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Updated: October 6, 2025
Imprisoned for a while in India, he went to Egypt about 1880, and had a hand in the anti-European movement of Arabi Pasha. When the English occupied Egypt in 1882 they promptly expelled Djemal, who continued his wanderings, finally reaching Constantinople. Here he found a generous patron in Abdul-Hamid, then evolving his Pan-Islamic policy.
One of these pioneers was the Turkish notable Aali Pasha, who was said to remark: "What we want is rather an increase of fanaticism than a diminution of it." Arminius Vambéry, the eminent Hungarian Oriental scholar, states that shortly after the Crimean War he was present at a militant Pan-Islamic gathering, attended by emissaries from far parts of the Moslem world, held at Aali Pasha's palace.
Turning back at this point to consider nationalist developments in the rest of North Africa, we do not, as in Egypt, find a well-marked territorial patriotism. Anti-European hatred there is in plenty, but such "patriotic" sentiments as exist belong rather to those more diffused types of nationalist feeling known as "Pan-Arabism" and "Pan-Islamic Nationalism," which we shall presently discuss.
The native Press is always attacking the above abuses, but they are firmly rooted. All three undermine the pan-Islamic structure by causing cleavage in public opinion.
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.
It is pleasant to think of the Pan-Islamic merriment with which Abdul Hamid must have viewed the indignant exit of his Christian brother, who had come such a long way to see him, and was so tactful about the Armenian atrocities. He might perhaps for those Christians were very odd pigs have expressed horror or remonstrance.
The lesson we have to learn from pan-Islamic activities of the last decade or two is that countries which are mainly Moslem should have Moslem rulers, and that Christian rule, however enlightened and benevolent, is only permissible where Islam is outnumbered by other creeds.
I was rather out of touch with the pan-Islamic movement during the summer of 1915, as my lungs had become seriously affected on the Canal, and the trouble became so acute that I had to spend two or three months in the hills of Cyprus. Before I had been there a week the G.O.C. troops in Egypt cabled for me to return and proceed to Aden as political officer with troops.
He and two others swam to our side of the Canal, where they surrendered to an Indian detachment. Our Indian troops on the Canal were naturally a mark for pan-Islamic propaganda reinforced by Hindu literature of the Bande Mataram type, a double-barrelled enterprise to bag both the great creeds of India.
But they were not moved by any pan-Islamic idea. Secondly, they all took place on Chinese soil, and all the Mohammedans involved, except in the rising of the Salars, were Chinese. These Chinese who became Mohammedans are called Dungans.
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