ABSTRACT
Their Number. Muḥammad said, ‘My people will be divided into seventy-three sects, of which only one will be saved.’ The early Muslim heresiologists, ‘Abdalqahir al-Baghdadi and Shahrastani, to quote no others, were at very great pains to make up, in their enumeration of the sects sprung from Islām, the traditional number of seventy-two. They thought they could fall back on the opinions and systems lauded in the philosophico-theological schools, Mu‘tazilites, Qadarites, Murjites, and others, and by means of this arithmetic had no difficulty in counting twenty Mu‘tazilite and ten Murjite sects. It was sufficient for them to detail the divers solutions that these Islāmic logicians claim to have furnished to the problems of Qorānic theodicy: the eternal apple of discord between the Islāmic schoolmen, the question of their divine essence and attributes (v. p. 57), then that of the substance and the accidents in relation to the creative action of Allah ; the question of free-will and predestination; the nature and definition of faith, the anthropomorphisms of the Qorān, etc.
