United States or Belgium ? Vote for the TOP Country of the Week !
Abd el Hamid, in spite of his zeal for Islam, would see in the preaching of a moral reform only a new heresy; and, as we have seen, the Móhdy's mission is against all evil rule, the Sultan's and Caliph's not excepted. So that, unless Abd el Hamid places himself openly at the head of the warlike movement in Africa and so forestalls a rival, he is not likely long to give it his loyal support.
About 200 yards from the well was Ali Hamid's village, a collection of some six or eight huts, in one of which dwells old Ali Hamid himself, the aged sheikh of this powerful branch of the Kourbab tribe; and the only evidence that we had of greater prosperity was that the women here wear gold nose-rings and have long gold earrings and more elaborate ornaments hanging from their plaited hair.
In Turkey liberals actually headed the government during much of the generation between the Crimean War and the despotism of Abdul Hamid, and Turkish liberal ministers like Reshid Pasha and Midhat Pasha made earnest though unavailing efforts to liberalize and modernize the Ottoman Empire. Even the dreadful Hamidian tyranny could not kill Turkish liberalism.
Wad Hamid camp, viewed not too closely, was a pleasing picture set in a background of dark hills with a bordering of wide tawny river flowing in front. There were a good many tents in the British lines, but relatively few in the Khedivial, for there fellaheen and Soudani had sheltered themselves as usual under palm leaf and grass huts, or beneath their brown soldier blankets.
The streets of Constantinople ran with their blood, and before Abdul Hamid was obliged by foreign civilised Powers to stop those holocausts, he had so decimated the race that not for at least a generation would they conceivably be a menace again even to that zealous guardian of the supremacy in its own dominions of the Ottoman power.
Nor is the physical presentment of Abdul Hamid the only thing that has gone to pieces under Bob's unrelenting hostility. The Sultan's character has been growing worse and worse as night after night the boy insists upon new examples of what bad Sultans do. To satisfy that inexhaustible demand, Harrington has shouldered Abdul Hamid with all the sins of all the epochs in history.
During that year's high Nile, he passed his gunboats over the long stretch of cataracts betwixt Merawi and Abu Hamid, and ran them up the river where they co-operated with the land forces, regulars and friendlies.
His childher are all grown up an' safe in jail, he has four hundhred an' eighty-nine less wives, but iliven are a good manny in th' suburbs; he has put away a few piasthres f'r a rainy day, out-iv-dure life may improve his health, an' I shudden't wondher if ye'd read some day in th' pa-aper: 'At th' Stambool county fair th' first prize f'r Poland Chiny hens was won be A. Hamid, th' pop'lar ex-sultan.
"To the jail with them!" the new arrival almost shrieked, and about a dozen in the crowd took up the cry "To jail with them!" "Infidels! Worshipers of dogs! Wine-drinkers! Eaters of pig flesh! Dogs and the sons of dogs what mothers gave them birth? Are your hands, True-believers, fit bonds for them? To the jail! To the jail that Abdul Hamid caused his men to build for such as these!"
In the same year in which he arrived at this dignity, really the desire and object of Ali's whole life, occurred also the death of the Sultan Abdul Hamid, whose two sons, Mustapha and Mahmoud, were confined in the Old Seraglio.
Word Of The Day