By such arts were subtle practices and silly legends grafted by scholasticism upon the primitive annals and laws of El Islam. In that faith almost every tenet or practice to which the philosopher could object may be traced to the Sunnat and Ahadis; the Koran is wholly free from them. Amongst others, upon these, and upon these solely, must be charged the defect of making the system eminently perceptive. Muhammad, like all other Eastern lawgivers, had suited his ordinances to the genius of his people by addressing them as semi-civilized men. The schools degraded their Muslims to the intellectual rank of babes and sucklings. Regarding these Sunnat and Ahadis, however, it must be borne in mind that they are purely sectarian. The four self-called orthodox schools hold to one tradition. The principal heresies, as the Shiahs and the Bayzawi, have their own recognized collections, whence all emanations from impure, that is to say, from other sources, have been carefully removed. But El Islam has existed, and can exist, independently of them. Had the Wahhabis, those Puritans or rather Reformers of the Saving Faith, succeeded in restoring to the Arabs their simple primitive belief, little of the Ahadis and the Sunnat would have been left to misguide and offend mankind. Secondly, men object that the Saving Faith is one of pure sensuality. It is difficult to divine how this most erroneous estimate could have been formed except by the grossest ignorance. Possibly it was a vicious conclusion thus drawn: that as the Muslim’s Paradise is one of sense, consequently there is no limit to his sensuality in this world. But El Jannat, or the Heavenly Garden, has many mansions; the ignorant and savage, the hungry and sensual Bedawin will taste the flesh of birds, live in a golden house, command any number of angelic wives, and drink the nectars of Kafur and Zingibil. But, as in Christianity so in El Islam, eye hath not seen, nor hath ear heard, nor hath fancy conceived the spiritual joys of those who in mundane life have qualified themselves for heavenly futurity. The popular error that the Muslim Prophet denied immortal souls to women, and therefore degraded them to the mere instruments of man’s comfort and passions, might also have tended to represent El Islam as a scheme of sense. Possibly, again, the monogamic races of a Northern clime--for monogamy, polygamy, and polyandry are an affair of geography--shocked by the permission to marry four wives and to maintain an indefinite number of concubines, overlooked in characterizing Muhammad’s ordinances the strict limits therein laid down for luxury and pleasure. The Muslim may not take to himself a single spouse, unless able to make a settlement upon her, to support, clothe, and satisfy her. He must act with the most rigid impartiality towards the whole household, and strictly avoid showing undue preference. He is allowed four wives with a view of increasing and multiplying his tribe.