The empire, in fact, gradually went to pieces. Shaken by the civil wars, bereft of strong leaders, and deprived of the invigorating amalgam of the unspoiled desert Arabs, political unity could not endure. Everywhere there occurred revivals of suppressed racial or particularist tendencies. The very rapidity of Islam's expansion turned against it, now that the well-springs of that expansion were dried up. Islam had made millions of converts, of many sects and races, but it had digested them very imperfectly. Mohammed had really converted the Arabs, because he merely voiced ideas which were obscurely germinating in Arab minds and appealed to impulses innate in the Arab blood. When, however, Islam was accepted by non-Arab peoples, they instinctively interpreted the Prophet's message according to their particular racial tendencies and cultural backgrounds, the result being that primitive Islam was distorted or perverted. The most extreme example of this was in Persia, where the austere monotheism of Mohammed was transmuted into the elaborate mystical cult known as Shiism, which presently cut the Persians off from full communion with the orthodox Moslem world. The same transmutive tendency appears, in lesser degree, in the saint-worship of the North African Berbers and in the pantheism of the Hindu Moslems--both developments which Mohammed would have unquestionably execrated. These doctrinal fissures in Islam were paralleled by the disruption of political unity. The first formal split occurred after the accession of the Abbasides. A member of the deposed Ommeyyad family fled to Spain, where he set up a rival caliphate at Cordova, recognized as lawful not only by the Spanish Moslems, but by the Berbers of North Africa. Later on another caliphate was set up in Egypt--the Fatimite caliphate, resting its title on descent from Mohammed's daughter Fatima. As for the Abbaside caliphs of Bagdad, they gradually declined in power, until they became mere puppets in the hands of a new racial element, the Turks. Before describing that shift of power from Neo-Arab to Turkish hands which was so momentous for the history of the Islamic world, let us first consider the decline in cultural and intellectual vigour that set in concurrently with the disruption of political and religious unity during the later stages of the Neo-Arab period.