'IRAQ AND THE PERSIAN GULF' [‎180r] (364/862)

THE ARAB CALIPHATES 253
a professor and finally a preacher at Baghdad. Ghazzali worked
through all the tendencies of Islam, both Sunni and Shia, before
finding satisfaction in Sufism, which he merged with the older
scholastic theology.
From Sufism there arose certain practices quite extraneous to
simple Islam, particularly the formation of Orders formed for in
struction and propaganda in particular doctrines; these brotherhoods,
the only ecclesiastical organizations of Islam, have maintained Sufi
thought down to the present day. The notion of the saint or Wali,
‘friend of God’, is Sufi in origin. One of the first Walis accepted by
the orthodox was the Sufi poetess Rabia of Basra (717-801).
Shiism. Though the Shia Moslems had supported Abbas, they
gained no advantage from the Abbasids; Mamun alone favoured
them and Mutawakkil persecuted them, destroying the tombs of Ali
and Husain. Hence the Shias were against the government, and their
faith developed after its own fashion by the multiplication of peculiar
sects and secret societies. They had no use for the Sunni rites and
theology, nor for Sufi mysticism. Their distinguishing doctrine is
belief in the Imams, the descendants of Ali, divinely protected from
error and sin, who inherited from Mohammed both his temporal
power and the gift of interpreting the law. The strict Shias do not,
however, deny the finality of Mohammed’s prophethood. The line
of the Imams terminated with the twelfth, Mohammed, in 878. From
his mysterious disappearance at Samarra there grew up the doctrine
of his ‘second coming’, that he will reappear as Mahdi (‘the divinely
guided’), restore the true Islam and initiate the millennium. In the
meantime the Shia mujtahids or theologians act as his spokesmen.
The Ismailis, a Shia sect, accepted Ismail (d. 760), the elder brother
of the seventh Imam, who had been rejected by his father because of
drunkenness, as a true Imam. The Ismailis developed a system
of initiations, rather like Freemasonry, and of secret or inner (Batin)
metaphysical doctrines derived apparently from Graeco-Persian
thought, and reconciled with the Koran by allegorical interpretation.
They sent secret missionaries through the Moslem world to spread
their beliefs and to prepare for revolution against the Abbasid Cali
phate. Their history and doctrines still remain obscure, but certainly
their greatest political success was the founding of the Fatimid
Caliphate of north Africa (a.d. 909).
The Carmathian sub-sect, based on a primitive communism, was
founded by an Iraqi peasant, Hamdan Qarmat (c. 880), who was very
successful in the founding of revolutionary guilds and cells. These