The greatest strategic shift of fortune in all human history had taken place. Instead of fronting hopelessly on the fiercest of Asiatics, against whom victory by direct attack seemed impossible, the Europeans could now flank them at will. Furthermore, the balance of resources shifted in Europe's favour. Whole new worlds were unmasked whence Europe could draw limitless wealth to quicken its home life and initiate a progress that would soon place it immeasurably above its once-dreaded Asiatic assailants. What were the resources of the stagnant Moslem East compared with those of the Americas and the Indies? So Western civilization, quickened, energized, progressed with giant strides, shook off its mediæval fetters, grasped the talisman of science, and strode into the light of modern times.
Yet all this left Islam unmoved. Wrapping itself in the tatters of Saracenic civilization, the Moslem East continued to fall behind. Even its military power presently vanished, for the Turk sank into lethargy and ceased to cultivate the art of war. For a time the West, busied with internal conflicts, hesitated to attack the East, so great was the prestige of the Ottoman name. But the crushing defeat of the Turks in their rash attack upon Vienna in 1683 showed the West that the Ottoman Empire was far gone in decrepitude. Thenceforth, the empire was harried mercilessly by Western assaults and was saved from collapse only by the mutual jealousies of Western Powers, quarrelling over the Turkish spoils.
However, not until the nineteenth century did the Moslem world, as a whole, feel the weight of Western attack. Throughout the eighteenth century the West assailed the ends of the Moslem battle-line in eastern Europe and the Indies, but the bulk of Islam, from Morocco to Central Asia, remained almost immune. The Moslem world failed to profit by this respite. Plunged in lethargy, contemptuous of the European "Misbelievers," and accepting defeats as the inscrutable will of Allah, Islam continued to live its old life, neither knowing nor caring to know anything about Western ideas or Western progress.
Such was the decrepit Moslem world which faced nineteenth-century Europe, energized by the Industrial Revolution, armed as never before by modern science and invention which had unlocked nature's secrets and placed hitherto-undreamed-of weapons in its aggressive hands. The result was a foregone conclusion. One by one, the decrepit Moslem states fell before the Western attack, and the whole Islamic world was rapidly partitioned among the European Powers. England took India and Egypt, Russia crossed the Caucasus and mastered Central Asia, France conquered North Africa, while other European nations grasped minor portions of the Moslem heritage. The Great War witnessed the final stage in this process of subjugation. By the terms of the treaties which marked its close, Turkey was extinguished and not a single Mohammedan state retained genuine independence. The subjection of the Moslem world was complete—on paper.
On paper! For, in its very hour of apparent triumph, Western domination was challenged as never before. During those hundred years of Western conquest a mighty internal change had been coming over the Moslem world. The swelling tide of Western aggression had at last moved the "immovable" East. At last Islam became conscious of its decrepitude, and with that consciousness a vast ferment, obscure yet profound, began to leaven the 250,000,000 followers of the Prophet from Morocco to China and from Turkestan to the Congo. The first spark was fittingly struck in the Arabian desert, the cradle of Islam. Here at the opening of the nineteenth century, arose the Wahabi movement for the reform of Islam, which presently kindled the far-flung "Mohammedan Revival," which in its turn begat the movement known as "Pan-Islamism." Furthermore, athwart these essentially internal movements there came pouring a flood of external stimuli from the West—ideas such as parliamentary government, nationalism, scientific education, industrialism, and even ultra-modern concepts like feminism, socialism, Bolshevism. Stirred by the interaction of all these novel forces and spurred by the ceaseless pressure of European aggression, the Moslem world roused more and more to life and action. The Great War was a shock of terrific potency, and to-day Islam is seething with mighty forces fashioning a new Moslem world. What are those forces moulding the Islam of the future? To their analysis and appraisal the body of this book is devoted.
FOOTNOTES:
[1] I. e. "Successor"; anglicized into the word "Caliph."
[2] To be carefully distinguished from divinity. Mohammed not only did not make any pretensions to divinity, but specifically disclaimed any such attributes. He regarded himself as the last of a series of divinely inspired prophets, beginning with Adam and extending through Moses and Jesus to himself, the mouthpiece of God's last and most perfect revelation.
[3] The influence of environment and heredity on human evolution in general and on the history of the East in particular, though of great importance, cannot be treated in a summary such as this. The influence of climatic and other environmental factors has been ably treated by Prof. Ellsworth Huntington in his various works, such as The Pulse of Asia (Boston, 1907); Civilization and Climate (Yale Univ. Press, 1915), and World-Power and Evolution (Yale Univ. Press, 1919). See also Chap. III. in Arminius Vambéry—Der Islam im neunzehnten Jahrhundert. Eine culturgeschichtliche Studie (Leipzig, 1875). For a summary of racial influences in Eastern history, see Madison Grant—The Passing of the Great Race (N.Y., 1916).
[4] The Turkish overrunning of Asia Minor took place after the destruction of the Byzantine army in the great battle of Manzikert, a.d. 1071. The Turks captured Jerusalem in 1076.