(2) half of its vocabulary; (3)
all that was best in the character and mentality of its population,
seeing that, from the Middle Ages to the Revolution of 1789, all the
reformers who laboured for its enfranchisement--Albigensians, Vaudois,
Calvinists, and Camisards--were probably descendants of the Saracens. It
was nothing less than the total annexation of France to Morocco."
Meanwhile, "it has become the fashion for fervent (Egyptian)
nationalists to go to Spain and meditate in the gardens of the Alcazar
of Seville or in the patios of the Alhambra of Granada on the defunct
splendours of western Islam."[101]

Even more grotesque are the rhapsodies of the Hindu wing of this Golden
Age school. These Hindu enthusiasts far outdo the wildest flights of
their Moslem fellows. They solemnly assert that Hindustan is the nursery
and home of all true religion, philosophy, culture, civilization,
science, invention, and everything else; and they aver that when India's
present regrettable eclipse is past (an eclipse of course caused
entirely by English rule) she is again to shine forth in her glory for
the salvation of the whole world. Employing to the full the old adage
that there is nothing new under the sun, they have "discovered" in the
Vedas and other Hindu sacred texts "irrefutable" evidence that the
ancient Hindu sages anticipated all our modern ideas, including such
up-to-date matters as bomb-dropping aeroplanes and the League of
Nations.[102]

All this rhapsodical laudation of the past will, in the long run, prove
futile. The East, like the West, has its peculiar virtues; but the East
also has its special faults, and it is the faults which, for the last
thousand years, have been gaining on the virtues, resulting in
backwardness, stagnation, and inferiority. To-day the East is being
penetrated--and quickened--by the West. The outcome will never be
complete Westernization in the sense of a mere wholesale copying and
absolute transformation; the East will always remain fundamentally
itself. But it will be a new self, the result of a true assimilation of
Western ideas. The reactionaries can only delay this process, and
thereby prolong the Orient's inferiority and weakness.

Nevertheless, the reactionary attitude, though unintelligent, is
intelligible. Westernization hurts too many cherished prejudices and
vested interests not to arouse chronic resistance. This resistance would
occur even if Western influences were all good an