ABSTRACT
Judging by appearances, Persia is a country of Muhammadans. Only the Muslim faith is recognized, and the inhabitants, who always have some pious phrase drawn from the Koran on their lips, seem to be the world’s most zealous believers. It is impossible to converse for a quarter of an hour with any native whomsoever, on any subject, without hearing expressions such as: inshallah! (please God!), mashallah! (God save us!), khudavand-i alam (Lord of the world), hazrat-i payghambar (His Highness the Prophet), salavat allah ali hu ala! (may God save and exalt him!) and other pious expressions of the same kind. If he speaks of the Koran he devoutly calls it the Book of God. If he wishes to quote a few verses he will call them precious verses; and, no matter how small his public, will never fail to utter those terms of studied piety without a sanctimonious, nasal accent, inflating his voice, raising his eyes to heaven and looking for all the world like a little saint. Yet for all that it can be taken as an irrefutable fact that scarcely one out of twenty Persians corresponding to this portrait believes what he is saying. How has an entire nation been led into the curious spectacle of a universal hypocrisy that deceives nobody? This curious moral and political philosophical question is undoubtedly most worthy of examination.
