this, and everyone
had agreed to conform to it, he ordered the Dais to assemble all
the women on a certain night so that they should mingle
promiscuously with all the men. This, he said, was perfection and
the last degree of friendship and fraternal union. Often a husband
led his wife and presented her himself to one of his brothers when
that gave him pleasure. When he (Karmath) saw that he had become
absolute master of their minds, had assured himself of their
obedience, and found out the degree of their intelligence and
discernment, he began to lead them quite astray. He put before them
arguments borrowed from the doctrines of the Dualists. They fell in
easily with all that he proposed, and then he took away from them
all religion and released them from all those duties of piety,
devotion, and the fear of God that he prescribed for them in the
beginning. He permitted them pillage, and every sort of immoral
licence, and taught them to throw off the yoke of prayer, fasting,
and other precepts. He taught them that they were held by no
obligations, and that they could pillage the goods and shed the
blood of their adversaries with impunity, that the knowledge of the
master of truth to whom he had called them took the place of
everything else, and that with this knowledge they need no longer
fear sin or punishment.

As the result of these teachings the Karmathites rapidly became a band
of brigands, pillaging and massacring all those who opposed them and
spreading terror throughout all the surrounding districts.

Peaceful fraternity was thus turned into a wild lust for conquest; the
Karmathites succeeded in dominating a great part of Arabia and the mouth
of the Euphrates, and in A.D. 920 extended their ravages westwards. They
took possession of the holy city of Mecca, in the defence of which
30,000 Moslems fell. "For a whole century," says von Hammer, "the
pernicious doctrines of Karmath raged with fire and sword in the very
bosom of Islamism, until the widespread conflagration was extinguished
in blood."

But in proclaiming themselves revolutionaries the Karmathites had
departed from the plan laid down by the originator of their creed,
Abdullah ibn Maymun, which had consisted not in acts of open violence
but in a secret doctrine which should lead to the gradual undermining of
all religious faith and a condition of me