VIII
THE WAR AND ISLAM
KEMAL HURRIES BACK TO CONSTANTINOPLE AND
RAUF BEY ASKS THE BRITISH EMBASSY TO FINANCE
NEUTRALITY—ENVER ENTERS THE WAR
AND PERSIA ATTEMPTS TO FOLLOW HIM—THE
HARD POSITION OF ISLAM IN INDIA.
Kemal left his post as military attache at Sofia immediately on the outbreak of war in Europe, and hurried back to Constantinople, still a young officer but an officer with a brilliant past, a hatred of the Enver Government which was both personal and political, and a prestige in the Army comparable to the prestige in the Navy which Hussein Rauf Bey had won in the raider Hamidie. The probability that Russia would participate in the European war had afforded the Enver Ministry the opportunity it sought to achieve its Pan-Turanian project, to carry the Crescent and Star to the "unredeemed" Turks of the Azerbaijan province of Persia, of Russian Trans-Caucasia and of the Russian provinces in Central Asia. Fired by the same crude Westernism as had turned the eyes of the Old Greeks to the "unredeemed" Greeks of Constantinople, the Enver Ministry had envisaged a Greater Ottoman Empire which, while maintaining the Caliphate out of deference to Old Turkish
