him, and on her husband Ali the fourth Caliph. They
therefore reject the first three Caliphs after Muhammad, that is Abu
Bakr, Omar and Othman. After Ali they also hold that the Caliphate
descended in his family to his two sons Hasan and Hussain, and the
descendants of Hussain. Consequently they reject all the subsequent
Caliphs of the Muhammadan world, as Hussain and his children did not
occupy this position. They say that there are only twelve Caliphs,
or Imams, as they now prefer to call them, and that the twelfth
has never really died and will return again as the Messiah of whom
Muhammad spoke, at the end of the world. He is known as the Mahdi, and
the well-known pretender of the Soudan, as well as others elsewhere,
have claimed to be this twelfth or unrevealed Imam. Other sects of
the Shiahs, as the Zaidiyah and Ismailia, make a difference in the
succession of the Imamate among Hussain's descendants. The central
incident of the Shiah faith is the slaughter of Hussain, the son
of Ali, with his family, on the plain of Karbala in Persia by the
sons of Yazid, the second Caliph of the Umaiyad dynasty of Damascus,
on the 10th day of the month Muharram, in the 61st year of the Hijra
or A.D. 680. The martyrdom of Hussain and his family at Karbala is
celebrated annually for the first ten days of the month of Muharram by
the Shiahs. Properly the Sunnis should take no part in this, and should
observe only the tenth day of Muharram as that on which Adam and Eve
and heaven and hell were created. But in the Central Provinces the
Sunnis participate in all the Muharram celebrations, which now have
rather the character of a festival than of a season of mourning. The
Shiahs also reject the four great schools of tradition of the Sunnis,
and have separate traditional authorities of their own. They count the
month to begin from the full moon instead of the new moon, pray three
instead of five times a day, and in praying hold their hands open by
their sides instead of folding them below the breast. The word Shiah
means a follower, and Sunni one proceeding on the _sunnah_, the path
or way, a term applied to the traditions of the Prophet. The two words
have thus almost the same signification. Except when otherwise stated,
the information in this article relates to the Sunnis.

16. Leading religious observances. Prayer.

The five standard observances of the Muhammadan religion are the
Kalima, or creed; Sula, or the five daily prayer