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Updated: July 6, 2025
The caliphal institution is still undoubtedly venerated in Islam. But the shrewd leaders of the modern Pan-Islamic movement have long been working on a much broader basis. They realize that Pan-Islamism's real driving-power to-day lies not in the caliphate but in institutions like the Hajj and the great Pan-Islamic fraternities such as the Sennussiya, of which I shall presently speak.
In Tripoli, where Turks and Arabs had been on the worst of terms, both races clasped hands in a sudden access of Pan-Islamic fervour, and the Italian invaders were met with a fanatical fury that roused Islam to wild applause and inspired Western observers with grave disquietude.
A flood of mingled despair and rage swept the Moslem world from end to end. And, of course, the Pan-Islamic implication was obvious. This was precisely what Pan-Islam's agitators had been preaching for fifty years the Crusade of the West for Islam's destruction. What could be better confirmation of the warnings of Djemal-ed-Din? The results were soon seen.
The point to be here noted is their complicating effect on the Pan-Islamic movement. Pan-Islamism was, in fact, cross-cut and deflected from its previous course, and a period of confusion and mental uncertainty supervened. This interim period was short. By 1912 Pan-Islamism had recovered its poise and was moving forward once more. The reason was renewed pressure from the West.
It is thus a very debatable question whether, if Abdul Hamid had ever called upon the Moslem world for armed assistance in a "holy war," he would have been generally supported. Yet Abdul Hamid undoubtedly furthered the general spread of Pan-Islamic sentiment throughout the Moslem world.
It was during these years that the famous Seyid Mahommed ben Sennussi came from his Algerian home to Mecca and there imbibed those Wahabi principles which led to the founding of the great Pan-Islamic fraternity that bears his name. Even the Babbist movement in Persia, far removed though it was doctrinally from Wahabi teaching, was indubitably a secondary reflex of the Wahabi urge.
Such were the foundations upon which Sultan Abdul Hamid built his ambitious Pan-Islamic structure. Abdul Hamid is one of the strangest personalities of modern times. A man of unusual intelligence, his mind was yet warped by strange twists which went to the verge of insanity.
Receptive though the liberals are to Western ideas, and averse though they are to Pan-Islamism's chauvinistic, reactionary tendencies, Europe's intransigeance is forcing them to make at least a temporary alliance with the Pan-Islamic and Nationalist groups, even though the liberals know that anything like a holy war would dig a gulf between East and West, stop the influx of Western stimuli, favour reactionary fanaticism, and perhaps postpone for generations a modernist reformation of Islam.
Whether a religion is the better for an organised priesthood or not is irrelevant to our subject, but the absence of it in Islam certainly strengthens the pan-Islamic movement, as each Moslem may consider himself a standard-bearer of his faith, while we are apt to leave too much to our priests, thus engendering slackness on our part and meticulous dogma on theirs; both undermine Christian brotherhood.
Turkish nationalism was also frowned on by Sultan Abdul Hamid. Abdul Hamid had an instinctive aversion to all nationalist movements, both as limitations to his personal absolutism and as conflicting with that universal Pan-Islamic ideal on which he based his policy.
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