But they had a still more vital, if not more important, philosophical base of objection. We have seen already how they viewed the doctrine of God’s qualities (_sifat_) and tried to limit them in every way. These qualities ran danger, they held, of being hypostatized into separate persons like those in the Christian Trinity, and we have just seen how near that danger really lay in the case of God’s _kalam_. In orthodox Islam it has become a plain Logos. The position in this of an-Nazzam has been given above. It is interesting as showing that the Qur’an, even then, was given as a probative miracle (_mu‘jiz_) because it deprived all men of power (_i‘jaz_) to imitate it. That is, its æsthetic perfection was raised to the miraculous degree and then regarded as a proof of its divine origin. But al-Muzdar, a pupil of Bishr ibn al Mu‘tamir and an ascetic of high rank, called the Monk of the Mu‘tazilites, went still further than an-Nazzam. He flatly damned as unbelievers all who held the eternity of the Qur’an; they had taken unto themselves two Gods. Further, he asserted that men were quite capable of producing a work even finer than the Qur’an in point of style. But the force of this opinion is somewhat diminished by the liberality with which he denounced his opponents in general as unbelievers. Stories are told of him very much like those in circulation with us about those who hold that few will be saved, and it is worth noticing that upon this point of salvability the Mu‘tazilites were even narrower than the orthodox. CHAPTER II Al-Ma’mun and the triumph of the Mu‘tazilites; the Mihna and Ahmad ibn Hanbal; al-Farabi; the Fatimids and the Ikhwan as-Safa; the early mystics, ascetic and pantheistic; al-Hallaj.