Sri Aurobindo
Karmayogin
Political Writings and Speeches — 1909-1910
Karmayogin: A Weekly Review
Saturday 2nd October 1909 — No.15
Facts and Opinions
Nation-stuff in Morocco
The Powers of Europe are highly indignant at the tortures and mutilations practised by Mulai Hamid on his vanquished rival, El Roghi, and his captured adherents.
There is no doubt that the savage outbreak of mediaeval and African savagery of which the Moorish Sultan has been guilty, is revolting and deprives him personally of all claim to sympathy; but European moral indignation in the matter seems to us to be out of place when we remember the tortures practised by American troops on Filipinos (to say nothing of the ghastly details of lynching in the Southern States), and the unbridled atrocities of the European armies in China.
Be that as it may, we come across a remarkable account, extracted in the Indian Daily News, of the stuff of which the Moorish people are made.
The narrator is Belton, the Englishman who commanded the Sultan's army and has resigned his post as a protest against the Sultan's primitive method of treating political prisoners.
Death and mutilation seem to have been the punishments inflicted.
Belton narrates that twenty officers of El Roghi had their right hands cut off and then seared, according 
to the barbarous old surgical fashion, in a cauldron of boiling oil, to stop the bleeding.
Not from one of these men, reports the English soldier with wonder, did there come, all the time, a single whimper.
And he goes on to tell how one of them, after the mutilation, quietly walked over to the fire where the cauldron was boiling, and, while his stump was being plunged in the boiling liquid, lighted from the flame with the utmost serenity a cigarette he held in his hand.
Whatever may be the present backwardness of the Moors and the averseness to light of their tribes, there is the stuff of a strong, warlike and princely nation in the land which gave birth to these iron men.
If ever the wave of Egyptian Neo-Islam and Mahomedan Nationalism sweeps across Morocco, Europe will have to reckon with no mean or contemptible people in the North West of Africa.