Page:The Rebirth Of Turkey 1923.pdf/51

 Old Turkish opinion in the capital and the larger provincial centers, which disliked Abdul Hamid the Sultan, but Abdul Hamid the Caliph was quite another matter. Under the Caliph, Moslem and non-Moslem were not equal. Non-Moslems had been given far more tolerant treatment under the Caliph than religious dissenters had sometimes been given under Christian rule in the West, but the tolerance which the Caliph guaranteed them did not make them the equals of Moslems.

Whether Moslem law was really thus inflexible was obviously a matter for Moslems themselves to determine, but the record of India's Moslems in accommodating themselves to British rule would have seemed to indicate otherwise. India's Moslems, however, were in touch with the Western world as the Old Turks were not. The very fact of British rule, not to mention their long contact with Hindus, had given India's Moslems a breadth of vision which Old Turkish opinion lacked. Old Turkish leadership embodied Islam at its best, but in the range of its experience it embodied Islam at its narrowest.

Meanwhile, the Rûm community whose relations with the Sultan-Caliph were still generally peaceful, had a very large source of strength outside the Empire. Had the Young Turks eventually proved successful in equalizing Moslem and non-Moslem in an Ottoman citizenry, the Rûm community might or might not have accepted the change and undertaken to work the newly Ottomanized Empire. But if the Young Turks failed, there were sources of outside strength available to the Oecumenical Patriarchate in Constantinople which would have broken