anthropomorphisms of the Qur'an. But these questions and answers are probably forgeries of the later traditional school, shadows of future warfare thrown back upon the screen of the patriarchal age. Again, in the first twenty or thirty years after Muhammad's death, the Muslims were too much occupied with the propagation of their faith to think what that faith exactly was. Thus, it seems that the questioning spirit in this direction was aroused comparatively late and remained for some time on what might be called a private basis. Individual men had their individual views, but sects did not quickly arise, and when they did were vague and hard to define in their positions. It may be said, broadly, that everything which has reached us about the early Muslim heresies is uncertain, confused and unsatisfactory. Names, dates, influences and doctrines are all seen through a haze, and nothing more than an approximation to an outline can be attempted. Vague stories are handed down of the early questionings and disputings of certain ahl-al-ahwa, "people of wandering desires," a name singularly descriptive of the always flighty and sceptical Arabs; of how they compared Scripture with Scripture and got up theological debates, splitting points and defining issues, to great scandal and troubling of spirit among the simpler-minded pious. These were not yet heretics; they were the first investigators and systematizers.

Yet two sects loom up through the mist and their existence can be tolerably conditioned through the historical facts and philosophical necessities of the time. The one is that of the Murji'ites, and the other

of the Qadarites. A Murji'ite is literally "one who defers or postpones," in this case postpones judgment until it is pronounced by God on the Day of Judgment. They arose as a sect during and out of the civil war between the Shi'ites, the Kharijites and the Umayyads. All these parties claimed to be Muslims, and most of them claimed that they were the only true Muslims and that the others were unbelievers. This was especially the attitude of the Shi'ites and Kharijites toward the Umayyads; to them, the Umayyads, as we have seen already, were godless heathen who professed Islam, but oppressed and slaughtered the true saints of God. The Murji'ites, on the other hand, worked out a view on which they could still support the Umayyads without homologating all their actions and condemning all their opponents. The Umayyads, they held, were de facto the rulers of the Muslim state; fealty had been sworn to them and they confessed the Unity of God and the apostleship of the Prophet. Thus, they were not polytheists, and there is no sin that can possibly be compared with the sin of polytheism (shirk). It was, therefore, the duty of all Muslims to acknowledge their sovereignty and to postpone until the secrets of the Last Day all judgment or condemnation of any sins they might have committed. Sins less than polytheism could justify no one in rising in revolt against them and in breaking the oath of fealty.

Such seems to have been the origin of the Murji'ites, and it was the origin also of the theory of the accomplished fact in the state, of which we have had to take account several times. Thus, between the fanatical