CHAPTER VIII.
ISLAM AS A FACTOR-OF  THE PROBLEM.

IT is with reluctance that I approach this side of
the question. It is not desirable that the sub¬
ject be complicated or embittered by religious
animosities. But unfortunately these animosities do
exist and have always formed a primary and essential
feature in all the relations of the Turks with their
Christian subjects. A writer who styles himself
" Diplomatist," in a recent review article of consider¬
able merit,* with a stroke of the pen, disposes of this
phase of the subject by characterizing it as '' pure
moonshine." But real diplomatists do not find it so
easy to dispose of, nor do the great historians treat
it as moonshine. The fanatical gleam that I have
often caught in the eye of Turks and Kurds was
never suggestive to me of the mild rays of the lunar
orb, but seemed rather like a gleam from the political
Crescent, whose baleful influence dominates the East.
The question is not concerning the merits of
Mohammed or of Mohammedanism in the abstract.
I have a profound respect for the Prophet of Arabia,
who might have been another Apostle Paul, but for
the fact that the corrupt church of that day failed

^ New Review for January, 1895.

IIO