{"book":"adl0957","page":151,"text":"112\n\ndefaulters have to pay heavy fines. The municipalities in the cities and towns, and the government officials in rural areas have to keep a keen watch over these matters. Similarly, the government stepped in to curtail the former heavy expenses of marriage ceremonies and mourning, (called Murdahdari). Previously, great feasts were arranged on such occasions, which generally lasted for three continuous days and nights, and the expenses incurred were generally beyond the means of the parties concerned. These have now been reduced to a minimum. In case of marriages, the guests are invited to an evening tea, costing not more than a few hundred Afghanis, while the mourning ceremony is totally abolished. Friends and relatives now repair to the mosque (between 8 a.m. to 12 noon) to sympathize with the bereaved and pray for the departed soul of the deceased.\n\nModern means of transportation and communication, such as cars, tractors, airlines, radio, telegraph and telephone, and diffusion of knowledge have affected the lives of the people even in the remotest part of the country, and have been instrumental in bringing about some important changes in their social life.\n\nThe Afghans are extremely religious. Islam of the Sunni doctrine is the State religion, and almost all the Pashtuns, Tajiks, Turkomans, and Uzbeks belong to this sect. The Hazaras and Kizilbashes are mostly Shias. Besides, there are a few thousand Sikhs, Hindus and Jews living in cities and carrying on lucrative businesses.\n\nThe Afghans are of a tolerant nature and have a liberal attitude towards the followers of others religions, who enjoy perfect freedom in the observance of their religious ceremonies in every part of the country. On the occasions of religious festivals, they gladly go to the temples of their countrymen and take part in their festivities,","chars":1847,"image":"https://storage.googleapis.com/adl-page-images/adl0957/00151.jpg","first_page":1,"last_page":377,"title":"new guide to Afghanistan","permalink":"https://afghanpress.org/book/adl0957/151","canvas":"https://afghanpress.org/iiif/adl0957/canvas/151","source":"https://afghanistandl.nyu.edu/books/adl0957/","source_pdf":"https://afghanistandl.nyu.edu/pdf/adl0957_download.pdf","rights":{"image":{"statement":"Public domain. NYU states: \"All works presented on this website are, unless otherwise indicated, in the public domain. The images available on this website may be freely reproduced, distributed and transmitted by anyone for any purpose, commercial or non-commercial.\"","uri":"http://rightsstatements.org/vocab/NoC-US/1.0/","holder":"New York University Libraries","source":"https://afghanistandl.nyu.edu/about.html","delivery":"Images are served from a copy mirrored by this project, not from NYU's servers, under the reproduction terms above.","endorsement":"This is an independent project. It is not affiliated with, endorsed by, or reviewed by New York University."},"text":{"statement":"Machine-generated transcription, dedicated to the public domain under CC0 1.0. No warranty of accuracy: see the provenance block on every page.","uri":"https://creativecommons.org/publicdomain/zero/1.0/","holder":"Steps Ventures"}},"provenance":{"text_produced_by":"gemini-3.1-pro-preview","thinking_level":"low","read_completed":"2026-08-09","per_page_confidence":null,"per_page_confidence_note":"Not recorded during the corpus run. No calibrated per-page score exists, and none is estimated here.","human_reviewed":false,"accuracy_context":"Roughly two thirds of characters agree with a modern printed edition of the same text. Much of the disagreement is editorial, not misreading. Treat the transcription as a finding aid and read the page image before quoting.","primary_source":"The page image. The text is an index into it."}}