Part 10

“That sympathy is generally looked upon in Europe as a manifestation of the so-called Moslem fanaticism or Pan-Islamism. Yet it is nothing of the kind. The so-called Moslem fanaticism is a mere legend whose insanity has been proved by history. Pan-Islamism, too, only exists in the mind of those who imagined its existence. The independent Moslem populations, such as the Persians and the Afghans, are most jealous of their independence, and do not think in the least of becoming the Sultan’s subjects. As to those who live under the dominion of a European Power, they have no wish to rebel against it, and only aim at improving their material and moral condition, and of preserving their personality as a race.

“The true reasons of the Moslems’ sympathy for the Ottoman Empire are historical, religious, and sentimental reasons.”

The delegation of the Moslems of India for the defence of the Caliphate sent to the Peace Conference was headed by Mohammed Ali, who, in 1914, on behalf of the Government of India, had written to Talaat, Minister of the Interior, to ask him not to side with the Central Empires, and to show him how difficult the situation of the Indian Mussulmans would be if Turkey entered into the war against England. On landing in Venice, he told the correspondent of the _Giornale d’Italia_ that the object of his journey was to convince the Allies that the dismemberment of the Ottoman Empire would be a danger to the peace of the world.

“The country we represent numbers 70 million Mohammedans and 230 million men belonging to other religions but agreeing with us on this point. So we hope that if the Allies really want to establish the peace of the world, they will take our reasons into account. Italy has hitherto supported us, and we hope the other nations will follow her example.”

This delegation was first received by Mr. Fisher, representing Mr. Montagu, Indian Secretary, to whom they explained the serious consequences which the carrying out of the conditions of peace contemplated for Turkey might have in their country.

Mr. Lloyd George, in his turn, received the delegation on March 19, before it was heard by the Supreme Council. Mohammed Ali, after pointing to the bonds that link together the Mohammedans of India and the Caliphate, because Islam is not only a set of doctrines and dogmas but forms both a moral code and a social polity, recalled that, according to the Muslim doctrine, the Commander of the Faithful must always own a territory, an army, and resources to prevent the aggression of adversaries who have not ceased to arm themselves; he maintained, therefore, that the seat of the Sultan’s temporal power must be maintained in Constantinople; that Turkey must not be dismembered; and that Arabia must be left under Turkish sovereignty.

“Islam has always had two centres, the first a personal one and the other a local one. The personal centre is the Caliph, or the Khalifa, as we call him—the successor of the Prophet. Because the Prophet was the personal centre of Islam, his successors, or Khalifas, continue his tradition to this day. The local centre is the region known as the Jazirat-ul-Arab, or the ‘Island of Arabia,’ the ‘Land of the Prophets.’ To Islam, Arabia has been not a peninsula but an island, the fourth boundary being the waters of the Euphrates and the Tigris....

“Islam required temporal power for the defence of the Faith, and for that purpose, if the ideal combination of piety and power could not be achieved, the Muslims said, ‘Let us get hold of the most powerful person, even if he is not the most pious, so long as he places his power at the disposal of our piety.’ That is why we agreed to accept Muslim kings, the Omayyids and the Abbasids, as Khalifas, now the Sultans of Turkey. They have a peculiar succession of their own. We have accepted it for the time being because we must have the strongest Mussulman Power at our disposal to assist us in the defence of the Faith. That is why we have accepted it. If the Turks agreed with other Muslims, and all agreed that the Khalifa may be chosen out of any Muslim community, no matter who he was, the humblest of us might be chosen, as they used to be chosen in the days of the first four Khalifas, the Khulafa-i-Rashideen, or truly guided Khalifas.

“But of course we have to make allowances for human nature. The Turkish Sultan in 1517 did not like to part with his power any more than the Mamluke rulers of Egypt liked to part with their power when they gave asylum to a scion of the Abbasids after the sack of Baghdad in 1258.”

It follows that “the standard of temporal power necessary for the preservation of the Caliphate must obviously, therefore, be a relative one,” and—

“Not going into the matter more fully, we would say that after the various wars in which Turkey has been engaged recently, and after the Balkan war particularly, the Empire of the Khalifa was reduced to such narrow limits that Muslims considered the irreducible minimum of temporal power adequate for the defence of the Faith to be the restoration of the territorial _status quo ante bellum_....

“When asking for the restoration of the territorial _status quo ante bellum_, Muslims do not rule out changes which would guarantee to the Christians, Jews, and Mussulmans, within the scheme of the Ottoman sovereignty, security of life and property and opportunities of autonomous development, so long as it is consistent with the dignity and independence of the sovereign State. It will not be a difficult matter. We have here an Empire in which the various communities live together. Some already are sufficiently independent and others hope—and here I refer to India—to get a larger degree of autonomy than they possess at the present moment; and consistently with our desire to have autonomous development ourselves, we could not think of denying it to Arabs or Jews or Christians within the Turkish Empire.”

He went on as follows:

“The third claim that the Mussulmans have charged us with putting before you is based on a series of injunctions which require the Khalifa to be the warden of the three sacred Harams of Mecca, Medina, and Jerusalem; and overwhelming Muslim sentiment requires that he should be the warden of the holy shrines of Nejef, Kerbela, Kazimain, Samarra, and Baghdad, all of which are situated within the confines of the ‘Island of Arabia.’

“Although Muslims rely on their religious obligations for the satisfaction of the claims which I have specified above, they naturally find additional support in your own pledge, Sir, with regard to Constantinople, Thrace, and Asia Minor, the populations of which are overwhelmingly Muslim. They trust that a pledge so solemnly given and recently renewed will be redeemed in its entirety. Although the same degree of sanctity cannot be claimed for Constantinople as for the three sacred Harams—Mecca, Medina, and Jerusalem—Constantinople is nevertheless held very sacred by all the Muslims of the world, and the uninterrupted historic tradition of nearly five centuries has created such an overwhelming sentiment with regard to Islambol, or the ‘City of Islam’—a title which no city has up to this time enjoyed—that an effort to drive the Turks out ‘bag and baggage’ from the seat of the Khilafat is bound to be regarded by the Muslims of the world as a challenge of the modern Crusaders to Islam and of European rule to the entire East, which cannot be taken up by the Muslim world or the East without great peril to our own Empire, and, in fact, to the Allied dominions in Asia and Africa. In this connection, Sir, I might mention one point, that the Muslims cannot tolerate any affront to Islam in keeping the Khalifa as a sort of hostage in Constantinople. He is not the Pope at the Vatican, much less can he be the Pope at Avignon, and I am bound to say that the recent action of the Allied Powers is likely to give rise in the Muslim world to feelings which it will be very difficult to restrain, and which would be very dangerous to the peace of the world.”

With regard to the question of the Caliphate and temporal power, on which the Indian delegation had been instructed to insist particularly, M. Mohammed Ali, in order to make the Moslem point of view quite clear, wrote as follows:[20]

“The moment this claim is put forward we are told that the West has outgrown this stage of human development, and that people who relieved the Head of a Christian Church of all temporal power are not prepared to maintain the temporal power of the Head of the Muslim Church. This idea is urged by the supporters of the Laic Law of France with all the fanaticism of the days of the Spanish Inquisition, and in England, too. Some of the most unprejudiced people wonder at the folly and temerity of those who come to press such an anachronistic claim. Others suggest that the Khalifa should be ‘vaticanised’ even if he is to retain Constantinople, while the Government of India, who should certainly have known better, say that they cannot acquiesce in Muslim statements which imply temporal allegiance to the Khilafat on the part of Indian Muslims, or suggest that temporal power is of the essence of the Khilafat. Where such criticisms and suggestions go astray is in misunderstanding the very nature and ideal of Islam and the Khilafat, and in relying on analogies from faiths which, whatever their original ideals, have, for all practical purposes, ceased to interpret life as Islam seeks to do.”

As he had said in the course of his official interview with the British Premier, as Islam is not “a set of doctrines and dogmas, but a way of life, a moral code, and a social polity,”—

“Muslims regard themselves as created to serve the one Divine purpose that runs through the ages, owing allegiance to God in the first place and acknowledging His authority alone in the last resort. Their religion is not for Sabbaths and Sundays only, or a matter for churches and temples. It is a workaday faith, and meant even more for the market-place than the mosque. Theirs is a federation of faith, a cosmopolitan brotherhood, of which the personal centre is the Khalifa. He is not a Pope and is not even a priest, and he certainly has no pretensions to infallibility. He is the head of Islam’s Republic, and it is a mere accident, and an unfortunate accident at that, that he happens to be a king. He is the Commander of the Faithful, the President of their Theocratic Commonwealth, and the Leader of all Mussulmans in all matters for which the Koran and the Traditions of the Prophet, whose successor he is, provide guidance.”

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:

“As regards Thrace, it is not necessary to support the Turkish claim for the retention of Thrace by any further argument than that of the principle of self-determination. Its fair and honest application will ensure the satisfaction of that claim.

“As regards Smyrna, the occupation of Smyrna by the Greeks, who were not even at war with Turkey, under the auspices of the Allies, has shaken to a great extent the confidence which Muslims reposed in the pledges given to them, and the atrocities perpetrated in that region have driven them almost to desperation. Muslims can discover no justification for this action except the desire of Greek capitalists to exploit the rich and renowned lands of Asia Minor, which are admittedly the homelands of the Turks. If this state of affairs is allowed to continue, not only will the Turk be driven out, ‘bag and baggage,’ from Europe, but he will have no ‘bag and baggage’ left to him, even in Asia. He would be paralysed, commercially and industrially, in a land-locked small Emirate in Asia Minor, the speedy bankruptcy of which is certain. The application of the principle of self-determination would entirely rule out the Greek claim in this fertile region, which obviously tempts the greed of the capitalist and the exploiter.

“As regards Cilicia, reasons similar to those that have promoted the action of Greeks in Smyrna seem clearly to prompt the outcry of the Christian population in Cilicia, and obviously it is the Gulf of Alexandretta which is attracting some people as the Gulf of Smyrna is attracting others.”

Afterwards, coming to the question of the massacres, M. Mohammed Ali declared:

“The Indian Khilafat delegation must put on record their utter detestation of such conduct and their full sympathy for the sufferers, whether they be Christian or Muslim. But, if the Turk is to be punished as a criminal, and populations of other races and creeds are to be released from their allegiance to the Ottoman Sovereign on the assumption that the Turks have been tyrants in the past and their rule is intolerable, then the delegation claim that the whole question of these massacres must be impartially investigated by an International Commission on which the All-India Khilafat Conference should be adequately represented.”

Moreover, the delegation had already said something similar in a telegram sent to Mr. Lloyd George:

“Where casualties have in fact taken place, not only should their true extent be ascertained, but the Commission should go fully into the so-called massacres and the intrigues of Tsarist Russia in Asia Minor after the success of similar intrigues in the Balkans; it should go into the question of the organisation of revolutionary societies by the Christian subjects of the Sultan, the rebellious character of which was subversive of his rule; it should go into the provocation offered to the Muslim majority in this region, and the nature of the struggle between the contending parties and the character of the forces engaged on either side....”

He went on:

“I have no brief for them; I have no brief for the Turks; I have only a brief for Islam and the India Muslims. What we say is this, as I said to Mr. Fisher: let there be a thorough inquiry, and if this thorough inquiry is carried out, and if it establishes to the satisfaction of the world that the Turks really have been guilty of unprovoked murders, and have been guilty of these atrocities and horrible crimes, then we will wash our hands of the Turks.

“To us it is much more important that not a single stain should remain on the fair name of Islam. We want to convert the whole world to our way of thinking, but with what face could we go before the whole world and say we are the brethren of murderers and massacrers?

“But we know the whole history of these massacres to some extent. It is only in Armenia that the Turk is said to be so intolerant; there are other parts of the world where he deals with Christian people, and where he deals with the Jewish community. No complaints of massacres come from those communities. Then the Armenians themselves lived under Turkish rule for centuries and never complained. The farthest back that we can go to discover any trace of this is the beginning of the last century. But in reality the ‘massacres’ begin only in the last quarter of the last century.

“It is pretty clear that they begin after the success of efforts like those made in the Balkans by Russia, which has never disguised its desire to take Constantinople since the time of Peter the Great. It has always wanted to go to Tsargrad, as it called it—that is, the city of the Tsars. They wanted to go there. They tried these things in the Balkans, and they succeeded beyond their expectation, only probably Bulgaria became too independent when it became Greater Bulgaria. But in the case of the Armenians, they had people who were not very warlike, who had no sovereign ambitions themselves, and who were also to a great extent afraid of conversion to another branch of the Orthodox Church, the Russian branch, so that they were not very willing tools. Still, they were egged on, and plots and intrigues went on all the time. These people were incited, and they understood that if they made a compromise with Tsarist Russia they would get something better. It was then that these massacres came on the scene. No doubt there have been several outcries about them; some evidence has been produced; but there has been no thorough international inquiry which would satisfy the entire world, Muslim as well as Christian. It is in that connection that we earnestly appeal to you, to the whole of Christendom, to the whole of Europe and America, that if the Turk is to be punished on the assumption that he is a tyrant, that his rule is a blasting tyranny, and that he ought to be punished, in that case the evidence should be of such a character that it should be absolutely above suspicion.”

Mr. Lloyd George in his reply upbraided Turkey with fighting by the side of the Central Powers though Great Britain had never fought against her, and protracting the hostilities by closing the Black Sea to the British fleet; but he did not seem to realise that the Russian policy of the Allies partly accounted for Turkey’s decision. Only at the end of the interview, in answer to a remark of the leader of the Indian delegation, he pleaded in defence of England “that she had made no arrangement of any sort with Russia at the expense of Turkey at the beginning of the war.” Then, before coming to the various points M. Mohammed Ali had dealt with, Mr. Lloyd George, who had kept aloof for a long time from the policy of understanding with France, said:

“I do not understand M. Mohammed Ali to claim indulgence for Turkey. He claims justice, and justice she will get. Austria has had justice. Germany has had justice—pretty terrible justice. Why should Turkey escape? Turkey thought she had a feud with us. What feud had Turkey with us? Why did she come in to try and stab us and destroy liberty throughout the world when we were engaged in this life-and-death struggle? Is there any reason why we should apply a different measure to Turkey from that which we have meted out to the Christian communities of Germany and Austria? I want the Mohammedans in India to get it well into their minds that we are not treating Turkey severely because she is Mohammedan: we are applying exactly the same principle to her as we have applied to Austria, which is a great Christian community.”