Children of Persia

A woman brought a child into the dispensary waiting-room one day covered with a smallpox rash. The doctor, new to the country, ordered her out, condemning her reckless disregard...

Persian boys and girls are white, almost as white as ourselves, though they generally have black hair and dark eyes. The chief difference in appearance between Tommy Jones and ‘...

There is a story that when the Muhammadans took Persia and killed the Parsee king Yazdigird, their _Khalif_ ‘Omar asked Yazdigird’s son where he would like to live. He said he w...

A great many things are topsy-turvy in Persia, but perhaps reading is as topsy-turvy as anything. It is not only that the lines, and indeed the whole book, begin at the wrong en...

A Persian baby--what a funny little mortal! It looks for all the world like a little mummy, rolled up in handkerchiefs and shawls till only its little face peeps out, and tied u...

There is a little Persian book, which many of the little boys learn to read, called “Sad Hikāyat” or “A Hundred Stories.” Some of the stories are very like Æsop’s Fables, and th...

It perhaps partly explains too why Muhammadans are allowed to beat their wives, though they will tell you, as a proof of their prophet’s kindness to women, that he forbade them...

In a Persian town there is a curious arrangement of the shops. All the shops where one kind of article is sold are generally grouped together in one street or _bāzār_. To buy sh...

Persian boys and girls need not say their prayers till they are seven years old. Sometimes they begin sooner, but that is considered unnecessarily good. They are not to be beate...

“No, I am an apprentice-baker,” he said with an evident sense of importance; he felt he was a wage-earner--a halfpenny a day, I think was the amount, but where a labourer often...

Persian boys begin to fast at twelve years old, but the girls have to begin at nine. Sometimes they begin sooner if they want to store up merit early. But even little four-year-...

It is curious to go thousands of miles to Persia--to cross vast sandy deserts--and at last to find little skirted boys in the mudwalled streets playing tipcat just like their co...

Muhammad did not write down his teaching, for he could not write, but his followers learnt it by heart, and wrote it down, and after his death it was collected into one book cal...

There are two branches of mission-work in Persia that bring the missionaries into close touch with Persian children: one is the hospital, the other is the school. You will hear...

Before we look at the Persian children of to-day, let us go back nearly thirteen and a half centuries to the year of our Lord 570, and take a look at two adjoining countries in...

“Does it not say that if you see your neighbour’s ox or ass fallen into a pit you are to pull it out? And Persia is an ass fallen into a pit, and your King should pull her out.”