The final result of some seven hundred years of Muhammadan rule in various parts of the country is that Musalmāns are in excess of Hindus only in the Western Panjāb, which is in contact with a purely Muhammadan country, and in Eastern Bengal, where the aboriginal low-caste Hindu was glad to get social promotion by accepting Islam, and where he thrives and prospers at the expense of his Hindu brother, partly because his diet is more nutritious, partly because he does not practise infant-marriage and other debilitating customs. As has been said above, Animism has affected Islam as well as Hinduism. From the old religion of the country Musalmāns have borrowed demonology, a belief in witchcraft, and the worship of departed Pirs or saints. The most remarkable instance of the latter is the sect of the Pachpiriyas of Bengal, the worshippers of the Five Saints, a cult which some have traced to the cult of the five Pāndava heroes of the Mahābhārata. The five Pirs, however, vary in name from district to district. In Eastern Bengal, no one, whether Hindu or Musalmān (or, I had almost said, Christian), begins a journey by boat without a loud and hearty invocation of the Ganges, the Wind, the Five Pirs, and Pir Badr before mentioned. Of the two great sects of Islam, the Sunnis and the Shias, the former are by far the most numerous in India. The Sunnis or Traditionalists accept the Sunnat or collected body of Arabic usage as possessing authority concurrent with that of the Koran, which is the sole scripture of the Shias. Yet in Eastern Bengal the annual procession of the Tazias, or representations of the tombs of the martyred grandsons of the Prophet, is much attended by Sunnis (though for them the practice is unorthodox), and indeed by Hindus also. In other parts of India, the Mohurram festival has often led to serious encounters between Hindus and Musalmāns, and even in Calcutta and Bombay has been the cause of dangerous riots.