world failed to profit by this
respite. Plunged in lethargy, contemptuous of the European
"Misbelievers," and accepting defeats as the inscrutable will of Allah,
Islam continued to live its old life, neither knowing nor caring to know
anything about Western ideas or Western progress.

Such was the decrepit Moslem world which faced nineteenth-century
Europe, energized by the Industrial Revolution, armed as never before by
modern science and invention which had unlocked nature's secrets and
placed hitherto-undreamed-of weapons in its aggressive hands. The result
was a foregone conclusion. One by one, the decrepit Moslem states fell
before the Western attack, and the whole Islamic world was rapidly
partitioned among the European Powers. England took India and Egypt,
Russia crossed the Caucasus and mastered Central Asia, France conquered
North Africa, while other European nations grasped minor portions of the
Moslem heritage. The Great War witnessed the final stage in this process
of subjugation. By the terms of the treaties which marked its close,
Turkey was extinguished and not a single Mohammedan state retained
genuine independence. The subjection of the Moslem world was
complete--on paper.

On paper! For, in its very hour of apparent triumph, Western domination
was challenged as never before. During those hundred years of Western
conquest a mighty internal change had been coming over the Moslem
world. The swelling tide of Western aggression had at last moved the
"immovable" East. At last Islam became conscious of its decrepitude, and
with that consciousness a vast ferment, obscure yet profound, began to
leaven the 250,000,000 followers of the Prophet from Morocco to China
and from Turkestan to the Congo. The first spark was fittingly struck in
the Arabian desert, the cradle of Islam. Here at the opening of the
nineteenth century, arose the Wahabi movement for the reform of Islam,
which presently kindled the far-flung "Mohammedan Revival," which in its
turn begat the movement known as "Pan-Islamism." Furthermore, athwart
these essentially internal movements there came pouring a flood of
external stimuli from the West--ideas such as parliamentary government,
nationalism, scientific education, industrialism, and even ultra-modern
concepts like feminism, socialism, Bolshevism. Stirred by the
interaction of all these novel forces and spurred by the ceaseless
pressure of European aggression, the Moslem world roused more and