Faithful Catholics across the world were grateful for the Vatican’s closely reasoned arguments and its firm stance. By 1907, fundamental discoveries in the sciences were coming quick and fast – the electron, the quantum, the unconscious and, most of all, perhaps, the gene, which explained how Darwin’s natural selection could take place. It was good to have a rock in a turbulent world. Beyond the Catholic Church, however, few people were listening. While the Vatican wrestled with its own modernist crisis, the wider movement in the arts, also known as modernism, marked the final arrival of the post-romantic/post-industrial revolution/post-French Revolution and post-American Civil War sensibility. As Nietzsche had foreseen, the death of God would unleash new forces. ‘Christianity resolved to find that the world was bad and ugly,’ wrote this son of a pastor, ‘and has made it bad and ugly.’ He thought nationalism would be one new force and he was right. But other forces also filled the vacuum that was being created. One of these was Marxist socialism, with its own version of an afterlife, and a second was an allegedly scientific psychology with its own, up-dated version of the soul – Freudianism.
We saw in Chapter 29, on the Oriental renaissance, that the Muslim world’s relationship with the West was chequered, to say the least, a mixture of arrogance that there was little Islam could learn from Europe, later tempered as European achievements filtered across the religious divide. But the gap only really began to close with the retreat of the Ottoman empire, based in Turkey, which culminated in the Crimean War of the 1850s. This proved crucial because that war was the first real alliance in history between Christian and Islamic forces, when Turkey joined together with France and Britain against Russia. As a result of this closer-than-usual co-operation, Muslims discovered that there was a huge amount they could learn and benefit from Europe, not just about weapons and fighting, and medicine, which had always attracted them, but in other walks of life too.
The new attitude surfaced first in Turkey, where, for example, there was a movement known as