In all these circumstances there is much to fear as well as to hope on the side of the Shiite sect; but their future only indirectly involves that of Islam proper. Their whole census does not probably exceed fifteen millions, and it shows no tendency to increase. Outside Persia we find about one million Iraki Arabs, a few in Syria and Afghanistan, and at most five millions in India. One small group still maintains itself in the neighbourhood of Medina, where it is tolerated rather than acknowledged, and a few Shiites are to be found in most of the large cities of the west, but everywhere the sect of Ali stands apart from and almost in a hostile attitude to the rest of Islam. It is noticeable, however, that within the last fifty years the religious bitterness of Shiite and Sunite is sensibly in decline. The next most important of the heretical sects is the Abadiyeh. These, according to some, are the religious descendants of the Khawarij, a sect which separated itself from the Califate in the time of the Seyid Ali, and, after a severe persecution in Irak, took refuge at last in Oman. Whatever their present doctrines, they seem at first to have been like the Shiites, political schismatics. They maintained that any Mussulman, so long as he was not affected with heresy, might be chosen Imam, and that he might be deposed for heresy or ill-conduct, and indeed that there was no absolute necessity for any Imam at all. They are at present only found in Oman and Zanzibar, where they number, it is said, about four millions. Till as late as the last century the Imamate was an elective office among them, but with the accession of the Abu Said dynasty it became hereditary in that family.[8] They reject all communion with the Sunites, but I have not been able to discover that they hold any doctrines especially offensive to the mass of Moslems. Their differences are mainly negative, and consist in the rejection of Califal history and authority later than the reign of Omar, and of a vast number of traditions now incorporated in the Sunite faith.