The Karmathite outbreak was more terrible, continuous, and enduring than that begun twenty years earlier by Babek, and far more dangerous. The Karmathites fought savage battles in the East and the West, in Irak and Syria. They plundered caravans and destroyed what they found with tiger-like fury unless it was valuable and they could bear it away with them. They attacked the holy city of Mecca and captured it through desperate fighting. More than thirty thousand true Moslems were slain while defending the temple. The sacred well, Zemzem, was polluted by corpses hurled into it by people to whom nothing whatever was sacred. The temple was fired, and the black, holy stone of the Kaaba, which in Abraham’s day had come down from heaven into Mecca, was borne off to be ransomed for fifty thousand gold coins two and twenty years later. This Karmathite madness, after raging at intervals for a century and torturing most parts of Islam, was extinguished in bloodshed. The career of the Karmathites proved the wickedness and folly of their method. Its turn came now to the system of Abdallah. Ismailian teaching had spread through the Empire of Mohammed and reached even Southern Arabia. About 892 a certain Mohammed Alhabib, who claimed his descent from Ismail, son of Jaffar es Sadik, sent one Abu Abdallah to the north coast of Africa. Abu Abdallah impressed the Berber tribes greatly, and his success was so enormous that they drove out the Aglabid dynasty then ruling them. He roused expectations to the highest degree by announcing a Mahdi, or infallible guide for believers. He then summoned in Obeidallah, a son of that Mohammed Alhabib, who had sent him to Africa. Obeidallah, after many strange deeds and adventures, and finally an imprisonment from which Abu Abdallah released him, was put on a throne in 909 and made the first Fatimid [12] Kalif at Mahdiya, his new capital near Tunis. Abu Abdallah, the successful assistant and forerunner, was assassinated soon after at command of Obeidallah, who owed him dominion, but who now had no wish for his presence. The new Kalif, since this man knew, of course, many secrets, might well think him safer in paradise. Obeidallah now proclaimed himself the only true Kalif, a descendant of the Prophet through Fatima his daughter, and became a dangerous rival of the Abbasids. By 967 his descendants had won Egypt and Southern Syria. A fortified palace was built near the Nile, and called Kahira. [13] Around this palace rose the city known later as Cairo.