Mr. Marmaduke Pickthall has a good letter in Monday's Westminster
Gazette on the British occupation of Egypt in reply to a characteristic explosion from Mr. Wilfrid Blunt. Mr. Blunt had rashly asserted that there was no difference whatever between the Egyptian Nationalists and the Young Turks. Mr. Pickthall reminds him that the former supported Abd-ul-Hamid till the Revolution of 1908, and then executed a ludicrous and indecently sudden volte-face. Then, while religious tolerance is in the Young Turk programme, the Egyptian Nationalists lose no oppor- tunity of insulting the Copts. Thus Mr. Pickthall was present at a meeting in May, 1907, when the Copts were inclined to turn Nationalist. One of their speakers cried pathetically :— " We are all brothers ; we are all Egyptians. Our Muslim brothers are the descendants of those Copts who of old embraced El Islam." No, no ! ' yelled the Muslim Party in the audience. ` Infidel! Son of a dog !' The speaker was howled down, and the meeting ended in disorder before it had well begun." In 1908 a leading Nationalist paper called the Copts curs who ought to be thankful to their Muslim masters for allowing them to be alive. "And lately we have had the murder of Biltros Pasha Ghali, a Copt, treated as a righteous deed by the Nationalists, and defended by the Mufti on religious grounds."
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