Page:The Rebirth Of Turkey 1923.pdf/100

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decreed, and now repeat my decree, that no subject of mine shall lift a finger against the feringhis."

As for Islam in India, its position became one of the sheer curiosities of contemporary history. Its Emperor in London was at war with its Caliph in Constantinople. As the result of the 1907 Treaty, its temporal and its religious allegiances were thrown into direct opposition. Its leaders attempted to harmonize this contradiction in its loyalties by drawing a distinction between its Caliph and the Ottoman Sultan, by conceiving of the war as existing between its Emperor in London and the Ottoman Sultan in Constantinople, and by demanding an undertaking from the Government of India that the war involved purely temporal objectives and was not concerned in any degree whatsoever with the Caliphate. The Government of India accordingly gave an undertaking that the question of the Caliphate was one for Moslem opinion alone to decide, and on this explicit understanding Moslem troops were enlisted in India for service against "our brother Turk."

This use of Indian Moslems against the Ottoman Sultan, one of the most delicate of operations, formed one of the outstanding British successes of the war, but Englishmen at home have never succeeded in discovering that British India exists. Forgetful of the fact that the British Empire was "the greatest Moslem Power in the world," that it contained 100,000,000 Moslems to 80,000,000 Christians, British statesmen in England publicly referred to Salonica as "the portal of Christianity" and to the Egyptian Expeditionary Force which later advanced into Palestine, as "Crusaders." At a moment