76 Preface إِنَّ هٰذَا القُرآنَ يَقُصُّ عَلىٰ بَني إِسرائيلَ أَكثَرَ الَّذي هُم فيهِ يَختَلِفونَYusuf AliVerily this Qur-ān doth explain to the Children of Israel most of the matters in which they disagree.1The Jews had numerous sects. Some were altogether out of the pale, e.g., the Samaritans, who had a separate Tawrah of their own: they hated the other J ews and were hated by them. But even in the orthodox body, there were several sects, of which the following may be mentioned: (1) the Pharisees, who were literalists, formalists, and fatalists, and had a large body of traditional literature, with which they overlaid the Law of Moses; (2) the Sadducees, who were rationalists, and seemed to have doubted the doctrine of the Resurrection or of a Hereafter; (3) the Essenes, who practised a sort of Communism and Asceticism and prohibited marriage. About many of their doctrines they had bitter disputes, which were settled by the Qur-ān, which supplemented and perfected the Law of Moses. It also explained clearly the attributes of God and the nature of Revelation, and the doctrine of the Hereafter.