or whether he is quite sure he is purely Teutonic and not Celtic
or Iberian. A man is a man; and a man is a very important thing.
One thing redeems the Moslem morality which can be set over against
a mountain of crimes; a considerable deposit of common sense.
And the first fact of common sense is the common bond of men.
There is indeed in the Moslem character also a deep and most dangerous
potentiality of fanaticism of the menace of which something may be
said later. Fanaticism sounds like the flat contrary of common sense;
yet curiously enough they are both sides of the same thing.
The fanatic of the desert is dangerous precisely because he does
take his faith as a fact, and not even as a truth in our more
transcendental sense. When he does take up a mystical idea he takes
it as he takes the man or the palm-tree; that is, quite literally.
When he does distinguish somebody not as a man but as a Moslem,
then he divides the Moslem from the non-Moslem exactly as he divides
the man from the camel. But even then he recognises the equality of men
in the sense of the equality of Moslems. He does not, for instance,
complicate his conscience with any sham science about races.
In this he has something like an intellectual advantage over
the Jew, who is generally so much his intellectual superior;
and even in some ways his spiritual superior. The Jew has far more
moral imagination and sympathy with the subtler ideals of the soul.
For instance, it is said that many Jews disbelieve in a future life;
but if they did believe in a future life, it would be something
more worthy of the genius of Isaiah and Spinoza. The Moslem Paradise
is a very Earthly Paradise. But with all their fine apprehensions,
the Jews suffer from one heavy calamity; that of being a Chosen Race.
It is the vice of any patriotism or religion depending on race
that the individual is himself the thing to be worshipped;
the individual is his own ideal, and even his own idol.