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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