ntal anarchy rather than of
material chaos. For violence, as always, had produced counter-violence,
and it was thus that while the Karmathites were rushing to their own
destruction through a series of bloody conflicts, another branch of the
Ismailis were quietly reorganizing their forces more in conformity with
the original method of their founder. These were the Fatimites,
so-called from their professed belief that the doctrine of the Prophet
had descended from Ali, husband of Fatima, Mohammed's daughter. Whilst
less extreme than the Karmathites, or than their predecessor Abdullah
ibn Maymun, the Fatimites, according to the historian Makrizi,
adopted the method of instilling doubts into the minds of believers and
aimed at the substitution of a natural for a revealed religion. Indeed,
after the establishment of their power in Egypt, it is difficult to
distinguish any appreciable degree of difference in the character of
their teaching from the anarchic code of Abdullah and his more violent
exponent Karmath.

The Fatimites

The founder of the Fatimite dynasty of the Khalifas was one Ubeidallah,
known as the Mahdi, accused of Jewish ancestry by his adversaries the
Abbasides, who declared--apparently without truth--that he was the son
or grandson of Ahmed, son of Adbullah ibn Maymun, by a Jewess. Under
the fourth Fatimite Khalifa Egypt fell into the power of the dynasty,
and, before long, bi-weekly assemblages of both men and women known as
"societies of wisdom" were instituted in Cairo. In 1004 these acquired a
greater importance by the establishment of the Dar ul Hikmat, or the
House of Knowledge, by the sixth Khalifa Hakim, who was raised to a
deity after his death and is worshipped to this day by the Druses. Under
the direction of the Dar ul Hikmat or Grand Lodge of Cairo, the
Fatimites continued the plan of Abdullah ibn Maymun's secret society
with the addition of two more degrees, making nine in all. Their method
of enlisting proselytes and system of initiation--which, as Claudio
Jannet points out, "are absolutely those which Weishaupt, the founder of
the _Illuminati_, prescribed to the 'Insinuating Brothers'"[129]--were
transcribed by the fourteenth-century historian Nowairi in a description
that may be briefly summarized thus[130]:

The proselytes were broadly divided into two classes, the learned and
the ignorant. The Dai was to agree with the former, applauding his
wisdom, and to impress the latter with h