THE MODERN EAST.

Star (Christchurch), Issue 16267, 6 November 1920, Page 17

THE MODERN EAST.

A SUDDEN CIVILISATION. \ “ " The Changing East ” is the subject of a striking nrticlo in the new number of the “ Round Table.” “ A piciuroivliter,’ says the author, “once coined I a phrase, ‘ The Unchanging East/ and i time has turned round' mid taken re-1 vengo upon him. The East is to-dav I the place of change—of change* so ; great and swift that in comparison with i it our Errope is standing still. 110 have been much engaged lately, making wars and peaces,, looking' at our own hurts, and trying to restore the balance of the times, and so wo. have not always been able to spare attention to what Asia is doing or thinking. Wo have tried to deal with her on the old traditional lines, and to our dismay sho has not reacted properly. There have been outbreaks, unrest, protestations, and we, lacking the knowledge, of movements there, have missed the sequence and find ourselves reduced to force, as our last remedy end restoration. ‘ ‘ We see the strain we have put on Asia soonest in the domain of matter. Wo evolved our own machinery in long ecuti'.nr.s of struggle and invention, years in which the lace of Europe gradually changed, without any too violent misery, to suit tho new ideas; we had pack-horses, solid wheels, Bpringless waggons, coaches, railways, motor-cars, aeroplanes; we found the progress indecently fast at times, and put men with red flags to walk before the machines while we breathed—but what of Asia:, which has stepped in a lifetime of thirty years from saddle-donkeys to Holls-Boyce cars, from blood mares to aeroplanesi' We civ by slow stages of muskets from ...,ws to automatic guns’; it took us five hundred years. The marauder of the desert laid away his spear just before the war, and today goes out on his raids with, a Maxim. We invented the printing press four hundred years ago, and served a long apprenticeship by way of wooden types, screw and level presses, steam presses, electric presses, to the cheap speed of the modern newspaper. The, East has side by side the old-fashioned scribe, making each year a poorer Gving, and the linotype. The vernacular press came to them full-born, These are the material sides. Asia has in thirty years leaped across a stage which took Vis hundreds.* She lias not done it verywell, perhaps no better than parts of Russia, parts »f tho Balkans, parts of South America; the important part is that she has done it, and the Asia of Kinglako and Lamartine is wholly gone. “ This mental and moral growth is so ha'rd to measure. The material changes prepare our heads to note great in other ways, but their apprehension stays uncertain. There has been a change in ideas; wo hear the people of Asia talking about representative government and parliaments. - In our fathers’ days they were governed by theocrats and autocrats. We think how long it took England to conceive and bring forth a House of Commons. and we begin to be astonished at this lieadlong Asia. There are labour troubles in Cairo and Bombay, n general strike in Mecca, trades union congresses in Constantinople. This disease they have caught quickly. Self-deter-mination—yes, they have adopted that; League of Nations—they cave more for it than we do. “ In tho nineteenth century the guiding idea of the people of tlie East was religion, a crcpd with a body as well as a spirit, one which showed them their road by day as well as by night. They regulated their _ manners, their meals, theif trades, their families, their by its light. Tho attempt of Abd el Hamid to rationalise this, to make it logical as well ks theological, smashed it. When ho fell, so did the rule of faith in words- Tho East remained Moslem, but its public life turned national. People called themselves Egyptians, or Arabs, or Turks, and their newspapers, directed by men emancipated from formal Islam by the influence of western ideas, carried this difference of motive, this new outlook, into the smallest points of life. The abstract standard by which politics and conduct were now judged was this new one of nationality. The nation became the rule of life, the modern creed—and as the war drew on Moslem learnt to go out and fight Moslem, and accept death gladly in battle for the new ideal. When England was at her greatest straits to (letcnd her straggled holdings in the East, these feelings reached their height —and the best measure of their height is not that Indian Moslem fought Turkish Moslem to vindicate the place of India as a partner in our Empire, but that the people of Mecca, the centre of Islam, under the Emir, the Sherif of Mecca, the senior descendant of the Prophet, rose in rebellion against the Gahph, Sultan of Constantinople, and that tins rebellion carried everyone of Arabic speech in Asia at least sympathetically to its side. This was the final triumph, the highest expression there can bo in Western Asia of fhe principle of nationality as the foundation of political action, opposed to the principle of a world-religion, a supranational creed. Not the Galilean but the politician had conquered. “Tho armistice came, but did not check' this movement; it made adherence to jt more safe and more rationalTho original stalwarts who marched north under Peisul side by side with Alletiby had staked their heads on their fervent belief in an Arab Movement. Their victory made them fashionable, and removed the drawback of campaigning from their programme. Two months after tho armistice Syria was nationalist in sentiment from south to north, Egypt was in arms against the British under a like banner, and the .young officers of Turkey were banding together against the Sultan (thought to be out of date silly, and too fond of Europe) to make a now Turkey out -of the ruins of the old.