B703 <=> B705 [BTG XXXVIII Religion, p. 704]

“Now as regards the fourth great religion existing there now, which arose several centuries after the Christian religion, and was founded on the teaching of the full-of-hope Saint Mohammed, this religion at first spread there widely: and it might perhaps have become eventually a ‘hearth of hope and reconciliation’ for them all if these strange beings had not stirred this also into a hotchpotch.

“On the one hand its followers also mixed into it something from the fantastic theory of the Babylonian dualists, but, on the other hand, the ‘elders of the church’ of this religion, called in this case ‘Sheiks-Islamists,’ themselves invented and added to it many things about the blessings of the notorious ‘paradise,’ which as it were, existed ‘in the other world,’ such blessings as perhaps could never even have entered the head of the chief Governor of Purgatory, His All-Quarters-Maintainer the Archcherub Helkgematios, even if he were deliberately to try to imagine them.

“Although the followers of this religion also, from the very first, split into many different ‘groups’ and ‘subgroups’ – which, by the way, continue there even up till now – nevertheless they all subscribe to one or another of its two independent, as they are called, ‘schools,’ which were formed at the very beginning of its arising.

“These two schools of the Mohammedan religion are called there the ‘Sunnite’ and the ‘Shiite.’

“It is very interesting to note that the psychic hatred of each other formed in the psyche of the beings who belong to these two independent schools of one and the same religion has, on account of their frequent clashes, now been transformed completely into an organic hate.