Modernity Quotes
Historically, this is an amazing quotation. It is typical of analyses of Islam in the 21st century when America and most of the non-Muslim world was having great difficulties with Islamic militancy. But this was written at the end of the 19th century, in 1899. Churchill had a grasp of much that it would take other politicians a century to understand. This book was relatively unknown to all but a few historians, military men, and political scholars. (There was a shortened version published in 1902 which did not include this passage and that is the version that Project Gutenberg posted on the Internet. So do not assume that the quotation is wrong if you cannot find it in the version you are reading on the Internet. You need the 1899 longer and more detailed version.
This is a very Jeffersonian type statement.
At the time, Muslim clerics had a great deal of influence and in many cases legal control over all facets of Turkish society much as exists in other Islamic societies today. They even controlled what was taught in the schools. Remarkably, without bloodshed, Ataturk broke both the power and the influence of the clerics on all official and public activities. Many Turkish Muslims even developed a type of reformed Islam with the relationship between the individual and the clerics one of parity much like Protestant churches in the West. At the same time there was a more orthodox part of the population and while they sent their children to religious schools, they also attended public schools so even the orthodox Muslims in Turkey learned science and modern subjects which are still not taught in most Islamic schools and madrassas.
Jinnah was a modern Islamist who saw the role of females in a modern context. He, like the Indian Hindu leaders were in a sense products of the West and Western government and education. He would be very surprised that in his Pakistan men can murder their female relatives who they believe have dishonored the family, or that women would not be educated in the Madrassas, or that authorities could sentence a female relative of a man deemed guilty of seduction to be gang raped, but that is what happens in modern Pakistan. Jinnah and many of the early leaders believed that their new government could modernize Islam but the control and influence went the other way. Pakistan became a religiously dominated autocracy rather than the democracy that Jinnah foresaw.
Ataturk as part of his radical reforms elevated secular teachers to a very high social status and moved science and engineering into the curriculum over the objections of traditionalists and Islamic fundamentalists, and he did this in an overwhelmingly Muslim country.
His view was that the major driver of globalization is communications and information which travel at light speed.
Lieber is best known because he was assigned by President Lincoln to study the then international laws of war and prepare a manual for the guidance of union troops in the Civil War. Lincoln then issued the document as a general order.
