Part 4 (2/2)

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 att.i.tude 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 G.o.d'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 role 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 regimes 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 G.o.d 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 part.i.tion 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 pa.s.sionate 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 pa.s.sion 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 pet.i.tions; even the mediaeval 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 Salafiya. 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 Salafi 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 compet.i.tion 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, steams.h.i.+p 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 compet.i.tion, 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 b.l.o.o.d.y 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 sh.o.r.es.

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 Vambery (London, 1905).

[28] The s.h.i.+te 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.

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