the universe as a whole; it is created anew by God every instant. There is no such thing as causal connection or natural law, nothing but the arbitrary act of the Creator. Nothing in nature, therefore, is constant; and nothing is impossible. If God willed it so, anything might be the next moment endowed with accidents or properties the exact opposite of those which in our experience it possesses. By this doctrine of the atomic constitution of matter and the momentaneity of accidents, Bakilani believed himself to have provided a theoretical basis and explanation for the doctrine of God's sole and universal creative activity.

CHAPTER XVIII

MOHAMMEDANISM

THE PARTISANS OF ALI

Ali-The Legitimist Party-Infallible Authority of the Imam-His Nature-Doctrine of the Return of the Imam-The ImamMahdi-Shiite Sects-Differences between Shiites and Sunnites.

AMONG those who supported the claims of Ali to the caliphate and afterward maintained his cause against Moawiya there were some who were moved by personal considerations. Ali had been one of the early believers at Mecca and one of the staunchest adherents of the Prophet. As a general, he was not the equal of some of the other Moslem leaders, but as a champion in single combat, he had distinguished himself on many fields. A popular saying ran: "There is no sword but Dhu al-Fakar,' and no paladin but Ali." In the first election, which resulted in the choice of Abu Bekr, there were some who, on such grounds, thought that Ali should have been the man. There was also a legitimist party who held that the successor of Mohammed should be of his own family. Ali was Mohammed's cousin, and husband of the Prophet's daughter, Fatima. Thus, both by blood and by marriage, he was nearest of kin to Mohammed. When Ali fell under the dagger of a Kharijite assassin, this party gave its allegiance to Hasan, Ali's son by Fatima, and when Hasan renounced his claim, preferring security and luxury on an ample pension to the doubtful issue of a conflict with Moawiya, they transferred their loyalty to his younger brother, Husein. Husein allowed himself to be drawn from the safety of the Holy Cities to head a hopeless revolt at Kufa, and fell at Kerbela (680), in the eyes of his partisans a martyr in the holy cause. more serious, though in the end unsuccessful revolt in Irak, 1 The name of Ali's sword.

A

headed by Mukhtar and supported not only by Arabs but by many of the native Persian converts to Islam, put forward as the legitimate successor a son of Ali by another wife, Mohammed ibn al-Hanafiyya.

The principle of legitimacy soon assumed a religious as well as a political aspect. In the eyes of this party the successor of Mohammed was not merely the caliph, vicar of the Apostle of God as the head of the theocratic Moslem state, who commanded its armies, protected its borders, administered and enforced its laws, civil and religious; he was the Imam, the successor of the Prophet as the religious head of the Moslem world. To this office, they asserted, Ali was formally appointed by Mohammed; consequently, the first three caliphs, elected by the companions of the Prophet, were not only illegitimate in the political sense, but their rule was from the religious point of view a usurpation by which the true Imam was set aside. The usurpers and their aiders and abettors thereby put themselves outside the pale of Islam; and to this day it is the mark of orthodoxy among the great body of the followers of Ali (Shia) to curse Abu Bekr, Omar, and Othman, in the public prayers in their mosques.

The legitimate Imam is for them not only the supreme religious authority, but an infallible authority. God, they argued, cannot have left the Moslem world to determine what is true doctrine and sound practice by study and discussion or the vague principle of consensus; he must have given it an infallible guide, not merely at the beginning, but in every generation. This infallible guide is the "Imam of the Age," and to recognise this Imam and submit to him in all things is the prime religious obligation of every true Moslem. The Imam is not only infallible in his deliverances on doctrine and practice, he is endowed with sinless perfection. Mohammed did not claim such perfection for himself; he speaks of himself as a man like other men, and urges men to repentance by his own example. But among his followers the belief that he was without sin early arose.

Some held that he was exempt even from sinful impulses, and the question was debated in the schools whether he was above all sorts of mistakes. Among orthodox Moslems, however, the Prophet's freedom from sin or from error, however far it extended, was ascribed to the singular favour of God, who bestowed it upon him of his grace. The Imam of the Shiites, on the contrary, is sinless as well as infallible by nature. One view widely entertained even among the more moderate Shiites was that a particle of substantial divine light was implanted by God in Adam, from whom it was transmitted by a kind of traducianism to elect descendants of his in different ages down to Abdallah and Abu Talib, between whom it was divided, passing to their sons, Mohammed and Ali; from Ali, in whose sons by Fatima the divided lines reunited, it descended generation by generation, to the successive Imams of the Age. It is, indeed, the presence of this particle of divine light in the substance of his soul which makes him the Imam, and gives him the spiritual qualities which raise him above the common ranks of men.

The more extreme sects of the Shiites, the "Ultras," as they are called by the other Shiites as well as by the Sunnites, are not content with this theory of a divine element in the soul of the Imam. For them, Ali and the Imams are incarnations of the godhead; and some of them have gone so far as to hold, not only that one and the same God has from age to age manifested himself in many human forms, but even that the body in which this manifestation has taken place is the same identical body.

Such extravagances, which may be called the radical Gnosticism of Islam, have always been condemned by the main body of the Shiites; but they have embodied themselves in sects, some of which have diverged so widely from Mohammedanism that they are more properly to be regarded as derivative religions.

A doctrine which is held in one form or another by all branches of the Shiites is "the return," which resembles the

Jewish expectation of the return of Elijah and the Christian belief in the return of Christ. According to Moslem writers, the first promulgator of the doctrine was a certain Abdallah ibn Saba, a Jewish convert to Islam, which would incline us to look for its starting-point in Jewish ideas; but in its development Christian influence is unmistakable. After the death of Ali, some of his followers asserted that he was not really dead, but had been taken up into the clouds of heaven, whence he would presently return to take vengeance on his enemies and establish the reign of justice on earth. A similar belief attached itself to Mukhtar's Imam, Mohammed ibn al-Hanafiyya, who was said not to have died, but to have withdrawn to a valley called Radwa, in the mountains seven days' journey from Medina, where he waited the hour determined by God for his return. The poets describe this abode of the Concealed Imam in language plainly derived from the Messianic prophecy in Isaiah 11: leopards and lions graze beside cattle and goats, which feed without fear in the same meadow with beasts of prey and slake their thirst at the same drinking-place, precisely as in orthodox Mohammedan belief, at the end of time, when Jesus shall return and bring in the golden age, "Lions and camels, tigers and oxen will graze peacefully together."

The belief that the Imam had not died was not the only form in which the expectation of his return was entertained; some Shiites adopted the theory of the transmigration of souls, in accordance with which it was possible at the same time to admit that the Imam had really died and that he would return. In time, however, the doctrine of the Concealed Imam, who was somewhere alive and waiting the day of his reappearance, prevailed among the principal Shiite sects. The Moslem books on the history of sects abound in such notices as this: Such and such a sect (bearing the name of its Imam) holds that So-and-So (their Imam) “never died, nor ever will die until he has filled the earth with justice as it is now filled with injustice." 1

It was the caliphs-in the beginning, the Omayyads, later the Abbasids of Bagdad-who filled the earth with injustice.