THE MOHAMMEDAN QUESTION
It is never well to have travelled from Dan to Beersheba and to
record that one has found all barren; and in my present chapter I
shall endeavour to paint the brighter side of the India which I saw
last winter. The material misery of her peasantry has been enough
described, and the bitter feeling of her townsmen educated to a
sense of their fallen estate as a conquered people; and it remains
to me to show the compensating good which by the mysterious law
which rules all human things is being born out of their otherwise
unredeemed misfortunes. The apologists of British rule boast that
they have given India peace, and peace doubtless is a noble gift;
but it has given her far more than this. What really deserves all
Indian thanks, and is indeed an inestimable acquisition, because it
contains within it the germs of a reconquest of all the rest, is
that it has given her liberty of thought. This is a new possession
which India never had, and never perhaps would have had, but
for English influences, and it is difficult not to see in it a
gift undesigned, but which, like the last treasure issuing from
Pandora’s box, is destined to transform the curse of conquest into
the blessing of a wider hope.
I am not one of those who love the East only in its picturesque
aspects, and I have no quarrel with Europe because it has caused
the East to change. I note, indeed, the destruction of much that
was good and noble and of profit in the past by the unthinking and
often selfish action of Western methods; but I do not wish the past
back in its integrity, or regret the impulse given to a new order
there of thought and action. I know that time never really goes
back upon its steps, and no one more readily accepts than myself
the doctrine that what is gone in human history is irrevocably
gone. On the contrary, I see in the connection of East and West a
circumstance ultimately of profit to both; and while the beauty of
its old world is being fast destroyed, and the ancient order of its
institutions subverted, I look forward with unbounded expectation
to the new cosmos which shall be constructed from the ruins. I am
anxious, indeed, to save what can still be saved of the indigenous
plan, and to use in reconstruction something of the same materials;
but I see that the new edifice may well be made superior to the
old, and I should be altogether rejoiced if it should be my lot to
share, however humbly, in the work of its rebuilding.
To speak plainly, the ancient order of Asiatic things, beautiful
as it was, had in it the germs of death, for the one reason that
it did not change. India especially, in old days, did not change.
Conquerors came and went; dynasties rose and perished; and years
of peace and war, of plenty and of famine, trod closely on each
other’s heels, while men were born and lived and died in the same
thoughts. It was the natural life, the remnant of a society which
still followed the law of instinct rather than of reason; but even
in the natural world health must be attended with growth or it will
turn into decay. The intellectual growth of India by the middle of
last century had long stopped; and there was no sign anywhere, when
our English traders first appeared, of a new beginning. Thought had
resolved itself into certain formulae from which there seemed no
escape; and the brain of the body politic, unused and oppressed
with its own mental restrictions, was growing every generation
weaker.
We have seen the ultimate result of such inaction in other
lands, in Asia Minor, in Persia, and, till within recent memory,
in countries nearer home. It was seen everywhere in Europe in
the Middle Ages, and seems to be a condition natural to all
human societies at a certain stage of their growth. If too long
prolonged it would seem they die, leaving their places empty, as
in Babylonia, or being absorbed in other more vigorous societies,
as the Byzantines were absorbed by the then vigorous Turks. In
almost every case the intellectual awakening has been quickened
from without, by the presence near it of an intelligence more
living than its own and generally hostile, and it may safely be
affirmed that the action and reaction of nations on each other’s
intellectual life is in itself a natural and necessary law of
their development. Thus Mediaeval Europe owed the new birth of its
thought to the invasion in the eighth century of the cultivated and
chivalrous Moors through Spain; and the Catholic Church reformed
its lax discipline, not four hundred years ago, in the presence of
advancing hosts from Western Asia. Something of the same process,
therefore, may be also traced in the counter-wave which has now for
the last hundred years and more been driving Europe back in menace
to the East. Asia has been awakened by it at last to her danger,
and is slowly informing herself with the victorious reason of the
West, and assimilating to her needs that intellectual daring which
is her adversary’s strength. And nowhere more so than in India.
After its long sleep the Indian intellect is rising everywhere
refreshed, and is attempting each day more boldly to strike out new
lines of speculation on the very subjects where it had been most
closely and most hopelessly confined.
All this India indubitably owes to England. Nor is there any
point on which the intellectual methods of the West have been
brought more strongly to bear in Asia than on its creeds. The
ancient monotony of religious practice divorced from religious
intelligence, is slowly giving place to intrusive questionings
which will not be appeased by mere formulae, and men of all faiths
are discussing and reasoning where a hundred years ago they only
asserted. We have witnessed within the last generation something of
this everywhere in Western Asia, but in India it is perhaps still
more marked; and it seems certain that, whatever evil may have been
there wrought to other interests, the interests of its religions
will have been served by our rule, unconsciously, perhaps, and
unwillingly, but none the less really. Paradoxical as it may sound,
the wholly secular rule of aliens, whose boast it is that they have
established no State creed, will be found to have renewed the life
of faiths and given them a stronger, because a more intelligent,
mode of being. The spiritual believer will be strengthened; and the
very pagan will be no longer “suckled in a creed outworn,” but in
living beliefs which will seek to exercise a moral influence on his
conduct more and more for good. To speak precisely, what I see will
be the outcome of such education as England is giving to the Indian
races is a reformation of each of their several religious faiths,
leading to purer thought in their followers, and above all to purer
practice.
The creeds of India, speaking generally, are four: the Hindu, which
under various forms embraces four-fifths of the whole population;
the Mohammedan, which is principally powerful in the North of
India and Bengal, and which includes a census of fifty millions;
the Christian (Roman Catholic), found mainly in the extreme South;
and the Parsi.
Of these, Hinduism alone would seem to be a truly indigenous
faith, or one wholly in harmony with the instincts of the rural
population; and it is impossible for a traveller not to be struck
with the tenacity of the ancient superstitions which are its
groundwork. Hinduism belongs to an older order of religions than
any now practised in the West. It is not a religion at all in
our modern sense of being a strict code of morals based upon any
revealed or written law; but, like the popular beliefs of ancient
Greece and Rome, is rather a mythology resting on traditional
reverence for certain objects in certain places. It is essentially
national and local. It does not seek to embrace humanity, but is a
privilege of the Indian races only; and it cannot be practised in
its purity elsewhere than in India. India, according to Brahminical
teaching, is a sacred land, and there alone can be the shrines of
its gods. There alone man can lead a perfect life, or worship with
spiritual profit. Certain localities are specially holy--not, as
with the Christians or the Mohammedans, on account of the tombs of
holy men, but in themselves as being the chosen homes of the divine
powers. All rivers in India thus are sacred, precisely as were
groves in ancient Italy, and on their banks the temples of the gods
are built and spiritual influences felt.
From an aesthetic point of view nothing can be more seductive to a
stranger from the West, or more surprising, than the spectacle of
Hindu worship at one of these ancient shrines--the processions of
women to some lonely grove by the water-side on holiday afternoons
with their offerings of rice and flowers, the old-world music of
pipe and tabour, the priests, the incense, the painted statues of
the immortal gods, the lighted fire, the joyous sacrifices consumed
with laughter by the worshippers. No one can see this without
emotion, nor, again, witness the gatherings of tens of thousands
clothed in white in the great temples of Southern India for the
yearly festivals, and not acknowledge the wonderful continuity of
thought which unites modern India with its European kindred of
pre-Christian days. The worship of idols here is a reality such as
untravelled Englishmen know only from their classics. The temples
of Madura and Seringam are more wonderful and imposing in their
structure than all the edifices of Europe put together, and the
special interest is that they are not dead things. The buyers and
the sellers still ply their trade in the porticoes, the birds have
their nests beneath the eaves. There are sacred elephants and
sacred apes. The priests chaunt still round lighted braziers. The
brazen bulls are anointed each festival day with oil, the foreheads
of the worshippers with ochre. There is a scent of flowers and
incense, and the business of religion goes on continuous from
old time, perhaps a little slacker, on account of the increasing
poverty of the people, but not less methodically, or as a living
part of men’s daily existence. When I had seen Madura I felt that
I had at last seen a temple of Babylon in all its glory, and
understood what the worship of Apis might have been in Egypt. This
worship of the gods--not any theological or moral teaching--is
the foundation of the Hindu religion, and what is still its
distinguishing feature.
At the same time it is beyond a doubt that among the cultivated
Brahmins, who have always acknowledged a higher philosophy than
that of the people, there is a renewed tendency towards the
spiritualization of beliefs. The philosophy of the Vedas is a
high one, and presents to the restored activity of thought a
standard for reform in intellectual conceptions; and although the
Brahminical system is without an absolute written code of morals,
it is easily reconcilable with the highest, and akin to all that
is best in the Semitic teaching. Nowhere more than among the
Hindus is the tradition of domestic virtue a noble one, or the
relation of father and child, of husband and wife, acknowledged
as a sacred one. The vices, therefore, which ages of intellectual
sleep have engendered, are readily recognized as evils now that the
intellect is once more awake; and all that is best in the Christian
moral code is being instinctively adopted into their system by
the enlightened modern Brahmins. This is the common feature of
all religious reform. Vicious practice is the concomitant of
intellectual sloth, and as that sloth yields to action the practice
reforms itself, usually after the model of whatever has roused it
from its sleep.
Thus we see the modern Brahmins proclaiming the morality of
unselfishness in no other language than that in which Christian
divines proclaim it, and making it peculiarly their own. They have
the same teaching as these about truth and justice and integrity,
and appeal in the same way to conscience as a guide. They choose
what is best, and make it harmonize with their own best traditions,
and the result is a general elevation of tone in the upper ranks of
life which presages a corresponding reform in the lower.
This sometimes shows itself, as must also naturally be, in
extravagance. There is a tendency always in such movements to
imitate servilely; and so we see in the rising generation of the
Hindus a certain advanced party which aims at making itself wholly
European. A very few of these have adopted Christianity, but far
more have contented themselves with an abandonment of their beliefs
in favour of philosophies more or less agnostic. Others, again,
without ceasing to be professed Hindus, have contented themselves
with throwing off caste restrictions; and a considerable body in
Bengal and Northern India have formed themselves into a special
sect, known as the Brahmo-Somaj, which would seem to hold doctrines
little different from the vaguer forms of Theism. In the South
of India, however, which is the stronghold of Brahminism, these
extreme innovations have taken little root, and instead there is
found only a more reasoned form of the traditional beliefs. Whether
the worships of Vishnu and Siva and the rest of the national Indian
gods, have a sufficient backbone of practical ethics to undergo a
great moral reform without losing in the end something of their
vitality as popular beliefs, I am not prepared to say; but I feel
certain that distinct moral improvement connected with these
worships is in progress, and that the result up to the present has
been an increased interest with the leaders of Hindu society in the
welfare and social improvement of their religious communities. This
shows itself in exertions made to spread education, in anxiety for
the better management of religious trusts, in the restoration of
temples, sometimes at very large individual cost, and in the rising
agitation against child-marriage and in favour of the re-marriage
of widows.
Something of the same process may be observed in the case of the
Parsis. These would hardly require mention as an Indian sect
at all were it not for their very great intelligence and the
lead they have recently taken in native political life. They are
insignificant in point of population, and very restricted in
their locality. Bombay alone of the great cities finds them in
large numbers. But their wealth there, their commercial aptitude,
and their persistence in availing themselves of every means of
education, have placed them in a position of large and growing
influence. They are, as is well known, the descendants of the
fire-worshippers of Persia, and still hold closely to their
traditions. The religion of Zoroaster, originally simple and
philosophical, seems, in common with the rest of the religions
imported into India, to have become overgrown there with grosser
thought and less worthy practice, and to have adopted many of
the superstitions peculiar to the Indians. Some of these seem,
indeed, to have been forced on the Parsis by the Hindu rulers at
the time of their first settlements, and others to be the result
of the general decay of knowledge due to political conditions. The
Parsis, however, were among the first to take advantage of the
intellectual liberty which has been the atmosphere of India since
the coming of the English, and being also extremely keen traders
they have profited more than others by the commercial _régime_ of
modern times and have grown rich. Well educated, well mannered,
and naturally inclined to good, their religion is now simplifying
itself once more, and the tendency of Parsi thought is, even more
than the Hindu, towards a spiritualization of theological dogmas
and a reform in social practice. Any one who has been with an
educated Parsi over their “Towers of Silence” in Bombay must have
been struck with the pains at which they are to interpret in a
philosophical sense their ancient practice of exposing the dead;
or who has discussed social questions, with their desire to improve
the condition of their women. Of the Parsis, however, and of the
native Christians of Southern India, I will not speak at length.
I saw too little of them to learn anything of real value; and the
great numerical superiority of the Hindus and Mohammedans entitles
them alone to general attention.
My own special attention was naturally most directed to the
Mohammedans.
Mohammedanism, as is well known, entered India from two separate
sides and under two separate conditions. Its first appearance was
on the western seaboard in the shape of Arab traders, who came with
the double mission of propagating the faith and making money. These
were peaceful preachers, who relied for success not upon the sword
but upon the power of persuasion, and the Mohammedanism implanted
in this form is still to be found on the west coast, in the Kokhnis
of Bombay, the Moplas of Malabar, and the Moormen, or Moors (“os
Moros” of the Portuguese) of Ceylon. They are a busy, prosperous
people--shopkeepers, pedlars, jewellers, or plying certain
handicrafts, and notably that of house-building.
It was extremely interesting to me to find at Colombo the
descendants of the ancient Arab settlers of the eighth and ninth
centuries still keeping up the commercial tradition of Arabia
intact. They number in the whole island of Ceylon about a quarter
of a million, and are among the most prosperous of its inhabitants.
I found them an old-fashioned community, more occupied with this
world than with the next, and only to a very small degree affected
by modern thought. Indeed, such change as was to be noticed among
them was of as recent growth as the advent in Ceylon of Arabi and
his fellow-exiles, whose larger experience of the great outside
world of Islam and the prestige of their late championship of the
faith had begun to make its impression on their thoughts. Until
their arrival no Mohammedan in the island had ever sat down to meat
with men of another faith, and very few had sent their children
to any secular school. The example, however, of the exiles was
beginning to be followed, and I found the Moormen already anxious
for wider instruction, and to come into communication with the
general body of the faithful. It will be a curious result of
Egypt’s misfortunes if the persecution of her patriot chiefs shall
have brought ideas of religious liberty to the Mohammedans of
Southern India; yet it is what seems to be happening. It would be
well if these Moormen were more widely spread than they are, for
their commercial instincts are a healthy element, and one much
needed in the Mohammedan community of India proper.
As I crossed from Ceylon to the mainland and left the coast I first
came in contact with the other and more common Mussulman type--the
descendants of the northern invaders--men wholly distinct from the
busy traders just described, and neither prosperous nor advancing.
The Mohammedans of the inland districts of the Madras Presidency
are the poorest in India. They represent the extreme wave of Mogul
conquest southwards, long ago spent and now receding. They are the
descendants, not of preachers and converts, but of the garrisons
of the north, and their occupation of government gone, they are
fast dying out from want of a means of living. The condition of
the small Mohammedan communities of such towns as Tanjore and
Trichinopoly is very pitiable. Isolated in a population wholly
Hindu, possessed of no traditional industry, without commercial
aptitude or knowledge of other service than the sword’s, they seem
dumbly to await extinction. Their few rich men, owners of landed
property, grow daily less and less at their ease, preyed upon as
they are by an army of helpless and needy relations. They fall in
debt to the Hindu money-lenders, are yearly less able to discharge
their liabilities, and bit by bit the civil courts engulf them.
Those who have no land are reduced to manual labour of the simplest
sort on daily wages. It is a hard but inevitable fate, the fate
which rests upon the law, that none shall live who cannot earn
his bread. These Mohammedans of Southern India are the extreme
exemplification of evils from which the whole community are to
some extent suffering. In the south they are few and hopeless, and
have almost ceased to struggle. In the north the danger of their
condition is rousing them to new activity.
The stronghold of Mohammedan India is the North-West, and there
Islam is far from hopeless or disposed to perish. Intellectually
the equals, and morally the superiors of their Hindu neighbours,
the Mohammedans of the Upper Ganges Valley have not forgotten that
till very lately the Administration of India was almost entirely
in their hands, and they look upon their declining fortunes as
neither deserved nor irremediable. Their historical status is that
of descendants of those Tartar and Persian and Afghan conquerors
who have at various times invaded Hindustan from the North-West,
or of the Hindu converts, principally Rajputs or Pathans, made by
these. Their race, indeed, is nowhere pure, except in the case
of a few princely and noble families, but the tradition of their
origin remains intact, and is at the same time their weakness and
their strength--their strength, inasmuch as it supplies them with
a certain standard of honour beneficial to all societies; their
weakness, inasmuch as it has given them prejudices against the
ordinary means of living open to all the world.
The pride of conquest is the bane of all Mohammedan societies
sprung from Northern Asia, and the Mohammedans of India form no
exception. The Moguls never condescended to trade, but either
settled on the land or took service, civil or military, under
government; and their descendants are still swayed by the same
proud instincts. Their misfortunes in India came upon them in
successive waves. Forced by the Mahratta wars into an alliance
with the East India Company, the Mogul Emperors became early
dependent on these; and with the gradual absorption of the
Delhi Monarchy, the exclusive privilege of rule departed from
the Mohammedan caste--not all at once, but by degrees as new
regulations were enacted and a new system introduced. The first to
suffer were the landowners. By a certain fiscal measure, known as
the “resumptions,” requiring all holders of lands to show their
title deeds, the Mohammedans, who often held by prescription
rather than by written grant, lost largely of their estates, and
so were reduced to poverty. Next, the military services were in
great degree cut off for them by the extinction of the native
armies. And, lastly, the Act, changing the official language from
Persian and Hindustani to English, took from them their still
leading position in the civil employment. The Mohammedans had up
to this more than held their own with the Hindus, as Hindustani
was their vernacular, and Persian the language of their classics;
but in English they were at a distinct disadvantage, for that was
already the language of commerce, and so of the educated Hindus.
Nor could English be learned except at the secular schools, to
which Mohammedans were averse from sending their sons as tending
to irreligion. The sources, therefore, of their employment were on
every side curtailed, and a growing poverty has been ever since
the natural result. The military revolt of 1857, which in Oude and
at Delhi assumed a specially Mohammedan aspect, completed their
disfavour with the English Government, and with it their material
decline.
At the same time, owing to circumstances which I have never
heard fully explained, it is an admitted fact that numerically
the Mohammedans of Northern India have been and are a rapidly
increasing body. This may have been due at times to extensions
of British territory, or to conversion among the lower castes of
Hindus, or to other causes; but it is certain that, whereas in old
calculations the Indian Mohammedans were placed roughly at thirty
millions, and more recently by Dr. Hunter at forty millions, they
are now by the last census acknowledged to number fifty millions
of souls, although the increase of the general population of India
has been not at all in like proportion. With regard to their
actual position, therefore, we are faced with the unsatisfactory
phenomenon in Northern India of a vast community growing yearly
more numerous, and at the same time less prosperous; of a community
owning the instincts and the traditions of administration
excluded yearly more and more from the administration; and of a
community which has good grounds for tracing its misfortunes to
the unfavourable conditions imposed upon them by the Imperial
Government. The Mohammedans of Northern India, there is no
denying it, are restless and dissatisfied, and the only question
is in what form their repressed energy, fired by misfortune and
threatened with despair, is likely to find its vent. It may be in
two ways--for their own and the general good, or for their own and
the general harm; and I believe that at the present moment it lies
largely within the power of those who rule India to guide it to the
former and turn it from the latter.
All who are responsible for tranquillity in India must be aware
that there are influences at work, both within the country and
beyond its borders, adverse to that tranquillity, and that at no
time have these been more active than within the last few years,
or engaged on ground more carefully prepared to receive them by
the unwisdom of English policy. I am not, and have never been,
an alarmist about Russian invasion. Viewed as a power hostile to
India, Russia is and may for ever remain innocuous, and I should
view with equanimity her approach to the Hindu Kush, or even to
the actual frontier, were it impossible for her to appear there
as a friend. But as a friend I fear her. If our selfish system of
government for our own and not for India’s good remains unchanged;
if we do nothing to secure Indian loyalty; if we refuse to give to
the people that assurance of ultimate self-government which shall
enable them to await in patience the realization of their hopes;
if we continue to treat them as enemies subdued, as slaves to work
for us, as men devoid of rights--then it is certain that within a
given time all the external world will appear to the Indians under
a friendly guise, and Russia as being the nearest, under the most
friendly.
Nor can it be denied that under present circumstances the Czar’s
Government has much to offer which the people of India might be
excused for thinking twice before they refused. The Russian,
himself an Oriental, would be probably less hateful as a master
than our unsympathizing official Englishman. But it is far from
certain that it would be at all as a master that he would present
himself to Indian hopes. He might well appear as an ally, a
liberator from the deadly embrace of our financial system, a friend
of liberty, sound economy, and material progress. Who is to say
that Russia should not, in exchange for a new commercial pact
with herself, offer to establish India in complete Home Rule, and
thus outbid us in the popular affection? It would not be hard to
persuade India that she would gain by the change, and, Englishman
as I am, I am not quite convinced that she would on all points lose
by it. In any case, it might well be that men would risk something
in the desire of change, knowing that at worst it would not be much
worse for them than now.
Nor is there any section of the community to which this kind of
argument would apply more strongly than the Mohammedan. The present
order of things is distinctly threatening them with ruin, while
just outside the frontier, and almost within hand’s reach of them,
live men of their own race and faith who are still self-ruled.
What could be more natural than that they should look to these for
support and succour, or to the still stronger Power beyond, if it
should present itself as, in any special manner, their religious
protector? Our own political unwisdom of the last few years has
made this for the first time a possibility; and what was a mere
chimera in the last generation is rapidly becoming a practical
danger.
Whatever may have been the defects of the old Ottoman alliance,
there is no question that it was popular in Mohammedan India, that
it symbolized the friendship of England for the outside world of
Islam, and that it left to Russia the invidious post of Islam’s
chief enemy. For this reason the recent Afghan war, in its earlier
stages, was condoned, it being understood as an indirect repulse
of the Northern Power; and it was not till later that it was
looked upon with general disfavour. But the doubtful arrangements
of the Berlin Treaty, the discreditable acquisition of Cyprus and
the abandonment of Tunis--when these things became slowly to be
understood--operated a change in men’s minds, and prepared them
for still stronger reprobations, when, for the first time, England
showed herself distinctly the aggressor in Egypt.
In spite of the illusions of Ministers on the subject, or the
subtleties to which they had recourse, it is beyond a doubt that
the Mohammedans of India wholly sympathized with Arabi during the
war; that they were disgusted with the false issues raised in
connection with the Sultan’s proclamation of his rebellion; and
that for the last two years Russia has ceased to hold with them the
position of the most dangerous enemy their faith has to fear. I do
not say that as yet the distrust is absolute. No little loyalty
still survives for the English Crown as contrasted with the English
Ministry; but it is quite certain that the history of Egypt’s ruin
since the war, and the apparent design of our Government to destroy
all that is best and foster all that is least good in Islam, is
working on all sides a change. In the decay of Constantinople
the Moslem world is looking more than ever for a champion; and
if England refuses the office it may well be offered to another
Christian Power.
This, I say, is one way in which Mohammedan India may be taught
to seek its salvation from accumulating evils. The other--and
to my mind the far more hopeful way--it is in the power of our
Government still to encourage them to choose. Three years ago I
pointed out, in a book entitled “The Future of Islam,” the view
which Indian Mohammedans took of her Majesty’s duties towards them
in connection with her assumption of the Mogul title; and, while
I was in India last winter, I had the satisfaction of finding
my statement of their case fully accepted by those whom it most
concerned. The Indian mulvis, Shiah as well as Sunni, held that
her Majesty, in making herself Empress of India, had accepted a
legal responsibility toward the Mohammedan community which involved
a distinct obligation of protection in return for their loyalty,
especially in such matters as the administration of their religious
trusts, the furtherance of their education, and the arrangements
connected with their pilgrimage; and they had even caused a
translation of my statement to be published in Hindustani.
With regard to religious trusts, I found everywhere complaint
of their being misapplied. It appears that at the time of the
_resumptions_, many of these were confiscated on the arbitrary
ground of defect in title, and others later on apparently no ground
at all but public convenience. The locally notorious case of the
Mohsin trust in Bengal has now been in part remedied, but it is
worth quoting as a case which the Government has been forced to
acknowledge, and it has been cited to me as an example of numerous
cases less well known in which similar injustice still exists.
In this, a large property was bequeathed by a rich Mohammedan
explicitly for pious uses, yet for many years the income held in
trust by the Government was devoted, not to any Mohammedan purpose
at all, but to the education of Hindus. This, I say, has been
acknowledged; but I have been repeatedly informed that sufficient
property is still in Government hands to satisfy, if it were
devoted to the uses originally intended, all the pressing needs
of Mohammedan education; and I have the authority of Dr. Leitner,
Principal of the Lahore Government College, for stating that in the
Punjab alone _wakaf_ property to the value of many thousand pounds
yearly is being officially misapplied.
Of the pilgrimage, I will only say that the need of organization
in the shipment of pilgrims is still strongly demanded, and of
protection while on their journey. Something has been, indeed,
done in the last three years, but exceedingly little; and the
Indian Mohammedans regard such protection as a duty of the Imperial
Government, made more than ever necessary by the growing abuses
connected with the quarantine and other vexatious regulations at
Jeddah.
Again, with regard to their education, the case of the Mohammedans
is this: Like the Catholics in England, they are extremely attached
to their religion, and anxious that their children should inherit
in its purity a blessing to which they themselves were born; and
they consider that a merely secular education, such as is offered
by the State, does not suffice for their need. In no country in
the world is the position of a teacher towards his pupil a more
powerful one than in India; and the Mohammedans see that at the
Government schools and colleges the masters are, almost without
exception, English or Hindu. The great mass of the orthodox,
therefore, hold aloof from these, and the consequence has been
that they find themselves deprived of nearly all State aid in
their education, and, for the more rigid, of all public education
whatsoever. It is of course cast in their teeth by their opponents
that this is mere fanaticism and prejudice; that they refuse to
learn English out of disloyalty, and that they desire no progress
and no modern instruction. But, whatever may have been the case in
former days, I can confidently assert that it is certainly not true
now; and I hold the position taken by the Indian mulvis to be an
unassailable one in justice, or on any other ground than the theory
that all religion is pernicious and should be discouraged by the
State. I do not say that the State in India has taken its stand
publicly on this ground, but in practice its action with regard
to public education affects Mohammedans in no other way. This,
therefore, is a point on which the Imperial Government may, if it
will, intervene as a protector, and in which its action would be at
once appreciated by its Mohammedan subjects, and be recognized by
them as a title to their loyalty.
Lastly, I would repeat what I have said elsewhere as to the special
nature of the connection between the political and the religious
organization of all Moslem societies. Mohammedans look to the
government under which they live as a fountain of authority; and
they expect that authority to be used; and it is useless to repeat
to them that the Government is impartial to all religions and
indifferent to their own. Indifference with them is tantamount
to neglect of duty; and as such the Mohammedans of India regard
the present abstention of the English Government. There are
many liberal-minded men among our high officials, and not a few
friends of Islam. But the tide of official movement is not in
this direction; and the general feeling is indifference. What I
mean is that I would have the matter taken up with vigour, as an
Imperial duty, and not in Oude only and the North-West, but in
every province where the Mohammedans are a numerous community. The
advancement of their education, their encouragement in commercial
and industrial pursuits, and a faithful protection of their
religious interests abroad, will secure to the English Crown the
renewed trust of its Mohammedan subjects. The neglect of these
things, and a prosecution of the present evil policy of doing harm
to Islam, will secure beyond redemption their disloyalty. It is a
thing seriously to consider and decide while time is yet given. It
soon may be wholly too late, for nothing is more certain than that
the Indian Mohammedans, like those elsewhere, are in a crisis of
their history; and that, by disregarding their just complaints,
we are allowing griefs to grow which will some day overwhelm us
with confusion. “England,” if I may be allowed to repeat what I
said three years ago, “should fulfil the trust she has accepted
by developing, not destroying, the existing elements of good in
Asia. She cannot destroy Islam nor dissolve her own connection
with her. Therefore, in God’s name, let her take Islam by the hand
and encourage her boldly in the path of virtue.” This, in spite of
the victory of force in Egypt, is still the only wise and worthy
course.[19]
On the whole, the intellectual and religious aspects of India under
English rule are what I found there of most hope, and I am glad
to think that they could hardly have been witnessed under other
domination than our own.
FOOTNOTE:
[19] Much of what is here recommended as England’s duty towards
Islam has within the last two years been taken to heart by our
rulers, and adopted as a part of English policy. It is only to
be regretted that in India the motive seems to have been the
encouragement of Mohammedan loyalty as a counterpoise to the Hindu
movement for self-government, 1909.