Say: O my people! Act as ye best can: I verily will act my part, and hereafter shall ye know!
CHAPTER THE TENTH
THE MARCH OF ISLAM
t the very moment when fate had deprived Islam of its genial founder, the organisation of this new religion was definitively and meticulously arranged even in its most humble practices.
The soldiers of Allah had already conquered the whole of Arabia and the attack on the colossal empire of the Cæsars in Syria was begun. A short period of unrest, inevitable after the disappearance of the inspired guide, caused a few rebellions; but Islam was so strongly constituted, overflowing with such enthusiasm that it was about to astonish the world by its impressive forward march, unique perhaps in the annals of history.
For the first time, rushing forth from their country forsaken by Nature, the proud Arabs, stirred by the miracle of Faith, were about to become masters in less than a century of the best part of the old civilised world from India to Andalusia, and that despite their extreme numerical inferiority.
This marvellous épopée engrossed the mind of the most wonderful man of our time, Napoleon, who always manifested the most sympathetic interest in favour of Islam. During the Egyptian compaign, he declared that he was: "Muslimun Muwahhidun," i.e. Unitarian Mussulman. (Bonaparte el l'Islam, by Ch. Cherfils.) Towards the end of his life, he returned to the subject: 'He thought that apart from fortuitous circumstances, giving rise to miracles, there must have been something more than we know in the establishing of Islam; that the Christian world had been so remarkably cut into by the results of some first cause still hidden; that these peoples, perhaps, suddenly emerging from the desert depths, had endured long periods of civil war in their midst, during which great characters and talents had been formed, as well as irresistible impulses, or some other cause of the same kind.' (Las Casas, Mémorial de Sainte-Hélène, iii, p. 183.)
Guessing, therefore, that beneath the slumber of Islam in decadence, there were incomparable reserves of energy, he tried, not once but often, to win it over by an alliance. If he succeeded, he deemed himself capable of awakening it and, by its aid, changing the face of the world.