One Babek, a man of great energy, appeared in 816 of our era as a leader in religion, in practical life, and in management of people, preaching indifference of action and community of property. Through various mystic doctrines most cunningly compounded with incitements to robbery and lust and dishonor, he rallied multitudes to his standard, and during twenty whole years he visited many parts of the Empire with ruin and slaughter. He had fixed himself firmly in those strong mountain places west and south of the Caspian, and thence scattered terror in various directions through sudden attacks which were ever attended by terrible bloodshed, till at last his forces were defeated in great part and driven westward.
In 835 Motassim, the Kalif, sent Afshin, one of the best among all his Turk generals, to seize this arch enemy and destroyer at all costs. Only after two years of most desperate fighting and many deceitful devices, were Babek’s strong places all taken and his own person captured. Thousands of women and children were taken with him, and restored to their families; and all the treasures which during two decades had been gathered by this murderous deceiver fell now to the Turk general, Afshin.
Babek had defeated six famous generals of Islam and slain, as some state, a million of people during twenty years of rebellion. One of his ten executioners declared that he alone had taken the lives of twenty thousand men; so merciless was the struggle between the partisans of the Kalifat and the advocates of freedom and equality.
The prisoner was brought by his captor to Samira in chains and confined there. Motassim went in disguise to the prison to look at this demon of Khorassan, this “Shaitan” (Satan), as they called him. When the Kalif had gazed at Babek sufficiently the captive was exhibited through the city as a spectacle, and brought at last to the palace where Motassim, surrounded by his warriors, commanded Babek’s own executioner to cut off the arms and legs of his master, and then plunge a knife into his body. The executioner obeyed, Babek meanwhile smiling as if to prove his own character, and the correctness of his surname, “Khurremi” (The Joyous). The severed head was exhibited in the [[204]]cities of Khorassan, and the body impaled near the palace of the Kalif.
In the ninth century, and contemporaneous with these horrors, there lived in Southern Persia, at Ahwas, a certain Abdallah, whose father, Maimun Kaddah, and grandfather, Daisan the Dualist, had taught him Persian politics and religion. This Abdallah conceived a broad system, and planned a great project to overturn Arab rule in his country and reëstablish the ancient faith and Empire of Persia. This involved complete change in the structure of Islam, and all its present ideals. He could not declare open war against the accepted religion and dynasty, since all the military power was at their command; hence he decided to undermine them in secret.
From Ahwas he went to Bussorah and later to Syria where he settled at Salemiya, whence his teachings were spread by Ahmed, his son, by two sons of that Ahmed, and also by his Dayis, men who performed each of them all the various duties of spy, secret agent, and apostle. The most active of those Dayis was Hussein of Ahwas, who, in the province of which Kufa was the capital, instructed many agents in the secrets of revolt and in perversion of the teachings of Islam. Among these agents the most noted was one famous later as Karmath. This man delayed not in showing his character and principles “through torrents of blood, and destruction of cities.” Crowds of men rallied to his war cry.
The Karmathites declared that nothing was forbidden, everything was a matter of indifference, justified by the fact of its existence, hence should receive neither punishment nor reward. The commands of Mohammed were pronounced parables disguising political maxims and injunctions. They differed from Abdallah’s disciples in that they began action immediately, and, in most cases, openly, while the others were preparing for a new throne in Islam to be occupied by a man of their own, a true and zealous co-believer.
The Karmathite outbreak was more terrible, continuous, and enduring than that begun twenty years earlier by Babek, and far more dangerous. The Karmathites fought savage battles in the East and the West, in Irak and Syria. They plundered caravans and destroyed what they found with tiger-like fury unless it was valuable and they could bear it away with them. They attacked [[205]]the holy city of Mecca and captured it through desperate fighting. More than thirty thousand true Moslems were slain while defending the temple. The sacred well, Zemzem, was polluted by corpses hurled into it by people to whom nothing whatever was sacred. The temple was fired, and the black, holy stone of the Kaaba, which in Abraham’s day had come down from heaven into Mecca, was borne off to be ransomed for fifty thousand gold coins two and twenty years later.
This Karmathite madness, after raging at intervals for a century and torturing most parts of Islam, was extinguished in bloodshed. The career of the Karmathites proved the wickedness and folly of their method. Its turn came now to the system of Abdallah.
Ismailian teaching had spread through the Empire of Mohammed and reached even Southern Arabia. About 892 a certain Mohammed Alhabib, who claimed his descent from Ismail, son of Jaffar es Sadik, sent one Abu Abdallah to the north coast of Africa. Abu Abdallah impressed the Berber tribes greatly, and his success was so enormous that they drove out the Aglabid dynasty then ruling them. He roused expectations to the highest degree by announcing a Mahdi, or infallible guide for believers. He then summoned in Obeidallah, a son of that Mohammed Alhabib, who had sent him to Africa.