 Al-Ghazâlî’s efforts in dealing with the philosophical movement amount to defining the boundaries of religious tolerance in Islam. Soon after the Incoherence, he wrote a similar book about the movement of the Ismâ’îlite Shiites, known as the “Bâtinites” (“those who arbitrarily follow an inner meaning in the Qur’an”). Initially the Ismâ’îlite Shiites were supporters of the Fâtimid counter-caliphate in Cairo and opposed the political and religious authority of the Sunni caliph in Baghdad and the Seljuq Sultans that he installed. During al-Ghazâlî’s lifetime, however, there occurred a schism within the clandestine Ismâ’îlite movement. The “new propaganda” of the Ismâ’îlites in Iraq and Iran was now independent from the center in Cairo and developed its own strategies. A key element of their—not entirely unsuccessful—efforts to persuade people to their camp was their criticism of sense perception and of rational arguments (al-Ghazâlî 1954, 34; 1964b, 76, 80). Al-Ghazâlî was closely familiar with the Ismâ’îlites’ propaganda efforts but did not always have reliable information on their teachings on cosmology and metaphysics. These were deeply influenced by cosmological notions in late antique Gnostic and Neoplatonic literature (Walker 1993, de Smet 1995). What information he got, al-Ghzâlî seems to have received from the Persian writings of the Ismâ’îlite propagandist and philosopher Nâsir-i Khosrow (d. c. 1075), who lived a generation earlier in Balkh in Khorasan and in the remote region of the Pamir Mountains (Andani 2017). Al-Ghazâlî, however, did not know about the schism within the movement. In his book on the Scandals of the Esoterics (Fadâ’ih al-Bâtiniyya) he looks closely at those teachings that he knew and discusses which of them are merely erroneous and which are unbelief. He assumes—wrongly—that the Ismâ’îlite propagandists teach the existence of two gods. Yet this presentation is not so much a misunderstanding on the side of al-Ghazâlî but rather a deliberate misrepresentation, based on a long discourse of anti-Ismâ’îlite polemics (Andani 2017: 193). This assumed dualism and the Ismâ’îlites’ denial of bodily resurrection in the afterlife leads to their condemnation by al-Ghazâlî as unbelievers and apostates from Islam (al-Ghazâlî 1964b, 151–55 = 2000b, 228–29).