Having bestowed this rapid glance on the modern dominions of the Moslimin, which the illustration of the subject justified, we shall now revert our attention to its primitive condition. The first and greatest schisms in Islamism proceeded from the contest for temporal rule, and the faith shared the dismemberment of the empire. We have already remarked the existence of the two great political and religious factions, the Motasali and Khavaredj, the apostates and the deserters, many of whose tenets differed materially from those inculcated by the ruling doctrine; but particularly that opinion which they maintained with arms, in respect to the right to the dignity of khalif and imam. This is the origin of most of the sects of Islamism, and is the fertile root from which has grown the many-branched stem of heresy. No less than seventy-two sects are counted, according to a tradition of Mohammed, who is said to have foretold that his people would divide into seventy-three branches, of which one only is the true one, all the rest being erroneous. A very instructive sub-division and enumeration of them is found in Sheheristani and also Macrisi, to which Silvestre de Sacy first directed public attention, in a treatise read by him to the Institute of France. We shall be satisfied with considering merely the two stems into which the tree of Islamism, as soon as it rose above the ground, bifurcated, and which even now, after the growth of twelve hundred years, still remain the two principal limbs which have given birth to the confused sectarian ramifications. These two divisions are the doctrines of the Soonnites and the Shiites, which, though otherwise multifarious, differ from each other principally in this,—that the former recognise, as legitimate, the succession of the four first khalifs, the latter only acknowledge the rights of Ali and his descendants. The Soonnite is shocked by the murder of Osman, and the Shiite is revolted by the slaughter of Ali and his sons. What the one execrates, the other defends; and what the latter receives, the former rejects. This exactly diametrical opposition of most of their dogmas became only the more decisive by the lapse of time, and the separation of political interests of the nations which subscribe to them. Most of the wars between the Turks and Persians, the former Soonnites, and the latter Shiites, have always been as much religious as inter-national wars: and the efforts, so often repeated, and last essayed by Shah Nadir, of bringing about a coalition of the two parties, remained as fruitless as the endeavours, century after century, to unite the Western and Eastern Christian churches, with whose schism that of the Soonnites and the Shiites may not inaptly be compared.