Page:Christiaan Snouck Hurgronje - Mohammedanism (1916).djvu/96

 Rh declared to be witnesses to the Faith as well as those who were slain in battle against the enemies of God,—traditions in which the real and greater holy war was described as the struggle against evil passions. The necessity of such a mitigating reaction, the spirit in which the chapters on holy war of Mohammedan lawbooks are conceived, and the galvanizing power which down to our own day is contained in a call to arms in the name of Allah, all this shows that in the beginning of Islâm the love of battle had been instigated at the expense of everything else.

The institution of the Khalifate had hardly been agreed upon when the question of who should occupy it became the subject of violent dissension. The first four khalîfs, whose reigns occupied the first thirty years after Mohammed’s death, were Qoraishites, tribesmen of the Prophet, and moreover men who had been his intimate friends. The sacred tradition relates a saying of Mohammed: "The imâms are from Qoraish," intended to confine the Khalifate to men from that tribe. History, however, shows that this edict was forged to give the stamp of legality to the results of a long political struggle. For at Mohammed’s death the Medinese began fiercely contesting the claims of the Qoraishites; and during the reign of Alî, the fourth Khalîf, the Khârijites rebelled, demanding, as democratic rigorists, the free election of khalîfs without restriction to the tribe of Qoraish or to any other