'Persia and the Persian Question by the Hon. George Nathaniel Curzon, M.P.' [‎547] (610/714)

THE NORTH-WEST AND WESTERN PROVINCES
Mussulman; and the law, known as that of Jedid-el-Islam, by which
any Christian convert to Islam is entitled to claim the entire pro
perty of his or her family, including collaterals. Male apostates
have always been rare ; but Christian girls were sometimes forcibly,
or even willingly, abducted by Mohammedan lovers, who then,
under a fictitious declaration of conversion, put in a claim for the
forfeited property. 1 This practice gave rise to much fraud and
imposture; but a careful inquiry is now as a rule instituted into
the spontaneity of the alleged conversion, and it rests with the
Governor either to carry out the law in its cruel intensity, or more
frequently to assign to the convert only a share of the family goods.
Class and social prejudices are drawbacks from which a subject
Christian population must always expect to suffer in a Mohammedan
country, and of which the Nestorians bear their share. They are
also liable to be oppressed by the village aghas or landlords, to
whom they pay their rent, and who will not infrequently exact
more than is their legal due. An official, called the serperast, was
appointed many years ago, at the instance of the British Govern
ment, to safeguard the interests of the Christian peoples, and as
a medium between them and the district governor; but he appears
to have utilised his position to inflame rather than allay disputes^
with a view to extracting bribes from the rival litigants. Unfor
tunately, the Nestorians are so incurably litigious themselves, that
even the certainty of being worsted in any legal encounter does
not in the least act as a deterrent to their zeal. These appear to
be the sole surviving hardships from which the Nestorian subjects
of Persia now'suffer; and their redress may provide material for the
energies of missionaries and consuls for a little while yet to come.
All Christians are exempt from military service in Persia ; but,,
m return, they pay a poll tax of five krans per annum to the state.
Taxation ^ ax ^£^7 l ev i e( ^ 0I1 ly upon males above the age
of fifteen; but it is sometimes exacted both from boys
and from old men. In certain villages on the Urumiah plain
there is a special tax called giur-al-lik (lit. ' see and take '), accord
ing to which a house tax of five krans per annum is levied upon
1 In the recent summer (1891), the papers have been full of a case which I
suspect of belonging to this category. A young girl named Greenfield, the
daughter of an English subject and an Armenian mother, the former of whom had
acquired property near Suj Bulak, was forcibly abducted by a Kurd, whose fellow-
countrymen took up arms and declined to surrender her. Upon examination she-
declared her conversion to Islam.
N N 2