Russian and Turk Author:Robert Gordon Latham Purchase of this book includes free trial access to www.million-books.com where you can read more than a million books for free. This is an OCR edition with typos. Excerpt from book: 54 CHAPTER III. Religious Creeds and Sects of the Ottoman Empire.—General View.— Sunnite and Shiite Mahometanism.—The Wahabis.—Judaism, Jndean and Samarita... more »n.-—Three forms of Syrian Christianity : Nestorian, Enty- chian, Romanist. The consideration of the Christianity of the Greek, Albanian, and Slavonic parts of the Empire makes no part of the present chapter. In respect to this the general statement that, with a few exceptions, it is the Christianity of the Eastern rather than the Western, or the Greek rather than the Latin, Church is sufficient. In Asia, however, the case is different. Of Christianity in Asia there is not very much, but what there is is of a peculiar and mixed character. Neither is there, within the pale of Mahometanism, any important amount of sectarisnism. The Turks, as thoroughly as the Arabs themselves, are orthodox Sunnites; but the Persians—of course, from the Turkish point of view,—are heretics and Shiites; and of the Shiite creed, eo nomine, there are certainly some dissenting subjects of the Porte. They are not either Georgians or Armenians, and but few of them are either Turks or Arabs; while, of Persia proper, a very small part belongs to the Porte. But there is all over Turkey the influence of the Persian literature; and, on the frontier of Turkey, there is the debateable ground, march, or boundary of the Kurd districts. They appear in the maps as '' Kurdistan," part of which is assigned to Persia and part to Turkey. But, beyond Kurdistan, there are Kurds, sometimes in continuity, sometimes sporadic; and wherever we get Kurds ve get the Persian language and the Shiite creed. We get, too, a good deal more in the way of miscellaneous sorts of barbarism and savagery ; for there is not much good to be said aboutthe Kurds. The extent, however, to...« less