fetters of religion,—a position which may have been true of his ancestor ʿAbdullah,—is extremely improbable in his case. Unexpected circumstances had given him an exceptional opportunity as the founder of a dynasty, and we have now to see how he used this opportunity. Towards religion the Mahdi’s attitude had been at first one of rabid Shiʿism, though he, as one of the fully initiated, could not have been sincere: no doubt he was acting up to what he expected to be the feelings of his subjects so far as he had observed the Katama and the immediate followers of Abu ʿAbdullah: closer acquaintance with the people of Kairawan showed him that he had been mistaken, the people generally were quite ready for a Mahdi, or anyone else, who could establish and maintain an orderly government, but as Muslims they were orthodox by a large majority, and by no means willing to accept the rather fantastic theories of incarnation and transmigration which appealed to the Persian mind. As soon as this was made clear the Mahdi formulated a definite policy in religion, enforcing strictly all the outward observances of Islam, rigidly punctilious in the prohibition of forbidden food and drink, and punishing severely those of the Ismaʿilian sect, who tried to practice the freedom of the higher grades of the initiated. It was no doubt possible for the initiate to disregard the rites of religion in their private life, but any external neglect, likely to cause scandal amongst the populace at large, was treated as a criminal offence: there was none of the open lawlessness of the Qarmatians tolerated in Ifrikiya: the inner grades of the sect were distinguished from other Muslims only by their reverence for the family of ʿAli, whom all revered to some extent, by their repudiation of the first three Khalifs, which was offensive to the orthodox but not intolerable, and by a few minor differences in the ritual of prayer, and in the treatment of the problems of the canon law. The most difficult problem demanding the new ruler’s immediate attention lay in the lands to the west, for the Mahdi claimed to control all the territory to the Atlantic, over which the Aghlabid princes had pretended to rule. The first difficult task came in the revolt of Tiharet. For long past the Berber lands of North Africa had afforded a refuge for every persecuted sect and dynasty of Islam. The earliest sect, the Kharijites, the wild men of the desert who adhered to the oldest form of purely Arab Islam, had entered Africa after they had been hunted down and slaughtered in Asia by the Umayyad Khalifs. In the days of the Mahdi they still held their own in the district of Tiharet in the mountainous country of Central Maghrab. They threw off all allegiance to the ruler at Kairawan and invited Muhammad b. Khazar to be their Emir. The Mahdi sent the Katami Aruba b. Yusuf against them: after three days siege the city was taken, plundered, and some 8,000 of the inhabitants slain.