Again, he was, in modern terms, a monarchist and a clericalist. His conception of the model state is a strange compound of the republic of Plato and Shi‘ite dreams of an infallible Imam. Its roots lie, of course, in the theocratic idea of the Muslim state; but his city, which is to take in all mankind, a Holy Roman Empire and a Holy Catholic Church at once, a community of saints ruled by sages, shows a later influence than that of the mother city of Islam, al-Madina, under Abu Bakr and Umar. The influence is that of the Fatimids with their capital, al-Mahdiya, near Tunis. The Hamdanids were Shi‘ites and Sayf ad-Dawla, under whom al-Farabi enjoyed peace and protection, was a vassal of the Fatimid Khalifas. This brings us again to the great mystery of Muslim history. What was the truth of the Fatimid movement? Was the family of the Prophet the fosterer of science from the earliest times? What degree of contact had they with the Mu‘tazilites? With the founders of grammar, of alchemy, of law? That they were themselves the actual beginners of everything—and everything has been claimed for them—we may put down to legend. But one thing does stand fast. Just as al-Ma’mun combined the establishment of a great university at Baghdad with a favoring of the Alids, so the Fatimids in Cairo erected a great hall of science and threw all their influence and authority into the spreading and extending of knowledge. This institution seems to have been a combination of free public library and university, and was probably the gateway connecting between the inner circle of initiated Fatimid leaders and the outside, uninitiated world. We have already seen how unhappy were the external effects of the Shi‘ite, and especially of the Fatimid, propaganda on the Muslim world. But from time to time we become aware of a deep undercurrent of scientific and philosophical labor and investigation accompanying that propaganda, and striving after knowledge and truth. It belongs to the life below the surface, which we can know only through its occasional outbursts. Some of these are given above; others will follow. The whole matter is obscure to the last degree, and dogmatic statements and explanations are not in place. It may be that it was only a natural drawing together on the part of all the different forces and movements that were under a ban and had to live in secrecy and stillness. It may be that the students of the new sciences passed over, simply through their studies and political despair—as has often happened in our day—into different degrees of nihilism, or, at the other extreme, into a passionate searching for, and dependence on, some absolute guide, an infallible Imam. It may be that we have read wrongly the whole history of the Fatimid movement; that it was in reality a deeply laid and slowly ripened plan to bring the rule of the world into the control of a band of philosophers, whose task it was