MOSLEM CHARACTER.

Hawke's Bay Herald, Volume XXXIX, Issue 12704, 12 March 1904, Page 2 (Supplement)

MOSLEM CHARACTER.

The conspicuous feature of Moslem society in the Nearer East, and the one which is admired most by a Western observer, is its steadiness of behaviour. Up to a certain point (says the “Monthly Review”) one can trust a follower of the Meccan prophet. His native Christian neighbour feels that not less than we; and it has become a law in the local struggle of Cross and Crescent, that if the Tatter prevail, the combatants, once their heat be cool, will settle down together again in confidence. For the beaten party knows that it is only in the collective, not in the individual fanaticism of Moslems, that its danger lies, and, surpremacy once assured, the Faithful will keep the pea' o as unanimously as before the war. Therefore, although Moslem core nunities are not wrongly regarded as i urseries of fanaticism, and Christians who put themselves in Moslem pow ir do so at some peril, yet both Chri itian individuals and Christian communities are safer in most territories of Islam, than Moslems in certain territories of Christendom. Since it is no merit that a Moslem attack a Christian except in “Jehad”— otherwise, whether he slay or be slain, he shall reap no special reward—massacres of many unbelievers have been of much commoner occnrance in Moslem lands than murders of single Christians. Danger seldom threatens the latter unless they are held to be forerunners of many, as were Conolly and Stoddart at Bokhara; or the whole Moslem world has been rendered uneasy by some conspicuous encroaching on the territory of Islam. Then should a Christian individual party, by reason of a penetrated disguise (disguise, like an abili, can be the worst of all defences), or of actions which are not comprehensible to the vulgar, be popularly supposed to represent a host of men, massacre may be expected with all the justification of “jehad.” So again if the whole community seems to threaen danger, as has the Greferian Armenian more than once.