early squabbles, were certain of Paradise. It has further become an article in Muslim creeds, that the Companions of the Prophet are not to be mentioned save with praise; and one school of theologians, in their zeal for the historic Khalifate, even forbade the cursing of Yazid, the slayer of al-Husayn (p. 28 below), and reckoned as the worst of all the Umayyads, because he had been a Khalifa in full and regular standing. This catholic recognition of the unity of Islam we shall meet again and again. [Sidenote: ALI; CIVIL WAR] Abandoning, then, any attempt to trace the details and to adjust the rights and wrongs of this story, we return to the fixed fact of the election of Ali and the accession to power of the legitimist party. This legitimist party, or parties, had been gradually developing, and their peculiar and mutually discordant views deserve attention. These views all glorified Ali, the full cousin of Muhammad and husband of his daughter Fatima, but upon very different grounds. There could not but exist the feeling that a descendant of the Prophet should be his successor, and the children of Ali, al-Hasan and al-Husayn were his only grandchildren and only surviving male descendants. This, of course, reflected a dignity upon Ali, their father, and gave him a claim to the Khalifate. Again, Ali himself seems to have made a great and hardly comprehensible impression upon his contemporaries. The proverb ran with the people, “There is no sword save _Dhu-l-faqar_, and no youth save Ali.” He was not, perhaps, so great a general as one or two others of his time, but he stood alone as a warrior in single combat; he was a poet and an orator, but no statesman. As one of the earliest of the Early Believers, it might be expected that the Muhajirs would support him, and so they did; but the matter went much farther, and he seems to have excited a feeling of personal attachment and devotion different from that rendered to the preceding Khalifas. Strange and mystical doctrines were afloat as to his claim. The idea of election was thrown aside, and his adherents proclaimed his right by the will and appointment of God to the successorship of the Prophet. As God had appointed Muhammad as Prophet, so He had appointed Ali as his helper in life and his successor in death. This was preached in Egypt as early as the year 32.