A literary history of Persia

221like Tamim), and the heroes of Qddisiyyaand other hardfoughtfields ;with whom were joinedthe puritans of Isldm," the people of fasting and prayer" as Shahristanf calls them,who saw the unity of the Faith imperilled by the ambition of/lidividuals, and its interests subordinated to those of a cliquejAlike in their indomitable courage, their fierce fanaticism, andtheir refusal to acknowledge allegiance save to God, theseShurdty or " Sellers " of their lives for heavenly reward (asthey called themselves, in allusion to Qur'an ii, 203) l remindus not only of the Wahhdbfs of the late eighteenth and earlynineteenth centuries, but of the Scottish Covenanters and theEnglish Puritans, and many a Kharijite poem 2 is couched inwords which, mutatis mutandis, might have served Balfour ofBurleigh.TQ_this_dem9c,rayic parfy th ? ari'storrjiPY yf TsMtr^ representedby ( Ali and the Hashimite faction of Quraysh, was onlyin degree less distasteful than the aristocracy of heathenesse,represented by Mu'awiya and the Umayyads ;and thoughthey fought on 'All's side at the Battle of SifKn, their alliance,as has been already observed, was by no means an unmixedadvantage. For after the fiasco resulting from the arbitrationon which they themselves had insisted, they came to 'Allto God alone. What ailedsaying, 3 "Arbitration belongsthee that thou madest men arbiters?" "I never acquiescedin the matter of this arbitration," replied 'All ;wished for it,and I told you that it was a stratagem"it was ye whoon thepart of the Syrians, and bade you fight your foes, but yerefused aught save arbitration, and overrode my judgment.1 And also Qur'an, ix, 112. See Briinnow (op. laud.), p. 29.The richest collection of such poems is contained in the Kdmil ofal-Mubarrad (composed in the ninth century of our era, edited by Wright,1864-1882), chaps, xlix, li, liv. A selection of them is contained inNoldeke's Delectus Vet. Carm. Arab. (Berlin, 1890), pp. 88-94. See alsovon Kremer's Culturgeschichte, vol. ii, pp. 360-362.3 I follow the account given by al-Fakhri (ed. Ahlvvardt), pp. 114et seqq.