il i w -J^ «-’ movertfsm--*>e3ent which was called the Sabiya, the Seveners.
The movement of Ismail and his son Muhammad developed in the * t Jiiiime of the Abbasid Caliph, Harun al-Rashid. They had to go in hidiitdif-igg and three of their descendants remained hidden somewhere in SyrT*ri«. a.*, keeping in touch with their secret organization, preparing for thesne - e establishment of the rival Caliphate and avoiding arrest by the
• dB authorities. The exact order of their succession is not No less than two hundred versions are given, leading
Someti’=tir nnes even to a doubt about the Fatimid origin of the Fatimid
Ca|jpl-|ohsss. . But from the Ismaili works of those times we have gathered a fairly ~ . good idea of this problem. The names of those Imams can now t»d be ftfixed as Abdullah, Ahmad and Hussain. It was Hussain’s son Ahmasad vwho became the first Fatimid Caliph, Mahdi. He is wrongly called bd L_U Ubaidullah al- Mahdi. It was he who established the Fatimid CalipHoh*»tce in North Africa in 909 A.D. during the time of the Abbasid CalipHoh «.aLl-Muqtadir.2
