ve elements in Mahomedan India that the
All-India Moslem League was founded in 1905, almost avowedly in
opposition to the subversive activities which the Indian National
Congress was beginning to develop. It was in this spirit, too, that the
influential deputation headed by the Agha Khan, who, though himself the
head of a dissenting and thoroughly unorthodox Mahomedan community
claiming descent from the Old Man of the Mountain, was then the
recognised political leader of the whole Indian Mahomedan community,
waited on Lord Minto to press upon the Government of India the Mahomedan
view of the political situation created by the Partition of Bengal, lest
political concessions should be hastily made to the Hindus which would
pave the way for the ascendancy of a Hindu majority equally dangerous to
the stability of British rule and to the interests of the Mahomedan
minority whose loyalty was beyond dispute. It was again in the same
spirit, and fortified by the promise which Lord Minto had on that
occasion given them, that they insisted, and insisted successfully, on
the principle of community representation being applied for their
benefit in the Indian Councils Act of 1909.

A new generation of young Mahomedans had nevertheless been growing up
who knew not Seyyid Ahmed and regarded his teachings as obsolete. The
lessons which they had learnt from their Western education were not his.
They were much more nearly those that the more ardent spirits amongst
the Hindus had imbibed, and they were ready to share with them the new
creed of Indian Nationalism in its most extreme form. Other
circumstances were tending to weaken the faith of the Mahomedan
community in the goodwill, not only of the Government of India, but of
the British Government. Even the most conservative Mahomedans were
disappointed and irritated by the revision of the Partition of Bengal in
1911 when the predominantly Mahomedan Province of Eastern Bengal,
created under Lord Curzon, was merged once more into a largely Hindu
Bengal. The more advanced Mahomedans had been stirred by the
revolutionary upheaval in Constantinople to seek contact with the
Turkish Nationalist leaders who now ruled the one great Mahomedan power
in the world, and they learnt from them to read into British foreign
policy a purpose of deliberate hostility to Islam itself inspired by
dread of the renewed vitality it might derive from the returning
consciousness in many Mahomedan countries of thei