and allied himself with the ‘Ubaydid al-Mustansir and began mustering troops for Iraq. They instituted the distinctive practices of the Rāfidah in Syria and Iraq, as they had already done in Egypt, and killed groups of Muslim scholars and shaykhs, just as their predecessors had previously killed groups of them in the Maghreb. From the pulpits they proclaimed the call:

“Come to the best of deeds.”

This continued until the Seljuk Turks, who were rulers of the Muslims, came, defeated them, and drove them back to Egypt. Among the last of these rulers was “the martyr Nūr al-Dīn Mahmūd,” who conquered most of Syria and rescued it from Christian hands. He then sent his army to Egypt when its people appealed to him for help against the Franks. The army entered Egypt repeatedly with Saladin, who conquered it, ended the missionary call of the ‘Ubaydids—the esotericist Qarmatians—and established the laws of Islam there. From that time onward, people who openly professed Islam came to live there.

During their rule, anyone living in Egypt feared being killed for narrating a hadith from the Messenger of Allah, may Allah bless him and grant him peace. This was related by Ibrāhīm ibn Sa‘d al-Habbāl, the associate of ‘Abd al-Ghanī ibn Sa‘īd, who refrained from narrating hadith for fear that they would kill him. They used to proclaim between the two palaces:

“Whoever curses and reviles will receive a dinar and an irdabb (a measure of grain).”

The al-Azhar Mosque contained several enclosed sections where the Companions were cursed; indeed, statements of outright unbelief were uttered there. They also had a school near the “shrine” they had built and attributed to al-Husayn, although, by scholarly agreement, neither al-Husayn nor any part of his remains is there. In their school they did not teach the Islamic sciences, but rather logic, natural philosophy, metaphysics, and similar doctrines of the philosophers. They built observatories on