Page:Christiaan Snouck Hurgronje - The Holy War, Made in Germany (1915).djvu/57

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The Holy War

expects, the Mohammedan nations under European rule will really be so charmed by the call to arms issued in the name of Sultan Mehmed Reshâd, that they will attack their masters "here with secrecy and ruse, there with fanatical courage." Grothe already sees in his imagination how "the thus developed religious war"—so he openly calls it—is to mean especially for England "the decline of her greatness."

We know that Turkey is at present engaged in an experiment with just such a holy war, as suggested by Grothe and his intellectual kin. The highest juridical authority in Constantinople, the Sheich-ul-Islâm, who since the revolution of 1908 has ever been a creature and an instrument of the Young Turk Committee, has answered affirmatively a series of questions submitted to him by the insignificant successor of Abdulhamîd, with whom the leaders of the Young