Art. 11.-ISLAM AND THE WAR.

THE end of the war still seems relatively so far off and the manner of its ending so obscure that it might be rash to speculate upon any of its ultimate and permanent results. But to the conduct of the war itself and of the peace negotiations, whenever that stage shall be reached, it is essential that we should take stock from time to time of its effects upon the great world forces directly or indirectly drawn within its fiery orbit.

One of the greatest of these is Islam, for it is a living religious force which has still preserved some of its original volcanic energy, and still unites upon the common ground of a stern and simple faith many different peoples, sprung from many different stocks, and speaking many different tongues, spread over a large part of the earth's surface, and numbering altogether, on the most moderate estimate, about 150 millions, or one-tenth of the world's population. In Europe itself the Mahomedans not only retain their foothold in Constantinople and the narrow strip of Thrace which was left to Turkey after the Balkan wars of 1912-13, but are still to be found in scattered groups where the receding tide of Turkish conquest left them under alien rule, in Bosnia and Herzegovina, in Albania, Serbia, Greece, Rumania and Bulgaria, as well as in the Crimea and the Caucasus, and even far up the valley of the Volga in what was until recently the great Russian Empire. In Asia they preponderate all over Asia Minor, Mesopotamia and Arabia, Persia and Afghanistan and Central Asia; they form more than a fifth of the total population of our Indian Empire; they penetrate right into Eastern and South-Eastern China, and they reach across the seas into the Dutch East India islands and the Philippines. In Africa the people of Egypt, Tripoli, Tunis, Algeria and Morocco are almost entirely Mahomedan, as are also the tribes of the Sudan and the Sahara and Northern Nigeria; and within the last half century Islam has made many millions of converts among the more primitive pagan populations of Central Africa.

To the vast majority of Mahomedans all over the world their religion is still vital, though, except in Central Africa, it has lost much of its old missionary fervour and fierceness. The ancient feud which arose shortly after

Mahomed's death over the succession to the Khalifate or Vicegerency of the Prophet still subsists between Sunni and Shia Mahomedans. There are a few other sects of much later growth, such as the Wahabis or 'Puritans' of Southern Arabia, and the Senussis of Northern Africa and the Babis of Persia, but they are numerically unimportant and have little influence outside their own borders. The claims of the Ottoman Sovereign to the spiritual headship of Islam since a descendant of the Abbaside Khalifs of Baghdad, who had found refuge in Cairo, transferred his shadowy rights to the Turkish Conqueror of Egypt, Selim I, about 400 years ago, have remained a more or less open question, upon which Mahomedan Doctors of the Law differed and still differ. Neither the Sultan of Morocco nor the Ameers of Western Africa, nor the Ameer of Afghanistan, nor the Khans of Central Asia, nor the Moghul Emperors of Hindustan, nor of course the Shah of Persia, who is a Shia, ever formally recognised the overlordship, either spiritual or temporal, of Constantinople. Constantinople wisely refrained from seeking to extract any such recognition from them; and even the late Sultan Abdul Hamid, when he started a Pan-Islamic movement in the hope of recovering as a spiritual ruler some of the ground he had lost as a temporal sovereign, confined his activities mainly to that part of the Mahomedan world which had passed into subjection to the Christian powers of Europe.

The strength of Islam lies in the essential simplicity of its creed; Allah, the one God; Mahomed, the one Prophet of God; the Koran, the one revelation of God's word; and, in theory at least, the Mahomedans the one people chosen of God to inherit the earth, for the world itself is divided into two parts only, the Dar-ul-Islam, or House of Islam, i.e. those lands which already belong to Islam, and the Dar-ul-Harb, the House of War, i.e. those lands which are still held by the infidel, but which will ultimately pass unto Islam by right of Holy War. These are the foundations upon which the unity of Islam has rested for more than thirteen centuries, rarely and only superficially shaken by the ebb and flow of conquest and defeat, or by political feuds, or by racial jealousies, or by sectarian differences.

Yet, far from inheriting the earth, the Mahomedans

have seen the Dar-ul-Islam shrinking steadily for several centuries past, and the Dar-ul-Harb encroaching upon them in almost every direction, especially during the last hundred years. The Turks, who once threatened Vienna, had been driven back almost to the walls of Constantinople. The Crimea and the Caucasus, and then Transcaspia and the whole of Central Asia, had passed under Russian rule, whilst with the transfer of the government of India to the British Crown in 1858, the last vestige of the Moghul Empire disappeared out of a sub-continent which contained a larger number of Mahomedans than any other country in the world. In Egypt and the Sudan, in Tripoli and Tunis, in Algeria and the Sahara, in Zanzibar on the Indian Ocean and in Morocco on the Atlantic, and even on the upper waters of the Niger, all independent power had passed out of the hands of the Mahomedans even when the trappings of titular sovereignty were left to the reigning dynasties. At the outbreak of the great war in 1914 Turkey was the one Mahomedan State left that could claim to rank as a great power, and Persia and Afghanistan were the only two others that still enjoyed a certain measure of independence. Turks, Persians and Afghans together numbered only some 20 or at the utmost 25 millions, while at least 80 or 90 million Mahomedans owned allegiance to Great Britain, some 20 millions to Russia, and a like number to France.

When Germany dragged Turkey into the great war as its ally, none could predict with absolute assurance what would be the attitude of Islam as a whole towards a conflict which threatened to rend the Mahomedan as well as the Christian world in twain, and to array Mahomedans against Mahomedans, even on the battlefield. Most Englishmen had been content to repeat light-heartedly the stock phrase that the British Empire was also the greatest Mahomedan Empire in the world, without realising that the phrase might in certain circumstances have a deep and ominous significance, which Germany with her usual thoroughness had been labouring for years past to bring home to us at the appointed hour. That hour had now struck.

In an article entitled Turkey in the Grip of Germany' I have already described in this Review (January 1915)

the policy, as deep laid as it was skilfully and patiently carried out, by which Germany, under William II's inspiration, had in the course of two decades established her military, political and economic hold over Turkey. He had built scarcely less on the spiritual influence of the Sultan as Khalif with the Mahomedan world outside Turkey. He had himself set the seal of his approval on Abdul Hamid's Pan-Islamic propaganda in the flamboyant speech he delivered as far back as 1898 in Damascus. That Abdul Hamid did succeed in making some impression upon the Mahomedan world is beyond doubt. It was admitted at the time that the great rising of fanatical tribesmen on the north-west frontier of India, which was only quelled with difficulty by the Tirah campaign of 1898, was mainly an echo of the Turkish victories of the preceding year in Thessaly— victories which the German Emperor applauded as the first-fruits of the reorganisation of the Turkish armies by his own officers. From that time onwards the Sultan's name came to be introduced more and more generally into the Khutba during the Friday prayers in the Mosques of India. The growing ascendancy of their Hindu rivals, as well as the gradual subjection of other Mahomedan states to European tutelage, induced many Indian Mahomedans to turn wistful eyes towards Constantinople as the one remaining bulwark of Islam; and the Turkish disasters during the first Balkan War aroused amongst them an amount of genuine distress and sympathy far in excess of any feeling they had manifested during the Russo-Turkish war of 1877-78.

In Persia, a general state of anarchy, checked only by Russian intervention in the north, and by our own command of the Persian Gulf in the south, had created an atmosphere eminently favourable to Turkish intrigue; and the 'young' Persians of Teheran seemed as ready to forget that they were Shias as the 'young' Turks of Constantinople to forget that they were Sunnis in their common detestation of the Anglo-Russian rapprochement. In Afghanistan, as amongst the tribes of the Indian frontier, the fierce fanaticism of the mullahs needed very little encouragement from Turkish PanIslamism. In Egypt Abdul Hamid had been in close touch both with the so-called 'liberals' of the Nationalist

Party and with the Khedive, Abbas Hilmi, whose autocratic instincts resented the restraints placed by British tutelage on the revival of ancient methods of oppression; and after Abdul Hamid's fall the Committee of Union and Progress maintained even closer relations with the discontented elements on the Nile and in every Mahomedan country under alien rule. The part which Enver Pasha played in organising Arab resistance to the Italian occupation of Tripoli is well known, and he brought about for the first time an understanding between Constantinople and the widespread organisation of the Senussis of North Africa, to whose school of religious thought the Turks had hitherto been as abhorrent as any infidel power. Pan-Islamic agents were also occasionally discovered to be busy in Tunis and Algeria; and, though Abdul Hamid had been too astute to give prominence in Morocco to his spiritual claims as Khalif, which would only have aroused the jealouy of the Moroccan Sultan, he had sought to revive long-forgotten relations between Constantinople and Fez by means of friendly letters and complimentary missions, following clearly enough the lead given to him by the German Emperor, who during his sensational visit to Tangier at the time of the first Moroccan crisis' in 1905 constituted himself the champion of Mahomedan sovereignty and independence in Morocco in language as unequivocal as that in which he had, a few years earlier, proclaimed himself at Damascus the friend and defender of the Sultan and Khalif.

It was not, therefore, unnatural that Germany and Turkey should have reckoned on some response from the Mahomedan world beyond the pale of Turkish rule when the Sultan was induced to proclaim a Holy War against the infidel Powers of the Entente, and William II allowed the report to spread throughout the whispering galleries of the East that he himself had embraced Islam and assumed the title of Hajji Wilhelm Mahomed. From German writers themselves we know very well what Germany's expectations were. She had steadily supported the Pan-Islamic movement in the belief that it was bound to cause embarrassment to every European power that had to reckon with a large Mahomedan element in its colonies and dependencies, whilst she herself,