This is mostly seen in nations including Estonia, the Czech Republic, China, and Japan, where over three-quarters of the population declines to practice a religion. Some disagreement and discord can be seen beginning with Ibn Ishaq’s (d. Islam is seen by its followers, Moslems, as the religion of Fitrah, the natural and primordial religion which was there at the beginning of humanity. There are three countries in Britain, England , Wales and Scotland . The study, by the Pew Research Center’s Forum on Religion & Public Life, is based on census data from more than 200 countries. Stein refused, and nothing more is known of him after that. More than four-fifths of Saudi Arabia’s total population live in cities, and almost all of the rest live in government-supported agricultural enterprises. Encyclopædia Britannica Online. Retrieved 2010-08-25. Shīʿites have come to account for roughly one-tenth of the Muslim population worldwide. We have emotions, and as any dog-owner can tell you, their canine friends exhibit joyful, affectionate and even depressed behavior. To sum up, the conclusion to which, with the present information, I have come, is that the scripts are genuine, and that most, if not all, of the block-prints in the Collection are also genuine antiquities, and that if any are forgeries, they can only be duplicates of others which are genuine.

My hope is that among those of my fellow-labourers who have made the languages of Central Asia their speciality, there may be some who may be able to recognize and identify the characters and language of these curious documents. Macartney purchased the documents and sent them to India in the hope that Augustus Rudolf Hoernlé, a prominent scholar of Indo-Aryan languages, would be able to decipher them. Stein had the sensitive task of breaking the news to Hoernlé, who was not only his mentor, but whom he had just succeeded in the post of Principal of the Calcutta Madrasah. Questions regarding the remarkably good condition of the scripts, their fortuitous discovery and bizarre script were raised, in particular by the Swedish missionary in Kashgar, Magnus Bäcklund who had also been approached by Islam Akhun. Islam Akhun was a Uyghur con-man from Khotan who forged numerous manuscripts and printed documents and sold them as ancient Silk Road manuscripts.

Hoernlé discussed this issue in his 1899 report but decided in favour of their authenticity, recounting Islam Akhun’s tale of the discovery of the manuscripts and documents in the ruined sites of the ancient Kingdom of Khotan in the Taklamakan desert. In the early summer of 1898, Islam Akhun acted as an unwilling guide for the explorer Captain Deasy on an expedition to look for ancient sites near Guma. During his first Central Asia expedition in 1900 Stein visited ancient sites of Khotan, but although he excavated many manuscripts, he found nothing similar to those sold by Islam Akhun. Islam Akhun and his colleague continued to sell items to the British and Russian consuls. It is probable that Islam Akhun feared further punishment having already received punishment for his desertion of a British group in 1898 (see below). Initially Islam Akhun claimed innocence, insisting he had only been an agent for Macartney, and had himself purchased the documents from other parties, knowing how much the English desired them. Some were in a script similar to Brahmi and the documents were in several different formats, many bound with copper ties.

He also mentioned that although initially he and his partner had hand-written the manuscripts and made an attempt to copy the Brahmi script from genuine manuscripts, such was the demand that they had moved onto woodblock printing. Many of the forgeries remain in the collections of the British Library and the Institute of Oriental Manuscripts, St. Petersburg. In 1895 he approached the British Consul in Kashgar, Sir George Macartney, with a number of manuscripts on paper. Stein also reports various other dubious activities, including masquerading as a British agent searching for illegal slaves in order to blackmail locals. In order to get rid of the shame, the Arab community used to bury daughters alive. On his return, he forged a note in Deasy’s handwriting to get money from Badruddin, the Aqsaqal (official who looked after the interests of the Indian traders, reporting to the Consul-General in Kashgar). Environmental engineering is something that you can get a degree in these days, but the field is one that existed long before it had a name, begun at the dawn of civilization when we started modifying our environment to meet our needs. The name of the religion is Islam, which comes from an Arabic root word meaning “peace” and “submission.” Islam teaches that one can only find peace in one’s life by submitting to Almighty God ( Allah) in heart, soul, and deed.