The saints form an invisible hierarchy, on which the order of the world is thought to depend. Its supreme head is entitled the _Qutb_ (Axis). He is the most eminent Sūfī of his age, and presides over the meetings regularly held by this august parliament, whose members are not hampered in their attendance by the inconvenient fictions of time and space, but come together from all parts of the earth in the twinkling of an eye, traversing seas and mountains and deserts as easily as common mortals step across a road. Below the _Qutb_ stand various classes and grades of sanctity. Hujwīrī enumerates them, in ascending series, as follows: three hundred _Akhyār_ (Good), forty _Abdāl_ (Substitutes), seven _Abrār_ (Pious), four _Awtād_ (Supports), and three _Nuqabā_ (Overseers). “All these know one another and cannot act save by mutual consent. It is the task of the _Awtād_ to go round the whole world every night, and if there should be any place on which their eyes have not fallen, next day some flaw will appear in that place, and they must then inform the _Qutb_ in order that he may direct his attention to the weak spot and that by his blessing the imperfection may be remedied.” We are studying in this book the mystical life of the individual Moslem, and it is necessary to keep the subject within the narrowest bounds. Otherwise, I should have liked to dwell on the external and historical organisation of Sūfism as a school for saints, and to describe the process of evolution through which the _walī_ privately conversing with a small circle of friends became, first, a teacher and spiritual guide gathering disciples around him during his lifetime, and finally the head of a perpetual religious order which bore his name. The earliest of these great fraternities date from the twelfth century. In addition to their own members--the so-called ‘dervishes’--each order has a large number of lay brethren attached to it, so that their influence pervades all ranks of Moslem society. They are “independent and self-developing. There is rivalry between them; but no one rules over the other. In faith and practice each goes its own way, limited only by the universal conscience of Islam. Thus strange doctrines and grave moral defects easily develop unheeded, but freedom is saved.”[15] Of course, the typical _walī_ is incapable of founding an order, but Islam has produced no less frequently than Christendom men who combine intense spiritual illumination with creative energy and aptitude for affairs on a grand scale. The Mohammedan notion of the saint as a person possessed by God allows a very wide application of the term: in popular usage it extends from the greatest Sūfī theosophists, like Jalāluddīn Rūmī and Ibn al-ʿArabī, down to those who have gained sanctity only by losing sanity--victims of epilepsy and hysteria, half-witted idiots and harmless lunatics. [15] D. B. Macdonald, _The Religious Life and Attitude in Islam_, p. 164.