E XVITH CENTURY, PROBABLY
EXECUTED IN ASIA MINOR FOR A PRINCELY OTTOMAN PATRON]

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[PAGE 23]

and professed unqualified allegiance. A powerful political unity came
into existence and continued for a period of SIX centuries
uninterrupted. The nations of this united kingdom of ISLAM were thus
merged into one unit, under the stimulus of one formal religion,
freely transmigrating local ideas. Arts and culture were transformed,
but the evolution thus caused by the Religion was essentially
political in nature.

"There is no God but GOD," said the APOSTLE OF ARABIA, but the poet
reflected awhile, and his rejoinder was: "The Ways of God are as the
number of SOULS OF MEN."

The Prophet's religion was rational, its principles attainable; it
secured for the poet social amelioration and physical comfort, but
there was a voice from the depth of his soul that he could not
silence. It was the voice of mystery; he was concerned with the
problems of the "Wherefore, the Whence, and the Whither".... Was he
not a Son of the land which PLOTINUS visited to learn mystery of the
Orient of Old?[9]

[Footnote 9: "Il prit un si grand gout pour la philosophie qu'il se
proposa d'etudier celle qui etait enseignee chez les Perses et celle
qui prevalait chez les Indiens. Lorsque l'empereur Gordien se prepara
a faire son expedition contre les Perses, Plotin, alors age de
trente-neuf ans, se mit a la suite de l'armee. Il avait passe dix
annees entieres pres d'Ammonius. Gordien ayant ete tue en Mesopotamie,
Plotin eut assez de peine a se sauver a Antioche."--PORPHYRY ON
PLOTINUS: Translation of the Enneads of Plotinus (Bouillet; Paris,
1857).]

We have to look therefore to the RELIGION, "The Ways" of whose God
"are as the number of Souls of Men", to perceive the true nature of
the evolution of the artistic expression of these people.

Souls with irresistible cravings for Mysticism, poets, artists,
philosophers and the like, discovered for the first time from
MUHAMMAD'S formal teachings, which contained certain esoteric
elements, that the senses, unreal and phenomenal, have yet an
important mission to fulfill in the task which aims to escape from
SELF (which is an illusion and the root of SIN, PAIN, and SORROW) and
to attain the height where the eternal beauty,

[CONTINUED ON PAGE TWENTY-SEVEN]

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"PORTRAIT OF MEHDI ALI GULI KHAN, COMMANDER OF FORTRESS, BY
RAM