Page:The Rebirth Of Turkey 1923.pdf/60

 had his own imperialism to consider, made necessary though it was by the Eastern institution of the Caliphate, and his fear that his Arab populations would use the conference to air their secessionist program led him to quash the project. Pan-Islamism gave way to the new Pan-Turanian program under which Turkish and Tartar Moslems were to shelve the Arabs who had given Islam to the world, the Turkish tongue was to supplant Arabic as the sacred tongue of Islam, and all Arabic words were to be rooted out of the Turkish language. This proved too large a morsel for conservative Islam to swallow, and Pan-Turanianism prospered no more than Pan-Islamism. It did live, however, as a political project for welding the Tartar peoples against Orthodox Russia, for the Turkish ancestry runs deeply into Central Asia.

Much of this Islamic maneuvring was the work of sophisticated Islamic capitals. Old Turkish opinion itself continued to place its simple reliance in the institution of the Caliphate which had now become the repository of the most venerable of Moslem usages. To the more thoughtful of the Old Turks, it was a matter of profound re-assurance that the British Empire contained 100,000,000 Moslems to 80,000,000 Christians, and that the Emperor of India in London was in friendly contact with the Caliph. Those were the days when the Sheikh-ul-Islam in Constantinople was one of the last independent interpreters of Moslem law, and when the British Empire proudly called itself the greatest Moslem Power in the world.

But King Edward's first visit to Austria in 1903 disquieted Moslem opinion both in the Ottoman