Although my father was a Muslim of the old Central-Asian school, a
Hegirist, of mixed Arab and Moghul blood, he had sent me to England
and the Continent for my school and university education. But boys are
much more broad-minded than grown-up men, and so my schoolmates and I
never worried about the fact that we had different customs, religion,
civilization, and atavistic tendencies.
It was only after my return to the borderland of Afghanistan and
India, and after I had assumed once more native garb and speech, that
I began to feel myself an alien among those Europeans and
Anglo-Indians with whom I was brought into contact.
For the first time in my life I felt the ghastly meaning of the words
“Racial Prejudice,” that cowardly, wretched caste-mark of the European
and the American the world over, that terrible blight which modern
Christianity has forced on the world. And it chilled me to the bone
and I wondered….
In Europe I had known many Asiatics who visited the universities
there. And we were the equals of the Europeans, the Christians, in
intellect and culture, and decidedly their superiors, being Muslim, in
cleanliness and courage. We were not only familiar with the European
classics which were the basis of their culture, but we were also
thoroughly versed in the literature and history of India and Central
Asia, things of which they knew less than an average Egyptian
donkey-boy. We were polyglots: we had mastered half a dozen European
languages, while even a smattering of Arabic or Turki or Chinese was a
rare exception amongst them. We all of us knew at least three Asian
languages to perfection. And finally we had a practical knowledge of
English, French and German political ideals and systems, while to them
the name of even such great Asian reformers as Asoka and Akbar and
Aurangzeb were absolutely unknown.
In physical strength, virility, power of endurance and recuperation we
were immeasurably their superiors. And we were not picked men, but
plain, average Asian gentlemen.
And yet, when I returned to my own land, there was that superior
smile, that nasty, patronizing attitude, that insufferable “Holier
than Thou” atmosphere about all of them whom I happened to meet.
They made me feel that I was of the East and they of the West; and
they tried to make me feel—with no success—that they were the salt
of the earth, while the men of my faith and race were but the lowly
dung.
Not even the bridge of personal friendship seemed able to span this
gulf, this abyss which I could feel more than I could define it; and
so I folded my tent and travelled; I studied India from South to
North, I visited Siberia, Egypt, Malta, Algeria, Turkey, Tunis, and
the Haussa country, wandering in all the lands where East and West rub
elbows, and I investigated calmly, I compared without too much bias.
Finally I bent my steps Northward, to see with my own eyes and
according to the limits of my own understanding the working of
Christian civilization, and to study the dominant Western Faith in the
lands where it rules supreme.
I was looking for a bridge with which to span the chasm, and I failed
miserably. Christian hypocrisy, Christian intolerance, savage
Christian ignorance frustrated me right and left.
But I learned one thing, perhaps two.
They spoke to me of Europe which they knew, and they spoke of India
which they did not know. They were what the world calls educated,
well-read people: and indeed they had read many books by eminent
Christian travellers, savants, and historians about the great
Peninsula. But the mirror of their souls reflected only distorted
pictures. They had no conception of the vastness of my land, they had
never heard of the great Asian conquerors and statesmen, they were
entirely ignorant of our wonderful literature.
But still they spoke of India … fluently, patronizingly.
They spoke of plague and cholera and famine and wretched sanitation
and cruelties unspeakable. But they did not understand me when I told
them that the teeming millions of Hindu peasantry somehow manage to
enjoy their careless lives to the full, and are really much more
satisfied than the European peasants or the small American farmers.
I did not argue: I simply stated facts. But I discovered that it is a
titanic, heart-breaking task to prove the absurdity of anything which
the Christians have made up their minds to accept as true. I found
arrayed against me an iron phalanx of preconceived opinions and
misconstrued lessons of history. I began to understand that even
amongst educated people there can exist opinion without thought, and
that my two arch-foes were the Pharisee intolerance which is the
caste-mark and the blighting curse of the Christian the world over,
and the other Aryan vice: an unconscious generalization of those ideas
which have been adopted for the sake of convenience and self-flattery,
and in strict and delightfully naïve disregard of truth. The whole I
found to be spiced with religious hypocrisy; and is there a lower form
of hypocrisy than that which makes a man pretend for his own material
or spiritual purposes that a thing is good which in his inmost heart
he knows to be bad? The sincerity of such people is on a par with that
of him who, being debarred by a doctor from constant drinking,
proclaims that he is a reformed character and prates to his friends
about the delights of temperance.
I learned that to fathom the murky depths of stupidity and intolerance
of the Christians of to-day, we should have a latter-day Moses
Maimonides amongst us, to write another _Moreh Nebukim_, another _Guide
for the Perplexed_.
And then I made up my mind to attack that structure of ignorance and
misunderstanding, that jumble of generalization and hyperdeduction,
that idiotic racial self-confidence and national self-consciousness
which breeds Pharisee intolerance, which destroys individual inquiry
and unprejudiced opinion, and which sounds the death-knell of
procreativeness.
The Hindu peasants say that it is a mistake to judge the quality of a
whole field of rice by testing one grain only. But the Europeans, the
Americans, who judge us have never even tested a solitary grain and
only know about its quality from hearsay.
Not that they are afraid to voice what they miscall their opinions.
Only instead of having the courage of their own convictions, they have
the courage of somebody else’s convictions, not knowing that the most
obtuse ignorance is superior to dangerous, second-hand knowledge.
They are eternally quoting the words of some writer whom they think
infallible. And there was chiefly one clever little jingle which was
on the lips of everybody with whom I tried to discuss the relations
between Orient and Occident. They used it as the final proof to settle
the argument and to preclude all further appeal to the tribunal of
common sense and common verity, and it ran as follows:
“East is East, and West is West,
And never the twain shall meet.”
I admire Kipling, chiefly because he is one of the few Europeans who
have studied the East with both intelligence and sympathy. From my
Oriental point of view I class his books with those of Max Müller, Sir
Alfred Lyall, Captain Sir Richard Burton, Pierre Loti, John Campbell
Oman, Victoria de Bunsen, Colonel Malleson, W. D. Whitney, William
Crooke, and two or three other Pandits.
But I became sick to death of that smooth little jingle about the East
and the West. I found it everywhere, until it haunted me in my dreams.
I would buy the gaudy Sunday edition of an American newspaper and I
would read the gruesome story of how a high-caste Mandchoo had beaten
and tortured his beautiful French wife … and, by the Prophet, the
picturesque account would wind up with an appeal to the intelligent
American reader not to wonder at the blue-beard Mandarin’s cruelty,
because the poet states that East is East and West is West.
In the morning I would see in the _Petit Journal_ how the
unspeakable Turk had invaded a peaceful Armenian settlement, had shot
the males, outraged the females, and roasted the babes over an open
fire, and how I should also suppress my natural indignation at such
atrocities, because the East is naturally the East.
And at night, before smoking the farewell cigarette of the dying day,
I would discover in _The Graphic_ harrowing accounts of
child-marriages in Hindustan, and would be instructed that the reason
for such a barbarous custom was contained in the poet’s statement that
“never the twain shall meet.”
Do you wonder that every night, in my dreams, I strangled Mr. Kipling
slowly and deliciously with a thin silken cord? But of course you do
not wonder; for I am an Afghan … and … well …
“East is East and West is West.”