Page:The Moslem World - Volume 02.djvu/145

 British India. The same cannot be said of the independent tribes which inhabit the mountains between India and Afghanistan. The Afridis, Waziris, and Mahsuds are the chief representatives of these tribes, and they are still barbarous, ignorant, and fanatical to a degree.

An unpleasant feature of their fanaticism is the frequency of acts of cjhaza or the assassination of Christians, Sikhs and Hindus from religious motives. The mullahs teach the young bloods that there is no more meritorious act in the sight of God than to creep up stealthily behind some unoffending and unsuspecting British officer, and, with fatal fire or blow, to destroy the life of a man whom perhaps the assassin may never have seen before, who may even have been his benefactor. If the ghazi succeeds in escaping, he will earn undying fame, and if he is slain or caught and hung, he makes forthmth a glorious entrance into the joys of Paradise, and the bards will voice his praises in odes to be sung all over the country-side for many a long day to come. Incited by this belief, and usually primed, too, with the intoxicating charas and Indian hemp, the young ghazi, for he is seldom more than a youth, will recklesslly throw his own life away in the murder, when he might have accomplished his object with less danger, though with less daring publicity. For instance, a few years ago, a regiment was marching out of Bannu with several mounted officers riding together at the head ; a ghazi suddenly dashed out from behind a culvert where he had been hiding, and shot one of the officers, holding his revolver almost against the unfortunate man's chest. He was at once knocked down and bayoneted by the sepoys, but he had courted that as a death of glory and a happy entry into Paradise.

Education is spreading rapidly among the Pathans of British India, and with it the old fanatical spirit is dying out. There are no less than twelve secondary schools in the North-west Frontier Province teaching up to the matriculation of the Panjab University, and there is an excellently equipped mission college at Peshawar which teaches up to the B.A., while the present Chief Commissioner, Sir George Roos-Keppel, has been the moving