Bibliography 2: #BIB00116

Key	BIB00116
Reference type	Journal Article
Title	The "Isms" of Central Asia
Journal	The Nation
Year	1869
Date	Feb. 18, 1869
Issue	190
Volume	8
Abstract	Literary Review of Gobineau's Les Religions et les Philosophies dans l’Asie Centrale: "M. de Gobineau does not sympathize with those who regard Mohammedanism as a hindrance to intellectual development. A religion which declares that 'the ink of the scholar is more precious than the blood of the martyr,' and that in the last judgement each man must give a strict account of the use made of the mental faculties with which he was originally endowed, cannot, he contends, be hostile to the intellectual growth of the race.... "M. de Gobineau's sketch of the prophet Bab and the religion which he founded is the most full and consecutive that we have anywhere seen. It contains all the information necessary to an intelligent appreciation of this important movement concerning which the reader would seek in vain for any knowledge, even in the most recent encyclopedias and theological dictionaries. The rise of a new religion with its attesting miracles and martyrs in the middle of the nineteenth century is an exceedingly curious and instructive phenomenon. Babism is a great historic event and seems destined to exert an influence upon the civilization of the East, and to produce a reformation in Islam analogous to that which Protestantism has effected not only in the Christian church but also in modern culture. Although scarcely a quarter of a century has elapsed since Mirza Ali Mohammed, surnamed the Bab, began to preach and to prophesy in the streets and mosques of Shiraz, and although he himself suffered martyrdom in 1849, in the twenty-fifth year of his age, his doctrines have been disseminated throughout all of Persia, and many provinces of India, and are at the present moment accepted and professed by millions of adherents, many of whom belong to the best educated and most influential classes of society."
Language	English
Keywords	ASIA, CENTRAL; RELIGION; PHILOSOPHY; IRAN; GOBINEAU, JOSEPH ARTHUR COMTE DE; BABI FAITH; HISTORY; 19TH CENTURY
Pages	134–135
Legal note	11.

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