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 HIS EELIGIOUS OPINIONS 395 may be dismissed as not supported by trustworthy evidence. 1 The sovereign's readiness even to discuss Christianity and speak with unbelievers upon questions of philosophy and religion would be certain to obtain for him the reputation of atheist from the ignorant among his own people ; for to the faithful Mahometan no other religions need be discussed : they exist only for condemnation ; to study them is to express a doubt upon the all-sufficiency of the teaching of the Koran, and a doubt on such a subject is treason to the faith. But at least such accusations do not point towards fanaticism. The man who by one party is claimed as almost persuaded to be a Christian and is regarded by the other as an atheist or at least a disloyal believer in Islam can hardly have been a religious persecutor. It may be true that after conversing with the patriarch or with any other unbeliever he went through the prescribed forms of washing, but if he wished to preserve the loyalty of his subjects it was necessary for him to observe such formalities of purification. He was at the head of the Turkish nation, that is, of an armed camp, a nation in the field whose chief if not sole bond of unity was, as it still remains, the belief in the prophet-hood of the founder of Islam. Nearly all his soldiers held the one great creed and went into battle with shouts of ' Allah ! ' and 6 Mahomet ! ' They believed, as the followers of the Prophet have always fervently believed, that death on the battle-field fighting for Islam is the shortest road to Paradise and the Houris. The Turks were ready to obey and endure unto death for the sake of the sovereign whom Allah had placed at their head. Some of them were as full of religious enthusiasm as crusaders, as confident that they were working for God as Cromwell's Ironsides, and as fanatic as a grossly ignorant army can be which believes itself to be immeasurably superior to the enemy because, on the one hand, it possesses the true faith, while, on the other, the enemy, more learned in the world's despicable science and philosophy falsely so called, is in the 1 These and many other fictions of the like kind come from Spandugino and Sansovino.