obliged at any rate to acknowledge the sovereignty of the Great Lord of Constantinople.  This was the case with the Sherifs of Mecca, who ever since the twelfth century have regarded the sacred territory as their domain.  Their principality arose out of the general political disturbance and the division of the Mohammedan empire into a number of kingdoms, whose mutual strife prevented them from undertaking military operations in the desert.  These Sherifs raised no claim to the Khalifate; and the Shi’itic tendencies they displayed in the Middle Ages had no political significance, although they had intimate relations with the Zaidites of Southern Arabia.  As first Egypt and afterwards Turkey made their protectorate over the holy cities more effective, the princes of Mecca became orthodox.

The Zaidites, who settled in Yemen from the ninth century on, are really Shi’ites, although of the most moderate kind.  Without striving after expansion outside Arabia, they firmly refuse to give up their own Khalifate and to acknowledge the sovereignty of any non-Alid ruler; the efforts of the Turks to subdue them or to make a compromise with them have had no lasting results.  This is the principal obstacle against their being included in the orthodox community, although their admission is defended, even under present circumstances, by many non-political Moslim scholars.  The Zaidites are the remnant of the original Arabian Shi’ah, which for centuries has counted adherents in all parts of the Moslim world, and some of whose tenets have penetrated Mohammedan orthodoxy.  The almost general veneration of the sayyids and sherifs, as the descendants of Mohammed are entitled, is due to this influence.

The Shi’ah outside Arabia, whose adherents used to be persecuted by the official authorities, not without good cause, became the receptacle of all the revolutionary and heterodox ideas maintained by the converted peoples.  Alongside of the visible political history of Islam of the first centuries, these circles built up their evolution of the unseen community, the only true one, guided by the Holy Family, and the reality was to them a continuous denial of the postulates of religion.  Their first imam or successor of the Prophet was Ali, whose divine right had been unjustly denied by the three usurpers, Abu Bakr, Omar, and Othman, and who had exercised actual authority for a few years in constant strife with Kharijites and Omayyads.  The efforts of his legitimate successors to assert their authority were constantly drowned in blood; until, at last, there were no more candidates for the dangerous office.  This prosaic fact was converted by the adherents of the House of Mohammed into the romance, that the last imam of a line of seven according to some, and twelve according to others, had disappeared in a mysterious way, to return at the end of days as Mahdi, the Guided One, who should restore the political order which