But for the military success of the first khalifs Islam would never have become a universal religion.  Every exertion was made to keep the troops of the Faithful complete.  The leaders followed only Mohammed’s example when they represented fighting for Allah’s cause as the most enviable occupation.  The duty of military service was constantly impressed upon the Moslims; the lust of booty and the desire for martyrdom, to which the Qoran assigned the highest reward, were excited to the utmost.  At a later period, it became necessary in the interests of order to temper the result of this excitement by traditions in which those of the Faithful who died in the exercise of a peaceful, honest profession were declared to be witnesses to the Faith as well as those who were slain in battle against the enemies of God,—­traditions in which the real and greater holy war was described as the struggle against evil passions.  The necessity of such a mitigating reaction, the spirit in which the chapters on holy war of Mohammedan lawbooks are conceived, and the galvanizing power which down to our own day is contained in a call to arms in the name of Allah, all this shows that in the beginning of Islam the love of battle had been instigated at the expense of everything else.

The institution of the Khalifate had hardly been agreed upon when the question of who should occupy it became the subject of violent dissension.  The first four khalifs, whose reigns occupied the first thirty years after Mohammed’s death, were Qoraishites, tribesmen of the Prophet, and moreover men who had been his intimate friends.  The sacred tradition relates a saying of Mohammed:  “The imams are from Qoraish,” intended to confine the Khalifate to men from that tribe.  History, however, shows that this edict was forged to give the stamp of legality to the results of a long political struggle.  For at Mohammed’s death the Medinese began fiercely contesting the claims of the Qoraishites; and during the reign of Ali, the fourth Khalif, the Kharijites rebelled, demanding, as democratic rigorists, the free election of khalifs without restriction to the tribe of Qoraish or to any other descent.  Their standard of requirements contained only religious and moral qualities; and they claimed for the community the continual control of the chosen leader’s behaviour and the right of deposing him as soon as they found him failing in the fulfilment of his duties.  Their anarchistic revolutions, which during more than a century occasionally gave much trouble to the Khalifate, caused Islam to accentuate the aristocratic character of its monarchy.  They were overcome and reduced to a sect, the survivors of which still exist in South-Eastern Arabia, in Zanzibar, and in Northern Africa; however, the actual life of these communities resembles that of their spiritual forefathers to a very remote degree.