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their heritage. Moawiyah gave himself out as the avenger of Othman; Ali was represented as his murderer, although his sons, the grandsons of the Prophet, had fought, and one of them received a wound, in the defence of that Caliph. Othman, cursed as a tyrant while alive, was revered as a martyr when dead; his bloody robe, the Koran stained also with his blood, the fingers of his wife, cut off in a vain attempt to save him, were treasured up as sacred relics and employed by Moawiyah to stir up the zeal of the Syrian army. Ayesha too, the Mother of the Faithful, Telha and Zobeir, the Prophet's old companions, revolted on their own account, and the whole of the brief reign of Ali was one constant succession of civil war. For the details I must refer to those writers whose object is direct narrative; how Moawiyah shrank from the challenge of Ali and the edge of his sword Dhulfekkar; how, worsted in battle, he appealed to the Koran to judge between them; how his arbitrator Amru outwitted the pedantic Abu-Musa; how the empire was distracted by the rival claims and rival curses of Ali and Moawiyah, should be studied in the pages of Price and of Ockley. At last Ali fell by the sword of an assassin, while Moawiyah escaped with his life from that of his confederate; and Hassan, his eldest son, finding himself unable to cope with the fortunate usurper, was driven to resign his claims into his hands.

The bright days of Islam have now quite passed away. Moawiyah was both a statesman and a soldier, an able and fortunate founder of a dynasty, but he was a man of very different cast from the saintly heroes whom he succeeded. Abu-Bekr and Omar

sought no advancement for their own families; their sons remained in the condition of private Moslems. If Ali asserted the rights of his offspring, he was asserting the hereditary claims of the offspring of the offspring of the Prophet. The Caliphate might conceivably be allotted to the worthiest of the Faithful; it might conceivably be hereditary in the family of the Apostle; but Mahomet could never have imagined that it would become hereditary in the family of his bitterest enemy. Yet this was what Moawiyah laboured, and laboured successfully, to effect; and, in so doing, he stuck at no act either of violence or perfidy. When Hassan surrendered his claims, it was on condition that Moawiyah appointed no successor, and that if Hassan survived Moawiyah, he should himself become Caliph. Moawiyah carried out these stipulations by poisoning Hassan, and securing the succession to his own son, the odious Yezid. He thus founded an hereditary monarchy in his own family, which lasted in the East for nearly a century, and which, translated beyond the Pillars of Hercules, endured nearly three centuries more.

But in thus converting the Caliphate into an hereditary monarchy he utterly changed its character. It soon assumed the character of a common oriental empire. Under the Ommiad dynasty we soon begin to hear of the same crimes, the same oppressions, which disfigure the ordinary current of eastern history. The first Caliphs had been the chief among their brethren; they took counsel with the people in the mosque; their authority rested on the reverence of believers for their spiritual head. The Ommiads were masters of slaves instead of leaders of freemen; the public will was no longer consulted, and the public good as

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little; the Commander of the Faithful sank into an earthly despot, ruling by force like any Assyrian conqueror of old. The early Caliphs dwelt in the sacred city of Medina, and directed the counsels of the Empire from beside the tomb of the Prophet. Moawiyah transferred his throne to the conquered splendours of Damascus; and Mecca and Medina. became tributary cities to the ruler of Syria. At one time a rival Caliph, Abdallah, established himself in Arabia; twice were the holy cities taken by storm, and the Kaaba itself was battered down by the engines of the invaders. No avenging birds appeared to visit the fierce Hejaj with the fate of Abrahah ; and the result of the mission of Mahomet and the conquests of his followers was practically to make his native country a subject province to the land which they had subdued.

Such a revolution, however, did not effect itself without considerable opposition. The partizans of the house of Ali continued to form a formidable sect. In their ideas the Vicarship of the Prophet was not to be, like an earthly kingdom, the mere prize of craft or of valour. It was the inalienable heritage of the sacred descendants of the Prophet himself. If Hassan surrendered his rights to Moawiyah, he surrendered that which he had neither the right nor the power to alienate. The descendants of Ommiah might be de facto temporal sovereigns, but the spiritual headship of the Faithful could never be taken away from the descendants of Mahomet. This was the origin of the Shiah sect, the assertors of the rights of Ali and his house. The strange forms into which this doctrine has developed I shall say more of at another stage of our subject. At present we have chiefly to

deal with the house of Ali as rivals of the house of Moawiyah. In the reign of Yezid, the second Ommiad Caliph, comes the tale of the martyrdom of Hossein, which I do not hesitate to call the most pathetic story in the whole course of history. It is probably well known from the pages of Gibbon, but it should be read in its full detail in those of Ockley and Price, who write respectively from Arabian and from Persian-that is Shiah-authorities. The grandson of the Prophet, beguiled by the promises of the fickle people of Cufa, comes from Arabia with his whole family to assert his hereditary claims. Deserted by his faithless partizans, surrounded by the armies of the usurper, cut off from the water of Euphrates, of which beasts and Giaours are allowed freely to partake, he sees his friends slaughtered around him, his infant is pierced in his arms by an arrow, he sees his female relatives condemned to captivity, and he is himself threatened with instant death. For a long time no believer can be found willing actually to smite his Imam, the heir of his Apostle; at last he is struck down, his body is trampled into the ground by the horses' hoofs, his head carried in triumph to his brutal conqueror. Obeidollah strikes the lifeless lips in mockery, while an aged Moslem by his side weeps as he murmurs, "Alas, on those lips I have seen the lips of the Apostle of God."

This whole scene has always appeared to me one of those events which are simply inexplicable. One can understand a misguided zeal leading to any atrocities perpetrated against men of another faith; but here is treatment to which Khaled himself would hardly have exposed a Christian or a Fire-worshipper, inflicted, in the name of the Mussulman religion, upon

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those for whom that religion inculcated reverence. In many cases we cannot condemn a settled government for inflicting punishment upon rebels, even when our sympathies are on the side of rebellion. But it is clear that there were persons in the army of Obeidollah, who did not carry about with them this calm conviction of the necessity of supporting the powers that be, but who were actuated by real religious enthusiasm for Yezid and against Hossein. As they encircle him they congratulate him on his speedy prospect of hell-fire; when he craves for a short truce at the hour of prayer, they ask how such a wretch as he could venture to address the Almighty. Yet it is hard to understand any enthusiasm for the debauched and cruel Yezid against the brave and saintly Hossein; it is hard to understand a religious enthusiasm which saw a heretic and a rebel in the grandson of Mahomet, a true Commander of the Faithful in the grandson of Abu-Sofian. In earlier times we might understand a feeling in favour of an elective Caliphate against hereditary succession even in the sacred family. But now the controversy was becoming purely dynastic; the choice no longer lay between an elective and an hereditary monarchy; but between an hereditary monarchy in the family of the Prophet, and one in the family of his bitterest antagonist.

But bad as Caliph Yezid undoubtedly was, he was not so bad as his followers. He treated the surviving captives with comparative gentleness, and declared that if Hossein had fallen alive into his hands, his life would have been spared. Hossein's son Ali was in Medina during its first revolt against the Ommiads, and, as he took no share in it, he received the most