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 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.
Public-domain text, read in full here on John Shaqi.
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