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George Horton's

TURKEY : THE BLIGHT OF ASIA

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EXCERPTS FROM TURKEY - THE BLIGHT OF ASIA

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From THE MAKING OF MUSTAPHA KHEMAL

    THE BUILDING UP of Mustapha Khemal by certain Christian countries was one of the unwisest, most pernicious and most dangerous deeds that Occidental diplomacy, intrigue and jealousy has ever perpetrated. It is a legend among Mohammedan peoples that the Turk is the "Sword of Allah," "the Defender of Islam," and "the Scourge of the Unbeliever." As he is the lowest of Mohammedans intellectually, with none, or at best few, of the graces and accomplishments of civilization, with no cultural history, the other disciples of the Prophet do not consider him as their intellectual or moral equal. [...] Even the other Mohammedans, who have been subjected to his rude and blighting sway, have continually fought to be freed from it, and have only joined him in common cause against the Christians.

    Of him, the historian Butler says:

    "The Goth might ravage Italy, but the Goth came forth purified from the flame, which he himself had kindled. The Saxon swept Britain, but the music of his Celtic heart softened his rough nature. Visigoth and Frank, Heruli and Vandal, blotted out their ferocity in the very light of the civilization they had striven to extinguish. Even the wildest Tartar from the Scythian waste was touched and softened in his wicker encampments, but the Turk, wherever his scimitar reached—degraded, defiled and defamed, blasting with eternal decay Roman, Latin civilization, until when all had gone he sat down satisfied with savagery to doze into hopeless decrepitude."

    But Mohammedans do not forget that it was the Turk who took the great and splendid city of Constantinople, the last bulwark of Europe against the devastating and enslaving hordes of Asia; that it was the Turk who firmly established himself in Europe on the field of Cossova; that it was the Turk who destroyed the flower of the Hungarian chivalry—twenty thousand together with their king—on the stricken field of Mohacz in 1526, and three years later arrived at the gates of Vienna, which he besieged; that a little over a hundred years later a Turkish horde again stormed the Austrian capital, which only the timely arrival of a Polish army saved.

    At the close of the Great War the Turk was beaten to his feet and his prestige ruined. "The Sword of Islam" had been broken. The victory over the Greeks, though with the aid of European officers and material, and the spectacular destruction of Smyrna with the massacre of its inhabitants, revived the legend of the conquering and avenging Turk. "The Sword of Islam" had been welded again, to conquer and destroy. The noise of that event resounded and is still echoing throughout the Moslem World, in Egypt, in India, in Northern Africa and in Syria. [...]

    That Oriental peoples believe that their opportunity will come from the dissensions and wars of Western nations, which they are watching with much interest and satisfaction, was expressed as early as 1907 by Yahya Siddyk, an Egyptian judge and writer of Mohammedan faith, who seems to have foreseen the Great War:

    "Behold these Powers ruining themselves in terrifying armaments; measuring each other’s strength with defiant glances; menacing each other; contracting alliances which continually break and presage those terrible shocks which overturn the world and cover it with ruins, fire and blood!"

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