The second cause, though less threatening to Islam, was more insidious, and fraught with greater danger to the Caliphate and the person of Othmân himself. Had the Coreish rallied loyally around the throne, the Arab factions might have been nipped in the bud. But the weakness of Othmân, and the partiality with which he favoured his own friends and relatives, stirred the jealousy of the house of Hâshim, which began vaunting the claims of Aly and the Prophet’s family, and depreciating the Omeyyad branch to which the Caliph belonged. That branch, unfortunately for the Omeyyads, had been the tardiest to recognise the mission of Mahomet; and the kinsmen on whom Othmân now lavished his favours had been the most inveterate in their opposition to it. Every unfavourable expression uttered by the Prophet during that period of bitter enmity was now raked up against them, and used to blacken their names, and to cast discredit on a government which promoted them to power and honour. Thus the Coreish were divided; rivalry paralysed their influence, and Othmân lost the support which would otherwise have enabled him to check the machinations of the Arab malcontents. Still worse, Aly and his party lent themselves to the disloyal policy of the Bedouin faction, which was fast sapping the foundations of the Caliphate, and which, as Aly should have foreseen, would in the end recoil against himself.[440] [Sidenote: Factious spirit diverted by military service.] It was not, however, till the later part of Othmân’s reign that these influences, though early at work, assumed dangerous prominence. Their retardation was in great measure due to the military operations, which, busily pursued in all directions by the Moslem arms, diverted attention from domestic trouble. Campaigns were annually prosecuted, with more or less vigour, throughout the twelve years of Othmân’s Caliphate. A very brief outline of them will suffice. [Sidenote: Operations in _Persia_.]