Book Review: India in the Balance by Khwaja Kamal-ud-Din
Book reviewed by Maulana Muhammad Ali
The Light (Pakistan), 1st September 1922 Issue (Vol. 1, No. 18, p. 4)
Such is the title of a timely publication by Khwaja Kamal-ud-Din, Imam of the Mosque, Woking.
Khwaja Kamal-ud-Din is a Muslim missionary, and as such, he has refrained from politics, but the question of Khilafat is one in which all leaders of Muslim opinion think alike.
In writing this book, the Khwaja Sahib has not only done a service to the cause of Islam, but a still greater service to the British public which, in supreme ignorance of matters Islamic, trusts either to the politician or to the missionary and looks upon their interested pronouncements as the final word on Islam and Muslims.
India in the Balance ably explodes the theory which finds the greatest favour in Christendom that Muslims are unfit to rule non-Muslims, and that this disability arises from the fundamental conceptions of the religion of Islam. Its opening chapter, “Muslim Conception of Government,” based, as it is on the Holy Quran, backed up by instances from the earliest Muslim history, is a sufficient answer to all [of] Lloyd George’s [Prime Minister of the UK] declarations.
The book then passes on the history of the relations of the Muslims to their British rulers and the present change in their attitude. The latter half is devoted to the question of the caliphate, and the conclusion gives a timely warning.
Whether the final conclusion of peace with Turkey would in any way be influenced by the book is doubtful, for Mr Lloyd George is bent upon carrying his will, whatever its consequences, to his own country or to the world at large, but it is the duty of all true Muslims to place correct information before the British public, and Khwaja Kamal-ud-Din has done his duty.
We only pray that the British politicians may not shut their eyes to facts in whose recognition is the good of their own country.
Muhammad Ali