca, and the caliphate. Contrary to the general opinion in the West, it is the Hajj rather than the caliphate which has exerted the more consistently unifying influence. Mohammed ordained the Hajj as a supreme act of faith, and every year fully 100,000 pilgrims arrive, drawn from every quarter of the Moslem world. There, before the sacred Kaaba of Mecca, men of all races, tongues, and cultures meet and mingle in an ecstasy of common devotion, returning to their homes bearing the proud title of "Hajjis," or Pilgrims—a title which insures them the reverent homage of their fellow Moslems for all the rest of their days. The political implications of the Hajj are obvious. It is in reality a perennial Pan-Islamic congress, where all the interests of the faith are discussed by delegates from every part of the Mohammedan world, and where plans are elaborated for Islam's defence and propagation. Here nearly all the militant leaders of the Mohammedan Revival (Abd-el-Wahab, Mahommed ben Sennussi, Djemal-ed-Din el-Afghani, and many more) felt the imperious summons to their task.[27]

As for the caliphate, it has played a great historic rôle, especially in its early days, and we have already studied its varying fortunes. Reduced to a mere shadow after the Mongol destruction of Bagdad, it was revived by the Turkish sultans, who assumed the title and were recognized as caliphs by the orthodox Moslem world.[28] However, these sultan-caliphs of Stambul[29] never succeeded in winning the religious homage accorded their predecessors of Mecca and Bagdad. In Arab eyes, especially, the spectacle of Turkish caliphs was an anachronism to which they could never be truly reconciled. Sultan Abdul Hamid, to be sure, made an ambitious attempt to revive the caliphate's pristine greatness, but such success as he attained was due more to the general tide of Pan-Islamic feeling than to the inherent potency of the caliphal name. The real leaders of modern Pan-Islamism either gave Abdul Hamid a merely qualified allegiance or were, like El Sennussi, definitely hostile. This was not realized in Europe, which came to fear Abdul Hamid as a sort of Mohammedan pope. Even to-day most Western observers seem to think that Pan-Islamism centres in the caliphate, and we see European publicists hopefully discussing whether the caliphate's retention by the discredited Turkish sultans, its transference to the Shereef of Mecca, or its total suppression, will best clip Pan-Islam's wings. This, however, is a distinctly short-sighted view. The caliphal institution is still undoubtedly venerated in Islam. But the shrewd leaders of the modern Pan-Islamic movement have long been working on a much broader basis. They realize that Pan-Islamism's real driving-power to-day lies not in the caliphate but in institutions like the Hajj and the great Pan-Islamic fraternities such as the Sennussiya, of which I shall presently speak.[30]

Let us now trace the fortunes of modern Pan-Islamism. Its first stage was of course the Wahabi movement. The Wahabi state founded by Abd-el-Wahab in the Nejd was modelled on the theocratic democracy of the Meccan caliphs, and when Abd-el-Wahab's princely disciple, Saud, loosed his fanatic hosts upon the holy cities, he dreamed that this was but the first step in a puritan conquest and consolidation of the whole Moslem world. Foiled in this grandiose design, Wahabism, nevertheless, soon produced profound political disturbances in distant regions like northern India and Afghanistan, as I have already narrated. They were, however, all integral parts of the Wahabi phase, being essentially protests against the political decadence of Moslem states and the moral decadence of Moslem rulers. These outbreaks were not inspired by any special fear or hatred of the West, since Europe was not yet seriously assailing Islam except in outlying regions like European Turkey or the Indies, and the impending peril was consequently not appreciated.

By the middle of the nineteenth century, however, the situation had radically altered. The French conquest of Algeria, the Russian acquisition of Transcaucasia, and the English mastery of virtually all India, convinced thoughtful Moslems everywhere that Islam was in deadly peril of falling under Western domination. It was at this time that Pan-Islamism assumed that essentially anti-Western character which it has ever since retained. At first resistance to Western encroachment was sporadic and unco-ordinated. Here and there heroic figures like Abd-el-Kader in Algeria and Shamyl in the Caucasus fought brilliantly against the European invaders. But though these paladins of the faith were accorded widespread sympathy from Moslems, they received no tangible assistance and, unaided, fell.

Fear and hatred of the West, however, steadily grew in intensity, and the seventies saw the Moslem world swept from end to end by a wave of militant fanaticism. In Algeria there was the Kabyle insurrection of 1871, while all over North Africa arose fanatical "Holy Men" preaching holy wars, the greatest of these being the Mahdist insurrection in the Egyptian Sudan, which maintained itself against England's best efforts down to Kitchener's capture of Khartum at the very end of the century. In Afghanistan there was an intense exacerbation of fanaticism awakening sympathetic echoes among the Indian Moslems, both of which gave the British much trouble. In Central Asia there was a similar access of fanaticism, centring in the powerful Nakechabendiya fraternity, spreading eastward into Chinese territory and culminating in the great revolts of the Chinese Mohammedans both in Chinese Turkestan and Yunnan. In the Dutch East Indies there was a whole series of revolts, the most serious of these being the Atchin War, which dragged on interminably, not being quite stamped out even to-day.

The salient characteristic of this period of militant unrest is its lack of co-ordination. These risings were all spontaneous outbursts of local populations; animated, to be sure, by the same spirit of fear and hatred, and inflamed by the same fanatical hopes, but with no evidence of a central authority laying settled plans and moving in accordance with a definite programme. The risings were inspired largely by the mystical doctrine known as "Mahdism." Mahdism was unknown to primitive Islam, no trace of it occurring in the Koran. But in the "traditions," or reputed sayings of Mohammed, there occurs the statement that the Prophet predicted the coming of one bearing the title of "El Mahdi"[31] who would fill the earth with equity and justice. From this arose the widespread mystical hope in the appearance of a divinely inspired personage who would effect the universal triumph of Islam, purge the world of infidels, and assure the lasting happiness of all Moslems. This doctrine has profoundly influenced Moslem history. At various times fanatic leaders have arisen claiming to be El Mahdi, "The Master of the Hour," and have won the frenzied devotion of the Moslem masses; just as certain "Messiahs" have similarly excited the Jews. It was thus natural that, in their growing apprehension and impotent rage at Western aggression, the Moslem masses should turn to the messianic hope of Mahdism. Yet Mahdism, by its very nature, could effect nothing constructive or permanent. It was a mere straw fire; flaring up fiercely here and there, then dying down, leaving the disillusioned masses more discouraged and apathetic than before.

Now all this was recognized by the wiser supporters of the Pan-Islamic idea. The impotence of the wildest outbursts of local fanaticism against the methodical might of Europe convinced thinking Moslems that long preparation and complete co-ordination of effort were necessary if Islam was to have any chance of throwing off the European yoke. Such men also realized that they must study Western methods and adopt much of the Western technique of power. Above all, they felt that the political liberation of Islam from Western domination must be preceded by a profound spiritual regeneration, thereby engendering the moral forces necessary both for the war of liberation and for the fruitful reconstruction which should follow thereafter. At this point the ideals of Pan-Islamists and liberals approach each other. Both recognize Islam's present decadence; both desire its spiritual regeneration. It is on the nature of that regeneration that the two parties are opposed. The liberals believe that Islam should really assimilate Western ideas. The Pan-Islamists, on the other hand, believe that primitive Islam contains all that is necessary for regeneration, and contend that only Western methods and material achievements should be adopted by the Moslem world.

The beginnings of self-conscious, systematic Pan-Islamism date from about the middle of the nineteenth century. The movement crystallizes about two foci: the new-type religious fraternities like the Sennussiya, and the propaganda of the group of thinkers headed by Djemal-ed-Din. Let us first consider the fraternities.

Religious fraternities have existed in Islam for centuries. They all possess the same general type of organization, being divided into lodges ("Zawias") headed by Masters known as "Mokaddem," who exercise a more or less extensive authority over the "Khouan" or Brethren. Until the foundation of the new-type organizations like the Sennussi, however, the fraternities exerted little practical influence upon mundane affairs. Their interests were almost wholly religious, of a mystical, devotional nature, often characterized by great austerities or by fanatical excesses like those practised by the whirling and howling dervishes. Such political influence as they did exert was casual and local. Anything like joint action was impossible, owing to their mutual rivalries and jealousies. These old-type fraternities still exist in great numbers, but they are without political importance except as they have been leavened by the new-type fraternities.

The new-type organizations date from about the middle of the nineteenth century, the most important in every way being the Sennussiya. Its founder, Seyid Mahommed ben Sennussi, was born near Mostaganem, Algeria, about the year 1800. As his title "Seyid" indicates, he was a descendant of the Prophet, and was thus born to a position of honour and importance.[32] He early displayed a strong bent for learning and piety, studying theology at the Moorish University of Fez and afterwards travelling widely over North Africa preaching a reform of the prevailing religious abuses. He then made the pilgrimage to Mecca, and there his reformist zeal was still further quickened by the Wahabi teachers. It was at that time that he appears to have definitely formulated his plan of a great puritan order, and in 1843 he returned to North Africa, settling in Tripoli, where he built his first Zawia, known as the "Zawia Baida," or White Monastery, in the mountains near Derna. So impressive was his personality and so great his organizing ability that converts flocked to him from all over North Africa. Indeed, his power soon alarmed the Turkish authorities in Tripoli, and relations became so strained that Seyid Mahommed presently moved his headquarters to the oasis of Jarabub, far to the south in the Lybian desert. When he died in 1859, his organization had spread over the greater part of North Africa.

Seyid Mahommed's work was carried on uninterruptedly by his son, usually known as Sennussi-el-Mahdi. The manner in which this son gained his succession typifies the Sennussi spirit. Seyid Mahommed had two sons, El Mahdi being the younger. While they were still mere lads, their father determined to put them to a test, to discover which of them had the stronger faith. In presence of the entire Zawia he bade both sons climb a tall palm-tree, and then adjured them by Allah and his Prophet to leap to the ground. The younger lad leaped at once and reached the ground unharmed; the elder boy refused to spring. To El Mahdi, "who feared not to commit himself to the will of God," passed the right to rule. Throughout his long life Sennussi-el-Mahdi justified his father's choice, displaying wisdom and piety of a high order, and further extending the power of the fraternity. During the latter part of his reign he removed his headquarters to the oasis of Jowf, still farther into the Lybian desert, where he died in 1902, and was succeeded by his nephew, Ahmed-el-Sherif, the present head of the Order, who also appears to possess marked ability.

With nearly eighty years of successful activity behind it, the Sennussi Order is to-day one of the vital factors in Islam. It counts its adherents in every quarter of the Moslem world. In Arabia its followers are very numerous, and it profoundly influences the spiritual life of the holy cities, Mecca and Medina. North Africa, however, still remains the focus of Sennussism. The whole of northern Africa, from Morocco to Somaliland, is dotted with its Zawias, or lodges, all absolutely dependent upon the Grand Lodge, headed by The Master, El Sennussi. The Sennussi stronghold of Jowf lies in the very heart of the Lybian Sahara. Only one European eye[33] has ever seen this mysterious spot. Surrounded by absolute desert, with wells many leagues apart, and the routes of approach known only to experienced Sennussi guides, every one of whom would suffer a thousand deaths rather than betray him, El Sennussi, The Master, sits serenely apart, sending his orders throughout North Africa.

The influence exerted by the Sennussiya is profound. The local Zawias are more than mere "lodges." Besides the Mokaddem, or Master, there is also a "Wekil," or civil governor, and these officers have discretionary authority not merely over the Zawia members but also over the community at large—at least, so great is the awe inspired by the Sennussiya throughout North Africa, that a word from Wekil or Mokaddem is always listened to and obeyed. Thus, besides the various European colonial authorities, British, French, or Italian, as the case may be, there exists an occult government with which the colonial authorities are careful not to come into conflict.

On their part, the Sennussi are equally careful to avoid a downright breach with the European Powers. Their long-headed, cautious policy is truly astonishing. For more than half a century the order has been a great force, yet it has never risked the supreme adventure. In many of the fanatic risings which have occurred in various parts of Africa, local Sennussi have undoubtedly taken part, and the same was true during the Italian campaign in Tripoli and in the late war, but the order itself has never officially entered the lists.

In fact, this attitude of mingled cautious reserve and haughty aloofness is maintained not only towards Christians but also towards the other powers that be in Islam. The Sennussiya has always kept its absolute freedom of action. Its relations with the Turks have never been cordial. Even the wily Abdul Hamid, at the height of his prestige as the champion of Pan-Islamism, could never get from El Sennussi more than coldly platonic expressions of approval, and one of Sennussi-el-Mahdi's favourite remarks was said to have been: "Turks and Christians: I will break both of them with one and the same stroke." Equally characteristic was his attitude toward Mahommed Ahmed, the leader of the "Mahdist" uprising in the Egyptian Sudan. Flushed with victory, Mahommed Ahmed sent emissaries to El Sennussi, asking his aid. El Sennussi refused, remarking haughtily: "What have I to do with this fakir from Dongola? Am I not myself Mahdi if I choose?"

These Fabian tactics do not mean that the Sennussi are idle. Far from it. On the contrary, they are ceaselessly at work with the spiritual arms of teaching, discipline, and conversion. The Sennussi programme is the welding, first, of Moslem Africa and, later, of the whole Moslem world into the revived "Imâmât" of Islam's early days; into a great theocracy, embracing all True Believers—in other words, Pan-Islamism. But they believe that the political liberation of Islam from Christian domination must be preceded by a profound spiritual regeneration. Toward this end they strive ceaselessly to improve the manners and morals of the populations under their influence, while they also strive to improve material conditions by encouraging the better cultivation of oases, digging new wells, building rest-houses along the caravan routes, and promoting trade. The slaughter and rapine practised by the Sudanese Mahdists disgusted the Sennussi and drew from their chief words of scathing condemnation.

All this explains the Order's unprecedented self-restraint. This is the reason why, year after year and decade after decade, the Sennussi advance slowly, calmly, coldly; gathering great latent power, but avoiding the temptation to expend it one instant before the proper time. Meanwhile they are covering North Africa with their lodges and schools, disciplining the people to the voice of their Mokaddems and Wekils; and, to the southward, converting millions of pagan negroes to the faith of Islam.[34]

Nothing better shows modern Islam's quickened vitality than the revival of missionary fervour during the past hundred years. Of course Islam has always displayed strong proselytizing power. Its missionary successes in its early days were extraordinary, and even in its period of decline it never wholly lost its propagating vigour. Throughout the Middle Ages Islam continued to gain ground in India and China; the Turks planted it firmly in the Balkans; while between the fourteenth and sixteenth centuries Moslem missionaries won notable triumphs in such distant regions as West Africa, the Dutch Indies, and the Philippines. Nevertheless, taking the Moslem world as a whole, religious zeal undoubtedly declined, reaching low-water mark during the eighteenth century.

The first breath of the Mohammedan Revival, however, blew the smouldering embers of proselytism into a new flame, and everywhere except in Europe Islam began once more advancing portentously along all its far-flung frontiers. Every Moslem is, to some extent, a born missionary and instinctively propagates his faith among his non-Moslem neighbours, so the work was carried on not only by priestly specialists but also by multitudes of travellers, traders, and humble migratory workers.[35] Of course numerous zealots consecrated their lives to the task. This was particularly true of the religious fraternities. The Sennussi have especially distinguished themselves by their apostolic fervour, and from those natural monasteries, the oases of the Sahara, thousands of "Marabouts" have gone forth with flashing eyes and swelling breasts to preach the marvels of Islam, devoured with a zeal like that of the Christian mendicant friars of the Middle Ages. Islam's missionary triumphs among the negroes of West and Central Africa during the past century have been extraordinary. Every candid European observer tells the same story. As an Englishman very justly remarked some twenty years ago: "Mohammedanism is making marvellous progress in the interior of Africa. It is crushing paganism out. Against it the Christian propaganda is a myth."[36] And a French Protestant missionary remarks in similar vein: "We see Islam on its march, sometimes slowed down but never stopped, towards the heart of Africa. Despite all obstacles encountered, it tirelessly pursues its way. It fears nothing. Even Christianity, its most serious rival, Islam regards without hate, so sure is it of victory. While Christians dream of the conquest of Africa, the Mohammedans do it."[37]

The way in which Islam is marching southward is dramatically shown by a recent incident. A few years ago the British authorities suddenly discovered that Mohammedanism was pervading Nyassaland. An investigation brought out the fact that it was the work of Zanzibar Arabs. They began their propaganda about 1900. Ten years later almost every village in southern Nyassaland had its Moslem teacher and its mosque hut. Although the movement was frankly anti-European, the British authorities did not dare to check it for fear of repercussions elsewhere. Many European observers fear that it is only a question of time when Islam will cross the Zambezi and enter South Africa.

And these gains are not made solely against paganism. They are being won at the expense of African Christianity as well. In West Africa the European missions lose many of their converts to Islam, while across the continent the ancient Abyssinian Church, so long an outpost against Islam, seems in danger of submersion by the rising Moslem tide. Not by warlike incursions, but by peaceful penetration, the Abyssinians are being Islamized. "Tribes which, fifty or sixty years ago, counted hardly a Mohammedan among them, to-day live partly or wholly according to the precepts of Islam."[38]

Islam's triumphs in Africa are perhaps its most noteworthy missionary victories, but they by no means tell the whole story, as a few instances drawn from other quarters of the Moslem world will show. In the previous chapter I mentioned the liberal movement among the Russian Tartars. That, however, was only one phase of the Mohammedan Revival in that region, another phase being a marked resurgence of proselyting zeal. These Tartars had long been under Russian rule, and the Orthodox Church had made persistent efforts to convert them, in some instances with apparent success. But when the Mohammedan Revival reached the Tartars early in the nineteenth century, they immediately began labouring with their christianized brethren, and in a short time most of these reverted to Islam despite the best efforts of the Orthodox Church and the punitive measures of the Russian governmental authorities. Tartar missionaries also began converting the heathen Turko-Finnish tribes to the northward, in defiance of every hindrance from their Russian masters.[39]

In China, likewise, the nineteenth century witnessed an extraordinary development of Moslem energy. Islam had reached China in very early times, brought in by Arab traders and bands of Arab mercenary soldiers. Despite centuries of intermarriage with Chinese women, their descendants still differ perceptibly from the general Chinese population, and regard themselves as a separate and superior people. The Chinese Mohammedans are mainly concentrated in the southern province of Yunnan and the inland provinces beyond. Besides these racially Chinese Moslems, another centre of Mohammedan population is found in the Chinese dependency of Eastern or Chinese Turkestan, inhabited by Turkish stocks and conquered by the Chinese only in the eighteenth century. Until comparatively recent times the Chinese Moslems were well treated, but gradually their proud-spirited attitude alarmed the Chinese Government, which withdrew their privileges and persecuted them. Early in the nineteenth century the breath of the Mohammedan Revival reached China, as it did every other part of the Moslem world, and the Chinese Mohammedans, inflamed by resurgent fanaticism, began a series of revolts culminating in the great rebellions which took place about the year 1870, both in Yunnan and in Eastern Turkestan. As usual, these fanaticized Moslems displayed fierce fighting power. The Turkestan rebels found an able leader, one Yakub Beg, and for some years both Turkestan and Yunnan were virtually independent. To many European observers at that time it looked as though the rebels might join hands, erect a permanent Mohammedan state in western China, and even overrun the whole empire. The fame of Yakub Beg spread through the Moslem world, the Sultan of Turkey honouring him with the high title of Commander of the Faithful. After years of bitter fighting, accompanied by frightful massacres, the Chinese Government subdued the rebels. The Chinese Moslems, greatly reduced in numbers, have not yet recovered their former strength; but their spirit is still unbroken, and to-day they number fully 10,000,000. Thus, Chinese Islam, despite its setbacks, is a factor to be reckoned with in the future.[40]

The above instances do not exhaust the list of Islam's activities during the past century. In India, for example, Islam has continued to gain ground rapidly, while in the Dutch Indies it is the same story.[41] European domination actually favours rather than retards the spread of Islam, for the Moslem finds in Western improvements, like the railroad, the post-office, and the printing-press, useful adjuncts to Islamic propaganda.

Let us now consider the second originating centre of modern Pan-Islamism—the movement especially associated with the personality of Djemal-ed-Din.

Seyid Djemal-ed-Din el-Afghani was born early in the nineteenth century at Asadabad, near Hamadan, in Persia, albeit, as his name shows, he was of Afghan rather than Iranian descent, while his title "Seyid," meaning descendant of the Prophet, implies a strain of Arab blood. Endowed with a keen intelligence, great personal magnetism, and abounding vigour, Djemal-ed-Din had a stormy and chequered career. He was a great traveller, knowing intimately not only most of the Moslem world but western Europe as well. From these travels, supplemented by wide reading, he gained a notable fund of information which he employed effectively in his manifold activities. A born propagandist, Djemal-ed-Din attracted wide attention, and wherever he went in Islam his strong personality started an intellectual ferment. Unlike El Sennussi, he concerned himself very little with theology, devoting himself to politics. Djemal-ed-Din was the first Mohammedan who fully grasped the impending peril of Western domination, and he devoted his life to warning the Islamic world of the danger and attempting to elaborate measures of defence. By European colonial authorities he was soon singled out as a dangerous agitator. The English, in particular, feared and persecuted him. Imprisoned for a while in India, he went to Egypt about 1880, and had a hand in the anti-European movement of Arabi Pasha. When the English occupied Egypt in 1882 they promptly expelled Djemal, who continued his wanderings, finally reaching Constantinople. Here he found a generous patron in Abdul-Hamid, then evolving his Pan-Islamic policy. Naturally, the Sultan was enchanted with Djemal, and promptly made him the head of his Pan-Islamic propaganda bureau. In fact, it is probable that the success of the Sultan's Pan-Islamic policy was largely due to Djemal's ability and zeal. Djemal died in 1896 at an advanced age, active to the last.

Djemal-ed-Din's teachings may be summarized as follows:

"The Christian world, despite its internal differences of race and nationality, is, as against the East and especially as against Islam, united for the destruction of all Mohammedan states.

"The Crusades still subsist, as well as the fanatical spirit of Peter the Hermit. At heart, Christendom still regards Islam with fanatical hatred and contempt. This is shown in many ways, as in international law, before which Moslem nations are not treated as the equals of Christian nations.

"Christian governments excuse the attacks and humiliations inflicted upon Moslem states by citing the latter's backward and barbarous condition; yet these same governments stifle by a thousand means, even by war, every attempted effort of reform and revival in Moslem lands.

"Hatred of Islam is common to all Christian peoples, not merely to some of them, and the result of this spirit is a tacit, persistent effort for Islam's destruction.

"Every Moslem feeling and aspiration is caricatured and calumniated by Christendom. 'The Europeans call in the Orient "fanaticism" what at home they call "nationalism" and "patriotism." And what in the West they call "self-respect," "pride," "national honour," in the East they call "chauvinism." What in the West they esteem as national sentiment, in the East they consider xenophobia.'[42]

"From all this, it is plain that the whole Moslem world must unite in a great defensive alliance, to preserve itself from destruction; and, to do this, it must acquire the technique of Western progress and learn the secrets of European power."

Such, in brief, are the teachings of Djemal-ed-Din, propagated with eloquence and authority for many years. Given the state of mingled fear and hatred of Western encroachment that was steadily spreading throughout the Moslem world, it is easy to see how great Djemal's influence must have been. And of course Djemal was not alone in his preaching. Other influential Moslems were agitating along much the same lines as early as the middle of the nineteenth century. One of these pioneers was the Turkish notable Aali Pasha, who was said to remark: "What we want is rather an increase of fanaticism than a diminution of it."[43] Arminius Vambéry, the eminent Hungarian Oriental scholar, states that shortly after the Crimean War he was present at a militant Pan-Islamic gathering, attended by emissaries from far parts of the Moslem world, held at Aali Pasha's palace.[44]

Such were the foundations upon which Sultan Abdul Hamid built his ambitious Pan-Islamic structure. Abdul Hamid is one of the strangest personalities of modern times. A man of unusual intelligence, his mind was yet warped by strange twists which went to the verge of insanity. Nursing ambitious, grandiose projects, he tried to carry them out by dark and tortuous methods which, though often cleverly Macchiavellian, were sometimes absurdly puerile. An autocrat by nature, he strove to keep the smallest decisions dependent on his arbitrary will, albeit he was frequently guided by clever sycophants who knew how to play upon his superstitions and his prejudices.

Abdul Hamid ascended the throne in 1876 under very difficult circumstances. The country was on the verge of a disastrous Russian war, while the government was in the hands of statesmen who were endeavouring to transform Turkey into a modern state and who had introduced all sorts of Western political innovations, including a parliament. Abdul Hamid, however, soon changed all this. Taking advantage of the confusion which marked the close of the Russian war, he abolished parliament and made himself as absolute a despot as any of his ancestors had ever been. Secure in his autocratic power, Abdul Hamid now began to evolve his own peculiar policy, which, from the first, had a distinctly Pan-Islamic trend[45]. Unlike his immediate predecessors, Abdul Hamid determined to use his position as caliph for far-reaching political ends. Emphasizing his spiritual headship of the Mohammedan world rather than his political headship of the Turkish state, he endeavoured to win the active support of all Moslems and, by that support, to intimidate European Powers who might be formulating aggressive measures against the Ottoman Empire. Before long Abdul Hamid had built up an elaborate Pan-Islamic propaganda organization, working mainly by secretive, tortuous methods. Constantinople became the Mecca of all the fanatics and anti-Western agitators like Djemal-ed-Din. And from Constantinople there went forth swarms of picked emissaries, bearing to the most distant parts of Islam the Caliph's message of hope and impending deliverance from the menace of infidel rule.

Abdul Hamid's Pan-Islamic propaganda went on uninterruptedly for nearly thirty years. Precisely what this propaganda accomplished is very difficult to estimate. In the first place, it was cut short, and to some extent reversed, by the Young-Turk resolution of 1908 which drove Abdul Hamid from the throne. It certainly was never put to the test of a war between Turkey and a first-class European Power. This is what renders any theoretical appraisal so inconclusive. Abdul Hamid did succeed in gaining the respectful acknowledgment of his spiritual authority by most Moslem princes and notables, and he certainly won the pious veneration of the Moslem masses. In the most distant regions men came to regard the mighty Caliph in Stambul as, in very truth, the Defender of the Faith, and to consider his empire as the bulwark of Islam. On the other hand, it is a far cry from pious enthusiasm to practical performance. Furthermore, Abdul Hamid did not succeed in winning over powerful Pan-Islamic leaders like El Sennussi, who suspected his motives and questioned his judgment; while Moslem liberals everywhere disliked him for his despotic, reactionary, inefficient rule. It is thus a very debatable question whether, if Abdul Hamid had ever called upon the Moslem world for armed assistance in a "holy war," he would have been generally supported.

Yet Abdul Hamid undoubtedly furthered the general spread of Pan-Islamic sentiment throughout the Moslem world. In this larger sense he succeeded; albeit not so much from his position as caliph as because he incarnated the growing fear and hatred of the West. Thus we may conclude that Abdul Hamid's Pan-Islamic propaganda did produce profound and lasting effects which will have to be seriously reckoned with.

The Young-Turk revolution of 1908 greatly complicated the situation. It was soon followed by the Persian revolution and by kindred symptoms in other parts of the East. These events brought into sudden prominence new forces, such as constitutionalism, nationalism, and even social unrest, which had long been obscurely germinating in Islam but which had been previously denied expression. We shall later consider these new forces in detail. The point to be here noted is their complicating effect on the Pan-Islamic movement. Pan-Islamism was, in fact, cross-cut and deflected from its previous course, and a period of confusion and mental uncertainty supervened.

This interim period was short. By 1912 Pan-Islamism had recovered its poise and was moving forward once more. The reason was renewed pressure from the West. In 1911 came Italy's barefaced raid on Turkey's African dependency of Tripoli, while in 1912 the allied Christian Balkan states attacked Turkey in the Balkan War, which sheared away Turkey's European provinces to the very walls of Constantinople and left her crippled and discredited. Moreover, in those same fateful years Russia and England strangled the Persian revolution, while France, as a result of the Agadir crisis, closed her grip on Morocco. Thus, in a scant two years, the Moslem world had suffered at European hands assaults not only unprecedented in gravity but, in Moslem eyes, quite without provocation.

The effect upon Islam was tremendous. A flood of mingled despair and rage swept the Moslem world from end to end. And, of course, the Pan-Islamic implication was obvious. This was precisely what Pan-Islam's agitators had been preaching for fifty years—the Crusade of the West for Islam's destruction. What could be better confirmation of the warnings of Djemal-ed-Din?

The results were soon seen. In Tripoli, where Turks and Arabs had been on the worst of terms, both races clasped hands in a sudden access of Pan-Islamic fervour, and the Italian invaders were met with a fanatical fury that roused Islam to wild applause and inspired Western observers with grave disquietude. "Why has Italy found 'defenceless' Tripoli such a hornets' nest?" queried Gabriel Hanotaux, a former French minister of foreign affairs. "It is because she has to do, not merely with Turkey, but with Islam as well. Italy has set the ball rolling—so much the worse for her—and for us all."[46] The Anglo-Russian man-handling of Persia likewise roused much wrathful comment throughout Islam,[47] while the impending extinction of Moroccan independence at French hands was discussed with mournful indignation.

But with the coming of the Balkan War the wrath of Islam knew no bounds. From China to the Congo, pious Moslems watched with bated breath the swaying battle-lines in the far-off Balkans, and when the news of Turkish disaster came, Islam's cry of wrathful anguish rose hoarse and high. A prominent Indian Mohammedan well expressed the feelings of his co-religionists everywhere when he wrote: "The King of Greece orders a new Crusade. From the London Chancelleries rise calls to Christian fanaticism, and Saint Petersburg already speaks of the planting of the Cross on the dome of Sant' Sophia. To-day they speak thus; to-morrow they will thus speak of Jerusalem and the Mosque of Omar. Brothers! Be ye of one mind, that it is the duty of every True Believer to hasten beneath the Khalifa's banner and to sacrifice his life for the safety of the faith."[48] And another Indian Moslem leader thus adjured the British authorities: "I appeal to the present government to change its anti-Turkish attitude before the fury of millions of Moslem fellow-subjects is kindled to a blaze and brings disaster."[49]

Most significant of all were the appeals made at this time by Moslems to non-Mohammedan Asiatics for sympathy and solidarity against the hated West. This was a development as unprecedented as it was startling. Mohammed, revering as he did the Old and New Testaments, and regarding himself as the successor of the divinely inspired prophets Moses and Jesus, had enjoined upon his followers relative respect for Christians and Jews ("Peoples of the Book") in contrast with other non-Moslems, whom he stigmatized as "Idolaters." These injunctions of the Prophet had always been heeded, and down to our own days the hatred of Moslems for Christians, however bitter, had been as nothing compared with their loathing and contempt for "Idolaters" like the Brahmanist Hindus or the Buddhists and Confucianists of the Far East.

The first symptom of a change in attitude appeared during the Russo-Japanese War of 1904. So great had Islam's fear and hatred of the Christian West then become, that the triumph of an Asiatic people over Europeans was enthusiastically hailed by many Moslems, even though the victors were "Idolaters." It was quite in keeping with Pan-Islamism's strong missionary bent that many pious Moslems should have dreamed of bringing these heroes within the Islamic fold. Efforts to get in touch with Japan were made. Propagandist papers were founded, missionaries were selected, and the Sultan sent a warship to Japan with a Pan-Islamic delegation aboard. Throughout Islam the projected conversion of Japan was widely discussed. Said an Egyptian journal in the year 1906: "England, with her sixty million Indian Moslems, dreads this conversion. With a Mohammedan Japan, Mussulman policy would change entirely."[50] And, at the other end of the Moslem world, a Chinese Mohammedan sheikh wrote: "If Japan thinks of becoming some day a very great power and making Asia the dominator of the other continents, it will be only by adopting the blessed religion of Islam."[51]

Of course it soon became plain to these enthusiasts that while Japan received Islam's emissaries with smiling courtesy, she had not the faintest intention of turning Mohammedan. Nevertheless, the first step had been taken towards friendly relations with non-Moslem Asia, and the Balkan War drove Moslems much further in this direction. The change in Moslem sentiment can be gauged by the numerous appeals made by the Indian Mohammedans at this time to Hindus, as may be seen from the following sample entitled significantly "The Message of the East." "Spirit of the East," reads this noteworthy document, "arise and repel the swelling flood of Western aggression! Children of Hindustan, aid us with your wisdom, culture, and wealth; lend us your power, the birthright and heritage of the Hindu! Let the Spirit Powers hidden in the Himalayan mountain-peaks arise. Let prayers to the god of battles float upward; prayers that right may triumph over might; and call to your myriad gods to annihilate the armies of the foe!"[52]

To any one who realizes the traditional Moslem attitude towards "Idolaters" such words are simply amazing. They betoken a veritable revolution in outlook. And such sentiments were not confined to Indian Moslems; they were equally evident among Chinese Moslems as well. Said a Mohammedan newspaper of Chinese Turkestan, advocating a fraternal union of all Chinese against Western aggression: "Europe has grown too presumptuous. It will deprive us of our liberty; it will destroy us altogether if we do not bestir ourselves promptly and prepare for a powerful resistance."[53] During the troublous first stages of the Chinese revolution, the Mohammedans, emerging from their sulky aloofness, co-operated so loyally with their Buddhist and Confucian fellow-patriots that Dr. Sun-Yat-Sen, the Republican leader, announced gratefully: "The Chinese will never forget the assistance which their Moslem fellow-countrymen have rendered in the interest of order and liberty."[54]

The Great War thus found Islam everywhere deeply stirred against European aggression, keenly conscious of its own solidarity, and frankly reaching out for Asiatic allies in the projected struggle against European domination.

Under these circumstances it may at first sight appear strange that no general Islamic explosion occurred when Turkey entered the lists at the close of 1914 and the Sultan Caliph issued a formal summons to the Holy War. Of course this summons was not the flat failure which Allied reports led the West to believe at the time. As a matter of fact, there was trouble in practically every Mohammedan land under Allied control. To name only a few of many instances: Egypt broke into a tumult smothered only by overwhelming British reinforcements, Tripoli burst into a flame of insurrection that drove the Italians headlong to the coast, Persia was prevented from joining Turkey only by prompt Russo-British intervention, while the Indian North-West Frontier was the scene of fighting that required the presence of a quarter of a million Anglo-Indian troops. The British Government has officially admitted that during 1915 the Allies' Asiatic and African possessions stood within a hand's breadth of a cataclysmic insurrection.

That insurrection would certainly have taken place if Islam's leaders had everywhere spoken the fateful word. But the word was not spoken. Instead, influential Moslems outside of Turkey generally condemned the latter's action and did all in their power to calm the passions of the fanatic multitude.

The attitude of these leaders does credit to their discernment. They recognized that this was neither the time nor the occasion for a decisive struggle with the West. They were not yet materially prepared, and they had not perfected their understandings either among themselves or with their prospective non-Moslem allies. Above all, the moral urge was lacking. They knew that athwart the Khalifa's writ was stencilled "Made in Germany." They knew that the "Young-Turk" clique which had engineered the coup was made up of Europeanized renegades, many of them not even nominal Moslems, but atheistic Jews. Far-sighted Moslems had no intention of pulling Germany's chestnuts out of the fire, nor did they wish to further Prussian schemes of world-dominion which for themselves would have meant a mere change of masters. Far better to let the West fight out its desperate feud, weaken itself, and reveal fully its future intentions. Meanwhile Islam could bide its time, grow in strength, and await the morrow.

The Versailles peace conference was just such a revelation of European intentions as the Pan-Islamic leaders had been waiting for in order to perfect their programmes and enlist the moral solidarity of their followers. At Versailles the European Powers showed unequivocally that they had no intention of relaxing their hold upon the Near and Middle East. By a number of secret treaties negotiated during the war, the Ottoman Empire had been virtually partitioned between the victorious Allies, and these secret treaties formed the basis of the Versailles settlement. Furthermore, Egypt had been declared a British protectorate at the very beginning of the war, while the Versailles conference had scarcely adjourned before England announced an "agreement" with Persia which made that country another British protectorate in fact if not in name. The upshot was, as already stated, that the Near and Middle East were subjected to European political domination as never before.

But there was another side to the shield. During the war years the Allied statesmen had officially proclaimed times without number that the war was being fought to establish a new world-order based on such principles as the rights of small nations and the liberty of all peoples. These pronouncements had been treasured and memorized throughout the East. When, therefore, the East saw a peace settlement based, not upon these high professions, but upon the imperialistic secret treaties, it was fired with a moral indignation and sense of outraged justice never known before. A tide of impassioned determination began rising which has set already the entire East in tumultuous ferment, and which seems merely the premonitory ground-swell of a greater storm. So ominous were the portents that even before the Versailles conference had adjourned many European students of Eastern affairs expressed grave alarm. Here, for example, is the judgment of Leone Caetani, Duke of Sermoneta, an Italian authority on Mohammedan questions. Speaking in the spring of 1919 on the war's effect on the East, he said: "The convulsion has shaken Islamic and Oriental civilization to its foundations. The entire Oriental world, from China to the Mediterranean, is in ferment. Everywhere the hidden fire of anti-European hatred is burning. Riots in Morocco, risings in Algiers, discontent in Tripoli, so-called Nationalist attempts in Egypt, Arabia, and Lybia are all different manifestations of the same deep sentiment, and have as their object the rebellion of the Oriental world against European civilization."[55]

Those words are a prophetic forecast of what has since occurred in the Moslem world. Because recent events are perhaps even more involved with the nationalistic aspirations of the Moslem peoples than they are with the strictly Pan-Islamic movement, I propose to defer their detailed discussion till the chapter on Nationalism. We should, however, remember that Moslem nationalism and Pan-Islamism, whatever their internal differences, tend to unite against the external pressure of European domination and equally desire Islam's liberation from European political control. Remembering these facts, let us survey the present condition of the Pan-Islamic movement.

Pan-Islamism has been tremendously stimulated by Western pressure, especially by the late war and the recent peace settlements. However, Pan-Islamism must not be considered as merely a defensive political reaction against external aggression. It springs primarily from that deep sentiment of unity which links Moslem to Moslem by bonds much stronger than those which unite the members of the Christian world. These bonds are not merely religious, in the technical sense; they are social and cultural as well. Throughout the Moslem world, despite wide differences in local customs and regulations, the basic laws of family and social conduct are everywhere the same. "The truth is that Islam is more than a creed, it is a complete social system; it is a civilization with a philosophy, a culture, and an art of its own; in its long struggle against the rival civilization of Christendom it has become an organic unit conscious of itself."[56]

To this Islamic civilization all Moslems are deeply attached. In this larger sense, Pan-Islamism is universal. Even the most liberal-minded Moslems, however much they may welcome Western ideas, and however strongly they may condemn the fanatical, reactionary aspects of the political Pan-Islamic movement, believe fervently in Islam's essential solidarity. As a leading Indian Moslem liberal, The Aga Khan, remarks: "There is a right and legitimate Pan-Islamism to which every sincere and believing Mohammedan belongs—that is, the theory of the spiritual brotherhood and unity of the children of the Prophet. The real spiritual and cultural unity of Islam must ever grow, for to the follower of the Prophet it is the foundation of the life and the soul."[57]

If such is the attitude of Moslem liberals, thoroughly conversant with Western culture and receptive to Western progress, what must be the feelings of the Moslem masses, ignorant, reactionary, and fanatical? Besides perfectly understandable fear and hatred due to Western aggression, there is, among the Moslem masses, a great deal of genuine fanaticism caused, not by European political domination, but by religious bigotry and blind hatred of Western civilization.[58] But this fanaticism has, of course, been greatly inflamed by the political events of the past decade, until to-day religious, cultural, and political hatred of the West have coalesced in a state of mind decidedly ominous for the peace of the world. We should not delude ourselves into minimizing the dangerous possibilities of the present situation. Just because the fake "Holy War" proclaimed by the Young-Turks at German instigation in 1914 did not come off is no reason for believing that a real holy war is impossible. As a German staff-officer in Turkish service during the late struggle very candidly says: "The Holy War was an absolute fiasco just because it was not a Holy War."[59] I have already explained how most Moslems saw through the trick and refused to budge.

However, the long series of European aggressions, culminating in the recent peace settlements which subjected virtually the entire Moslem world to European domination, have been steadily rousing in Moslem hearts a spirit of despairing rage that may have disastrous consequences. Certainly, the materials for a holy war have long been heaping high. More than twenty years ago Arminius Vambéry, who knew the Moslem world as few Europeans have ever known it, warned the West of the perils engendered by recklessly imperialistic policies. "As time passes," he wrote in 1898, "the danger of a general war becomes ever greater. We should not forget that time has considerably augmented the adversary's force of resistance. I mean by this the sentiment of solidarity which is becoming livelier of late years among the peoples of Islam, and which in our age of rapid communication is no longer a negligible quantity, as it was even ten or twenty years ago.

"It may not be superfluous to draw the attention of our nineteenth-century Crusaders to the importance of the Moslem press, whose ramifications extend all over Asia and Africa, and whose exhortations sink more profoundly than they do with us into the souls of their readers. In Turkey, India, Persia, Central Asia, Java, Egypt, and Algeria, native organs, daily and periodical, begin to exert a profound influence. Everything that Europe thinks, decides, and executes against Islam spreads through those countries with the rapidity of lightning. Caravans carry the news to the heart of China and to the equator, where the tidings are commented upon in very singular fashion. Certain sparks struck at our meetings and banquets kindle, little by little, menacing flames. Hence, it would be an unpardonable legerity to close our eyes to the dangers lurking beneath an apparent passivity. What the Terdjuman of Crimea says between the lines is repeated by the Constantinople Ikdam, and is commented on and exaggerated at Calcutta by The Moslem Chronicle.

"Of course, at present, the bond of Pan-Islamism is composed of tenuous and dispersed strands. But Western aggression might easily unite those strands into a solid whole, bringing about a general war".[60]

In the decades which have elapsed since Vambéry wrote those lines the situation has become much more tense. Moslem resentment at European dominance has increased, has been reinforced by nationalistic aspirations almost unknown during the last century, and possesses methods of highly efficient propaganda. For example, the Pan-Islamic press, to which Vambéry refers, has developed in truly extraordinary fashion. In 1900 there were in the whole Islamic world not more than 200 propagandist journals. By 1906 there were 500, while in 1914 there were well over 1000.[61] Moslems fully appreciate the post-office, the railroad, and other modern methods of rapidly interchanging ideas. "Every Moslem country is in communication with every other Moslem country: directly, by means of special emissaries, pilgrims, travellers, traders, and postal exchanges; indirectly, by means of Mohammedan newspapers, books, pamphlets, leaflets, and periodicals. I have met with Cairo newspapers in Bagdad, Teheran, and Peshawar; Constantinople newspapers in Basra and Bombay; Calcutta newspapers in Mohammerah, Kerbela, and Port Said."[62] As for the professional Pan-Islamic propagandists, more particularly those of the religious fraternities, they swarm everywhere, rousing the fanaticism of the people: "Travelling under a thousand disguises—as merchants, preachers, students, doctors, workmen, beggars, fakirs, mountebanks, pretended fools or rhapsodists, these emissaries are everywhere well received by the Faithful and are efficaciously protected against the suspicious investigations of the European colonial authorities."[63]

Furthermore, there is to-day in the Moslem world a widespread conviction, held by liberals and chauvinists alike (albeit for very different reasons), that Islam is entering on a period of Renaissance and renewed glory. Says Sir Theodore Morison: "No Mohammedan believes that Islamic civilization is dead or incapable of further development. They recognize that it has fallen on evil days; that it has suffered from an excessive veneration of the past, from prejudice and bigotry and narrow scholasticism not unlike that which obscured European thought in the Middle Ages; but they believe that Islam too is about to have its Renaissance, that it is receiving from Western learning a stimulus which will quicken it into fresh activity, and that the evidences of this new life are everywhere manifest."[64]

Sir Theodore Morison describes the attitude of Moslem liberals. How Pan-Islamists with anti-Western sentiments feel is well set forth by an Egyptian, Yahya Siddyk, in his well-known book, The Awakening of the Islamic Peoples in the Fourteenth Century of the Hegira.[65] The book is doubly interesting because the author has a thorough Western education, holding a law degree from the French university of Toulouse, and is a judge on the Egyptian bench. Although, writing nearly a decade before the cataclysm, Yahya Siddyk clearly foresaw the imminence of the European War. "Behold," he writes, "these Great Powers ruining themselves in terrifying armaments; measuring each other's strength with defiant glances; menacing each other; contracting alliances which continually break and which presage those terrible shocks which overturn the world and cover it with ruins, fire, and blood! The future is God's, and nothing is lasting save His Will."

Yahya Siddyk considers the Western world degenerate. "Does this mean," he asks, "that Europe, our 'enlightened guide,' has already reached the summit of its evolution? Has it already exhausted its vital force by two or three centuries of hyperexertion? In other words: is it already stricken with senility, and will it see itself soon obliged to yield its civilizing rôle to other peoples less degenerate, less neurasthenic, that is to say, younger, more robust, more healthy, than itself? In my opinion, the present marks Europe's apogee, and its immoderate colonial expansion means, not strength, but weakness. Despite the aureole of so much grandeur, power, and glory, Europe is to-day more divided and more fragile than ever, and ill conceals its malaise, its sufferings, and its anguish. Its destiny is inexorably working out!...

"The contact of Europe on the East has caused us both much good and much evil: good, in the material and intellectual sense; evil, from the moral and political point of view. Exhausted by long struggles, enervated by a brilliant civilization, the Moslem peoples inevitably fell into a malaise; but they are not stricken, they are not dead! These peoples, conquered by the force of cannon, have not in the least lost their unity, even under the oppressive régimes to which the Europeans have long subjected them....

"I have said that the European contact has been salutary to us from both the material and intellectual point of view. What reforming Moslem princes wished to impose by force on their Moslem subjects is to-day realized a hundredfold. So great has been our progress in the last twenty-five years in science, letters, and art that we may well hope to be in all these things the equals of Europe in less than half a century....

"A new era opens for us with the fourteenth century of the Hegira, and this happy century will mark our Renaissance and our great future! A new breath animates the Mohammedan peoples of all races; all Moslems are penetrated with the necessity of work and instruction! We all wish to travel, do business, tempt fortune, brave dangers. There is in the East, among the Mohammedans, a surprising activity, an animation, unknown twenty-five years ago. There is to-day a real public opinion throughout the East."

The author concludes: "Let us hold firm, each for all, and let us hope, hope, hope! We are fairly launched on the path of progress: let us profit by it! It is Europe's very tyranny which has wrought our transformation! It is our continued contact with Europe that favours our evolution and inevitably hastens our revival! It is simply history repeating itself; the Will of God fulfilling itself despite all opposition and all resistance.... Europe's tutelage over Asiatics is becoming more and more nominal—the gates of Asia are closing against the European! Surely we glimpse before us a revolution without parallel in the world's annals. A new age is at hand!"

If this was the way Pan-Islamists were thinking in the opening years of the century, it is clear that their views must have been confirmed and intensified by the Great War.[66] The material power of the West was thereby greatly reduced, while its prestige was equally sapped by the character of the peace settlement and by the attendant disputes which broke out among the victors. The mutual rivalries and jealousies of England, France, Italy, and their satellites in the East have given Moslems much food for hopeful thought, and have caused corresponding disquietude in European minds. A French publicist recently admonished his fellow Europeans that "Islam does not recognize our colonial frontiers," and added warningly, "the great movement of Islamic union inaugurated by Djemal-ed-Din el-Afghani is going on."[67]

The menacing temper of Islam is shown by the furious agitation which has been going on for the last three years among India's 70,000,000 Moslems against the dismemberment of the Ottoman Empire. This agitation is not confined to India. It is general throughout Islam, and Sir Theodore Morison does not overstate the case when he says: "It is time the British public realized the gravity of what is happening in the East. The Mohammedan world is ablaze with anger from end to end at the partition of Turkey. The outbreaks of violence in centres so far remote as Kabul and Cairo are symptoms only of this widespread resentment. I have been in close touch with Mohammedans of India for close upon thirty years and I think it is my duty to warn the British public of the passionate resentment which Moslems feel at the proposed dismemberment of the Turkish Empire. The diplomats at Versailles apparently thought that outside the Turkish homelands there is no sympathy for Turkey. This is a disastrous blunder. You have but to meet the Mohammedan now in London to realize the white heat to which their anger is rising. In India itself the whole of the Mohammedan community from Peshawar to Arcot is seething with passion upon this subject. Women inside the Zenanas are weeping over it. Merchants who usually take no interest in public affairs are leaving their shops and counting-houses to organize remonstrances and petitions; even the mediæval theologians of Deoband and the Nadwatul-Ulama, whose detachment from the modern world is proverbial, are coming from their cloisters to protest against the destruction of Islam."[68]

Possibly the most serious aspect of the situation is that the Moslem liberals are being driven into the camp of political Pan-Islamism. Receptive though the liberals are to Western ideas, and averse though they are to Pan-Islamism's chauvinistic, reactionary tendencies, Europe's intransigeance is forcing them to make at least a temporary alliance with the Pan-Islamic and Nationalist groups, even though the liberals know that anything like a holy war would dig a gulf between East and West, stop the influx of Western stimuli, favour reactionary fanaticism, and perhaps postpone for generations a modernist reformation of Islam.

Perhaps it is symptomatic of a more bellicose temper in Islam that the last few years have witnessed the rapid spread of two new puritan, fanatic movements—the Ikhwan and the Salafîya. The Ikhwan movement began obscurely about ten years ago in inner Arabia—the Nejd. It is a direct outgrowth of Wahabism, from which it differs in no essential respect. So rapid has been Ikhwanism's progress that it to-day absolutely dominates the entire Nejd, and it is headed by desert Arabia's most powerful chieftain, Bin Saud, a descendant of the Saud who headed the Wahabi movement a hundred years ago. The fanaticism of the Ikhwans is said to be extraordinary, while their programme is the old Wahabi dream of a puritan conversion of the whole Islamic world.[69] As for the Salafî movement, it started in India even more obscurely than Ikhwanism did in Arabia, but during the past few years it has spread widely through Islam. Like Ikhwanism, it is puritanical and fanatical in spirit, its adherents being found especially among dervish organizations.[70] Such phenomena, taken with everything else, do not augur well for the peace of the East.

So much for Pan-Islamism's religious and political sides. Now let us glance at its commercial and industrial aspects—at what may be called economic Pan-Islamism.

Economic Pan-Islamism is the direct result of the permeation of Western ideas. Half a century ago the Moslem world was economically still in the Middle Ages. The provisions of the sheriat, or Moslem canon law, such as the prohibition of interest rendered economic life in the modern sense impossible. What little trade and industry did exist was largely in the hands of native Christians or Jews. Furthermore, the whole economic life of the East was being disorganized by the aggressive competition of the West. Europe's political conquest of the Moslem world was, in fact, paralleled by an economic conquest even more complete. Everywhere percolated the flood of cheap, abundant European machine-made goods, while close behind came European capital, temptingly offering itself in return for loans and concessions which, once granted, paved the way for European political domination.

Yet in economics as in politics the very completeness of Europe's triumph provoked resistance. Angered and alarmed by Western exploitation, Islam frankly recognized its economic inferiority and sought to escape from its subjection. Far-sighted Moslems began casting about for a modus vivendi with modern life that would put Islam economically abreast of the times. Western methods were studied and copied. The prohibitions of the sheriat were evaded or quietly ignored.

The upshot has been a marked evolution toward Western economic standards. This evolution is of course still in its early stages, and is most noticeable in lands most exposed to Western influences like India, Egypt, and Algeria. Yet everywhere in the Moslem world the trend is the same. The details of this economic transformation will be discussed in the chapter devoted to economic change. What we are here concerned with is its Pan-Islamic aspect. And that aspect is very strong. Nowhere does Islam's innate solidarity come out better than in the economic field. The religious, cultural, and customary ties which bind Moslem to Moslem enable Mohammedans to feel more or less at home in every part of the Islamic world, while Western methods of transit and communication enable Mohammedans to travel and keep in touch as they never could before. New types of Moslems—wholesale merchants, steamship owners, business men, bankers, even factory industrialists and brokers—are rapidly evolving; types which would have been simply unthinkable a century, or even half a century, ago.

And these new men understand each other perfectly. Bound together both by the ties of Islamic fraternity and by the pressure of Western competition, they co-ordinate their efforts much more easily than politicals have succeeded in doing. Here liberals, Pan-Islamists, and nationalists can meet on common ground. Here is no question of political conspiracies, revolts, or holy wars, challenging the armed might of Europe and risking bloody repression or blind reaction. On the contrary, here is merely a working together of fellow Moslems for economic ends by business methods which the West cannot declare unlawful and dare not repress.

What, then, is the specific programme of economic Pan-Islamism? It is easily stated: the wealth of Islam for Moslems. The profits of trade and industry for Moslem instead of Christian hands. The eviction of Western capital by Moslem capital. Above all, the breaking of Europe's grip on Islam's natural resources by the termination of concessions in lands, mines, forests, railways, custom-houses, by which the wealth of Islamic lands is to-day drained away to foreign shores.

Such are the aspirations of economic Pan-Islamism. They are wholly modern concepts, the outgrowth of those Western ideas whose influence upon the Moslem world I shall now discuss.[71]

FOOTNOTES:

[25] Islam has not only won much ground in India, Brahmanism's homeland, but has also converted virtually the entire populations of the great islands of Java and Sumatra, where Brahmanism was formerly ascendant.

[26] The small Parsi communities of India, centring in Bombay, are the sole surviving representatives of Zoroastrianism. They were founded by Zoroastrian refugees after the Mohammedan conquest of Persia in the seventh century a.d.

[27] Though Mecca is forbidden to non-Moslems, a few Europeans have managed to make the Hajj in disguise, and have written their impressions. Of these, Snouck Hurgronje's Mekka (2 vols., The Hague, 1888) and Het Mekkaansche Feest (Leiden, 1889) are the most recent good works. Also see Burton and Burckhardt. A recent account of value from the pen of a Mohammedan liberal is: Gazanfar Ali Khan, With the Pilgrims to Mecca; The Great Pilgrimage of A. H. 1319 (A.D. 1902), with an Introduction by Arminius Vambéry (London, 1905).

[28] The Shiite Persians of course refused to recognize any Sunnite or orthodox caliphate; while the Moors pay spiritual allegiance to their own Shereefian sultans.

[29] The Turkish name for Constantinople.

[30] On the caliphate, see Sir W. Muir, The Caliphate: Its Rise, Decline, and Fall (Edinburgh, 1915); Sir Mark Sykes, The Caliph's Last Heritage (London, 1915); XX, "L'Islam après la Guerre," Revue de Paris, 15 January, 1916; "The Indian Khilafat Delegation," Foreign Affairs, July, 1920 (Special Supplement).

[31] Literally, "he who is guided aright."

[32] "Seyid" means "Lord." This title is borne only by descendants of the Prophet.

[33] The explorer Dr. Nachtigal.

[34] On the Islamic fraternities in general and the Sennussiya in particular see W. S. Blunt, The Future of Islam (London, 1882); O. Depont and X. Coppolani, Les Confréries réligieuses musulmanes (Paris, 1897); H. Duveyrier, La Confrérie musulmane de Sidi Mohammed ben Ali es Sénoussi (Paris, 1884); A. Le Chatelier, Les Confréries musulmanes du Hedjaz (Paris, 1887); L. Petit, Confréries musulmanes (Paris, 1899); L. Rinn, Marabouts et Khouan (Algiers, 1884); A. Servier, Le Nationalisme musulman (Constantine, Algeria, 1913); Simian, Les Confréries islamiques en Algérie (Algiers, 1910); Achmed Abdullah (himself a Sennussi), "The Sennussiyehs," The Forum, May, 1914; A. R. Colquhoun, "Pan-Islam," North American Review, June, 1906; T. R. Threlfall, "Senussi and His Threatened Holy War," Nineteenth Century, March, 1900; Captain H. A. Wilson, "The Moslem Menace," Nineteenth Century and After, September, 1907; ... "La Puissance de l'Islam: Ses Confréries Réligieuses," Le Correspondant, 25 November and 10 December, 1909. The above judgments, particularly regarding the Sennussiya, vary greatly, some being highly alarmist, others minimizing its importance. A full balancing of the entire subject is that of Commandant Binger, "Le Péril de l'Islam," Bulletin du Comité de l'Afrique française, 1902. Personal interviews of educated Moslems with El Sennussi are Si Mohammed el Hechaish, "Chez les Senoussia et les Touareg," L'Expansion Coloniale française, 1900; Muhammad ibn Utman, Voyage au Pays des Sénoussia à travers la Tripolitaine (translated from the Arabic), Paris, 1903.

[35] On Moslem missionary activity in general, see Jansen, Verbreitung des Islams (Berlin, 1897); M. Townsend, Asia and Europe, pp. 46-49, 60-61, 81; A. Le Chatelier, L'Islam au dix-neuvième Siècle (Paris, 1888); various papers in The Mohammedan World To-day (London, 1906).

[36] T. R. Threlfall, "Senussi and His Threatened Holy War," Nineteenth Century, March, 1900.

[37] D. A. Forget, L'Islam et le Christianisme dans l'Afrique centrale, p. 65 (Paris, 1900). For other statements regarding Moslem missionary activity in Africa, see G. Bonet-Maury, L'Islamisme et le Christianisme en Afrique (Paris, 1906); E. W. Blyden, Christianity, Islam, and the Negro Race (London, 1887); Forget, op. cit.

[38] A. Guérinot, "L'Islam et l'Abyssinie," Revue du Monde musulman, 1918. Also see similar opinion of the Protestant missionary K. Cederquist, "Islam and Christianity in Abyssinia," The Moslem World, April, 1921.

[39] S. Brobovnikov, "Moslems in Russia," The Moslem World, January, 1911.

[40] Broomhall, Islam in China (London, 1910); Nigârèndé, "Notes sur les Musulmans Chinois," Revue du Monde musulman, January, 1907; paper on Islam in China in The Mohammedan World To-day (London, 1906).

[41] See papers on Islam in Java and Sumatra in The Mohammedan World To-day (London, 1906); A. Cabaton, Java, Sumatra, and the Dutch East Indies (translated from the Dutch), New York, 1916.

[42] Quoted from article by "X," "Le Pan-Islamisme et le Pan-Turquisme," Revue du Monde musulman, March, 1913. This authoritative article is, so the editor informs us, from the pen of an eminent Mohammedan—"un homme d'étât musulman." For other activities of Djemal-ed-Din, see A. Servier, Le Nationalisme musulman, pp. 10-13.

[43] Quoted from W. G. Palgrave, Essays on Eastern Questions, p. 111 (London, 1872).

[44] A. Vambéry, Western Culture in Eastern Lands, p. 351 (London, 1906).

[45] Abdul Hamid's Pan-Islamic schemes were first clearly discerned by the French publicist Gabriel Charmes as early as 1881, and his warnings were published in his prophetic book L'Avenir de la Turquie—Le Panislamisme (Paris, 1883).

[46] Gabriel Hanotaux, "La Crise méditerranéenne et l'Islam," Revue Hebdomadaire, April 13, 1912.

[47] See "X," "La Situation politique de la Perse," Revue du Monde musulman, June, 1914; B. Temple, "The Place of Persia in World-Politics," Proceedings of the Central Asian Society, May 4, 1910; W. M. Shuster, The Strangling of Persia (New York, 1912).

[48] Quoted from A. Vambéry, "Die türkische Katastrophe und die Islamwelt," Deutsche Revue, July, 1913.

[49] Shah Mohammed Naimatullah, "Recent Turkish Events and Moslem India," Asiatic Review, October, 1913.

[50] Quoted by F. Farjanel, "Le Japon et l'Islam," Revue du Monde musulman, November, 1906.

[51] Farjanel, supra.

[52] Quoted by Vambéry, supra.

[53] Vambéry, "An Approach between Moslems and Buddhists," Nineteenth Century and After, April, 1912.

[54] Vambéry, "An Approach between Moslems and Buddhists," Nineteenth Century and After, April, 1912.

[55] Special cable to the New York Times, dated Rome, May 28, 1919.

[56] Sir T. Morison, "England and Islam," Nineteenth Century and After, July, 1919.

[57] H. H. The Aga Khan, India in Transition, p. 158 (London, 1918).

[58] This hatred of Western civilization, as such, will be discussed in the next chapter.

[59] Ernst Paraquin, formerly Ottoman lieutenant-colonel and chief of general staff, in the Berliner Tageblatt, January 24, 1920.

[60] A. Vambéry, La Turquie d'aujourd'hui et d'avant Quarante Ans, pp. 71, 72 (Paris, 1898).

[61] A. Servier, Le Nationalisme musulman, p. 182.

[62] B. Temple, "The Place of Persia in World-Politics," Proceedings of the Central Asian Society, May, 1910.

[63] L. Rinn, Marabouts et Khouan, p. vi.

[64] Sir T. Morison, "England and Islam," op. cit.

[65] Yahya Siddyk, Le Reveil des Peuples islamiques au quatorzième Siècle de l'Hégire (Cairo, 1907). Also published in Arabic.

[66] For a full discussion of the effect of the Great War upon Asiatic and African peoples, see my book The Rising Tide of Colour against White World-Supremacy (New York and London, 1920).

[67] L. Massignon, "L'Islam et la Politique des Alliés," Revue des Sciences politiques, June, 1920.

[68] Sir T. Morison, "England and Islam," op. cit.

[69] For the Ikhwan movement, see P. W. Harrison, "The Situation in Arabia," Atlantic Monthly, December, 1920; S. Mylrea, "The Politico-Religious Situation in Arabia," The Moslem World, July, 1919.

[70] For the Salafî movement, see "Wahhabisme—Son Avenir sociale et le Mouvement salafî," Revue du Monde musulman, 1919.

[71] On the general subject of economic Pan-Islamism, see A. Le Chatelier, "Le Reveil de l'Islam—Sa Situation économique," Revue Économique internationale, July, 1910; also his article "Politique musulmane," Revue du Monde musulman, September, 1910; M. Pickthall, "La Morale islamique," Revue Politique internationale, July, 1916; S. Khuda Bukhsh, Essays: Indian and Islamic (London, 1912).

CHAPTER III

THE INFLUENCE OF THE WEST

The influence of the West is the great dynamic in the modern transformation of the East. The ubiquitous impact of Westernism is modifying not merely the Islamic world but all non-Moslem Asia and Africa,[72] and in subsequent pages we shall examine the effects of Western influence upon the non-Moslem elements of India. Of course Western influence does not entirely account for Islam's recent evolution. We have already seen that, for the last hundred years, Islam itself has been engendering forces which, however quickened by external Western stimuli, are essentially internal in their nature, arising spontaneously and working toward distinctive, original goals. It is not a mere copying of the West that is to-day going on in the Moslem world, but an attempt at a new synthesis—an assimilation of Western methods to Eastern ends. We must always remember that the Asiatic stocks which constitute the bulk of Islam's followers are not primitive savages like the African negroes or the Australoids, but are mainly peoples with genuine civilizations built up by their own efforts from the remote past. In view of their historic achievements, therefore, it seems safe to conclude that in the great ferment now stirring the Moslem world we behold a real Renaissance, whose genuineness is best attested by the fact that there have been similar movements in former times.

The modern influence of the West on the East is quite unprecedented in both intensity and scope. The far more local, partial influence of Greece and Rome cannot be compared to it. Another point to be noted is that this modern influence of the West upon the East is a very recent thing. The full impact of Westernism upon the Orient as a whole dates only from about the middle of the nineteenth century. Since then, however, the process has been going on by leaps and bounds. Roads and railways, posts and telegraphs, books and papers, methods and ideas, have penetrated, or are in process of penetrating, every nook and cranny of the East. Steamships sail the remotest seas. Commerce drives forth and scatters the multitudinous products of Western industry among the remotest peoples. Nations which only half a century ago lived the life of thirty centuries ago, to-day read newspapers and go to business in electric tram-cars. Both the habits and thoughts of Orientals are being revolutionized. To a discussion of the influence of the West upon the Moslem world the remainder of this book will be devoted. The chief elements will be separately analysed in subsequent chapters, the present chapter being a general survey of an introductory character.

The permeation of Westernism is naturally most advanced in those parts of Islam which have been longest under Western political control. The penetration of the British "Raj" into the remotest Indian jungles, for example, is an extraordinary phenomenon. By the coinage, the post-office, the railroads, the administration of justice, the encouragement of education, the relief of famine, and a thousand other ways, the great organization has penetrated all India. But even in regions where European control is still nominal, the permeation of Westernism has gone on apace. The customs and habits of the people have been distinctly modified. Western material improvements and comforts like the kerosene-oil lamp and the sewing-machine are to-day part and parcel of the daily life of the people. New economic wants have been created; standards of living have been raised; canons of taste have been altered.[73]

In the intellectual and spiritual fields, likewise, the leaven of Westernism is clearly apparent. We have already seen how profoundly Moslem liberal reformers have been influenced by Western ideas and the spirit of Western progress. Of course in these fields Westernism has progressed more slowly and has awakened much stronger opposition than it has on the material plane. Material innovations, especially mechanical improvements, comforts, and luxuries, make their way much faster than novel customs or ideas, which usually shock established beliefs or ancestral prejudices. Tobacco was taken up with extraordinary rapidity by every race and clime, and the kerosene-lamp has in half a century penetrated the recesses of Central Asia and of China; whereas customs like Western dress and ideas like Western education encounter many setbacks and are often adopted with such modifications that their original spirit is denatured or perverted. The superior strength and skill of the West are to-day generally admitted throughout the East, but in many quarters the first receptivity to Western progress and zeal for Western ideas have cooled or have actually given place to a reactionary hatred of the very spirit of Western civilization.[74]

Western influences are most apparent in the upper and middle classes, especially in the Western-educated intelligentsia which to-day exists in every Eastern land. These élites of course vary greatly in numbers and influence, but they all possess a more or less definite grasp of Western ideas. In their reactions to Westernism they are sharply differentiated. Some, while retaining the fundamentals of their ancestral philosophy of life, attempt a genuine assimilation of Western ideals and envisage a higher synthesis of the spirits of East and West. Others break with their traditional pasts, steep themselves in Westernism, and become more or less genuinely Westernized. Still others conceal behind their Western veneer disillusionment and detestation.[75]

Of course it is in externals that Westernization is most pronounced. The Indian or Turkish "intellectual," holding Western university degrees and speaking fluently several European languages, and the wealthy prince or pasha, with his motor-cars, his racing-stables, and his annual "cure" at European watering-places, appear very Occidental to the casual eye. Such men wear European clothes, eat European food, and live in houses partly or wholly furnished in European style. Behind this façade exists every possible variation of inner life, from earnest enthusiasm for Western ideals to inveterate reaction.

These varied attitudes toward Westernism are not parked off by groups or localities, they co-exist among the individuals of every class and every land in the East. The entire Orient is, in fact, undergoing a prodigious transformation, far more sudden and intense than anything the West has ever known. Our civilization is mainly self-evolved; a natural growth developing by normal, logical, and relatively gradual stages. The East, on the contrary, is undergoing a concentrated process of adaptation which, with us, was spread over centuries, and the result is not so much evolution as revolution—political, economic, social, idealistic, religious, and much more besides. The upshot is confusion, uncertainty, grotesque anachronism, and glaring contradiction. Single generations are sundered by unbridgeable mental and spiritual gulfs. Fathers do not understand sons; sons despise their fathers. Everywhere the old and the new struggle fiercely, often within the brain or spirit of the same individual. The infinite complexity of this struggle as it appears in India is well summarized by Sir Valentine Chirol when he speaks of the many "currents and cross-currents of the confused movement which is stirring the stagnant waters of Indian life—the steady impact of alien ideas on an ancient and obsolescent civilization; the more or less imperfect assimilation of those ideas by the few; the dread and resentment of them by those whose traditional ascendancy they threaten; the disintegration of old beliefs, and then again their aggressive revival; the careless diffusion of an artificial system of education, based none too firmly on mere intellectualism, and bereft of all moral or religious sanction; the application of Western theories of administration and of jurisprudence to a social formation stratified on lines of singular rigidity; the play of modern economic forces upon primitive conditions of industry and trade; the constant and unconscious but inevitable friction between subject races and their alien rulers; the reverberation of distant wars and distant racial conflicts; the exaltation of an Oriental people in the Far East."[76] These lines, though written about India, apply with fair exactitude to every other portion of the Near and Middle East to-day. As a French writer remarks with special reference to the Levant: "The truth is that the Orient is in transformation, and the Mohammedan mentality as well—though not perhaps exactly as we might wish. It is undergoing a period of crisis, wherein the past struggles everywhere against the present; where ancient customs, impaired by modern innovations, present a hybrid and disconcerting spectacle."[77]

To this is largely due the unlovely traits displayed by most of the so-called "Westernized" Orientals; the "stucco civilization"[78] of the Indian Babu, and the boulevardier "culture" of the Turkish "Effendi"—syphilized rather than civilized. Any profound transformation must engender many worthless by-products, and the contemporary Westernization of the Orient has its dark as well as its bright side. The very process of reform, however necessary and inevitable, lends fresh virulence to old ills and imports new evils previously unknown. As Lord Cromer says: "It is doubtful whether the price which is being paid for introducing European civilization into these backward Eastern societies is always recognized as fully as it should be. The material benefits derived from European civilization are unquestionably great, but as regards the ultimate effect on public and private morality the future is altogether uncertain."[79]

The good and the evil of Westernization are alike mostly clearly evident among the ranks of the educated élites. Some of these men show the happiest effects of the Western spirit, but an even larger number fall into the gulf between old and new, and there miserably perish. Lord Cromer characterized many of the "Europeanized" Egyptians as "at the same time de-Moslemized Moslems and invertebrate Europeans";[80] while another British writer thus pessimistically describes the superficial Europeanism prevalent in India: "Beautiful Mogul palaces furnished with cracked furniture from Tottenham Court Road. That is what we have done to the Indian mind. We have not only made it despise its own culture and throw it out; we have asked it to fill up the vacant spaces with furniture which will not stand the climate. The mental Eurasianism of India is appalling. Such minds are nomad. They belong to no civilization, no country, and no history. They create a craving that cannot be satisfied, and ideals that are unreal. They falsify life. They deprive men of the nourishment of their cultural past, and the substitutes they supply are unsubstantial.... We sought to give the Eastern mind a Western content and environment; we have succeeded too well in establishing intellectual and moral anarchy in both."[81]

These patent evils of Westernization are a prime cause of that implacable hatred of everything Western which animates so many Orientals, including some well acquainted with the West. Such persons are precious auxiliaries to the ignorant reactionaries and to the rebels against Western political domination.

The political predominance of the West over the East is, indeed, the outstanding factor in the whole question of Western influence upon the Orient. We have already surveyed Europe's conquest of the Near and Middle East during the past century, and we have seen how helpless the backward, decrepit Moslem world was in face of the twofold tide of political and economic subjugation. In fact, the economic phase was perhaps the more important factor in the rapidity and completeness of Europe's success. To be sure, some Eastern lands were subjugated at a stroke by naked military force, as in the French expedition to Algiers, the Russian conquest of central Asia, and the Italian descent upon Tripoli. Much oftener, however, subjection began by the essentially economic process known as "pacific penetration"—the acquirement of a financial grip upon a hitherto independent Oriental country by Western capital in the form of loans and concessions, until the assumption of Western political control became little more than a formal registration of what already existed in fact. Such is the story of the subjection of Egypt, Morocco, and Persia, while England's Indian Empire started in a purely trading venture—the East India Company. The tremendous potency of "pacific penetration" is often not fully appreciated. Take the significance of one item alone—railway concessions. Says that keen student of Weltpolitik, Doctor Dillon: "Railways are the iron tentacles of latter-day expanding Powers. They are stretched out caressingly at first. But once the iron has, so to say, entered the soul of the weaker nation, the tentacles swell to the dimensions of brawny arms, and the embrace tightens to a crushing grip."[82]

On the question of the abstract rightness or wrongness of this subjection of the East by the West, I do not propose to enter. It has been exhaustively discussed, pro and con, and every reader of these pages is undoubtedly familiar with the stock arguments on both sides. The one thing certain is that this process of subjugation was, broadly speaking, inevitable. Given two worlds at such different levels as East and West at the beginning of the nineteenth century—the West overflowing with vitality and striding at the forefront of human progress, the East sunk in lethargy and decrepitude—and it was a foregone conclusion that the former would encroach upon the latter.

What does concern us in our present discussion is the effect of European political control upon the general process of Westernization in Eastern lands. And there can be no doubt that such Westernization was thereby greatly furthered. Once in control of an Oriental country, the European rulers were bound to favour its Westernization for a variety of reasons. Mere self-interest impelled them to make the country peaceful and prosperous, in order to extract profit for themselves and reconcile the inhabitants to their rule. This meant the replacement of inefficient and sanguinary native despotisms inhibiting progress and engendering anarchy by stable colonial governments, maintaining order, encouraging industry, and introducing improvements like the railway, the post, sanitation, and much more besides. In addition to these material innovations, practically all the Western governments endeavoured to better the social, intellectual, and spiritual condition of the peoples that had come under their control. The European Powers who built up colonial empires during the nineteenth century were actuated by a spirit far more enlightened than that of former times, when the early colonial empires of Spain, Portugal, Holland, and the English East India Company had been run on the brutal and short-sighted doctrine of sheer exploitation. In the nineteenth century all Western rule in the Orient was more or less impregnated with the ideal of "The White Man's Burden." The great empire-builders of the nineteenth century, actuated as they were not merely by self-interest and patriotic ambition but also by a profound sense of obligation to improve the populations which they had brought under their country's sway, felt themselves bearers of Western enlightenment and laboured to diffuse all the benefits of Western civilization. They honestly believed that the extension of Western political control was the best and quickest, perhaps the only, means of modernizing the backward portions of the world.

That standpoint is ably presented by a British "liberal imperialist," Professor Ramsay Muir, who writes: "It is an undeniable fact that the imperialism of the European peoples has been the means whereby European civilization has been in some degree extended to the whole world, so that to-day the whole world has become a single economic unit, and all its members are parts of a single political system. And this achievement brings us in sight of the creation of a world-order such as the wildest dreamers of the past could never have anticipated. Without the imperialism of the European peoples North and South America, Australia, South Africa, must have remained wildernesses, peopled by scattered bands of savages. Without it India and other lands of ancient civilization must have remained, for all we can see, externally subject to that endless succession of wars and arbitrary despotisms which have formed the substance of their history through untold centuries, and under which neither rational and equal law nor political liberty, as we conceive them, were practicable conceptions. Without it the backward peoples of the earth must have continued to stagnate under the dominance of an unchanging primitive customary régime, which has been their state throughout recorded time. If to-day the most fruitful political ideas of the West—the ideas of nationality and self-government—which are purely products of Western civilization, are beginning to produce a healthy fermentation in many parts of the non-European world, that result is due to European Imperialism."[83]

The ethics of modern imperialism have nowhere been better formulated than in an essay by Lord Cromer. "An imperial policy," he writes, "must, of course, be carried out with reasonable prudence, and the principles of government which guide our relations with whatsoever races are brought under our control must be politically and economically sound and morally defensible. This is, in fact, the keystone of the imperial arch. The main justification of imperialism is to be found in the use which is made of imperial power. If we make good use of our power, we may face the future without fear that we shall be overtaken by the Nemesis which attended Roman misrule. If the reverse is the case, the British Empire will deserve to fall, and of a surety it will ultimately fall."[84]

Such are the basic sanctions of Western imperialism as evolved during the nineteenth century. Whether or not it is destined to endure, there can be no question that this prodigious extension of European political control greatly favoured the spread of Western influences of every kind. It is, of course, arguable that the East would have voluntarily adopted Western methods and ideas even if no sort of Western pressure had been applied. But they would have been adopted much more slowly, and this vital element of time renders such arguments mere academic speculation. For the vital, expanding nineteenth-century West to have deliberately restrained itself while the backward East blunderingly experimented with Westernism, accepting and rejecting, buying goods and refusing to pay for them, negotiating loans and then squandering and repudiating them, inviting in Europeans and then expelling or massacring them, would have been against all history and human nature.

As a matter of fact, Western pressure was applied, as it was bound to be applied; and this constant, ubiquitous, unrelenting pressure, broke down the barriers of Oriental conservatism and inertia as nothing else could have done, forced the East out of its old ruts, and compelled it to take stock of things as they are in a world of hard facts instead of reminiscent dreams. In subsequent chapters we shall examine the manifold results of this process which has so profoundly transformed the Orient during the past hundred years. Here we will continue our general survey by examining the more recent aspects of Western control over the East and the reactions of the East thereto.

In my opinion, the chief fallacy involved in criticisms of Western control over Eastern lands arises from failure to discriminate between nineteenth-century and twentieth-century imperialism. Nineteenth-century imperialism was certainly inevitable, and was apparently beneficial in the main. Twentieth-century imperialism cannot be so favourably judged. By the year 1900 the Oriental peoples were no longer mere fanatical obscurantists neither knowing nor caring to know anything outside the closed circle of their ossified, decadent civilizations. The East had been going to school, and wanted to begin to apply what it had been taught by the West. It should have been obvious that these peoples, whose past history proved them capable of achievement and who were now showing an apparently genuine desire for new progress, needed to be treated differently from what they had been. In other words, a more liberal attitude on the part of the West had become advisable.

But no such change was made. On the contrary, in the West itself, the liberal idealism which had prevailed during most of the nineteenth century was giving way to that spirit of fierce political and economic rivalry which culminated in the Great War.[85] Never had Europe been so avid for colonies, for "spheres of influence," for concessions and preferential markets; in fine, so "imperialistic," in the unfavourable sense of the term. The result was that with the beginning of the twentieth century Western pressure on the East, instead of being relaxed, was redoubled; and the awakening Orient, far from being met with sympathetic consideration, was treated more ruthlessly than it had been for two hundred years. The way in which Eastern countries like Turkey and Persia, striving to reform themselves and protect their independence, were treated by Europe's new Realpolitik would have scandalized the liberal imperialists of a generation before. It certainly scandalized present-day liberals, as witness these scathing lines written in 1912 by the well-known British publicist Sidney Low:

"The conduct of the Most Christian Powers during the past few years has borne a striking resemblance to that of robber-bands descending upon an unarmed and helpless population of peasants. So far from respecting the rights of other nations, they have exhibited the most complete and cynical disregard for them. They have, in fact, asserted the claim of the strong to prey upon the weak, and the utter impotence of all ethical considerations in the face of armed force, with a crude nakedness which few Eastern military conquerors could well have surpassed.

"The great cosmic event in the history of the last quarter of a century has been the awakening of Asia after centuries of somnolence. The East has suddenly sprung to life, and endeavoured to throw itself vigorously into the full current of Western progress. Japan started the enterprise; and, fortunately for herself, she entered upon it before the new Western policy had fully developed itself, and while certain archaic ideals about the rights of peoples and the sanctity of treaties still prevailed. When the new era was inaugurated by the great Japanese statesmen of the nineteenth century, Europe did not feel called upon to interfere. We regarded the Japanese renaissance with interest and admiration, and left the people of Nippon to work out the difficulties of their own salvation, unobstructed. If that revolution had taken place thirty years later, there would probably have been a different story to tell; and New Japan, in the throes of her travail, would have found the armed Great Powers at her bedside, each stretching forth a mailed fist to grab something worth taking. Other Eastern countries which have endeavoured to follow the example of Japan during the present century have had worse luck. During the past ten years a wave of sheer materialism and absolute contempt for international morality has swept across the Foreign Offices of Europe, and has reacted disastrously upon the various Eastern nations in their desperate struggles to reform a constitutional system. They have been attempting to carry out the suggestions made to them for generations by benevolent advisers in Christendom.

"Now, when they take these counsels to heart, and endeavour, with halting steps, and in the face of immense obstacles, to pursue the path of reform, one might suppose that their efforts would be regarded with sympathetic attention by the Governments of the West; and that, even if these offered no direct aid, they would at least allow a fair trial." But, on the contrary, "one Great Power after another has used the opportunity presented by the internal difficulties of the Eastern countries to set out upon a career of annexation."[86]

We have already seen how rapid was this career of annexation, extinguishing the independence of the last remaining Mohammedan states at the close of the Great War. We have also seen how it exacerbated Moslem fear and hatred of the West. And the West was already feared and hated for many reasons. In the preceding chapter we traced the growth of the Pan-Islamic movement, and in subsequent chapters we shall trace the development of Oriental nationalism. These politico-religious movements, however, by no means exhaust the list of Oriental reactions to Westernism. There are others, economic, social, racial in character. In view of the complex nature of the Orient's reaction against Westernism, let us briefly analyse the problem in its various constituent elements.

Anti-Western feeling has been waning in some quarters and waxing in others during the past hundred years. By temperamental reactionaries and fanatics things Western have, of course, always been abhorred. But, leaving aside this intransigeant minority, the attitude of other categories of Orientals has varied greatly according to times and circumstances. By liberal-minded persons Western influences were at first hailed with cordiality and even with enthusiasm. In the opening chapter we saw how the liberal reformers welcomed the Western concept of progress and made it one of the bases of their projected religious reformation. And the liberals displayed the same attitude in secular matters. The liberal statesmen who governed Turkey during the third quarter of the nineteenth century made earnest efforts to reform the Ottoman State, and it was the same in other parts of the Moslem world. An interesting example is the attempt made by General Kheir-ed-Din to modernize Tunis. This man, a Circassian by birth, had won the confidence of his master, the Bey, who made him vizier. In 1860 he toured Europe and returned greatly impressed with its civilization. Convinced of Europe's infinite superiority, he desired passionately to transplant Western ideas and methods to Tunis. This he believed quite feasible, and the result would, so he thought, be Tunis's rapid regeneration. Kheir-ed-Din was not in the least a hater of the West. He merely recognized clearly the Moslem world's peril of speedy subjection to the West if it did not set its house rapidly in order, and he therefore desired, in a perfectly legitimate feeling of patriotism, to press his country along the road of progress, that it might be able to stand alone and preserve its independence.

So greatly was the Bey impressed by Kheir-ed-Din's report that he gave him a free hand in his reforming endeavours. For a short time Kheir-ed-Din displayed great activity, though he encountered stubborn opposition from reactionary officials. His work was cut short by his untimely death, and Tunis, still unmodernized, fell twenty years later under the power of France. Kheir-ed-Din, however, worked for posterity. In order to rouse his compatriots to the realities of their situation he published a remarkable book, The Surest Means of Knowing the State of Nations. This book has profoundly influenced both liberals and nationalists throughout the Near East, especially in North Africa, where it has become the bible of Tunisian and Algerian nationalism. In his book Kheir-ed-Din shows his co-religionists the necessity of breaking with their attitude of blind admiration for the past and proud indifference to everything else, and of studying what is going on in the outer world. Europe's present prosperity is due, he asserts, not to natural advantages or to religion, but "to progress in the arts and sciences, which facilitate the circulation of wealth and exploit the treasures of the earth by an enlightened protection constantly given to agriculture, industry, and commerce: all natural consequences of justice and liberty—two things which, for Europeans, have become second nature." In past ages the Moslem world was great and progressive, because it was then liberal and open to progress. It declined through bigotry and obscurantism. But it can revive by reviving the spirit of its early days.

I have stressed the example of the Tunisian Kheir-ed-Din rather than the better-known Turkish instances because it illustrates the general receptivity of mid-nineteenth-century Moslem liberals to Western ideas and their freedom from anti-Western feeling.[87] As time passed, however, many of these erstwhile liberals, disillusioned with the West for various reasons, notably European aggression, became the bitterest enemies of the West, hating the very spirit of Western civilization.[88]

This anti-Western feeling has, of course, been greatly exacerbated since the beginning of the present century. As an influential Mohammedan wrote just before the Great War: "The events of these last ten years and the disasters which have stricken the Mohammedan world have awakened in its bosom a sentiment of mutual cordiality and devotion hitherto unknown, and a unanimous hatred against all its oppressors has been the ferment which to-day stirs the hearts of all Moslems."[89] The bitter rancour seething in many Moslem hearts shows in outbursts like the following, from the pen of a popular Turkish writer at the close of the Balkan Wars: "We have been defeated, we have been shown hostility by the outside world, because we have become too deliberative, too cultured, too refined in our conceptions of right and wrong, of humanity and civilization. The example of the Bulgarian army has taught us that every soldier facing the enemy must return to the days of barbarism, must have a thirst of blood, must be merciless in slaughtering children and women, old and weak, must disregard others' property, life, and honour. Let us spread blood, suffering, wrong, and mourning. Thus only may we become the favourites of the civilized world like King Ferdinand's army."[90]

The Great War itself was hailed by multitudes of Moslems as a well-merited Nemesis on Western arrogance and greed. Here is how a leading Turkish newspaper characterized the European Powers: "They would not look at the evils in their own countries or elsewhere, but interfered at the slightest incident in our borders; every day they would gnaw at some part of our rights and our sovereignty; they would perform vivisection on our quivering flesh and cut off great pieces of it. And we, with a forcibly controlled spirit of rebellion in our hearts and with clinched but powerless fists, silent and depressed, would murmur as the fire burned within: 'Oh, that they might fall out with one another! Oh, that they might eat one another up!' And lo! to-day they are eating each other up, just as the Turk wished they would."[91]

Such anti-Western sentiments are not confined to journalists or politicians, they are shared by all classes, from princes to peasants. Each class has its special reasons for hating European political control. The native princes, even when maintained upon their thrones and confirmed in their dignities and emoluments, bitterly resent their state of vassalage and their loss of limitless, despotic power. "Do you know, I can hardly buy a pen or a sword for myself without asking the Resident for permission?" remarked an Indian rajah bitterly. His attitude was precisely that of Khedive Tewfik Pasha, who, in the early days of the British occupation of Egypt, while watching a review of British troops, said to one of his ministers: "Do you suppose I like this? I tell you, I never see an English sentinel in my streets without longing to jump out of my carriage and strangle him with my own hands."[92] The upper classes feel much the same as their sovereigns. They regret their former monopoly of privilege and office. This is especially true of the Western-educated intelligentsia, who believe that they should hold all government posts and resent bitterly the reservation of high-salaried directive positions for Europeans. Of course many intelligent liberals realize so fully the educative effect of European control that they acquiesce in a temporary loss of independence in order to complete their modernization and ultimately be able to stand alone without fear of reaction or anarchy. However, these liberals are only a small minority, hated by their upper-class fellows as time-servers and renegades, and sundered by an immense gulf from the ignorant masses.