Page:The Tarikh-i-Rashidi - Mirza Muhammad Haidar, Dughlát - tr. Edward D. Ross (1895).djvu/156

 Rh They had no special nationality, but formed a class or brotherhood of devotees, banded together in aim and design, though wandering or dwelling, separately, in all the countries of Central Asia. They became expounders of the Musulman law, and the executive authority (such as it was) dare not oppose them; they were also workers of miracles and healers of the sick, and in these capacities obtained a hold over the minds of the mass of the people. "Their tombs," Dr. Bellew tells us, "were converted into sacred shrines endowed with all sorts of munificent virtues. Rich grants of land were apportioned by successive Khans for the support of their establishments, whose presiding elders in return dispensed, in the name of their patron saint, endless favours and bounties to an illiterate and superstitious peasantry."

The Khwájas, in short, were a class that had been evolved by all that had gone before, during the rule of the Moghul Khans—a rule that had begun with the raiding and lawlessness of irresponsible nomads, and had ended with the hypocrisy and fanaticism that usually mark a people incapable of attaining to any degree of civilisation. In the Khwájas they unconsciously raised up rivals who were to displace their house, while these, within little over a century, had, for much the same reasons as their predecessors, to quit the stage and make room for others. They had scarcely begun to wield the power that had fallen into their hands when, as is the case with most governments and dynasties of Asia, discord began to spring up among them, and their brotherhood was divided into two opposing camps. One of these was known as the party of the "White Mountain," and the other as that of the "Black Mountain"—the Ak-tághlik and the Kara-tághlik. Their feuds were at first based on religious dissensions, but this rendered them none the less bitter: they soon developed into political strife, which would speedily have brought about the end of their rule, but for the support that both parties obtained from the Kirghiz. The White mountaineers summoned the nomad clans from Moghulistan, while the Black mountaineers called in those from the Pamir region; and though the White party, under the leadership of the celebrated saint, Khwája Hidáyat Ullah (better known as Hazrat Afák) obtained the upper hand for a time towards the end of the seventeenth century, their perpetual contentions resulted in the entire country falling first into the