“Quite recently I read Count de Castries’ excellent book on the Islam faith.[22] De Castries is an old French officer who has lived many years in the Algerian deserts, and has become almost an Arab himself in language, habits, and even in religion. I call his book excellent not merely because it is favourable to us, but because it reveals the attitude of the Christian world towards Islamism. I recommend you strongly to read it. But before you do so, I would like to tell you that we Mohammedans have never produced a single poet or prophet in the East who has written against Christianity and Christians in the spirit of those thousand abominations in which the Italian, French, and Spanish troubadours sang of Islam. You will not find a single line in all our literature of the kind such as the hundreds cited by De Castries from Christian writers, and which justly arouse his indignation. I do not exaggerate, my dear friend, I merely tell you the naked truth. You can defy the Christian world to cite, not a single Mohammedan writer, but a single line in the whole of our popular literature which could inspire hatred of the Christian. Even the wars of the Crusades, which lasted through centuries, were powerless to change the sentiment of tolerance towards the Christian world, a sentiment for ever rooted in the spirit of the Koran—the Word of God revealed by His Hadis (the words of the Prophet) and by the legislation of His Imams the so-called Cheriat. Footnote 22: “L’Islam: Impressions et Études.” Par le Comte Henri de Castries. Paris: Armand Colin. “The hatred which the Christian world attributes so gratuitously to us is only the reflection of its own animosity towards us. The centuries which have elapsed since the Renaissance have been unable to efface this hatred from the spirit of Christianity. It is now half a century since Orientalists of different countries have been doing their best to eradicate these voluntary errors, and to spread the truth with regard to Islamism; but they have not been able to change the old Christian antagonism with regard to us. The last Græco-Turkish war fully demonstrated this. ‘Cet animal est bien méchant. Quand on l’attaque il se défend!’ Our legitimate defence against unprovoked aggression was accounted a crime because the aggressors were Christians and according to the words of the mediæval troubadours we are the ‘Adorers of Moham.’ “I see that thoughtful minds, such as Father Hyacinthe, Draper, Carlyle, and others, are supposed to have investigated the tenets of Islamism. Is it really possible to make serious investigations into what you have been accustomed to look upon as a ‘multitude of contradictory and false[23] conceptions—the barbarous ideas of a false Prophet, the sanguinary aspirations of a barbarian’? Footnote 23: