We cannot within the small compass of these lectures consider the excrescences of the normal Islam, the Shi’itic ultras, who venerated certain descendants of Mohammed as infallible rulers of the world, Ishma’ilites, Qarmatians, Assassins; nor the modern bastards of Islam, such as the Sheikhites, the Babi’s, the Beha’is—­who have found some adherents in America—­and other sects, which indeed sprang up on Moslim soil, but deliberately turned to non-Mohammedan sources for their inspirations.  We must draw attention, however, to protests raised by certain minorities against some of the ideas and practices which had been definitely adopted by the majority.

In the midst of Mohammedan Catholicism there always lived and moved more or less freely “protestant” elements.  The comparison may even be continued, with certain qualifications, and we may speak also of a conservative and of a liberal protestantism in Islam.  The conservative Protestantism is represented by the Hanbalitic school and kindred spirits, who most emphatically preached that the Agreement (Ijma’) of every period should be based on that of the “pious ancestors.”  They therefore tested every dogma and practice by the words and deeds of the Prophet, his contemporaries, and the leaders of the Community in the first decades after Mohammed’s death.  In their eyes the Church of later days had degenerated; and they declined to consider the agreement of its doctors as justifying the penetration into Islam of ideas and usages of foreign origin.  The cult of saints was rejected by them as altogether contradictory to the Qoran and the genuine tradition.  These protestants of Islam may be compared to those of Christianity also in this respect, that they accepted the results of the evolution and assimilation of the first three centuries of Islam, but rejected later additions as abuse and corruption.  When on the verge of our nineteenth century, they tried, as true Moslims, to force by material means their religious conceptions on others, they were combated as heretics by the authorities of catholic Islam.  Central and Western Arabia formed the battlefield on which these zealots, called Wahhabites after their leader, were defeated by Mohammed Ali, the first Khedive, and his Egyptian army.  Since they have given up their efforts at violent reconstitution of what they consider to be the original Islam, they are left alone, and their ideas have found adherents far outside Arabia, e.g., in British India and in Northern and Central Africa.

In still quite another way many Moslims who found their freedom of thought or action impeded by the prevailing law and doctrine, have returned to the origin of their religion.  Too much attached to the traditions of their faith, deliberately to disregard these impediments, they tried to find in the Qoran and Tradition arguments in favour of what was dictated to them by Reason; and they found those arguments as easily as former generations had found the bases