the stability of British rule and to the interests of the Mahomedan
minority whose loyalty was beyond dispute. It was again in the same
spirit, and fortified by the promise which Lord Minto had on that
occasion given them, that they insisted, and insisted successfully, on
the principle of community representation being applied for their
benefit in the Indian Councils Act of 1909.
A new generation of young Mahomedans had nevertheless been growing up
who knew not Seyyid Ahmed and regarded his teachings as obsolete. The
lessons which they had learnt from their Western education were not his.
They were much more nearly those that the more ardent spirits amongst
the Hindus had imbibed, and they were ready to share with them the new
creed of Indian Nationalism in its most extreme form. Other
circumstances were tending to weaken the faith of the Mahomedan
community in the goodwill, not only of the Government of India, but of
the British Government. Even the most conservative Mahomedans were
disappointed and irritated by the revision of the Partition of Bengal in
1911 when the predominantly Mahomedan Province of Eastern Bengal,
created under Lord Curzon, was merged once more into a largely Hindu
Bengal. The more advanced Mahomedans had been stirred by the
revolutionary upheaval in Constantinople to seek contact with the
Turkish Nationalist leaders who now ruled the one great Mahomedan power
in the world, and they learnt from them to read into British foreign
policy a purpose of deliberate hostility to Islam itself inspired by
dread of the renewed vitality it might derive from the returning
consciousness in many Mahomedan countries of their own independent
nationhood. In that light they saw in the British occupation of Egypt,
in the Anglo-French agreement with regard to Morocco and the
Anglo-Russian agreement with regard to Persia, and last but not least,
in the Italian invasion of Tripoli, the gradual development of a scheme
in which all the powers of Christendom were involved for the extinction
of the temporal power of Islam and, with it inevitably, according to
orthodox doctrine, of its spiritual authority. The Ottoman Empire had
been saved for a time by the protection extended to it for her own
purposes by Germany who had alone stood between it and the
disintegrating machinations of the "European Concert" in
Constantinople, bent on undermining the ascendancy of the ruling
Mahomedan race by its menacing insistence on reforms for the benefit of
the subject Christian races which could result only in the further
aggrandisement of the independent Christian states already carved out of
the Sultans' former dominions in Europe and in the introduction of
similar processes even into their Asiatic dominions. The Balkan wars of
1912-1913 appeared to bear out the theory of a great European conspiracy
directed against Turkey as "the sword of Islam," and whilst the
sympathies of Indian Mahomedans of all classes and schools of thought
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