the women corrected them. Yahya went on to lay siege to Damascus, while al-Husayn went to Ramla to meet Sa'id. Although later Fatimid sources are at pains to disassociate Sa'id from the brothers' uprising, Sa'id at that time apparently condoned their operations, and even ordered money be paid to them. After the death of Yahya before Damascus in July 903, al-Husayn abandoned the siege and turned north. He captured Salamiya, Homs, and other towns, and, in the expectation that the would finally come forth, began to establish the institutions of a state: at the mint of Homs, coins were issued in the name of the , and in the Friday sermon the name of the Abbasid caliph al-Muktafi was dropped in favour of the "Successor, the rightly-guided Heir, the Lord of the Age, the Commander of the Faithful, the Mahdi". Encamped at Salamiya since August 903, the Bedouin expected that Sa'id would return and announce himself. Despite al-Husayn's repeated entreaties in his correspondence with his master—in which Sa'id names himself Abdallah ibn Ahmad ibn Abdallah, assuming his eventual regnal name and apparently omitting his father—Sa'id refused to leave the safety of Ramla. In the end, the Abbasid government sent an army under Muhammad ibn Sulayman al-Katib, which on 29 November 903 routed the 'Fatimid' Bedouin army at the Battle of Hama. Enraged about the apparent abandonment by the supposed divinely-guided imam, al-Husayn turned against him: the residence at Salamiya was destroyed, and all family members and servants encountered there executed. Sa'id's women, however, were rescued by Sul'uk, who eventually brought them to rejoin his master upon the conquest of Ifriqiya. This atrocity, along with the failure of the uprising, led later Fatimid historians to try and excise Sa'id's relationship with the sons of Zakarawayh in what the historian Heinz Halm calls an act of damnatio memoriae. Al-Husayn himself was captured shortly after, and under torture revealed what he knew about the leader of the Isma'ili movement. Zakarawayh himself remained at large, and in 906 tried to revive the uprising in Iraq in a movement that, according to historian Farhad Daftary now "acquired the characteristics of dissident Qarmatism". This revolt too was defeated in 907 by Abbasid forces, and Zakarawayh was captured and died of his wounds shortly after. Flight to Egypt and Sijilmasa Once again, Sa'id and his entourage had to flee the Abbasid manhunt, making for Egypt, which at