Sketches of Central Asia (1868): Additional chapters on my travels, adventures, and on the ethnology of Central AsiaVámbéry, Ármin
History
Sketches of Central Asia (1868): Additional chapters on my travels, adventures, and on the ethnology of Central Asia
Vámbéry, Ármin
Asia, Central -- Description and travel
where religious enthusiasm has ever found a most fruitful soil,
Islam has revealed itself in the oddest forms. The brotherhoods
introduced in the days of the Taimurides, are there more powerful
and important than elsewhere; and not Scoat alone, but every place
has an Akhond of its own to show, whose summons to a crusade would
be followed by thousands. In spite of the manifold blessings which
English rule has secured to the Mohamedans, it is they alone who
form the nest of revolutions; they alone who gave most support to
the rebellion in its last disorders; they alone who take chief
delight in conspiring for a Russian occupation, and proclaim in all
directions the advantages of Muscovite rule.
[61] Query--Hangman's halter? (Trans.)
Should we not also take this occasion to think of the Armenians,
who, scattered through Persia and India, form single links of the
chain wherewith the court of St. Petersburg conducts the electric
stream of its influence from the Neva to the Ganges; aye, even to
the shores of Java and Sumatra? The hard-working, wealthy Armenians,
who in their religious sentiments are inclined to be more catholic
than the Papist, more Russian, more orthodox than the Tzar himself,
will assuredly not recommend the Protestant church and Protestant
power to the natives of India, to the injury of supremely Christian
Russia. How many zealous subjects of British rule in Calcutta,
Bombay, and Madras, are not enrolled at Petersburg as yet more
zealous promoters of Russian interests! Every member of this church
in Asia is to be regarded as a secret agent of Muscovite policy; and
if the moment came for a decision, the English would be amazed to
see what kind of chrysalis emerged from this religious, moral, free
and industrious people.
Public-domain text, read in full here on John Shaqi.
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