Download PDF | The Fatimid Empire (The Edinburgh History of the Islamic Empires), By Michael Brett , Edinburgh University Press 2017.
348 Pages
Introduction The Question of Empire
N either holy, nor Roman, nor an empire.’ Voltaire’s disparaging description of the great mediaeval empire founded by Charlemagne and his Saxon successors on the eve of its extinction by Napoleon not only reveals the gap between the ideal and the reality, but identifies the elements of the ideal that had originally inspired its creation — religion, race and overrule. Race, in this empire of the Germanic barbarians who had overrun the western European portion of the Roman world, was sublimated into the succession to the Caesars who had conquered and ruled that world before reinventing their dominion in the name of Christ.
Christianity, however, the first of the three religions in the Biblical tradition to emerge out of the post-exilic Judaism of the Second Temple, was closely followed after the destruction of the Temple at Jerusalem by Talmudic Judaism, and 600 years later by the third. A hundred and fifty years before Charlemagne, the Arabs, the last of the barbarians, overran Roman Syria and Egypt as well as Persian Iraq and Iran, and went on to conquer North Africa and Spain in the name of God. Like that of Charlemagne, the empire they created was founded on the basis of religion, race and overrule; the difference was that the race in question was that of the Arabs themselves, who took up their position as rivals rather than heirs of Rome.
Their Emperors were the Caliphs or Lieutenants of God and His Prophet Muhammad, first at Medina, then Damascus and finally Baghdad. Meanwhile, in the course of the seventh, eighth and ninth centuries, the faith preached by Muhammad took shape as the religion of Islam, modelled not on the pattern of Christianity as a religion of sacraments administered by priests, but on that of Talmudic Judaism as a religion of divine law interpreted by scholars.
But at the same time, the element of Messianism, common to all three religions, had not only thrown up a series of challenges for the right to rule the empire, most notably the revolution in 750 that had transferred the Caliphate from the Umayyads at Damascus to the “Abbasids at Baghdad. It had begun to generate a rival version of the faith in which authority for the divine law rested not with the scholars but with a successor to the Prophet in his capacity as the source of revelation as well as leader of the community.
That successor was held to be a member of the Prophet’s family, but his descendants in line from his daughter Fatima and his son-in-law “Ali had consistently failed to make good their claim, until by the end of the ninth century they had disappeared from view, to give rise to the expectation of the coming of a second Muhammad out of the obscurity into which they had vanished. By the end of the century, that expectation came to a head in the crisis out of which, in 910, the Fatimid dynasty and empire was born in opposition to that of the “Abbasids at Baghdad.
To call it an empire is to introduce this particular, indeed peculiar, combination of religion, race and overrule into the modern discussion of what the term might imply. The contrast between the ideal and the reality of the nation state, the standard political unit of the modern world, whose populations are regularly composed of different peoples rather than a single one, is at least partly responsible for the problem of deciding where to draw the line between the unitary state and Kipling’s vision of empire as ‘dominion over palm and pine’, the rule of some metropolitan power over a heterogeneous collection of peoples and places assembled in the course of conquest and colonisation.
The problem is apparent in the case of Great Britain and the British empire, the first a combination of at least four different peoples that subsequently extended to embrace the second, a vast miscellany of territories strung around the world. Apart from its lack of uniformity, what was missing from this evidently supranational entity was a rationale for its creation over and above the various economic and political objectives that brought it into being. Its justification after the event as the glorious achievement of a British race that had, with the help of God, brought it into being as an instrument of civilisation, was never particularly convincing.
Unlike the Roman empire, which systematically pursued as well as proclaimed its civilising mission, it had neither the means, the time nor the inclination to draw its members into a similarly closely knit polity, in the manner of the United Kingdom at its heart. When it was rapidly obliged to reinvent itself in the middle of the twentieth century, it did so rather as a commonwealth of nations under the token presidency of the monarch, on the basis of shared values and interests rather than overrule. And with the secession of the bulk of Ireland, the United Kingdom itself began to break up on the same principle of home rule.
By contrast, when the Roman empire reinvented itself, it did so in the name of a universal faith that sanctified it as the empire of God on earth. In the imperial moment of the early Middle Ages, such a faith inspired the creation of the Holy Roman Empire in western Europe out of the Frankish and German kingdoms, and still more so the rapid conquest by the Arabs of a truly enormous area, the territory of an empire that formed God’s government of the world.
It is a little ironic, therefore, that when both of these empires began, like the British empire, to break up under the impossibility of maintaining central control of their various provinces, the outcome should be a commonwealth solution in which the role of the Emperor as the representative of God preserved him as the nominal suzerain of his erstwhile subjects. This was particularly striking in the case of the “Abbasid Caliphs of Baghdad, who after 200 years had lost all power even in Iraq, but continued to be recognised by the monarchs of Islam as the authority for their rule. Such recognition was the only means at their disposal to preserve what little remained of their dominion when they were challenged by the Fatimids for the right to rule Islam.
Despite their messianic zeal, however, the Fatimids were not able to repeat the exploits of the original Arabs, nor that of the “Abbasids themselves, in conquering the bulk of the territories that now constituted the lands of Islam. The culmination of the revolution that brought them to power in North Africa was their acquisition of Egypt and Syria, a nuclear state that served as their equivalent of Great Britain, a composite base from which to pursue their imperial ambition. The aim of further conquest was then largely abandoned in favour of a similar drive for recognition by the sovereigns of the Muslim world, a means to displace their “Abbasid rivals as the legitimate rulers of a Muslim commonwealth centred upon Cairo. To win such recognition, the Fatimids not only laid claim to the Caliphate in the main line of descent from Muhammad, Fatima and ‘Ali, the trio at the root of the holy family of Islam, but still more to the Imamate, the supreme authority for the faith as well as the government of the community.
Such a claim had been abandoned by the “Abbasids; in western Europe it was reserved to the Pope rather than the Emperor. But it lay at the heart of the Fatimid empire and its complicated history, as the dynasty transferred itself from North Africa to Egypt, and its mission to rule the world separated out into the tasks of governing the lands it controlled, of winning recognition for itself elsewhere in the Muslim world and of developing a doctrine and a following of true believers in its mission. Some 150 years after the inception of this mission, the religious and political opposition it generated turned into a counterrevolution that not only changed the face of the Islamic, and indeed the mediaeval world, but eventually disposed of the dynasty itself.
The Question of the Fatimids
In following this trajectory of rise, decline and fall over a period of almost 300 years from 910 to 1171, the problem for the historian is to combine these strands into a single story that does not break down, as it usually does, into episodes in the histories of North Africa, Egypt and Isma‘ilism, the branch of Shi‘ite Islam that the Fatimids established. This breakdown is not simply because the Fatimids did indeed play an important part in all these different histories, but because the sources fall into two quite separate groups, the North African and the Egyptian, both of which are coupled with a third, the doctrinal literature of the sect.
For the most part, the secondary literature has in consequence lost sight of the empire as a whole, to the extent that up to now it has only been treated in its entirety by Heinz Halm in his three-volume work, Das Reich des Mahdi, translated as The Empire of the Mahdi; Die Kalifen von Kairo; and Kalifen und Assassinen.' Paul Walker’s Exploring an Islamic Empire summarises its history in ninety pages before turning to a discussion of the sources.” Brett’s The Rise of the Fatimids* stops at the end of the tenth; Farhat Dachraoui’s Le Califat Fatimide au Maghreb,‘ like Halm’s Empire of the Mahdi, deals only with the North African period to 973.
In Egypt, Walker’s Caliph of Cairo discusses the reign of al-Hakim° and Thomson’s Politics and Power in Late Fatimid Egypt covers the reign of al-Mustansir.° Elsewhere, the fragmentation of the subject is apparent in The Cambridge History of Egypt,’ where the imperial dimension is treated separately from the state in Egypt. In general histories of the Arabs and Islam, from Hitti‘s A History of the Arabs* through Bernard Lewis’s The Arabs in History? and Hugh Kennedy’s The Prophet and the Age of the Caliphates'® to The New Cambridge History of Islam,'' the Fatimids appear as a postscript to the empire of the Umayyads and “Abbasids as the founders of an independ-ent Egyptian state.
In Farhad Daftary’s The Isma‘ilis’* the emphasis is on their role in the evolution of their adherents into the sectarian communities of today. Meanwhile, in histories of North Africa, from Georges Margais, La Berbérie musulmane et l’'Orient au Moyen Age," through Brett and Fentress, The Berbers,'* to, once again, The New Cambridge History of Islam, they appear as contributors to regional histories of the Maghrib and the Mashriq, the Muslim West as distinct from the Muslim East.
To a large extent, this is because the Fatimids per se have attracted attention relatively recently: the above list of studies of their empire are, with few exceptions, all publications of the last forty years. As rulers of Egypt in particular, they have profited from the general growth of the subject of Islamic history, in which Egypt has figured prominently on the strength of the available sources, witness the ongoing series of conference publications under the title of Egypt and Syria in the Fatimid, Ayyubid and Mamluk Eras.'° But the rise to prominence of the Fatimids themselves stems from the study of Isma‘ilism and its literature, which began in the 1930s with the pioneering work of Wladimir Ivanow and entered the mainstream of scholarship in 1959 with the publication of the first of Wilferd Madelung’s many studies.
Since 1977 it has enjoyed the institutional support of the Institute of Ismaili Studies, whose research and publications have been directed by Farhad Daftary, the author of The Isma‘ilis, published in 1990 as the first comprehensive account of their history and subsequently revised. It is the recovery of the literature of the sect, including the pronouncements of the Fatimids themselves, which has added that extra dimension to the study of the dynasty, and made possible the study of their empire as a religious as well as a political and administrative exercise.
It has, on the other hand, created its own problems, with paradoxical consequences that stem from the doctrinal character of the literature in question. ‘This is predicated not simply upon a belief in the Imamate as the necessary instrument of God’s guidance of the community, but upon its corollary, a belief in the unbroken continuity of this Imamate in a direct line of succession to the Prophet. For the historical veracity of this article of faith before the advent of the Fatimids, however, there is nothing to confirm the versions given out by the dynasty, its sectarian successors and its enemies.
This has not only created an inconclusive argument over the origins of the Fatimids. Belief in the previous continuity of their line has retrospectively imposed a narrow sectarian perspective upon an imperial enterprise designed to establish the Imamate as the true form of the faith, one that endorses rather than contradicts the understanding of the Fatimid project as the vain attempt of a divergent minority to rule over the consensual majority of Muslims.
As their place in history, this was assigned to them, implicitly or otherwise, by the Arab generalists of the post-Fatimid period, beginning with Ibn al-Athir, in whose Kitab al-kamil fi -ta’ rikh the political history of the dynasty is scattered across the years in the annual record of events throughout the Muslim world.
It was agreed by Ibn Khaldiin in his Mugaddima when he denounced the Fatimids as heretical extremists, but ones who were indeed the descendants of the Prophet that they claimed to be, since otherwise their success in winning the support required to found such a long-lasting dynasty would be inexplicable. Such an understanding of their history as yet another dynasty built on the strength of the “asabiyya or solidarity of its followers agrees very well with our own understanding of the revolution that brought them to power, but not with that of the dynasty itself; from its point of view, the distinction between the doctrine and the genealogy separates the inseparable. But the distinction finds a perverse echo in Stanley Lane-Poole’s A History of Egypt in the Middle Ages, first published in 1901, when it was still possible to regard their revolution as the work of unscrupulous fraudsters trading on the gullibility of simple tribesmen.
Subsequent scholarship may have relegated this preposterous explanation to some historiographical dustbin, but as the disconnected treatment accorded to the dynasty in the plan of The New Cambridge History of Islam makes clear, it has not yet gone far enough to consider the Fatimids for a major role in the history either of Islam or of the world of which Islam was a part, not least as having been responsible in some measure for the crisis of the eleventh century that divides the first from the second volume.
The Argument
In “Abbasids, Fatimids and Seljuqs’, Chapter 22 of The New Cambridge Medieval History, vol. 1V, part 2, together with the relevant chapters in The New Cambridge History of Islam, | have made the case for such a role.'7 It is a thesis developed in the following narrative, which takes up the theme of empire in the way that the Fatimids themselves conceived it, as the dynasty pursued its claim to govern the empire of Islam in succession to the Prophet in his dual capacity, on the one hand as leader of the community and on the other as source of revelation.
That is to subordinate their Dawla, the state that they actually created in the three centuries of their career, to their Da‘wa, or Calling, an English translation of their Arabic whose ambiguity nicely conveys the double sense of their summons to the faithful to believe in their divine mission, and their own summons by God to their divinely appointed task. It will do so on the basis of four closely related premises.
The first is that the formation of Islam over the first centuries of its existence was a matter of convergence as well as divergence, as elements of Christianity and Judaism, rabbinical and Roman law, and Greek philosophy were all adduced to explicate the meaning of the revelation to Muhammad and give a doctrinal character to the disputes within the community that broke out within thirty years of his death. The second is the argument advanced in The Rise of the Fatimids, my account of the dynasty in the first century of its existence, that in the case of the Fatimids such a convergence served to unite a disparate collection of believers and beliefs in a doctrine that now passes under the name of Isma‘ilism. The third is that the controversy which that doctrine engendered at the hands of an aggressive monarchy was instrumental in completing the present broad division of Islam between Sunnism and Shi‘ism, as its opponents were obliged to take up their theological positions in reply to the challenge.
The fourth is that the theocratic principle of government by a ruler possessed of religious as well as political authority was not unique either to the Fatimids or to Islam, but was common to the Byzantine empire and to Christian Europe in various ways of which the Fatimid doctrine of the Imam-Caliph was an extreme example. How that principle worked itself out in practice is the story of their empire.
The Sources
It is a story obviously dependent upon the available sources, to which the most comprehensive introduction is provided by Paul Walker’s Exploring an Islamic Empire.'* The threefold division of the Fatimid enterprise between the dynasty’s consecutive political careers in North Africa and Egypt, and the evolution of its mission, corresponds to a similar but even more complicated division in the sources.
These are not only specifically North African, specifically Egyptian, and specifically doctrinal, but are divided between the works of the dynasty itself and its adherents; those hostile to the dynasty and its claims; and the broad range of Islamic historiography, the annals and histories of cities, countries and the Islamic world, including the histories of the Christian churches of Egypt.
Crucially, moreover, they are divided between the contemporary and the subsequent, all the more important because it is the later compilations from the thirteenth century cE onwards that preserve in various degrees many of the contemporary sources that have not otherwise survived. This is true of the only two such complete histories of the dynasty, those of the fifteenth-century Yemeni Idris “Imad al-Din and the Egyptian al-Maqrizi, also from the fifteenth century.
Idris was an Isma‘ili, the head of the community in the Yemen, which had kept the faith of the Fatimids after the demise of the dynasty, to the extent of preserving its literature as a record of the sacred history of the Imamate, from its inception down to Idris’s own day. In drawing on that literature for his own history of the Imamate, in the final three volumes of his seven-volume work, the ‘Uyin al-akhbar, he has preserved a great deal that otherwise would have been lost or remained inaccessible.’? Al-Maqrizi, on the other hand, was a historian of Egypt, albeit one so interested in the Fatimids that in his /¢ti°az al-hunafa’ he compiled an annalistic chronicle of the dynasty from its beginnings in North Africa.
As an Egyptian, he was unfamiliar with the North African period, but as an Egyptian, he drew on an Egyptian tradition beginning with al-Kindi’s Wulat wa’l-qudat or Governors and Judges,’ which was continued by Ibn Zilaq into the Fatimid period, and thereafter by a succession of Fatimid and post-Fatimid authors. These begin with al-Musabbihi in the early eleventh century,” and continue to al-Muhannak in the mid-twelfth, when they are followed by Ibn al-Ma°min and Ibn al-Tuwayr in the second half of the century, and by Ibn Muyassar 100 years later. The works of al-Musabbihi and his successors are largely lost, but supply al-Magqrizi with the bulk of his information.
For the twelfth century, this information is supplemented by the surviving portions of the history compiled by his fourteenth-century predecessor Ibn al-Furat.’? These Egyptian authors are complemented by the fourteenth-century Moroccan historian Ibn “Idhari al-Marrakushi, whose Kitab al-bayan al-mughrib is a history of North Africa and Spain, the first volume of which covers the history of North Africa down to the end of the eleventh century.“ Thus it includes the Fatimid period and that of their Zirid successors, in other words the history of their empire in the Maghrib.
The section on the Fatimids is drawn from the Andalusian historian °Arib ibn Sad, writing from the hostile viewpoint of the rival Umayyad Caliphate at Cordoba. It is nevertheless the principal source for their North African career. The Zirids, on the other hand, had their own chroniclers in their secretary al-Raqiq and his successors Ibn Sharaf and Abia*l-Salt, who between them provide the substance of the narrative in the Bayan, and thus the backbone of the history of the dynasty in H. R. Idris’s La Berbérie orientale sous les Zirides.”°
The corpus of literature produced by the Fatimids themselves is centred on a cluster of works produced in the mid-tenth century, after they had secured their hold on the Maghrib and before their conquest of Egypt. At their heart is the Da‘a’ im al-Islam, or Pillars of Islam, the doctrine of the Imamate and its definition of the Shari‘a, the divine law, produced by the Qadi al-Nu‘man on the authority of the Imam-Caliph al-Mu‘izz.
The accompanying works are similarly doctrinal in character, but as contributions to a body of such literature they are of wider historical value, whether like al-Nu°man’s Kitab al-majalis wa’ l-musdayarat they recount the sayings and doings of the Imam-Caliph,”’ or like the Sirat al-Ustadh Jawdhar they detail the workings of government,”® or like al-Nu‘ man’s [ftitah al-da‘wa wa ibtida’ al-dawla they narrate the previous history of the foundation of the dynasty from the standpoint of the mid-tenth century.
After the move of the dynasty to Egypt, this immediacy is largely lost to the Iranian authors who take over from the Imam-Caliphs and their entourage. Thus al-Naysabiri early in the eleventh century writes of the necessity of the Imamate for the faith; of the duties of the da‘7, or caller, the missionary who takes the place of the Imam at the head of some distant community; and problematically of the Imamate in sazr, or concealment, before the appearance of the Mahdi.”
His contemporary al-Kirmani continued in the same Iranian tradition of philosophical theology,*' which was carried further by his successor al-Shirazi in the middle of the century. Al-Shirazi was nevertheless exceptional as a narrator of the part he played in the politics of the period;” but with him and his fellow Iranian Nasir-i Khusraw the line of these authors comes to an end as the Iranians branched away from the Fatimids under a breakaway Imamate. The Yemenis eventually followed suit, but meanwhile the Fatimid connection generated the last surviving work of Fatimid literature, the Sijillat al-mustansiriyya or letters of the Imam-Caliph al-Mustansir to the Yemen in the second half of the eleventh century.
The sijillat or sijills, from the Latin sigillum, or seal, were documents of the Fatimid chancery, and are of major importance from both the religious and the political point of view. With the disappearance of the Fatimid archives, however, they have survived for the most part only as copies of the originals, either, in this case, for their religious character as utterances of the Imam, or in the case of the fifteenth-century Subh al a‘sha of al-Qalqashandi, for their merit as examples of chancery practice in a work that also includes material on the Fatimid hierarchy.
The principal exception is the group of ten privileges mostly granted to the monks of St Catherine’s monastery in Sinai, and published by Stern under the title Fatimid Decrees.*> These are supplemented by an assorted group of documents from the Genizah collection, published by Khan under the title of Arabic Legal and Administrative Documents in the Cambridge Genizah Collections.
They come from the Cairo Genizah, a vast assortment of manuscripts of the North African Jewish community in the Egyptian capital. Deposited in their synagogue, these have enabled the reconstruction of everyday life in Fatimid Egypt, most notably by Goitein in A Mediterranean Society.” Documentation of a different kind is provided by the dynasty’s coinage, catalogued by Nicol in A Corpus of Fatimid Coins.
The style and legends of the gold coins, the dinars, are statements of the dynasty’s claims to the Imamate and Caliphate, which are matched by the numerous inscriptions on buildings, woodwork and so on recorded by Wiet in ‘Matériaux pour un Corpus inscriptionum arabicarum’®” and by Sayyid in La Capitale dEgypte jusqu'a Vépoque fatimide.
These are the subject of an informative study by Bierman in Writing Signs; the Fatimid Public Text.*' The relevant buildings themselves are described by Sayyid in La Capitale, and those in North Africa by Lézine in Mahdiya: recherches d archéologie islamique.” Sayyid’s work is an essay in reconstruction going back to that other indispensable work of al-Magrizi, his voluminous Khitat, or ‘Places’, which besides its topography contains a large quantity of other historical information.
Meanwhile, the impressive art and architecture of Fatimid Egypt is comprehensively illustrated by Bloom in Arts of the City Victorious, and in L Egypte Fatimide: son art et son histoire, edited by Marianne Barrucand,” and is put in its wider context in Egypt: Faith after the Pharaohs, ed. C. Fluck et al. (2015), the catalogue of the exhibition under that name at the British Museum.“ The life that animated the city thus created by the dynasty is described by Sanders in Ritual, Politics and the City in Fatimid Cairo,’ and by Cortese and Calderini in Women and the Fatimids in the World of Islam.*
The size and importance of the Christian communities of Egypt make their own literature a necessary supplement to the Muslim sources, beginning with History of the Coptic Patriarchs of Alexandria® and including the Ta°rikh of al-Antaki® and History of Churches and Monasteries by Abia’l-Makarim Jirjis, formerly attributed to Abi Salih the Armenian.
Yahya was an Orthodox, Melkite Christian from Antioch rather than an Egyptian Copt, who moved in court circles at al-Qahira before returning to his home town in 1014. Antioch at the time was ruled from Constantinople, but Yahya’s career illustrates the Syrian dimension of the Fatimid empire and the importance of Syrian sources, among them the Dhayl ta’rikh Dimashq of the twelfth-century Damascan chronicler Ibn al-Qalanisi.* Such works feed into the universal histories of the following centuries, beginning with the thirteenth-century Kamil fr’ l-ta’rikh of Ibn al-Athir. In this the history of the Fatimids is itemised year by year in the midst of events from across the Muslim world, losing its identity in the process.
With its religious and political claims to the Imamate and Caliphate generally dismissed by the prevalent Sunni historiography of this later period, it was left to the thoughtful Ibn Khaldiin in the Mugaddimah or preface to his own universal history to comment that the Fatimids must have been the descendants of the Prophet that they claimed to be, since otherwise the success of their appeal would be inexplicable.’ However justified, it is a remark that places the dynasty firmly at the heart of the struggle for power and authority in Islam that came to a head in the 300 years of its career.
Link
Press Here
0 التعليقات :
إرسال تعليق