Fatimid Caliphate

• 1. Introduction

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  The Fatimid Caliphate ruled over a stretch of land so vast it reached from the western Mediterranean all the way to the Red Sea. At its height, this empire held Egypt, Sicily, the Levant, the Hejaz, Yemen, and territories as distant as Multan in what is now Pakistan. Yet it began as something stranger and more subversive than a mere kingdom: a secret revolutionary movement that claimed the right to lead all of Islam through descent from the Prophet Muhammad's own daughter, Fatima.

  Two and a half centuries before Saladin brought the caliphate to its end in 1171, a network of hidden missionaries was spreading a radical Isma'ili doctrine across the Islamic world. A small merchant town called Salamiya on the edge of the Syrian Desert served as the secret headquarters. Berber tribesmen in the mountains of present-day Algeria were being converted to a cause they barely understood. And somewhere in the Maghreb, the man who would declare himself the awaited mahdi waited in hiding.

  How did this clandestine network become one of the most powerful empires of the medieval world? What made Fatimid Cairo a center of trade reaching all the way to China? And why, after more than two centuries of power, did the empire collapse from within, leaving Saladin to close the door on a dynasty that had once upended the entire Islamic political order?

• 2. The Secret Network

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  Salamiya was a small town on the western edge of the Syrian Desert, and in the late ninth century it held a remarkable secret. A wealthy merchant named Abdallah al-Akbar, known as "Abdallah the Elder", had established himself there as the hidden head of the Isma'ili movement, serving as the living proof of the imam's existence. His son and grandson followed him in this role, guiding a covert network of missionaries called da'is across a wide arc of territory.

  The Isma'ili movement traced its identity to a succession crisis that followed the death of the sixth imam, Ja'far al-Sadiq, in 765. Al-Sadiq had appointed his son Isma'il as successor, but Isma'il died before his father. The majority of followers ultimately traced a line down to a twelfth imam who supposedly went into hiding in 874 and would one day return. These became the Twelvers. A smaller faction believed there had been only seven imams, with the seventh having gone into hiding. From this second branch, named after Isma'il ibn Ja'far, came the movement that would eventually produce the Fatimid dynasty.

  Da'is such as Hamdan Qarmat and Ibn Hawshab carried the network outward from Iraq in the late 870s, reaching Yemen in 882, India in 884, Bahrayn in 899, and the Maghreb in 893. This expansion was helped by the collapse of Abbasid central authority during the period of the Anarchy at Samarra, and by the social upheaval of the Zanj Revolt. In 899, Abdallah al-Akbar's great-grandson Abdallah took control of the movement and made a proclamation that fractured it: he declared that he himself was the awaited mahdi, not the hidden imam Muhammad ibn Isma'il. This break, rejected by Hamdan Qarmat and others who became known as the Qarmatians, forced Abdallah to flee Salamiya under Abbasid pressure, eventually settling in Sijilmasa in the Maghreb sometime around 904-905.

• 3. The Kutama Conquest

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  In 893, a da'i named Abu Abdallah al-Shi'i arrived among the Banu Saktan tribe, part of the larger Kutama Berber confederation, near the city of Mila in what is northeastern Algeria today. Driven out by hostile Aghlabid authorities and rival tribes, he found refuge with the Banu Ghashman in the nearby settlement of Tazrut, where he began patiently building a new movement among people he called the Awliya' Allah, the "Friends of God".

  Over the next two years Abu Abdallah won over most of the Kutama tribes through persuasion or coercion. He established a small Isma'ili theocratic state based in Tazrut while the major cities of Ifriqiya remained under Aghlabid control. The Aghlabids were an Arab dynasty who ruled nominally for the Abbasids but operated as a de facto independent power across a large part of the Maghreb.

  The decisive turning point came while the Aghlabid emir Ibrahim II was away on campaign in Sicily in 902. Abu Abdallah captured the city of Mila, triggering a punitive expedition of 12,000 men from Tunis in October of the same year. The Kutama were pushed back to Ikjan, but internal Aghlabid troubles did the rest: the emir Abdallah II was assassinated on the 27th of July 903, successive expeditions mutinied or were scattered, and the strategic fortress of Baghaya fell to the Kutama in May or June 907 when local notables simply opened its gates.

  On the 25th of February 909, Abu Abdallah set out from Ikjan with an army of 200,000 men for a final march on Kairouan. He met the remaining Aghlabid force near al-Aribus on the 18th of March. Kutama horsemen outflanked the Aghlabid line and caused a rout. Ziyadat Allah III packed his treasures and fled toward Egypt. On the 25th of March 909, Abu Abdallah entered the palace-city of Raqqada and took up residence. The Aghlabid dynasty that had ruled Ifriqiya for over a century was gone.

• 4. Founding Cairo

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  Abdallah entered Raqqada in triumph on the 15th of January 910 and publicly proclaimed himself caliph with the regnal name al-Mahdi. He then quickly moved to neutralize the man who had made all of this possible: Abu Abdallah al-Shi'i had become too powerful and too demanding, pressing the new caliph for proof that he was the true mahdi. The elimination of Abu Abdallah and his brother triggered an uprising among the Kutama, but it was suppressed. Al-Mahdi made clear he had no intention of honoring the millenarian expectations his movement had encouraged.

  The historian Heinz Halm described the early Fatimid state as, in essence, "a hegemony of the Kutama and Sanhaja Berbers over the eastern and central Maghrib". The new regime's real ambition was Baghdad. Two successive invasions of Egypt, led by the heir al-Qa'im, failed in 914-915 and again in 919-921. Construction began on a new fortified capital along the Mediterranean coast, al-Mahdiyya, officially inaugurated on the 20th of February 921. In 948 the seat of power shifted again to al-Mansuriyya, near Kairouan.

  In 969, the general Jawhar launched a carefully prepared invasion of Egypt and founded a new city a few miles northeast of the older capital Fustat. The name al-Qahira, meaning "the Vanquisher" or "the Conqueror", referenced the planet Mars rising in the sky at the moment construction began. In 988, Al-Azhar Mosque, built as the official state mosque of this new capital, also became an academic institution central to the spread of Isma'ili teachings. The caliph al-Mu'izz himself arrived in Cairo on the 10th of June 973, bringing his court, his treasury, and the remains of the early Fatimid caliphs from Ifriqiya. The trade networks Egypt developed under Fatimid rule extended all the way to China under the Song Dynasty, eventually shaping the economic course of Egypt through the High Middle Ages.

• 5. Al-Hakim and Pluralism's Limits

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  Fatimid society was genuinely pluralistic by the standards of the medieval world. Most of the population remained Sunni Muslim and a large part remained Christian. Jews occupied a smaller minority. Advancement in state offices was more meritocratic than hereditary, and non-Muslims rose to high positions based on ability. The first vizier appointed by al-Mu'izz's successor al-Aziz, in 979, was Ya'qub ibn Killis, a Jewish convert. The policy of tolerance also had a practical dimension: it helped finance the caliphs' Mamluk forces, brought in from Circassia by Genoese merchants.

  Yet this record had a significant rupture during the reign of al-Hakim, the son of al-Aziz, who came to the throne in 996 at the age of 11. His reign lasted until his mysterious disappearance in 1021 and remains the most controversial in Fatimid history. Al-Hakim was noted for executing officials without warning when unsatisfied with them rather than dismissing them from their posts. He opened the Dar al-'Ilm, or "House of Knowledge", a library for the sciences, and was known for riding personally among the people of Fustat. At the same time, he imposed new restrictions on Christians and Jews in public life, ordered the demolition of churches and monasteries, and in 1009, for reasons that remain unclear, ordered the demolition of the Church of the Holy Sepulchre in Jerusalem.

  Al-Hakim also alarmed his own Isma'ili followers. In 1013 he announced the division of the caliphate and imamate between two separate heirs, undermining the dynasty's core purpose of uniting political and religious leadership in one person. In 1015 he halted the majalis al-hikma, the regular doctrinal lectures held inside the palace, without explanation. While wandering the desert outside Cairo on a nightly excursion in 1021, he disappeared. His body was never found. A group of his followers went further than anyone in the dynasty had intended: they proclaimed his divinity. This sect, suppressed in Egypt and elsewhere, eventually found a lasting home in the region of Mount Lebanon, where their descendants are known today as the Druze.

• 6. Civil War and Collapse

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  Al-Mustansir, who came to the throne in 1036 at the age of seven, had the longest reign in Fatimid history, serving as caliph until 1094. He remained largely uninvolved in state affairs throughout his reign. The government passed through a series of viziers until a Kalbid commander and a Hamdanid warlord named Nasir al-Dawla ibn Hamdan led rival ethnic factions of the army into open civil war.

  The Fatimid military had been built on a mix of Kutama Berbers, Turkish ghilman, Daylamis from Iran, and Black African troops recruited from the upper Nile valley. Each faction competed for political influence as well as pay. In 1062 this uneasy balance collapsed entirely. Factions fought each other in the streets while Egypt simultaneously endured a seven-year drought and famine known as the Mustansirite Hardship. In 1067-1068, Turkish troops plundered the state treasury and then looted the palaces. Historical sources from this period report extreme hunger in Cairo, even to the point of cannibalism.

  By 1072, al-Mustansir recalled Badr al-Jamali, at the time the governor of Acre, as a last resort. Badr entered Cairo in January 1074 and suppressed the warring factions. He was made vizier with the title amir al-juyush, "commander of the armies", effectively becoming head of state. The Juyushi Mosque, commissioned by Badr and completed in 1085, served both as a place of worship and as a victory monument commemorating his restoration of order. Between 1087 and 1092 he rebuilt Cairo's walls in stone, and three of his monumental gates, Bab Zuweila, Bab al-Futuh, and Bab al-Nasr, still stand today. When Badr died in 1094, however, the caliphate he had propped up was already structurally hollowed out from within.

• 7. Crusaders and Final Years

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  Al-Afdal Shahanshah, Badr al-Jamali's son, inherited the vizierate in 1094 and faced a threat that no amount of internal reform could have prepared the Fatimids for. First contact with the crusaders was established when they sent an embassy in May or June 1097, at the suggestion of Byzantine Emperor Alexios Komnenos, to al-Afdal. The Fatimids dispatched a return embassy to the crusading forces in February 1098, while the crusaders were besieging Antioch. The two sides congratulated each other on victories against the Seljuk Turks and exchanged ambassadors.

  Al-Afdal took advantage of the crusader victory at Antioch to reconquer Jerusalem from the Seljuks in August 1098, possibly to improve his negotiating position. When both parties met at Arqah in April 1099, they reached an impasse over ownership of the city. The crusaders crossed into Fatimid territory and captured Jerusalem in July 1099 while al-Afdal was still marching a relief army toward it. The two forces met at the Battle of Ascalon, which al-Afdal lost. The last remaining Fatimid foothold in the Levant, Ascalon, surrendered to Crusader King Baldwin III of Jerusalem in August 1153 after a siege that began in January of that year.

  The final three Fatimid caliphs, al-Zafir, al-Fa'iz, and al-Adid, were all children when they came to the throne. Real power shifted between rival generals and viziers who murdered their predecessors with regularity. Shawar, one vizier, infamously set fire to Fustat in 1168 to deny the Crusaders a staging base, destroying the older capital of Egypt. The Kurdish general Shirkuh, sent by the Zengid ruler Nur ad-Din, had Shawar murdered in 1169 with the agreement of Caliph al-Adid himself and was appointed vizier. Two months later Shirkuh died unexpectedly. The position passed to his nephew, Salah ad-Din Yusuf ibn Ayyub. Known in the West as Saladin, he suppressed the Shi'a call to prayer, ended the majalis al-hikma, installed Sunni judges, and officially deposed the last Fatimid caliph al-Adid in September 1171. The Ayyubid dynasty that replaced the Fatimids returned Egypt to the nominal authority of the Abbasid caliphs in Baghdad, the very rivals the Fatimids had spent two and a half centuries trying to unseat.