But what is the truth about the Osmanlis? Are they the vile and abominable people which Carlyle’s epithet would indicate? And are the Christian nations of Europe justified in adopting towards them what the English Conservatives aptly termed “Gladstone’s bag and baggage policy”?
Let us see.
First of all it may be premised that most of the above indictments against the Turks have been made by people who have little or no personal knowledge of them, or by people who have been governed by passion or prejudice or have been actuated by selfish or political motives. And, secondly, it may be asserted as a fact that cannot be gainsaid that those who have lived among the Turks any length of time and have had an opportunity of becoming intimately acquainted with them find them to be thoroughly good, gentle, brave, and loyal to the core. And the longer one lives among them and the better one knows them the greater is one’s admiration for them. This is especially true of the real Turk—the Osmanli—particularly those of the peasant and bourgeois class in Anatolia. These are as honest and upright as they are temperate, pious, and religious.
The piety and the devotion of the Moslems, their gravity and solemnity and reverential attitude during prayer, whether in the mosque or elsewhere, are of such character as to make a deep impression on even the least religious. “I have never entered a mosque,” writes Renan, “without a deep emotion, and—shall I say it?—without a certain regret at not being a Mussulman.”[115]
This devout character of the Mohammedans which so profoundly impressed Renan, appealed with equal force to the poet who wrote:
Most honor to the men of prayer,
Whose mosque is in them everywhere!
Who amid revel’s wildest din,
In war’s severest discipline,
On rolling deck, in thronged bazaar,