(Ijmâʿ) of every period should be based on that of the "pious ancestors." They therefore tested every dogma and practice by the words and deeds of the Prophet, his contemporaries, and the leaders of the Community in the first decades after Mohammed's death. In their eyes the Church of later days had degenerated; and they declined to consider the agreement of its doctors as justifying the penetration into Islâm of ideas and usages of foreign origin. The cult of saints was rejected by them as altogether contradictory to the Qorân and the genuine tradition. These protestants of Islâm may be compared to those of Christianity also in this respect,—that they accepted the results of the evolution and assimilation of the first three centuries of Islâm, but rejected later additions as abuse and corruption. When on the verge of our nineteenth century, they tried, as true Moslims, to force by material means their religious conceptions on others, they were combated as heretics by the authorities of catholic Islâm. Central and Western Arabia formed the battlefield on which these zealots, called Wahhâbites after their leader, were defeated by Mohammed Ali, the first Khedive, and his Egyptian army. Since they have given up their efforts at violent reconstitution of what they consider to be the original Islâm, they are left alone, and their ideas have found adherents far outside Arabia, e. g., in British India and in Northern and Central Africa.
