[1]
These summed up in the well-known "Kelemat" or act of faith, "There is
no God but God, and Mohammed is the apostle of God," form a common
doctrinal basis for every sect of Islam--and also common to all are the
four religious acts, prayer, fasting, almsgiving and pilgrimage,
ordained by the Koran itself. On other points, however, both of belief
and practice, they differ widely; so widely that the sects must be
considered as not only distinct from, but hostile to, each other. They
are nevertheless, it must be admitted, less absolutely irreconcileable
than are the corresponding sects of Christianity, for all allow the rest
to be distinctly within the pale of Islam, and they pray on occasion in
each other's mosques and kneel at the same shrines on pilgrimage.
Neither do they condemn each other's errors as altogether
damnable--except, I believe, in the case of the Wahhabites, who accuse
other Moslems of polytheism and idolatry. The census of the four great
sects may be thus roughly given--
1. The Sunites or Orthodox Mohammedans 145,000,000
2. The Shiites or Sect of Ali 15,000,000
3. The Abadites (Abadhiyeh) 7,000,000
4. The Wahhabites 8,000,000
The _Sunites_, or People of the Path, are of course by far the most
important of these.
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