Babek had defeated six famous generals of Islam and slain, as some state, a million of people during twenty years of rebellion. One of his ten executioners declared that he alone had taken the lives of twenty thousand men; so merciless was the struggle between the partisans of the Kalifat and the advocates of freedom and equality. The prisoner was brought by his captor to Samira in chains and confined there. Motassim went in disguise to the prison to look at this demon of Khorassan, this “Shaitan” (Satan), as they called him. When the Kalif had gazed at Babek sufficiently the captive was exhibited through the city as a spectacle, and brought at last to the palace where Motassim, surrounded by his warriors, commanded Babek’s own executioner to cut off the arms and legs of his master, and then plunge a knife into his body. The executioner obeyed, Babek meanwhile smiling as if to prove his own character, and the correctness of his surname, “Khurremi” (The Joyous). The severed head was exhibited in the cities of Khorassan, and the body impaled near the palace of the Kalif. In the ninth century, and contemporaneous with these horrors, there lived in Southern Persia, at Ahwas, a certain Abdallah, whose father, Maimun Kaddah, and grandfather, Daisan the Dualist, had taught him Persian politics and religion. This Abdallah conceived a broad system, and planned a great project to overturn Arab rule in his country and reëstablish the ancient faith and Empire of Persia. This involved complete change in the structure of Islam, and all its present ideals. He could not declare open war against the accepted religion and dynasty, since all the military power was at their command; hence he decided to undermine them in secret. From Ahwas he went to Bussorah and later to Syria where he settled at Salemiya, whence his teachings were spread by Ahmed, his son, by two sons of that Ahmed, and also by his Dayis, men who performed each of them all the various duties of spy, secret agent, and apostle. The most active of those Dayis was Hussein of Ahwas, who, in the province of which Kufa was the capital, instructed many agents in the secrets of revolt and in perversion of the teachings of Islam. Among these agents the most noted was one famous later as Karmath. This man delayed not in showing his character and principles “through torrents of blood, and destruction of cities.” Crowds of men rallied to his war cry. The Karmathites declared that nothing was forbidden, everything was a matter of indifference, justified by the fact of its existence, hence should receive neither punishment nor reward. The commands of Mohammed were pronounced parables disguising political maxims and injunctions. They differed from Abdallah’s disciples in that they began action immediately, and, in most cases, openly, while the others were preparing for a new throne in Islam to be occupied by a man of their own, a true and zealous co-believer.