THE ROLE OF PILGRIMAGES 103

Gentile Christian human freight with a legendary Mosaic Israel, they
were fortifying one of their emotional links with the Old World in the
act of nerving themselves to sever another; for, though any lingering
home-sickness for England that might have persisted in their hearts
would have been condemned by their consciences and repressed by their
wills as a hankering after the fleshpots of Egypt1 which would indeed
have proved them unfit for the Kingdom of God, there was no counter-
text in the Bible to harden their hearts against the appeal of texts2 sum-
moning them to succour scattered and shepherdless Christian sheep in
'Bible Lands* where the labourers were few. The nineteenth-century
descendants of seventeenth-century Pilgrim Fathers who dedicated their
lives, from father to daughter and from mother to son, to the service of
American missionary institutions at Bayriit, Smyrna, Constantinople,
Merzifun, and a dozen other stations in the Near and Middle East were
pilgrims still, as their fathers had been before them;3 and, when they
thus turned right-about-face, to make the return-voyage eastward-ho
across the Atlantic from the Fair Havens4 of an American New Canaan5
to Levantine scalas at which Saint Paul had once embarked and disem-
barked, instead of pressing on westward to a Salt Lake or a Klondyke,
they were showing their loyalty to their ancestral faith by responding to
a call of 'Bible Lands' which was stronger than their dread of re-entang-
ling themselves in an Old-World city of destruction.

The call of a holy land in partibus alienis^ which thus continued to re-
echo in Western Christian ears down a corridor of Time stretching from
'the Dark Ages' to the twentieth century of the Christian Era, likewise
availed, in the rtnth century of the Islamic Era, to move the Iranic
Muslim *Ghazis of Rum'6 to trespass on Arabic Muslim ground by
annexing an Egyptian Mamluk Empire which included among its do-
minions the Islamic Holy Land in the Hijaz. The last Egyptian Mamluk
Sultan Tuman Bey's Ottoman conqueror, Sultan Sellm I, who did not
deign to relieve the Mamluks' puppet Cairene 'Abbasid Caliph of a
Caliphial title which Selim I's forebears had already usurped,7 was proud
to number among the fruits of his portentous victory the privilege of
becoming the guardian of the Holy Places of Islam ;* and, some three
hundred years later, his successor Sultan Selim III (imperabat A.D.
1789-1807) was confronted with the choice between vindicating his
claim to this still-treasured ancestral office by effective action or else
suffering a politically disastrous loss of face in orthodox Sunni Muslim
eyes when, in A.D. 1803, the Sunni Muslim World was cut to the heart
by the shocking news that the impiously militant Wahhabi sectaries had
made a descent upon the Hijaz. The Padishah at Constantinople was
constrained to discharge his bounden duty vicariously by instructing his
virtually self-appointed viceroy in Egypt, Mehmed ' All,9 to act on his

See II. ii. 24-25.

Matt. ix. 36-38; Mark vi. 34; Luke x. 2; John Iv. 34-35.

Ps. xxxix. 12. * Acts xxvii. 8. s See I. i. 212, n. i.

The 'Osmanlis are thus designated by their Timurid Turkish kinsman Zahir-ad-
n Muhammad Babur in his Memoirs (see I. i. 349, n. i).
See VI. vii. 21-23.

See Arnold, Sir T. W.: The Caliphate (Oxford 1924, Clarendon Press), pp. 148-53.
For a notice of Mehmed 'All's career, see IX. viii. 239-40.