A literary history of Persia

1 a'396 THE ISMAfli SECTtheir oppressors, and that " the Old Man of the Mountain "xhimself was not so black as it is the custom to paint him. 1Let us return, however, to 'Abdu'llah b.Mayrnunal-Qaddih, to whom is generally ascribed the origin of theIsma'fH power and organisation and the real parentage of theFatimid Caliphs of Egypt and the West ;and let us take theaccount of him given in the Fihrist in preference to theassertions of more modern and less accurate writers. He was,according to this work, a native of Ahwaz ;and his fatherMaymun the Oculist was the founder of the Maymuniyyasect a branch of the Khattabiyya, which belonged to theGhul&t or Extreme bhIMtes, teaching that the Imams, and inparticular the sixth Imam Ja'far as-Sadiq, the father of Isma'il,were Divine incarnations. 2 'Abdu'llah claimed to be aProphet, and performed prodigies which his followers regardedas miracles, pretending to traverse the earth in the twinklingof an eye and thus to obtain knowledge of things happeningat a distance ;an achievement really effected, as the author otthe Fihrist asserts, by means of carrier-pigeons despatched byhis confederates.3 From his native village he transferred hisresidence after a time to 'Askar Mukram, whence he wascompelled to flee in succession to Sabat Abf Nuh, Bas.ra, andfinally Salamiyya near Hims (Emessa) in Syria. Therejiebought land, and thence he sept his dfr{*I'nt-o f^ r rrmnt ryabout Kufa, where his doctrines were espoused by a certainHamdan b. al-Ash'ath, of Quss Bahrdm, nicknamed armaton account of his short body and legs,who became one of the1See my remarks on the " Ethics of Assassination," on pp. 371-3 of the(second volume of The Episode of the Bab (Cambridge, 1891).See Shahristani's J^tjiht'iMilgjjr 136-138-3 Cf. de Goeje's Carmathes, p. 23. A similar use was made of carrierpigeonsby Rashidu'd-Din Sinan, one of the Grand Masters of the SyrianAssassins in the twelfth century of our era. See Stanilas Guyard'scharming monograph in the Journal Asiatique for 1877, pp. 39 and 41 ofthe tirage-a-part.The employment of carrier-pigeons was apparentlycommon in Persia in Samanid times (tenth century). See my translationof the Chahtir Maqala, pp. 29-30 of the tirage-a-part.