Between Turkey and Persia, there is a broad distinction as to tolerance. The Osmanlies, notwithstanding their close territorial contact with Christianity, are, in virtue of their orthodoxy, intolerant of the least divergence from the Faith; while the more distant Persia (following the example of the Motázilite Caliphs) is less impatient of other creeds, and more amenable to outer influence.[613] In other respects, too, the ancient sentiment dividing the Soonnie and the Shîya is as bitter now as in the days when Aly cursed Muâvia, and Muâvia cursed Aly, in the daily public service. The hopeless schism has tended to slacken the progress of Islam, and abate its aggressive force. Thus recently, when a deadly blow was aimed at the head of the Moslem Empire on this side of the Bosphorus, the sectarians of Persia, through hate and jealousy of the Soonnie creed, declined to rally round the banner of the Crescent; and, indeed, so far as any help or even sympathy from Shîyas went, Islam might have been blotted out of Europe altogether. The Soonnie scorns the Shîya; and the Shîya, in his turn, spits on the graves of those great Caliphs, Omar and Abu Bekr, to whom they owe it that Islam spread thus marvellously, nay even that it survived its birth. [Sidenote: Political and economical outlook of Islam.] The Islam of to-day is substantially the same as the Islam which we quitted at the close of this history. By the middle of the third century it had completed its circuit, and had rung all the changes which seem to lie within the range of its potentiality. Swathed in the rigid bands of the Corân, Islam is powerless, like the Christian dispensation, to adapt itself to the varying circumstances of time and place, and to keep pace with, if not to lead and direct, the progress of society and elevation of the race. In the body politic, the spiritual and the secular are hopelessly confounded; and we fail of perceiving any approach to free institutions, or any germ whatever of popular government. The nearest approach to it was in the brotherhood of Islam; but that, as a controlling power, was confined strictly to the Arab races, and with their fall it has entirely disappeared. The type and exemplar of Moslem rule is the absolute and autocratic monarch, alternating at times with the will of lawless soldiery; and the only check on the despot’s power is the law of the Corân, as expounded by the learned, and enforced by the sentiment of the nation. [Sidenote: Obnoxious social ordinances.]