one of these americans , known by the moorish name wali fard , travelled for years in india , persia , and afghanistan , where he collected an impressive assortment of exotic initiations : tantra in calcutta , from an old member of the bengali terrorist party ; sufism from the ovayssi order in shiraz , which rejects all human masters and insists on visionary experience ; and finally , in the remote badakhshan province of afghanistan , he converted to an archaic form of ismailism ( the so-called assassins ) blended out of buddhist yab-yum teachings , indigenous shamanic sorcery and extremist shiite revolutionary philosophy-worshippers of the umm-al-kitab , the matrix book .