MOHAMMEDAN DEVOTEES. 
209 
An admirable account is given of the Mohammedan 
sects in Sale’s Preliminary Discourse to his trans- 
lation of the Koran, in which he furnishes all the 
remarkable particulars of their tenets, these being 
often based upon metaphysical subtleties, that invest 
them with just sufficient light to render their darkness 
visible. “ Their scholastic divinity/’ * says Sale, 
is a mongrel science, consisting of logical, metaphy- 
sical, theological, and philosophical disquisitions, and 
built on principles and methods of reasoning very 
different from what are used by those who pass 
among the Mohammedans themselves for the sounder 
divines or more able philosophers.” 
In Hindostan it is certain that many of the Mo- 
hammedan devotees have mixed up the monstrous 
abominations of Brahminical theology with the scarce- 
ly more consistent doctrines of their own divines ; and 
nothing can well exceed the fanaticism which they 
display when they have reached, as they imagine, the 
climax of spirituality. Bigotry tends everywhere to 
produce the same results ; and he who witnesses the 
Mohammedan fakeer practising such austerities as 
would excite the envy of the sternest Trappist, whose 
life of severe mortification is comparatively a pro- 
longed enjoyment, cannot help feeling a momentary 
humiliation at the pitiful weakness of humanity. 
The Mohammedans of India are not generally very 
rigid in the performance of their religious, much less 
of their moral duties ; but in proportion as the mass is 
lax, the few who really devote their lives to vagrant 
devotion or solitary asceticism are strict to the letter 
* Preliminary Discourse, page 207. 
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