INTRODUCTORY NOTICES. 
7 
relied upon, his active career must have begun some time previous to the 
year 1622, while his death is recorded in the year of the Hijra 1105, or 
1693-94 A. D.—dates which would point to a life of almost incredible 
length, considering the country and times in which it was passed. Among 
the appendices to the present volume will be found an interesting account 
of a visit paid by Mr. Shaw to Hazrat Afaq’s tomb at Kashghar in 1874, 
but it is remarkable that no mention is made of the duration of his life. 
So scanty and fragmentary are the notices of the Khojas of Eastern 
Turkistan in known or available works, that it is necessary to fall back 
on such brief statements as our author, Muhammad Sadiq, vouchsafes 
to his readers, in order to trace their identity and origin. He very 
naturally omits any explanation of what constitutes a Khoja (or khwnja, 
as it is more properly written), for it must have been a household word 
among his associates and countrymen, and in every-day use with them. 
Still it may not, at first sight, be quite easy to determine whether any 
difference existed between a Khoja, as understood in some countries, 
and the members of other families supposed to owe their origin to the 
Prophet Muhammad. The learned orientalist, M. Schefer, has defined 
them 1 as those who claim descent from the Khalifs Abu-Bakr and Umar, 
by other women than the daughters of the Prophet; and that they were 
divided into two categories:—the Khojas Sayyid-ata, who possessed 
deeds proving their descent, and the Khojas Juibarl, whose deeds were 
lost and who could only appeal to tradition and repute. They differed 
from the Sayyids in that the latter claimed to originate from the Khalifs 
*Usman and All, through the daughters of the Prophet; and they had 
precedence of the Khojas. But this definition, though no doubt correct 
for some regions, seems scarcely to apply to the usage in Eastern 
Turkistan. Mr. Shaw, in his “ TurkI Vocabulary” defines the word 
khwaja as “ a title applied to the offspring of a Sayyid by a woman of 
any other family : also to their descendants.” In other words the Khojas 
w^ere Sayyids 2 : for the offspring of Sayyids, by whatever woman, are 
always Sayyids; and it may be remarked that Mr. Shaw must have 
obtained his description from the mouths of people who were living 
among the posterity of those very Khojas with whom our history is 
concerned. Thus, whether strictly accurate or not, it would seem that in 
Eastern Turkistan (and probably other neighbouring countries also) the 
name of “ Khoja ” had become synoymous with Sayyid. 3 
1 See Ho worth, II, page 870. 
3 It may be remarked here that the Khojas belonged to the order of Darwlshes 
known as “ Naqshbandi ”, but this does not affect the question of their being Sayyids. 
8 Compare Richardson’s Persian Dictionary and Redhouse’s Turki Dictionary 
under the words Sayyid and KJwaja. 
