his successor; others, again, advanced the duty of seeking the rightful Imam and rendering allegiance to him till it covered the whole field of faith and morals—no more was required of the believer. To one of these sects, al-Mukanna, "the Veiled Prophet of Khorasan," adhered before he started on his own account.

We have seen already that so early as 32 the doctrine had been preached in Egypt that Ali was the God-appointed successor of the Prophet. Here we have its legitimate development, which was all the quicker as it had, or assumed, a theological basis, and did not simply urge the claims to leadership of the family of the Prophet after the fashion in which inheritance runs among earthly kings. That was the position at first of the other and far more important Shi'ite wing. It regarded the leadership as being in the blood of Muhammad and therefore limited to the children of Ali by his wife Fatima, the daughter of Muhammad. Again, the attitude toward the person of the leader varied, as we have already seen. One party held that the leadership was by the right of the appointment of God, but that the leader himself was simply a man as other men. These would add to "the two words" (al-kadimatani) of the creed, "There is no god but God, and Muhammad is the Apostle of God," a third clause, "and Ali is the representative of God." Others regarded him as an incarnation of divinity; a continuing divine revelation in human form. His soul passed, when he died, to his next successor. He was, therefore, infallible and sinless, and was to be treated with absolute, blind obedience.

Here there is a mingling of the most strangely varied ideas. In Persia the people had been too long accustomed to looking upon their rulers as divine for them to be capable of taking up any other position. A story is told of the governor of a Persian province who wrote to the Khalifa of his time that he was not able to prevent his people from giving him the style and treatment of a god; they did not understand any other kind of ruler; it was as much as his authority was worth to attempt to make them desist. From this attitude, combined with the idea of the transmigration of souls, the extreme Shi'ite doctrine was derived.

But though the party of Ali might regard the descendants of Ali as semi-divine, yet their conspiracies and revolts were uniformly unsuccessful, and it became a very dangerous thing to head one. The party was willing to get up a rising at any time, but the leader was apt to hang back. In fact, one of the most curious features of the whole movement was the uselessness of the family of Ali and the extent to which they were utilized by others. They have been, in a sense, the cat's-paws of history. Gradually they themselves drew back into retirement and vanished from the stage, and, with their vanishing, a new doctrine arose. It was that of the hidden Imam. We have already seen the case of Muhammad ibn al-Hauafiya, whom Muslims reckon as the first of these concealed ones. Another descendant of Ali, on another line of descent, vanished in the same way in the latter part of the second century of the Hijra, and another about A.H. 260. Their respective followers