The author of the Dabistán, after having treated of the most ancient religions, passes to the comparatively modern religious system of Arabia. The Arabians, although frequently attacked, were never conquered by the Assyrians, Medians, Persians, or Romans; they maintained their political indepen­dance, but could not avoid nor resist the religious influence of nations with whom they were, during ages, in various relations. The ancient history of Arabia is lost, like that of many other nations; so much is known of their oldest religion, that it resembled that of the Persians and Hindus: it was the Magism or Sabæism; the stars were worshipped as idols from the remotest times; we read of antedilu­vian idols. At the time, which we now consider, that is the seventh century of our era, all the then existing religions seemed to be far remote from their original simplicity and purity;* idolatry was dominant, and Monotheism preserved and positively professed only in Judaism and Christianity, although likewise corrupted by various kinds of superstition. Followers of both these religions were settled in Arabia, to which region the Jews fled from the cruel destruction of their country by the Romans; and the Christians, on account of the persecutions and disorders which had arisen in the Eastern church.

We see by what facts, circumstances, and notions Muhammed was acted upon, whilst nourishing his religious enthusiasm by solitary contempla­tion in the cavern of mount Hara, to which he was wont to retire for one month in every year. In his fortieth year, at the same age at which Zoroaster began to teach 600 years before Christ (according to some chronologers), Muhammed, as many years after the Messiah, assumed the prophetic mission to reform the Arabians. He felt the necessity of seizing some safe and essential dogmas in the chaos of Magian, Zoroastrian, Jewish, and Christian notions; broke all the figures of planets in the temple of Mecca, and declared the most violent war against all plastic, graven, and painted idols; he left undis­turbed only the black stone, Saturn's emblem before, and at the time when the Jewish traditions claimed it for Abraham, and even transported it to heaven. Muhammed preferred the latter to the more ancient superstition; as to the rest, he abhorred the prevail­ing idolatry of the Sabaians; and blamed the cor­ruption of monotheism in the Jews and Christians. He felt in himself the powerful spirit, and undertook to re-establish the Touhid, “the unity and spiri­tualism of God;” he preached with enthusiastic zeal the Islam, “devotedness und resignation to God.”

But, in order to found and to expand the great and necessary truths, he knew no other means, but to attach the believers to his own person, and to accustom them to blind obedience to his dictates; he proclaimed: “There is no God but God, and Muhammed is his prophet;” he gave them the Koran, the only holy book, in which his precepts were as many commands proclaimed under the penalty of eternal damnation. In the Muhammedan all spon­taneity is stifled; all desire, all attempt to be self-convinced is interdicted; every thing becomes exte­rior, the religious and civil Code but one.

Muhammed seemed not to know that religion cannot be the gift, as it is not the property, of any single man; it belongs to mankind. Any particular creed lives only by its inherent force, independently of the founder, who retires and leaves nothing behind him but his name as a mere distinction from that of another religion. Every individual action is of little avail, if it does not proceed from the free and pure impulse of the spirit, which must revive in all succeeding generations. This is acknowledged in the Dabistán* by giving a very philo­sophic explanation of the expression prophetic seal, or “the last of prophets:” “That which is reared up by superior wisdom, renders the prophet's knowledge vain, and takes his color; that is to say: if one hundred thousand prophets like him­self realise in themselves the person of superior wisdom, they are possessors of the seal, the last prophets, because it is superior wisdom which is the seal, and they know themselves to be effaced, and superior wisdom existing.” Muhammed, although wise enough to connect himself with other prophets, his predecessors, pretended however to close the series, and to be the last of prophets, or “the seal of prophetism.”

Vain project! Immediately after him violent contests arose,

Thirty years after his death his family was dispos­sessed of the Khalifat. This passed to the Moa­viyahs, who, residing in Damascus, kept it during 90 years, and then ceded it to the Abbasides, who established their seat at Baghdad. The impulse and development of the Islám was overwhelm­ing during the one hundred and twenty years after the prophet's death; the mighty spirit of con­quest had arisen and was—I shall not say irresistible —but certainly badly resisted by the nations assailed. The Romans and Persians were then hard pressed themselves; on the West by the Goths, on the East by the Huns:—whilst the Greeks had sunk into general luxury and degeneracy; all feebly sustained the attack of hardy and active men, whose native habit of rapine and devastation was then exalted and sanctified by the name of religion, and continually invigorated by rich, splendid, and easy conquests. Thus, the khalifs, who were divided into two great lines, the before-mentioned Abbasides and the Fati­mites , extended their empire within 600 years after Muhammed, not only over the greatest part of Asia, but also along the western shore of Africa, Egypt, Spain, and Sicily; threatening the rest of Europe.

After the first labors, came rest, during which the genius of the Arabs turned to persevering study, deep speculation, and noble ambition: this was the scientific age of the Arabs, which began in the middle of our eighth century, and was most conspicuous in the old seats of learning, Babylonia, Syria, Egypt, Persia, and India. But in the numerous schools rose violent schisms and bloody contests between philosophy and religion. In the mean time the khalifs, by becoming worldly sovereigns, had lost their sacred character, and were in con­tradiction with the principle of their origin. The crusades of the Christians, by reviving their martial energy, maintained for some time the vacillating power of the Khalifs, but their vast and divided empire, assailed by Pagan nations, first in the West in 1211, and forty-seven years afterwards in the East, fell in 1258 of our era. Muhammedism however revived in the barbarous and energetic conquerors, Turks, Seljuks, Albanese, Kurds, Afri­cans, who were drawn into its circle; and science was again cultivated in Tunis, Bulgaria, and India.

I thought necessary to draw this rapid historical sketch, because within its outlines is contained the account of the Muhammedan sects as given in the text of the Dabistán.

Mohsan Fani himself lived in the age of general decline of Muhammedism. He exhibits in the sixth chapter the religion of his own nation: we may expect that he will be true and accurate. He divides the chapter into two sections: the first treats of the creed of the Sonnites; the second, of that of the Shiâhs. These are the two principal sects of the Muhammedans, but divided into a number of others, exceeding that of seventy-three, which Muhammed himself has announced, and consigned, all except one, to eternal damnation. This one was that of the sonnah “the traditional law,” or Jamaât, “the assembly.” The Dabistán explains this religion in a manner which, to Muhammedans, might appear sufficiently clear, in spite of digressions and want of order in the arrangement of the matter; but an European reader will desire more light than is afforded in the text, and feel himself perplexed to understand the meaning of frequent technical terms, and to connect the various notions dissemi­nated in an unequal narrative—now too diffuse, now too contracted. The following are the principal features of the long account of Muhammedism con­tained in the Dabistán.

Immediately after the promulgation of the Koran, which followed Muhammed's death, it became necessary to fix the meaning and to determine the bearing of its text. There was one theme in which all agreed: the grandeur, majesty, and beneficence of one supreme Being, the Creator, ruler, and pre­server of the world, which is the effulgence of his power. This is expressed in the Koran in such a strain of sublimity as may unite men of all religions in one feeling of admiration. This excellence is an inheritance of the most ancient Asiatic religion. God can but be always the object of boundless adoration, but never that of human reasoning. Hence the Muhammedan sects disagreed about the attributes of God.

The residence assigned, although inconsistently with pure spiritualism, to the supreme Being was the ninth heaven; an eighth sphere formed the intermediate story between the uppermost heaven and seven other spheres, distributed among so many prophets, in the same manner as, in the Desátir, the seven prophet kings of the Péshdadian dynasty were joined to the seven planets which they, each one in particular, venerated. Numberless angels, among whom four principal chiefs, fill the universe, and serve, in a thousand different ways, the supreme Lord of creation. We recognisee the notions of the ancient Persian religion in this, and in the whole system of divine government.

Another subject of violent and interminable dis­pute was God's action upon the nether world, prin­cipally upon mankind, or God's universal and eter­nal judgment, commonly called predestination. This subject was greatly agitated by the Matezalas, Kadarians, Jabarians, and others; they disputed

Although this subject appears to be connected with the Zoroastrian doctrine of the two principles, “good and bad,” yet it has never been agitated with so much violence in so many particular ways by any religionists as by the Muhammedans.

It has already been observed that, according to tradition, the ancient Persian philosophy was carried in the reign of Alexander to Greece, and from thence, after having been recast in the mould of Greek genius, returned in translations to its original country. We find it expressly stated in the Dabistán, that Plato and Aristotle were acknowledge as the founders of two principal schools of Muhammedan philosophers, to wit, those of the Hukma ashrákín, “Platonists,” and the Hukma mas­háyín , “Aristotelian, or Peripatetics.” To these add the Súfí's matsherâin, “orthodox Sufis,” who took care not to maintain any thing contrary to revela­tion, and exerted all their sagacity to reconcile passages of the Koran with sound philosophy. This was the particular profession of the Matkalmin, “scholastics.” These cede to no other philosophers the palm of mastering subtilties and acute distinc­tions. They had originally no other object but that of defending their creed against the heterodox philosophers. But they went further, and attacked the Peripatetics themselves with the intention to substitute another philosophy for theirs. It may be here sufficient to call to mind the works of three most celebrated men, Alfarabi, Ibn Sina (Avisenna), and Ghazali, whose works are reckoned to be the best specimens of Arabian and Muhammedan phi­losophy.* They contain three essential parts of orthodox dogmatism: 1. ontology, physiology, and psy­chology ; these together are called “the science of possible things;” 2. theology, that is, the discus­sion upon the existence, essence, and the attributes of God; as well as his relations with the world and man in particular; 3. the science of prophetism, or “revealed theology.” All these subjects are touched upon in the Dabistán, but in a very desultory manner. I shall add, that the author puts in evi­dence a sect called Akhbárín, or “dogmatic tradi­tionists,” who participate greatly in the doctrine of the Matkalmin, and in his opinion are the most approvable of all religious philosophers.

The contest for the khalifat between the family of Ali, Muhammed's son-in-law, and the three first khalifs, as well as the families of Moaviah and Abbas, a contest which began in the seventh cen­tury, and appears not yet terminated in our days— this contest, so much more violent as it was at once religious and political, occasioned the rise of a great number of sects. Much is found about Ali in the Dabistán, and even an article of the Koran,* published no where else relative to this great Musel­man, which his adversaries are said to have sup­pressed. The adherents of Ali are called Shiâhs.

The Persians, after being conquered by the Arabs, were compelled to adopt the Muhammedan religion, but they preserved a secret adherence to Magism, their ancient national creed, they were therefore easily disposed to join any sect, which was more or less contrary to the standard creed of their con­querors, and bore some slight conformity, or had the least connection with, their former religion. They became Shiâhs.

Among these sectaries originated the particular office of Imám, whose power partook of some­thing of a mysterious nature: the visible presence of an Imám was not required; he could, although concealed, be acknowledged, direct and command his believers; his name was Mahdi, “the direc­tor.” This opinion originated and was spread after the sudden disappearance of the seventh Imám, called Ismâil. His followers, the Ismâilahs, main­tained that he was not dead; that he lived concealed, and directed the faithful by messages, sent by him, and brought by his deputies; that he would one day reappear, give the victory to his adherents over all other sects, and unite the world in one religion. More than one Mahdi was subsequently proclaimed in different parts of Asia, Africa, and Europe—always expected, never appearing—so that it became a pro­verbial expression among the Arabs to denote tar­diness: “as slow as a Mahdi.” We recognize in this an ancient idea of Zoroaster: he too was to reappear in his sons at the end of 12,000 years; rather late, —but mankind never tire of hope and expectation.

A creed, like that of the Ismâilahs, because founded upon something mysterious, vague, and spiritual, was likely to branch out in most extraordinary con­ceptions and practices. The Dabistán abounds with curious details about them. Their doctrine bore the character of duplicity: one part was manifest, the other concealed. Their manner of making proselytes was not open; they acted in the dark. They first induced the neophyte to doubt, then to despise his own creed, and at last to exchange it for apparently more sublime truths, until, after having suf­ficiently emboldened his reasoning faculty, they enabled him to throw off every restraint of authority in religious matters. We see in the Dabistán,* the degrees through which an Ismâilah was to pass until he believed in no religion at all.

A most remarkable sect of the Ismâilahs was that of the Almutians, so called from Alamut, a hill-fort in the Persian province of Ghilan. This fort was the seat of Hassan, a self-created Imám, and became the capital of an empire, perhaps unique in the history of the world.* An Imám, called by Europeans “the old man of the mountain,” without armies, or treasures, commanded the country around, and ter­rified a great part of Asia by a band of devoted adherents, whom he sent about to propagate his reli­gion, and to execute his commands, which were frequently the murder of his enemies. The execu­tioners were unknown save at the fatal moment of action; mighty khalifs and sultans met with their murderers among their most intimate servants, or the guardians of their doors, in the midst of crowded public places or in the solitude of their secret bed-chambers. The Fedayis, so were they called, devoted themselves not only to the sacred service of their Imám, but hired their arm also for profane service to foreign chiefs, such as the Christian cru­saders. Among Europeans, these Ismâilahs were known under the name of Assassins, which well answered their infamous profession, but is better derived from Hashishah*, a sort of hemp, from which they extracted an intoxicating beverage for their frequent use. During one hundred and sixty years the Ismâilahs were the terror of the weak and the mighty, until they fell in one promiscuous slaughter, with the khalif of Islámism, under the swords of the ferocious in vaders who, issuing from the vast steppes of Tartary, fell upon the disordered empire of the Muhammedans.

The Ismâilahs, and other sects connected with them, professed a great attachment to an Imám, whose lineage was always traced up to Ali through a series of intermediate descendants; but it belonged to the Ali-Ilahians to deify Ali himself, or to believe his having been an incarnation of God.

Another sect, the Ulviahs, also devoted to Ali, maintain that he was united with the sun, that he is now the sun, and having also been the sun before, he was for some days only united to an ele­mental body. Both these sects reject the Koran.

Here terminates the review of the second volume of the English Dabistán.