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Stratford de Redcliffe's Error

The Turkish Government know well, as I have often told them, that the regeneration of this empire is, humanly speaking, impossible while the principles and forms of legislation applied to administrative and judicial matters are invested with the inflexibility of divine truths. It has been found necessary to ascribe a suspending or dispensing power to the head of the State, and in the exercise of that prerogative lies a principle of vitality capable of imparting fresh vigour, under new forms, to the most decayed institutions. Soliman the Magnificent departed as much from the established maxims of the Koran, when he made his first durable treaty with France, as Abdul Medjid would do in setting his seal on the perpetual abolition of penal enactments against apostasy. That great and glorious monarch perceived the necessities of his empire in their very germ, and with the foresight of genius laid the first stone of that broad causeway over which the Western nations were in due season to advance to the successor of his descendants, not only with the pomp and powers of war, but yet more effectually with the arts of peace and the miracles of science.*

This is a specimen of the magniloquent nonsense (written in 1855, while the Crimean War was going on) with which Lord Stratford de Redcliffe was accustomed to deceive himself and his employers. The Ambassador was entirely in error in supposing that the Sultan possessed a suspending or dispensing power' as regards any article of the Sacred Law. Nor was Soliman's treaty with France a proof of it. That

*Eastern Papers, pt. xvii. pp. 26-28. Cf. Lord Aberdeen's despatches to Sir Stratford Canning in 1843 and 1844.

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treaty, like the treaties of Paris and Berlin, doubtless violated the law of the Koran on paper; but all such treaties, as I have already explained, not having received the Fetva of the Sheikh-ulIslâm, were mere waste paper, having no validity whatever in law for any Musulman. The controversy ended, as it had ended eleven years previously, in the Sultan promising the British Ambassador, that although the law sanctioning persecution of Christians and death of apostates was irrepealable, yet it would be allowed to become obsolete. As a matter of fact, it went on unimpeded, although the executions took place privately. But in the year 1880 a case was brought to light by accident. An enlightened member of the Ulema, Ahmed Tewfik Effendi by name, a professor in a college at Constantinople, was suddenly flung into a dungeon and condemned to death by the Sheikh-ul-Islâm for revising, in a purely literary sense, some pages of a Turkish translation of the English Book of Common Prayer; and it required the intervention of the Great Powers and three months' diplomatic pressure to get the punishment of death commuted to banishment to Chios, where the man would have been put quietly to death if he had not been able to escape to England by the aid of some Greek fisherman. In this case also the Sultan admitted to Sir Henry Layard, after repeated lies, that the law could not be abolished, and that he had no power to interfere

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with it. And Sir Henry Layard, who knew Turkey well in other respects, was quite surprised. He admits, however, that there has been no change from Sir Stratford Canning's day to his own, and devotes a long despatch to the task of proving and illustrating his assertion. The despatch opens thus:

In looking back to the despatches addressed by Lord Stratford de Redcliffe (then Sir Stratford Canning) to Lord Aberdeen relating to the execution of an Armenian youth, who was beheaded in 1843 as an apostate from Islamism, I have been very much struck by the remarkable resemblance that the circumstances of that case bear to those of the affair of Ahmed Tewfik Effendi. By substituting for the names of the principal actors in that tragedy those of present Turkish statesmen, I might almost have used the very words of Lord Stratford's despatches in addressing your lordship [Lord Salisbury] with respect to the present instance. of Turkish fanaticism.

How is it that so practical a people as the English appoint men to the posts of Secretaries for Foreign Affairs and Ambassadors to Turkey who do not know the rudiments of the Constitution of the Ottoman Empire? To send an Ambassador to Paris without knowing a word of French would be nothing to the absurdity of our dealing with Turkey. The true parallel to it would be the appointment to a Regius Professorship of Greek of a man who did not know the Greek alphabet. Russia acts very differently, and till we imitate her common sense we shall go blun

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dering on, extorting promises from Sultan after Sultan, and then wondering that nothing comes of it. 'An Amurath an Amurath succeeds'; but what avails it while the system remains? It is the Ulema who hold the key of the position, for it is in them that all sacerdotal, judicial, and legislative functions are centred. And they are a very powerful corporation too. More than three-fourths of the soil of Turkey belong to them. Their property, moreover, is exempt from taxation, and they are the only class whose property is hereditary in the family. Lord Salisbury is the only Foreign Secretary for fifty years who understands the theocratic system of Turkey, and that is one reason why I cannot believe that he will go on indefinitely relying on a policy of barren promises on the one hand and futile admonitions on the other.

And now let me conclude this part of my subject with one caution. Neither here nor anywhere else have I ever written or spoken a word which, taken with its context, can furnish the slightest excuse for the accusation sometimes recklessly made against me, namely, that I advocate a crusade against Islâm as a religion. The Musulmans of India enjoy perfect religious liberty, including polygamy; and I am glad of it, much as I dislike polygamy as degrading to woman and injurious to man. But the Musulmans of India are not allowed to practise slavery, though it is sanctioned by their religion; nor are

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Musulman Rule Inhuman

Musulman judges allowed to reject Christian evidence against Musulmans, though that also is sanctioned by their religion. I draw the line where the British Government has drawn it in India; liberty for the Musulman to practise his religion without let or hindrance up to the point where his religion invades the sacred sphere of natural justice, as it does in Turkey. I should object to Christianity on the same ground with just as much emphasis. Moreover, the govern

ment of Turkey is, as I have shown, an ecclesiastical government, which I consider the worst possible form of government in the civil sphere, even when it is Christian ecclesiasticism; much more when it is an ecclesiastical government which professes to be theocratic. For then it follows that the regulations which fix the status of the Christians are not simply civil ordinances which admit of amendment, but dogmas of religions which are absolutely immutable so long as the Musulman Power rules supreme. I object to a system of that sort, not because it is Musulman, but because it is inhuman.