y to Mecca, and in the fact that their sympathies
lie on the side of liberality in opinion and reform in morals. Neither
Zeidites nor Abadites have any adherents out of their own countries.

Of the Wahhabites a more detailed account is needed, as although their
numbers are small and their political importance less than it formerly
was, the spirit of their reform movement still lives and exercises a
potent influence on modern Mohammedan ideas. I have described
elsewhere[9] the historical vicissitudes of the sect in Arabia, and the
decline of its fortunes in Nejd, but a brief recapitulation of these may
be allowed me.

The early half of the last century was a period of religious stagnation
in Islam, almost as much as it was in Christendom. Faith, morals, and
religious practice were at the lowest ebb among Mussulmans, and it
seemed to Europeans who looked on as though the faith of Mecca had
attained its dotage, and was giving place to a non-curantist infidelity.
Politically and religiously the Mussulman world was asleep, when
suddenly it awoke, and like a young giant refreshed stood once more
erect in Arabia. The reform preached by Abd el Wahhab was radical. He
began by breaking with the maxim held by the mass of the orthodox that
inquiry on matters of faith was closed. He constituted himself a new
mujtahed and founded a new school, neither Hanafite, Malekite, nor
Shafite, and called it the school of the Unitarians, Muwaheddin, a name
still cherished by the Wahhabites. He rejected positively all traditions
but those of the companions of the Prophet, and he denied the claims of
any but the first four Caliphs to have been legitimately elected. The
Koran was to be the only written law, and Islam was to be again what it
had been in the first decade of its existence. He established it
politically in Nejd on precisely its old basis at Medina, and sought to
extend it over the whole of Arabia, perhaps of the world. I believe it
is hardly now recognised by Mohammedans how near Abd el Wahhab was to
complete success.

Before the close of the eighteenth century the chiefs of the Ibn Saouds,
champions of Unitarian Islam, had established their authority over all
Northern Arabia as far as the Euphrates, and in 1808 they took Mecca and
Medina. In the meanwhile the Wahhabite doctrines were gaining ground
still further afield. India was at one time very near conversion, and
in Egypt, and North Africa, and even in Turkey many secretly subs