into the war the mullah of the principal mosque at
Damascus was told to announce _jihad_ against the British from his
pulpit on the following Friday in accordance with an order from the
Grand Mufti at Stamboul. The poor man appears to have jibbed
considerably and sent his family over the Nejd border to be out of reach
of Turkish persecution. Finally he decided to conform, but when he
climbed the steps of his "minbar" and scanned his congregation he saw a
group of German officers wearing tarboushes with a look of almost
porcine complacency. His fear fell from him in a gust of rage and he
spoke somewhat as follows: "I am ordered to proclaim _jihad_. A _jihad_,
as you know, is a Holy War to protect our Holy Places against infidels.
This being so, what are these infidel _pigs_ doing in our mosque?"

There was a most unseemly scuffle; the Turco-German contingent tried to
seize the mullah; the Arab congregation defended him strenuously from
arrest. In the confusion that worthy man got clear away and joined his
family in Nejd. _Jihad_ is incumbent on all Moslems if against infidel
aggression. We stood on the defensive when the Turks first attacked us
on the Canal, and when we finally overran Palestine and Syria it was in
co-operation with the Arabs, who have more right there than the Turks.

Those who forged the blade of this counterfeit _jihad_ could not temper
it in the flame of religious fervour, and it shattered against the
shield of religious tolerance and good faith: we make mistakes, but can
honestly claim those two virtues.

FOOTNOTES:

[Footnote A: "The Land of Uz," Macmillan.]

CHAPTER III

ITS STRENGTH AND WEAKNESS

To gauge the strength or weakness of pan-Islam as a world-force we may
best compare it with its great militant rival, the Christian Church,
choosing common ground as the only sound basis of comparison, and
remembering that it is pan-Islam we are examining rather than Islam
itself--the tree, not the root; and though we cannot study the one
without considering the other, Islam has already been extensively
discussed by men better qualified than myself to deal with it: the
requirements of this work only call for comparison so far as the
driving-power of pan-Islam is concerned as a material force.

First of all we must discard common factors. I set the great Shiah
schism against the Catholic Church (omitting the word "Roman" as a
contradiction in terms) and cancel both for the purpos