Now the enthusiastic mothers approach, and cast their children before the presiding sheikh, who, as they lie extended before him, deliberately plants his heavy feet upon their frail bodies, and so stands for some seconds. Old men and maidens, lay themselves low before this saint, who is supposed to be by this time so inspired as to have a miraculous power of expressing all ailments and maladies from the human frame, and to have become so etherealized by the ecstatic ceremonies as to lose all his specific gravity. The Abdals include the various classes of the stoics, who generally pretend to a total renunciation of all worldly comforts. Sometimes clothed in the coarsest garments, and again half naked, and even with lacerated bodies, they wander through the Mohammedan dominions, a miserable set of frantic, idle, and conceited beggars. They may, in fact, be considered the "communists" of the East, who despising honest pursuits, live upon the community at large. They commit the worst extravagances under the pretence of heavenly raptures, and are even supposed to be divinely inspired. Idiots and fools are esteemed by the Mohammedans as the favorites of Heaven; their spirits are supposed to have deserted their earthly tenements, and to be holding converse with angels, while their bodies still wander about the earth. It would be wearisome to go into further details; for infinite is the diversity of the orthodox theologies of the Mohammedans, with the 235 articles of the creed, on which all the doctors of divinity differ; hopeless must be the task of the student to surmount the commentaries of the 280 canonical authors, not to mention the innumerable heretical tenets of other sects, which must be studied to be controverted. Verily we would suggest the recipe of a certain Molla, who must have given up in dire despair, "Whenever you meet with an infidel, abuse him with all your might, and no one will doubt you are a staunch believer." As long as war and its exciting scenes occupied the restless minds of the Arabs, there was no time for religious or party intrigue. The simple "La Illah-Illallah," satisfied the momentary breathings of their souls heavenward. The turmoil of their life, the glitter of their arms and dreadful carnage of all infidels, sufficed to ease their fancy, and satisfy the thirst for excitement. It was as they wiped their blood-stained scimitars, and during the reaction which comparative peace and luxury created, that their minds, free from more substantial food and activity, sought greater refinement of spirituality. In the absence of the real, the speculative began to grow, until Imams and Ulema found that they could turn the tide of human affairs to their own advantage, by exciting polemical and theological controversies.