THE MOHAMMEDAN QUESTION It is never well to have travelled from Dan to Beersheba and to record that one has found all barren; and in my present chapter I shall endeavour to paint the brighter side of the India which I saw last winter. The material misery of her peasantry has been enough described, and the bitter feeling of her townsmen educated to a sense of their fallen estate as a conquered people; and it remains to me to show the compensating good which by the mysterious law which rules all human things is being born out of their otherwise unredeemed misfortunes. The apologists of British rule boast that they have given India peace, and peace doubtless is a noble gift; but it has given her far more than this. What really deserves all Indian thanks, and is indeed an inestimable acquisition, because it contains within it the germs of a reconquest of all the rest, is that it has given her liberty of thought. This is a new possession which India never had, and never perhaps would have had, but for English influences, and it is difficult not to see in it a gift undesigned, but which, like the last treasure issuing from Pandora’s box, is destined to transform the curse of conquest into the blessing of a wider hope. I am not one of those who love the East only in its picturesque aspects, and I have no quarrel with Europe because it has caused the East to change. I note, indeed, the destruction of much that was good and noble and of profit in the past by the unthinking and often selfish action of Western methods; but I do not wish the past back in its integrity, or To speak plainly, the ancient order of Asiatic things, beautiful as it was, had in it the germs of death, for the one reason that it did not change. India especially, in old days, did not change. Conquerors came and went; dynasties rose and perished; and years of peace and war, of plenty and of famine, trod closely on each other’s heels, while men were born and lived and died in the same thoughts. It was the natural life, the remnant of a society which still followed the law of instinct rather than of reason; but even in the natural world health must be attended with growth or it will turn into decay. The intellectual growth of India by the middle of last century had long stopped; and there was no sign anywhere, when our English traders first appeared, of a new beginning. Thought had resolved itself into certain formulae from which there seemed no escape; and the brain of the body politic, unused and oppressed We have seen the ultimate result of such inaction in other lands, in Asia Minor, in Persia, and, till within recent memory, in countries nearer home. It was seen everywhere in Europe in the Middle Ages, and seems to be a condition natural to all human societies at a certain stage of their growth. If too long prolonged it would seem they die, leaving their places empty, as in Babylonia, or being absorbed in other more vigorous societies, as the Byzantines were absorbed by the then vigorous Turks. In almost every case the intellectual awakening has been quickened from without, by the presence near it of an intelligence more living than its own and generally hostile, and it may safely be affirmed that the action and reaction of nations on each other’s intellectual life is in itself a natural and necessary law of their development. Thus Mediaeval Europe owed the new birth of its thought to the invasion in the eighth century of the cultivated and chivalrous Moors through Spain; and the Catholic Church reformed its lax discipline, not four hundred years ago, in the presence of advancing hosts from Western Asia. Something of the same process, therefore, may be also traced in the counter-wave which has now for the last hundred years and more been driving Europe back in menace to the East. Asia has been awakened by it at last to her danger, and is slowly informing herself with the victorious reason of the West, and assimilating to her needs that intellectual daring which is her adversary’s strength. And nowhere more so than in India. After its long sleep the Indian intellect is rising everywhere refreshed, and is attempting each day more boldly to strike out new lines of speculation on the very subjects where All this India indubitably owes to England. Nor is there any point on which the intellectual methods of the West have been brought more strongly to bear in Asia than on its creeds. The ancient monotony of religious practice divorced from religious intelligence, is slowly giving place to intrusive questionings which will not be appeased by mere formulae, and men of all faiths are discussing and reasoning where a hundred years ago they only asserted. We have witnessed within the last generation something of this everywhere in Western Asia, but in India it is perhaps still more marked; and it seems certain that, whatever evil may have been there wrought to other interests, the interests of its religions will have been served by our rule, unconsciously, perhaps, and unwillingly, but none the less really. Paradoxical as it may sound, the wholly secular rule of aliens, whose boast it is that they have established no State creed, will be found to have renewed the life of faiths and given them a stronger, because a more intelligent, mode of being. The spiritual believer will be strengthened; and the very pagan will be no longer “suckled in a creed outworn,” but in living beliefs which will seek to exercise a moral influence on his conduct more and more for good. To speak precisely, what I see will be the outcome of such education as England is giving to the Indian races is a reformation of each of their several religious faiths, leading to purer thought in their followers, and above all to purer practice. The creeds of India, speaking generally, are four: the Hindu, which under various forms embraces four-fifths of the whole population; the Mohammedan, which is principally powerful in the North of India Of these, Hinduism alone would seem to be a truly indigenous faith, or one wholly in harmony with the instincts of the rural population; and it is impossible for a traveller not to be struck with the tenacity of the ancient superstitions which are its groundwork. Hinduism belongs to an older order of religions than any now practised in the West. It is not a religion at all in our modern sense of being a strict code of morals based upon any revealed or written law; but, like the popular beliefs of ancient Greece and Rome, is rather a mythology resting on traditional reverence for certain objects in certain places. It is essentially national and local. It does not seek to embrace humanity, but is a privilege of the Indian races only; and it cannot be practised in its purity elsewhere than in India. India, according to Brahminical teaching, is a sacred land, and there alone can be the shrines of its gods. There alone man can lead a perfect life, or worship with spiritual profit. Certain localities are specially holy—not, as with the Christians or the Mohammedans, on account of the tombs of holy men, but in themselves as being the chosen homes of the divine powers. All rivers in India thus are sacred, precisely as were groves in ancient Italy, and on their banks the temples of the gods are built and spiritual influences felt. From an aesthetic point of view nothing can be more seductive to a stranger from the West, or more surprising, than the spectacle of Hindu worship at one of these ancient shrines—the processions of women to some lonely grove by the water-side on holiday afternoons with their offerings of rice and At the same time it is beyond a doubt that among the cultivated Brahmins, who have always acknowledged a higher philosophy than that of the people, Thus we see the modern Brahmins proclaiming the morality of unselfishness in no other language than that in which Christian divines proclaim it, and making it peculiarly their own. They have the same teaching as these about truth and justice and integrity, and appeal in the same way to conscience as a guide. They choose what is best, and make it harmonize with their own best traditions, and the result is a general elevation of tone in the upper ranks of life which presages a corresponding reform in the lower. This sometimes shows itself, as must also naturally be, in extravagance. There is a tendency always in such movements to imitate servilely; and so we Something of the same process may be observed in the case of the Parsis. These would hardly require mention as an Indian sect at all were it not My own special attention was naturally most directed to the Mohammedans. Mohammedanism, as is well known, entered India from two separate sides and under two separate conditions. Its first appearance was on the western seaboard in the shape of Arab traders, who came with the double mission of propagating the faith and making money. These were peaceful preachers, who relied for success not upon the sword but upon the power of persuasion, and the Mohammedanism implanted in this form is still to be found on the west coast, in the Kokhnis of Bombay, the Moplas of Malabar, and the Moormen, or Moors (“os Moros” of the Portuguese) of Ceylon. They are a busy, prosperous people—shopkeepers, pedlars, jewellers, or plying certain handicrafts, and notably that of house-building. It was extremely interesting to me to find at Colombo the descendants of the ancient Arab settlers of the eighth and ninth centuries still keeping up the commercial tradition of Arabia intact. They number in the whole island of Ceylon about a quarter of a million, and are among the most prosperous of its inhabitants. I found them an old-fashioned community, more occupied with this world than with the next, and only to a very small degree affected by modern thought. Indeed, such change as was to be noticed among them was of as recent growth as the As I crossed from Ceylon to the mainland and left the coast I first came in contact with the other and more common Mussulman type—the descendants of the northern invaders—men wholly distinct from the busy traders just described, and neither prosperous nor advancing. The Mohammedans of the inland districts of the Madras Presidency are the poorest in India. They represent the extreme wave of Mogul conquest southwards, long ago spent and now receding. They are the descendants, not of preachers and converts, but of the garrisons of the north, and their occupation of government gone, they are fast dying out from want of a means of living. The condition of the small Mohammedan communities of The stronghold of Mohammedan India is the North-West, and there Islam is far from hopeless or disposed to perish. Intellectually the equals, and morally the superiors of their Hindu neighbours, the Mohammedans of the Upper Ganges Valley have not forgotten that till very lately the Administration of India was almost entirely in their hands, and they look upon their declining fortunes as neither deserved nor irremediable. Their historical status is that of descendants of those Tartar and Persian and Afghan conquerors who have at various times invaded Hindustan from the North-West, or of the Hindu converts, principally Rajputs or Pathans, made by these. Their race, indeed, is nowhere pure, except in the case of a few princely and noble families, but the tradition of their origin remains intact, and is at the same time their weakness and their strength—their The pride of conquest is the bane of all Mohammedan societies sprung from Northern Asia, and the Mohammedans of India form no exception. The Moguls never condescended to trade, but either settled on the land or took service, civil or military, under government; and their descendants are still swayed by the same proud instincts. Their misfortunes in India came upon them in successive waves. Forced by the Mahratta wars into an alliance with the East India Company, the Mogul Emperors became early dependent on these; and with the gradual absorption of the Delhi Monarchy, the exclusive privilege of rule departed from the Mohammedan caste—not all at once, but by degrees as new regulations were enacted and a new system introduced. The first to suffer were the landowners. By a certain fiscal measure, known as the “resumptions,” requiring all holders of lands to show their title deeds, the Mohammedans, who often held by prescription rather than by written grant, lost largely of their estates, and so were reduced to poverty. Next, the military services were in great degree cut off for them by the extinction of the native armies. And, lastly, the Act, changing the official language from Persian and Hindustani to English, took from them their still leading position in the civil employment. The Mohammedans had up to this more than held their own with the Hindus, as Hindustani was their vernacular, and Persian the language of their classics; but in English they were at a distinct disadvantage, for that was already the language of commerce, and At the same time, owing to circumstances which I have never heard fully explained, it is an admitted fact that numerically the Mohammedans of Northern India have been and are a rapidly increasing body. This may have been due at times to extensions of British territory, or to conversion among the lower castes of Hindus, or to other causes; but it is certain that, whereas in old calculations the Indian Mohammedans were placed roughly at thirty millions, and more recently by Dr. Hunter at forty millions, they are now by the last census acknowledged to number fifty millions of souls, although the increase of the general population of India has been not at all in like proportion. With regard to their actual position, therefore, we are faced with the unsatisfactory phenomenon in Northern India of a vast community growing yearly more numerous, and at the same time less prosperous; of a community owning the instincts and the traditions of administration excluded yearly more and more from the administration; and of a community which has good grounds for tracing its misfortunes to the unfavourable conditions imposed upon them by the Imperial Government. The Mohammedans of Northern India, there is no denying it, are restless and dissatisfied, and the only question is in what form their repressed energy, fired All who are responsible for tranquillity in India must be aware that there are influences at work, both within the country and beyond its borders, adverse to that tranquillity, and that at no time have these been more active than within the last few years, or engaged on ground more carefully prepared to receive them by the unwisdom of English policy. I am not, and have never been, an alarmist about Russian invasion. Viewed as a power hostile to India, Russia is and may for ever remain innocuous, and I should view with equanimity her approach to the Hindu Kush, or even to the actual frontier, were it impossible for her to appear there as a friend. But as a friend I fear her. If our selfish system of government for our own and not for India’s good remains unchanged; if we do nothing to secure Indian loyalty; if we refuse to give to the people that assurance of ultimate self-government which shall enable them to await in patience the realization of their hopes; if we continue to treat them as enemies subdued, as slaves to work for us, as men devoid of rights—then it is certain that within a given time all the external world will appear to the Indians under a friendly guise, and Russia as being the nearest, under the most friendly. Nor can it be denied that under present circumstances the Czar’s Government has much to offer which the people of India might be excused for thinking twice before they refused. The Russian, Nor is there any section of the community to which this kind of argument would apply more strongly than the Mohammedan. The present order of things is distinctly threatening them with ruin, while just outside the frontier, and almost within hand’s reach of them, live men of their own race and faith who are still self-ruled. What could be more natural than that they should look to these for support and succour, or to the still stronger Power beyond, if it should present itself as, in any special manner, their religious protector? Our own political unwisdom of the last few years has made this for the first time a possibility; and what was a mere chimera in the last generation is rapidly becoming a practical danger. Whatever may have been the defects of the old Ottoman alliance, there is no question that it was popular in Mohammedan India, that it symbolized In spite of the illusions of Ministers on the subject, or the subtleties to which they had recourse, it is beyond a doubt that the Mohammedans of India wholly sympathized with Arabi during the war; that they were disgusted with the false issues raised in connection with the Sultan’s proclamation of his rebellion; and that for the last two years Russia has ceased to hold with them the position of the most dangerous enemy their faith has to fear. I do not say that as yet the distrust is absolute. No little loyalty still survives for the English Crown as contrasted with the English Ministry; but it is quite certain that the history of Egypt’s ruin since the war, and the apparent design of our Government to destroy all that is best and foster all that is least good in Islam, is working on all sides a change. In the decay of Constantinople the Moslem world is looking more than ever for a champion; and if England refuses the office it may well be offered to another Christian Power. This, I say, is one way in which Mohammedan India may be taught to seek its salvation from With regard to religious trusts, I found everywhere complaint of their being misapplied. It appears that at the time of the resumptions, many of these were confiscated on the arbitrary ground of defect in title, and others later on apparently no ground at all but public convenience. The locally notorious case of the Mohsin trust in Bengal has now been in part remedied, but it is worth quoting as a case which the Government has been forced to acknowledge, and it has been cited to me as an example of numerous cases less well known in which similar injustice still exists. In this, a large property was bequeathed by a rich Mohammedan explicitly for pious uses, yet for many years the income held in trust by the Government was devoted, not to any Of the pilgrimage, I will only say that the need of organization in the shipment of pilgrims is still strongly demanded, and of protection while on their journey. Something has been, indeed, done in the last three years, but exceedingly little; and the Indian Mohammedans regard such protection as a duty of the Imperial Government, made more than ever necessary by the growing abuses connected with the quarantine and other vexatious regulations at Jeddah. Again, with regard to their education, the case of the Mohammedans is this: Like the Catholics in England, they are extremely attached to their religion, and anxious that their children should inherit in its purity a blessing to which they themselves were born; and they consider that a merely secular education, such as is offered by the State, does not suffice for their need. In no country in the world is the position of a teacher towards his pupil a more powerful one than in India; and the Mohammedans see that at the Government schools and colleges the masters are, almost without exception, English or Hindu. The great mass of the orthodox, therefore, hold aloof from these, and the consequence has been that they find themselves deprived of nearly all State aid in their education, and, for the more rigid, of all public education whatsoever. It is of course Lastly, I would repeat what I have said elsewhere as to the special nature of the connection between the political and the religious organization of all Moslem societies. Mohammedans look to the government under which they live as a fountain of authority; and they expect that authority to be used; and it is useless to repeat to them that the Government is impartial to all religions and indifferent to their own. Indifference with them is tantamount to neglect of duty; and as such the Mohammedans of India regard the present abstention of the English Government. There are many liberal-minded men among our high officials, and not a few friends of Islam. But the tide of official movement is not in this direction; and the general feeling is indifference. What I mean is that I would have the matter taken up with vigour, as an Imperial duty, and not in Oude only and the North-West, On the whole, the intellectual and religious aspects of India under English rule are what I found there of most hope, and I am glad to think that they could hardly have been witnessed under other domination than our own. |