Saint Muhammad

 

       "The fourth great religion existing there today arose several centuries after the Christian religion and was founded on the teaching of the 'full-of-hope' Saint Muhammad; at first it spread there widely, and might eventually have become a 'hearth of hope and reconciliation' for all of them if these strange beings had not also stirred this up into a 'hodge-podge.'

 

     "On the one hand, its followers mixed into it some of the fantastic theories of the Babylonian dualists, and on the other, the 'Fathers of the Church' of this religion, in this case called 'Islamic sheikhs,' invented and added to it many things about the blessings of that famous Paradise supposedly existing in the 'other world'--blessings such as could never have entered the head of the chief governor of Purgatory, His All-Quarters Maintainer the Arch-Cherub Helkgematius, even if he had deliberately tried to imagine them.

 

     "Although the followers of this religion also split up, from the very first, into many different 'sects' and 'sub-sects'--which, by the way, continue to exist even till now--they nevertheless all subscribe to one or the other of its two independent 'schools,' as they are called, which were formed at the time of its arising.

 

     "These two schools of the Islamic religion are called there the 'Sunnite' and the 'Shi'ite.'

  

 

Beelzebub's Tales To His Grandson, by G. I. Gurdjieff, page 644-645.

 

Viking Arkana Edition, 1992.

 

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