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.  They stand in that relation to the other sects in which the Catholic Church stands to the various Christian heresies, and claim alone to represent that continuous body of tradition political and religious, which is the sign of a living church.  In addition to the dogmas already mentioned, they hold that, after the Prophet and his companions, other authorised channels of tradition exist of hardly less authority with these.  The sayings of the four first Caliphs, as collected in the first century of the Mohammedan era, they hold to be inspired and unimpeachable, as are to a certain extent the theological treatises of the four great doctors of Islam, the Imams Abu Hanifeh, Malek, Esh Shafy, and Hanbal, and after them, though with less and less authority, the “fetwas,” or decisions of distinguished Ulema, down to the present day.  The collected body of teaching acquired from these sources is called the Sheriat (in Turkey the Sheriati Sherifeh) and is the canon law of Islam.  Nor is it lawful that this should be gainsaid; while the Imams themselves may not inaptly be compared to the fathers of our Christian Church.  It is a dogma, too, with the Sunites that they are not only an ecclesiastical but a political body, and that among them is the living representative of the temporal power of the Prophet, in the person of his Khalifeh or successor, though there is much division of opinion as to the precise line of succession in the past and the legitimate ownership of the title in the present.  But this is too intricate and important a matter to be entered on at present.