The Fearless Muslims Of North Africa- Part2

Karmayogin, 2 October 1909

Nation-stuff in Morocco
The Powers of Europe are highly indignant at the tortures and
mutilations practised by Mulai Hamid on his vanquished rival,
El Roghi, and his captured adherents. There is no doubt that the
savage outbreak of mediaeval and African savagery of which
the Moorish Sultan has been guilty, is revolting and deprives
him personally of all claim to sympathy; but European moral
indignation in the matter seems to us to be out of place when we
remember the tortures practised by American troops on Filipinos
(to say nothing of the ghastly details of lynching in the Southern
States), and the unbridled atrocities of the European armies in
China. Be that as it may, we come across a remarkable account,
extracted in the Indian Daily News, of the stuff of which the
Moorish people are made. The narrator is Belton, the Englishman
who commanded the Sultan’s army and has resigned his
post as a protest against the Sultan’s primitivemethod of treating
political prisoners. Death and mutilation seem to have been the
punishments inflicted. Belton narrates that twenty officers of El
Roghi had their right hands cut off and then seared, according to the barbarous old surgical fashion, in a cauldron of boiling
oil, to stop the bleeding. Not from one of these men, reports
the English soldier with wonder, did there come, all the time,
a single whimper. And he goes on to tell how one of them,
after the mutilation, quietly walked over to the fire where the
cauldron was boiling, and, while his stump was being plunged
in the boiling liquid, lighted from the flame with the utmost
serenity a cigarette he held in his hand. Whatever may be the
present backwardness of the Moors and the averseness to light
of their tribes, there is the stuff of a strong, warlike and princely
nation in the land which gave birth to these iron men. If ever
the wave of Egyptian Neo-Islam and Mahomedan Nationalism
sweeps across Morocco, Europe will have to reckon with no
mean or contemptible people in the North West of Africa.

The Fearless Musliims Of North African-Part1

Karmayogin, 28 August 1909
Spain and the Moor
Another corner of the Asiatic world—for Northern Africa is
thoroughly Asianised if not Asiatic,—is convulsed with struggles
which may well precede another resurgence. There was a
time when the Moor held Spain and gave civilisation to semibarbarous
Europe. The revolution of the wheel has now gone to its utmost length and finds the Spaniard invading Morocco. But
this invasion does not seem to promise any Spanish expansion in
Africa.With infinite difficulty and at the cost of a bloody ´emeute
in Spain King Alfonso’s Government have landed a considerable
army in Morocco and yet with all that force can only just protect
their communications and stand facing the formidable country
where the stubborn Kabyle tribesmen await the invader. There
the army is hung up for the present, unwilling to retreat and
afraid to advance, and the Spanish General has again sent to
Spain for reinforcements, a feat of military strategy at which he
seems to be exceptionally skilful. If the men of the mountains are
fortunate enough to have a leader with a head on his shoulders,
the circumstances augur a reverse for Spain as decisive and perhaps
more sanguinary than the Italian overthrow in Abyssinia.
Meanwhile King Alfonso has sacrificed all his youthful popularity
by this ill-omened war and the bloody severity which
has temporarily saved his throne. And with the popularity of
the young King has gone the friendship of the Spanish nation
for England, for the Spaniards accuse that friendship of the
origination of these troubles and the British Govern