OUR MUSSULMAN SUBJECTS.
NYBODY who thinks it an easy task to govern our Indian 1I Empire, or desires to know how much of vital force yet lives in the Mussulman creed, should read the demi-official pamphlet in boards in which Mr. W. W. Hunter has re- counted the history of the fifty years' struggle between our Government and the Wahabees of Bengal. Dim rumours of that great contest, incomparably the most dangerous as well as the strangest in which we have ever been engaged, have from time to time reached England, in the shape of stories of frontier expeditions, usually disastrous, or records of convic- tions for treason ; but here we have for the first time its en- tire history from 1822, when Syud Ahmed, brigand and Doctor of Mahommedan Law, founded at Sitana, beyond the Peshawur frontier the colony which has never ceased to ray out missionaries preaching throughout India the solemn duty of extirpating Europeans, to the present hour, when in every county of the vast Delta the devotees of Mahommedan Protestantism, Puritan ascetics, zealous as Ultramontanes, faithful as Catholic priests, fearless as Jesuits, are preaching under a hundred disguises the obligation of slaughter, rousing a deadly hate among millions of our Mus- sulman subjects, and converting, sometimes by thousands a week, the degraded castes of Bengal into Mohammedans so fanatic that they, by birth despised Bengalees, so cowardly and so puny that they are forbidden to enter our armies, set Sepoys at defiance, and have been known to die fighting hand to hand in the open against the dreaded Europeans. Very few, we think, who read the narrative, with its episodes of adventure, close it without a conviction that in these Wahabee, or as they are called on the spot, Ferazee fanatics, these butchers and curfiers, and village schoolmasters, and low men of every kind, we have found the most dangerous foes who ever faced us ; that our dominion hangs even now,
to-day, by a hair ; that at any moment in any year a
Mussulman Cromwell may take the field, and the Empire be temporarily overwhelmed in universal massacre. We are not writing sensational sentences. It is a fact proved by evidence as indisputable as was ever offered in courts of justice that throughout India, and especially throughout Bengal, a vast Mohammedan sect, in which every man is a missionary, is devoting itself steadily to our destruction ; is making con- verts in thousands, and has the sympathy, avowed or silent, of our thirty millions of Mohammedan subjects ; that it waits
only an expected leader to declare war to the knife ; and that in 1870, only a year ago, the existence of our rule depended mainly upon the answer which three Arabs in Mecca, asun-
known in Europe as if they were negroes in Timbuctoo, might give to a question on the most difficult point of the Moham- medan moral code.
The situation is this. For fifty years the followers of Syud. Ahmed, the Luther of the Indian Mussulmans, have been preaching war against us, forming colonies beyond the frontier, sending out missionaries throughout India, convert- ing Ilindoo villagers in Bengal, and levying from all Mohammedans with money subscriptions for the maintenance of their organization, the centre of which is Patna, where site in secret a Caliph or Vicegerent of the faithful whose orders are obeyed by the entire creed. They have created a literature of the most " treasonable " and deeply religious kind, which is circulated in all the bazaars by bodies of devoted colporteurs ; have trained thousands of Missionaries, who are eagerly heard as they teach that to escape damnation it is above all things necessary that a Mohammedan wage war upon the Infidel ; and have made converts in such vast numbers that in 1843 a single preacher near Calcutta was followed by eighty thousand dis- ciples bound in a kind of brotherhood. It is believed, indeed known, that their conversions are still increasing, the primary civil tenet of the Ferazees, the absolute equality of all Mussul- mans, proving irresistibly attractive to men who, under the. Hindoo social code, are treated as carrion fit only for manure. The Wahabees perhaps alone among mankind make of this. doctrine a reality, and the lowest Chundal in Dacca or Cal- cutta, a man whose social rank is about equal to that of an English rag-picker, has but to place the turban on his head, recite the creed and submit to circumcision, and he is the equal of the highest Wahabee, may marry his daughter, and is treated in every relation of life as if he were not only an equal but a kinsman. The Government has arrested and confined the leaders ; but in a community which knows nothing of birth new leaders are always forthcoming, and the popularity of the sect has of late years received a new and, as it were, accidental impulse. Hitherto their main difficulty with the Mussulman millions has been to prove the religious obligation of rebellion. No Mussulman doctor doubts that if India ceases to be governed on Mussulmain principles rebellion becomes a duty ; but there has, until lately, been a great doubt whether India had or had not ceased to be a land of Islam. Most doctors hold that it had not, The British Government always avoided assuming the emblems of Sovereignty ; the Koran was officially maintained to be the Common Law ; and in every case in which a Moham- medan was concerned sentence was given, in theory at all events, by a Mohammedan Cazee. Since the Mutiny, however, all these relics of the old" system have been swept away. The sovereignty of the Queen throughout India is pressed forward. on every possible occasion. The Code is the common law, and not the Koran. The law doctors have been abolished. It is no longer possible, write the Mussulmans, for us even to be married according to the forms prescribed by our religious books.. India is therefore no longer a Mussulman country, but a country which was Mussulman, in which Mussulman rule has been overthrown by force, and in which therefore the highest moral duty of every Mussulman is rebellion in order to recover a State naturally belonging to his faith. Fortunately for us, the Meccan Doctors who were consulted by the Mussulmans in 1870 were not aware of the facts, and replied that a country was still in possession of Islam while the observances of Islam prevailed there, that is, were legalized there ; but these• " customs " have been abolished, and the Calcutta Doctors avow
that the main condition now wanting to a Jehad is a fair prospect of success. The Wahabees therefore are eagerly heard, and all the more because the social misery of the Mussulmans is at last reaching its climax. They have lost their ascendancy,
they have lost their lands—being, as compared with Hindoos, reckless spenders—and they have been driven en masse from Government employ. Partly from their refusal to accept education in " Godless " Colleges, partly from their dislike of the English language, but mainly from the antipathy with which they are regarded by the British, who contrast their proud bearing with the easy civility of the Hindoo, they are now a race proscribed. The details given by Mr. Hunter on this subject will astound even those who know India well. The military career has been finally barred to a people with whom war is at once a duty and a delight. Not one Mussul- man holds the Queen's commission. In the higher grades of the Native Civil Service they are dying out, British collectors even venturing to advertise that in the competition for their offices none but Hindoos will be received,—the most astounding example of needless insult to a formerly dominant people we ever remember to have hoard of. In the Department of Public Works there are but three Mussulmans to 107 Hindoos ; in the offices of Account not one Mussulman. In the entire State service of Bengal, out of 2,111 officials ninety/-two are Mussulmans. No Mussulman sits, serves, or pleads in the Supreme Court, the exclusion being so complete that not one Mussulman is even reckoned among the articled clerks, and the following petition, almost ludicrous in its pathos, may be taken to be literally true :— " As loyal subjects of her most Gracious Majesty the Queen, we have, we believe, an equal claim to all appointments in the administration of the country. Truly speaking, the Orissa Muhammadans have been levelled down and down, with no hopes of rising again. Born of noble parentage, poor by profession, and destitute of patrons, we find ourselves in the position of a fish out of water. Such is the wretched state of the Muhammadans, which we bring unto your Honour's notice, believing your Honour to be the sole representative of her Most Gracious Majesty the Queen for the Orissa Division, and hoping that justice will be ad- ministered to all classes, without distinction of colour or creed. The penniless and parsimonious condition which we are reduced to, conse- quent on the failure of our former Government service, has thrown us into such an everlasting despondency, that we speak from the very core of our hearts, that we would travel into.the remotest corners of the earth, ascend the snowy peaks of the Himalaya, wander the forlorn regions of Siberia, could we be convinced that by so travelling we would be blessed with a government appointment of ton shillings a wook."
"A hundred and seventy years ago, it was almost impossible for a well-born Mussulman in Bengal to become poor ; now, it is almost impossible for him to continue rich." It comes therefore to this, that the followers of a creed which makes scores of thousands of converts every year, which only a cen- tury ago ruled India with unquestioned sway, which fifty years ago possessed nearly all offices, is now excluded from all means of gaining wealth, and is sinking into utter misery, just as it is beginning to perceive that it can no longer declare that it still lives under its own religious laws. And the men who hold this creed are thirty millions, form for all social purposes one vast brotherhood, are bred up from childhood in a tradition of battle, and are capable when moved of this kind of adventure. A Mussulman serjeant of police in May, 1863, arrested four of the leading Wahabee missionaries, who appealed for aid to an old scrivener of Thaneswar, a quiet and indeed unknown man. He offered any bribe for their release, but the serjeant was faithful, and sent the Wahabees before the magistrate. The magistrate discharged them, and the serjeant " Devised an enterprise hardly surpassed in the legends of Spartan fortitude or the annals of Roman fidelity. To leave his post without leave would have been desertion ; but be had a son in his native village, far in the North, whom he loved better than anything upon earth, except the family honour. Between hie village and the Frontier lay our out- paste, all on the alert to stop any stray plunderer or absconding traitor. Beyond the Frontier were the Fanatics, on the eve of their great act °revert hostility to the Crown, and in the last degree suspicious of any stranger not forwarded iu the regular manner by their agents within our Empire. Tho father, well knowing that hie son, if he escaped being hanged at our outposts as a traitor on his way to join the Rebel Camp, ran a very imminent risk of being strangled by the Wabitbis as a spy, commanded his boy in the name of the family honour to go to Mulka, and not return till he could bring back the names of the conspirators within our territory who were aiding the Fanatics outside. The son received the *letter, and next day disappeared from the !dingo. What were his sufferings and hair-breadth escapes, none but his own family knows. But it came out in evidence that he completely deceived the Withithis, joined in their descent upon Sittana, repassed our outpost unscathed, and turning neither to the left nor to the right, presented himself one evening at his father's hut, many hundred miles inland, worn out by travel, want, and disease, but charged with the secret 'that Munshi Joni. of Thaneswar, whom men call Khalifs, was the groat man who passed up the Bengalis and their carbines and rifles.' Now Jaffir was the scrivener in the market town of Thaneswar, who would have nt once paid the bribe, if the Sergeant had let the four travellers go."
If there are not in these facts elements of danger such as has rarely threatened an established government, historians have but ill described the causes of insurrection.
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