As has been noted, al-Farabi was mixed up with the Shi`ite group; the supporters of `Alid claims who held aloof from the official Khalifate at Baghdad. About the time of al-Kindi’s death (circ. 260), the twelfth Imam of the _Ithna `ashariya_ or orthodox Shi`ite sect, Muhammad al-Muntazar, “disappeared.” In the year 320, within the period of al-Farabi’s activity, the Buwayhid princes became the leading power in `Iraq, and in 334, five years before his death, they obtained possession of Baghdad, so that for the next 133 years the Khalifs were in very much the same position as the Frankish kings when they, surrounded with great ceremony and treated with the utmost reverence, were no more than puppets in the hands of the Mayors of the Palace. In exactly the same way the Khalifs, half popes and half emperors, whose sign manual was sought as giving a show of legitimacy to sovereigns even in far-off India, possessed in Baghdad only ceremonial functions, and were treated as honoured prisoners by the Buwayhid Emirs, who themselves were Shi`ites of the _Ithna `ashariya_ sect, and who, consequently, regarded the Khalifs as mere usurpers. At this period the Shi`ites were the patrons of philosophy, and the orthodox Sunnis generally took a reactionary attitude. Besides the _Ithna `ashariya_, the comparatively orthodox Shi`ites, there was another branch of extremer type known as the _Sab`iya_ or “seveners.” The sixth Imam Ja`far as-Sadiq had nominated his son Isma`il as his successor, but as Isma`il was one day found drunk, Ja`far disinherited him and appointed his second son Musa al-Qazam (d. 183). But some did not admit that the Imamate, whose divine right passed by hereditary descent, could be transferred at will, but remained loyal to Isma`il, and these preferred, when Isma`il died in Ja`far’s lifetime, to transfer their allegiance to his son Muhammed, reckoning him as the seventh Imam. These “seveners” continued to exist as an obscure sect until, it would appear, somewhere about the year 220, when `Abdullah, the son of a Persian oculist named Maymun, either was made their head or led a secession from them, and organised his followers with a kind of freemasonry in seven (afterwards nine) grades of initiation and a very admirably organised system of propaganda on the lines already laid down by the Hashimites (cf. supra). In the earlier grades the doctrine of _batn_ or allegorical interpretation of the Qur´an was laid down as essential to a right understanding of its meaning, for the literal sense is often obscure, and sometimes refers to things incomprehensible, a doctrine commonly attributed to Ja`far as-Sadiq. The initiate was then taught that the true meaning could not be discovered by private interpretation but needed an authoritative teacher, the Imam, or, as he had disappeared, his accredited representative, the Mahdi `Abdullah, son of Maymun. In the higher grades the disciple had this inner meaning of the Qur´an