Page:The further side of silence (IA furthersideofsil00clifiala).pdf/372

 luck, I do not know; but he certainly lived to return to Kelantan after an absence of about a couple of years.

This was rendered possible for the ma'iong people by the sudden and violent death of the Maha Mentri. That great and good man—the self-appointed cham- pion of Muhammadanism in its strictest forms, the enforcer of public and private prayer, the orderer of fasts for the mortification of the erring flesh-had one little weakness that marred the purity and the con- sistency of his character. He was so scrupulous that he would not suffer himself to be photographed when a view of Kota Bharu, in which several hundreds of people figured, was being taken, since he held that the making of pictures was contrary to the Prophet's ordinances. In the name of religion, he had con- trived to make his neighbours' lives as little worth living as possible; but all the while he was aggres- sively attentive to an increasingly large number of the said neighbours' wives. Meticulous regard for the letter of the law, combined with an ostentations disregard for its spirit, is only to be found in its full perfection in Asiatic lands, but the Maha Mentri dovetailed the incompatabilities together with an wi- precedented persistence and shamelessness.

The mild folk of Kelantan bore with him and with his amiable peculiarities for a considerable time, and they might perhaps have endured them even longer had it not been that his zeal for religion was pushed, in directions that were not distasteful to him person- ally, to extremes which rendered life a very weari-