I have said that Islam is already well prepared for change. Whatever
Europeans may think of a future for the Ottoman Empire, Mussulmans are
profoundly convinced that on its present basis it will not long survive.
Even in Turkey, the thought of its political regeneration as an European
Empire has been at last abandoned, and no one now contemplates more than
a few years further tenure of the Bosphorus. Twenty years ago it was not
so, nor perhaps five, but to-day all are resigned to this.
Ancient prophecy and modern superstition alike point to a return of the
Crescent into Asia as an event at hand, and to the doom of the Turks as
a race which has corrupted Islam. A well-known prediction to this
effect, which has for ages exercised its influence on the vulgar and
even the learned Mohammedan mind, gives the year 1883 of our era as the
term within which these things are to be accomplished, and places the
scene of the last struggle in Northern Syria, at Homs, on the Orontes.
Islam is then finally to retire from the north, and the Turkish rule to
cease. Such prophecies often work their own fulfilment, and the feeling
of a coming catastrophe is so deeply rooted and so universal that I
question whether the proclamation of a Jehad by the Sultan would now
induce a thousand Moslems to fight voluntarily against the Cross in
Europe.
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