…despite all the multifarious benefits he bestowed during his time there, he is cordially loathed in Egypt today.
Pan-Islamism almost necessarily connotes a recrudescence of racial and religious animosity. Many of its adherents are, I do not doubt, inspired by a genuine religious fervor. Others again, whether from indifference verging on agnosticism, or from political and opportunist motives, or—as I trust may sometimes be the case—from having really assimilated modern ideas on the subject of religious toleration, would be willing, were such a course possible, to separate the political from the religious, and even possibly from racial issues. If such are their wishes and intentions, I entertain very little doubt that they will make them impossible of execution. Unless they can convince the Muslim masses of their militant Islamism, they will fail to arrest their attention or to attract their sympathy. Appeals, either overt or covert, to racial and religious passions are thus a necessity of their existence in order to insure the furtherance of their political program.Pan-Islamism almost always connotes an attempt to regenerate Islam on Islamic lines—in other words, to revivify and stereotype in the twentieth century the principles laid down more than a thousand years ago for the guidance of a primitive society. Those principles involve recognition of slavery, laws regulating the relations of the sexes which clash with modern ideas, and, what is perhaps more important than all, that crystallization of the civil, criminal, and canonical law into one immutable whole, which has so largely contributed to arrest the progress of those countries whose populations have embraced the Moslem faith.
Islam’s gone through this cycle over and over again. The original spurt of jihad, conquest and forced conversion that started with the Rashidun and Umayyad Caliphates tapered off around the ninth century, when a resurgent Byzantine Empire started making gains in Anatolia and Syria, and the Reconquista started gaining steam in Spain. It was only the arrival of newly converted Turks that heralded a resurgence of Islamism, and also led to a severe setback for the Byzantines after Manzikert.
The success of the First Crusade and the rise of the Comneni kept the Turks and the Fatimid Caliphate at bay for a time, until the incompetence of Guy of Lusignan and treacherous Crusaders led to the fall of Jerusalem and Constantinople respectively.
This period we’re going through is nothing new, and how we weather it will depend on the unity and discipline of what remains of the Western, Christian world right now.