emphatically preached that the Agreement (Ijmâ') of every period should be
based on that of the "pious ancestors." They therefore tested every dogma
and practice by the words and deeds of the Prophet, his contemporaries, and
the leaders of the Community in the first decades after Mohammed's death.
In their eyes the Church of later days had degenerated; and they declined
to consider the agreement of its doctors as justifying the penetration
into Islâm of ideas and usages of foreign origin. The cult of saints was
rejected by them as altogether contradictory to the Qorân and the genuine
tradition. These protestants of Islâm may be compared to those of
Christianity also in this respect, that they accepted the results of the
evolution and assimilation of the first three centuries of Islâm, but
rejected later additions as abuse and corruption. When on the verge of our
nineteenth century, they tried, as true Moslims, to force by material means
their religious conceptions on others, they were combated as heretics by
the authorities of catholic Islâm. Central and Western Arabia formed the
battlefield on which these zealots, called Wahhâbites after their leader,
were defeated by Mohammed Ali, the first Khedive, and his Egyptian army.
Since they have given up their efforts at violent reconstitution of what
they consider to be the original Islâm, they are left alone, and their
ideas have found adherents far outside Arabia, _e.g._, in British India and
in Northern and Central Africa.

In still quite another way many Moslims who found their freedom of thought
or action impeded by the prevailing law and doctrine, have returned to the
origin of their religion. Too much attached to the traditions of their
faith, deliberately to disregard these impediments, they tried to find in
the Qorân and Tradition arguments in favour of what was dictated to them by
Reason; and they found those arguments as easily as former generations had
found the bases on which to erect their casuistry, their dogma, and their
mysticism. This implied an interpretation of the oldest sources independent