ABSTRACT
When Caliph Abdulhamid II advised him, in a helpful way, to getmarried, Sayyid Jamal ad Din Afghani threatened to get himself castrated. Even the great Saladin had a normal family life, and was known, as a teenager, to sip a bit of wine. However, such banal needs as sex and family were unacceptable distractions for a man with a single mission: to launch a pan-Islamic jihad against the power and inexhaustible will of Great Britain, superpower of the age and fountainhead, in his view, of Christian imperialism.
