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Updated: June 1, 2025
Sir Theodore Morison describes the attitude of Moslem liberals. How Pan-Islamists with anti-Western sentiments feel is well set forth by an Egyptian, Yahya Siddyk, in his well-known book, The Awakening of the Islamic Peoples in the Fourteenth Century of the Hegira.
Their occupation is hereditary, but they are vestals and daughters of vestals, however strange this may sound to a European ear. But the notions of the Hindus, especially on questions of morality, are quite independent, and even anti-Western, if I may use this expression.
The French conquest of Algeria, the Russian acquisition of Transcaucasia, and the English mastery of virtually all India, convinced thoughtful Moslems everywhere that Islam was in deadly peril of falling under Western domination. It was at this time that Pan-Islamism assumed that essentially anti-Western character which it has ever since retained.
Anti-Western feeling has been waning in some quarters and waxing in others during the past hundred years. By temperamental reactionaries and fanatics things Western have, of course, always been abhorred. But, leaving aside this intransigeant minority, the attitude of other categories of Orientals has varied greatly according to times and circumstances.
I have stressed the example of the Tunisian Kheir-ed-Din rather than the better-known Turkish instances because it illustrates the general receptivity of mid-nineteenth-century Moslem liberals to Western ideas and their freedom from anti-Western feeling.
As time passed, however, many of these erstwhile liberals, disillusioned with the West for various reasons, notably European aggression, became the bitterest enemies of the West, hating the very spirit of Western civilization. This anti-Western feeling has, of course, been greatly exacerbated since the beginning of the present century.
But alongside, or rather intermingled with, these anti-Western, fulminations, there now appeared special appeals to the Oriental masses, inciting them against all "capitalists" and "bourgeois," native as well as foreign, and promising the "proletarians" remedies for all their ills. Here is a Bolshevist manifesto to the Turkish masses, published in the summer of 1920.
Such anti-Western sentiments are not confined to journalists or politicians, they are shared by all classes, from princes to peasants. Each class has its special reasons for hating European political control.
Before long Abdul Hamid had built up an elaborate Pan-Islamic propaganda organization, working mainly by secretive, tortuous methods. Constantinople became the Mecca of all the fanatics and anti-Western agitators like Djemal-ed-Din.
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