Sd.) 
ON THE NOMAD TRIBES OF ASIA MINOR. ott 
which is placed before the name of the village in Persia, and at once 
establishing a bond of union between the two religions. 
Ali is the name for God, the Allah of the Mussulmans, the God of the 
Christians, in use amongst ‘both of them ; and throughout, when closely 
examined into, the religions are identical. 
These points gave us the somewhat startling fact of the vast extent 
of this secret religion, which has hitherto been supposed to be more or 
less confined to the so-called Ansairee mountains of the Lebanon and the 
adjacent villages, whereas in reality it extends from the shores of the 
Mediterranean to the Caspian, and may be styled the religion of the 
nomads who traverse this wild mountain district. Future investigations 
proved to us that the Afshars also belong to it, the Kizilbash, and many 
Kourdish tribes, and they are all knit together by one bond of mystic: 
brotherhood of religious belief, and know each other, much as the Free- 
masons of Hurope do, by secret signs. 
In Persia the Ali-Ullah-hi outwardly conform to the Shiite sect of the 
Mohammedans. In Turkey the Ansairee outwardly conform to that 
of the Sonnee, the only external evidence to the contrary being that 
they have no mosques and say no prayers, never go to Kerbela or Mecca,. 
and do not keep the fasts. To arrive at a definite knowledge of this 
religion is exceedingly difficult ; the facts which I have gathered are from 
three sources :— 
1. The above-mentioned statement of the renegade Suleiman. ' 
2. Information given me concerning the Ali-Ullah-hi in Persia by 
people of reliable authority. 
3. Personal investigations made this year at Tarsus, and evidence 
contributed by Greeks, Armenians, and Protestants of that place; and as. 
these three sources of information are thoroughly independent, and on 
the face of it admit of no collusion, they may be clearly taken as giving 
satisfactory proof of the mysteries of the religion, its vast extent, and 
the principal tenets which it inculcates. 
The fundamental principle of their mystery is to believe in a god 
whom they call Ali, a name doubtless chosen as a blind in the first 
instance to their Mohammedan neighbours. In their forms of prayer 
they address God in somewhat similar strains to those found in Christian 
prayer-books—‘ the Creator of all Things,’ ‘Lord of Glory,’ ‘the Seed- 
burster,’ ‘the Prince of Bees,’ or rather Prince of Angels, for the Ansairee 
have the idea that bees are angels who visit the earth in this form, and 
suck the fragrance of earth’s sweetest flowers. 
They have a special prayer to revile those who say that Ali ever took 
upon himself the form of man, ate, drank, or was subject to like passions 
as man; their prayers may be styled invocations rather than supplications. 
The Ansairee or Nasaree, though admitting as a body the same basis 
of religious belief, are divided into four sects :— 
1. The Northerners or Shemali, a name derived from the ae 
Shems, the sun, who say that God, or Ali, dwells in the sun. To this sect 
belong the Ali-Ullah-hi of Northern Persia; their ziarets, or sacred places, 
are all set up on hill-tops, and the origin of this may possibly be traced 
to the existence of sun-worship in those parts in ancient days. The 
~ Shemali are great fire-eaters, and on the sacred tombs of their departed 
Seids they say the holy light of Ali comes down much as the Zoroastrians 
used to say of their fire-temples in olden days. 
2. The second sect are called the Kalazians, or moon-worshippers-— 
