0 t ft* 8h«I»gi»/ Jf 
 
 PRINCETON, N. J. 
 
 
 \ 
 
 Purchased by the Hamill Missionary Fund. 
 
 Division 
 
 Section .' 
 
CHILDREN OF PERSIA 
 
Uniform with this Volume 
 
 CHILDREN OF INDIA 
 
 By Janet Harvey Kelman 
 
 CHILDREN OF CHINA 
 By C. Campbell Brown 
 
 CHILDREN OF AFRICA 
 By James B. Baird 
 
 CHILDREN OF ARABIA 
 By John Cameron Young 
 
 CHILDREN OF JAMAICA 
 By Isabel C. Maclean 
 
 CHILDREN OF JAPAN 
 
 By Janet Harvey Kelman 
 
 CHILDREN OF EGYPT 
 By L. Crowther 
 
 CHILDREN OF CEYLON 
 By Thomas Moscrop 
 
Digitized by the Internet Archive 
 
 * 
 
 in 2018 with funding from 
 Princeton Theological Seminary Library 
 
 * 
 
 https://archive.org/details/childrenofpersiaOOmalc 
 
PERSIAN SHEPHERD BOV 
 
CHILDREN OF PERSIA 
 
 BY 
 
 MRS NAPIER MALCOLM 
 
 
 v 
 
 \ v 
 
 JAM 19 1915 
 
 :J f A * ’ r> i 
 
 • • i • r 
 
 M 
 
 UjH L 
 
 
 WITH EIGHT COLOURED ILLUSTRATIONS 
 
 FLEMING H. REVELL COMPANY 
 
 NEW YORK CHICAGO TORONTO 
 
My Dear Boys and Girls, 
 
 This is a book about Persia, intended 
 to be read by children; and, on this account, much 
 has had to be left out. Do not think, when you have 
 read this book, that you know how bad Muhammadan¬ 
 ism is, for a great deal of its sin and cruelty is too 
 terrible to tell to young folks. But I hope enough 
 has been said to show you that Persian children do 
 need to be rescued from Muhammadanism and brought 
 to the Lord Jesus Christ to be His children. He 
 needs them and they need Him. So for His sake and 
 theirs we must do all we can to win the Persians for 
 Christ. 
 
 I am, 
 
 Your sincere friend, 
 
 U. MALCOLM. 
 
 Broughton, Manchester, 1911. 
 
 TURNBULL AND SPEARS, PRINTERS, EDINBURGH 
 
CONTENTS 
 
 PAGE 
 
 I. Muhammad ...... 7 
 
 II. Persia . . . . . . .11 
 
 III. Persian Babies . . . . .18 
 
 IV. Persian Clothes . . . . .24 
 
 V. Persian Games and Toys. . . -31 
 
 VI. Persian Sweets ..... 36 
 
 VII. Persian Prayers . . . . .41 
 
 VIII. Fasting and Pilgrimages . . .4 7 
 
 IX. Savabs ...... 52 
 
 X. Muhammadan Charms and Superstitions . 58 
 
 XI. Persian Schools ..... 62 
 
 XII. Christian Schools ..... 69 
 
 XIII. Work ...... 74 
 
 XIV. Child Wives ..... 79 
 
 XV. Sick Children ..... 84 
 
 XVI. Conclusion ...... 92 
 
ILLUSTRATIONS 
 
 Persian Shepherd Boy . 
 
 • 
 
 PAGE 
 
 . Frontispiece 
 
 A Street of Shops 
 
 • 
 
 15 
 
 A Baby in Hammock 
 
 • 
 
 20 
 
 Ladies’ Out-door and In-door Costumes 
 
 25 
 
 Persians at Prayer 
 
 • 
 
 43 
 
 Reading the Quran to the Sick 
 
 • 
 
 . 58 
 
 A Persian School . 
 
 • 
 
 64 
 
 A Mission Hospital 
 
 90 
 
CHILDREN OF PERSIA 
 
 CHAPTER I 
 
 MUHAMMAD 
 
 Before we look at the Persian children of to-day, 
 let us go back nearly thirteen and a half centuries to 
 the year of our Lord 570, and take a look at two 
 adjoining countries in Europe and two adjoining 
 countries in Asia. 
 
 In Western Scotland, St Columb is teaching the 
 people Christianity, and is writing out copy after copy 
 of the Bible, until tradition tells that he copied it out 
 three hundred times. 
 
 In England the heathen Saxons are conquering the 
 Midlands and crushing out the Christianity of the 
 Britons. 
 
 In Persia there is a Christian Church, but most of 
 the people are Zoroastrians, that is, they belong 
 to the Parsee religion. They worship God and believe 
 in a prophet called Zoroaster, who lived long before 
 the birth of our Lord Jesus Christ, and so knew 
 nothing about Him. He seems to have taught his 
 people much that was very good, but their religion has 
 become full of superstitions. 
 
 Lastly, we must go to Arabia, where a Muhammadan 
 legend describes a curious scene. 
 
 7 
 
8 
 
 CHILDREN OF PERSIA 
 
 A number of Arab women are riding into the town 
 of Mecca. Their animals are weary and very thin and 
 weak, for it is a year of famine. Last of all comes a 
 woman with a crying baby, riding on the thinnest and 
 most miserable looking donkey of all the company. 
 They are nurses from the healthiest part of Arabia, 
 come to find children to take home and nurse, each 
 hoping to get the child of a wealthy man, who will 
 pay her well, and give her handsome presents. 
 
 They are not long kept waiting. The babies are 
 brought out, and questioning and bargaining begin. 
 One baby is not popular—the whisper goes round that 
 it is an orphan—there is no father to give presents— 
 the grandfather who is looking for a nurse will surely 
 not do much for it. And so one after another all the 
 women refuse the baby, and the old man begins to 
 despair of success. All the women have found 
 nurslings except one, the woman who rode in last. 
 She, too, has refused the orphan, but now, seeing no 
 hope of a better bargain, rather than have taken her 
 journey for nothing, she tells the old man she has 
 changed her mind, and carries the baby home. And 
 the story runs that the thin weak donkey that could 
 hardly drag itself along as it entered Mecca, ran along 
 so nimbly on the way home that the rest could 
 scarcely keep up with it. 
 
 The orphan baby was Muhammad, the founder 
 of the religion called after him Muhammadanism. 
 Some of the details of this story (told by a Muham¬ 
 madan writer) are probably quite untrue. Little 
 Muhammad’s grandfather was known to be very rich 
 
MUHAMMAD 
 
 9 
 
 and in a very high position, and if the baby was re¬ 
 fused it was probably because he was a sickly child, 
 and would be difficult to rear. However, in due course 
 he grew bigger, and came home to his mother, and after 
 her death lived with his old grandfather, who thought 
 all the world of him. 
 
 Mecca was an interesting town to live in, for once 
 a year pilgrims from all parts of Arabia came to the 
 great idol temple, and little Muhammad would see all 
 there was to be seen, for his grandfather kept the keys 
 and superintended everything. 
 
 When his grandfather died he went to live with his 
 uncle, who used to take him on business journeys, going 
 through the wide deserts to distant towns with long 
 strings of camels loaded with goods to sell. So the 
 boy grew up a good man of business and saw much of 
 foreign countries and something of foreign religions, 
 Christianity, Judaism, and Parsiism, and he grew dis¬ 
 contented with his own country and his own religion. 
 
 All the great peoples round worshipped one God. 
 Surely Arabia would be a better and greater country if 
 it did the same. All the great religions had a prophet 
 and a book. The Christians had Jesus Christ and the 
 Gospel, the Jews had Moses and the Law, even the 
 Parsees had Zoroaster and his book the Zend Avesta. 
 Surely what the Arabs needed was a prophet and a book. 
 
 Muhammad was not the only person who thought 
 this. There was a group of people, several of whom 
 were relations of him or of his wife, who shared this 
 view. Some of them thought that Moses and the Law 
 would be best for Arabia; but many of them saw that 
 
10 
 
 CHILDREN OF PERSIA 
 
 Jesus Christ and the Gospel were what they needed, 
 and most of these in the end became Christians. If 
 Muhammad had joined them, the history of the world 
 from then to now might have been very different. 
 But Muhammad had set his heart on an Arabian 
 prophet and an Arabian book, and the more he 
 thought of it the more sure he felt that this was the 
 real way to unity and greatness for Arabia. 
 
 He himself belonged to the family which took the 
 lead in religious matters in Arabia, he had always 
 been made much of, and told he would be a great man; 
 he used to have fits which seemed to him and to 
 others to mark him out as something out of the 
 common ; so it is not surprising that he at last came 
 to believe that he was to be the new Arabian prophet 
 who seemed to him to be so badly wanted. His fits began 
 to take the form of visions, and he believed that the 
 words of the longed for book were being revealed to him. 
 
 But it was a long time before he came forward 
 publicly, and when he did he was a good deal laughed 
 at, and only a few became his followers. Then he got 
 an invitation to the town of Medina, where he had a 
 number of cousins. The people of Medina were very 
 jealous of Mecca, and all, whether they believed in him 
 or not, joined in giving Muhammad a great welcome. 
 
 It was in Medina that Muhammad really founded 
 his religion, and there he became a very great 
 man. But sad to say, as his religion developed all its 
 bad points came out, and Muhammad became a very 
 cruel tyrant and very self-indulgent, excusing himself 
 by saying that God allowed him, because he was a 
 
PERSIA 11 
 
 prophet, to do things which were sinful when other 
 people did them. 
 
 The people who joined Muhammad’s religion were 
 called Muhammadans or Muslims, and they went every¬ 
 where making as many converts as they could, by fair 
 means or foul. They had learnt that there was one 
 God, but they knew nothing of the Bible; they only 
 knew the Quran, the book which Muhammad was 
 revealing, and they knew nothing of the example of 
 Jesus Christ: their only example was Muhammad, 
 who was a murderer. 
 
 You may wonder what all this has to do with 
 Persian children. One of the first countries conquered 
 by the Muhammadans was Persia—and the Persian 
 children to-day are themselves Muhammadans. 
 
 CHAPTER II 
 
 PERSIA 
 
 There is a story that when the Muhammadans took 
 Persia and killed the Parsee king Yazdigird, their 
 Khalif ‘Omar asked Yazdigird’s son where he would 
 like to live. He said he would like to settle in Persia 
 out of reach of any cultivated spot. ‘Omar accordingly 
 sent him off with an escort of soldiers to find a suitable 
 place. After three years he returned and said he 
 could not find any place such as he had asked for. 
 ‘Omar saw that he was doing all this with some pur¬ 
 pose, and asked him what it was. Yazdigird’s son 
 answered that he wanted to show ‘Omar how prosperous 
 
12 
 
 CHILDREN OF PERSIA 
 
 and well cultivated the land had become in the hands 
 of the Parsees, and begged him to see to it that it 
 remained so under the Muhammadans. 
 
 But it did not, and to-day a great deal of Persia 
 has relapsed into desert. 
 
 In our country all is green, and stones have to be 
 put up to show where one village ends and the next 
 begins. In most parts of Persia you may look over 
 the plain and see the villages quite distinct—each a 
 little green blot on a vast sheet of sand or dry earth. 
 
 The very fruitfulness of the ground makes it less 
 green than it would otherwise have to be to support the 
 population, for when three crops can be got off the 
 same piece of land in one year, only a third of the 
 amount of land that you would expect to be needed to 
 support the village is under cultivation. 
 
 The villages vary very much. Some count their 
 population by hundreds, while one village, marked on 
 the map, contains just two families, seven persons in 
 all, including two children. Their nearest neighbours 
 live six miles off, over the sand. 
 
 How bare the world must appear to those two 
 little children. Children here who live in the 
 country can hardly imagine any boundary to the 
 wonderful green tangle that they can see on every 
 side of them. And children who live in towns look 
 out every day upon wonderful human works, which, 
 although they are not as marvellous as God’s country, 
 yet puzzle them very much as to how they were ever 
 made. With a Persian child it is quite different. In 
 many places the children do not know what wild growth 
 
PERSIA 
 
 13 
 
 is, and if you talk of continuous country, hundred miles 
 after hundred miles of field and wood and meadow, 
 they think you are telling an impossible fairy tale. 
 While as for the little town children, the buildings 
 which they see all round them made of sun-dried bricks 
 and earth, the barrels and the thousand and one 
 household utensils formed of exactly the same material, 
 or perhaps of clay very roughly baked in a primitive 
 kiln, seem to them hardly more artificial and man-made 
 than the corn in the walled gardens outside the city, 
 which they see watered twice a week. 
 
 They have a very different life from you and me. 
 
 Little Ahmad was a sturdy, jolly little lad of four 
 when I knew him, and, though he ought to have known 
 better, he used to call after me (if his parents were out 
 of hearing) the rhyme so familiar to Europeans in 
 Persia— 
 
 Ferangi, 
 
 Chi rang-i, 
 
 Palang-i, 
 
 which, translated into English, means— 
 
 European, 
 
 What colour art thou ? 
 
 Thou art a leopard. 
 
 He lived in a really beautiful house, built of sun-dried 
 bricks and clay, and whitened inside with a smooth 
 coat of plaster of Paris. 
 
 The rooms were large and very nicely furnished with 
 beautiful Persian carpets, and a mattress and pillows 
 of gay designs, and Ahmad, little rascal though he was, 
 would never have dreamed of treading on those carpets 
 
14 
 
 CHILDREN OF PERSIA 
 
 with his shoes on ; all shoes were left at the door. 
 One small table for the tea-urn completed the furniture. 
 And upstairs ? Upstairs was the roof, such a lovely 
 large flat roof, Ahmad loved it, and he often terrified 
 his mother by the way he leaned over the low wall to 
 look down at the street, for the house had no window 
 looking to the road. All the windows looked into the 
 garden, which might be said to be in the middle of the 
 house, for the rooms were built round it. The windows, 
 too, were all doors ; some of the rooms had as many as 
 five double doors all in a row, and when they were all 
 open the room was very airy and bright. 
 
 There was no grass, and no gravel path for Ahmad to 
 play on, but there was a nice wide brick-paved walk all 
 round the garden, which gave him plenty of room. In 
 the centre were the beds, which were watered by turning 
 a stream in and flooding them once a week. There were 
 watering cans, but they were only used for watering the 
 path and roof, and even the rooms, to keep them cool, not 
 for the flower beds. There was a large tank, too, in the 
 garden with gold fish in it, where Ahmad loved to cool 
 his feet on a hot day, and the days can be hot in Persia. 
 
 When it was dinner-time in Ahmad’s home a cloth 
 was spread on the floor, and he sat on his heels beside 
 it, and had a loaf of bread for a plate. It was flat and 
 round, and about as thick as a plate, so it did very well. 
 But he had no spoon or fork. 
 
 One of the things he liked best was rice, and when 
 his mother put a few handfuls on his bread he would 
 eat it quickly and tidily with one hand, without spilling 
 any, which is not as easy as it sounds. 
 
A STREET UK SHOPS 
 
PERSIA 
 
 15 
 
 Sometimes Ahmad went out for a walk in the town 
 with his father, or with his mother and a servant, and 
 he passed along streets that had not any names, and 
 by houses that had not any names or numbers. There 
 was no pavement except sometimes a narrow strip in the 
 middle of the road for the mules and donkeys. There 
 were no gardens in front of the houses, there were no 
 windows facing the road, all he saw was a sandy road 
 with a high mud wall on each side, and a heavy wooden 
 door here and there, the front door of a house. 
 
 Sometimes they came to a " bazar ” or street of 
 shops. Here the street was covered over with a 
 mud roof so that goods and sellers and purchasers 
 might keep cool in hot weather and dry in wet weather. 
 He did not need to go into the shops, for the counters 
 were all along the street and there were no windows. 
 
 When the summer was getting very hot, it was 
 decided that Ahmad and all his family should go for a 
 summer holiday to a village in the hills. 
 
 What a packing up there was ! They packed the 
 carpets, they packed the beds, they packed the kettles 
 and saucepans. Then a number of mules were brought 
 to the door and such a shouting and bustle began as 
 the loads were roped together, two and two, and slung 
 across the big padded pack-saddles. One mule carried 
 two great covered panniers and these were filled with 
 cushions, and Ahmad's great-grandmother got into 
 one, and his mother got into the other to balance her, 
 and they pulled the curtains well over the front, so 
 that no one might see them. Ahmad himself sat in 
 front of a servant who held him safe, and some of the 
 
16 
 
 CHILDREN OF PERSIA 
 
 bedding made a nice broad soft seat for them on the 
 mule’s back. At last all the mules were ready with 
 their loads and off they set through the streets, and 
 soon they found themselves outside the town, going 
 mile after mile across the bare desert plain. This 
 went on for fifteen miles and then they reached a large 
 village at the foot of the hills. They had been riding 
 five hours and were tired and hungry, so they dis¬ 
 mounted at the caravansarai or inn. One of the 
 servants took a carpet off one of the loads and got a 
 cloth and some food wrapped up in a large handker¬ 
 chief out of the saddlebags and spread a meal on the 
 ground, while another got the tea-urn and charcoal, 
 boiled the water and made the tea. After a few hours' 
 rest on the roof, the shouting and loading began again 
 and off they went, up the hill, which was terribly steep 
 in some places. Now they saw scattered and stunted 
 plants growing here and there, and finally, after 
 another seven hours, they reached their summer 
 holiday quarters in a little hill village. 
 
 How Ahmad enjoyed the hills and fields and trees, 
 the flowers and birds and butterflies. A little brook 
 ran down the valley and on either side were cornfields 
 and orchards and gardens, as many as the brook could 
 provide water for. And at night Ahmad would hear 
 the shouting, as ‘Ali Muhammad declared that Husain 
 had had his fair share of water and now it was his turn 
 to have it for his orchard. For water is very precious 
 in Persia, and must be made the greatest possible use 
 of, day and night alike. 
 
 But the little children who live in the village are 
 
PERSIA 
 
 17 
 
 not so fortunate as little Ahmad. They work all the 
 summer at gardening, shepherding, and other work; 
 but in winter they have to stay in, and they live up¬ 
 stairs and their sheep and goats downstairs. But 
 the stairs are outside and sometimes it is too cold for 
 them even to go down to feed the animals. If they 
 can they make a little fire of sticks in the oven, which 
 is only a deep, round hole in the floor, and when the 
 flame has died down they sit round with their legs 
 hanging into the oven and cover over the opening to 
 keep it warm as long as possible. One very severe 
 winter there was a report current in the town that in 
 this village the water was all frozen and that the animals 
 were dying because there was not enough fuel to melt 
 the ice and give them water. The poor children must 
 have had a very hard time that winter. 
 
 Even in the town Ahmad is one of the fortunate 
 children. Little Soghra had a very different home. She 
 lived with her grandmother in a single small room. 
 The floor was mud, covered in one place by a 
 small ragged piece of coarse matting. On this the 
 grandmother lay, for she was old and ill. The bed¬ 
 clothes were filthy and torn. One side of the room 
 was filled with a pile of pomegranate skins, which are 
 used for making dye, and there were several fowls 
 wandering about. There was no furniture, nothing 
 but a few old pots and cups and a waterbottle. And 
 yet Soghra was a cheery little girl, and she and her 
 grandmother were very fond of each other. 
 
 B 
 
18 
 
 CHILDREN OF PERSIA 
 
 CHAPTER III 
 
 PERSIAN BABIES 
 
 A Persian baby—what a funny little mortal! It 
 looks for all the world like a little mummy, rolled up in 
 handkerchiefs and shawls till only its little face peeps 
 out, and tied up with a long strip of braid exactly like 
 a parcel tied up with string. Hasn’t it got any arms 
 and legs ? Oh, yes, safely put away inside all those 
 wrappings and put away carefully too—straightened 
 out and rolled up so thoroughly that it will stand up 
 stiff and straight against the wall though it is only a 
 week old. 
 
 How surprised and shocked the Persian mothers are 
 to see the English babies kicking and throwing their 
 arms about. “ O Khanum, aren’t you. afraid its limbs 
 will grow crooked ? Why don’t you bind them 
 straight ? Aren’t you afraid its legs will get broken 
 if you leave them loose like that ? ” 
 
 So at its very start on life’s journey the poor little 
 Persian baby is checked and prevented from growing 
 up properly ; for how can its little legs grow strong 
 without kicking ? It is no wonder that Persian babies 
 as a rule learn to walk much later than English babies. 
 
 But perhaps the Persians are not quite so foolish 
 as they seem when they roll their babies up in these 
 stiff little bundles. Very likely the little anns and 
 legs would be broken or bent if they were left loose, 
 for many of the Persian mothers are very young— 
 much too young to know how to look after babies. 
 
PERSIAN BABIES 
 
 19 
 
 They often treat them like dolls and would very 
 likely break them just as English girls break their 
 dolls. 
 
 Even the grown-up mothers are often very careless. 
 One woman I knew laid her baby, not quite a year old, 
 on a chair, and left it there. Of course it fell off—it 
 was sure to; and yet she did this over and over again, 
 and a few days later dropped it into a stream of water. 
 She was very much surprised that it began to have fits 
 at this time, and she said she could think of nothing 
 to account for them. 
 
 A new missionary, who did not know the ways of 
 Persians, went one day to see another woman and found 
 her in bed, that is, lying on a mattress on the floor 
 under a large quilt. Her friends invited the missionary 
 to sit on the quilt beside her, for they do not use 
 chairs in most Persian houses. After she had sat for 
 some time she enquired for the baby. They pointed 
 to a little lump in the quilt, and there, close beside 
 her, entirely covered up and invisible, was the baby, 
 and it gave the poor missionary a terrible shock 
 to see how near she had been to sitting down upon 
 it. After that, she always asked to see the baby before 
 she sat down. 
 
 A baby less than a week old was brought one day 
 to the Julfa hospital with its face badly torn by a cat. 
 A few days later the doctor went into the ward and 
 found the mother smoking and gossiping with the other 
 women, but the baby was nowhere to be seen. “ Where 
 is the baby ? ” “ It is all right,” said the mother; 
 " I put it under the bed.” And sure enough, a little 
 
20 
 
 CHILDREN OF PERSIA 
 
 way off, under a bed (this time an English bed) lay the 
 poor little bundle, its arms bound to its sides, only 
 its little face exposed, or rather half-exposed, for the 
 torn half was covered with a dressing, while close at 
 hand there prowled in search of food a large half-wild 
 cat, which frequented the hospital and had slipped in 
 at an open door.* 
 
 When they get a little older the babies are laid in 
 broad comfortable leather hammocks slung between 
 rings let into the walls of the room. Most Persian 
 rooms have these rings in the walls. These hammocks 
 save the Persian mothers a great deal of trouble, for a 
 single push will set the hammock swinging for a long 
 time and keep the baby quiet or send it to sleep. 
 
 No baby may be left alone in a room till it is forty 
 days old. 
 
 From the very first the baby is given kaif every¬ 
 day, that is, something to make it sleep ; this kaif 
 is almost invariably opium. After the first week 
 most babies are also given tea every day, without milk 
 but with a great deal of sugar in it, or better still 
 sugar-candy. This is considered specially good for 
 babies, but it takes a long time to dissolve. Both 
 opium and tea are very bad for the baby’s digestion, 
 so we are not surprised to find that nearly all Persians 
 suffer from indigestion. 
 
 There is one Persian custom connected with babies 
 that boys and girls of other lands would probably like 
 
 * For the credit of the hospital authorities it must be stated 
 that they were making every effort to destroy the cat, but had 
 hitherto failed owing to its wildness and cunning. 
 
A BABY IN HAMMOCK. 
 
PERSIAN BABIES 
 
 
 to introduce into their own country. The newly- 
 arrived baby is weighed and its weight in sweets is 
 handed, round to the people in the house, and it is 
 supposed to bring bad luck to the baby if anyone 
 refuses its sweets. Plenty of people always drop in 
 when they hear that a new baby has arrived. 
 
 Another Persian rule for babies would not please 
 your mothers at all. After the first bath no baby 
 must be washed all over till it is a year old. One 
 Persian lady, who was better educated than most, 
 and had been reading about European ideas on health 
 and cleanliness, told the missionaries that she was 
 bringing up her little boy just like a European baby. 
 She said she gave him a bath every day and generally 
 let him kick instead of tying his legs up to make them 
 straight. She was delighted and trumphant when, 
 instead of getting crooked, his legs grew so strong that 
 he walked at about half the usual age. But when he 
 was nearly a year old his body became covered with 
 sores and the missionary doctor told the mother to 
 wash them not with ordinary water in the bath, but 
 with a lotion. " I should never think of washing them 
 in the bath/' she said. “ His body must not be washed 
 till he is a year old.“ But I thought/’ said the doctor, 
 <f that you gave him a bath every day.” “ Oh dear 
 no,” she replied ; “ I don’t wash his body. It is his legs 
 that I wash every day.” 
 
 When a Persian baby learns to talk it begins just 
 like any other baby, so that the Persians declared 
 with great glee that the English babies were talking 
 Persian when they said “ Baba ” and “ Dada.” But 
 
22 
 
 CHILDREN OF PERSIA 
 
 instead of “ Daddy ” and “ Mummy ” Persian babies 
 call their father and mother Baba and Nana. 
 
 When the baby is shown to anyone the mother 
 generally remarks that it is an ugly little thing, and 
 similarly the visitors are expected to say how ugly and 
 dark it is, though there is no need to say it with any 
 great conviction. It is possible to say “ How ugly you 
 are ” just as affectionately as “You little darling/’ 
 But such uncomplimentary remarks are used to avert 
 bad luck and to guard against any suspicion of the evil 
 eye. If the visitor makes any complimentary remark 
 she must add “Masha alldh ” ( i.e . “ May God avert it ”), 
 or the parents will be seriously alarmed, and Baby’s 
 admirer may be held responsible for any calamity 
 which befalls him for weeks afterwards. 
 
 Bibi Fati was the mother of four dear little children, 
 Rubabeh, Hasan, Riza, and Sakineh, and very dearly 
 she loved them. One day they were all gathered to¬ 
 gether for dinner when in walked a poor old beggar 
 woman in search of a meal. She was very anxious 
 to please the mother, and looking round at the 
 children said: “ What a nice little family you have; 
 you are like a hen surrounded by her chickens.” 
 
 Poor Bibi Fati did not feel at all comfortable at such 
 a complimentary speech and quickly gave the old 
 woman some food and sent her about her business. 
 
 For a day or two all went well. Then one after 
 another Rubabeh, Hasan, Riza, and even little 
 Sakineh sickened and died, probably of some infectious 
 disease, and the poor mother was left childless and 
 heartbroken. Nothing would convince her and her 
 
PERSIAN BABIES 23 
 
 neighbours that the old beggar woman had not caused 
 the catastrophe by her admiration. 
 
 Baby girls do not get such a good welcome as baby 
 boys. When little Feranglz Khanum was born, her 
 father was staying at a garden a few miles away, and 
 no one troubled to send him word. “ I would have 
 sent a message if it had been a boy,” said the mother, 
 “ but it is not worth while for a girl. It will do when 
 he comes home next week.” 
 
 Persian fathers and mothers are often very fond of 
 their little girls, but there is no doubt that they very 
 much prefer boys. The father and mother, but 
 especially the mother, are often known by the name 
 of their son, so much so that sometimes the neighbours 
 know them by no other name than “ the father of 
 Hasan,” the “ mother of ‘Ali.” 
 
 Perhaps one reason for preferring boys is that the 
 girls marry so young, just as they might begin to be 
 of some use to their mothers ; and the father has to 
 pay a sum of money to his daughter’s husband on her 
 marriage. A son, on the other hand, does not 
 generally marry till he is grown up, and then he almost 
 invariably brings his little wife home and continues 
 to live with his parents. 
 
 A greater reason is that the Persians are Muham¬ 
 madans, as you have already heard, and in a Muham¬ 
 madan country the men are allowed to treat the girls 
 and women very badly, and parents who care at all 
 for their girls must always feel great anxiety as to 
 their future. 
 
 We shall never get the Persians to treat their girls 
 
u 
 
 CHILDREN OF PERSIA 
 
 and women much better till we teach them the religion 
 of our loving Saviour, Who cares for us all equally 
 and wants us to be equally kind to one another. 
 
 CHAPTER IV 
 
 PERSIAN CLOTHES 
 
 Persian boys and girls are white, almost as white as 
 ourselves, though they generally have black hair and 
 dark eyes. The chief difference in appearance between 
 Tommy Jones and ‘Ali Muhammad is that Tommy 
 wears trousers while ‘Ali Muhammad appears to wear 
 a skirt. Tommy’s sister on the other hand wears a 
 skirt, and ‘Ali Muhammad’s sister wears trousers. 
 
 The fact is that if ‘Ali Muhammad is a poor boy, his 
 trousers are short and so very wide as to be practically 
 a divided skirt. Indeed they catch like a skirt in 
 running, so that if he wants to go fast he pulls one 
 trouser-leg up out of the way. If he wears a coat at 
 all, it is a long cotton one, or more probably two long 
 cotton ones, reaching nearly to his knees and adding 
 to the skirt-like appearance. 
 
 The sons of well-to-do men often wear frock coats 
 with the skirts pleated all round almost like a kilt, so 
 that in spite of their longer and narrower trousers they 
 still have a look of wearing skirts. 
 
 ‘Ali Muhammad's girdle too, which binds his coats 
 to him and prevents their blowing about in the wind, 
 is more suggestive of a sash than a belt. I once saw 
 a little boy putting on his girdle on New Year’s Day. 
 
ladies’ out-door and in-door costumes 
 
PERSIAN CLOTHES 
 
 25 
 
 It was 4 long folded scarf or shdl and he put one end 
 round his waist while his brother took the other to the 
 far end of the long room and drew it tight. Then my 
 little friend turned round and round, so winding his 
 shdl round him, gradually moving up the room as the 
 length grew less, and he finished by tucking in the end. 
 But whether they wear long trousers or short ones, wide 
 trousers or narrow ones, the boys all fasten them by 
 drawing them up with a string round the hips—braces 
 are not the fashion. 
 
 As we have found that, in spite of appearances, ‘Ali 
 Muhammad after all wears trousers, we may perhaps 
 find that his sister, Rubabeh, wears a skirt, and so in¬ 
 deed she does, but it is so short as not to be very notice¬ 
 able indoors, while out of doors it is completely hidden 
 by the big baggjf over-trousers, gathered in at the 
 ankles and footed, which she wears when she goes in 
 the street. An English missionary once suggested to a 
 young woman that a skirt reaching to the knees would 
 look better, but she said she was not an old woman 
 yet. The old women generally wear quiet colours 
 and long skirts, reaching down to the knee, but young 
 women and girls like something more dressy. They 
 like a nice bright-patterned skirt about a foot long, 
 but wide enough to reach half across the room. This 
 they draw up with a string over the white cotton 
 trousers, and the short shirt hangs loose outside. The 
 shirt is generally white but may be coloured, and a 
 short coloured jacket is worn over it, varying from 
 plain coarse cotton to velvet embroidered with gold 
 and pearls. 
 
26 
 
 CHILDREN OF PERSIA 
 
 The indoor chadar , or “ prayer -chadar,” is often of 
 pretty print or muslin, and when Rubabeh puts on her 
 clean white trousers, shirt and headkerchief, with a 
 bright frill of skirt round the waist and a pretty j acket 
 and chadar, she makes a very bright and effective 
 picture. But when she goes out she must put on dark 
 overtrousers which cover everything up to the waist, 
 and over her head, in place of the pretty prayer 
 chadar, she must throw a large black chadar which hangs 
 over everything, while a long strip of white cotton 
 hangs down in front of her face with drawn thread 
 work in front of the eyes, so that she may be able to 
 see without being seen. 
 
 So, unlike our streets, the Persian ones get their 
 colour from the men and boys, while the women and 
 girls supply the darker, duller element. Bright blue 
 is the commonest colour for the men’s coats, and green 
 is not uncommon, while, at the New Year, pink, yellow, 
 lilac and other colours make the streets very gay indeed. 
 
 The children are dressed just like their fathers and 
 mothers, and are little imitation men and women. 
 The little tots look so funny sometimes; tiny boys 
 toddling about in long trousers, frockcoats, and grown¬ 
 up hats, and wee girls, who cannot yet speak dis¬ 
 tinctly, in the long trousers, short skirts and chadars 
 of the women. 
 
 It seems to suggest that no great distinction is made 
 between children and grown-ups, and really there is 
 not as much difference as we find at home. The 
 children are taught to take life very seriously and are 
 treated as little men and women before their time, and 
 
PERSIAN CLOTHES 
 
 27 
 
 so they have no time to grow up into proper men 
 and women, and the result is that we find the children 
 too grown-up and the grown-ups too childish. 
 
 You will find, roughly speaking, if you look at 
 animals that the higher the animal, the longer its 
 childhood lasts, because it has more growing up to 
 do. Caterpillars and tadpoles look after themselves 
 from the time of coming out of the egg, mice grow up 
 in a few weeks, horses in a few years, and man takes 
 longer to grow up than any animal. 
 
 Now Muhammad, the false prophet whom the 
 Persians believe in and obey, had no such high 
 standard to set before them, no such high ideal for 
 them to grow up to, as our Lord Jesus Christ set before 
 His followers and enables them to grow up to ; and 
 so his religion provides only a short time for growing 
 up, and stunts instead of assisting the growth both 
 of individual Muhammadans and of Muhammadan 
 nations. 
 
 But we must get back to our Persian children and 
 their clothes. Their day-clothes we have seen; what 
 about their night-clothes ? They have none. They 
 just take off their outer garments and lie down in the 
 rest, and in the morning they just get up and put on 
 their outer garments again. Sometimes they do not 
 put off anything. 
 
 “ We are so tired,” said some ladies one New Year’s 
 morning. “ With all our new clothes on we could not 
 lie down, we should have crushed them, so we sat up 
 all night.” 
 
 You wonder why they were so foolish as to put them 
 
28 
 
 CHILDREN OF PERSIA 
 
 on on New Year’s Eve in that case, instead of on the 
 morning of the New Year itself. The reason is simple. 
 A Persian only puts on new clothes after a bath, and 
 a bath in Persia is not a mere matter of half an hour ; it 
 takes half a day, and sometimes a whole one. Some 
 of the richer people have baths in their own houses, 
 but most people go to the public baths. 
 
 All Persian women and girls love a day at the bath, 
 and will not shorten it if they can possibly help it. 
 It is something like a Turkish bath, and there they 
 meet their friends and sit about in steamy rooms, 
 talking, laughing, gossiping. No wonder they look 
 forward to it, for a Persian girl has a much more 
 secluded and restricted life than girls in Europe and 
 her intercourse with her friends is much less free. One 
 girl of fifteen told me that except for her weekly visit 
 to the bath she had only left her house once in a period 
 of six months, and in her own house she received very 
 few visitors, the calls of her English missionary friends 
 being great events for the whole household. 
 
 At the bath they wash their hair, dye it with henna, 
 and plait it up in a dozen or more long plaits which 
 hang down their backs under the headkerchief and 
 chddar, not to be undone again probably until the next 
 visit to the bath. The henna is a reddish dye and 
 though it does not show on black hair it turns fair or 
 grey hair a carroty red. The newcomer to Persia 
 wonders to see so much red hair, till he finds that this 
 is the explanation. But the boys and girls nearly all 
 have black hair. 
 
 Boys have their heads shaved, though sometimes 
 
PERSIAN CLOTHES 
 
 29 
 
 a handful of hair is left over each ear, or a lock in the 
 middle of the scalp. This shaving is probably the 
 reason why Persian boys always keep on their caps 
 or hats indoors and only take them off to sleep. In¬ 
 stead of taking off their caps, Persian boys, and girls 
 too, take off their shoes when they come into a room, 
 and this, together with the absence of chairs and tables 
 explains how Persian carpets last a hundred years. 
 They are actually more valuable after several years 
 wear than when they were new. 
 
 Besides the hair, the fingernails, palms of the hands 
 and soles of the feet must, by Muhammadan rules, be 
 dyed with henna. The richer bathers have all these 
 things done by the bath attendant, but the poorer 
 ones do it all themselves, and the very poor often omit 
 the henna, except on special occasions. 
 
 Just as no Persian likes to put on clean clothes 
 without going to the bath, so he will not go to the bath 
 without putting on clean clothes. 
 
 “ Khanum, give me a new shirt,” begged one old 
 woman, displaying a ragged one she had on. “ For 
 want of one I have not been able to go to the bath 
 since this was new.” 
 
 But where there’s a will there’s a way, and some 
 people who are too poor to have a change of clothes go 
 to the bath, take off their clothes and wash them, and 
 then wait in the bath till they are dry. 
 
 There is a large tank in which the people wash and 
 a ceremonial washing requires a dip right under the 
 water. The usual idea of changing the water is to 
 take out canfuls to water the tiles round, and then fill 
 
30 
 
 CHILDREN OF PERSIA 
 
 up the tank again with clean water, so simply adding a 
 little clean water to the dirty. 
 
 During a cholera epidemic the Governor of a Persian 
 town ordered that the bath water should be changed 
 at least once a month. One cannot help wondering 
 whether the monthly change was carried out as de¬ 
 scribed above, and I am sure you would prefer the 
 little village baths where there is often so small a 
 tank that no one can get into it, and they ladle out the 
 water and wash in basins. 
 
 The common use of the one tank, with the only 
 partial changing of the water, and the general care¬ 
 lessness of infection, make the bath one of the greatest 
 means of spreading disease. 
 
 The Muhammadan religion provides strict rules as 
 to clothes and baths and washing. In the washings 
 before prayers it even decides which hand and which 
 side of the face shall be washed first. And all this 
 the parents teach the children as carefully as, gener¬ 
 ally much more carefully than, such matters as truth¬ 
 fulness, honesty and kindness. 
 
 Here again we see Muhammad giving his people 
 what we may call “ nursery rules,” treating them as 
 children, while our Master expects us to grow up so 
 that we can arrange these matters for ourselves. 
 
 As children we must live under detailed rules, but 
 always with the object before us of growing up right. 
 The very fact that the detailed rules of Muham¬ 
 madanism are binding through life shows that the 
 Muhammadan is not expected to grow up as we 
 understand growing up. 
 
PERSIAN GAMES AND TOYS 
 
 31 
 
 CHAPTER V 
 
 PERSIAN GAMES AND TOYS 
 
 It is curious to go thousands of miles to Persia—to 
 cross vast sandy deserts—and at last to find little 
 skirted boys in the mudwalled streets playing tipcat 
 just like their counterparts in our own cities. Hop¬ 
 scotch and duck-stone too are favourite games, and 
 kites are very popular. The kites are large and square 
 and fly very well, and the boys often fly them from the 
 roofs, sending “ messages ” up the string just as our 
 boys do. There is a regular game of “ wolf ” too, 
 played almost exactly as it is in many parts of the 
 world by English-speaking children. I am sorry to 
 say that pitch and toss and gambling with cards are 
 very common. 
 
 There is nothing like cricket and football, but in 
 Yezd there is a kind of “ rounders'’ which is played 
 for a fortnight only at the New Year—the Persian 
 New Year, that is, in March. Any evening during 
 that fortnight if you go out into the desert just outside 
 the town walls you will see a crowd of men and boys, 
 some playing, some watching. And any day during 
 that fortnight if you visit the women, some small boy 
 will proudly show his chaftar or rounders stick. For 
 a week or two afterwards an occasional chaftar may 
 be seen but after that it is a puzzle where they dis¬ 
 appear to, not one is to be seen till the next New 
 Year. 
 
 The little girls in Persia, as everywhere else, depend 
 
32 
 
 CHILDREN OF PERSIA 
 
 largely on dolls. The dolls are home made—rag-dolls 
 without much shape, with the features worked in fine 
 cross-stitch, and dressed of course, as Persians. Good 
 European dolls are great treasures, even to the women, 
 and I knew one rich lady who had eight very nice ones 
 all for herself. 
 
 In Shiraz they make wooden horses for the children 
 and little models of the kajavehs or covered panniers in 
 which women and children often travel. In Yezd, 
 where the workers in clay are cleverer than the 
 carpenters, little model kuzehs or waterpots are 
 commoner and clay money-boxes and nightingales. 
 Roughly moulded and gaily painted clay animals 
 and men too, are made in quantities—but only at the 
 “ Festival of the Sacrifice ” when a camel is sacrificed. 
 At the time of this festival there are stalls and shops in 
 the bazaars full of clay toys and toy drums, but they 
 cannot be got at any other time of year, and as clay 
 animals are quickly broken they are only to be seen 
 for a very short time. Among the toys may some¬ 
 times be seen a figure evidently copied from an 
 Italian statuette of the Virgin and Child—copied by 
 Muhammadans without any idea of what it represents. 
 But when all is said the games and toys are very few 
 in Persia, as compared with those you are accustomed 
 to. Perhaps they are not so much needed there. 
 The grown-ups are so childish that it is no great hard¬ 
 ship to a child to practice grown-up ways instead of 
 playing games of its own. There is so much in ordinary 
 grown-up life that is really a very good substitute for a 
 game—the elaborate greetings to be gone through 
 
PERSIAN GAMES AND TOYS 
 
 33 
 
 with each person in turn according to their importance, 
 the tea served in tiny cups no bigger than a child’s 
 teaset, the sweet-eating, the pressing of roseheads into 
 the visitor’s hand, or the more elaborate arrangement 
 of stiff sticks closely covered with roses, the presenta¬ 
 tion of tiny unripe first-fruits, of melon seeds or nuts 
 ornamented with fluffy bits of silk, of oranges inlaid 
 with velvet, all these would seem a very attractive 
 game to a child. Perhaps they really prefer to join 
 in the games their elders play in earnest rather than 
 play their own in jest. The conversation too is seldom 
 over their heads, but generally interests them as much 
 as their parents. The entertainments of the elders are 
 of a kind to suit the children too. What child does 
 not enjoy the Fifth of November with its Guy Fawkes, 
 its fireworks, and its bonfires ? and the Persians, too, 
 have their firework day, when they burn not Guy 
 Fawkes, but ‘Omar, the Muhammadan leader who 
 conquered Persia. They do not burn him, because he 
 conquered Persia, but because he was Khalif or head 
 of the Muhammadans, and the Persians say that ‘Ali, 
 Muhammad’s son-in-law, ought to have been Khalif 
 and that ‘Omar was a usurper. There are torchlight 
 processions, in which ‘Omar’s effigy is carried, bonfires 
 illuminations, and fireworks in plenty. 
 
 All the year round fireworks and illuminations are 
 very popular, so much so that the main work of 
 the Government Arsenals seems to be the manu¬ 
 facture of fireworks. Another very popular form of 
 entertainment is the ruzehkham , or religious reading. 
 It is considered a very pious act for a man to have a 
 c 
 
34 
 
 CHILDREN OF PERSIA 
 
 ruzehkhdnl in his house in the two months of Muharram, 
 and his friends come in crowds and greatly prefer it to 
 an ordinary party. Muharram is the time of mourning 
 for Husain and Hasan, Muhammad's grandsons. 
 
 The courtyard is crowded with people sitting on the 
 ground, and as the professional reader recites the story 
 of the death of Husain and Hasan the people sway 
 their bodies to and fro to the rhythm and gradually 
 work up their excitement. Then they all begin to 
 beat on their bare chests with the open hand and raise 
 a wail that gradually grows in strength, till the wailing 
 and the sound of the blows can be heard several streets 
 off and the tears stream down their cheeks. It is 
 very exciting, and grown-ups and children alike enjoy 
 it thoroughly. 
 
 But the day of the year is the day of the death of 
 Husain when the nakhl is carried and the great 
 passion play of the death of Husain and Hasan is 
 played. 
 
 This is a general holiday and all through the early 
 part of the day, the villagers come trooping in to the 
 towns. The streets are now full and processions pass 
 along them carrying the nakhls from the squares out¬ 
 side the smaller mosques. In some towns, too, they 
 carry alams, or long poles with a series of handkerchiefs 
 tied to them. When the processions from two different 
 quarters of the town meet there is generally a struggle, 
 often ending in a free fight; so both alams and nakhls 
 are now forbidden in some towns. 
 
 I only once met a procession myself, and then it 
 most politely halted to allow me to pass comfortably. 
 
PERSIAN GAMES AND TOYS 
 
 35 
 
 The smaller processions being over, everyone crowds 
 to the large squares to see the carrying of the great 
 nakhls of the big mosques. 
 
 The nakhls are wooden frameworks carried on poles 
 and hung on one side with looking-glasses, on the other 
 with daggers. Those in the large squares are of 
 immense weight. They are said on this day to be 
 carried across the square by Fatimeh, Muhammad's 
 daughter, but it is a work of great merit to help her, 
 so as many as can possibly get within reach of the 
 poles join in the work, and the nakhl moves across the 
 square. But the afternoon is the best part when the 
 great play of the death of Husain and Hasan is acted. 
 Then, indeed, there is wailing and beating of breasts. 
 “ I enjoy it more than anything in the year," one lady 
 told me. 
 
 One year there was a little boy dangerously ill with 
 inflammation of the lungs when the great day came 
 round. It was considered quite out of the question for 
 any of the family to stay away from the play to nurse 
 him, and being a boy he was not likely to obey the 
 woman servant who was being left in charge of the 
 house. “ He would have been all over the roof trying 
 to get a glimpse of the play," his mother said, “ and 
 probably would have fallen off, so we had to take him." 
 So they took a mattress for him, and he lay and listened 
 to the play from a gallery, and of course got up to 
 watch the exciting parts. It very nearly killed him, 
 but they seemed to feel they had taken the only reason¬ 
 able course, and he eventually recovered. 
 
36 
 
 CHILDREN OF PERSIA 
 
 CHAPTER VI 
 
 PERSIAN SWEETS 
 
 In a Persian town there is a curious arrangement of 
 the shops. All the shops where one kind of article is 
 sold are generally grouped together in one street or 
 bazar. To buy shoes we go to the shoe bazaar, for 
 cooking pots to the copper bazaar. 
 
 The copper or brass bazaar is almost always worth 
 a visit in a Persian town. It is a long roofed-in street 
 with a continuous row of small shops on either side. 
 The “ shop ” consists of a lock-up room with a small 
 mud platform in front of it, raised a foot-or two above 
 the street. On this platform are two or three stumps 
 on which the pots are placed for hammering, for after 
 being heated over a charcoal brazier they are hammered 
 and beaten into the required shape, thickness and 
 pattern. On nearly every platform is a man, some¬ 
 times two or three men and boys, hammering each on 
 his copper pot and the noise produced by a hundred 
 or more men hammering vigorously on copper vessels, 
 which give different notes according to size, shape and 
 thickness, is deafening, but not wholly disagreeable.* 
 But there is another bazaar well worth a visit in 
 Yezd at anyrate. * The shops here have counters rising 
 in tiers, so as to display the very tempting goods to 
 advantage. The goods themselves are chiefly laid out 
 on huge round copper trays, about a yard across and 
 
 * This description is taken from the Shiraz copper bazaar. 
 
PERSIAN SWEETS 37 
 
 very heavy, made in the bazaar we have just left, but 
 whitened over, as all copper vessels are. 
 
 Surely we are in Fairyland at last. Shop after 
 shop shows tier upon tier of the most delicious sweets 
 in the most tempting profusion. Here is pashnak, 
 looking like cotton wool and tasting something like 
 butter creams. There are two or three kinds of almond 
 toffee, or son —some with green pistachio nuts in it. 
 Huge fondants, or Idz , in diamond-shaped cakes, nearly 
 as large as the ordinary penny fancy cakes in England, 
 alternate with similar cakes of green pari-taus (pea¬ 
 cock’s feathers), and brown baghalavd, richer and 
 stickier than either. 
 
 Those white nuqls are delicious burnt almonds, which 
 seem to melt away in your mouth, the long ones have 
 strips of cocoa-nut instead of almonds, and the little 
 round ones burnt peas. Here are little flat round 
 cakes of gaz, a kind of nougat only made in Isfahan, 
 but sent to all the towns in Persia. One variety of gaz 
 contains little sticks of a gum which is supposed to 
 cure rheumatism, a very pleasant remedy. 
 
 There is a great bowl a foot across, and over an inch 
 thick made wholly of sugar candy, which has taken 
 the shape of the basin in which it crystallised, and in 
 the middle of which three long sticks of sugar candy 
 stand up high above the top. Such a bowl a kind 
 Persian friend sent to a missionary’s little boy, when 
 he was a few days old, to provide him with “ sugar- 
 candy water,” which is considered particularly good 
 for young babies. These are only a few of the sweets, 
 there are too many to mention all. Some kinds are 
 
38 
 
 CHILDREN OF PERSIA 
 
 only made in the fast month of Ramazan, and others 
 only at the New Year. The sweets are delicious but 
 they are as a rule very simple and very sweet. So the 
 Persians do not hand them round in little paper bags, 
 nor even in pretty little boxes ; they pile them on 
 plates and dishes, as we do cakes ; and, as you have 
 seen, many of them are as large as cakes. When you 
 go to visit a Persian, you have not tea and cakes, but 
 tea and sweets. For a quiet call on quiet people, two 
 or three plates of sweets are enough, but at a regular 
 sweet-eating at a big house, one or two great trays will 
 be set on the ground before the guests, each with five 
 dishes of sweets on it, each dish holding about a pound 
 and a half to two pounds of sweets. The Persian 
 women are often very pressing with their sweets, even 
 to the point of putting them into their visitors’ mouths, 
 and in their hospitality they sometimes over-estimate 
 the size of the mouth. Often too, the guests are made 
 to carry home what is left, or a part of it, tied up in a 
 handkerchief. This is so common that where the 
 European is shy of pressing the custom, the Persian 
 ladies will sometimes carry home the remains of 
 European dishes out of courtesy, to show that they 
 have appreciated them. This custom probably exists 
 and has existed in many Eastern countries, and may 
 very likely be the reason why Joseph gave Benjamin 
 five times as much as his other brothers. Benjamin 
 was probably intended to take what was over away 
 with him. 
 
 I was visiting some Persian women one day, and 
 they asked for my handkerchief to wrap up the re- 
 
PERSIAN SWEETS 
 
 39 
 
 mainder of the sweets in. I apologised for being un¬ 
 able to take them as I had not a clean handkerchief, 
 on which they all eagerly assured me that it did not 
 matter in the least, they would be quite content with 
 the one I had. The Persian dastmal or handkerchief 
 serves every purpose except the one we connect it with. 
 Your Persian servant, always carries a large coloured 
 one in his pocket. He dusts the rooms with it, puts 
 his purchases from the bazar into it, polishes your 
 boots with it before you enter a Persian house, and 
 carries home sweets or nuts in it. 
 
 At the New Year, there are twenty-one days set 
 apart for holiday making and visiting, and in every 
 house tea and sweets and sherbet are ready for all 
 comers. In those twenty-one days people are ex¬ 
 pected to visit all their friends, and even with strict 
 moderation the most sweet-loving schoolboy of your 
 acquaintance would probably be glad of a rest by the 
 end of the three weeks. 
 
 All this sounds delightful, doesn’t it ? But un¬ 
 fortunately it is more for the grown-ups than for the 
 children. The children like sweets well enough and 
 get a good many, but they have not the same oppor¬ 
 tunities as the grown-ups. 
 
 But sweets have their serious uses among the 
 Persians. We have seen that rheumatism may be 
 cured with nougat, and we find that sweets in general 
 are very strengthening. It is not at all uncommon, 
 after a small operation or the extraction of a tooth, to 
 see the friends pressing sugar or sweets into the 
 patient’s mouth, to restore her strength after the shock, 
 
40 
 
 CHILDREN OF PERSIA 
 
 and in the same way after a fright a few sweets make 
 you feel much better. 
 
 Bread and sweets are not an uncommon dinner, 
 and a child who was ordered by the doctor to take 
 plenty of milk because it was good strengthening food, 
 was given three-quarters of a pound of sweets for her 
 dinner instead. “ So much more strengthening than 
 milk/’ the mother said. 
 
 Persian sweets are very soft and in the dry climate 
 quickly get hard and lose their first freshness, and 
 to offer a Persian stale sweets is like offering you 
 stale cakes. They are at their best only on the 
 day they are made, and the servant sent to buy sweets 
 will sit down with his tray of plates at the shop-door 
 and wait till the new sweets are ready, when they can 
 be put quite fresh and new on the plates on which they 
 are to be served. In Yezd, where the best sweets are 
 made, our servants seemed to regard the moving of 
 sweets to a fresh plate much as we should the removal 
 of a pie to a fresh pie-dish, and many sorts are certainly 
 the worse for being shifted after they have got cold. 
 All better-class Persians make their own sweets at home 
 and consider “ shop sweets ” very inferior. 
 
 The fame of Persian sherbet has spread far, and 
 nearly every visitor to Persia looks forward to a treat 
 when he tastes it. But it by no means comes up to 
 expectation. It is often made fresh in the presence 
 of the guests, so the recipe is no secret. A sugar loaf 
 is put in a basin, by preference a pot pourri bowl, and 
 cold water is poured over it, and it is allowed to melt 
 with an occasional stir. A little rosewater is then 
 
PERSIAN PRAYERS 
 
 41 
 
 added to flavour it, and it is handed round in glasses, 
 with ice if possible. At meals, however, the bowl 
 is placed on the tablecloth,—there is no table,—and a 
 large carved wooden spoon is passed to each in turn 
 from which to drink it. 
 
 Sometimes lime or orange juice is offered as an 
 alternative flavour to rosewater, which makes it much 
 more palatable to Europeans. But insipid as the 
 ordinary sherbet is, it seems the most delicious com¬ 
 pound imaginable when it is taken, well-iced, after a 
 long walk with the thermometer at ioo° in the shade. 
 Perhaps that is why it has been so much praised. 
 
 Another favourite beverage is sekunjibin, which is 
 like raspberry vinegar with mint instead of raspberry. 
 
 Sherbet and good things to eat figure largely in 
 Muhammad’s description of the joys of Heaven. 
 His ideals were ideals that did not need much growing 
 up to. He expected his followers to have childish ideas 
 and childish desires even in heaven. 
 
 CHAPTER VII 
 
 PERSIAN PRAYERS 
 
 Persian boys and girls need not say their prayers 
 till they are seven years old. Sometimes they begin 
 sooner, but that is considered unnecessarily good. 
 They are not to be beaten for not saying them till they 
 are ten, and I have not seen many children under ten 
 years old saying their prayers. We cannot remember 
 learning to pray, for as soon as we could understand 
 
42 
 
 CHILDREN OF PERSIA 
 
 anything about God, we were taught to ask Him to 
 take care of us, to ask Him to forgive us when we were 
 naughty, and to help us to be good, to thank Him for 
 His kindness and His gifts. It is so simple that a 
 child of three or four can come to God in this way, we 
 need not wait till we are seven to bring simple petitions 
 to our Heavenly Father. But little Ghulam Husain’s 
 prayers are far from simple. He has first to learn to 
 wash his face, hands and arms, and feet and legs. 
 “ That does not need much teaching,” you say. " He 
 can surely wash himself at that age.” But there is a 
 right and a wrong way of washing in Persia before 
 prayers. There is a right and a wrong side of your face to 
 wash first, there is a right and a wrong hand and a right 
 and a wrong foot to wash first. If a Persian is very 
 religious and careful there is even a right and a wrong 
 side of his arm and leg to wash first, but few Persian 
 children are as careful as that. No soap is wanted, 
 just plain water, or, if there is no water, sand. So our 
 our little Ghulam Husain learns his washings, and now 
 he is ready to learn the prayers themselves, which are 
 all in Arabic so that he does not understand them. 
 
 He is shown the direction of Mecca to which he must 
 always turn when saying them, and he is taught when 
 to stand, when to kneel, when to bow himself till his 
 forehead touches the ground, and when to make 
 various gestures. And when he has learnt all this he 
 is ready to begin saying his prayers regularly, and he 
 is told that if he says them correctly, and with the 
 right movements, they will be pleasing to God, and 
 count as good works. He must say them three times 
 
PERSIANS AT PRAYER 
 
PERSIAN PRAYERS 
 
 43 
 
 a day, and he cannot choose his time. When the 
 prayer-call sounds from the mosque roofs, and is 
 taken up by people on the house roofs, he must leave 
 what he is doing, and wash and say his prayers—the 
 same prayers every time. First in the early dawn, 
 before sunrise, he hears the call, and he must get out 
 of bed for washing and prayers. In the summer it may 
 be as early as four o'clock, in winter not till six or 
 seven. Then, again, when the sun-dial on the mosque 
 marks noon, the call is heard, and again at sunset, 
 and each time the prayers must be said within half 
 an hour. Half an hour's grace is allowed, so if 
 Persians have visitors when the prayer-call sounds, 
 they are able to go in turns to say their prayers, so as 
 not to leave the visitor alone. 
 
 Some Persians are very particular about their prayers, 
 but many are not so particular and will leave them 
 unsaid if there is any excuse; and, as in other religions, 
 there are people who neglect their prayers altogether. 
 
 There are many who are very regular in their prayers 
 and very particular as to the direction towards which 
 they face, and their positions and gestures at various 
 parts of the prayers, but who are not in the least really 
 reverent over them. Medical missionaries especially 
 cannot always choose the time of their visits, and 
 sometimes cannot avoid prayer-time. Then, instead 
 of going to a quiet room, the Muhammadans often say 
 their prayers in the room where the missionary is being 
 entertained, and the conversation is never hushed for 
 them; indeed, they will often themselves join in the con¬ 
 versation even while they are supposed to be praying. 
 
44 
 
 CHILDREN OF PERSIA 
 
 One day a party of women from a Mulla’s house 
 were visiting a missionary, when the evening prayer- 
 call sounded. 
 
 “ We shall hardly have time to get home in half an 
 hour,” the Mulla’s wife said. “ May I say my prayers 
 here ? ” The missionary readily gave her consent, 
 but only the one lady availed herself of the permission, 
 and, having asked in which direction Mecca lay, placed 
 her prayer-stone in front of her and knelt down to say 
 her prayers. 
 
 The rest went on talking loudly round her, calling 
 out and stretching across just in front of her in a 
 way that must have attracted her attention. When 
 the missionary asked them to be quiet they assured 
 her that their friend did not mind, and she herself 
 turned from her prayers to beg them not to stop for 
 her. But the missionary insisted on quiet until the 
 prayers were over, explaining that it was not a 
 question of respect to the lady, but of reverence to 
 God, and, in the conversation which naturally followed, 
 she was able to tell them some of the Bible teaching on 
 prayer. 
 
 The prayer-stone is a small slab of about an inch 
 and a half across, made of the earth of Kerbela where 
 Husain, the grandson of Muhammad was killed. The 
 Kerbela earth is said to be scented with “ the blood of 
 the martyrs,” and is much used for prayer-stones and 
 rosaries. 
 
 A Muhammadan places his prayer-stone on the 
 ground before him when he says his prayers. If 
 anyone passes in front of a Muhammadan as he 
 
PERSIAN PRAYERS 
 
 45 
 
 is saying his prayers it is supposed to greatly 
 reduce their value. But if he puts the prayer- 
 stone in front of him it acts as a church wall 
 and cuts him off from the outside world, and nothing 
 passing on the far side of the stone can affect his 
 prayers. If he has no prayer-stone he sometimes 
 draws a line on the earth instead, and this is said to 
 be just as effectual. At certain points in the prayers 
 the forehead must touch the ground, and when a 
 prayer-stone is used the forehead touches the prayer- 
 stone, and perhaps the holiness of the earth touched 
 is supposed to increase the value of the prayers. 
 
 After the regular Arabic prayers have been said 
 any further prayers may be added in Persian, but the 
 people seem generally to content themselves with the 
 set prayers and to be shy of adding any of their own 
 wording, and in any case the Arabic prayers are con¬ 
 sidered the more important. 
 
 Although the Persians use their prayers like charms, 
 repeating forms which convey to them no meaning, 
 yet they have great faith in the efficacy of prayers as 
 charms. One Sunday a Persian woman brought her 
 little girl to the doctor’s house, covered with small¬ 
 pox and very ill. Finding that it was service time 
 she thought the prayers might do the child good, 
 so she put off asking for medicine till later, and, hiding 
 the child under her chadar, she sat down among the 
 other women and children through the whole service. 
 
 I have never known Persians refuse Christian 
 prayers over their sick friends, and generally they 
 join in with a heartfelt Amen to prayers which, they 
 
46 
 
 CHILDREN OF PERSIA 
 
 have been able to understand. At one house where 
 they were afraid of the medicine they entreated the 
 missionary doctor to come daily to pray over the 
 patient. The patient was one of five cases of typhoid 
 fever in the house. The others were being treated by 
 a Persian doctor, but this woman had very serious 
 complications and seemed so unlikely to recover that 
 he suggested their calling in a Christian doctor for her. 
 For many days she lay quite unconscious, but every 
 day the missionary walked a mile and a half to pray 
 beside her, and every day the same entreaty was re¬ 
 peated, “You will come again to-morrow, won’t 
 you ? ” And the prayers were answered, for at last 
 signs of improvement appeared, and the poor woman 
 was restored to health and strength again. 
 
 God has given us a wonderful privilege in allowing 
 us to come freely to Him as our Father, and lay all 
 our joys and sorrows, troubles and perplexities before 
 Him. 
 
 “ Oh ! What peace we often forfeit, 
 
 Oh ! What needless pain we bear, 
 
 All because we do not carry 
 
 Everything to God in prayer ! ” 
 
 And, if that is true of us, how much more true it is 
 of the Muhammadans who do not know God as their 
 Father, who do not know that God is love, who do 
 not know that they may carry everything to God in 
 prayer. When we think of the want of peace, the 
 needless pain, the sin, the sorrow, the wretchedness in 
 Muhammadan lands, and yet see the people so ready 
 to pray, surely it is our plain and urgent duty to teach 
 
FASTING AND PILGRIMAGES 
 
 47 
 
 them how to pray, as our Lord has taught us, and to 
 teach them to Whom they must pray—not to an un¬ 
 knowable, unloving Allah, but to a tender, pitying 
 Father, Who so loved them that He gave His only 
 begotten Son to die for their salvation. 
 
 CHAPTER VIII 
 
 FASTING AND PILGRIMAGES 
 
 One month in every year Muhammadans have to fast. 
 
 Persian boys begin to fast at twelve years old, but 
 the girls have to begin at nine. Sometimes they 
 begin sooner if they want to store up merit early. 
 But even little four-year-old Ibrahim, who is considered 
 too young to join in the fast, shares it to a certain 
 degree. For no one is going to cook anything for him 
 or make him his usual cup of tea when they may not 
 share it. He gets a bit of dry bread and a drink of 
 water when he wants it, but little more all through the 
 day. 
 
 “ It makes me hungry to see him eating/' his mother 
 said. 
 
 The name of the fast-month is Ramazan, and 
 through Ramazan it is often difficult to get eggs, be¬ 
 cause the sweetmakers buy them up to make sweets. 
 It is a great month for sweets, and there are several 
 kinds that are only made in Ramazan ; and, so far from 
 having “ self-denial boxes," as many Christians do in 
 Lent, the more devout Muhammadan servants ask 
 for an advance of wages to buy better food in Ramazan 
 
48 
 
 CHILDREN OF PERSIA 
 
 This all seems strange in a fast-month, but a 
 Muhammadan fast only lasts from dawn to dark. 
 At night people may eat what they like, and they take 
 full advantage of the permission and have nightly 
 feasts, ending up with a great feast on the last night. 
 
 Boys and girls are not late for supper in Ramazan. 
 They gather round the tablecloth as the time draws 
 near, ready to start directly the signal is given that 
 it is dark. In towns there is generally a gun fired, and 
 at the sound of the gun the meal is begun in every 
 house. 
 
 One day such a party was waiting round the supper, 
 listening for the gun, and they got hungrier and 
 hungrier, but they heard no gun and waited on. At 
 last they realised that the wind had carried the sound 
 away from them, and they had fasted far longer than 
 they need have done. This was bad enough, but another 
 family fared worse, for they overslept themselves in 
 the morning, and woke to find they had missed their 
 breakfast and must eat nothing till night. 
 
 People might differ as to when it was dark, so a test 
 has been appointed—as long as you can distinguish a 
 black thread from a white one it is light, and you must 
 fast. 
 
 It does not sound a very difficult fast, and in winter, 
 when the days are short, it is not so bad, but on a long 
 summer day it is very hard. No food, no drink, and 
 a blazing sun all day. It takes a plucky boy or girl 
 to get through it without complaining. It is no wonder 
 that in Ramazan- “ bed-time ” is forgotten and all 
 the children sit up half the night and sleep half the 
 
FASTING AND PILGRIMAGES 49 
 
 day—the longer they can sleep in the day the better, 
 poor little things. Towards evening tempers are apt 
 not to be very good, but everyone enjoys the night. 
 
 No one wants to work in Ramazan; they do not want 
 to get more hungry than they need; and, of course, the 
 schools are all closed. 
 
 The dispensaries and hospitals are nearly empty, for 
 the taking of medicine, or the use of drops for the eyes 
 or ears, would be a breaking of the fast, and there was 
 a great discussion once as to whether having a tooth 
 out would have the same effect. It seems curious to 
 have to tell the people to take their medicine twice a 
 night instead of twice a day. 
 
 After Ramazan the dispensaries are full of patients 
 who have made themselves ill by fasting all day and 
 overeating themselves at night. 
 
 Besides the younger children there are a good many 
 other people who get off the fast. Opium-eaters need 
 not fast; travellers need not fast on a journey ; sick 
 people can get a dispensation from a mulla. A great 
 many people take advantage of this, and make a 
 small ailment an excuse for not fasting, but they are 
 supposed to make it up at some other time of year. 
 
 If anyone forgets and thoughtlessly breaks his fast 
 no great harm is done, but he must fast an extra day 
 in the year to make up for it. Some people " forget ” 
 every day, but such people do not usually make it up 
 at any other time. 
 
 Just before Ramazan a good many people are fast¬ 
 ing, having put off to the last minute the making-up 
 of the fast days for the previous Ramazan. 
 
 D 
 
50 
 
 CHILDREN OF PERSIA 
 
 People who want to be very good sometimes fast on 
 Saints’ Days too, and one old lady always fasted on the 
 day when Muhammadan tradition says that our Lord 
 Jesus Christ was born. 
 
 Another way in which Muhammadans think they can 
 gain merit is by making a pilgrimage to some holy place. 
 
 Pilgrimages may be made to any place where a 
 Muhammadan saint is buried, but there are four 
 special places to which the Persians go—Qum, Meshed, 
 Kerbela, and Mecca. Mecca is considered far the 
 greatest place of pilgrimage, because it is the place 
 where Muhammad was born. A pilgrimage to Qum 
 gives the pilgrim no commonly used title, but if he goes 
 to Meshed he becomes Meshedi ; if to Kerbela, Kerbelai; 
 and, if to Mecca, Hdji ; and a Hdji always uses his title. 
 In accosting a working-class stranger it is polite to 
 call him Meshedi , and more polite to call him Kerbelai, 
 but Hdji is too important a title to be used in this way. 
 Quite little boys and girls are sometimes Hdjis —they 
 have been taken to Mecca by their parents. 
 
 But the people who most frequently go are the 
 business men and the old people. The business men 
 manage to make a business journey, which will include 
 Mecca, and the old people, old women especially, are 
 often sent as a polite way of getting rid of them 
 when they are cranky and ill-tempered. If they die 
 on the way, they are supposed to go straight to Heaven. 
 A good many do die on the road, which is a very 
 rough one. It reminds one of the man who said of his 
 enemies that he should like to convert them and send 
 them to Heaven before they had time to backslide. 
 
FASTING AND PILGRIMAGES 
 
 51 
 
 One day in a caravanserai , or native inn, I met a 
 young woman who told me a friend who was going on 
 a pilgrimage had passed through her village and had 
 persuaded her to come too. She was going to walk 
 all the way and trust to charity for food, as many 
 pilgrims do, for it is considered a greater work of 
 merit to give to a pilgrim than to an ordinary beggar. 
 The journey would take several months. 
 
 I asked her a few questions. 
 
 Yes, she said, she had a husband and children. 
 
 “ And are they with you ? ” 
 
 “No, they are in my village/’ 
 
 “ Are the children grown-up then ? ” 
 
 “ Oh no, they are quite little.” 
 
 “ Then who is going to take care of them while you 
 are away ? ” 
 
 “ I do not know. There was no time to make arrange¬ 
 ments. I had not even time to tell my husband I was 
 going. He was at work. My friends tell me it will be a 
 very great work of merit if I go. What do you think ? ” 
 We had a long talk, and I believe she went back the 
 same evening to her home. If so, she would get back 
 within twenty-four hours of having left it. 
 
 The Muhammadans themselves generally allow 
 that they are no more agreeable or kind or truthful 
 or good after their pilgrimages—at least those who 
 do not go say so freely. They even have a proverb: 
 " If your friend has been to Mecca, trust him not. 
 If he has been there twice, avoid him. But if he has 
 made the pilgrimage the third time, flee from him as 
 you would from Satan.” 
 
52 
 
 CHILDREN OF PERSIA 
 
 Even dead people make pilgrimages, generally to 
 Qum, or, if they are very important people, to Kerbela. 
 I have not been to Kerbela, but I have been to Qum, 
 and we met quite a number of corpses going to the 
 burying-ground outside the big mosque. Sometimes 
 the relations bring them, but often they cannot 
 afford the journey and pay a muleteer to take them, 
 and to pay the fees, which are very large. Sometimes 
 the muleteers bury the bodies elsewhere and pocket the 
 fees. 
 
 Qum itself is considered such a holy city that they 
 do not allow dogs inside it. 
 
 CHAPTER IX f. 
 
 SAVABS 
 
 Their is a little Persian book, which many of the little 
 boys learn to read, called “ Sad Hikayat ” or “A 
 Hundred Stories/’ Some of the stories are very like 
 /Esop’s Fables, and they are all supposed to teach the 
 children something. One story tells them that at the 
 end of the world God will take a great pair of scales, 
 and as each person comes up for judgment God will put 
 his good deeds in one scale and his evil deeds in the 
 other. If the good deeds weigh heaviest he will go 
 to Heaven, if his evil deeds weigh the balance down he 
 will go to Hell. 
 
 These good deeds are called savdbs, and every Persian, 
 whether child or grown-up, hopes to get to Heaven by 
 doing enough savdbs to outweigh his sins. 
 
SAVABS 
 
 53 
 
 So a little Persian boy or girl is not taught to try to 
 always do right or to always try to please and serve 
 God, but only to do enough right to outweigh the 
 wrong he does, and if he feels he has done wrong 
 instead of confessing his sin to God and asking His 
 forgiveness he simply tries to balance it by a good deed. 
 
 And what a Persian boy or girl is taught of what 
 is right and wrong is very different from all you have 
 learnt. First there is a definite list of sins, which they 
 can learn by heart, and nothing outside of this list is 
 considered a " sin/' though other things which are not 
 right may be called “ errors/’ which is a much less 
 strong word. 
 
 As to good deeds there is more difference of opinion. 
 One of the “ Hundred Stories ” deals with this point. 
 
 A man was travelling in the desert and came to a 
 well. He dismounted, drove a stable-pin into the 
 ground, and tied his horse to it while he ate his meal. 
 When he resumed his journey he left the pin in the 
 ground that other travellers coming there might tie 
 their horses to it. Presently a man on foot came 
 along, and, not seeing the pin, knocked his foot against 
 it and hurt himself. He pulled up the pin and threw 
 it into the well lest any one else should hurt himself in 
 the same way. A discussion arose as to which of the 
 two had done a savdb, the man who drove the nail 
 in or the man who took it out, and finally a learned 
 and holy man was consulted. After much thought 
 he gave it as his opinion that both had done savdbs. 
 
 Every little act of kindness is a savdb , and this en¬ 
 courages good nature and kindliness. 
 
54 
 
 CHILDREN OF PERSIA 
 
 The children are taught to look out for chances of 
 doing a kind action and so balancing their wrong-doing. 
 But at the same time they are taught to think that if 
 they do a certain number of kind deeds it will not 
 matter if they do wrong at other times. Little 
 Rajab ‘Ali, the muleteer’s boy, would run to fasten up 
 the trailing head-rope of another man’s mule, he would 
 lend a helping hand to some stranger whose donkey 
 had fallen under its load, and between whiles he would 
 treat his own mules and donkeys most cruelly. He 
 thought his cruelty did not matter, because he had been 
 kind as well. 
 
 A dishonest lad will try to wipe out his dishonesty 
 by being regular with his prayers or by an extra day’s 
 fast. A man who has cheated someone of ten krans 
 will give a krdn to a beggar and consider his account 
 settled. One man tried to atone for the most out¬ 
 rageous extortion and injustice by spending part of his 
 ill-earned gains on good roads for the villagers and a 
 free school, while all the time he made no pretence of 
 giving up his evil ways. Those he had injured com¬ 
 plained that now he would escape the punishment of 
 God. 
 
 The Persians seem unable to realise the possibility 
 of any other motive for good works. When the 
 missionaries first went to Yezd and opened a medical 
 mission, the people said, “ What terribly wicked people 
 they must be to have to do so much good.” 
 
 One curious result of this idea of winning Heaven 
 and securing better places there by good works is 
 that it almost destroys gratitude. The beggar feels 
 
SAVABS 
 
 55 
 
 that he has helped you one step up in Heaven by 
 accepting your alms ; then surely he has done you 
 more good than you have done him, and why should 
 he be grateful to you ? 
 
 The patients who are treated free at the dispensary 
 have the same feeling; the doctor improved their bodily 
 state, but they have improved his spiritual position. 
 
 It is considered a special work of merit to do any¬ 
 thing for a Seyid, that is, a descendant of Muhammad, 
 so everyone tries to be kind to Seyids, and they are so 
 spoilt and are made so much of that they are generally 
 unbearably selfish, and think themselves the most 
 important people in the world. 
 
 Often in the dispensary the doctor is exhorted to do 
 his utmost or to break through some rule because the 
 patient is a Seyid, and they are incredulous and rather 
 shocked when they are told that an ordinary patient’s 
 pain is just as great as a Seyid’s, and that all must be 
 taken in their turn. 
 
 Another result of this doctrine of works of merit, 
 or savabs, as they call them, is that even when a 
 Muhammadan seems straight and honest and alto¬ 
 gether a good fellow you cannot entirely trust him, 
 because he has so many good works to his credit that 
 he feels a few sins do not matter, they are more than 
 paid for beforehand. 
 
 A Persian’s idea of what is a savab is sometimes 
 curious. Prayers, fasting, pilgrimages, and the reading 
 of the Quran are, of course, all considered works of merit. 
 
 Marrying your father’s brother’s daughter is a 
 savab , though there is no particular merit in marrying 
 
56 
 
 CHILDREN OF PERSIA 
 
 your father’s sister’s daughter or your mother's 
 brother’s daughter. 
 
 Some Persian women inquired one day what each 
 of three missionaries living together ate for breakfast, 
 and hearing that two had eggs, while the third had not, 
 they nodded at each other, as much as to say, “ I told 
 you so,” and remarked, “ It is a savdb. She wants to 
 get a higher place in Heaven.” 
 
 Giving money to beggars is always considered a 
 savdb, but it is considered a greater savdb on Thursday 
 than on any other day. Friday is the Muhammadan 
 holy day, and they call Thursday “ the Eve of Friday,” 
 and on Thursday the beggars all call out as you pass, 
 " It is the Eve of Friday ; give me a copper.” 
 
 The grown-up beggars generally, but not always, 
 sit by the roadside begging, but the children run 
 alongside of you and are often very persistent. There 
 are nearly always beggars at the gate of any town, 
 asking those who are starting on a journey to give 
 them an alms, and so secure safety on their journey. 
 If Jericho was anything like a Persian town it was 
 most natural that our Lord should find one blind 
 beggar as He went into the town (St Luke 18, v. 35), 
 and one or two more as He came out by another gate 
 (St Matt. 20, v. 30), and that they should address Him 
 in almost exactly the same language. 
 
 Begging is often a very paying occupation, for so 
 many people feel that they have sins to make up for, 
 that the cry, " Give me a copper. It will be a savdb,” 
 is a difficult one to refuse, especially if the copper is 
 only worth a farthing. 
 
SAVABS 
 
 57 
 
 So well does begging pay that on more than one 
 occasion the mothers and wives of well-to-do trades¬ 
 men have been detected in old chddars begging in the 
 streets and at houses. The difficulty of recognising a 
 woman who is completely covered up with a black 
 chadar makes disguise easy. 
 
 During the massacre of the Babis, a dissenting sect 
 of Muhammadans, in 1903, it was considered a savdb 
 to kill a Babi, but some of the kindlier people thought 
 it also a savdb to save a life, even if it was a Babi’s, 
 One man is said to have been seen with a prisoner, in 
 great perplexity, saying, “ I am quite sure of Hell for 
 my sins, unless I can do a big savdb ; if this man is a 
 Babi, my chance of salvation is to kill him, but I am 
 not sure whether he is, and if I kill a true believer I shall 
 be worse off than ever.” 
 
 But there are savdbs of a very different sort. 
 
 There was an old woman friendless and ill, and a 
 Persian man found her in the street, too ill to get home 
 to the one wretched room where she lived all alone. 
 He did not know her, but he decided to undertake the 
 savdb. He sent across the town for a medical mission¬ 
 ary, knowing the Christians had the reputation of 
 never refusing to help the sick poor. He stayed there 
 till the doctor arrived, and said that if she would visit 
 the old woman and provide the medicines he would send 
 for them, and would provide the food and nursing, and 
 this he did until the old woman died a few days later. 
 
 The adoption of a destitute child is not an uncommon 
 savdb, and these children are often treated very well 
 and given a good start in life. 
 
58 
 
 CHILDREN OF PERSIA 
 
 A kind action, as we have seen, is always considered 
 a savab , whether it is helping a fallen mule to get up, 
 giving a copper to a beggar, or tending a friendless 
 stranger in sickness and death. We may almost say 
 that this is the one redeeming point of a Persian's 
 religion. Generally speaking, Persians are not im¬ 
 proved by their religious ideas, for the stronger their 
 religious ideas are the worse their lives are, and what 
 one most admires in Persian character is least in 
 accordance with their religious beliefs. 
 
 CHAPTER X 
 
 MUHAMMADAN CHARMS AND SUPERSTITIONS 
 
 Muhammad did not write down his teaching, for he 
 could not write, but his followers learnt it by heart, 
 and wrote it down, and after his death it was collected 
 into one book called the Quran. It was arranged 
 in a haphazard way, and probably the early chapters 
 were really spoken last, and the later ones first. How¬ 
 ever, the Muhammadans believe it to be, as it now 
 stands, the Word of God, and they treat it with great 
 respect. When they pick the book up or lay it down 
 they put it first to the forehead and then to the lips, 
 and they hold it in both hands. Many Christians might 
 learn from them to treat God’s Word more reverently. 
 They consider it a work of merit to read the Quran 
 or listen to it, and they read it over their sick folk in 
 hopes of curing them. But perhaps the commonest 
 and most popular edition is a two-inch hexagonal one 
 
READING THE QURAN TO THE SICK 
 
 

 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 I 
 
 
 
 
 
 
MUHAMMADAN SUPERSTITIONS 59 
 
 which is almost illegible. This is sewn up in two little 
 round or hexagonal cases, each containing half, and 
 is worn on the arms to keep off evil of every kind. 
 The cases may be plain leather or cloth, or they may 
 be more elaborate and ornamental, or silver cases may 
 be used with texts from the Quran engraved upon them. 
 
 Smaller and cheaper charms are made of texts from 
 the Quran enclosed in the same way. 
 
 These charms, and also beads made from the blue 
 clay of the holy city of Qum, are used for animals 
 as well as people, especially young mules. I once 
 had a charm given me for a kitten. 
 
 Children often wear a very large number of charms 
 sewn on to the cap or hung on a chain round the neck, 
 as they are supposed to be much more susceptible 
 than grown-up people to evil influences. One quaint - 
 looking charm is a little cloth camel, Abraham’s 
 camel, sewn on the cap. 
 
 What the Persians fear more than anything for their 
 children is the evil eye, and it is especially to protect 
 them from this that they cover them with charms. 
 They say there are certain people who have an “ evil 
 eye.” No one seems to know many such people, but 
 most people say they know at least one. These 
 people injure everything that pleases them, and that 
 they admire. If they admire a baby it will get ill and 
 very likely die ; if they admire a mule it will probably 
 go lame ; if they admire a tree it will wither ; if they 
 admire a cup it will break. There does not seem to 
 be necessarily any wish to do harm, the mere taking 
 pleasure in the thing causes the disaster. 
 
60 
 
 CHILDREN OF PERSIA 
 
 Persons with the evil eye are quite impossible to 
 distinguish, so the Persians are afraid of all strangers 
 lest they should have it. This is why you must 
 not admire a baby, and Persian mothers cover up 
 their young babies completely in the street for fear a 
 casual passer-by should admire them and should 
 prove to have the evil eye. 
 
 The men carry iron in their pockets as a protection, 
 and a magnet is considered specially powerful in this 
 way. A more common form of iron to carry is an 
 iron chain, which is useful for driving mules and 
 donkeys and beating off savage dogs. 
 
 The women sometimes wear charms to make their 
 husbands love them. One poor thing gave me hers— 
 two large beads : they had not proved of much use, for 
 her husband beat her and treated her very badly. 
 
 Another charm is a tiny bag of the scented earth of 
 Kerbela, where Muhammad’s grandson Husain was 
 killed, and if rubbed on the eyelids it is said to cause 
 the eyes to shine brightly. 
 
 The beads of the Muhammadan rosaries are often 
 made of this Kerbela earth. Every Muhammadan has 
 his rosary—many of them have quite a collection, for 
 pilgrims to Kerbela bring back rosaries for all their 
 friends. 
 
 These rosaries are never used for counting prayers, 
 but occasionally for counting the attributes of God or 
 invocations. But the main use is a very different 
 one. They are the Persian’s ordinary means of trying 
 to find out God’s will. They are used both in serious 
 and in frivolous matters; no Persian will settle any¬ 
 thing without “ taking the beads.” He takes the beads 
 
MUHAMMADAN SUPERSTITIONS 61 
 
 before making a business appointment, but he takes 
 them again to see whether he shall keep it or not. 
 He takes the beads to see what doctor he is to send for, 
 and again to see if he shall follow his instructions. He 
 takes the beads to see if it is a good day to buy a new 
 coat, and again to see if it is a good day to put it on. 
 You often see a pious Muhammadan fingering the beads 
 under her chadar before she answers your questions. 
 
 The rosaries are made of a large number of small 
 beads all alike, and three only, which are different and 
 are called “ Sheikhs placed in different parts of the 
 string. To take the beads a Muhammadan turns to¬ 
 wards Mecca and says an Arabic collect. Then he 
 divides the beads without looking, and tells them 
 off two by two, saying over and over, as he does so, 
 “ Subhdnu'lldh " (God is glorious) “ Alhamdu'li'lldh" 
 (Praise be to God), “ Va'lldh ” (and He is the God), 
 passing two beads for each word until he comes to a 
 Sheikh, when he stops. If there are two beads for the last 
 word, the answer is much more emphatic than if there is 
 only an odd one. If the last word is “ Subhdnu'lldh " 
 the answer is favourable, “Alhamdu 'll lldh " is doubtful 
 and <( Va'lldh " is unfavourable. If the answer is doubt¬ 
 ful a Persian generally follows his own inclinations. 
 
 If the answer is not what the questioner likes, the 
 beads may be taken again in the mosque, and the 
 answer in the mosque take precedence of that in the 
 house. If, however, the answer is still the same, there 
 is a third method. For a small fee a mulla will do the 
 same sort of thing with the Quran, and the text 
 selected overrules the two previous answers. 
 
 A Persian lady sent for an English missionary to 
 
62 
 
 CHILDREN OF PERSIA 
 
 extract an aching tooth. The missionary found her in 
 great pain, but she said she could not have the tooth 
 out as the beads were against it, but she had sent to the 
 mosque and was hoping for a favourable answer from 
 there. However, all methods gave an unfavourable 
 answer, so she put off the extraction to another day. 
 
 “ It would be much better for me to have it out,” 
 she said, “ but it is not God's Will.” 
 
 The Wise Men from the East looked for God's 
 guidance among the stars, and there God sent them a 
 message. And here and there where a Muhammadan 
 earnestly seeks God's guidance, because he is trying to 
 really live as God's servant, who shall say that he does 
 not receive it where he has been taught to look for it. 
 
 But taken as a system, how trivial, how childish, 
 how irreverent it all is. They use God's name, but 
 they take His name in vain. They profess to seek 
 God’s will, and profess to receive an answer from Him, 
 and often try the next moment to set it aside and force 
 or coax an opposite answer out of Him. 
 
 The Muhammadans think that through their beads 
 they can use God for settling the every-day matters of 
 this world in a lucky way, while they are disobeying 
 Him in the greater matter of godly living. 
 
 CHAPTER XI 
 
 PERSIAN SCHOOLS 
 
 A great many things are topsy-turvy in Persia, but 
 perhaps reading is as topsy-turvy as anything. It 
 
PERSIAN SCHOOLS 
 
 63 
 
 is not only that the lines, and indeed the whole book, 
 begin at the wrong end, but the lessons begin at the 
 wrong end too. 
 
 An English boy leams to read his own language 
 first, and does not always go on to a foreign language. 
 A Persian boy learns to read a foreign language first, 
 and does not always go on to his own language. 
 
 When a little Persian boy goes to school he is given 
 a big Arabic book, with a great many long words in it, 
 and he is not taught how the words are spelt, but is 
 told what they are, and made to repeat them from 
 memory, pointing to each word in the book as he says 
 it, and gradually he gets some idea of which word is 
 which. 
 
 The boys sit on the floor round the room, all reading 
 at the top of their voices at the same time in different 
 parts of the book. They read in a monotonous sing¬ 
 song voice, swaying their bodies in time to the sound. 
 
 The master sits and listens through the din to one 
 and another correcting mistakes here and there, and 
 calling up any boy who seems perfect in his lesson to 
 learn the next bit, and then return to his seat and read 
 it over and over till he knows it too. 
 
 The book is the Quran, which the Muhammadans 
 think was dictated by God to Muhammad through the 
 Archangel Gabriel. It would not be surprising if the 
 Persians, being Muhammadans, wished all their boys 
 to learn what they believe to be God’s Word ; but the 
 book is written in Arabic, which Persian boys do not 
 understand, and even the letters are not quite the same 
 as in Persian ; so when the little pupil reaches the end 
 
64 
 
 CHILDREN OF PERSIA 
 
 of the book he can read the Quran with the proper 
 intonation, but he can read nothing else, and he cannot 
 understand the Quran. 
 
 The Muhammadans, however, think that reading the 
 Quran, quite apart from understanding it, is a very 
 good action, so the little Persian boys work away at 
 it, and they do not think it hard lines because they 
 know all the men, and big boys began in the same way, 
 so it seems the natural thing to do. And perhaps it is 
 a little consolation to know that when they reach 
 certain points they will be given sweets. One little 
 boy, who was asked how far he had got in the Quran, 
 said that he had just got to his first sweets. 
 
 Having finished the Quran our little Persian boy 
 goes on to Persian books. These, too, he studies 
 in much the same way as he did the Quran, but it 
 is more useful, because now he understands what he 
 reads. After plodding through the Quran it is a 
 pleasant change for little Ghulam Husain to turn 
 to the War between the Cats and Mice, the Hundred 
 Fables, or Stories of Husain and Hasan (Muhammad’s 
 two grandsons). Later on he reads the poems of Hafiz 
 and Sa’adi, and other great Persian poets, for there is 
 a great deal of beautiful poetry in Persian. 
 
 There is no convenient desk or table for Ghulam 
 Husain to write on. He sits on the floor and holds the 
 paper in his hand or on his knee. His pen is a bit of 
 fine cane, cut like a quill, but with a slanting end. As 
 he holds it the handle points directly to the right and 
 it is the horizontal lines which he must make broad, 
 while the up and down strokes must both be fine. 
 
A PERSIAN SCHOOL 
 

PERSIAN SCHOOLS 
 
 65 
 
 Ghulam Husain never spills his ink. Each boy has 
 his own inkpot, which contains a tangled piece of silk 
 soaked in ink. It dries up between the lessons, so 
 when Ghulam Husain wants to write he moistens it 
 with water so that the silk is thoroughly wet, but there 
 is no water lying in the inkpot. In among this wet 
 silk he dips his pen. 
 
 If you look into Ghulam Husain’s pen-box you will 
 find pens cut to various breadths for large or small 
 writing, a penknife, and a little slab to rest the pen- 
 point on for the final cut; an inkpot, and a tiny brass 
 ladle for adding water. 
 
 Many an English boy finds it tiresome to have to 
 dot his is, but little Ghulam Husain has to dot almost 
 every letter, some above the line and some below, 
 some with one dot, some with two, and some with 
 three. These dots are not round, but square, and the 
 height of the letters is measured by the size of the 
 dots. This letter must be one dot high, that letter 
 two dots high, another three, and yet another five 
 dots high. The size of the dot itself depends on the 
 breadth of the pen. 
 
 As he learns to write better he will run his letters 
 into curious combinations, and group his dots 
 picturesquely in parts of the word to which they do 
 not belong, or leave them out altogether, until at 
 last, when he can write a really beautiful hand, 
 the schoolmaster himself will not be able to read 
 the letter without careful study, and may even have 
 to guess at the meaning of particularly well-written 
 passages. 
 
 One great beauty of a Persian letter is the way each 
 
 E 
 
66 
 
 CHILDREN OF PERSIA 
 
 line runs up at the end, making a pile of words, syllables, 
 and even single letters, something in this style :— 
 
 rew 
 s sc 
 Persian 
 way the 
 
 " My dear Children,— This is the 
 
 ers. 
 
 lett 
 write 
 en they 
 
 up the ends of their lines wh 
 
 f 
 
 k o 
 thin 
 ey can 
 words th 
 
 They also use all the longest 
 
 eir 
 at th 
 so th 
 arly all 
 els or ne 
 
 and leave out all their vow 
 
 ops.” 
 no st 
 they use 
 ecially as 
 read, esp 
 
 letters are very hard to 
 
 The Persians do not apparently think much of 
 their own system of education, for they are always 
 laughing at their schoolmasters. 
 
 They have a story of a charvaddr , or muleteer, one 
 of whose mules strayed one day into a school. It was 
 quickly driven out, and the muleteer claimed damages 
 
PERSIAN SCHOOLS 
 
 67 
 
 from the schoolmaster to the extent of half the value 
 of the mule. The schoolmaster indignantly asked on 
 what he based his claim. The muleteer turned to the 
 crowd which had gathered to listen to the argument. 
 “ My beast,” said he, “ went into his school a mule 
 and it has come out a donkey.” You see a donkey 
 counts half a mule in caravan travelling, just as a child 
 counts half a person in train travelling. 
 
 The punishments are as topsy-turvy as the lessons. 
 When a boy is caned he lies on his back and holds out 
 his feet instead of his hands. Sometimes his feet are 
 held in a kind of stocks while he is caned across the 
 soles. They call it “ eating sticks ” or “ eating wood ” 
 —the words are the same. 
 
 Some missionaries were picnicking one day in an 
 orchard in a hill village, and the village children 
 gathered round to watch the foreigners’ strange ways. 
 “Do you often come and eat plums here ? ” one of the 
 ladies asked; and she was greatly bewildered by the 
 curious tastes of Persian boys, when the owner of the 
 orchard answered for them, that the boys who came 
 into his orchard ate not the plums but the wood. 
 
 This beating on the soles of the feet is a common 
 punishment for every one, from the slave and the school¬ 
 boy to the criminal and the political offender. With 
 schoolboys it is of course not very severe, but in more 
 serious cases it may be very severe indeed, even re¬ 
 sulting in death. The culprit in these cases is ordered 
 not so many blows but so many sticks, i.e. he is to be 
 beaten till so many sticks have been broken. A 
 hundred sticks is not an uncommon punishment. If 
 the culprit is rich enough he may bribe the farrashes to 
 
68 
 
 CHILDREN OF PERSIA 
 
 strike the stocks when possible and so break the 
 sticks quickly, and not over his feet ; but a poor man 
 has to take his punishment. 
 
 There is no compulsory education in Persia and very 
 little free education. There was one man who tried 
 to atone for sins, which he made no pretence of giving 
 up, by founding a large free school in one Persian 
 town, but it is not a common form of benevolence. 
 So it is only those who can spare a little money who 
 send their boys to school, and a great many never get 
 beyond a very early stage of reading and writing. 
 
 As for the girls very few parents care to waste their 
 money over their girls’ education A certain number 
 are taught to read the Quran, a less number go on 
 to reading such books as they have studied, but very 
 few can read at sight, and writing is even rarer. Still 
 in the matter of the education of girls Persia is in 
 advance of other Muhammadan countries. 
 
 In these days of general education it is difficult 
 for us to realise in this country how hard it is for the 
 missionaries to teach the gospel truths to the Persians. 
 There is so much to be taught and there are so many 
 to be taught, and when it has to be done orally to 
 people whose intelligence and memory have never been 
 developed by study of any kind, whose minds and 
 brains have never grown up properly, and who forget 
 so easily, it means an amount of work that w r ould 
 take up all the time and strength of far more mission¬ 
 aries than are now in the field. 
 
 Many of the converts cannot come regularly for 
 
 oral teaching, and they are liable at any time to move 
 
 out of the missionaries’ reach, so the missionaries trv 
 
 %/ 
 
CHRISTIAN SCHOOLS 
 
 69 
 
 to teach all the converts and their children to read their 
 Bibles at any rate, so that they can get teaching direct 
 from God’s Word themselves. 
 
 Besides the Persian schools there are now several 
 Christian schools in Persia, but we will talk about 
 those in the next chapter. Since they were started 
 there has been an attempt in some of the big towns 
 to introduce an improved system of teaching, and 
 Persian reading-books are now printed with ba-bi-bu, 
 pa-pi-pu, etc. etc.; but this is the exceptional method 
 of teaching, and not the rule in Persia, and I doubt 
 if any orthodox schoolmaster would care to teach 
 Persian before he taught the Arabic Quran. 
 
 The Parsees have a very good school in Yezd, largely 
 supported by the Parsees in Bombay, but this is only 
 for Parsee boys. 
 
 CHAPTER XII 
 
 CHRISTIAN SCHOOLS 
 
 There are two branches of mission-work in Persia 
 that bring the missionaries into close touch with 
 Persian children : one is the hospital, the other is the 
 school. You will hear about the medical work 
 presently ; in this chapter we will look at the school 
 work. 
 
 There are Europeans in Persia, wanting English- 
 speaking servants and employes; there are rich 
 Persians wanting secretaries who can write French and 
 English; there are business firms trading with England 
 and India who want English-speaking clerks and 
 
70 
 
 CHILDREN OF PERSIA 
 
 correspondents; so naturally many Persians want 
 their sons to learn English ; and who should teach it 
 better than the Englishman ? 
 
 But this is not all they want. As they get to know 
 the Christians they see that there is something in 
 English ways and English character that the Persian 
 lacks. And they bring their boys to the missionary, 
 and ask him not merely to teach them English, not 
 merely to teach them book-learning of any sort, but 
 to teach them to be good boys. 
 
 They do not so often ask for a girls’ school, for they 
 do not think a girl needs any book education as a 
 rule, and only a few of the Persian women can even 
 read. Yet in some of the Mission-stations girls’ 
 schools have been started with great success, and year 
 by year the demand for them is growing. 
 
 English is less taught in these schools, but some of the 
 girls learn it, especially those most closely connected 
 with the mission. The girls, of course, have to give 
 a good deal of time to sewing and embroidery, which 
 are more necessary for them than foreign languages. 
 
 But in all the Mission-stations sooner or later, 
 generally sooner, a boys’ school is started, and these 
 schools vary very much according to the needs of the 
 different towns. 
 
 In one school Armenians and Muhammadans work 
 side by side, in another we find Muhammadans and 
 Parsees, while a third contains all three. 
 
 In one school only English is taught, in another 
 advanced Persian and Arabic are added. In yet 
 another, everything is taught from the Persian alphabet 
 onwards. 
 
CHRISTIAN SCHOOLS 
 
 71 
 
 One missionary works alone in his own house, 
 another has a full staff of Armenian and Persian 
 teachers and monitors, and a well-built convenient 
 school. 
 
 But whatever the race of the boys, whatever the 
 subjects taught, whatever the organisation, there are 
 difficulties to be faced. 
 
 It is difficult to get teachers; sometimes none 
 can be got on the spot, and they have to be fetched 
 from some other town, perhaps several weeks’ journey 
 away. Sometimes the missionary has to be the only 
 teacher till he can train some of his own boys to be 
 first monitors and then masters in the school. 
 
 Then there is the school itself. Sometimes the 
 small beginnings of a school are started in the 
 missionary’s own dining-room; sometimes he is able 
 to spare a room entirely for school purposes. In one 
 case this was supplemented by a rough tent or shed 
 made of matting in the compound. But as the school 
 grows, separate buildings have to be found or 
 built. 
 
 Books are another difficulty. All books for teaching 
 English have to be got from abroad, and many are not 
 suitable. Readers which are very suitable for the 
 size of boy who reads them in England or India, are 
 not suitable for the young men who often use them 
 in Persia. If you give an educated young man, well 
 read in the finest Persian poetry, the childish stories 
 and rhymes in many of the readers, he thinks English 
 books are very, very foolish, and his opinion of English 
 intelligence in both literary and religious matters falls 
 very low. 
 
72 
 
 CHILDREN OF PERSIA 
 
 All these things need money. The boys generally 
 pay a very small fee and buy their own books, but the 
 fees do not go far towards paying for the schools 
 and the teachers' salaries, and the getting together of 
 the necessary money is another difficulty. 
 
 The pupils themselves present three great difficulties. 
 In our country boys under fourteen generally go to 
 different schools from boys over fourteen, and those 
 who wish to continue their education after seventeen or 
 eighteen leave school and go to college, or attend special 
 lectures. But in Persia the missionary is asked to 
 take them all together in one school, even middle-aged 
 men wishing to become pupils. But it is quite im¬ 
 possible to make a satisfactory school of boys and men 
 together. It is sometimes possible, especially in the 
 larger schools, to arrange separately for the men, but 
 generally an age limit has to be set. 
 
 The second difficulty arises from the number of boys 
 who want to learn English and who are never likely to 
 have any use for it. They have an idea that it is so 
 new and uncommon that any one who knows it is bound 
 to get work at a good salary, and so they want to 
 waste their time over it when they ought to be learning 
 the subjects they will really need for their work. It 
 takes some time and trouble to sort these boys out 
 from those who are really likely to need English. 
 The third difficulty is not peculiar to Persia, though it 
 presents some peculiarities there. It is the problem 
 of managing the boys. 
 
 Boys in England, I am sorry to say, sometimes tell 
 lies, but in Persia it would be more correct to say that 
 they sometimes tell the truth. 
 
CHRISTIAN SCHOOLS 
 
 73 
 
 Then again the boys are of different ranks ; some 
 of them come with their servants, and a certain amount 
 of tact has to be used to get them to accept the ordi¬ 
 nary rules of discipline. But in a school where every¬ 
 body comes to learn most of these difficulties can be 
 overcome. 
 
 / 
 
 Persian boys want knowing, like all boys, but when 
 one tries to do one’s best for them one finds them 
 thoroughly lovable and possessed of a large number 
 of exceedingly good points. 
 
 Lastly, the Mullds, or Muhammadan clergy, see 
 in the schools the greatest danger to their religion, and 
 they oppose them strongly. They know that such 
 close contact with Christians must open the boys’ 
 eyes to some extent to the contrast between Muham¬ 
 madanism and Christianity, and they know Muham¬ 
 madanism cannot stand such a comparison. 
 
 Many Muhammadans, who believe that Muhamma¬ 
 danism is a true religion given to them by God through 
 Muhammad, still see that Christianity is the better 
 religion, and Muhammadans have told me that God had 
 given us a better religion than He had given them. 
 
 So the Mullds try to persuade or frighten the 
 fathers into not sending their boys to the Mission- 
 school, they try to frighten the boys out of going, and 
 they try to get the governors to close the schools. But 
 it is God’s work, and He does not allow them to stop 
 it for long. 
 
 The boys themselves show the greatest interest in 
 whatever they are told about the Bible, and naturally 
 in one way or another Bible reading is always a 
 prominent feature of every class of Mission-school. 
 
74 
 
 CHILDREN OF PERSIA 
 
 Sometimes there is a regular lesson on the Bible as 
 one of the school subjects, but in other placs there 
 are no Bible lessons, but only prayers and Bible-reading, 
 with very simple explanations. But however this 
 may be, the gospel story of Christ Jesus, which is known 
 by name to every Muhammadan, but by more than 
 name to very, very few, is always of absorbing interest, 
 and is not likely to be forgotten. 
 
 CHAPTER XIII 
 
 WORK 
 
 " To the house of ‘Ali Akbar the pea-roaster/' I said to 
 my servant. 
 
 " There are two ‘Ali Akbars pea-roasters/’ he replied, 
 “ one is alive, and one dead; which do you want ? ” 
 
 It proved to be the widow who had sent for me, and 
 we were soon great friends. 
 
 “ And do you go to school ? ” I asked Husain, a 
 merry little boy of eight. 
 
 “ No, I am an apprentice-baker/' he said with an 
 evident sense of importance; he felt he was a wage- 
 earner—a halfpenny a day, I think was the amount, but 
 where a labourer often only earns fivepence a day, even 
 a halfpenny a day counts for something in the family. 
 
 Seven years old seems to be a very common age for 
 apprenticing boys in Persia. A boy of that age can 
 make himself useful and gradually learn his trade, and 
 if his master and his fellow-apprentices are kind he 
 may be very happy, like my little baker. He probably 
 fetched and carried, brought sticks for heating the 
 
WORK 
 
 75 
 
 oven, laid out the long thin flat loaves in rows as they 
 were handed to him from the oven, and later carried 
 them in a tray on his head, or hanging over his shoulder, 
 to some of the customers. 
 
 Probably our Lord Jesus Christ Himself started 
 work in the carpenter’s shop at Nazareth as soon as 
 He could be of any use. He would fetch and carry 
 tools, sort out the nails, help to clear away the 
 shavings, and later He would learn to hammer nails, to 
 saw and plane, just as the little Persian apprentices 
 do to-day, and He would thoroughly enjoy helping 
 Joseph in the workshop and Mary in the house. 
 
 There was a little “ apprentice-carpenter ” who 
 looked such a baby he can hardly have been as old as 
 seven. He used to run back to the shop for tools or 
 nails, and hold the hammer, and he even succeeded 
 in pulling some nails out of a packing-case. But his 
 master was not always kind to him, and sometimes beat 
 him, and he did not seem as happy as the baker boy. 
 
 Servants will often bring their little boys to the 
 house to help them in their work, and gradually fit 
 themselves for service. When they begin to be really 
 useful the master generally gives them a small wage. 
 A servant who has no boy of his own will often bring 
 a nephew or a cousin. 
 
 In every trade you find them, little boys whose 
 business it is to lighten their elders’ work a little in 
 any way they can, for the Persians are not over fond of 
 hard work. 
 
 You find them too in the houses of poor people, who 
 cannot afford to keep a regular servant, but pay a few 
 coppers or a meal to a little boy to come in and make 
 
76 
 
 CHILDREN OF PERSIA 
 
 himself useful, sweeping the floor and watering it in 
 hot weather, preparing the qalian, or hookah, running 
 errands, chopping firewood, and a hundred other 
 things. It is a system that works very well when it is 
 worked with kindness and consideration, but it is a 
 terrible system when it is abused. 
 
 In the Persian carpet trade we see this. In the 
 villages the whole family works at one carpet, and 
 as the children grow old enough they are taught and 
 made to join in the work. There need be no cruelty 
 in this, and often the little things are only too proud 
 and happy to do as their elders do, and join in the 
 family task. But unhappily even in the family there 
 are many cases of cruel overwork and ill-treatment. 
 
 But for the horrors of child labour in the carpet trade 
 we must turn to the factories of Kirman. 
 
 These factories are filled with children from four 
 years old upward, underfed, overworked, living a 
 loveless, joyless, hopeless life. The factories are built 
 without windows lest the children’s attention should 
 be distracted, and the bad air, want of food, and the 
 constantly keeping in one position produce rickets 
 and deformity in nearly all. Of thirty-eight children 
 examined in one factory thirty-six were deformed. 
 
 One of the Governors of Kirman forbade the em¬ 
 ployment of children under twelve in the factories, 
 but the order did not last beyond his governorship. 
 The same Governor gave the order still in force, which 
 forbids the employment of children before dawn or 
 after sunset, thus reducing their working hours to an 
 average of twelve hours a day. A recent Governor 
 added to this an order limiting the Friday work to 
 
WORK 
 
 77 
 
 about two and a half hours, “ from sunrise to full 
 sunshine,” so now the children share in part the general 
 Friday holiday of Muhammadanism. 
 
 One of our medical missionaries was called to attend 
 the wife of the owner of one of these factories, and 
 consented to do so on condition he made windows in 
 his factory to allow the children air and light. He 
 objected at first, saying that it would prevent their 
 working, but finally consented, and admitted after¬ 
 wards that the children did more work with the 
 windows than they had done without them. 
 
 The factory owners are glad to get the children, for 
 they say children work better than grown-up people 
 at carpet-making, and of course they expect less wages. 
 But how can the parents allow their children to live 
 this cruel life ? You will find the answer in the 
 Persian saying that “ of every three persons in Kirman, 
 four smoke opium.” 
 
 The man who takes opium regularly becomes a 
 wreck ; first his digestion is ruined, then his heart gets 
 weak and he get bronchitis and other chest troubles, 
 and he become unreliable physically and morally; he 
 is untruthful and deceitful, and when he is once well 
 under the power of the habit, he goes almost mad if 
 he cannot get his opium at the usual time, and would 
 sell his soul for it, and does sell his children. Over 
 and over again comes the terrible story, the father and 
 mother smoke opium; the little deformed child toils 
 through the long days to earn the money that buys it. 
 
 In the villages the children begin almost as soon as 
 they can run about to take out the sheep and goats, not 
 in green fields, for there are none, but among the 
 
78 CHILDREN OF PERSIA 
 
 scattered plants on the mountain-side or under the 
 village trees. 
 
 Only the boys are allowed to take the flocks out on 
 the hills at any distance from the village, and on 
 mountains where there are thought to be wolves, even 
 the boys are forbidden to go without a man. 
 
 But in and around the villages boys and girls alike 
 turn out. Often they carry a long pole, generally more 
 than twice as long as themselves. This pole serves at 
 times as a fence to keep the flock from wandering into 
 crops as they pass them on their way, or as they graze 
 on the stubble of the neighbouring crops which have 
 been already gathered in. The stubble itself is not 
 much, but there are more weeds there because the 
 ground has been watered. But neither on the hills 
 nor in the fields can they find much pasture in the heat 
 of summer, so the little shepherds and shepherdesses 
 take their flocks under the trees and beat the leaves 
 down with their poles for the animals to eat. When 
 the lower leaves are finished they climb, boys and 
 girls alike, into the trees, often to considerable heights, 
 and beat the higher branches. The leaves that are 
 not eaten are dried and kept for the winter as we keep 
 hay. It is an awkward thing for a child to climb 
 trees encumbered with a long pole, and in the districts 
 where they do this there are often accidents. One 
 little boy of eight or nine was brought to the Yezd 
 hospital with a bad compound fracture of his skull 
 through falling out of a tree while tending the sheep. 
 He got nearly well, and then his mother took him home, 
 so I do not know whether he fully recovered or not. 
 
 Among the richer classes the children sometimes 
 
CHILD WIVES 
 
 79 
 
 undertake nominal work at a very early age, but not 
 actual work. One boy of about sixteen in our school 
 held a position in the Persian army corresponding to 
 that of Colonel, and there was said to be a Field- 
 Marshal of twelve in the army. 
 
 Merchants consider it good training for their sons 
 to do a little business on their own account, and some 
 of our schoolboys imported goods from Bombay or 
 elsewhere while they were still at school, and disposed 
 of them at a profit. 
 
 CHAPTER XIV 
 
 CHILD WIVES 
 
 The Persian girls stay at home longer than the little 
 apprentices, but not so long as the richer schoolboys. 
 
 The usual age for a Muhammadan girl to marry is 
 thirteen or fourteen, but in many places they marry 
 as early as eight or nine. 
 
 This perhaps explains why the girl is given no voice in 
 the choice of a husband, and all is left to the parents. 
 
 It perhaps partly explains too why Muhammadans 
 are allowed to beat their wives, though they will tell 
 you, as a proof of their prophet’s kindness to women, 
 that he forbade them to do it with a chain. A little girl 
 who has not had time to grow up and learn to behave 
 herself, will often no doubt be difficult to control. 
 
 The young wife of a shoemaker one day lost her 
 temper because her husband said he could not afford 
 to buy her something she wanted. She proceeded to 
 break all the ornaments in the house and to tear her 
 
80 
 
 CHILDREN OF PERSIA 
 
 best chddar to rags. Her husband, who was a Christian, 
 went to the English missionary to ask whether it would 
 be allowable under the circumstances to beat her. 
 
 Another girl refused to cook her husband any food 
 when he came home from his work, and would not 
 even speak to him. She admitted that he was very 
 kind to her, and that she liked him better than her 
 own brothers, but still continued to sulk in this way. 
 Her own relations said a good beating was what she 
 wanted, but her husband had scruples about wife¬ 
 beating, and would not do anything. But not many 
 Persian husbands are so forbearing. 
 
 Another necessary result of these early marriages 
 is the custom of living with the husband's parents. 
 A girl of even fourteen is not fit to be given sole charge 
 of a house. So the bridegroom takes his bride home 
 to his father’s house, and puts her under the charge of 
 her mother-in-law. When, however, the mother-in- 
 law becomes a widow, she has to take a secondary place, 
 if her daughter-in-law is at all of an age to manage her 
 own affairs. Then the old lady often prefers to leave 
 her son’s house, and to go and live with a married 
 daughter, and the men are generally very good in 
 taking in their mothers-in-law. 
 
 Poor little girl wives! They are taken away from 
 home before they are grown up, and although they are 
 now married women they cannot help behaving as 
 children. There was one young wife of a Government 
 official who received her visitors with the utmost 
 dignity and propriety, and then could not resist the 
 temptation to pinch the old black woman who was 
 handing the tea and make her jump. 
 
CHILD WIVES 
 
 81 
 
 And they hardly know what to do with their babies. 
 They love to nurse them and play with them, but they get 
 very tired of them and are often glad to hand them over to 
 the grandmother. I went to condole with one girl on the 
 death of her dear little baby, and she said, “ It was just 
 as well it died before the winter. It would have been 
 such cold work getting up in the night to look after it.” 
 
 Even when the children grow older their mothers, 
 grown-up children themselves, do not know how to 
 manage them. What do you think of mothers who 
 lose their tempers with their children, and fly at them 
 and bite them ? And they are not ashamed of it, and 
 their neighbours do not seem surprised or horrified. 
 One woman bit her little boy’s hand, till it bled badly. 
 He was about seven, and had cried to have his best 
 coat on when he went to see the missionary. Another 
 woman bit the cheek of a poor little consumptive girl 
 of eight or nine, so that there was a great bruise, and the 
 skin was broken. She told a neighbour, with a laugh, that 
 she had got angry with the child because she was tire¬ 
 some about taking her medicine, which was very nasty. 
 
 There is no command in the Quran that girls should 
 be married so young, but the mothers declare that it 
 was the command of Muhammad, and certainly he 
 himself set the example by marrying a girl of nine. So 
 when a mother thinks her girl is getting old enough 
 to marry she begins to look out for a suitable husband, 
 and talks things over with the mother or sister of any 
 man she thinks likely. The man’s mother is allowed 
 to see the girl, but not the man himself, so you see even 
 the men cannot choose their own wives. Then the 
 money matters are arranged. It is settled how much 
 
 F 
 
82 
 
 CHILDREN OF PERSIA 
 
 the girl’s father will give her, and how much her 
 husband will settle on her, and there is often a great 
 deal of haggling over this. 
 
 If a girl has a cousin who is the son of her father’s 
 brother, he is considered the most appropriate husband 
 for her, and it is considered an act of merit for him to 
 marry her. 
 
 If a girl has a large dowry she can generally get a 
 good husband as husbands go out there. If she is 
 poor she has more difficulty, but a capable, industrious 
 girl may do fairly well. But a penniless girl with 
 nothing to recommend her fares badly indeed. When 
 her mother fails to get any husband who is at all de¬ 
 sirable instead of letting her girl remain single, she 
 marries her to a madman or a drunkard or a deformed 
 man, or someone utterly undesirable. 
 
 The engagement is celebrated by a formal sweet¬ 
 eating to which the friends on both sides are invited. 
 
 The bride and her family prepare her trousseau, and 
 she also has to make a complete suit of clothes for the 
 bridegroom. In one town now it is customary for every 
 well-to-do bride to have one European dress in her trous¬ 
 seau, and for her father to give her a table and chairs. 
 
 The wedding itself is a great affair, lasting a week, 
 if the bride’s father can afford it, but only a day or 
 part of a day in the case of poor people. The little 
 bride in her finest clothes, of which she is very proud, 
 looks very disconsolate and cries a great deal. No 
 doubt the tears are sometimes genuine enough, for the 
 child is leaving her home and going to people she knows 
 little of, but even if she feels inclined to laugh and smile 
 she must not do anything so improper. 
 
CHILD WIVES 88 
 
 After the wedding she must not leave her husband’s 
 house for a year, but she may receive visitors. 
 
 As we have seen the marriage and wedding are 
 arranged by the women, but generally the bridegroom 
 has more say in the matter than one young man I 
 knew. He had been engaged for some time, and on 
 going home from work one evening found his wedding 
 prepared without his having been consulted, and had 
 to be married then and there. He was fond of children, 
 and quickly won the heart of his little wife, who cried 
 when he had to go back to his work. 
 
 We do sometimes find happy family parties in 
 Persia, the husbands treating their wives with con¬ 
 sideration, and the wives being very fond of their 
 husbands. One old lady told me, with tears in her eyes, 
 how good her husband always was to her, and how he 
 always got up and made a cup of tea for her in the 
 morning if she was not well. But this is the exception 
 and not the rule. There does not generally seem to be 
 any great affection between husband and wife. The 
 husband expects implicit obedience from his wife, and 
 is prepared to enforce it. On the other hand she has 
 certain privileges. She generally has the best court¬ 
 yard in the house, to which no men are admitted but 
 near relations, and the smaller courtyard is given up 
 to her husband to receive his guests in. 
 
 Except in the highest classes Persian women go about 
 a good deal, but always have to wear a veil in the street 
 or draw the chadar over their faces. 
 
 The man is absolute master in his own house, and unless 
 his wife has powerful relations he may do what he likes 
 to her and her children, and no one will take any notice. 
 
84 
 
 CHILDREN OF PERSIA 
 
 I knew one woman whose husband treated her like a 
 slave. He forced her not only to do all the work of 
 the house, but the work of the stable too, for he was 
 well enough off to keep a horse. He killed one child 
 in her arms, and twice stole another away from her, 
 sending it once to a town a week’s journey off, and once 
 to another part of the town. Finally he divorced her, 
 without giving any reason, and left her ill and destitute. 
 And she had at no time any redress. 
 
 Certainly Muhammadanism does not tend to make 
 good husbands, nor perhaps good wives either. The 
 Persians are many of them kindly people, however, and 
 treat their wives better than Muhammad taught them 
 to do. Otherwise the lot of women in Persia would be 
 harder than it is. One great evil they are spared, for 
 the widows are not despised and ill-treated as the 
 Hindu widows are, but are allowed to marry again, and 
 generally do so if they are of a suitable age. 
 
 Still the condition of girls in Persia is not a happy 
 one, and I think that all of you who have Christian 
 mothers, and know what the love of such a mother can 
 be, will have something to pray about, when you think 
 of mothers and their children in Persia. 
 
 CHAPTER XV 
 
 SICK CHILDREN 
 
 Measles, scarlet fever, whooping cough, mumps, 
 chickenpox, Persian children have them all. Typhoid 
 fever, diphtheria, rheumatic fever are all common. 
 But almost the commonest illness of all is smallpox. 
 
SICK CHILDREN 
 
 85 
 
 A woman brought a child into the dispensary waiting- 
 room one day covered with a smallpox rash. The 
 doctor, new to the country, ordered her out, con¬ 
 demning her reckless disregard for infection. “ Is 
 there anyone who has not had smallpox ? ” she asked, 
 looking round at the thirty or forty other people 
 in the room. As she expected, all had had it, and she 
 came in. 
 
 It is considered a children’s illness, because people 
 hardly ever grow up without having had it. In fact, 
 their parents take care they shall not, for they are so 
 afraid they will take it badly at an awkward time that 
 they choose a convenient time, and either put the child 
 with a person who has smallpox mildly, or, oftener, 
 inoculate him with it, just as we inoculate our babies 
 with vaccine. 
 
 My cook asked me one day, with tears, to go and 
 see his baby ; they had given it smallpox to get it 
 over, and it had taken it badly. I am glad to say it 
 recovered. He had not thought it necessary to make 
 any difference in his cooking for us, while he was 
 spending his nights with a baby with smallpox. 
 Another missionary’s cook brought his little boy with 
 smallpox to the kitchen because it was more cheerful 
 for him than being at home; he could lie and watch his 
 father cooking. 
 
 So the Persians do not take much trouble to prevent 
 their children from getting ill. How do they care for 
 them when they are ill ? 
 
 First of all they start doctoring them themselves, 
 except in smallpox, when they say it is dangerous to give 
 any medicine. For other illnesses they give plenty of 
 
86 
 
 CHILDREN OF PERSIA 
 
 medicine, not in little teaspoonfuls, but in nice big 
 bowlfuls, and the nastier it is the more good they think 
 it will do. On the whole Persian children are ex¬ 
 ceedingly good about taking their medicine, but 
 whether they are or not they have to take it. One 
 way of giving it to naughty children is to pour it 
 through their noses from a little tin cup with a long 
 narrow spout. 
 
 If the child gets no better the doctor is consulted ; 
 very often two or three doctors are called in, and some¬ 
 times the parents follow the doctor’s advice, but very 
 often they do not. It depends partly on the beads, 
 and a good deal on how much they have paid. If they 
 pay much they generally make the patient take all 
 the medicine for fear their money should be wasted. 
 If the doctor seems unable to cure the patient a reader 
 is called in, sometimes a man, sometimes a woman, who 
 reads the Quran over the patient in the hope that it 
 may effect a cure where medical treatment has failed. 
 
 In the case of a long, tiresome illness, or when they 
 despair of recovery, it is not uncommon for the patient’s 
 friends to hasten the end by giving a dose of poison. 
 
 One girl, who had very little the matter with her, but 
 was always making a fuss over her ailments, gave her 
 family a great deal of trouble with her fancies. They 
 found her recovery was likely to be slow, and although 
 she was going on well they one day told the doctor that 
 “ they had given her sherbet and she had died.” 
 
 I myself was several times asked to give poison in 
 the form of medicine, and I think they were rather 
 surprised when I told them how Christians regard 
 such a thing. 
 
SICK CHILDREN 
 
 87 
 
 When the medical missionary starts work he may 
 be puzzled by the very common request that he will 
 give the second medicine first. It appears that the 
 people think, with how much truth I cannot say, that 
 their doctors give first a medicine to make the patient 
 worse and then one to make him better. 
 
 Perhaps that was what the devoted old grandmother 
 was thinking of, who had brought her poor little grand¬ 
 daughter in from a village many miles away, very, very 
 ill with rheumatic fever. She called in the English 
 doctor, and got her medicine from the dispensary, but 
 when the doctor called next day, she said she had not 
 given the child any, because she remembered she had 
 never asked if it would do her good and so she was 
 afraid to try it. 
 
 It must surely have been in the minds of the friends 
 of one patient who came to the missionary, and said 
 their friend was worse every time she took her medicine, 
 and they wanted some more, it was doing her so much 
 good. 
 
 When you are very ill, Mother keeps you very quiet 
 and does not let you see visitors, but when a little 
 Persian is very ill all the neighbours crowd in to see him, 
 and the more ill he is the more people come in. And 
 they do not tread on tiptoe and talk in a whisper, they 
 all talk quite loud out and smoke qalians and drink 
 tea, and make noise enough to give anyone in good 
 health a headache, much more a sick child. 
 
 One day I was called in to see a child who was 
 dangerously ill. Instead of showing me into her room, 
 the mother, together with a variety of aunts, sisters, 
 and other relations, escorted me to their receiving- 
 
88 
 
 CHILDREN OF PERSIA 
 
 room. I asked for the sick child, and was told I should 
 see her after tea, which meant at least half an hour’s 
 delay. As the account they had given of her sounded 
 very bad, I said I could not wait, that it was not our 
 custom to think of tea-drinking and entertainment 
 when our patients were perhaps dying. With great 
 difficulty I managed to persuade them to take me to 
 the poor little girl, whom they had left alone while they 
 all came to have tea and sweets with me. She was, as 
 they had said, very ill, her recovery was very doubtful, 
 yet as soon as we left the room, and had sent for the 
 medicine, they were all eager to entertain me, and I do 
 not think anyone would have stayed with the child if I 
 had not insisted, and they were all as gay and lively as if 
 they had had no one dangerously ill in the next room. 
 
 The Persians are very hospitable and like to put their 
 best before a visitor, and they consider it very necessary 
 to provide something nice for the doctor. Some 
 Persian doctors send word beforehand what refresh¬ 
 ments they would like got ready. 
 
 Sometimes this deters the very poor from calling 
 in even the mission doctor, who, they know, would 
 treat them free. They cannot even provide tea and 
 sugar. It was a great relief to more than one poor 
 person, when it was discovered that the mission ladies 
 were fond of boiled turnips, for a plate of turnips was 
 within the reach of the poorest, costing only about a 
 halfpenny. The news spread, and several sick people 
 were able at once to have a doctor. 
 
 But it is in surgery that one sees the Persian doctor 
 at his worst. 
 
 Here comes little Husain with his head plastered 
 
SICK CHILDREN 
 
 89 
 
 up with mud ; on removing the mud we find a broken 
 skull and a large wound in a foul condition. Next 
 comes little Saklneh with both hands burnt; the 
 burns are smeared with sticky white of egg covered 
 over with leaves; it will take days of proper dressing 
 to get the wounds clean. But she is not so badly off 
 as Rubabeh, whose burn has been dressed with cam¬ 
 phorated oil, and is so inflamed that she screams and 
 cries the whole time. 
 
 A more fortunate child was the little girl who was 
 scalded nearly all over, but not deeply, and who looked 
 like a little nigger with the ink they had put on. She 
 got well very quickly. It is like Indian ink, and seems 
 to be the best of the remedies the Persians use for burns. 
 
 With broken bones the Persian doctors are not very 
 successful either. Little Hasan, aged four, fell and 
 broke both arms. The Persian doctor as usual tied 
 them up with splints that were too small to be any real 
 use, but he tried to make up for that by tying the 
 bandages very tight, and poor little Hasan had both 
 arms partly destroyed. How proud he was when, 
 after some weeks’ at the C.M.S. hospital, he was able 
 to carry an English doll clasped to his heart with the 
 two poor bandaged stumps. 
 
 There was some truth in what one doctor said, that 
 more than half the cases that came into the hospital had 
 come there in consequence of the Persian doctors’ treat¬ 
 ment. The remedy is generally worse than the disease. 
 
 There are exceptions, and I have met Persian doctors, 
 who not only had real knowledge of medical treatment, 
 but had some of the true doctor’s spirit of pity and 
 self-sacrifice. Especially I would mention the brave 
 
90 
 
 CHILDREN OF PERSIA 
 
 Persian doctor who stayed at his post in Shiraz in the 
 cholera epidemic of 1904, and fought that terrible 
 disease instead of 3/ielding to the panic that had seized 
 his fellow countrymen. 
 
 It is evident, however, that there is a great and 
 crying need for dispensaries and hospitals in Persia. 
 So in the north the American Presbyterians, and in the 
 south the Church Missionary Society, have founded 
 them in a number of towns. 
 
 As a rule a dispensary is started first, to which out¬ 
 patients can come to get medicines and have their hurts 
 attended to. Later a hospital is opened. Generally 
 the first hospital is a very poor affair, but as the work 
 grows money is collected, and nice, clean, convenient 
 hospitals are built and furnished. Armenian and 
 Persian boys and girls are trained as nurses and 
 assistants, the boys for the men’s hospital, the girls 
 for the women’s and children’s. 
 
 Here Hasan and *Ali, Fatimeh and Rubabeh, and a 
 great many other little Persian children are made as 
 comfortable as their illness allows, and are kept clean 
 and happy in comfortable beds, and well fed and cared 
 for. 
 
 Morning and evening they hear prayers read, and 
 soon they too venture to join in the " Our Father.” 
 And every day someone reads and explains in the ward 
 something about the Lord Jesus Christ, and His love 
 and His teaching, and they learn that He knows and 
 loves each little Akbar or Saklneh and wants them for 
 His own, and they learn to love Him because He first 
 loved them. They learn hymns too, and love to sing 
 them, the same hymns that you know so well, “ Whiter 
 
A MISSION HOSP1TAI 
 
SICK CHILDREN 
 
 91 
 
 than snow/’ “ Simply trusting,” “ Here we suffer 
 grief and pain,” and many others. 
 
 The last recalls the story of little Bagum, the child- 
 wife, who was deliberately and cruelly burnt by her 
 husband, and was brought to the mission hospital. 
 There was no hope of recovery, but all was done that 
 was possible to relieve her pain and brighten her last 
 days. 
 
 She had heard something of the Gospel story from 
 a missionary who had paid a visit to her native village, 
 and she had been so interested that she had asked two 
 Persian children to teach her more. When she was 
 brought to the hospital even the terrible pain she was 
 suffering did not make her forget the wonderful story, 
 and she begged to be told more and more. And resting 
 in the love of Christ and trusting wholly in Him and 
 His salvation, she loved to sing of the joy to which He 
 was going to take her and kept begging for “ Here we 
 suffer grief and pain,” and repeating over and over the 
 refrain, “ Shadl, Shadi,” (joy, joy), until even the 
 Muhammadan women would sit beside her and sing the 
 hymn that comforted her so much. 
 
 In a small village in another part of Persia lived a 
 little lame girl. She could not walk at all, and her 
 leg was drawn up so that she could not straighten it, 
 and she suffered very much. She was a good deal of 
 trouble to her parents, and they got tired of taking care 
 of her, and neglected her a good deal, till at last her 
 father heard of the mission hospital in the neighbour¬ 
 ing town, seventeen miles off, and took her there to see 
 if the Ferangis (Europeans) could cure her. She was 
 taken in, washed, and dressed in clean clothes and 
 
92 
 
 CHILDREN OF PERSIA 
 
 put to bed. At first she used to scream when her leg 
 was touched, but it was operated on, and gradually, very 
 gradually, the pain grew less, and the leg grew straighten 
 But still, as the months went on, the recovery was very 
 slow, and when the weather grew so hot that the 
 hospital had to be closed and her father took her 
 home, though free from pain while she lay still in 
 bed, the pain was so great when she tried to stand that' 
 she could not walk a step. But as she lay alone on her 
 bed at home she thought over all she had heard at the 
 hospital, and one day a new thought struck her. 
 Surely the Khanums had told her that the Lord Jesus 
 Christ, Who used to cure people so wonderfully, was 
 alive still and could hear when anyone spoke to Him. 
 Why had she never asked Him to make her leg well ? 
 And then and there, in her ignorance and simple faith, 
 she asked Him, Who in the old Gospel days had made 
 the lame to walk, to make her walk, and, confident in 
 His love and power, she “ arose and walked.” 
 
 When the hospital was reopened she came back 
 again still lame, still in pain, but able to walk about 
 with a stick. And she loved more than ever to hear of 
 Him who had not only done so much for the sick 
 Jews of old times, but had done so much too for 
 her. 
 
 CHAPTER XVI 
 
 CONCLUSION 
 
 A Persian was one day talking to an English mission¬ 
 ary and asked why our King did not annex Persia. 
 
CONCLUSION 
 
 93 
 
 “ It is not right,” said the missionary, “ to take 
 what belongs to someone else, and Persia belongs to 
 your Shah.” 
 
 “ Still your King is surely bound to do as the Bible 
 tells him, and the Bible tells him to annex it.” 
 
 “ Where does the Bible say that ? ” 
 
 “ Does it not say that if you see your neighbour’s 
 ox or ass fallen into a pit you are to pull it out ? And 
 Persia is an ass fallen into a pit, and your King should 
 pull her out.” 
 
 Yes, Persia has indeed fallen into a pit, and we must 
 pull her out, but the pit is not simply one of political 
 difficulty, it is the pit of Muhammadanism, Persia’s 
 most real difficulty, and we must annex Persia for the 
 King of Kings. As long as the Persians are Muham¬ 
 madans lying and dishonesty will be the rule, cruelty 
 and injustice will go hand in hand, the poor will be 
 oppressed, the girls and women will be treated as 
 inferior creatures, the children will be liable to over¬ 
 work and cruelty, and religious persecution will con¬ 
 tinue. And the Persians are finding out that they 
 are in the pit and they are struggling to get out, they 
 are crying to us for help. Are we going to help them ? 
 
 Thousands of Muhammadans in Persia are dis¬ 
 satisfied with their religion, and are looking for some¬ 
 thing better. Many are trying a dissenting form of 
 Muhammadanism, called Bablism, but many are look¬ 
 ing to Christianity for help. 
 
 At first they distrusted the Christians, and Christian 
 work was constantly hindered or stopped. Now they 
 have learnt to know and trust the Christians, and the 
 work is not greatly interfered with. Indeed every- 
 
94 
 
 CHILDREN OF PERSIA 
 
 where the Persians are asking for teachers and doctors, 
 for schools and hospitals, and for Christian teaching. 
 
 If we do not help them in their search after the Way, 
 the Truth, and the Light, Muhammad’s mistake, which 
 has caused so much misery, may be repeated, and 
 Christianity rejected in favour of some new religion 
 made to suit the needs of the moment, but not the 
 needs of eternity. We must all put our shoulder to 
 the wheel to prevent that. 
 
 The Persians are well worth an effort. Numbers 
 of Babis went to their death in 1903 rather than deny 
 their prophet, and even children have stood persecu¬ 
 tion for Christ. “ I have a foolish husband,” said one 
 little girl. “ He says he will beat Jesus Christ out of 
 me, but he can only beat my body, and J esus Christ is 
 in my heart, so he cannot beat Him out.” 
 
 And the Persians are naturally a religious people, 
 and if their religious energy could be turned from dead 
 works, formal prayers, fastings, pilgrimages, divining, 
 —turned to the service of the true and living God, what 
 a splendid people they might be again, what a force 
 for God in Asia, and in the world. For the wave of 
 true religious life would act again on us and help us 
 on. God grant we may yet see the Persian, stunted 
 as he is by Muhammadanism, grow up to a perfect 
 man to the measure of the stature of the fulness of 
 Christ. And what is our part in this great work ? It 
 is threefold. 
 
 1. Prayer. Persia wants our prayers. God wants 
 our prayers for Persia. We none of us know all the 
 power and possibilities of prayer, and most of us are 
 surprised when we get direct and obvious answers to 
 
CONCLUSION 
 
 95 
 
 our prayers. It takes us a long time to find out that 
 God answers all our prayers, but He does. And there 
 are many in Persia who need our prayers : the mission¬ 
 aries ; the converts, often standing alone in a Muham¬ 
 madan house or even in a village or in a quarter of the 
 town, with no Christian friend to encourage them ; the 
 inquirers, perplexed as to the truth, or struggling 
 with their fears of confessing the Saviour in Whom they 
 have learnt to believe; the untouched Muhammadans, 
 oppressing or oppressed ; the schools, the hospitals 
 and dispensaries, and the services held week by week 
 in the name of Jesus Christ. 
 
 2. Giving. We may help to send out missionaries 
 and to keep up the schools and hospitals, either by 
 giving some of our money, or our time and work. 
 Have you only five loaves and two small fishes ? Our 
 Lord can use them to feed five thousand men besides 
 women and children. 
 
 3. Personal service. We cannot all be missionaries 
 in the foreign field. No, but those who cannot give 
 themselves for foreign service can do “ garrison duty ” 
 at home. People often try to dissuade missionaries 
 from going abroad, telling them they are wanted at 
 home. But they ought not to be wanted at home; 
 every Christian who cannot go abroad ought to be 
 doing his share of the work at home, so that those 
 who can go abroad may be spared. 
 
 And you who read this book, if you want to help 
 forward God’s kingdom in heathen and Muhammadan 
 lands, set to work now at once to fit yourselves to work 
 as Christian teachers, that you may be ready to take 
 your place in the ranks here or there as the great 
 
96 
 
 CHILDREN OF PERSIA 
 
 Captain places you. Get to know your Bibles well, 
 studying them if possible with commentaries or aids. 
 Do not let shyness stand in the way of your under¬ 
 taking direct Christian work if you are old enough. 
 Do your lessons or your work thoroughly and well, and 
 so make yourselves more fit to be used when the time 
 comes. Get into good habits of healthy living and 
 simple food. Put away all unkind words and thoughts 
 and learn to live in charity with all men. Be regular 
 in your prayers morning and evening, and if possible 
 get a regular time for midday prayer, even if it is 
 only two minutes, but speak to God too all through 
 the day—get into the habit of turning to Him at all 
 times. For whether we work here at home or far 
 away in foreign lands we can only do God’s work by 
 keeping in close touch with Him. 
 
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