THE
building up of Mustapha Khemal by certain Christian countries was one of the
unwisest, most pernicious and most dangerous deeds that Occidental diplomacy,
intrigue and jealousy has ever perpetrated.
It is a legend among Mohammedan peoples that the Turk is the “Sword of
Allah,” “the Defender of Islam,” and “the Scourge of the Unbeliever.” As he is
the lowest of Mobaminedans intellectually, with none, or at best few, of the
graces and accomplishments of civilization, with no cultural history, the other
disciples of the Prophet do not consider him as their intellectual or moral
equal.
In
only one particular has he always kept abreast of the age, and that is in the
art of war. He is perhaps the only example of a great and scientifically warlike
nation that is great in nothing else. He destroys but can not construct. Even
the other Mohammedans, who have been subjected to his rude and blighting sway,
have continually fought to be freed from it, and have only joined him in common
cause against the Christians.
Of
him, the historian Butler says:
“The
Goth might ravage Italy, but the Goth came forth purified from the flame, which
he himself had kindled. The Saxon swept Britain, but the music of his Celtic
heart softened his rough nature. Visigoth and Frank, Heruli and Vandal, blotted
out their ferocity in the very light of the civilization they had striven to
extinguish. Even the wildest Tartar from the Scythian waste was touched and
softened in his wicker encampments, but the Turk, wherever his scimitar
reached—degraded, defiled and defamed, blasting with eternal decay Roman, Latin
civilization, until when all had gone he sat down satisfied with savagery to
doze into hopeless decrepitude.”
But
Mohammedans do not forget that it was the Turk who took the great and splendid
city of Constantinople, the last bulwark of Europe against the devastating and
enslaving hordes of Asia; that it was the Turk who firmly established himself in
Europe on the field of Cossova; that it was the Turk who destroyed the
flower of the Hungarian chivalry—twenty thousand together with their king—on the
stricken field of Mohacz in 1526, and three years later arrived at the gates of
Vienna, which he besieged; that a little over a hundred years later a Turkish
horde again stormed the Austrian capital, which only the timely arrival of a
Polish army saved.
At
the close of the Great War the Turk was beaten to his feet and his prestige
ruined. “The Sword of Islam” had been broken. The victory over the Greeks,
though with the aid of European officers and material, and the spectacular
destruction of Smyrna with the massacre of its inhabitants, revived the
legend of the conquering and avenging Turk. “The Sword of Islam” had been welded
again, to conquer and destroy. The noise of that event resounded
and is still echoing throughout the Moslem World, in Egypt, in India, in
Northern Africa and in Syria.
And
more than that, the rise of Mustapha Khemal, creature of divided
Christendom, of the mutually jealous and internecine Occident, has given
new courage to all the yellow and black and brown peoples, whom Kipling
describes as “the White Man’s Burden,” who while they may cut one another’s
throats over the question of Mohammed or Confucius or Buddha, are united in
their hatred of the white man.
The
ferment in the East is the bubbling up of a deeper feeling, than the careless or
unobservant thinker wots of: It is the revelation of a profound and fundamental
antipathy. The East is tired of being civilized by superior peoples; of being
educated and converted; of being shoved off the sidewalks; of being called
“Eurasians” and having their daughters ostracized if they marry whites; of
having their children excluded from white schools; of being discriminated
against in immigration laws.
One
can not say that the West is entirely wrong in attempting to maintain its
prestige and its Occidental civilization, but he can safely affirm that
the hatred that has been steadily growing in the Orient is deep and implacable,
and that the result will be murders, uprisings, little wars, big wars.
The maker of this statement may be set down as an alarmist. So is the man who
sticks up the sign at the railway crossing, “Stop! Look! Listen!” The
dissension in the Western World that made it possible for the Turks to make a
clean sweep of Christian civilization in the Ottoman Empire, to burn Smyrna and
massacre its inhabitants in sight of a powerful fleet of European and American
war vessels, has added unknown weight to the “White Man’s
Burden.”
That
a mutual hatred of the West is bringing together peoples hitherto antagonistic
and of different creeds is confirmed by Lothrop Stoddard in his book, “The
New World of Islam”, quoting the writer, H. Vambery, the authority on Moslem
affairs:
“The
change in Moslem sentiment can be gauged by the numerous appeals made by the
Indian Mohammedans at this time to Hindus, as may be seen from the following
sample, entitled significantly, ‘The Message of the
East’:
“
‘Spirit of the East,’ reads this noteworthy document, ‘arise and repel the
swelling flood of Western aggression! Children of Hindustan aid, aid us with
your wisdom, culture and wealth; lend us your power, the birthright and heritage
of the Hindu! Let the Spirit Powers hidden in the Hinalayan mountain peaks
arise! Let prayers to the God of Battles float upward; prayers that right may
triumph over might; and call to your myriad gods to annihilate the armies of the
foe!’ ”
Let
the reader compare this appeal of Mohammedan to Hindu with the spirit of the
article from the “Progres de Saloniqne” of July 22, 1910, quoted in an
early chapter of this book, in which Turkish Mohammedans and Japanese Buddhists,
etc., are conceived as having common cause against Western civilization. That
Oriental peoples believe that their opportunity will come from the dissensions
and wars of Western nations, which they are watching with much interest and
satisfaction, was expressed as early as 1907 by Yahya Siddyk, an Egyptian judge
and writer of Mohammedan faith, who seems to have foreseen the Great
War:
“Behold
these Powers ruining themselves in terrifying armaments; measuring each other’s
strength with defiant glances; menacing each other; contracting alliances which
continually break and presage those terrible shocks which overturn the world and
cover it with ruins, fire and blood!”
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