other contemporary Muslim rulers, they certainly did not carry out a wholesale Aristotelian propaganda; indeed, the line of "philosophers" proper simply misses over Fatimite Egypt, although there were several distinguished medical workers there. From the Isma'ilians or Sab'iya of Egypt there came two interesting off-shoots. Towards the end of the reign of the sixth Fatimite Khalif, al-Hakim, who may have been a religious fanatic, perhaps insane, or possibly an enlightened religious reformer of views far ahead of his age—his real character is one of the problems of history—there arrived in Egypt certain Persian teachers holding doctrines of transmigration and of theophanies, which seem to be endemic in Persia, and these persuaded al-Hakim that he was an incarnation of the Deity. A riot followed the open preaching of this claim, and the preachers fled to Syria, then a part of the Fatimite dominions, and there founded a sect which still exists in the Lebanon under the name of the Druzes. Soon after this al-Hakim himself disappeared; some said he was murdered, others said he had retired to a Christian monastry, and was recognised there afterwards as a monk; others believed he had gone up to heaven, and more than one claimant appeared asserting that he was al-Hakim returned from concealment. The other off-shoot shows a more definitely philosophical bearing. In the days of al-Mustansir, al-Hakim's grandson, one of the Isma'ilian missionaries, a Persian named Nasir-i-Khusraw, came from Khurasan
