Fatimid Caliphate

A counter-caliphate

Drafted from Halm, The Empire of the Mahdi: The Rise of the Fatimids (1996)formation

Ambitious dynasties normally took a province and left the caliphate standing. The Fatimids took the caliphate.

The movement was Isma'ili — a branch of Shi'ism holding that the imamate had passed through Isma'il, son of the sixth imam — and it had spent decades running a clandestine missionary organisation, the da'wa, across the Islamic world from a hidden centre. Its agent Abu Abdallah al-Shi'i converted the Kutama Berbers of the Kabylie, raised them as an army, destroyed the Aghlabid emirate of Ifriqiya in 909, and then summoned his master.

Abd Allah declared himself caliph and mahdi at Raqqada in 909, claiming descent from Fatima and Ali and therefore the whole office — not a rival governorship but a statement that the Abbasids in Baghdad were usurpers of an imamate that belonged to the Prophet's line. He had Abu Abdallah, who had built the entire thing, executed in 911.

This is what makes the Fatimids structurally different from every caliphate before them. The Rashidun, the Umayyads and the Abbasids are one office passing between houses. The Fatimids are a second office, asserted against the first, and for two centuries there were two caliphs in the Islamic world who each regarded the other as illegitimate.

The man on the donkey

Drafted from Halm, The Empire of the Mahdi: The Rise of the Fatimids (1996)formation

Thirty-three years after the mahdi declared himself caliph, the state he founded came within one siege of not existing. The threat was not Baghdad. It was a Kharijite preacher riding a donkey, and for two years he came close to finishing what he started.

An old heresy, revived

Abu Yazid began preaching in the Aurès mountains in February 944, calling the Berber tribes of the interior to holy war against the Fatimids on Ibadi Kharijite doctrine — the same argument that had produced the oldest and most stubborn opposition to every caliphate that came before this one: that leadership belonged to the most righteous Muslim and not to a claimed descent. His own descent was the opposite of grand, and he preached it as a virtue; the donkey was deliberate, and the name stuck to him because of it.

The Kutama army that had made the Fatimid state was built for conquest, not for holding down a hostile interior, and it broke almost at once. Kairouan fell on 14 October. Abu Yazid destroyed the main Fatimid field army in a night attack two weeks later. By the new year his forces were outside al-Mahdiyya itself, the fortified capital on its promontory, the one place the founder had built specifically to be unconquerable.

The eight months

The siege ran from January to September 945. Al-Qa'im, the second caliph, had a wall and a ditch thrown up to shelter the refugees crowding into the suburbs, and refused every entreaty from his own court to appear before them or send one of his sons in his place. He stayed inside the walls he had inherited and let the city itself be the answer.

It held. Abu Yazid's following was a peasant army that could not sustain a siege — men drifted home to their fields between assaults, and Fatimid sorties sometimes found the enemy camp standing empty. In September, Arab contingents in the rebel force defected in the middle of a battle outside the walls, and Abu Yazid broke off the siege and pulled back to Kairouan. He found the city had turned on him too, worn out by his own Berbers' exactions, and shut its gates against him.

The caliph who was already dead

What happened next was concealed for a year, and the concealment is the most revealing part of the whole crisis.

Al-Qa'im died on 17 May 946, with Abu Yazid still in the field and the war still undecided. His son Isma'il did not announce it. Every proclamation, every order to the army, every public ceremony continued to be issued in his dead father's name, while Isma'il governed as heir-designate for a caliph who no longer existed — a deception made easier by the fact that al-Qa'im had spent his whole reign, siege included, refusing to be seen. A state that had just proven it could survive an army at its gates now had to survive not having a caliph at all, and solved it by pretending the fact away until the war was won.

Isma'il ran that war himself for nearly two years after the siege broke, pursuing Abu Yazid's retreating forces through mountains his own troops did not know, against a man whose peasant following melted away and reassembled and melted away again. He cornered him at last in the fortress of Kiyana in the spring of 947, forced a breakout, and had him brought in grievously wounded after a fall. Abu Yazid died under interrogation four days later, on 19 August 947.

Isma'il proclaimed his own caliphate — taking the title al-Mansur — and his father's death, on the same day he announced his enemy's. The Kharijite's skin, by the fullest surviving account, was salted, stuffed, dressed in a heretic's tall cap and paraded through every town the victorious caliph passed on the way home, with trained monkeys set on it to pull its beard and strike its head.

What it proved

The Fatimid state that reached Egypt in 969 is usually read backward from that success, as though the outcome had been likely all along. For two years in the 940s it was not: a peasant revolt built on the oldest rival doctrine in Islam took the capital's own countryside, destroyed the field army, and besieged the caliph in his own unconquerable city while the caliph himself, unknown to everyone outside the palace, was dead.

It survived because the son was better at the war than the father had been at the siege, and because the state could keep functioning in the name of a caliph who was not there — which is the same lesson, learned early and the hard way, that later Fatimid viziers would use to run Cairo through children and absentees for a century after Badr al-Jamali. Kharijism never recovered its standing in the Maghreb after Kiyana. Neither claim — that the office belonged to the worthiest man, or that a raided province could out-organise a Kutama army — got a second chance to test the Fatimids again before Jawhar sailed for Egypt.

The promise of protection

Drafted from Khallikan, Ibn Khallikan's Biographical Dictionary (Wafayat al-A'yan) (1843)expansion

Egypt was not stormed. It was negotiated, and the negotiation began inside Egypt.

Kafur, the eunuch who had governed for the Ikhshidids, died in 968. The officers settled the succession on a boy, with a cousin as his lieutenant, a general over the troops and the vizier Ibn al-Furat over the revenue — and then the pay fell short and the customary gratuities stopped, and the soldiers became turbulent. At which point, Ibn Khallikan records, a number of men of high rank in Fustat wrote to al-Mu'izz in Ifriqiya inviting him to send an army and take the country.

Sending Jawhar

The man he sent had been his own slave. Jawhar ibn Abd Allah, called the Greek scribe, was a freedman of the caliph, and he was so ill when the order came that nobody expected him to live. Al-Mu'izz visited him and told him that he would not only survive but conquer Egypt.

The send-off Ibn Khallikan describes is the most revealing thing in the account. Jawhar had a hundred thousand horse and more than twelve hundred chests of money. Al-Mu'izz came out to say goodbye, leaned down from his horse's neck to speak with him privately, and then ordered his own sons to dismount and salute Jawhar — which forced every great officer of the kingdom to dismount too. Jawhar kissed the caliph's hand and the hoof of his horse. When al-Mu'izz got back to his palace he sent Jawhar every garment he had been wearing, keeping only his drawers and his seal-ring, and wrote to his governor of Barqa ordering him to go out and kiss Jawhar's hand. The governor offered a hundred thousand dinars to be excused that ceremony, and had to do it anyway.

A dynasty that claimed the whole caliphate as the descendants of Fatima choreographed the humiliation of its own nobility in front of a freedman, because the freedman was carrying the claim to Egypt.

The document

When the army was close, Fustat panicked. The vizier Ibn al-Furat wrote asking for terms; the city sent an ambassador, a sharif named Abu Ja'far Muslim, on the condition that a body of citizens went with him. They met Jawhar at a village near Alexandria in June 969. He granted every demand and put it in writing.

Then the arrangement nearly failed — not because Jawhar broke it but because Fustat could not agree to accept it. The Ikhshidid loyalists, Kafur's old officers and part of the army hid their valuables, camped outside the city and refused the peace. The sharif arrived with the aman, the written promise of protection, and read it out; Jawhar had attached to it individual answers granting the fiefs, money and governorships that various Egyptians had privately written to ask for, and a letter to the vizier addressed to him as vizier. The meeting broke up without agreeing.

So there was a battle after all, at Giza, and it was brief. Jawhar took the ford at Munyat Shalqan; some Egyptian troops came over to him by boat and surrendered; when the rest guarded the ford he stripped to his trousers, crossed in a boat while his men forded the river, and broke them on the far bank. The Ikhshidids left Fustat in disorder that night.

The date that mattered

Jawhar had Fustat on 16 Sha'ban 358. Three days later he went up into the pulpit and pronounced the khutba with a prayer for his master al-Mu'izz.

That is the conquest. Not the battle at Giza — the sentence from the pulpit, in which the Friday prayer of Egypt named a Shi'i imam in Ifriqiya as the rightful caliph of all Islam. It took another month for the news to reach al-Mu'izz.

Jawhar governed Egypt with absolute power for five years until his master came, and kept his rank until 974, when al-Mu'izz removed him from the bureaux, the revenue and the control of affairs. He lived another eighteen years, and Ibn Khallikan says there was not a poet of the time who failed to compose verses lamenting him.

Cairo

Drafted from Brett, The Fatimid Empire (2017)peak

The Fatimids took Egypt in 969 after three failed attempts, and founded a new city north of Fustat: al-Qahira, the Victorious. It was a palace city for the caliph, his Kutama troops and his administration, closed to the general population at first — the same instinct that built Samarra and Baghdad, and Mahdiyya before it.

Egypt made them rich in a way Ifriqiya never had. The Nile's agriculture, plus the Red Sea trade that the Fatimids deliberately cultivated as an alternative to the Gulf routes running through Abbasid Iraq, gave them a revenue base that funded a gold dinar of famous reliability and a navy. Al-Azhar was founded in 970 as a mosque and became a college for Isma'ili teaching; the dar al-ilm followed in 1005.

The empire at its height held Egypt, Ifriqiya, Sicily, the Levantine coast, and the Hijaz with the holy cities — which meant the Friday sermon at Mecca and Medina was preached in the Fatimid caliph's name, the single most valuable piece of symbolic ground in the Islamic world.

What it did not do was convert Egypt. The population remained largely Sunni and substantially Coptic Christian throughout, and the regime made little sustained attempt to change that. Isma'ilism was the creed of the ruling establishment and the da'wa was directed outward. The doctrine travelled through the missionary organisation, not through the army that took Egypt.

The caliph the sources cannot agree about

Drafted from Walker, Caliph of Cairo: Al-Hakim bi-Amr Allah, 996-1021 (2009)peak

Al-Hakim became caliph in 996 at eleven and vanished in 1021 at thirty-six. He went out at night to the Muqattam hills above Cairo, as he often did, and did not come back; the search found his donkey and his bloodstained clothes and nothing else.

Between those two facts sits one of the most contested reigns in Islamic history. The hostile tradition gives a tyrant: the destruction of the Church of the Holy Sepulchre in Jerusalem in 1009, part of a wider campaign against Christian and Jewish worship; humiliating dress requirements for non-Muslims; a stream of public-order decrees reaching into what could be eaten, sold and done after dark, several of them reversed within a few years of being issued. The favourable tradition gives an ascetic and an imam, patron of the dar al-ilm and of the astronomers, who walked the streets himself and heard petitions.

Walker's position is that both portraits are real and neither is disinterested — they are what two constituencies made of the same man, and the chronicles that survive were written by people who belonged to one or the other. The reversals are the awkward fact for both. A ruler who restores what he demolished and rescinds what he decreed is doing something the mad-tyrant account cannot explain and the ideal-imam account does not want to.

Two consequences outlived him regardless of which portrait is preferred. The first is that around 1018 a group of missionaries began preaching that al-Hakim was a manifestation of the divine — a doctrine he does not seem to have authorised and that Cairo repudiated — and after his disappearance they became a closed community holding that he had not died but withdrawn. That community is the Druze, and it exists now.

The second is the Holy Sepulchre. The church was rebuilt, on Byzantine money, under a later agreement; but the memory of its destruction was in western circulation when the preaching of the First Crusade began ninety years later, which is a long fuse from an Egyptian decree to a Frankish army — and to 1099, when the Fatimids lost Jerusalem to it.

The name in Baghdad

Drafted from Khallikan, Ibn Khallikan's Biographical Dictionary (Wafayat al-A'yan) (1843)peak

Al-Mustansir was proclaimed caliph in 1036 at the age of seven and reigned for sixty years, which Ibn Khallikan notes was longer than any Abbasid or any other Fatimid ever managed. The high point of the whole Fatimid claim falls in the middle of it, and it happened two thousand miles from Cairo without a Fatimid army being involved at all.

Fifty-eight weeks

Arslan al-Basasiri was a Turkish commander who had acquired great power in Baghdad. In 450 of the hijra — 1058 — he substituted, in the Friday prayer, the name of al-Mustansir for that of the Abbasid caliph al-Qa'im.

Ibn Khallikan gives it in a sentence that is worth reading slowly: during twelve months the khutba was recited, in the name of al-Mustansir, from all the pulpits of Baghdad.

The Abbasid caliph left his own capital. The city that the Abbasids had built, in which the office had sat for three centuries, spent a year publicly acknowledging a Shi'i imam in Cairo as the commander of the faithful.

It did not last, and the reason it did not is instructive: what restored the Abbasid name was not an Abbasid recovery but Tughril Beg and the Seljuk army. The Fatimids had reached Baghdad through a disaffected general and could not hold it, because holding Iraq would have required the thing they had never built — an army that could operate that far east.

What else that reign held

Ibn Khallikan lists the Baghdad khutba as one of several things that happened in al-Mustansir's reign the like of which had never happened to any other prince of the family, and the others fill out the shape of the claim at its widest.

Ali ibn Muhammad al-Sulayhi took Yemen and had the prayer offered for al-Mustansir from every pulpit in the country — an event, Ibn Khallikan says, so well known that details are unnecessary.

And the western half of the inheritance was going the other way at the same time. When al-Mu'izz left for Egypt he had appointed Buluggin ibn Ziri to hold Ifriqiya for him, and the prayer there continued to be said for the Fatimids as usual — until al-Mu'izz ibn Badis, Buluggin's descendant, stopped saying it.

A caliphate measured in pulpits

Put those together and the nature of this polity comes into focus.

At its widest the Fatimid name was pronounced from the pulpits of Egypt, Syria, the Hijaz, Yemen, and for one year Baghdad — and it was being withdrawn in Ifriqiya, which the dynasty had actually ruled and where its founder was buried.

That is a fair description of what the Fatimids were: not primarily a territorial empire but a claim with an army attached, propagated by a missionary organisation and registered in the only place a caliphal claim could be registered, which was the Friday sermon. It was capable of reaching further than any army it had, and of losing ground it physically held.

The reign that contained the widest extent of that claim also contained the worst thing that ever happened to the state underneath it, and the two were seven years apart.

The apparatus that outlived the state

Drafted from Halm, The Empire of the Mahdi: The Rise of the Fatimids (1996)aside?What aside means

The two chapters before this one mention the da'wa and move on. It deserves its own, because the mission mattered to this polity more than the army ever did, and because it is the part of the Fatimid enterprise that lasted longest.

The da'wa was a hierarchy rather than a department. It had ranks, a curriculum, and a chief — the da'i al-du'at — who sat in Cairo, and it operated overwhelmingly outside Fatimid territory: in Abbasid Iraq, in Iran and Khurasan, in Sind, in Yemen. Its agents were in the business of persuading the subjects of a rival caliph that the caliph they lived under was a usurper. The dar al-ilm, founded in Cairo in 1005 and usually described as a library, is also where those agents were trained before being sent out. An institution that trains missionaries and sends them abroad is doing something different from a state that merely holds a faith, and this is what the difference looked like in practice.

It worked well enough to produce states. Yemen came over in the eleventh century under the Sulayhids, who ruled in the Fatimid caliph's name from Sana'a and funded the mission further east.

Then it did what an apparatus does when the head fails. Al-Mustansir died in 1094 and the succession was disputed between his elder son Nizar and the vizier's candidate al-Musta'li. The da'wa split along the same line. Hasan-i Sabbah, who had taken the fortress of Alamut in northern Iran four years earlier as a Fatimid agent, backed Nizar, broke with Cairo, and ran the eastern network as something independent of the caliphate that built it.

The arithmetic of that is worth setting out plainly. Cairo fell to its own vizier in 1171. Alamut fell to Hulegu in 1256, two years before he took Baghdad. The state lasted two hundred and sixty-two years; the organisation it sent out lasted eighty-five years longer, and in Yemen and later India longer still.

The years the Nile did not come

Drafted from Brett, The Fatimid Empire (2017)contraction

Al-Mustansir reigned for fifty-eight years, the longest reign in Islamic history. He is usually named as the dynasty's greatest ruler, which is defensible about the first half of it and grimly misleading about the second, because the break comes inside the reign rather than after it.

Three things failed at once in the 1060s. The Nile flood came in short for several years running, and in a country whose entire agriculture is a function of that flood, a run of low years is not a bad harvest but a famine. The army — Turkish regiments, Sudanese infantry and Berber contingents, recruited separately and loyal separately — stopped being an army and fought each other through the streets of Cairo for control of what revenue remained. And the treasury emptied, along with the palace: the shidda, the hardship, is the period in which the caliph's own libraries and treasures were sold, looted or used to pay soldiers, and the Fatimid book collection, one of the largest in the world, was dispersed.

What ended it was a soldier. In 1074 al-Mustansir sent for Badr al-Jamali, an Armenian commander governing Acre, who came to Egypt with his own troops in winter, killed the faction leaders, restored order, and took for himself the vizierate together with command of the armies, the judiciary and the mission — every civil and religious office the state had.

That is the hinge, and it is worth being exact about what turned. Badr saved the dynasty; Egypt recovered; the caliphate lasted another ninety-seven years. It did so as a state in which the caliph reigned and the vizier ruled, with the army answering to the vizier's household rather than to the palace. The Abbasids had arrived at the same arrangement under the Buyids a century earlier, where the caliphate became a currency rather than a government. Cairo reached it by a different road, and the office that saved the dynasty in 1074 is the office that ended it in 1171.

Losing the coast

Drafted from Brett, The Fatimid Empire (2017)contraction

The Fatimids took Jerusalem back from the Seljuks in 1098 and held it for about a year. The following July the armies of the First Crusade came over the wall and took it from them, and the Fatimid garrison that surrendered the citadel was one of the few groups in the city allowed to leave.

This is a distinction worth drawing, because the Crusade is usually narrated against the Seljuks. The Turks had taken Jerusalem from Cairo in the 1070s and lost it again to Cairo eleven months before the Franks arrived, so the power the Crusaders actually dispossessed in the city was the Isma'ili caliphate, not the Sunni sultanate they had been recruited against.

What followed was a coastal war Egypt could not win. The Fatimid navy and the ports of the Levant — Acre, Tyre, Sidon, Ascalon — had been the outer edge of the empire and the thing that made the Red Sea trade a Mediterranean business as well. They fell one after another over the next thirty years, the last of them in 1153, and the Italian fleets that took them kept the sea lanes afterwards. A caliphate that had preached the Friday sermon at Mecca and Medina, held Sicily, and disputed the whole Islamic world with Baghdad became a power whose reach ended at its own delta.

The internal consequence was worse than the territorial one. Egypt's defence now depended entirely on whoever commanded the army, and the office that commanded it was the vizierate, which had been where the actual government sat since 1074. Every later Fatimid crisis is a quarrel between viziers with an outside army invited in by one of them, and the last of those quarrels ends the dynasty.

The viziers, and Saladin

Drafted from Brett, The Fatimid Empire (2017)end

The vizierate saved the dynasty in 1074 and spent the following century becoming the only thing in it that mattered. Badr al-Jamali was succeeded by his son; caliphs were installed as children by viziers who had chosen them; and the succession dispute of 1094, which split the mission and is described three chapters earlier, was itself settled by a vizier putting his own candidate on the throne over the claim of the elder son.

The end came through the same office. Competing viziers in the 1160s each invited outside help against the other — the Crusader kingdom of Jerusalem on one side, Nur al-Din of Damascus on the other. Nur al-Din's expeditionary commander Shirkuh won the contest and became vizier in 1169; when he died two months later his nephew Saladin took the post, dismantled the Isma'ili establishment, and in 1171 had the Friday sermon in Cairo preached in the name of the Abbasid caliph. Al-Adid died days later.

It is not a conquest. No foreign army took Cairo. The dynasty was ended by its own chief minister, which is what the vizierate had made structurally possible a century earlier.

A storeroom in Fustat

Drafted from Goitein, A Mediterranean Society: The Jewish Communities of the Arab World as Portrayed in the Documents of the Cairo Geniza (1967)aside?What aside means

Almost all medieval Islamic history is reconstructed from chronicles: written later, by men attached to courts, about rulers and battles and successions. For the Fatimid centuries there is an exception, and the reason for it is a disposal problem.

Jewish practice forbids destroying documents that might bear the name of God, so the Ben Ezra synagogue in Fustat, old Cairo, kept a geniza — a storeroom into which written paper went instead of being thrown away. Because the community wrote in Hebrew script but often in Arabic, and because nobody sorted the sacred from the ordinary, the room accumulated roughly a thousand years of everything: letters, court records, marriage contracts, dowry lists, bills of lading, business partnerships, prescriptions, school exercises, complaints, a child's alphabet practice.

Its densest period is the eleventh and twelfth centuries — the Fatimid century and the one after it. What comes out of it is a picture of the economy these chapters describe from above, seen from inside: merchants in Fustat with partners in Qayrawan, Palermo, Aden and the Malabar coast; credit extended across the whole of that distance on reputation and correspondence; India-trade cargoes financed in Cairo; a Mediterranean that functioned as one commercial space regardless of which caliph claimed which coast.

Two things follow. It confirms from documents what the chronicles assert — that the Fatimid state's wealth came from the Nile and from a deliberately cultivated Red Sea and Indian Ocean trade — which is a rarer kind of confirmation than it sounds. And it does something no chronicle does at all: it records people the chronicles never mention, in a period otherwise known through rulers, viziers and the men who killed them.

It also sits awkwardly beside the previous chapters, and should. A dynasty is easy to narrate as a sequence of caliphs and a hard problem when the evidence starts describing what its subjects were actually doing, which in Fustat was mostly business, conducted with people on the other side of a religious frontier that the chronicles treat as the organising fact of the age.

The congregation looked surprised

Drafted from Lane-Poole, A History of Egypt in the Middle Ages (1901)afterlife

On Friday 10 September 1171 the preachers in the mosques of Cairo named the Abbasid caliph instead of the Fatimid one.

That was the whole of it. Saladin had spent the previous year founding three orthodox colleges to prepare opinion, and had waited until he was sure of it. The congregations, Lane-Poole writes, looked merely surprised. Two centuries of Isma'ili caliphate in Egypt ended in the interval between two sentences of a sermon, and nobody objected.

The last caliph did not find out. Al-Adid had been a recluse in his palace since Saladin arrived, and he was dying when his name was suppressed; the news was kept from him, and he died three days later without knowing he had been deposed.

Every luxury except posterity

His relations — eleven sons, four sisters, four wives and the rest, a hundred and fifty-two people — were shut up in different buildings of the palace, the sexes separated, and kept in comfort. The phrase for the arrangement is exact: they were indulged with every luxury except posterity.

It did not entirely work. They contrived to rear grandsons of the caliph, and the family was not extinct in 1260. A magic cup made at Cairo in 1175 carries the name of an imam with a regnal title, which may be one of al-Adid's sons, whose claim the pro-Fatimid party went on conspiring over for years afterwards, hoping either to restore the dynasty or to profit from restoring it nominally.

The books, twice

The library was the part that could not be replaced, and it was destroyed twice.

The first time was in 1068, during the famine and the mutiny of the Turkish soldiery, when over a hundred thousand volumes were sold off or carried away against arrears of pay. It had been kept in locked presses labelled by subject, run by a librarian, two copyists and two servants. It held two thousand four hundred illuminated Qur'ans, manuscripts in the hand of Ibn Muqla and other famous calligraphers, thirty copies of the great dictionary called the Ayn, and twenty copies of Tabari's history including the author's own autograph.

Manuscripts that scholars would now give anything for were used to light fires. Bindings were cut up to mend the shoes of Turkish officers' slaves. Torn volumes were thrown out and buried in the sand, and the mounds near Abyar were long known as the hills of the books. The luckiest were the ones exported abroad.

Then the dynasty started again, with such energy that Saladin found a hundred and twenty thousand volumes in the palace a century later. He gave them away — to his chancellor, al-Qadi al-Fadil.

The palaces

Saladin kept nothing of the treasure for himself. Some went to his followers, some to his own sovereign in Syria, and the rest was sold for the treasury. He did not move into the caliph's halls either; he stayed in the vizier's house and handed the palaces to his army officers.

They were not royal residences any more, so they decayed, and not a fragment of them survives. The poet Umara, who had written for the dynasty and who three years later would be crucified with the other leaders of a conspiracy to bring it back — a plot that reached as far as the kings of Sicily and Jerusalem and the master of the Assassins — said the thing worth ending on: censure my love for the sons of Fatima if you like, and then come and weep with me over the desolate halls of the two palaces.