As was natural in the case of professional devotees, a constantly prayerful attitude began to assume importance beside and in contrast to the formal use of the five daily prayers, the salawat. This development was in all probability aided by the existence in Syria of the Christian sect of the Euchites, who exalted the duty of prayer above all other religious obligations. These, also, abandoned property and obligations and wandered as poor brethren over the country. They were a branch of Hesychasts, the quietistic Greek monks who eventually led to the controversy concerning the uncreated light manifested at the transfiguration on Mount Tabor and added a doctrine to the Eastern Church. Considering these points, it can hardly be doubted that there was some historical connection and relation here, not only with earlier but also with later Sufiism. There is a striking resemblance between the Sufis seeking by patient introspection to see the actual light of God's presence in their hearts, and the Greek monks in Athos, sitting solitarily in their cells and seeking the divine light of Mount Tabor in contemplation of their navels.

But our immediate point is the matter of constant, free prayer. In the Qur'an (xxxiii, 41) the believers are exhorted to "remember (dhikr) God often;" this command the Sufis obeyed with a correlative depreciation of the five canonical prayers. Their meetings for the purpose, much like our own prayer-meetings, still more like the "class-meetings" of the early Methodists, as opposed to stated public worship, were called dhikrs. These services were fiercely attacked by the orthodox theologians, but survived

and are the darwish functions which tourists still go to see at Constantinople and Cairo. But the more private and personal dhikrs of individual Sufis, each in his house repeating his Qur'anic litanies through the night, until to the passer-by it sounded like the humming of bees or the unceasing drip of roof-gutters, these seem, in the course of the third century, to have fallen before ridicule and accusations of heresy.

Another point against the earlier Sufis was their abuse of the principle of tawakkul, dependence upon God. They gave up their trades and professions; they even gave up the asking for alms. Their ideal was to be absolutely at God's disposal, utterly cast upon His direct sustenance (rizq). No anxiety for their daily bread was permitted to them; they must go through the world separated from it and its needs and looking up to God. Only one who can do this is properly an acknowledger of God's unity, a true Muwahhid. To such, God would assuredly open the door of help; they were at His gate; and the biographies of the saints are full of tales how His help used to come.

To this it may be imagined that the more sober, even among Sufis, made vehement objection. It fell under two heads. One was that of kasb, the gaining of daily bread by labor. The examples of the husbandman who casts his seed into the ground and then depends upon God, of the merchant who travels with his wares in similar trust, were held up against the wandering but useless monk. As always, traditions were forged on both sides. Said a man—apparently in a spirit of prophecy—one day to the Prophet,