matters. The Caliphate has become the symbol of all those Eastern traditions which are woven into the fabric of Islamic civilization, a symbol thrown into vivid relief by the increasing inroads which Western and Russian imperialisms have been making into that civilization. However narrow Old Turkish opinion was, however stubbornly it confined the Young Turks to a rigidly conservative interpretation of the Caliphate, Islam in India could
Caliphate may have come to be two quite separate
adjust its Caliphate to such modern and healthy growths as that of Arab nationalism. But the forcible imposition of Western civilization upon the Arabs was a still further step in that process of Western imperialism against which the very existence of the Caliphate had become a protest.
Until the war ended, Islam in India relied not only on the Government of India's undertaking to the effect that the Caliphate was a matter for Moslem opinion alone to decide, but on the fact that the Empire as a whole contained 100,000,000 Moslems to 80,000,000 Christians. With these assurances, Indian Moslem troops even participated in the capture of Jerusalem, but when the peace proposed to continue what the war had begun, the Caliphate agitation in India soon became the most formidable fact in the British Empire. The Foreign Office and the India Office are supposed to be housed on the same quadrangle off Downing Street in London, but the distance which the Anglo-Russian Treaty of 1907 has brought between them is one of the sheer curiosities of contemporary history. One sometimes wonders, on that exalted plane on which Sovereigns dwell, what the Emperor
