Marvellously adapted alike to the climate, character, and
occupations of those countries upon which it has laid its adamantine grip,
Islám holds its votary in complete thrall from the cradle to the grave. To him,
it is not only religion, it is government, philosophy, and science as well. The
Muhammadan conception is not so much that of a state church as, if the phrase
may be permitted, of a church state. The undergirders with which society itself
is warped round are not of civil, but of ecclesiastical, fabrication; and,
wrapped in this superb, if paralysing, creed, the Musulman lives in contented
surrender of all volition, deems it his highest duty to worship God and to
compel, or, where impossible, to despise those who do not worship Him in the
spirit, and then dies in sure and certain hope of Paradise.
...These Siyyids, or descendants of the Prophet, are an
intolerable nuisance to the country, deducing from their alleged descent and
from the prerogative of the green turban, the right to an independence and
insolence of bearing from which their countrymen, no less than foreigners, are
made to suffer.
- Lord Curzon (Extract
from “Persia and the Persian Question”, quoted by Shoghi Effendi in the
Introduction to the Dawn-Breakers)
