and others—ignorant people who knew of the religion of Islam only what Allah willed. He taught them prayer, zakāh, fasting, and other prescribed duties of Islam. He considered it permissible to perform various deceptive tricks before them in order to call them to the religion. He would go to graveyards and bury people there, having secretly arranged with them to speak to him when he called them and to testify to whatever he requested. For example, they would testify that he was the Mahdī foretold by the Messenger of Allah, may Allah bless him and grant him peace, whose name would match the Messenger’s name and whose father’s name would match that of the Messenger’s father; that he would fill the earth with equity and justice just as it had been filled with oppression and injustice; and that whoever followed him would prosper, while whoever opposed him would lose, and other such statements.

Once those Berbers believed that the dead spoke to him and testified on his behalf in this way, their faith in him and obedience to his commands grew stronger. He would then collapse the graves upon those buried inside, so that they would die and not expose his deception. He believed that it was permissible to shed their blood even apart from this, and that he was entitled to display this falsehood so that those ignorant people would support and follow him.

Those in the Maghreb and the East who recorded accounts of his life related various stories of this kind about him. They are well known among those familiar with his circumstances.

Among the stories they relate about him is that he secretly arranged with a man to feign madness. This man was a scholar who had memorized the Quran, hadith, and jurisprudence. He presented himself as mad, and people knew him only as a madman. Then one morning he appeared perfectly sane, reciting the Quran, hadith, and jurisprudence. He claimed that he had learned all this in a dream and had been cured of what had afflicted him