riest, or head, or chief in religious matters, whether he be the
head of all Muhammadans--as the Khalifah--or the priest of a mosque,
or the leader in the prayers of a congregation. This title, however,
is given by the Shias only to the immediate descendants of Ali, the
son-in-law of the Prophet, and they are twelve in number, Ali being
the first. The last of them, Imam Mahdi, is supposed to be concealed
(not dead), and the title which belongs to him cannot, they conceive,
be given to another.

But among the Sunnis it is a dogma that there must always be a visible
Imam or father of the Church. The title is given by them to the four
learned doctors who were the exponents of their faith, viz., Imams
Hanifa, Malik, Shafai and Hanbal. Of these, Imam Hanifa, the founder
of the first of the four chief sects of the Sunnis, died A.D. 767. He
was followed by Imam Malik, Imam Shafai, and Imam Hanbal, the founders
of the other three sects, who died A.D. 795, 820 and 855 respectively.
From these four persons are derived the various codes of Muhammadan
jurisprudence. They have always been considered as the fundamental
pillars of the orthodox law, and have been esteemed by Mussulmans as
highly as the fathers of the Church--Gregory, Augustine, Jerome and
Chrysostom--have been appreciated by Christians.

Of these four sects, the Hanbalite and Malikite may be considered as
the most rigid, the Shafaite as the most conformable to the spirit of
Islamism, and the Hanifite as the wildest and most philosophical of
them all.

In addition to the four Imams just mentioned, there was a fifth, of
the name of Abu Sulaiman Dawud az Zahari, who died A.D. 883. He was
the founder of the sect called Az-Zahariah (the External), and his
lectures were attended by four hundred Fakihs (doctors of the civil
and of the ecclesiastical law), who wore shawls thrown over their
shoulders. But his opinions do not seem to have secured many
followers, and in time both his ideas, and those of Sofyan at Thauri,
another chief of the orthodox sect, were totally abandoned.

The third century of the Hijrah (A.D. 816-913) is noted for the six
fathers of tradition, viz., Al-Bukhari, Muslim, At Firmidi, Abu Dawud,
An-Nasai and Ibn Majah, with whom others, such as Kasim bin Asbagh,
Abu Zaid, Al-Marwazi, Abu Awana and Al-Hazini, vied in great works on
tradition, but these last-named could never acquire the authority of
the six previously mentioned, who died A.D. 870, 875, 89