There is, however, one very curious passage in an author, whom we should have little expected to afford any illustration to the history of Sind, which would seem to prove that, before they apos­tatized from their ancestral faith to Islám, the Súmras had inter­mediately adopted the tenets of the Karmatian heresy. In the sacred books of the Druses, we find an epistle of Muktana Baháu-d dín, the chief apostle of Hamza, and the principal compiler of the Druse writings, addressed in the year 423 H. (1032 A.D.), to the Unitarians of Multán and Hindústán in general, and to Shaikh Ibn Súmar Rájá Bal in particular.* Here the name is purely Indian, and the patronymic can be no other than our Súmra. That some of that tribe, including the chiefs, had affiliated themselves to the Karmatians is more probable than the other alternative, suggested by M. Reinaud,* that certain Arabs had adopted indigenous denomi­nations. It seems quite evident from this curious coincidence of names, that the party particularly addressed was a Súmra; that this Súmra was a Karmatian, successor of a member of the same schism, who bore in the time of Mahmúd a Muhammadan name (Abú-l Fath Dáúd), and whose son was probably the younger Dáúd men­tioned in the letter; and that the Karmatians of the valley of the Indus were in relation and correspondence, not only with those of Persia and Arabia, but with the Druses, who adored Hákim, the Fátimide Khalif of Egypt, as a God.

That the Karmatians obtained many converts to their infidel opinions is rendered highly probable by the difficulty of accounting for their rapid conquest of Sind by any other supposition. Being merely refugees from Bahrein and Al Hassa after their successive defeats, mentioned in another note, and their subsequent persecution in Arabia, they could scarcely have traversed an inhospitable country, or undertaken a long sea voyage, in sufficient numbers, to appear suddenly with renovated power in Sind. Many Hindú converts doubt­less readily joined them, both in the hope of expelling their present masters, and in the expectation of receiving a portion of their ancient patrimony for themselves, after the long exclusion under which they had groaned. One of the Bulúch clans, indeed, still preserves the memory of its heresy, or that of its progenitor, in retaining its pre­sent title of Karmatí.

Independent of the general dissemination of Shía' sentiments in the valley of the Indus, which favoured notions of the incorpo­ration of the Godhead in Man, the old occupants of the soil must, from other causes, have been ready to acquiesce in the wild doc­trines of the heretics, who now offered themselves for spiritual teachers, as well as political leaders. Their cursing of Muhammad; their incarnations of the deity; their types and allegories; their philosophy divided into exoteric and esoteric; their religious re­ticence; their regard for particular numbers, particularly seven and twelve; the various stages of initiation; their abstruse allusions; their mystical interpretations; their pantheistic theo­sophy, were so much in conformity with sentiments already prevalent amongst these willing disciples, that little persuasion could have been required to induce them to embrace so con­genial a system of metaphysical divinity, of which the final de­gree of initiation, however cautiously and gradually the development was concealed, undoubtedly introduced the disciple into the regions of the most unalloyed atheism. So susceptible, indeed, must the native mind have been of these insidious doctrines, that Hammer-Purgstall and others, who have devoted much attention to these topics, have very reasonably concluded that the doctrines of these secret societies,—such as the Karmatians, Isma'ílians or Assas­sins, Druses, Bátinís, and sundry others, which at various periods have devastated the Muhammadan world, and frequently threat­ened the extinction of that faith,—though originally based upon the errors of the Gnostics, were yet largely indebted to the mystical philosophy and theology of Eastern nations, and especially of India, where the tenets of transmigration and of absorption into the Deity were even more familiar both to Buddhists and Bráhmans than they were to these miserable schismatics.

The Hindú population, therefore, though they had much to dread from them, if it continued obstinately in the path of idolatry, was likely to offer a rich field of proselytism to such zealous fanatics as the Karmatians, or “people of the veil,” whose creed could not have been less attractive to an ignorant and superstitious multitude, from its eluding in many instances the grasp of human apprehension, and from its founder being announced, in profane and incomprehensible jargon, to be “the Guide! the Director! the Invitation! the Word! the Holy Ghost! the Demonstration! the Herald! the Camel!”

Assuming, then, that this Ibn Súmar, the ruler of Multán in 423 H. (1032 A.D.), was in reality a Súmra, we must date the com­mencement of the Súmra dynasty at least as early as that period, and most probably even before Mahmúd's death, in the lower course of the Indus; for it has already been observed, on the authority of Ibn Asír, that Mahmúd on his return from Sommát, in 416 H., (1025 A.D.), placed a Muhammadan chief in possession of Mansúra; for that the incumbent had abjured Islámism. So that the expelled ruler must necessarily have been a Karmatian, or a Hindú; and, in either case, doubtless a Súmra, who, in the distractions of the Ghaznivide Empire, would have allowed no long time to elapse before he recovered the dominions from which he had been expelled.

This re-establishment might have been delayed during the reign of Mas'úd, who is expressly mentioned by Baihakí as comprising all Sind within his dominions. The Súmras, indeed, may possibly have allowed a titular sovereignty to the Ghaznivides, even down to the time of 'Abdu-r Rashíd in 443 H. (1051 A.D.); or paid tribute as an acknowledgment of fealty; but after that time, the advance of the Saljúks on the northern frontier of the empire, and the internal disorders of the government, must have offered too favourable a conjuncture for them to profess any longer an even nominal sub­ordination to distant monarchs unable to enforce it.

The Súmra power could at no time have been extensive and absolute in Sind; and the passage translated above at p. 340, from the Tuhfatu-l Kirám, showing seven tributary chiefs in Sind in the time of Násiru-d dín, represents perhaps the true state of the country during a great portion of the so-called Súmra period. Moreover, this unfortunate province was subject to perpetual incursions from the Ghorian, Khiljí, and Tughlik dynasties of Dehlí and the Panjáb, as well as the still more ruinous devastations of the Moghals. The retreats in their native deserts offered temporary asylums to the Sindians during these visitations, till it pleased the stronger power to retire, after ravaging the crops and securing their plunder: but, beyond the personal security which such inhospitable tracts offered, the Súmras could have enjoyed little freedom and independence, and can only claim to rank as a dynasty, from the absence of any other predominant tribe, or power, to assert better pretensions to that distinction.*