Why it should be that men who have a common origin should have followed such different roads, and at such an uneven pace, is in many ways an insoluble problem. But it should not be, by this time, an unfamiliar one. It would rather be strange, and the world would be much poorer than it is, if humanity had marched from the beginning in a single phalanx—if the world had been one great India, or one great Egypt, or one great Greece. The Turk, then, as I have no need of insisting, is a mediæval man. And one reason why he is so may be that he has a much shorter heritage of civilisation than the countries of the West. He is a new man as well as a mediæval one. In Europe and in Asia alike he is a parvenu who came on to the scene long after every one else. It is only verbally that the American is a newer man; for in the thirteenth century, when the warlike Turkish nomads first began to make themselves known, the different states which have contributed to make America were already formed, while India, China, and Japan had long before reached a high degree of civilisation.
It seems to me that this fact might well account for much of the backwardness of the Turk. He has a much thinner deposit of heredity in his brain cells. It is conceivable, too, that another matter of heredity may enter into it. Whether civil life originated in Asia or not, it is certain that of existing civilisations the Oriental are older than the Occidental. Perhaps, therefore, the Asiatic formed the habit of pride and self-sufficiency. Then as successive tides of emigration rolled away, Asia was gradually drained of everything that was not the fine flower of conservatism. He who believed whatever is is best stayed at home. The others went in search of new worlds, and found them not only in the field of empire but in those of science and art. This continual skimming of the adventurous element can only have confirmed Asia in the habit of mind so perfectly expressed by the Book of Ecclesiastes. And the Turk, who was one of the last adventurers to emerge from Asia, impelled by what obscure causes we hardly know, must have a profound racial bent toward the belief that everything is vanity and vexation of spirit. He asks himself what is the use, and lets life slip by.
Many people have held that there is something in Islam which automatically arrests the development of those who profess it. I cannot think, myself, that the thesis has been sufficiently proved. While no one can deny that religion, and particularly that Islam, is a great cohesive force, it seems to me that people have more to do with making religions than religions with making people. The principles at the root of all aspiring life—call it moral, ethical, or religious, as you will—exist in every religion. And organised religion has everywhere been responsible for much of the fanaticism and disorder of the world. For the rest, I find much in Mohammedanism to admire. There is a nobility in its stern monotheism, disdaining every semblance of trinitarian subtleties. Its daily services impress me as being a more direct and dignified form of worship than our self-conscious Sunday mornings with their rustling pews and operatic choirs. Then the democracy of Islam and much of what it inculcates with regard to family and civil life are worthy of all respect, to say nothing of the hygienic principles which it succeeded in impressing at a very early stage upon a primitive people. At the same time there can be no doubt that Mohammedanism suffers from the fact that it was designed, all too definitely, for a primitive people. Men at a higher stage of evolution than were the Arabs of the seventh century require no religious sanctions to keep themselves clean. For modern men the social system of Islam, with its degrading estimate of woman, is distinctly antisocial. And many of them must find the Prophet’s persuasions to the future life a little vulgar. The question is whether they will be able to modernise Islam. It will be harder than modernising Christianity, for the reason that Islam is a far minuter system. Is there not something moving in the spectacle of a people committed to an order which can never prevail? Even for this one little ironic circumstance it can never prevail in our hurrying modern world, because it takes too much time to be a good Mohammedan. But the whole order is based on a conception which the modern world refuses to admit. The word Islam means resignation—submission to the will of God. And there can be no doubt that the mind of Islam is saturated with that spirit. Why does one man succeed and another fail? It is the will of God. Why do some recover from illness and others die? It is the will of God. Why do empires rise or fall? It is the will of God. A man who literally believes such a doctrine has no chance against the man, however less a philosopher, who believes that his destiny lies in his own hand.
It would be an interesting experiment to see what two generations, say, of universal education might do for the Turks. By education I mean no more than the three R’s, enough history and geography to know that Turkey is neither the largest nor the most ancient empire in the world, and some fundamental scientific notions. It is incredible how large a proportion of Turks are illiterate, and what fantastic views of the world and their place in it the common people hold. To nothing more than this ignorance must be laid a great part of Turkey’s troubles. But another part is due to the character of the empire which it befell the Turk to conquer. If he had happened, like ourselves, into a remote and practically empty land he might have developed his own civilisation. Or if he had occupied a country inhabited by a single race he would have stood a better chance. Or if, again, he had appeared on the scene a few centuries earlier, before Europe had had time to get so far ahead of him, and before the spread of learning and an increasing ease of communications made it increasingly difficult for one race to absorb another, he might have succeeded in assimilating the different peoples who came under his sway. Why the conquerors did not exterminate or forcibly convert the conquered Christians has always been a question with me. It may have been a real humanity on the part of the early sultans, who without doubt were remarkable men and who, perhaps, wished their own wild followers to acquire the culture of the Greeks. Or it may have been a politic deference to new European neighbours. In any case, I am convinced that it was, from the Turkish point of view, a mistake. For the Turk has never been able to complete his conquest. On the contrary, by recognising the religious independence of his subjects he gave them weapons to win their political independence. And, beset by enemies within and without, he has never had time to learn the lessons of peace.
Here, I think, we come very near the root of his difficulties. Not only has he paid, not only does he continue and will he long continue to pay, the price of the invader, incessantly preoccupied as he is with questions of internal order. He created a form of government which could not last. At its most successful period it depended on the spoils of war—not only in treasure but in tribute-boys, carefully chosen for the most famous corps of the army and for the highest executive posts in the empire. This form of government was highly efficient so long as the frontiers of the empire continued to advance. But it was not self-contained, and it kept the native-born Turk from developing normal habits and traditions of government. The traditions it chiefly fostered in him were those of plunder and idleness. Much of the proverbial readiness of Turks in office to receive “presents” is less a matter of dishonesty than the persistence of a time-honoured system of making a living in irregular ways. The system is one that naturally dies out with the disappearance of irregular sources of income. There must inevitably follow, however, a painful period of forming new habits, of creating new traditions. How radical this process had to be with the Turks can scarcely be realised by a country like England, for instance, which has been able to continue for a thousand years developing the same germ of government. The Turk himself hardly realises yet how little he can build on the foundations of his former greatness. And he has been the slower to come to any such realisation because circumstances have kept up an illusion of that greatness long after the reality was gone. If England, if France, if Germany, were to be left to-morrow without a bayonet or a battle-ship, they would still be great powers by the greatness of their economic, their intellectual, their artistic life. Could the same be said of the Ottoman Empire? For a century or more that empire has continued to play the rôle of a great power simply through comparison with smaller or the mutual jealousies of greater ones. It is a long time since the Turk has really stood on his own feet. He has too often been protected against the consequences of his own acts. And, the last comer into the land he rules, he has been too ready to ignore the existence of other rights. But now, stripped of his most distant and most ungovernable provinces, enlightened by humiliation as to the real quality of his greatness, he may, let us hope, put aside illusion and pretence and give himself to the humbler problems of common life. If he sincerely does he may find, in the end, that he has unwittingly reached a greatness beyond that won for him by the Janissaries of old.