Therefore, according to the Moslem doctrine—
“There is no such theory of ‘divided allegiance’ here, as the Government of India consider to be ’subversive of the constitutional basis on which all Governments are established.’ ‘There is no government but God’s,’ says the Koran, ‘and Him alone is a Mussulman to serve,’ and since He is the Sole Sovereign of all mankind, there can be no divided allegiance. All Governments can command the obedience of the Muslims in the same way as they can command the obedience of other people, but they can do so only so far as they command it, as Mr. H. G. Wells would say, in the name of God and for God, and certainly no Christian Sovereign could expect to exercise unquestioned authority over a Muslim against the clear commandments of his Faith when no Muslim Sovereign could dream of doing it. Mussulmans are required to obey God and His Prophet and ‘the men in authority from amongst themselves,’ which include the Khalifa; but they are also required, in case of every dispute, to refer back to the Holy Koran and to the Traditions of the Prophet, which are to act as arbitrator. Thus the Khalifa himself will be disobeyed if he orders that which the Faith forbids, and if he persists in such unauthorised conduct, he may not only be disobeyed, but also be deposed.
“But whatever he could or could not do, the Khalifa was certainly not a pious old gentleman whose only function in life was to mumble his prayers and repeat his beads.
“The best way to understand what he is and what he is not is to go back to the Prophet whose Khalifa or Successor he is. The Koran regards man as the vicegerent of God on earth, and Adam was the first Khalifa of God, and free-willed instrument of divine will. This succession continued from prophet to prophet, and they were the guides of the people in all the affairs of life. The fuller and final revelation came with Mohammed, and since then the Commanders of the Faithful have been his Khalifas or Successors. But as religion is not a part of life but the whole of it, and since it is not an affair of the next world but of this, which it teaches us to make better, cleaner, and happier, so every Muslim religious authority has laid it down unequivocally and emphatically that the allegiance which Muslims owe to the Khalifa is both temporal and spiritual. The only limits recognised to his authority are the Commandments of God, which he is not allowed to disobey or defy....
“The Mussulmans, therefore, do not believe that Christ, for instance, could have said that His was the kingdom not of this earth but of Heaven alone; or that men were to render to Cæsar what was due to Cæsar, and to God what was due to God. Cæsar could not share the world with God or demand from mankind any allegiance, even if only temporal, if he did not demand it for God and on behalf of God. But the ordinary Christian conception has been that the kingdom of Christ was not of this world, and no Pope or priest could, consistently with this conception, demand temporal power. It is doubtful if the Papacy is based on any saying of Christ Himself. At any rate, the Pope has always claimed to be the successor of St. Peter and the inheritor of his prerogatives. As such he has been looked upon as the doorkeeper of the kingdom of heaven, his office being strictly and avowedly limited to the spiritual domain. A study of history makes it only too apparent that the doctrine of the Papacy grew in Christianity by the application to the Popes of the epithets which are applied to St. Peter in the Gospels. Just as St. Peter never had any temporal authority, so the Papacy also remained, in the first stages of its growth, devoid of temporal power for long centuries. It was only by a very slow development that the Popes aspired to temporal power. Thus, without meaning any offence, it may be said that the acquisition of temporal power by the Popes was a mere accident, and they have certainly been divested of it without doing the least violence to the religious feelings of one half of the Christian world.
“On the contrary, the temporal power of the Khilafat in Islam is of the very essence of it, and is traceable not only to the earliest Khalifas, but to the Prophet himself. This is obviously not the religious belief of Christian Europe or America; but equally obviously this is the religious Muslim belief, and after all it is with the Muslim belief that we are concerned....”
So, considering the ever-increasing armaments of European and American nations, “even after the creation of a nebulous League of Nations,” he asked himself:
“How then can Islam dispense with temporal power? Others maintain armies and navies and air forces for the defence of their territories or their commerce, because they love these more than they hate armaments. To Islam, its culture and ethics are dearer than territory, and it regards faith as greater than finance. It needs no army or navy to advance its boundaries or extend its influence; but it certainly needs them to prevent the aggression of others.”
Then M. Mohammed Ali dealt separately with the chief clauses of the Turkish treaty in the course of his interview with Mr. Lloyd George, and made the following remarks: