Pan-Islam

by G. Wyman Bury

If Turkey is allowed to remain in Europe at all it will be on sufferance. Even in Asia Minor signs are not wanting that Turkish rule will be pruned, clipped and trained considerably, as humanity will stand its rampant luxuriance of blood and barbarity no longer. The Young Turks were given every chance to consolidate their national aspirations and have achieved national suicide. One may feel sorry for the patient, sturdy peasantry and the non-political cultured classes who have been coerced or cajoled into fighting desperately in a cause that meant calamity for them whether they won or lost; but a nation gets the rulers it deserves and must answer for their acts.

Asia Minor will probably be more accessible as a mission-field in due course. The Moslem Turk is not amenable to conversion; in fact, during a quarter of a century's wandering in the East I have never met a Turkish convert. The American Protestant Mission will probably be well to the fore in this area in view of its excellent work on behalf of the Armenians and other distressed Christians during the War. Just as it has concentrated its principal energies on the Copts in Egypt, so it may with advantage devote itself to the education and "uplift" of the Armenians, and if its activities are as successful as with the Copts, even the Armenians cannot but approve, for the more enlightened individuals of that harassed and harassing little nation admit that the Armenian character could be considerably improved, and that, though their hideous persecution is indefensibly damnable, their covetous instincts and parasitic activities are an incentive to maltreatment.

One of the most difficult minor problems of reconstruction in Eastern Europe and Asia Minor will be how to safeguard the interests and modify the provocative activities of such subject-races as the Jews and the Armenians where established among ill-controlled nations and numerically inferior, though intellectually superior, to them. With their natural gift for intrigue and finance, they repay public persecution and oppression by undermining the administration and battening on the resources of their unwilling foster-country until active dislike becomes actual violence and outbursts of brutish rage yield ghastly results. Deportation is not only tyrannically harsh but impracticable, for unless they were dumped to die in the waste places of the earth, which is unthinkable, some other nation must receive them, and even the most philanthropic Government would hesitate to upset its economic conditions by admitting unproductive hordes of sweated labour and skilled exploiters. There are only two logical alternatives to such an impasse. One is to treat such subject-races so well that they may be trusted not to use their peculiar abilities against the interests of their adoptive country, which would then be their interests too, and the other is to exterminate them, which is inhuman. There is no middle course.

It is a salutary but humiliating fact that we incur the worst human ills by our lack of human charity. We starved and over-crowded our poor till they bred consumption, and we enslaved negroes till they degenerated our Anglo-Saxon sturdiness of character, then plunged a great nation into civil war, and have finally become one of its most serious social problems. So the Jews were debarred from liberal pursuits and privileges until they concentrated on finance and commerce, being also persecuted until they perfected their defensive organisation. The consequence is that they are individually formidable in those activities and collectively invincible. Similarly the Turks harried the Armenians to their own undoing with even less excuse, for those ill-used people were certainly not interlopers, and so far from ameliorating their condition in the course of time, as we have done with the Jews, the Turks went from bad to worse till they culminated in atrocities which no provocation can palliate or humanity condone.

But to return to Asia Minor; there the Armenians were first on the ground, and yet the Moslems of Armenia outnumber them by three to one. Any sound form of government would have to give equal rights, but it would have to be strong and farseeing to prevent the greedy exploitation and savage reprisals which such conditions would otherwise evolve.

On entering Asia we shall find a somewhat similar problem confronting the administration in Syria and Palestine. Here we have several mixed races and at least three distinct creeds—Christianity, Islam, and Judaism.

The Zionist movement looks promising, everyone concerned seems to be in accord, and a Jew millennium looms large in the offing, but——. In Palestine there are normally about 700,000 Moslems and Christians (the latter a very small minority) to 150,000 Jews. The lure of the Promised Land will presumably increase the Jewish population enormously, but they will still be very much in the minority unless the country is over-populated. The Zionist organisation will naturally try to select for emigration agriculturists, mechanics, and craftsmen generally to develop the resources of the country, but that is easier said than done. If Palestine, in addition to the sentimental aspect, is to be a refuge and asylum for the downtrodden and persecuted Jews of Eastern Europe, there would be very few farmers among that lot—except tax-farmers. Even in England, where he labours under no landowning disability, the Jew thinks that farming for a living is a mug's game and confines his agricultural activities to week-ends in the autumn with a "hammerless ejector" and a knickerbocker suit. As for mechanics and skilled labour generally, such Jews as take to it usually excel in such work and do very well where they are. The bulk of the immigrant population—unless Palestine is going to be artificially colonised without regard for the necessitous claims of the very people who should be drawn off there—will be indigent artisans, small shopkeepers, shop assistants, weedy unemployables, and a sprinkling of shrewd operators on the look-out for prey. If the scheme is going to be run entirely on philanthropic lines (and there are ample resources and charity at the back of it to do so) the Zionists will be all right, and will, perhaps, improve immensely in the next generation under the influence of an open-air life—if they adopt it; but the resident majority of Moslems and Christians will not take too kindly to their new compatriots, while the Palestine Jews are already carping at the idea of so many trade rivals and accusing them of not being orthodox. None of this ill-feeling need matter in the long run with a firm but benevolent government, but the authorities will have to evolve some legislation to check profiteering and over-exploitation, or there will be trouble. It is not only the new-comers who will want curbing, but the present population. During the War the flagrant profiteering of Jew and Christian operators in Palestine and Syria did much to accentuate the appalling distress and was the more disgraceful compared with the magnificent efforts of the American and Anglican Churches to relieve the situation. The Jews nearly incurred a pogrom by their operations, which were only checked by a wealthy Syrian in Egypt starting a co-operative venture of low-priced foodstuffs and necessities with the support of the British authorities. As for the local Syrians, some of them were even worse. French and British officers speak of wealthy Syrians (presumably Christian, certainly not Moslem) giving many and sumptuous balls at Beyrout, at which they lapped Austrian champagne while their wives, blazing in diamonds, whirled with Hunnish officers in the high-pressure, double-action German waltz. And this with thousands of their compatriots starving in the streets and little naked children banding together to drive pariah dogs with stones from the street offal they were worrying, if perchance it might yield a meal. Meanwhile decent Anglo-Saxon Christendom was battling in that very town under adverse conditions to succour human destitution which had been largely caused by the callous operations of these soulless parasites. The Christians of Syria have no monopoly of such scandals. Yet there are otherwise intelligent people who speak of modern Christianity as an automatic promoter of ethics, and have the effrontery to try to thrust it on the East as a moral panacea. It is human ideals which make or mar a soul when once the seed of any sound religion has been sown, and they depend upon environment and climate more than our spiritual pastors admit; otherwise, why this missionary activity among oriental Christians? If you try to grow garden flowers in the rich, rank irrigation soil of the Nile valley they flourish luxuriantly, but soon develop a marked tendency to revert to their wild type, and it is permissible to suppose that human character is even more sensitive to its mental and physical surroundings. Any observant teacher of oriental youth will tell you that the promise of their precocious ability is seldom fulfilled by their maturity. Even the "country-born" children of British parents are considered precocious at their preparatory school in England, and, if not sent home to be educated, are apt to fall short of their parents' intellectual and moral standard in later years. The Mamelukes knew what they were about when they kidnapped hardy Albanian youths to carry on their rule in Egypt and passed over their own progeny. Kingsley has shown us in "Hypatia" what the Nile valley did for the Christian Church.

It is not a question of Jew, Christian, or Moslem that the administrative authorities in Syria and Palestine will have to consider beyond ensuring that each shall follow his religion unmolested. They will have to defend the many from the machinations of the few and the few from the violent reprisals of the many. It is statecraft that is wanted, not politics or religious dogma.

In Mesopotamia there has not been much missionary effort hitherto, and there is not a good case for exploiting it as a missionary field beyond certain limits. The riparian townsfolk are respectable people of some education and grasp of their own affairs, and the country-folk are a harum-scarum set of scallywags who used to attack Turks or British indifferently, whichever happened to be in difficulties for the moment. They are best left to the secular arm for some time to come. Medical missions, staffed by both sexes, could do good work at urban centres, and a few river steamers, or even launches, would extend their efforts considerably.