Page:The Rebirth Of Turkey 1923.pdf/45

 time when the Empire was one of the very few Moslem States which were able to interpret Moslem law independently of external pressure, and Islam looked as it had never looked before to its political leadership in Constantinople and its juridical leadership in Mecca. The Sultan was the trustee of that venerable Eastern civilization which was Islam's own. The Caliphate which Selim the Grim had lightly taken at Cairo in 1517, when Islam was powerful, was now in the days of Islam's political decline, becoming an actual and heavy responsibility. The position was not a hopeless one, for Indian Moslems who comprise some of the best brains in Islam, had shown in their accommodation to the fact of British India, that Moslem law is not inflexible. But for Moslems both within and without the Empire, the challenge which the Old Greeks had flung down, produced a position about as serious as can be imagined.

The Ottoman Empire was becoming the cockpit of an enormous arena whose slopes extended from the back hills of Java to the country towns of the United States. With the eyes of this worldwide audience upon them, a handful of Young Turks in Constantinople were beginning secretly to grope about after a way out of the apparent impasse in which they found themselves, after some formula which should adapt the Empire, not to the hot-*house Westernism of the Old Greeks, but to the maturer and healthier Westernism of England. Luckily, the fact of India's 70,000,000 Moslems had thrown the Caliph of Islam in Constantinople and the Emperor of India in London into intimate contact.