After a few years of assiduously imitating the great man, the young priest or lawyer is, perhaps, sent to a small village, where he may become pedagogue and parson, or he elects to follow the fortunes of some grandee, as secretary on no wages, with possible opportunities of modakel (peculation).
Or, if a doctor’s son or relative, he compounds his drugs for a year, and then is a full-blown hakim, or physician, and, setting up in some distant town, on the principle that “no man is a prophet in his own country,” he may earn a very comfortable living.
In Teheran there is a college where the rudiments of a liberal education are taught by English and French professors on an ambitious scale. From this college are recruited the courtiers, diplomats, and Government employés of the Shah, also the principal officers of the army.
The daughters of the rich and learned are the only women who are at all educated; some of them are good readers and reciters of poetry, and can even write verse themselves; but most of the educated women can merely write a letter and read the Koran, or an ordinary Persian story-book, the former without comprehension, it being in Arabic. A great deal of their time is given to poetry, and they are all of a very sentimental turn. About one woman to fifty educated men are found, the policy of Mahommedanism being “not to open the eyes of a woman too wide.”
Among the educated classes many are infidels, others pure theists, while communism as a religion is followed by the numerous secret sectaries of the “Baab;” among whose tenets is undoubtedly, though the Baabis deny the fact, that of community of wives and property.
The great portion, however, of the merchants, traders, and villagers are really Mahommedans, a practical and work-a-day religion, when stripped of mummery and bigotry. The Persian is not prone to fanaticism, though he is easily excited to it, and dangerous when in a state of religious fervour. They are very particular as to prayers and forms, as fasting, etc., and many carry them out at great personal inconvenience.
Among the higher servants—military and courtier class—however, irreligion is rife. These say no prayers, keep no fasts, have no belief, and are utterly dead to everything but what they believe to be their own interests. Many openly boast their disbelief in anything, and this is done with impunity.
In the year 1874 I had occasion to march down to Bushire. The journey was without incident, but shows the extraordinary variety of the climate. We went down on our own horses in five days.
The first night we lay covered with all our rugs in a small room, four of us, with a huge fire, and it was impossible to sleep for the intense cold. The next day we rode through heavy snow, having to blunder through drifts on foot up to our waists, dragging our horses, and glad to drink raw curaçoa to keep any warmth in us when freezing on our horses, where we were able to ride. The fourth night we slept in the open air at Dalliké, under some palms, with next to no covering; and as I was the only one of the party who had taken the precaution to keep my head wrapped up in a handkerchief, and my gloves and a pair of socks on, so I was the only one who was not terribly bitten on face, feet, and hands by mosquitoes. That day and the next we suffered from the heat.
The only memorable event in Bushire, which we left after a week’s stay, was the good fortune of one of the cable employés. He had bought a ticket in the big Indian Derby sweepstakes for nine rupees, the original price being ten. It was sold to him rather against his will, the seller being a married man, and feeling it wrong to gamble. The ticket won five thousand pounds, which was duly paid to the lucky buyer. What must have been the feelings of the other man? Mr. S⸺ (the purchaser), however, salved them by generously giving him five hundred rupees.