Extremes, too, of
morality are seen, fierce asceticisms and gross licentiousnesses. By no
sect of Islam is the duty of pilgrimage more religiously observed, or
the prayers and ablutions required by their rule performed with a
stricter ritual. But the very pilgrims who go on foot to Mecca scruple
not to drink wine there, and Persian morality is everywhere a byword.
In all these circumstances there is much to fear as well as to hope on
the side of the Shiite sect; but their future only indirectly involves
that of Islam proper. Their whole census does not probably exceed
fifteen millions, and it shows no tendency to increase. Outside Persia
we find about one million Iraki Arabs, a few in Syria and Afghanistan,
and at most five millions in India. One small group still maintains
itself in the neighbourhood of Medina, where it is tolerated rather than
acknowledged, and a few Shiites are to be found in most of the large
cities of the west, but everywhere the sect of Ali stands apart from and
almost in a hostile attitude to the rest of Islam. It is noticeable,
however, that within the last fifty years the religious bitterness of
Shiite and Sunite is sensibly in decline.
The next most important of the heretical sects is the Abadiyeh.
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