where he taught young boys. On one occasion, as he was ascending toward the mountain fortresses on a donkey, the people of Iqminas (1) tried to seize the animal; only after great effort did they let him go. In the end, his affairs reached the point that he ruled several castles.

One day he exhorted his followers, saying, “You must be pure with one another; let none of you withhold from his brother anything that is his.” Thereupon one man took another’s daughter and another took his companion’s sister in fornication. They called themselves “the Pure Ones.” Sinān later summoned them and put many of them to death.

Ibn al-ʿAdīm says: He entrenched himself in the forts, and the people submitted to him. ʿAlī ibn al-Hawwārī informed me that Ṣalāḥ al-Dīn sent an envoy to threaten Sinān. Sinān said to the envoy, “I shall show you the men with whom I confront him.” He then signaled to a group of his followers to hurl themselves from the top of the fortress; they threw themselves down and perished.

He continues: I was told that he declared lawful for them intercourse with their own mothers, sisters, and daughters, and that he abolished the fast of Ramadan.

He adds: I read in the handwriting of Abū Ghālib ibn al-Ḥuṣayn that in Muḥarram of the year 589 AH Sinān, the leader of the daʿwa, died in the fortress of al-Kahf. He was a formidable man—subtle in intrigue, lofty in ambition, prodigious in trickery, possessed of a great capacity to mislead, to captivate hearts, to conceal secrets, and to employ the rabble and the heedless in his corrupt designs.

His origin was in the villages of Basra. He served the Ismaʿili leaders at Alamut, trained himself in the sciences of the philosophers, read widely in books of dialectic and sophistry, the Epistles of the Brethren of Purity, and the seductive, persuasive—though not demonstrative—philosophy. In Syria he built fortresses, seized others, made their approaches rugged, and mankind left him in peace while kings feared him on account of his followers’ dagger assaults. His authority lasted for a little over thirty years.

And indeed he had dispatched to him