the non-Kharijites Muslims to the extent that the Kharijites might live amongst them and mix with them? This the severely logical party denied, but Abd Allah ibn Ibad affirmed. From this it will be abundantly clear that the only party with a possible future was that of Ibn Ibad. His sect survives to the present day under the name of Ibadites. Very early it spread to Uman, and, according to their traditions, their first Imam, or president, was elected about A.H. 134. He was of a family which had reigned there before Islam, and from the time of his election on, the Ibadites have succeeded in holding Uman against the rest of the Muslim world. Naturally, the election of the Imam by the community has turned into the rule of a series of dynasties; but the theory of election has always held fast. They were sailors, merchants, and colonizers already by the tenth century A.D., and carried their state with its theology and law to Zanzibar and the coast of East Africa generally. Still earlier Ibadite fugitives passed into North Africa, and there they still maintain the simplicity of their republican ideal and their primitive theological and legal views. Their home is in the Mzab in the south of Algeria, and, though as traders and capitalists they may travel far, yet they always return thither. Any mingling in marriage with other Muslims is forbidden them. [Sidenote: SHI‘ITES] At the opposite extreme from these in political matters stands the sect that is called the Shi‘a. It, as we have seen, is the name given to the party that glorifies Ali and his descendants and regards the Khalifate as belonging to them by right divine. How early this feeling arose we have already seen, but the extremes to which in time the idea was carried, the innumerable differing views that developed, the maze of conspiracies, tortuous and underground in their methods, some in good faith and some in bad, to which it gave rise, render the history of the Shi‘a the most difficult side of a knowledge of the Muslim East. Yet some attempt at it must be made. If there was ever a romance in history, it is the story of the founding of the Fatimid dynasty in Egypt; if there was ever the survival of a petrifaction in history, it is the survival to the present day of the Assassins and the Druses; if there was ever the persistence of an idea, it is in the present Shi‘ite government in Persia and in the faith in that Mahdi for whom the whole world of Islam still looks to appear and bring in the reign of justice and the truth upon the earth. All these have sprung from the devotion to Ali and his children on the part of their followers twelve centuries ago.