Page:Olmstead - The New Arab Kingdoms.djvu/3



In the autumn of 1916, a bored newspaper correspondent at Washington amused his readers with an account of a new power, somewhere in Arabia, whose request for recognition had caused our Department of State no little search to discover its exact location. Shortly after, professional orientalists were afforded that first of all proofs that a state actually exists: stamps marked "Hijaz Post." Since then, the metropolitan papers have occasionally devoted two or three lines to the advance made by the sultan of that country east of the Jordan and little more has been contributed by our periodicals.

Prophecy has never been more at a discount than at the present, and yet we may venture the prediction that here we have an event of world meaning, that problems are raised which America must aid in settling, that the historians of the future may see in this event one of the most important results of the war. Americans have devoted little enough attention to the Near Eastern Question as a whole; the Arabian phase is virtually unknown.

What has happened is no less than the rebirth of Islam. We all know from our school books that Islam began with Mohammed in Mecca, that under his immediate successors it conquered the greater part of the civilized world, and that there was developed within the century a civilization without a contemporary rival. We may further remember that the original Arab rulers were supplanted by Persians, Moors, and Turks, and that the civilization was transformed and then began to decline. Here our knowledge is likely to end. Few of us realize that Islam is one of the most potent forces in the world today, that it counts its adherents by the hundred millions, that in the waste places of the earth it converts its hundreds where Christianity wins its tens, that its followers occupy a belt of the best territory on earth, extending from Morocco and the Sudan to China and the Philippines. What happens in Mecca becomes matter for more than amusement when we realize that hundreds of thousands of men under our own flag feel exactly the same sentiments toward that city that other millions of our fellow-citizens feel toward Rome.

Contrary to the general belief, the "Unspeakable Turk" has his good points. He is a soldier without superior, has much administrative