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His word had the force of law. He was, so to speak, the custodian of the honour and prestige of the family. From this exalted position he is now dislodged, and the most junior member now claims equality with him." Mr. Bukhsh deplores the current wave of extravagance, due to the wholesale adoption of European customs and modes of living. "What," he asks, "has happened here in India?
But such as it was, it was to be paid for, and Ephraim, agent and collector for the local auctioneer, waited in the verandah with the receipt. He was announced by the Mahomedan servant as 'Ephraim, Yahudi' Ephraim the Jew. He who believes in the Brotherhood of Man should hear my Elahi Bukhsh grinding the second word through his white teeth with all the scorn he dare show before his master.
XII., p. 498. This article gives an excellent general survey of the intellectual development of the Moslem world in the nineteenth century. S. Khuda Bukhsh, Essays: Indian and Islamic, pp. 20, 24, 284. 1856 to 1878. S. Khuda Bukhsh, op. cit., p. 241. Sheikh Abd-ul-Haak, in Sherif Pasha's organ, Mecheroutiette, of August, 1921.
Hence, they are mostly extreme "Nationalists," while they are also deep in Pan-Islamic reactionary schemes. Indeed, we often witness the strange spectacle of atheists posing as Moslem fanatics and affecting a truly dervish zeal. Mr. Bukhsh well describes this type when he writes: "I know a gentleman, a Mohammedan by profession, who owes his success in life to his faith.
In India a similar permeation of social life by Westernism is depicted by the Moslem liberal, S. Khuda Bukhsh, albeit Mr. Bukhsh, being an insider, lays greater emphasis upon the painful aspects of the inevitable transition process from old to new.
The Moslem loyalists reprobate the nationalist agitation for the reasons expressed by one of their representative men, S. Khuda Bukhsh, who remarks: "Rightly or wrongly, I have always kept aloof from modern Indian politics, and I have always held that we should devote more attention to social problems and intellectual advancement and less to politics, which, in our present condition, is an unmixed evil.
Bukhsh, Essays: Indian and Islamic, pp. 221-226. Bukhsh, Essays: Indian and Islamic, p. 240. The purdah is the curtain separating the women's apartments from the rest of the house. Bukhsh, Essays: Indian and Islamic, pp. 254-255.
In fine: "Destruction has done its work, but the work of construction has not yet begun." Like Vambéry, Bukhsh lays strong emphasis on the increasing emancipation of women. No longer regarded as mere "child-bearing machines," the Mohammedan women of India "are getting educated day by day, and now assert their rights.
Their view-point is well set forth by another of their leading figures, S. Khuda Bukhsh. "Nothing was more distant from the Prophet's thought," he writes, "than to fetter the mind or to lay down fixed, immutable, unchanging laws for his followers. The Quran is a book of guidance to the faithful, and not an obstacle in the path, of their social, moral, legal, and intellectual progress."
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