{"book":"adl0970","page":61,"text":"28\n\nwith the Afghan soldiers and Mahmud was afraid of incurring the wrath of his own people if an action was taken against him. At one time he thought that he had an opportunity to ruin his cousin. During the siege of Isfahan, Ashraf was given a post. It was through his defence line that Tahmasap Mirza, the eldest son of Sultan Hussein, had effected his escape from Isfahan. Mahmud endeavoured to fan the ill-will of his people towards him by accusing Ashraff of cowardice and treachery. But the latter defended himself in an artful manner characteristic of his nation. He proved that his authority had been so circumscribed and weakened that it was impossible for him to oppose the superior force by which he was attacked. It was established by irrefutable evidence that he had done all that he could do to prevent the prince's escape, but those were to be blamed who had sent the men under his command to another quarter. He was acquitted of the charge by the unanimous votes of the assembled chiefs, and Mahmud had the mortification to see his plan frustrated. He thus enhanced the popularity and reputation of his opponent.","chars":1129,"image":"https://storage.googleapis.com/adl-page-images/adl0970/00061.jpg","first_page":1,"last_page":191,"title":"Afghanistan","permalink":"https://afghanpress.org/book/adl0970/61","canvas":"https://afghanpress.org/iiif/adl0970/canvas/61","source":"https://afghanistandl.nyu.edu/books/adl0970/","source_pdf":"https://afghanistandl.nyu.edu/pdf/adl0970_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."}}