had been disturbed ever since Mohammed’s death.  Until his reappearance there is nothing left for the community to do but to await his advent, under the guidance of their secular rulers (e.g., the shahs of Persia) and enlightened by their authoritative scholars (mujtahids), who explain faith and law to them from the tradition of the Sacred Family.  The great majority of Mohammedans, as they do not accept this legitimist theory, are counted by the Shi’ah outside Arabia as unclean heretics, if not as unbelievers.

At the beginning of the fifteenth century this Shi’ah found its political centre in Persia, and opposed itself fanatically to the Sultan of Turkey, who at about the same time came to stand at the head of orthodox Islam.  All differences of doctrine were now sharpened and embittered by political passion, and the efforts of single enlightened princes or scholars to induce the various peoples to extend to each other, across the political barriers, the hand of brotherhood in the principles of faith, all failed.  It is only in the last few years that the general political distress of Islam has inclined the estranged relatives towards reconciliation.

Besides the veneration of the Alids, orthodox Islam has adopted another Shiitic element, the expectation of the Mahdi, which we have just mentioned.  Most Sunnites expect that at the end of the world there will come from the House of Mohammed a successor to him, guided by Allah, who will maintain the revealed law as faithfully as the first four khalifs did according to the idealized history, and who will succeed with God’s help in making Islam victorious over the whole world.  That the chiliastic kingdom of the Mahdi must in the end be destroyed by Anti-Christ, in order that Jesus may be able once more to re-establish the holy order before the Resurrection, was a necessary consequence of the amalgamation of the political expectations formed under Shi’itic influence, with eschatological conceptions formerly borrowed by Islam from Christianity.

The orthodox Mahdi differs from that of the Shi’ah in many ways.  He is not an imam returning after centuries of disappearance, but a descendant of Mohammed, coming into the world in the ordinary way to fulfill the ideal of the Khalifate.  He does not re-establish the legitimate line of successors of the Prophet; but he renews the glorious tradition of the Khalifate, which after the first thirty years was dragged into the general deterioration, common to all human things.  The prophecies concerning his appearance are sometimes of an equally supernatural kind as those of the Shiites, so that the period of his coming has passed more and more from the political sphere to which it originally belonged, into that of eschatology.  Yet, naturally, it is easier for a popular leader to make himself regarded as the orthodox Mahdi than to play the part of the returned imam.  Mohammedan rulers have had more trouble than they cared for with candidates for the dignity of the Mahdi; and it is not surprising that in official Turkish circles there is a tendency to simplify the Messianic expectation by giving the fullest weight to this traditional saying of Mohammed “There is no mahdi but Jesus,” seeing that Jesus must come from the clouds, whereas other mahdis may arise from human society.