combating the arguments of the mutakallims, makes little difference between the Mu'tazilites and the others. They are only, to him, another variety of scholastic theologian, with a rather better idea, perhaps, of logic and argument. He considered, as we shall find later, all the mutakallims as sadly to seek in such matters. Since then, and into quite modern times, there have been sporadic cases of theologians called Mu'tazilites by themselves or others. Practically, they have been scholastics of eccentric views. Finally, the use of this name for themselves by the present-day broad school Muslims of India is absolutely unhistorical and highly misleading.

We turn now to suggest, rather than to trace, some of the non-theological consequences of the preceding theology.

Increasingly, from this time on, it is not heresy which has to be met so much as simple unbelief, more or less frank. It is evident that the heretics of the earlier period are now dividing in two directions, one part inclining toward milder forms of heresy and the other toward doubt in the largest sense, passing over to Aristotelian + neo-Platonic philosophy, and thence dividing into materialists, deists, and theists. Thus we have seen earlier the workings of al-Farabi and of the Ikhwan as safa. The teachings of the latter pass on to the Isma'ilians who developed them in the mountain fortresses, the centres of their power, scattered from Persia to Syria. These were otherwise called Assassins; otherwise Batinites in the narrower sense—in the broader that term meant only those who found under the letter of the Qur'an a

hidden, esoteric meaning; otherwise Ta'limites or claimers of a ta'lim, a secret teaching by a divinely instructed Imam, and with them we shall have much to do later. It is sufficient here to notice how the peaceful and rather watery philosophy of the "Sincere. Brethren" was transmuted through ambition and fanaticism into belligerent politics at the hands and daggers of these fierce sectaries. Into this period, too, fall some well-known names of dubious and more than dubious orthodoxy. Al-Beruni (d. 440) even at the court of Mahmud of Ghazna managed to keep his footing and his head. Yet it may be doubted how far he was a Karramite or even a Muslim. He was certainly the first scientific student of India and Indica and of chronology and calendars, a man whose attainments and results show that our so-called modern methods are as old as genius. On religion, he maintained a prudent silence, but earned the favor of Mahmud by an unsparing exposure of the weakness in the Fatimid genealogy. In this sketch he has a place as a man of science who went his own way without treading on the religious toes of other people.

His contemporary Ibn Sina (d. 428), for us Avicenna, was of a different nature, and his lines were cast in different places. He was a wanderer through the courts of northern Persia. The orthodox and stringent Mahmud he carefully avoided; the Buwayhids and those of their ilk took such heresies as his more easily. Endowed with a gigantic memory and an insatiable intellectual appetite, he was the encyclopaedist of his age, and his scientific work, and especially that in medicine, went further than anything