Pan-Islam

us treatise, nor do I class them with the globe-trotter who searched Benares brass-bazar diligently for "a real

other pagans or kafirs, and it will have served its purpose if it brings about a friendlier feeling

it a political bogey and some a world-menace, but these are extremist views-it is really the practic

a partial success or aim lower and achieve is a matter of personal opinion and need not be discussed here, but one tangible fact stands out-that Islam, with its easier moral standard and frequent physical discipline of attitudes and observances connected with obliga

ots who were persecuting them. In the palmy days of the Abbaside Caliphate it was quiescent enough, and men of all creeds were w

es and traders prefer the Christian traveller whom they know to the Moslem stranger from the coast whom they usually distrust, and who, to do h

; it assumed the character of a definite organisation under the crafty touch of that wily diplomat Abdul Hamid, once call

denying its existence has been discredited, since 1914, as completely as the somewhat similar one (attributed to Mississippi engineers) of sitting on the safety-valve just too long for safety. Moreover, in view of Abdul's undoubted ability, he probably discovered fo

eapon most as governing wide Moslem territories,

g about frontiers, I do hope affairs are quite quiet now on your north-w

nterest when we remember that even while Yamen Arabs were fighting the Turks, their neighbours on the Aden side o

g at Stamboul with German guns and a German military system. Then "our Mr. William" of the well-known Potsdam firm of Hohenzollern and Sons made his great advertising campaign in the Near Ea

ary pomp into Jerusalem) and as a prince of peace. That the hospice of Kaiserin Augusta Victoria on the top of the Mount of Olives was loop-holed for musketry and mounted a searchlight in its tower that could signal with Haifa was possibly due to some wayward caprice of the buil

frequented native cafés, where he fraternised with the local Arabs and conducted a vigorous verbal propaganda against the Entente. Then there was the German engineer who wrecked the British railway scheme to connect Haifa and Damascus and re-naturalised as a German citizen after

Railway, who was collecting railway material for Sinai before war broke out. Some time before the Turks came in he imported, for the alleged use of the Jewish technical school, so great a quantity of high explosives tha

of Germans and pro-German Dutchmen when I called there in 1912. They were very active early in the Wa

s the happy hunting-ground of a great German fi

monopoly of Divine assistance, they had taken a l

ing the War and to appreciate the causes which contributed to its final collapse w

st people agree to call Tartar. Their language is closely allied to Mongolian, though written in Arabic, or rather Persian, character, and its Arabic words are pronounced u

hey made Mongolia too hot for them, and we hear of Turks smelting iron for their Mongol masters in what

a raid on their neighbours and then fighting over the loot. That is why you find racial Turks in such outlandish places as Merv, Khiva, Samarcand, Bokh

wizardry and totem-worship they used to practise, and their contact with the Arabs who raided them and afterwards accepted their military service to the Caliphate had civilised them considerably. Their Seljouk cousins were already ruling in Asia Minor, whither they had be

o gift or desire for permanent colonisation. So it came about that the Ottoman Empire began in 1326 under Othman I in Bithynia and grew by absorption and lack of effective

flourished securely, had long since set in blood under circumstances of t

al for assistance against the schismatic seditionists to his Mongol neighbours. It had been done before under similar conditions, and even in these days such a man?uvre seems still to appeal to some types of religious fanaticism, judging by certain passages between our sister

e promise of an alliance, and murdered the whole party, the Caliph being trampled to death. Then Baghdad was g

nce until Selim I seized it, with the person of the then Caliph, by right of c

ess consolidated by benevolent and sound administration, which is not a feature of Turkish rule. Add to this the facts that Turks are slack Moslems, that the national party which ousted Abdul Hamid (himself most orthodox) is not r

Khan's Chinese Empire, and the Moguls did much for India in their prime. But the wolf-taint was in their blood, and just as a pet wolf gets fat and degenerate, so it has been with these Tartars. Their undoubted soldierly qualities are sa

but would not trust the pack ranging in its native forest. I once heard a member of our Ottoman Embassy who has unique experience of the Turk size him up as follows: "The Turk can be a suave and cultured gentleman till his time comes, and then he will tear your guts out and dance

before the War, for a race that can no longer conquer and has never lea

l but the shadow of sovereignty in Egypt, while Arabia was seething with discontent, where not in actua

lthough it took a corrupt, self-seeking Government and a final push from th

ia moderately quiet, apart from its value as a weapon against he