Compare Asoka on toleration; 'The sects of other people all deserve reverence for one reason or another' (Rock Edict xii; V.A.
Smith, _Asoka_, 2nd edition (1909), p.

170).
11.

Mir Salamat Ali is a stanch Sunni, the sect of Osman; and they are always at daggers drawn with the Shias, or the sect of Ali.

He alludes to the Shias when he says that one of the seventy-two sects is always ready to take in the whole of the other seventy-one.
Muhammad, according to the traditions, was one day heard to say, 'The time will come when my followers will he divided into seventy-three sects; all of them will assuredly go to hell save one.' Every one of the seventy-three sects believes itself to be the one happily excepted by their prophet, and predestined to paradise.

I am sometimes disposed to think Muhammad was self-deluded, however difficult it might be to account for so much 'method in his madness'.
It is difficult to conceive a man placed in such circumstances with more amiable dispositions or with juster views of the rights and duties of men in all their relations with each other, than are exhibited by him on almost all occasions, save where the question of _faith_ in his divine mission was concerned.
A very interesting and useful book might be made out of the history of those men, more or less mad, by whom multitudes of mankind have been led and perhaps governed; and a philosophical analysis of the points on which they were really mad and really sane, would show many of them to have been fit subjects for a madhouse during the whole career of their glory.