Another eclectic sect, but on a very different principle, was that of the Karramites, founded by Abu Abd Allah ibn Karram, who died in 256. Its teachings had the honor to be accepted and protected by no less a man than the celebrated Mahmud of Ghazna (388-421), Mahmud the Idol-breaker, the first invader of India and the patron of al-Beruni, Firdawsi, Ibn Sina and many another. But that, to which we will return, belongs to a later date and, probably, to a modified form of Ibn Karram’s teaching. For himself, he was an ascetic of Sijistan and, according to the story, a man of no education. He lost himself in theological subtleties which he seems to have failed to understand. However, out of them all he put together a book which he called “The Punishment of the Grave,” which spread widely in Khurasan. It was, in part, a frank recoil to the crassest anthropomorphism. Thus, for him, God actually sat upon the throne, was in a place, had direction and so could move from one point to another. He had a body with flesh, blood, and limbs; He could be embraced by those who were purified to the requisite point. It was a literal acceptance of the material expressions of the Qur’an along with a consideration of how they could be so, and an explanation by comparison with men—all opposed to the principle _bila kayfa_. So, apparently, we must understand the curious fact that he was also a Murji’ite and held faith to be only acknowledgment with the tongue. All men, except professed apostates, are believers, he said, because of that primal covenant, taken by God with the seed of Adam, when He asked, “Am I not your Lord?” (_Alastu bi-rabbikum_) and they, brought forth from Adam’s loins for the purpose, made answer, “Yea, verily, in this covenant we remain until we formally cast it off.” This, of course, involved taking God’s qualities in the most literal sense. So, if we are to see in the Mu‘tazilites scholastic commentators trying to reduce Muhammad, the poet, to logic and sense, we must see in Ibn Karram one of those wooden-minded literalists, for whom a metaphor is a ridiculous lie if it cannot be taken in its external meaning. He was part of the great stream of conservative reaction, in which we find also such a man as Ahmad ibn Hanbal. But the saving salt of Ahmad’s sense and reverence kept him by the safe proviso “without considering how and without comparison.” All Ahmad’s later followers were not so wise. In his doctrine of the state Ibn Karram inclined to the Kharijites. Before we return to al-Jubba‘i and the fate of the Mu‘tazilites, it remains to trace more precisely the thread of mysticism, that _kashf_, revelation, which we have already mentioned several times. Its fundamental fact is that it had two sides, an ascetic and a speculative, different in degree, in spirit and in result, and yet so closely entangled that the same mystic has been assigned, in good and in bad faith, as an adherent of both. [Sidenote: WOMEN SAINTS]