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.

Another democratic doctrine, still more radical than that of the
Kharijites, makes even non-Arabs eligible for the Khalifate. It must have
had a considerable number of adherents, for the tradition which makes the
Prophet responsible for it is to be found in the canonic collections. Later
generations, however, rendered it harmless by e