'Report of Lieutenant-Colonel Charles Edward Stewart, Bengal Staff Corps, on Special Duty on the Perso-Afghan Frontier.' [‎132v] (20/80)

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Tr , i, , trnctpd to fight for the Shah, except the one or
are stationed in Khurasan could usually form the garrison of Mashad,
two regiments of Turks from Azarhaijan pla( f e> The Turk regi-
and the few hundred Turk artillerymen w o ^ P himself, and they
rf* 0f L r S^«ft /Tu a ^lnc y in Pe. S ia as against Persian,
look upon the dynasty as repieseming been alienated . Khurasan has always
people from Khurasan try ‘o ea«jp«mto other ^ g f n f®;«own districts under
eLwTas prisoner's? “while I wL in Khaf a large body of Arab nomads, who had gone
C Kaian to settle on the rich unoccupied lands of Bakharz, were brought rac i
under a stoin» escort °and were forcibly driven into the desert hills near Kanm, where
there was no grazing for the flocks of sheep which accompanied them, and where, pro
bably a largf proportion of them would die, while the lands o Bakharz remain
unoccupied. The Amir of Kaian is a powerful noble, and will not let any one sir ,!< ■
to him leave his districts. The people everywhere were saying, I he ^ hal
“ sold us to the different Governors, and we are worse than slaves. On the one hand,
every penny beyond the barest subsistence is screwed out of them and, on the other,
they are not protected from Turkoman inroads, there is no law, and no justice can be
obtained. It is not wonderful that the people long for a change, and looiv upon t m
Russians as deliverers. It would only be exchanging one alien luie toi another, link
rule for Russian. ^ , . . . . . .
While I was in Mohsinabad, three Circassians (Daghistanis) passed through that
place. They were very frightened of me, and could not he fully persuaded that I was
not a Russian. I had some conversation with them, but they were too frightened to
converse freely. They said they had been engaged in a rising in Daghistan eight years
ago, and had been transported to Tomsk, in Siberia; that, 13 months previous to my
meeting them, they had been released, and that they had ever since been on the road,
begging their way from Tomsk, in Siberia, to their homes in the Caucasus. They
said they had come by Almalyk (this is the place called Viernay by the Russians),
then to Huzrut Sultan and Bokhara, thence to Maimana, and from Maimana to Herat.
They were miserably poor, so I gave them a small sum of money to help them on their
road home.
The only possible difficulty that might arise if the Russians were to occupy the
whole of Khurasan to-morrow would he about the town of Mashad. The shrine of
Imam Reza, the eighth Imam in descent from Aly, is revered and loved by Persians
in a way that we cannot understand. The Persian has no love of country, or
patriotism, as we understand it at all. Persia is so broken up, and inhabited by races
so different, and who have not at all amalgamated,—in the north chiefly Turks, in the
centre tribes of Persian origin, Kurds, Lurs, &c., speaking Persian dialects and often
not even understanding one another, and in the south-east Arabs, all governed by a
king who is alien in race to the majority. It is true a Persian will sometimes rave
about Iran, hut when he does that he does not at all mean the Iran of the present, but
some ideal Iran of the long past, when a Persian king, such as Anoshirwan, ruled, and
when, he believes, justice was obtainable, and Persia a great kingdom, when the Shah-
in-Shah was indeed a King of Kings, and his orders were obeyed from Egypt to the
Indus.
All love and reverence and patriotism, or what stands in its stead in a Persian’s
mind, has been transferred to Aly and his descendants. The Persians have adopted
Aly as their prophet, their hero, and, in many instances, as their God (I here refer to
the sect of Aly lllahis, who believe Aly to have been God incarnate). The reverence
for Hasan and Husain, the sons of Aly, and for their descendants down to the twelfth
Imam, is something not to he understood by a European. Fanaticism could he
strongly roused in Khurasan if it was thought that any insult was to he offered to the
holy place around the tomb of Imam Reza at Mashad, hut if the Russians contented
themselves with occupying the whole country, proclaiming that Mashad would be left
alone, and would not he occupied by Russian troops, the whole province would welcome
thtm as deliverers. Even Mashad itself could he occupied without danger if the
priests m charge of the shrine were first won over, which could easily he done at the
price <d a little money and a few Russian decorations. In this matter, the vome of
some five or six of the principal priests in Mashad would be all that it would he
necessary to purchase, and the able Russian Consular Agent, Karim Beg, who resides