Chapter IV

You speak of Oriental mystery, of Oriental romance.

Are we Asians then like Molière’s bourgeois who spoke prose all his life without knowing it? Is there really a veil of mystery about us?

No, no. The Most High God did not take the trouble to create two different types of human beings, one to work on the banks of the Seine, and the other to sing His praises on the shore of the Ganges. There is no veil, no mystery, no romance … except the veil of Christian ignorance, the romance of Christian imagination, the mystery of Christian want of desire to know.

There is perhaps a latent search after knowledge and truth in your hearts’ souls. But your inborn selfishness forces you to believe that a healthy portion of ignorance is the best medicine against the ravages of the dangerous malady which is called Tolerance. Just a little effort would teach you that there is no mystery about us, no abyss which separates you from us. But your ignorance is your bliss and provides you with a sort of righteous bias. It also sheds a holy and therefore eminently Christian halo around your attitude of meddlesome interference in the affairs of Asia and North Africa. Of course you only interfere because of your laudable intention to show us the true path to civilization and salvation. And if accidentally you increase your own power and wealth, if you impoverish the native whom you attempt to “save,” if you incite strife where no strife existed before you imported soldiers and bibles and missionaries and whisky and some special brands of “white” diseases … well … Allah is Great….

The mystery which is supposed to shroud the Orient is a lying invention of Christendom destined to give a semblance of justice to your selfish, harmful meddlings in the affairs, religions, politics and customs of other countries.

If you wish to conquer with the right of fire and the might of sword, go ahead and do so, or at least say so. It would be a motive which we Muslim, being warriors, could understand and appreciate. But do not clothe your greed for riches and dominion in the hypocritical, nasal, sing-song of a heaven-decreed Mission to enlighten the poor native, a Pharisee call of duty to spread the word of your Saviour, your lying intention to uplift the ignorant Pagan.

Drop your mask of consummate beatitude in the contemplation of the spiritual joys, the Christian and therefore very sanitary plumbing you are endeavoring to confer upon us. Stop being liars and hypocrites: and you will cease being what you are to-day:

The most hated and the most despised men in the length and breadth of Asia and North Africa.

And I am not exaggerating. I am really putting it mildly so as not to hurt your feelings.

Let me point out just one instance: the Young Turk Revolution.

You, the apostles of freedom and constitutional government and half a dozen assorted fetishes, what was your attitude then?

You allowed Austria, your trusted steward of other people’s property since the Berlin Congress of Thieves, to steal this property, the fertile provinces of Bosnia and Herzegovina. You looked on calmly while the Bulgar mountebank annexed Turkish territory in time of peace. You passed resolutions, full of blatant Christian hypocrisy and Christian lies; but you never raised a finger in our behalf, in behalf of that justice and humanity which you proudly claim as your caste-right. The whole affair was a piece of brigandage, carried on under the much-patched cloak of that whining cant which has made modern Christianity an ugly by-word in Asia and North Africa.

You united in your endeavors to establish an independent and constitutionally governed Roumania, a free Servia, a modern Greece and Bulgaria, and, more recently, an autonomous Macedonia, under the pretext that Turkey, being controlled with an iron rod by a despotic Sultan and an intolerably exalted Sheykh-ul-Islam, was not fit to govern Christian races.

But you obstruct Mohammedan Turkey’s efforts to introduce and enforce the very principles of liberty and popular government which in former years you had been advocating as a _sine qua non_ in the administration of your precious Christian protégés.

An ounce of baptismal water makes such a difference, does it not?

I believe that I am the mouthpiece of a great majority of my fellow-Muslim and my fellow-Asians when I state that the Jesuit policy of Europe during the political travail of Young Turkey, when the Osmanli attempted to crystallize his newly found liberty, will do more to fan the red embers of fighting Pan-Islam into living, leaping flames than any other political event since the Berlin treaty.

We have suffered long enough a series of deliberate moral insults and material injuries at the hands of selfish, canting, lying Christianity, and we are still capable of tremendous energies when Islam is in danger.

And who can deny that Islam is in danger?

Your attitude during the Balkan troubles proved to us that the liberty which you deem necessary to the Christian Balkans is a negligible quantity when applied to the followers of the Prophet Mohammed who inhabit the same peninsula.

And I could mention a dozen instances to prove that you yourselves are forcing on the world the coming struggle between Asia, all Asia, against Europe and America, against Christendom, in other words.

You are heaping up material for a Jehad, a Pan-Islam, a Pan-Asia Holy War, a gigantic Day of Reckoning, an invasion of a new Attila and Tamerlane … who will use rifles and bullets, instead of lances and spears.

You are deaf to the voice of reason and fairness, and so you must be taught with the whirling swish of the sword when it is red.