The inevitable event comes to pass … as enticed by the vanity of the
Great States. It was thought that their politicians due to their shrewdness
were able to hold down the fire in the stove so that its evil will not
extend to its neighboring places. Europe that is filled with gunpowder
and dynamite thought to secure itself from the flame against which
Bismarck had already warned … forgetting God’s general justice in all
nations and peoples. This is what Shaykh Muhammad Rashīd Ridā (1865–1935) wrote in early August 1914, a few days after the Great War broke out in Europe.
