Bahraini history. Qarmatian, Shi’ite and Other Dynasties (800-1281). Tradition reports that the Prophet Muhammad said, "The Israelites have been divided into seventy-one or seventy-two sects, and so have the Christians, but my community shall be divided into seventythree." True or false, by the ninth century opposing sects had formed, with the same fissiparous consequences that are observable in sixteenth century Europe, where also they took on a political form. A basic division was between Sunni and Shi'ite, between traditionalists and believers in the prescriptive right of the descendants of Ali to the caliphate. A new major division appeared in 827 when a rigid puritanical Mu'tazilite judge asserted that the Qur'an had been created, as opposed to the orthodox belief that it is the identical representation of a celestial original. Shortly thereafter Baghdad proclaimed the former position be law, and the caliph al-Ma'mun instituted an inquistion. In the mid-tenth century the orthodox creed was reestablished in Baghdad, and scholastic theology developed. Its greatest exponent was Abu Hamid al-Ghazzali, a professor at Nizamiyah college. To him is owed the development of Sufism and the mystical practices of the Islamic fraternities, similar in many respects to Christian religious orders. These fraternities contributed significantly to the spread of Islam beyond its Middle Eastern home as far as the Atlantic and sub-Saharan Africa and to Malaysia and China. In opposition to this orthodoxy the Ismailis, who today claim the Agha Khan as their leader, spread their esoteric doctrines by means of underground missionaries. From the Ismailis in the mid-ninth century Hamdan Qarmat, an Iraqi peasant, organized a secret society that preached a form of communism and set up an independent state in the Persian Gulf. From this society were derived the doctrines that formed the seed of the Fatimid movement in North Africa. In the eleventh century the Qarmatian movement engendered the Nusayris in northern Syria, while the Fatimids were the progenitors of the Druse in Lebanon and later the neo-Ismailis or Assassins, of Alamut and Syria, both borrowing greatly from Christianity. The Ithna'ashari Shi'ites in Persia and the Zaydites of Yemen and Tunisia represent a middle course, nearer to the Sunni doctrine, and more tolerant. - (An Illustrated History of Islam by G.S.P. FREEMAN-GRENVILLE and STUART CHRISTOPHER MUNRO-HAY) See less