Colonel Roosevelt - Edmund Morris [21]
Islamic fundamentalists resented the establishment of the university, only two years earlier, as a school for their accommodationist brethren. So on 26 March, Roosevelt made a goodwill visit to Al-Azhar Mosque, the world’s oldest religious academy. He found nine thousand students, all male, squatting on classroom floors and chanting in Arabic. To the amazement of the library staff, he asked to see a scroll of the fourteenth-century Travels of Ibn Battuta, and proceeded, with the aid of a translator, to locate and recite passages he had read in French, many years before. This so pleased his hosts that he left the mosque with a copy of the Koran under his arm. It was the first ever presented by Al-Azhar to an infidel.
Interest on all sides was therefore intense two days later, when Roosevelt rose to address the general assembly of Cairo University. Small and struggling, with only apathetic support from local authorities, the institution typified, for him, Great Britain’s loss of imperial will. He tried not to show his contempt for the khaki-clad soldiers around him on the platform, so querulous about native feelings, and the Nationalist Muslims whose tarbooshes dotted his audience.
At first he was tactfully equivocal. “Those responsible for the management of this University should set before themselves a very high ideal,” he said. “Not merely should it stand for the uplifting of all Mohammedan peoples and of all Christians and peoples of other religions who live in Mohammedan lands, but it should also carry its teaching and practice to such perfection as in the end to make it a factor in instructing the Occident.”
Swinging into the preaching mode that came naturally to him, he counseled the university professors headed for study in Great Britain to embrace, rather than resist, the best findings of Western Enlightenment. He emphasized that a full education “is attained only by a process, not by an act,” and compared it to the political gradualism inevitable in any backward nation’s attempt to modernize itself. “The training of a nation to fit itself successfully to fulfill the duties of self-government is a matter, not of a decade or two, but of generations.” He quoted an Arab proverb: “Allah ma el saberin, izza sabaru, God is with the patient, if they know how to wait.”
The tarboosh-wearers found this so patronizing that they broke into derisive laughter. But the soldiers applauded, and Roosevelt ploughed on toward the reference Sir Eldon was bracing for:
All good men, all the men of every nation whose respect is worth having, have been inexpressibly shocked by the recent assassination of Boutros Pasha. It was an even greater calamity for Egypt than it was a wrong to the individual himself. The type of man who turns out an assassin … stands on a pinnacle of evil infamy; and those who apologize for or condone his act, those who by word or deed, directly or indirectly, encourage such an act in advance, or defend it afterward, occupy the same bad eminence.
Englishmen used to pomposities, and Levantines to elaborate circumlocutions, were aghast at Roosevelt’s readiness to call a spade a spade. What Lawrence Abbott described as an “electrical” thrill ran around the hall. But there were loud cheers when Roosevelt ended with a call for mutual respect between Islam and Christianity.
Next day, comments on the speech in native newspapers expressed widespread resentment of Roosevelt as a stooge for the British. He was accused of not really caring whether Arabs were oppressed or not. “How,” asked the Shaab, “could a man who so denies liberty and individual rights have been chosen president of a free people?” Hundreds of furious students marched on Shepheard’s Hotel and shouted, “Give us a constitution!” at his terrace windows. The Colonel was engaged elsewhere, but got back to the hotel in time to see the demonstration breaking up.
When he embarked with his family from Alexandria the following afternoon, the dockside jostled with both Copts and Muslims. He was pursued across the