Dhaka, July 18 -- When I was a graduate student of History at Cambridge, my thesis supervisor, the fatherly Leslie Wayper, once recited to me a wonderful little poem, "Which is Which", by a man called John Byrom. The poem goes:

"God bless the King! God bless the faith's defender!

God bless, no harm in blessing, the Pretender.

But who pretender is, and who is king,

God bless us all, that's quite another thing."

That poem was Dr. Wayper's way of telling me to keep religious verities outside my study of History. Certainly, religion is a personal reality and a sociological fact and, in that sense, it is a historical truth as well, but the historian has no business subscribing to any religious truth as the foundation of his scholarly work...