History - BRITISH TACTICS

Hempher, a British missionary who was assigned the task of serving Christianity says:

When I went to the Ministry to receive new orders, I met the secretary. Holding my hand, he took me to a room in the Ministry. I met with something very attractive in this room. Ten men were sitting around a round table. The first man was in the guise of the Ottoman Emperor. He spoke Turkish and English. The second one was dressed in the attire of the Shaikh-ul-Islam (Chief of Islamic Matters) in Istanbul. The third one was dressed in an attirement identical with that of the Shah of Iran. The fourth one was in the atttire of the vizier in the Iranian palace. The fifth one was dressed like the great scholar leading the Shiites in Najaf. The last three of these people spoke Persian and English.

The secretary said, “These five people represent the five people there. In order to know what their archetypes think, we have educated and trained these people exactly like their archetypes. We intimate the information we have obtained about their originals in Istanbul, Teheran and Najaf to these men. And these men, in their turn, imagine themselves to be their originals in those places. Then we ask them and they answer us. We have determined that the answers given by these people are seventy-percent agreeable with the answers that their originals would give.

He said, “With this method we are assessing the mental capacities of the (Ottoman) Sultan and the Muslim scholars, be they Shi’î or Sunnî. We are searching for the measures that will help us cope with them. For instance, if you know what direction the enemy forces will come from, you will make preparations accordingly, post your forces at suitable positions, and thus rout the enemy. On the other hand, if you aren’t sure about the direction of the enemy assault you will spread your forces here and there in a haphazard way and suffer a defeat. . . . By the same token, if you know the evidences Muslims will furnish to prove that their faith, their madh-hab is right, it will be possible for you to prepare the counter-evidences to rebut their evidences and undermine their belief with those counter-evidences. ”

Then he gave me a book of one thousand pages containing the results of the observations and projects carried out by the aforenamed five representative men in areas such as military, finance, education, and religion. He said, “Please read this book and return it to us. ”

Having read the book, I now had more confidence in my State and I knew for certain that the plans for demolishing the Ottoman Empire in time shorter than a century had already been prepared. The secretary also said, “In other similar rooms we have identical tables intended for countries we have been colonizing as well as for those we are planning to colonize. ”

I read the book part by part from the beginning to the end, focusing all my attention on it. It increased my information about the Muhammadans. Now I knew how they thought, what their weaknesses were, what made them powerful, and how to transform their powerful qualities into vulnerable spots.