As a world-force this band of pan-Islamism had failed because it had been invoked by the wrong people for a wrong purpose. Such a movement should at least have as its driving power some great spiritual crisis: this Turco-German manifestation of it had its origin in self-interest, and if successful would have immolated Arabia on the demoniac altar of _Weltpolitik_. Seyid Muhammed er-Rashid Ridha, a descendant of the Prophet and one of the greatest Arab theologians living, has voiced the verdict of Islam on this unscrupulous and self-seeking adventure in a trenchant article published in September, 1916. He showed up Enver and his Unionist party as an atheist among atheists who had deprived the Sultan of his rightful power and Islam of its religious head, and contrasted their conduct with that of the British, who exempted the Hejaz from the blockade enforced against the rest of the Ottoman Empire until it became quite clear that the Turks were benefiting chiefly by that exemption, and who, out of respect for the holy places of Islam, refrained from making that country a theatre of war. True to the Teutonic tradition, the movement had been laboriously organised, but lacked psychic insight, for the Turk is too much of a Tartar and too little of a Moslem to appreciate the Arab mind, and the German ignored it, rooting with eager, guttural grunts among the carefully cultivated religious prejudices of Islam like a hog hunting truffles until whacked out of it by the irate cultivators. The following incident may serve to illustrate their crude tactics. Soon after the Turks came into the war the mullah of the principal mosque at Damascus was told to announce _jihad_ against the British from his pulpit on the following Friday in accordance with an order from the Grand Mufti at Stamboul. The poor man appears to have jibbed considerably and sent his family over the Nejd border to be out of reach of Turkish persecution. Finally he decided to conform, but when he climbed the steps of his "minbar" and scanned his congregation he saw a group of German officers wearing tarboushes with a look of almost porcine complacency. His fear fell from him in a gust of rage and he spoke somewhat as follows: "I am ordered to proclaim _jihad_. A _jihad_, as you know, is a Holy War to protect our Holy Places against infidels. This being so, what are these infidel _pigs_ doing in our mosque?" There was a most unseemly scuffle; the Turco-German contingent tried to seize the mullah; the Arab congregation defended him strenuously from arrest. In the confusion that worthy man got clear away and joined his family in Nejd. _Jihad_ is incumbent on all Moslems if against infidel aggression. We stood on the defensive when the Turks first attacked us on the Canal, and when we finally overran Palestine and Syria it was in co-operation with the Arabs, who have more right there than the Turks.