The suppression of Nizar involved a definite separation between the Fatimids of Cairo and their court on the one side and the Asiatic adherents of Nizar’s Imamate on the other, and so from 488 onwards the Assassins formed a distinct sect, as much opposed to the Fatimids and their followers as to the orthodox Muslims. The founder, Hasan-i-Sabbah, had now fully organised that sect on lines which were in general outline imitated from the traditional system of the Ismaʿilians, but differed in detail. There were grades and successive stages of initiation, and the real beliefs of the higher grades were of the same pantheistic-agnostic type as in the Ismaʿilian body, and similarly the members of those upper grades were keen students of the science and philosophy which had been derived from Hellenistic tradition. When the headquarters of the sect at Alamut were finally taken they were found to contain a vast library as well as an observatory and a collection of scientific instruments. In fact we may say with confidence that the Assassins represent the highest level of scholarship and research in contemporary Asiatic Islam, if we can indeed regard them as within the Islamic fold; an island of culture and learning in the midst of reactionary orthodoxy and actual ignorance, the result of the submerging of Asiatic Islam beneath the flood of Turkish invasion. Far away in the west a purer culture was beginning to dawn in Muslim Spain, but in Asia philosophy and science were being rapidly obscured by the reactionary flood.