>> From the Library of Congress in Washington DC. >> Fenella France: Good morning, everyone. I want to welcome you to today's Topics in Preservation Series talk by Elham Bakhtary, "Tracking the Provenance of Printing in Afghanistan." Elham was the 2016, '17 CLIR Mellon fellow here in the Preservation Research and Testing Division. And this is [inaudible] here from CLIR with us. And this is a program, a doctoral fellowship program that we are just delighted to be involved in. It means we get to really see people, up-and-coming people with new research. And it means that they get to use any of the instrumentation in our lab to look at original materials within the library. So it's been for us all a fascinating journey as we learn more about collections that we didn't know about. So I'm going to hand over to Elham to talk about some of his research today. Thank you. >> Elham Bakhtary: Oh, man. Yeah, sorry about that. I just want to give some brief acknowledgment. I want to thank the Council on Library and Information Resources for making all of this possible. And giving me the opportunity to work with the Preservation Research and Testing Division of the Library of Congress. And I want to extend a warm thank you to everyone in PRTD. Not every single member of PRTD worked on this project, but everyone offered their assistance. And so I want to give a special thank you to Fenella for approving and overseeing this project. Also to Amanda Jones, Megan Wilson and Chris Bolser [assumed spellings] for being with me every step of the way in this project. And also to Jasmine Hahn in conservation for giving constant advice. And also Stephanie Stillo [assumed spelling] as well from the Rosenwald Collection for being a great advisor as well through some tough times and doubtful moments. But thank you for helping me get through this as well. And also just to recognize the Library of Congress as an incredible institution that helps with some of these challenging issues. Like the history of print in Afghanistan. Which began in the reign of this fearsome looking gentlemen. This is Amir Shayr Ali Khan. This came from an issue of a London paper called "The Graphic" in November of 1878, immediately after the British invaded Afghanistan to dethrone Amir Shayr Ali Khan. They feared that he was creating an alliance with the Russians. And that the Russians in the future could potentially use Afghanistan as a base from which to attack British India. And so they invaded him and dethroned him in 1878. He died actually trying to escape to Russia in the process. When they invaded Afghanistan, the British shelled the Amir's fortress where the first printing press was housed. And the printing house caught on fire and all of its materials were burned. And it was subsequently looted as well. So we actually have very, very few materials from this time period left. But thanks to the diligence of the Library of Congress we have some of these materials available to us. And I know this doesn't look like a very long list. But this is actually a really large percentage of the materials that are known to exist from this time period. The first work of "Hujjat-i qaviyah dar ibtal-i aqayid-i Vahhabiyah-i ghaviyah" means Conclusive Argument Invalidating the Misleading Wahabbi Creed. This was a heresiography targeting Wahabbis. "Shams al-Nahar," Afghanistan's first newspaper. "Shams al-Nahar" meaning "The Morning Sun." The library has two original issues of "Shams al-Nahar." And "Tuhfat al-Ulama," which means a "Gift to the Ulama." Now the first item, as the title suggests, is a heresiography condemning Wahabbis. The second two I would describe as mirrors for subjects. Meaning that they instruct subjects, including the ulama on how to behave as good Muslims. And in this talk I will suggest that, although the Amir's court initially used propaganda to attack the Wahabbis, it was the Wahabbis that inspired these latter forms of propaganda in both form and substance. And through my research with PRTD, I will also propose that the amir of Kabul not only shared a common market of ideas with the Wahabbis, but also a common market of printing materials with them as well. So I want to give a brief survey of the history of print during Amir Shayr Ali Kahn's reign. According to colonial records in 1869, he starts using a lithographic press explicitly for the purpose of printing stamps. On the left you have an image of a lithographic press from around this time period. And on the right you have an image of a stamp of Amir Shayr Ali Kahn. That image in the middle is of lion. That was the symbol of Amir Shayr Ali Kahn's reign. His name Shayr meaning lion. That he imported the press to print stamps is quite telling in that it shows the press was not originally intended for propaganda. It's not until two years later that we actually have works of propaganda. So why did he begin to use the press for propaganda? To answer that we look at the two oldest works, both of which were religious polemics targeting Wahabbis. Now, they were called Wahabbis, but their actual name was the Tariqah-i-Muhammadiyah, which means the Muhammadan way. They were a militant revivalist movement in British India founded in the 19, in the 1820s. And you can think of them as a Muslim counterpart to the Protestant movement in Europe. They believed that Muslims should not rely on saints to be mediators between them and God. They believed Muslims should access holy scriptures themselves. Read them for themselves. And interpret it themselves. And like Protestants they were enthusiastic about using print. If you think everyone should read the scriptures themselves, there needs to be a means by which they can get access. So in 1824, they established a printing press from Calcutta. And then shortly thereafter they established printing presses in other cities such as Delhi. Lucknow. Lahore. And Bhopal. They printed pamphlets that were easy to understand in simplified language. And in those pamphlets they would explain to people how traditional clerics, traditional ulama had prevented Muslims from understanding true Islam. Which could only be found in the holy scriptures. This is an image of a later Wahabbi publication housed here at the Library of Congress. We actually had to order this from the field office in Islamabad. But it came relatively quick. I mean, faster than the stuff I order off of Amazon. But this author, Shah Abd al-Aziz, he was not actually a member of the Wahabbis. He was sort of a forerunner to them. But they revered his work. And this image just kind of gives you an idea of how the works look. Very simple. Simple design. But the writing is very elegant. You see three different types of scripts there Nasta'liq, Naskh and Thuluth. So this kind of gives you an idea of how their other publications looked. Now, in 1826, not too long after they established the printing press, the founders of the movement go to what is today the Punjab to fight the Sikhs, who had been Muslim there, from certain practices. Like the public declaration of prayer. And also the consumption of beef. And at first the people, at first the Wahabbis were welcomed by the locals. But then they started to have conversations with them about religion. And found that their ideas were very unorthodox and very untraditional. And one of those individuals was the Akhund of Swat. This is his tomb, which is frequented today by many pilgrims. This, the Akhund of Swat was an illiterate saintly figure who had hundreds of thousands of followers in India and Afghanistan. He was so influential that the British referred to him as a pope. And he has some conversations with these Wahabbis. And he figures out how different their outlook is. And he declares the Wahabbis to be infidels. And so he basically expels them from the areas that are under his influence. They go and find refuge with the religious rival or spiritual rival, if you will, of the Akhund, the Moolla of Kotal. And this individual had a large following himself, but not as great at the Akhund of Swat. And this Moolla listens to the Wahabbis and he actually agrees with their views. Even though he was a saintly figure himself, he actually came to, came around to accepting most of their doctrines. And when Akhund finds this out, he declares the Moolla to be a Wahabbi too. And to make matters more complicated for himself, the Moolla also embraced Protestant missionaries. Such as T.P. Hughes, who was a very important missionary in the Pashto speaking areas of what is today Pakistan. He let's these missionaries, these Protestant missionaries preach to the people and circulate translated copies of the Bible. And what happens then is that Christian converts become labelled Wahabbis as well. And part of the reason is that people didn't really know they were Christians a lot of time. Because, when they would come to the villages, they would try to talk about Islam strictly using the Quran and Hadith. But in this part of the world, there are more sources about what Islam could be. There could be oral traditions. Saintly figures and so forth. And so, when you only use Quran and Hadith, they were like, oh, these guys are Wahabbis. And they, sometimes they would never even find out that they were actually Christians because of that. So sometime before 1871, the Akhund requests from Amir Shayr Ali Kahn and his ulama a refutation of the beliefs of the Wahabbis. Now, why ask Amir Shayr Ali Kahn? Well, the Akhund was illiterate for one. But there were already refutations written in India about this group. Massive refutations by eminent scholars like [inaudible] of Delhi. But traditionally it was the prerogative of an Islamic ruler to deal with heretics. Even if he would commission ulama to write heresiographies about them, it was still his responsibility to do that and also to punish the heretics. The problem is, is that India's ruled by the British. They're not Muslims. And, therefore, they can't really give these types of polemics any legitimacy. But the Amir of Kabul, the Amir of Afghanistan could. And he was the closest independent Islamic ruler to India at the time. And it also helped that he had a printing press. And I believe that because the Wahabbis were very effective in using the press and perhaps the Akhund recognized that manuscripts and even oral traditions were not going to be enough to counter the effects of Wahabbi publications. It was time to fight fire with fire, print against print. And so in 1871, the Kabul court, the court of Afghanistan issues two refutations of Wahabbi doctrine. The one on the left is the one I mentioned "Hujjat-i qaviyah." And the one on the right is "Shihab-i Saqib," "The Piercing Flame." The one on the left, which is housed here at the Library of Congress, was authored by Abd al-Rahman. This is a very scholarly work. It is in very sophisticated Persian and Arabic. The one on the right is actually authored by the Amir. And it's not scholarly at all. And the Amir admits this in the work. And he explains why. He says "In this tract I have not entered into a discussion of many Islamic sciences. I believe the ulama in every country have already crafted scholarly responses to this unbelief. But because those writings include scholarly terminology, the masses cannot understand them. Hence, it is not the clerics that are falling into the claws of these owls, rather the hunt of these enslavers is after the mice who are ignorant. This is a teeth-shattering response to the infidels that no one has yet to give, which will render the infidels without the strength and ability to speak." So, yeah, you can't really talk without your teeth. So, and that kind of gives you an idea of how flowery this language is. And what kind of language Persian actually, it goes in all kinds of twists and turns. But this was actually very simplified. This, the kind of Persian used in "Shihab-i Saqib" was much more simplified than the one used in "Hujjat." And, in general, this was one of the traits that "Shihab-i Saqib" shared with Wahabbi literature. The focus was on using the Quran and Hadith, not using auxiliary or supplementary texts from the Islamic sciences. Those materials were not really used at all. At the top I have some of the works that were cited in "Hujjat," the scholarly work. Those are just a fraction. I mean, there are many, many works from different time periods. Different schools of thought. And "Shihab-i Saqib" only two works are mentioned. And they're not really even cited. They're just kind like the Amir is saying, I'm not really making all this up. If you don't believe me, you can find something similar in these works, if you want. Otherwise he just uses the Quran and Hadith, which was very common of the Wahabbi literature. They didn't use auxiliary materials either. And it's written for society at large. It's in this accessible language. The Amir states in "Shihab-i Saqib," "For the honor of the strong Muhammad in religion, I have desired to present in some plain words, in simple, fluent Persian the beliefs and opinions held by these unfortunate people." So that was his opinion of what simple Persian is. But, nonetheless, yes, I mean, relative to the time period, it was actually quite accessible. After these two heresiographies are published, Amir decides to produce more propaganda. But not to attack the Wahabbis. But to attack Afghanistan's own ulama, Afghanistan's own religious clerics. He actually never mentions the Wahabbis again after these publications. And I suggest that, although the first two Kabul publications went after the Wahabbis viciously, the Amir learned from the Wahabbis just how effective print propaganda could be in changing the minds of society in challenging recalcitrant clerics. The Wahabbis had really shaken the authority of traditional ulama in India. They had drawn tens of thousands of followers away from eminent ulama, including seminary. Some prominent scholars even became members of the tariqa became Wahabbis themselves. And the tariqa also inspired the Deoband and Ahl-i Hadith movements, which are today major schools of thought in India, Pakistan and Afghanistan. Now, why is the Amir so interested in challenging his own country's ulama? Well, historically in Afghanistan the ulama were central to legitimizing the power of the Amir. And also recruiting volunteers for his army, especially during civil wars and foreign invasions. And the Amir was trying to centralize the government of Afghanistan, primarily through a central, modern army. The problem was that a lot of ulama were financially independent of the Amir. They didn't need his patronage. They already had other sources of patronage. Tribal chieftains. Local rulers. Even the Amir's brothers who are rival claimants to the throne. And, moreover, these reforms threatened to disenfranchise the ulama's patrons of their traditional military authority and revenue. Historically these chieftains and local rulers provided military levies to the Amir in exchange for revenue and autonomy. But the Amir was looking to circumvent them and reduce them to pensionaries, to state pensionaries. And so the ulama, almost like representatives, articulated opposition to the Amir. But instead of saying, hey, you know, you're disenfranchising our patrons, they crafted a religious argument. And said these reforms you're trying to institute have no precedence in Islam. They're innovations and, therefore, they are violations of Islamic law of the sharia. Therefore, the Amir had been in need of a way to respond to that argument. But it's only after the Wahabbi debates he begins printing materials that address that opposition. One of those pieces of propaganda is Afghanistan's first newspaper, "Shams al-Nahar." This was more like a gazette. It was first printed in 1873, and it contained news from around the world. Now, the Amir didn't actually have correspondence, you know, in Africa and Europe and these other places. What he did was he took stories from British-Indian and even British newspapers. And he would have those, this is a table just kind of giving you an idea of some of the newspapers used. There were many other newspapers used. But you can see they're from all over South Asia. Karachi. Lahore. Bombay. Calcutta. Very distant parts. And in very, in different languages as well. Persian, Urdu and English were the main ones. He had a translation bureau. They would translate these materials into Persian if they weren't already into Persian. And there was a pretty, I mean, there was all kinds of different topics. A lot of them focused on conflicts in Europe. Civil wars in Spain. Franco-Prussian War. Also topics about science. But the most important pieces in "Shams al-Nahar" for my research were these think pieces that could be reflections on news items. Or they were printed speeches of the Amir or his chief secretary. And sometimes they were even original articles. And all of these think pieces had a common argument. That the Amir's subjects needed to take the example of other countries. And pursue knowledge and show loyalty to their ruler, to the Amir. And they also voiced opposition to the clerics that opposed the Amir's reforms. And in 1875, a book was published addressing this very issue. This is "Tuhfat al-Ulama," the book that addresses this issue, housed here at the Library of Congress. You can see it's pretty beat up. These lithographs have witnessed quite a bit of war going back to the second Anglo-Afghan War in 1878. This work was authored by the Amir and his chief secretary. And the way this work opposes the ulama of Afghanistan is almost identical to how the Wahabbis opposed the ulama of British India. For one, I mean, it's in print just like Wahabbi literature was. But also it was an accessible language. It emphasized the holy scriptures, the Quran and Hadith to the exclusion of supplementary materials from the Islamic sciences. And it casted the ulama of Afghanistan as being misleading, holding people back from the true message of Islam. The same way the Wahabbis characterized the ulama of India. And this raised the question for me, if the Amir's court was getting discursive ideas, rhetorical ideas from the Wahabbis. Were they also getting printing materials from some of the same places Wahabbis were getting materials? Or just simply where did the Amir get his printing materials and his printing press from? This is something that scholarship has not really addressed. Very few scholars have even touched upon the reign of Amir Shayr Ali Kahn. I've even seen in some books on the history of Afghanistan, they just don't even mention him. Even though, I mean, he's there for about two decades involved in Afghanistan's history. It's a very difficult period to talk about and not for no reason. Because, again, most of the materials from that time period were destroyed when the British invaded the country. Also British colonial records have a lot of information about Amir Shayr Ali Kahn's reign. But they don't have much information about the printing press. When I was doing research in India, I found an item in the catalog saying it was about the newspaper. And I was so excited. And I got the item, and I opened it up. And it was one sentence. The Amir wants to start a newspaper. So the British didn't, weren't really interested in where the Amir was getting his printing materials from. They were really only concerned where he was getting his weapons and those type of materials. So we don't have a lot of info. We can gather bits and pieces from the lithographs themselves by looking at the colophons. And in the colophons we see that there was a clear Iranian element. That there was definitely Iranians involved in the production of these works. Two of the names, Muhammad Sadiq Tabrizi and Mirza Bayza Khan Shirazi. The [inaudible] onomastics, Tabrizi, Shirazi, note where their city of origin was. So we know they came from Iran. And the fact that they were from Iran was not surprising. Because Iran had long established printing there, both topography and lithography, early in the 19th century. And they had learned it from the Russians. They had sent individuals from Tabriz initially and then later from Shiraz to go there and learn topography and lithography. It's not clear how they came to Afghanistan. But since there was no printing press in Afghanistan prior to Amir Shayr Ali Kahn's reign, we can deduce there weren't people in Afghanistan who had adequate knowledge on how to work a press. And, therefore, the Amir solicited the services of these men to work the press and possibly import printing materials as well. These were the only clues I got from the text themselves about the possible origin of the press. But instead of answering the question concerning the origin of the press and printing materials, it just created more confusion for me. Iranians got lithography from the Russian. But Indians got it from the British. The Afghans have Iranian staff, but they're getting their newspapers from India. So where do the Afghans get their printing press and printing materials from? Well, thanks to the clear Library of Congress Mellon Fellowship I got to work with PRTD in trying to answer this question. And what we did was analyze the paper used in the Afghan lithographs to see if we could identify point of origin or points of origin for that paper. And we compared the paper in the Afghan prints with paper used in prints from neighboring areas. So we first assessed the paper used in the Afghan prints. And we saw that there was a combination of laid paper and machine-made paper. And we used multispectral imaging and x-ray fluorescence to see if we could establish the characteristics of both the Afghan and foreign paper. And to see if there were any matches. XRF didn't help much because each source had a unique reading. There were some patterns, such as zinc peaks, were characteristic of Amir Shayr Ali Kahn's lithographs in comparison to those produced outside of Afghanistan. As well as those produced inside Afghanistan after his reign. But none of these patterns could give us a definitive indication of where the paper came from. Multispectral imaging was more helpful in that it allowed us to see watermarks on the laid paper without too much interference from the ink and chain lines. And so just going to go through some of these watermarks with you. The first here is C. Millington. This appears to be referring to the English paper company Millington and Sons, which was managed by Charles Samuel Millington and Charles Leschallas Millington. This watermark is found in a few materials from around the world. Including England. India. Japan. New Zealand. And, of course, Afghanistan. Next one is of a lion and a unicorn with a shield and a cross in the center. I believe this is, was the counter mark to the C. Millington watermark. And you can see that the font of the years is identical. The next one is Pro Bono Publico. It says universal foolscap at the bottom there. This was also found in a few works around the world. Including India. Indonesia. And possibly among the Armenian community of Iran and Jaffa. This one, Leschallas. I don't know if I'm pronouncing that right. This one, as you can see, is a shield. Leschallas across the front. Horses head at the top. I believe this one also came from Millington and Sons. Because the middle name of one of the sons was Charles Leschallas Millington. There were other people with this name, but that's my inference is that this also came from that company. And the use of the crescent moons is quite interesting. Because crescent moons were commonly used by other European mills to produce paper explicitly for the Islamic world. And thus we see this watermark mostly in the, used in the Muslim parts of India. Like Kashmir and Hyderabad. And the last one is Dorling and Gregory. This one doesn't seem to have been used very commonly outside of the British. I only saw one instance of it being used outside of British India in Ethiopia. But it was being used by British Indian officials. So it doesn't seem like this one had a particularly wide distribution. And we only had one case of this being used in the Afghan lithographs as well. Now, all of these mills or the companies that owned them were based in London. And so this gives us a pretty good indication that the press and printing materials came from British India or at least by way of British India. So that helped answer the question of where the Amir got his printing materials from. But a couple of these watermarks have even more significance. The C. Millington watermark was found in a work printed by Reverend T.P. Hughes in British India. And he was one of the missionaries that worked very closely with the Moolla of Kotal, the Akhund's rival and accused Wahabbi. And the Pro Bono Publico universal foolscap, I found this in a book authored by the son and successor of the Moolla of Kotal. So it's interesting that at least part of the group the [inaudible] referred to as Wahabbis were probably procuring printing materials from the same distributors the Amir was using. And at a minimum it shows that, although the heresiographies implied a sharp divide between the Amir and the Wahabbis, in actuality not only did they share discursive methods. But also sources of printing materials as well. So reminds us not to take polemical works at face value. And to see how they can often be produced within a common market of both ideas and print. Thank you. [ Applause ] Has anyone, okay, so the question is, is there any research existing, scholarship on the importation of materials originating in Britain to India? >> Paper. >> Elham Bakhtary: Paper, paper specifically. So it's interesting, I mean, there were newspapers printed in the 19th century just about paper. And they would discuss the mills of England. That's where I got the information about these watermarks from mostly. And they would talk about how much the rates were. And where they were landing in British India. But at that point the trail kind of gets lost. We don't really know what happens with the paper itself, who it was sold to specifically. There's also the issue of paper being produced in India itself. Especially starting in 1870. The British actually, the British raj passed a law stating that all paper used in official tasks needs to use domestically produced paper. And they had a huge campaign to have paper produced in prisons. I don't know if they really followed up with their act. Because when I was looking at, you know, colonial records from the 1870s, I mean, they still were using paper produced mostly from Britain. So I'm not sure how far that went. But based on those newspapers that were produced in the 19th century, there's not a very strong indication of what happened to the paper once it got to India; right? It was mostly just tracking the rates and how much they sold for. So there aren't really any, not to my knowledge, there aren't really any sources, primary or secondary, about where the paper ended up. Especially machine made paper. I mean, because there was so many different producers in Europe at the time, it's very chaotic. And they didn't have watermarks either. And so that kind of made our task quite difficult as well. >> Does the design of the polemical lithographs, is that sort of specific to a manuscript tradition? Or was it sort of reaching out to something that was familiar in terms of sort of a visual cue or culture? >> Elham Bakhtary: I would say it was mostly in line with the manuscript tradition. It's interesting though, yeah, I would say it was mostly in line. Like there's things that, there are changes that don't take place yet. I mean, because I've thought about this. So you don't really see punctuation marks yet. And this was one of the reasons why lithography was so popular in the Islamic world is that because it wouldn't be so different from the manuscript tradition. People would be able to keep their jobs as calligraphers and scribes and what have you. What's interesting, though, about this one is, "Hujjat" on the left, is that it doesn't use a colophon. And I still don't know why. It just has an imprint on the front. Whereas, "Shihab-i Saqib" does. Another interesting thing is, this is not exactly related to your question. But I'll just bring it up since we're talking about the colophons and everything. The editor for the one on the left, for the scholarly one. His last name was Shirazi, which would have been a good indication that he was Shia from Iran. And this author is Sunni. The Shirazi is left out of his name in the imprint, but it's not in the Amir's publication. And so it kind of highlights perhaps the different mentality that the Amir, mentalities the Amir had. Or different mentality the Amir had in contrast to his own ulama at the time, yeah. And this individual, Mulla Abd al-Rahman, he did not author anything else besides this. So "Tuhfat al-Ulama," which criticized ulama, he had nothing to do with that. And he probably was not very fond of it either, yeah, yeah. But it's interesting because there is its own system of punctation that I'm not sure how far, how much it goes back into the history of the manuscript. But I had to figure it out. Because they would use things like the letter [inaudible] in Persian over certain words. And then I finally realized that that's an indication that it's a foreign word. You know, they would do things like that. They would have the first word of the next page at the bottom. That was a standard process carried over from the manuscript tradition. Which is funny because that helped people when they, they used codex style bindings. And that helped making sure that the binding was accurate. They don't use that kind of binding for most of these works. The one on the left, they did. But for the rest they didn't. But they still kept that system of putting the first word of the next page at the bottom. So, yeah. >> Yeah, it's very interesting that they would have imported that much paper. So I'm interested in local and whether there's any evidence that local paper making was done [inaudible] like the mills would establish local mills and so [inaudible]? >> Elham Bakhtary: Yeah. So the question is did any of these mills based in London or any of these companies have mills set up in other locations in South Asia where they could produce this paper with the same watermarks? I think it's a possibility. Based on my research I was not given any indication of that. But there were a few mills. I think India at the time, in 1870, only had something like five mills. And I don't have much information about those mills. And it seems like they were making machine made paper as well. Not the laid paper with watermarks. But it's possible. I wouldn't rule it out. There's also, there was paper being made in Iran as well. But it's so confusing because in a country like Iran, they are making their own paper. But they're still importing the majority of their paper. And they're importing it from places like Russia and British India. And so in a particular work, you don't even actually really know where the paper came from. Was this Iranian paper? Was this British Indian paper? Was this Russian paper? Again, you know, once the paper is, arrives, it's like, it's just lost as to where the origins were and so forth. So it's just kind of hard to kind of figure out all these things. I wouldn't rule that out though. I wouldn't rule that out. I think that still is a possibility. We would just need more research in that respect. But because the watermarks, they were not altered at all. Like, you know, they would still say London or what have you. That, to me that suggests they had actually come from British India, produced in, excuse me, in Britain and imported to British India. But we still have to keep that possibility open as well, yeah. [ Inaudible Comment ] Yeah. >> And you see that paper appear in archival records, different principalities. [ Inaudible Comment ] >> Elham Bakhtary: Right. [ Inaudible Comment ] Right. And this particular work, "Tuhfat al-Ulama," it had some really, I mean, it used some really weird paper. It was very thick. It reminded me of some of the paper samples I saw in Dard Hunter's work on paper made in India. And, I mean, one of the questions we had was, were the Afghans possibly making their own paper? And, you know, I don't want to jump into a crazy conspiracy theory for you guys just yet. But this work was printed in 1875. This was the same year that relations between the Amir of Afghanistan and the British soured. Like, they really went south. The British really started having suspicions that the Amir was entering into an alliance with Russia. The Amir starts talking a lot about jihad. And the British are afraid that he's trying to, you know, prepare his own people for a possible war with the British. And so I sometimes, it seems kind of odd that the paper would just be so different from all the other ones that we had from earlier years. And I feel, I suspect that there's a possibility that the British started restricting the Amir's access to paper. And he had to start getting paper from some other sources. So that's a possibility as well too that we have to keep open. Just can't say definitively, yeah. Any other questions. You can ask general questions, too, about the Wahabbis. I mean, I know that that's a lot of information. Hopefully I explained it in a way that was easy to comprehend. [ Inaudible Comment ] Yeah, yeah. >> Fenella France: So just please, if you can join with me in thanking Elham. [ Inaudible Comment ] >> Elham Bakhtary: Thank you very much. [ Applause ] >> This has been a presentation of the Library of Congress. Visit us at loc.gov.