In Central Asia there exists no trace of anything of the kind. Here the Persians are hated and persecuted as fiercely as on their first appearance among the Shiitish sect. In the year 945 of the Hidjra, they were declared outlaws and infidels by the fetwah of a certain Mollah, Shemseddin Mohammed, a native of Samarkand, and living in Herat at the time of the Sultan Husein Baikera. This fetwah has done much injury to the poor inhabitants of Iran, for, although the marauding Turkomans would have taken them prisoners without any form of law, they would not have been sold in the market-place of fanatical Bokhara, had not the brand of the Kafir qualified them for it, only such men being saleable. Whatever cruelties were practised on them, were all committed under the pretext of punishing an unbeliever, and though Eastern Mohammedans try to vindicate the Mollahs of Turkestan, by pointing out that the Persians recognize one and the same Koran, and one and the same prophet, yet they declare the fetwah to be just and proper, and protest against all assertions to the contrary, of the West-Mohammedan learned men, as ignorance and error. There are essential distinctions also in the ritual of the Eastern and Western Mohammedans. I doubt very much whether, even at Bagdad and Damascus, during the most brilliant period of Islamism, officers (Reis) were daily traversing the streets, stopping everybody in the midst of their daily occupations in order to hear them the prayer Farz-i-Ayin, and punishing the ignorant on the spot. This is actually being done in Bokhara at the present day. In the various ceremonies of circumcision, marriage, and burial, the Central Asiatics have several customs of their own, entirely heterogeneous to western Islam; their daily prayers, which have to be repeated five times, consist here of more Rikats (genuflexions) than in other countries; and it is curious, at the Ezan (call to prayer), the Turkestans most carefully avoid all tune or melody, and recite it in a sort of howl. The manner in which the Ezan is cried in the West, is here declared sinful, and the beautiful, melancholy notes, which, in the silent hour of a moonlit-evening, are heard from the slender minarets on the Bosphorus, fascinating every hearer, would be listened to by the Bokhariot with feelings only of detestation.