Page:Christiaan Snouck Hurgronje - The Revolt in Arabia (1917).djvu/12



LL those interested in Mohammedan affairs were much surprised to learn, through a despatch from Cairo on June 22, 1916, that the Emir of Mecca had revolted from Turkish overlordship. Much speculation was indulged in regarding the causes for such an uprising and its probable or possible outcome; for there are few parts of the habitable globe about which the ordinary student of international affairs knows so little as he does about Arabia. Life there has remained in much of its mediæval primitiveness; and even scholars who are specially concerned about Mohammedanism, and about the several hundred millions of its devotees, are little better situated in