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Updated: May 3, 2025
It is only in the last few years that the general political distress of Islam has inclined the estranged relatives towards reconciliation. Besides the veneration of the Alids, orthodox Islam has adopted another Shiitic element, the expectation of the Mahdi, which we have just mentioned.
In our own time, you can hear Qoraishites, and even Alids, warmly defend the claims of the Turkish sultans to the Khalifate, as they regard these as the only Moslim princes capable of championing the threatened rights of Islam. Even the sultans of Stambul could not think of restoring the authority of the Khalif over the whole Mohammedan world.
Yet the Alids never succeeded in accomplishing anything against the dynasties of the Omayyads, the Abbasids, and the Ottomans, except in a few cases of transitory importance only. The Fatimite dynasty, of rather doubtful descent, which ruled a part of Northern Africa and Egypt in the tenth century A.D., was completely suppressed after some two and a half centuries.
The means which served the Alids for the establishment only of an invisible dynasty of princes who died as martyrs, enabled the descendants of Mohammed's uncle Abbas to overthrow the Omayyads, and to found their own Khalifate at Bagdad, shining with the brilliance of an Eastern despotism.
The reaction of the non-Arabian converts against the suppression of their own culture by the Arabian conquerors found support in the opposition parties, above all with the Shi'ah. The Abbasids, cleverer politicians than the notoriously unskillful Alids, made use of the Alid propaganda to secure the booty to themselves at the right moment.
Its voidness would sooner have been realized, if lack of energy had not prevented the later Abbasids from trying to recover the lost power by the sword, or if amongst their rivals who could also boast of a popular tradition e.g., the Omayyads, or still more the Alids a political genius had succeeded in forming a powerful opposition.
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