Nor are the schools the only things mainly, if not wholly, due to the occupation that offend Moslem sentiment, and thus retard progress and decrease the sympathy there might be between the people and their rulers. I can only just mention two or three of these without staying to comment upon them, as perhaps the most active among many others. The sale and consumption of intoxicating drinks in the open streets, the almost unchecked promenading of brazen-faced European women in the busiest and most crowded thoroughfares; the open eating, drinking, and smoking during the Ramadan fast; quarantine and other sanitary measures frequently trenching upon Moslem sentiment, such as restrictions upon the pilgrimage and the holding of the religious festivals of the people. These things are to the Egyptian as the breaking of the Sabbath to the Scotchman. What would the Scotch Sabbatarians say if a number of Englishmen were to settle among them, and insist upon carrying on business, opening the theatres, and breaking the Sabbath in a dozen other openly offensive ways? Would they be considered "unreasonable" if they protested? Would they be regarded as "ungrateful" because they did not thank the invaders for the financial benefit they were conferring on the country? Yet when the Egyptians protest, however faintly, against such outrages upon their sentiments, they are told that they are "unreasonable," "backward," "unenlightened," "narrow-minded," and "fanatical."
There is another influence for evil to which my reference to Sabbatarianism naturally leads me--the Christian missions and their agents. Of the magnificent social and humanitarian work done by Christian missions and Christian missionaries in India no one has a higher opinion than I have. Years ago I spent a couple of days in one of the wildest parts of the Bengal Presidency as the guest of a grand old man who, with his wife--a worthy mate for him--were dwelling, as they had been for years, among the semi-savage tribes of the jungle, isolated from all the comforts and conveniences of civilisation, seeing no European faces other than their own save once or twice in the year when the Commissioner made his annual rounds. A grand old couple--labouring with endless self-devotion for the good of the stolid, stunted-brained, almost naked people, more than half savage in nature and habit, and by dint of tedious toil and never-resting effort lifting some few of these out of the depths, and winning them to humanity. I have met many men and many women in my life, but none that have claimed from me a more sincere or lasting respect than these. But there are missionaries and missionaries; and in Moslem lands there are some who do much ill, and not less by their speech than by the literature they circulate. In this they are backed up by missionary and other journals, which take a pleasure in representing Islam as a religion that inculcates bigotry and fanaticism. I have myself heard a missionary undertake to prove to Mahomedan hearers that unless they hated Christians they were no better than infidels. Taking passages from the Koran, ignoring their context and the teaching and interpretation placed upon them by the orthodox Ulema, he had little difficulty in apparently justifying his promise, with the result that some of his hearers went away filled for the first time with the conception that it was their duty to hate Christians. Such incidents are by no means rare, and it would be difficult to estimate the mischief they do. A few years ago the late well-known Canon MacColl flooded the Press at home for a brief time with speeches and writings of this kind. Every word of what he wrote was reproduced in oriental languages, and did far more to excite fanaticism than any of the most inflammatory articles that have ever appeared in any portion of the Moslem Press. How often have Pan-Islamists, advocating friendship with England and other European nations as a means of advancement for Moslems, been met with the reply, "But they themselves say that it is our duty to hate them"! So the bigotry that takes unholy pleasure in misrepresenting the truth reacts with fatal effect upon the cause it pretends to serve.