Page:Ossendowski - The Fire of Desert Folk.djvu/153

Rh message and believe it has a serious and true character, while others, especially among our group here, are of a different mind, as Abd Allah was certainly a heretic and a political adventurer."

"And what do you, Imam, think about the eighth period and the new Messiah?" I asked, as I nonchalantly lighted a cigarette, in order not to betray my emotion and curiosity. The mullah sat thinking profoundly, but, after a long silence, responded:

"I think that the time has come for all peoples to be free, to live their own life according to their particular faith and laws. Such a time has surely come, Sidi."

"I do not understand about what people the worthy scholar is speaking, as a great many nations believe in the Prophet."

The Kairween professor made a long answer to my query, from which I understood that for Islam Moslem nationalism does not exist. It recognizes only Moslems in one or another country with but slight differences in their specific moral laws. There is no such thing as pan-Arabism for an Arab, a Berber or a fellah; but they all foster and recognize a religious patriotism, which, in explosion, becomes a pan-Islamism and then overspreads and envelops the various Islamic peoples inhabiting the vast stretches of the earth from the Pacific and Indian Ocean westward to the Mediterranean and the Atlantic. I further gathered that the propaganda for liberation flows into Maghreb from Turkey, Egypt and Tripolitania and also, to my great astonishment, from Paris, though the professor did not indicate the exact sources and perhaps himself knew nothing about these. It was