ecret society with carefully graduated stages
of initiation, used the doctrines of all religions and sects as weapons
in the propaganda, and sent missionaries throughout the provinces of
Islam to increase the numbers of the initiates and pave the way for the
great revolution. We see their partial success in the ravages of the
Karmathians, who were the true parents of the Fatimites. The leaders and
chief missionaries had really nothing in common with Mahometanism. Among
themselves they were frankly atheists. Their objects were political, and
they used religion in any form, and adapted it in all modes, to secure
proselytes, to whom they imparted only so much of their doctrine as they
were able to bear. These men were furnished with "an armory of
proselytism" as perfect, perhaps, as any known to history: they had
appeals to enthusiasm, and arguments for the reason, and "fuel for the
fiercest passions of the people and times in which they moved." Their
real aim was not religious or constructive, but pure nihilism. They used
the claim of the family of Ali, not because they believed in any divine
right or any caliphate, but because some flag had to be flourished in
order to rouse the people.

One of these missionaries, disguised as a merchant, journeyed back to
Barbary in 893, with some Berber pilgrims who had performed the sacred
ceremonies at Mecca. He was welcomed by the great tribe of the Kitama,
and rapidly acquired an extraordinary influence over the Berbers--a race
prone to superstition, and easily impressed by the mysterious rites of
initiation and the emotional doctrines of the propagandist, the wrongs
of the prophetic house, and the approaching triumph of the Mahdi.
Barbary had never been much attached to the caliphate, and for a century
it had been practically independent under the Aglabite dynasty, the
barbarous excesses of whose later sovereigns had alienated their
subjects. Alides, moreover, had established themselves, in the dynasty
of the Idrisides, in Morocco since the end of the eighth century. The
land was in every respect ripe for revolution, and the success of
Abu-Abdallah esh-Shii, the new missionary, was extraordinarily rapid. In
a few years he had a following of two hundred thousand armed men, and
after a series of battles he drove Ziyadat-Allah, the last Aglabite
prince, out of the country in 908. The missionary then proclaimed the
imam Obeid-Allah as the true caliph and spiritual head of Islam. Whethe