arrive. According to the contemporary Baghdadi chronicler al-Khatib al-Baghdadi, Hamza fled the persecution to Mecca, where he was placed under the protection of the local ruler, the Sharif of Mecca. However, he was soon recognized by Egyptian Hajj pilgrims, who demanded his execution. The Sharif hesitated—according to Heinz Halm, likely waiting to see whether the new regime in Egypt would last—but after a series of supposed signs of divine displeasure, he had Hamza and one of his slaves beheaded in front of one of the gates of the Kaaba. The corpses were crucified, and stoned by passers-by; their remains were later burned. Aftermath The leadership of the Druze movement, now scattered and decimated, was taken over by one of Hamza's chief disciples, Baha al-Din al-Muqtana, who from 1027 tried to reconstitute the movement by sending his own epistles to the various Druze communities. Al-Muqtana remained the head of the Druze missionary movement until 1042, when he issued his own farewell epistle, announcing his retirement into concealment. In this final epistle, he again reiterated the imminent coming of the end times and the Last Judgment under al-Hakim, where truth would be made manifest, so that his own activity was no longer necessary. Until then, he ordered his followers to hide their true allegiance and even denounce him by name, if necessary to preserve their cover. This marked the end of the Druze "divine call", i.e., its active missionary phase. From then to the present day, the Druze have been a closed community, in which neither conversion nor apostasy is allowed. The 71 epistles of al-Muqtana, together with those of Hamza and another disciple, Isma'il ibn Muhammad al-Tamimi, that al-Muqtana compiled, form the scripture of the Druze faith, the Epistles of Wisdom () or Exalted Wisdom (). Of its six books, the first two contain the work of Hamza and others, while the remaining four encompass al-Muqtana's writings. Thirty of the 113 Epistles of Wisdom (numbers 6 to 35) are attributed to Hamza. Teachings The doctrine propagated by Hamza in his epistles reflects ideas current among Iranian Isma'ilis in the 10th century, particularly in the work of Abu Ya'qub al-Sijistani. Both Hamza and his assistant, Isma'il al-Tamimi, ascribed to and elaborated on Neo-Platonic ideas on the world soul and the universal intellect that had been absorbed by Isma'ili doctrine. Bryer terms the Druze a sect of Isma'ilism, but stresses that the ideas