ower of the Ottoman Empire, but against the
Mahomedan religion all over the world by depriving the Sultan of Turkey
of the authority essential to the discharge of his office as Khalif or
spiritual head of Islam.

The agitation was at first very artificial, for the bulk of Indian
Mahomedans had until recent years known very little about and taken
still less interest in Turkey, and their loyalty had never wavered
during the war. Some of the leading Indian Mahomedans had indeed openly
disputed Sultan Abdul Hamid's claim to the Khalifate of Islam when he
first tried at the end of the last century to import his Pan-Islamic
propaganda into India. But the long delay on the part of the Allies in
formulating their Turkish peace terms allowed time for the movement to
grow and to carry with it the more fanatical element amongst Indian
Mahomedans. The Government of India tried in vain to allay Mahomedan
feeling by receiving deputations from the _Khilafat_ Association founded
to prosecute an intensified campaign in favour of Turkey, and professing
its own deep anxiety to procure what it called "a just peace with
Turkey," for which the Indian delegates to the War and to the Peace
Conferences in Europe had been constantly instructed to plead. The
greatest success which the _Khilafat_ agitators achieved was when Mr.
Gandhi allowed himself to be persuaded by them that the movement was a
splendid manifestation of religious faith, as he himself described it to
me. For, once satisfied that the cause which they had taken up was a
religious cause, he was prepared to make it his own without inquiring
too closely into its historical or political justification. For him it
became a revolt of the Mahomedan religious conscience against the
tyranny of the West just as legitimate as the revolt of the Hindu
conscience against the same tyranny embodied in the Rowlatt Acts. Whilst
Mahomedans proved their emancipation from narrow sectarianism by joining
in the _Satyagraha_ movement of passive resistance in spite of the Hindu
character impressed upon it by its Sanscrit name, it was, he declared,
for Hindus to show that they, too, could rise above ancient prejudice
and resentment by throwing themselves heart and soul into the _Khilafat_
movement. Both movements were to be demonstrations of the "soul-force"
of India, to be put forth in passive resistance according to his
favourite doctrine of _Ahimsa_, the endurance and not the infliction of
suffering.