The New World of Islam. Lothrop Stoddard

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]