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One most amusing group of Mahomedan exquisites reminded one forcibly of PUNCH'S Noah's ark costumes and Bond Street specimens of fashion.
The fact is that the more we delegate of our authority in India to the natives of India on the principles which we associate with self-government, the more we must necessarily in practice delegate it to the Hindus, who form the majority, however much we may try to protect the rights and interests of the Mahomedan minority. This is what the Mahomedans know and fear.
In the political lament over a golden past, there is glorification by Hindus of the Mahomedan emperor Akbar, praise of the Native States and their rule as opposed to the condition of British India, and there are apologies for leaders in the Mutiny of 1857.
At the beginning of the eleventh century, the citizens of Amalfi seem to nave got the start of the Venetians in the favor and commerce of the Mahomedan states of the East: they were permitted to establish factories in the maritime towns, and even in Jerusalem; and those privileges were granted them expressly because they imported many articles of merchandize hitherto unknown in the East.
Yakoub Khan had gained little personal popularity during his brief and troubled reign, but he was an Afghan and a Mahomedan; and his deportation to India, followed shortly afterwards by that of his three Ministers, intensified the rancour of his countrymen and co-religionists against the handful of presumptuous foreigners who arrogantly claimed to sway the destinies of Afghanistan.
All these have been related to me in the Mandingo language, with tolerable exactness, by different people; and my surprise was not greater on hearing these accounts from the lips of the Negroes, than theirs, on finding that I was already acquainted with them; for although the Negroes in general have a very great idea of the wealth and power of the Europeans, I am afraid that the Mahomedan converts among them think but very lightly of our superior attainments in religious knowledge.
It was in this spirit, too, that the influential deputation headed by the Agha Khan, who, though himself the head of a dissenting and thoroughly unorthodox Mahomedan community claiming descent from the Old Man of the Mountain, was then the recognised political leader of the whole Indian Mahomedan community, waited on Lord Minto to press upon the Government of India the Mahomedan view of the political situation created by the Partition of Bengal, lest political concessions should be hastily made to the Hindus which would pave the way for the ascendancy of a Hindu majority equally dangerous to the stability of British rule and to the interests of the Mahomedan minority whose loyalty was beyond dispute.
Apart from the great Mahomedan community, whose political aspirations are largely different from, and opposed to, those of Hinduism, there are agricultural interests, always of supreme importance in such a country as India, and industrial and commercial interests of growing importance which cannot be adequately represented by the average Indian politician who is chiefly recruited from the towns and from, professions that have little or no knowledge of or sympathy with them.
A great quantity of ivory is likewise brought from the interior by the slave coffles. There are, however, some Slatees, of the Mahomedan persuasion, who, from motives of religion, will not deal in ivory, nor eat of the flesh of the elephant, unless it has been killed with a spear.
I however do not fear any evil consequences, for the simple reason that every responsible Mahomedan understands that non-co-operation to be successful must be totally unattended with violence. The other objection raised is that those who may give up their service may have to starve.
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