It must be allowed, however, that this confraternity of the Faithful Brethren of Basra seems to have led a quiet existence, as perhaps was the case also with a branch-settlement of theirs in Bagdad. The relation of the Brethren to the Karmatites may have resembled that of the more peaceful Baptists to the revolutionary Anabaptists of the ‘King of Sion’. [14] The names of the following have been given to us by later writers, as having been members of the Brotherhood and collaborators of the Encyclopaedia, viz.: Abu Sulaiman Mohammed ibn Mushir al-Busti, called al-Muqaddasi; Abu-l-Hasan Ali ibn Harun al-Zandjani; Mohammed ibn Akhmed al-Nahradjuri; Al-Aufi and Zaid ibn Rifaa. In the time of their activity the Caliphate had already been forced to make an entire surrender of its secular power into the hands of the Shiʻite dynasty of the Buyids. Probably this circumstance was favourable to the appearance of an Encyclopaedia, in which Shiʻite and Mutazilite doctrines together with the results of Philosophy were comprehended in one popular system. 3. The Brethren themselves avow their eclecticism. They wish to collect the wisdom of all nations and religions. Noah and Abraham, Socrates and Plato, Zoroaster and Jesus, Mohammed and Ali are all prophets of theirs. Socrates, and Jesus and his apostles, no less than the children of Ali, are honoured as holy martyrs of their rational faith. The religious law in its literal sense is pronounced good for the ordinary man,—a medicine for weak and ailing souls: the deeper philosophic insight is for strong intelligences. Though the body is devoted to death, dying means rising again to the pure life of the Spirit, for those who during their earthly existence have been awakened by means of philosophic considerations out of careless slumber and foolish sleep. This is impressed with endless repetition, by means of legends and myths of later-Greek, Judaeo-Christian, Persian or Indian origin. Every transitory thing is here turned into an emblem. On the ruins of positive religion and unsophisticated opinion a spiritualistic philosophy is built up, embracing all the knowledge and endeavour of human kind, so far as these came within the Brethren’s field of view. The aim of their philosophizing is given as ‘the assimilation of the soul to God, in the degree possible for man’. In this scheme, the negative tendencies of the Brethren, are kept somewhat in the background, for reasons which are quite intelligible. But their criticism of human society and of positive religions is exhibited with least reserve in the ‘Book of the Animal and the Man’, in which the figurative dress makes it possible for them to represent animals as saying what might he questionable if heard from a human mouth.