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THE INDIAN ANTIQUARY.
Vedic Aryans... In other words, it will be seen that there is reason to believe that the Vedic Aryans were Moghuls; that Asoka and Akber sprang from the same stock as the worshippers of the Vedic gods." But he does not adduce what any sober thinker would regard as a shadow of proof for this or any of his numerous other hasty conclusions.
The brief outline given of the history of India is divided by the author into "four stages of development"-" the Sunni, the Shiah, the Safi, and the Sunni revival;" the first found expression from the eleventh to the fourteenth century; the second from the conquest of the Dakhan in the fourteenth to the sixteenth century; the Çaff during the establishment of the Mughal empire in the 16th and 17th centuries,-" during this period," he says, "Hinduism worked its strongest. It imbued Mussulman thinkers with a belief in the transmigrations of the soul; in the final union of the soul with the supreme spirit. It brought the worship of Ali and his two sons, as incarnations of God, into harmony with the worship of Râma and Krishna, as incarnations of Vishnu. But the movement failed to reconcile Mussulmans and Hindus. It drifted into indifference and scepticism, and was finally swamped in a religious revival." The last epoch, that of the Sunni revival, coincides with "the culmination and decadence of the Moghul empire in the 17th and 18th centuries." And the Sunni reaction" was a revival of the orthodox religion in a puritanical form." Again the author calls attention to another division of Indian history: he says,"The Mussulman period is the one properly so called. It extended from the 11th century to the 16th. Throughout this interval of five centuries the religion of Islam was dominant throughout the Mussulman empire. The Sultans were mostly staunch Mussulmans. The Moghul period has been wrongly called Mussulman. It extended from the 16th century to the middle of the 17th. Throughout this interval the Korân was neglected or ignored; many of the so called Mussulmans were Safi neretics; many affected open infidelity. Akber, the greatest sovereign of the Moghul dynasty, threw off all pretence of being a Mussulman. He
the ten tribes were said to have been removed might be Hazara, a district of Kabul (4sit. Res. yol. II. pp. 67-76). The Rev. Ch. Forster, in his New Key to the Recovery of the Lost 7 en Tribes (1854), supported the theory, and held that Hazira may be derived from the Arabic hazar-expelled, tanished,' and Kibal from Ar. kabul-'a tribe,' pointing out at the same time that Ptolemy places the Kabalitui on the borders of Seistin, and immediately to the south the Aristophyloi, or 'noble tr bes'-a title which he thinks could only be appropriated by Israelites; while he supposes that "Halah and Habor by the river Gozan' (2 Kings xvii. 6) were in the west of Khorasin, and the same as Ghor, from which the Afghans claim to have originally come. The same theory is supported by Major James in his Settlement Report, 1362, and by Dr. H. Bellew in his Political
[NOVEMBER, 1877.
persecuted Mussulmans; he destroyed mosques; he broke up the power of the Ulamâ, or Mussulman Church." Some of the statements above quoted will be so new to students of Indian history who have derived their ideas from Oriental sources, or even from Elphinstone, Orme, Dow, Mill, Marshman, and other respected writers, that we need not further challenge them. Nor, though so carefully defined in his preface, does the author himself in the work very markedly distinguish between "the Mussulman" and "the Moghul periods." The short space of 300 pages of large type, into which Mr. Wheeler compresses his account of six centuries and a half, does not give him the opportunity of entering into details either of campaigns or of policy, and the reader gets much less than is given in the compilation of Murray and other popular handbooks of the class. The whole is expressed in a series of very short sentences, all cast in one mould, and averaging from sixteen to nineteen on a page of 34 lines. The abruptness of the style may be judged from the quotations we make. Much new material for the history of India has been made available within the last few years, even to those, like Mr. Wheeler, unacquainted with any Oriental langunge: we need only mention the invaluable work on the Muhammadan period, embracing the translations of native histories, prepared by the late Sir H. M. Elliot and continued by Professor Dowson, filling eight octavo volumes, containing about 4600 pages of matter, which the judicious and well-merited encouragement of Her Majesty's Secretary of State for India has enabled the able editor to carry through the press. But Mr. Wheeler's opinion of native historians is not high. "The historians of the Mussulman period, properly so called," he says, "generally told the truth. Occasionally they may have praised bad princes because they were good Mussulmans; otherwise they were honest and trustworthy. They were kept up to the mark by the influence of the Ulama. The Ulan & comprised the collective body of doctors, lawyers, magistrates, and judges resident at the capital... Had the historians of the Mussulman period sacrificed truth to flattery, they would have exposed themselves to the scorn of
Mission to Afghanistan, 1857. The national tradition of the Afghans may be seen in Dorn's Hist ry of the Afghans by Ni'amat Ullah (London, 1826); but, as may be noticed by comparing this with the other versions of this tradi ion given y Wolff, Forster, and Bellew, there is but little accordance in its details as reported by themselves; and their histories are none of them more than three hundred years old. Dorn, Trumpp, Lewenthal, and Wolff have failed to discover a single Hebrew or Chaldee root in the Pushto language except in purely Arabic words introduced with Muhammadanism, and most of the customs pointed out as characteristically Hebrew can be traced to the Qorfn. The weakness of all the arguments has been well p inted out in a paper by the Rev. T. P. Hughes in 7he Indian Christian Intelligencer, vel. I. p. 60-7, to which we are chiefly indebted for the substance of this note.
