religion, for the Nationalist party, with a view to the Ottomanisation
of the Arabs, have definitely stated that Arab Moslems are not of the
true faith, and that their own Allah (in whose name they subsequently
exterminated the Armenians) is the God of Love--German equivalent
Got--whereas the Arab Allah is the God of vengeance. The sinister motive
in this discovery needs no comment, for it is obvious that it releases
the Ottoman Government from the prohibition in the Koran, whereby Moslem
may not fight against Moslem. Therefore the Arabs were declared not to
be true Moslems. Later on, that motive was translated into practical
measures.

Among the first tasks with regard to the Arabs that faced the
Nationalist party from what we may call the pacific side of their
mission was to substitute the Turkish language for Arabic. Kemal Bey, a
Nationalist of Salonika, with the help of Ziya Bey, collected round him
a group of young writers, and these proceeded to translate the Koran out
of Arabic into Turkish, and to publish the prayers for the Caliphate in
their own language, and orders went out that these revised versions
should be used in all mosques. Turkish was to be the official language
for use in all public proclamations, and, with Prussian thoroughness, it
was even substituted on such railway tickets as had hitherto been
printed in Arabic. The new Turkish tongue (Yeni Lisan) had also to be
purged of all foreign words, but here some difficulty was experienced,
for Persian and Arabic formed an enormous percentage in the language as
hitherto employed, and the promoters of this Ottoman purity of tongue
found themselves left with a very jejune instrument for the rhapsodies
of their patriotic aims. Poets in especial (for the Nationalists, like
all well-equipped founders of romantic movements, had their bards) found
themselves in sore straits owing to the limited vocabulary; and we read
of one, Mehmed Emin Bey, who was forced to publish his odes in small