Download PDF | Michael Brett - The Fatimids and Egypt-Routledge (2019).
252 Pages
This collection follows on from a previous one in the Variorum series, Ibn Khaldun and the Medieval Maghrib , 1999, which dealt extensively with the Zirid viceroys of the Fatimids in Egypt, their break with Cairo and the consequences of the coming of the Banu Hilal. Comprising for the most part a series of contributions to the annual Colloquium at Leuven and Ghent, under the title of Egypt and Syria in the Fatimid, Ayyubid and Mamluk Eras , it deals mainly with the Fatimids in Egypt and Egypt under the Fatimids, closely related subjects that require an introduction to the Fatimids themselves in the religious and political context of the mediaeval world of Catholic Latinate Western Europe, Orthodox Greek Byzantium and the Islamic lands from Spain to Central Asia. In that context, a common religious heritage gave rise to what John Wansbrough called the Sectarian Milieu, 1 marked by strong oppositions and competing claims, religious and political, to represent God on earth.
In that heritage, the elements of the Biblical religions of Judaism, Christianity and Islam – divine law, sacerdotalism and sacramentalism, sacred monarchy and messianism – were variously combined in all three faiths, with the emphasis placed on divine law in Judaism and Islam, and on sacerdotalism and sacramentalism in Christianity. All three have nevertheless subscribed to a belief in sacred monarchy and messianism, in a kingdom of the past, in the present, or yet to come. At the head of this tradition in the mediaeval West stood the Biblical fi gure of Melchizedek, king and priest, who appears in Genesis 15: 18–20 as the King of Salem, offering to Abraham bread and wine, and receiving in return a tenth of the booty from Abraham’s victory over the King of Elam. As a prototype, he is then invoked in Psalm 110: 4, where David, as King, is declared to be a priest ‘after the order of Melchizedek’, and in the New Testament becomes a prefi guration of Christ. In Hebrews 5: 6, Christ is likewise declared to be ‘a priest forever after the order of Melchisedec’, while in 7: 1–3, the identifi cation is complete: the rehearsal of the story in Genesis concludes that as King of righteousness and King of peace, he was ‘without father, without mother, without descent, having neither beginning of days nor end of life; but made like unto the Son of God’. Thus in the literature of the late Roman empire, Christ appears as the last and greatest Melchizedek, whose role as king and priest was now divided between His two institutionalised successors, on the one hand the Church and on the other the state, two swords for the government of the City of God on earth. 2 At Rome, then, after the end of the Roman empire in the West in the fi fth century, the outcome of the protracted confl ict between the Papacy and the successors of Charlemagne in the Holy Roman empire was the explicit claim by the Popes in the twelfth and thirteenth centuries, as Vicars of Christ, to reign in that dual capacity, ‘after the order of Melchizedek’, with the emperors like the moon to the sun as their executives in the government of Christendom. 3
At Constantinople, on the other hand, the relationship between Church and state was reversed. It was the Byzantine emperors, no longer semi- divine in the manner of their Roman predecessors, who nevertheless claimed a divine authority to rule over the Church as well as the state. In matters of faith, the doctrines laid down by the ecclesiastical councils they convened for the purpose were endorsed by them as the orthodoxy of Christendom, Church and state. 4 These two models of mediaeval Christian monarchy, the Papal and the Caesaropapist, found their equivalents, mutatis mutandi , in mediaeval Islam, in which the religion was that of the law rather than the priesthood. With the title of Khalīfat Alläh, the fi rst Umayyads at Damascus laid claim to supreme religious as well as political authority as the deputies of God, offering in this way a direct challenge to the Christian emperor at Constantinople for the government of the world. 5 But while they claimed in this way to lay down the law of God, the development of that law over the fi rst two centuries of the faith fell into the hands of the jurists, whose collective efforts put an end to any claim by the Umayyads at Damascus and the messianic ‘Abbasids at Baghdad to inherit the supreme religious as well as political authority of Muhammad as Caliphs of God. The claim was effectively abandoned with the failure of the attempt of al- Ma’mun in the ninth century to prescribe the doctrine of the created Qur’ān as the foundation of the faith, leaving the ‘Abbasids in a position comparable to that of the Byzantine emperors, as guarantors of a divine law which they had not made but which fell to them to uphold as Commanders of the Faithful, the rulers of the community. 6 In the next, tenth century, however, the messianism that had propelled the ‘Abbasids to power in the eighth century gave rise to the Fatimids, monarchs who claimed for themselves the mantle of the Prophet, endowed with supreme religious as well as political authority in their dual role as Imam and Caliph, Pope and Emperor in one, very much ‘after the order of Melchizedek’. 7
The response of the ‘Abbasids to this radical challenge to the religious and political establishment in the Arab world was checked by the disappearance of their empire in mid- century as a political reality, reviving only in the eleventh century with the weakening of their Buyid protectors, and the rise of the Ghaznavids and Seljuqs as their champions. In the tenth century the immediate challenge came from the Umayyads of Spain, who in response to the claims of the Fatimids turned their state from an Amirate into a Caliphate. While laying claim to the inheritance of the Umayyads, ‘the fi rst dynasty of Islam’, 8 this was a monarchy on late ‘Abbasid and Byzantine lines which celebrated the prince as the representative of God for the government of the community, in which capacity he endorsed and defended the Malikite version of the law rather than proclaiming a version of his own. 9 In both these cases, the comparison with the Papacy of Pope Innocent III on the one hand and Byzantium on the other is not simply typological. In a post- Fatimid Nizari source, which may derive from a previous Fatimid borrowing from a Christian source, Melchizedek appears as in Hebrews as Malik Yazdāq together with the titles of Malik Shūlim, or King of Salem, and Malik al- Salām, or King of Peace, in which personae he presides over the ages of Adam, Noah and Abraham. 10 Meanwhile the Caliphate at Cordoba allied itself with Constantinople, not only as a counter to the Fatimids. In doing so, it adopted and adapted the regal symbolism of the Byzantine mosaic, most spectacularly employed for the glorifi cation of God and His viceroy in the Mihrab it built in the Great Mosque of Cordoba, but also in the adornment of the palace of Madinat al- Zahra’, to serve its own comparable purpose, the affi rmation of both its religious and political authority.
II The Caesaropapist model of monarchy adopted by the Caliphate at Cordoba set the seal on the restoration of central government in al- Andalus. By way of contrast, the Fatimids’ ambition to rule the Islamic world produced a different history, one of evolution dictated by circumstance. The claim of the Fatimid Mahdi in his Letter(s) to his followers in the Yemen, that he had arisen as the founder of a dynasty destined to rule until the end of time, announced the principle of his empire, but left it to develop in practice over the rest of the century. 11 The dual role of Melchizedek as king and priest, translated into that of the Fatimid monarch as Imām and Caliph, gave rise from the beginning to two sets of problems, those of belief and those of government. The Mahdi ‘Abd Allah and his son Muḥammad al- Qa’im came out of obscurity in 910 against a background of expectation of the coming of a second Muḥammad who would be the bearer of a fi nal revelation before the end of the world. That, as the Mahdi made clear in his Letter(s), was not so. The Dā‘ī Abū ‘Abd Allah, who had come from the Yemen and brought him to power in Ifriqiya, was evidently disillusioned, and swiftly put to death. 12 So too were the ghulāt , the extremists, for whom he had come to abolish the law of the Prophet. 13 While the Yemenis were seemingly persuaded of his identity and purpose, however, the numerous Iranians who looked for the coming of the second Muhammad remained unconvinced. It took fi fty years, and a claim by the Mahdi’s great- grandson al- Mu‘izz to be the Second Seventh in line of descent from Muḥammad ibn Isma‘il, the Seventh in line from ‘Ali, before they agreed in the 960s to recognise the legitimacy of the Fatimid Imāmate, and join with the believers in the West in the community of the faithful that now goes under the name of Isma‘ii. 14 That sectarian character was naturally alien to the Fatimids themselves, whose creed in their eyes was Islam itself, and the believers in their Imamate were the mu’minūn , the truly faithful, as distinct from the muslimūn , the majority who had simply submitted to God and His Caliph.
This genealogical and doctrinal development of the claim to the Imāmate, which led to the creation of a worldwide community of believers, was an aspect of the relaunch of the dynasty along new lines after the drastic shock of near- revolution in the 940s. In Ifriqiya, the Mahdi’s vision of his dynasty had been suited to the character of the fully fl edged state, which he took over from his Aghlabid predecessors, but less so with its politics. Thus, the fi rst converts to his cause after the Berber Kutama recruited by the Dā‘ī for the conquest of the country came from the Ḥanafi tes, the minority of schoolmen historically at odds with the Malikite majority. The latter were antagonised by the Mahdi, who persecuted them for their refusal to recognise his claims. 15 Equally at odds with the population was the way in which, in his pursuit of his destiny to carry his conquests away to the East, the Mahdi shut himself off from his subjects in his fortress city of al- Mahdiyya on the coast. This approach to the government of Ifriqiya was brought up short by the rising of the Kharijite Abu Yazid, the Man on a Donkey, whose messianic appeal swept the country in the 940s. His fi nal defeat, acclaimed by the victorious Imam- Caliph Isma‘il al- Mansur as the predestined victory of the dynasty over the Dajjāl, the Antichrist, was nevertheless the occasion for a radical change of policy. The accession in the midst of the crisis of Isma‘il al- Mansur was itself a coup carried out by the Slavonic eunuch Jawdhar at the expense of Isma‘il’s brothers and uncles, who were placed under house arrest for their refusal to recognise his alleged designation by his father al- Qa’im, the reclusive son of the Mahdi. 16 With the name of Muhammad ibn ‘Abd Allah and the messianic title of al- Qa’im, what should have been his destiny to fulfi l the purpose of the Mahdi with the conquest of Baghdad had come to nothing with his failure to conquer Egypt, and an obscure confrontation with the Mahdi over the succession. But with his death, the new era began with Isma‘il’s claim to his father’s designation, which established the principle of such designation to the Imāmate in line from father to son as the governing principle of the dynasty down to its last days. 17 To reconcile himself with his subjects, then, the victorious al- Mansur not only left al- Mahdiyya for a new palace city built next to the metropolis of Qayrawan, but appointed a Malikite as Qāḍī of the old city, responsible for the general administration of justice in Ifriqiya. 18
In the palace city of al- Manṣūriyya itself, the supreme Qāḍī of the realm, al- Nu‘man, became the theorist of the dynasty, whose Da‘ā’im or Pillars of Islam spelt out on the one hand the entitlement of the monarch to the Imāmate and the necessity of belief in him as the appointed representative of God, and on the other the stipulations of the divine law, set out on the authority of al- Mansur’s successor al- Mu‘izz as the sole true version, in contrast to the variety of doctrines exhibited by the schools. 19 This division of the judicature gave formal recognition to the distinction between mu’minūn and muslimūn inherent in the title which had been borne by al- Qa’im, that of Walī ‘Ahd al- Muslimīn, or Keeper of the Covenant of the Muslims. 20 As al- Mu‘izz then returned to the pursuit of universal empire with the conquest of Egypt, these various elements of theory and practice were incorporated into the Amān or Pax offered to the Egyptians by Jawhar, the plenipotentiary lieutenant of al- Mu‘izz who took over the country in 969, as the principle of the new regime. At the heart of the Amān was the ‘Ahd, the pact concluded between the sovereign and his new subjects in a text worth quoting at length: I give you the Amān of God in its completeness, its perpetuity and its universality. . . . And I take it upon me to fulfi l what I have committed myself to give you – the ‘Ahd or Pact of God and His inviolable Mīthāq or Covenant, together with His Dhimma or Protection, and that of His Prophets and Messengers; the Protection of the Imāms our Lords, the Commanders of the Faithful, God bless their souls; and that of our Lord and Master the Commander of the Faithful, al- Mu‘izz li- Din Allah, the blessings of God be upon him. And you in turn shall act openly in accordance with his Dhimma, coming out and submitting to me, and placing yourselves at my disposal until I cross the bridge into your city and alight in the blessed abode. Thereafter you will persevere in your obedience, and hasten to perform its obligations, not forsaking such a Walī or Representative of our Lord and Master the Commander of the Faithful . . . as myself, but doing as he commands. 21 Between them, the Amān of Jawhar and the ‘Ahd which laid down its terms spelt out the principle of Fatimid government in Egypt along the lines laid down by al- Mansur and al- Mu‘izz in Ifrīqiya – protection of the population in return for its obedience, irrespective of its belief or otherwise in the Imāmate of the dynasty. The ‘Ahd was a compact made with the representatives of the Muslim population; but in a country with a substantial Christian population and a sizeable Jewish community, the effect was to place that population alongside the other Peoples of the Book under the same lofty umbrella. 22
As a blueprint for the universal empire which al- Mu‘izz envisaged with the capture of ‘Abbasid Baghdad, however, the ‘Ahd came to nothing as the projected conquest almost immediately stalled in Syria, never reaching with any permanent success beyond Damascus. Control of the government of Ifriqiya was lost some fi fteen years after al- Mu‘izz’s departure, when its Zirid viceroys asserted their freedom from the interference of the Caliph in their conduct of affairs. Ruling nevertheless in the name of the Imam- Caliph, they thus established the future character of the empire – a dominion in Egypt and Syria where the Fatimids both reigned and ruled according to the ‘Ahd, and a fl uctuating periphery of domains over which they reigned as the acknowledged Caliphs, but in which they did not rule. Beyond that periphery, the rest of the Muslim world remained to be persuaded by their call to recognise their Caliphate rather than that of the ‘Abbasids. 23 Where then did that leave Melchizedek, King and Priest, Imam and Caliph? The Caliphate continued to depend for its sovereignty upon the Imamate, hereditary in the line of ‘Ali by the designation of the son by the father from the original designation of ‘Ali by Muhammad at Ghadīr Khumm, a designation analogous to that of Peter by Christ as the rock on which the Church would be built. The result was a charismatic monarchy, celebrated in its Egyptian capital in theatrical style with processions and festivals, Christian as well as Islamic, and specifi cally Egyptian in the ceremony of the cutting of the canal at the height of the Nile fl ood. 24 In their various ways, these celebrations not only proclaimed the dynasty, but in their various ways involved, entertained and fed the populace, a benevolent enactment of the covenant made by Jawhar on behalf of al- Mu‘izz. Its religious authority was proclaimed in the rituals of public worship, and by the requirement, under the auspices of the Qāḍī- s from the family of al- Nu‘man, that the stipulations of the Da‘ā’im should be observed in the courts by qāḍī - s of whatever school. 25 The claim of the dynasty constituted in this way to be the plenipotentiary heirs of ‘Ali was addressed with varying degrees of success to the Ashrāf, the descendants of Hasan and Husayn, now formed into an important congregation whose membership was locally vetted by a Naqīb; most importantly, it was recognised by the Sharīfs of Mecca, dependent upon the supply of Egyptian grain for the Hajj. 26 It challenged those other, Twelver, Shī‘ites to recognise a present Imām instead of one in occultation, Ghayba. And to the rulers of the Islamic world, it appealed on the grounds of a better title to the Caliphate than that of the ‘Abbasids, as direct descendants of Muḥammad rather than his uncle. At the same time, however, that this da‘wa or call for recognition was addressed to the world of Islam, it was accompanied by a growing separation of the mu’minūn , the true believers, from the Muslim majority. The adhesion of the Iranians to the dynasty in the 960s had fi nally established a worldwide community of the faithful, one which continued to proselytise on behalf of the Imām, and push for the recognition of his Caliphate. But as this community became increasingly organised and structured through regular teaching at the new palace city of al- Qahira, 27 and regular correspondence with the du‘āt , the callers who headed the individual communities abroad, 28 so it began to take on a sectarian character at variance with the claim of the dynasty to universal recognition as heir to the Prophet and guarantor of his religion in perpetuity. The kingdom of Melchizedek did not, as it were, completely coincide with his priesthood .
III The context in which this religious and political evolution of the Fatimid empire took place, all- important for its success and ultimate failure, was the fi nal phase of the ‘Abbasid empire, and its mid- tenth- century disintegration into what Hugh Kennedy has called the Muslim commonwealth. 29 In this pattern of regional states, the Fatimids were conspicuous by their success in rising to prominence in the collection, and by their failure to overthrow it. 30 It was a success that clearly depended upon their revolutionary claim to the inheritance of the Prophet through ‘Ali and his line, but would have been impossible without a salient feature of Kennedy’s commonwealth, namely the way in which tribal peoples of the mountains and the deserts, originally incorporated by conquest into the Arab empire, but never subjected to its administration, took the opportunity to invade its heartlands and form their own dominions. Of these, the Arab bedouin of what Ibn Khaldun called the fourth race in succession to the third, the race of the Arab conquerors, moved in from the Iraqi- Syrian desert to establish the series of tribal polities listed by Kennedy in his description of his Muslim commonwealth. Meanwhile the Daylamī- s of the mountains of northern Iran, traditionally rebellious, moved down into western Iran and into Iraq under their Buyid commanders to create a family confederation which took over Baghdad as protectors of the ‘Abbasids. And in North Africa, beyond the scope of Kennedy’s survey, were the Berbers of the Algerian mountains, formed into an army of conquest by the Fatimid missionary Abu ‘Abd Allah. While his preaching was crucial to their mobilisation, without them the Fatimids would have joined the ranks of the many messianisms that had come to nothing. As it was, their Berber forces fi rst overthrew the Aghlabid dynasty of Ifriqiya, then drove the Turkish Ikhshidids from Egypt, only to be brought up short in Syria by the opposition of its cities and tribes. Bringing the Fatimid project of empire to a halt at Damascus, that opposition inaugurated a period of adjustment to the internal realities of government in Egypt, and the external realities of the world abroad, which lasted down to the middle of the eleventh century. By then, not only had the government of Egypt lapsed into the hands of the Men of the Pen, the secretaries of state, but, abroad, the weakening of Buyid control of Baghdad had fi nally enabled the ‘Abbasids to mount their challenge to the Fatimids. In the third quarter of the century, from 1050 to 1075, these two developments conjoined in a crisis for the dynasty, its state and its empire whose outcome over the next hundred years was the dwindling down to extinction of the original grand design of a universal Imamate and Caliphate. In Egypt, ever since the death of the Caliph al- Hakim in 1021, the Men of the Pen had been rival politicians in the business of forming a government. Controversially, this had led to the appointment of an outsider, al- Yazuri, in 1050. Meanwhile, at the beginning of the century, the ‘Abbasids had found an ally in Mahmud of Ghazna and his successor Mas‘ud. These Turkish warriors had left the service of the Samanid dynasty of Transoxania to establish their own empire in Afghanistan and eastern Iran. Upstarts in the Muslim world, for this purpose they needed a cause, which they basically found in holy war upon the infi dels of India, but more particularly in their championship of the ‘Abbasids against the Fatimids. In the 1030s, Mas‘ud declared his intention to come to Baghdad to exterminate the rival dynasty, but was overtaken by the infl ux into Iran of yet another tribal people, this time from outside the limits of the original Arab empire. These were the Turcomans, whose coming, as they spread westwards through northern Iran and Iraq into Anatolia, began the demographic and linguistic transformation of this long region. At the same time, under the leadership of the Seljuq chieftains Tughril and his brothers, they defeated Mas‘ud at the battle of Dandanqan in 1040, and Tughril took over from him the ‘Abbasid cause. In the 1050s he came down to Baghdad to be proclaimed King of the East and the West, with the same intention of ousting the Fatimids. The Seljuqs, meanwhile, were not the only nomadic invaders to be caught up in the ‘Abbasid challenge to the Fatimids. Out to the west of Egypt, the Fatimid viceroy of Ifrīqiya, the Zirid Mu‘izz ibn Badis, had likewise declared his allegiance to the ‘Abbasids, only to be checked in his ambition to enlist the chiefs of Tripoli and Barqa in an anti- Fatimid coalition by his defeat by the Banu Hilal in the battle of Haydarān in 1052. Arab bedouin of the fourth race, these had drifted westwards from the western deserts of Egypt over the past half century. Not the equivalents of the Seljuqs as empire builders, they were nevertheless promptly persuaded by the Wazir al- Yazuri to besiege Mu‘izz in his capital Qayrawan, an event which certainly led to the return of Mu‘izz to his Fatimid allegiance, but at the cost of his abandonment of Qayrawan for the fortress of Mahdiyya on the coast, and the disintegration of the Ifriqiyan state. Still further to the west, the militant Sunnism of the jurists of Qayrawan had stimulated the Berbers of the western Sahara, yet another tribal population from outside the old Arab empire, to form themselves into an army of conquest that created the Almoravid empire in Morocco and Spain. Matters came to a head in both Egypt and Iraq when alYazuri, emboldened by his success in Ifriqiya, turned eastwards to aid al- Basasiri, the Buyid commander at Baghdad, retake the city from the Seljuqs. In 1058, alBasasiri had his hundred days of success before Tughril fi nally retook the city, but by then al- Yazuri had been executed on a charge of sending the wealth of Egypt to Iraq, endangering the country by provoking a Seljuq invasion. The result was a catastrophic failure on the part of the Men of the Pen to agree on a successor. While Wazirs came and went, in 1066 the Turkish soldiery on the one hand, and the ambitious general Nasir al- Dawla on the other, began a struggle for power which plunged Egypt into a seven- year famine. The confl ict was only ended by the arrival in 1074 of Badr al- Jamali, the governor of Acre, who suppressed the remnants of the Fatimid army and took power as the Commander of the Armies. But in the meantime Syria had been lost, and now fell into the hands of the Seljuqs under a brother of the new Sultan Malik Shah. As Badr al- Jamali took a fi rm grip of Egypt, the Fatimid world had irrevocably changed. Badr was a ghulām , a so- called slave soldier brought up in a Fatimid household; but he was by origin Armenian, and so were his troops, yet another people from outside the old Arab empire who now became a major presence in the army and the government, one of lasting importance. Despite the renascence of the regime that Badr himself effected, however, over the next hundred years, the Fatimids themselves lost both their mission and eventually their state. That they lasted for so long was because, in their palace city of al- Qaḥira, their title remained unassailable. As Imams and Caliphs, they conferred an indispensable legitimacy on the military who governed in their name. Badr himself, who began the process, did so by the designation of the Caliph al- Mustansir, who was promptly excluded from control of the state, and exercised control of the mission only under supervision. Abroad, Badr failed to retake Damascus from the Seljuqs, but had greater success to the south, with Christian Nubia and with the Yemen, ruled by the Fatimid Sulayhids. These, with whom Badr permitted al- Mustansir to correspond in his capacity as Imam, were active in developing the mission, with du‘āt sent out to the Gulf and Gujerat But this was in contrast to the mission in Iran,where the Dā‘ī Hasan- i Sabbah struck out on his own in militant opposition to the Seljuqs, taking as his headquarters the impregnable citadel of Alamut in the mountains south of the Caspian. For him, the decisive moment came at the death of Badr, closely followed by that of al- Mustansir himself in 1094, when Badr’s son and successor al- Afdal imposed al- Mustaṣir’s younger son Ahmad in place of the older son Nizar as Imam and Caliph under the title of al- Musta‘li. Nizar’s rebellion was duly put down, and al- Afdal took over the regime from his father with the Caliph as his protégé. But his manipulation of the Fatimid succession proved to be the beginning of the end for the Da‘wa as far as the Fatimids were concerned. Nizar had disappeared, done away with, but his succession to the Imamate was recognised by Hasan- i Sabbah, who thus broke away from the Imāmate in Cairo to create the Nizari branch of Isma‘ilism. The Yemenis accepted the succession of al- Musta‘li, but they too broke away from the dynasty after the murder of the Caliph al- Amir in 1130, to leave the Da‘wa of the dynasty in Cairo a mere rump of its old self. Nine years after the murder of al- Afdal in 1121 had restored power to the young and inexperienced al- Amir, his assassination by the Nizaris of Syria not only provoked the Yemenis to recognise his newborn son Muhammad, promptly eliminated in the confusion over the succession, as the Hidden Imam al- Tayyib. In Egypt itself, the irregular accession of a surviving son of al- Mustansir under the title of al- Hafi z introduced a protracted struggle for power within the military which, as in the case of the Men of the Pen a hundred years earlier, eventually combined with events abroad, in this case to bring the dynasty to an end. The events in question were the Crusades and their consequences: the creation of the Kingdom of Jerusalem and the Latin states, and the subsequent mounting of the counter- Crusade by the Turkish Zangi and his son Nur al- Din at Aleppo and Damascus. Since the initial stimulus for the Crusades had been the appeal of the Byzantines for aid against the Seljuqs, it could be argued that their invasion of the Muslim world was the ultimate outcome of the Fatimid–‘Abbasid rivalry of the mid- eleventh century. From the point of view of Cairo in the twelfth, however, the Crusades had begun with the capture of Jerusalem from the Fatimids in 1099, followed by the rout of al- Afdal and his army at Ascalon. For al- Afdal, it was an opportunity to relaunch the Fatimids as the champions of Islam against the infi del, with himself as their hero. For the rest of his reign he fought to delay the capture of the coastal cities of Syria- Palestine by the Franks, for which he turned to the old enemy, the Seljuq rulers of Damascus, for allies in the cause. But after his death, the failure in 1123 of an ambitious expedition mounted by the newly independent Caliph al- Amir led to the fi nal fall of Tyre, and thereafter, as the struggles for power of the Fatimid military intensifi ed, these increasingly turned to Damascus for allies. The culmination came in the 1160s, when the Franks and the Damascans were brought into Egypt by the rivalry of two such contenders, Dirgham and Shawar, ending in 1169 when the Kurdish Saladin, on behalf of Nur al- Din, took power as Wazir, before doing away with the Fatimids at the convenient, and possibly engineered, death of the last of the dynasty, al- ‘Adid.
IV Summarised in this way, the history of the Fatimids has been variously categorised in political thought, as representative of sundry types of state. A point of departure is provided by Ibn Khaldun in his Muqaddimah , his observations on geography, history, society, the arts, craft and sciences, which serves as an introduction to his Kitāb al- ‘Ibar , or universal history. 31 Famously, it attributes the foundation of empire to the mobilisation of tribal ‘aṣabiyya , or clannishness, for a war of conquest by a religious revolutionary. But once the empire has been won and the monarchy established, the tribesmen are replaced by mercenaries and ministers, ‘aṣabiyya is lost, and the dynasty eventually succumbs to idleness and luxury, to be replaced by yet another tribal conqueror. This is a moral tale of rise, decline and fall which doesn’t hold entirely true of the reality of the empires he has in mind. Nevertheless, there is enough in it that holds good for the histories to which he refers to lie behind Max Weber’s discussion of the historical Islamic state. Weber, like Ibn Khaldun, envisaged the creation of such a state through the revolutionary appeal of some charismatic religious fi gure such as the Fatimid Mahdi. Once in power, however, the charisma was routinised, and government evolved through the patriarchal into the patrimonial state. In the patriarchal state, the monarch ruled through his household, but in the patrimonial state government fell into the hands of ministers either civilian or military, until the original charisma was exhausted, and the dynasty was replaced. 32 His examples are the ‘Abbasids and the Ottomans, but might equally well have been the Fatimids. As to the principles of government in such a state, the genre of literature known as ‘Mirrors for Princes’ included the pseudo- Aristotelian work known as the Sirr al- asrār , or Secretum Secretorum , in which is found the circular maxim of the Wheel of State or Circle of Equity, in which the monarch is responsible for justice. There can, however, be no justice without the army, no army without taxation, no taxation without wealth, and no wealth without justice. The reality behind that maxim was identifi ed by Hartmann as the fundamental distinction between the Oriental and the Occidental state. 33 The Oriental state he had in mind was the Byzantine in succession to the late Roman empire, which rested upon the paramount right, which could never be alienated, to tax the land in cash and kind. This was a right that was certainly acquired by the Arabs in the lands they conquered, and most certainly in Egypt, with its long history under the Greeks and Romans as a state domain. Under the Fatimids, the result was an elaborate system of taxation which had nothing to do with the Islamic Law, but which underlay what Kennedy has called the ghulām state. 34 This was a state which depended upon its military for survival, whether or not these were ghilmān (sing. ghulām ), so- called slave soldiers, or mercenaries, or tribesmen. The Fatimids employed them all – Berbers, Turks, Blacks, Daylamī- s, Arabs, Slavs, Armenians; what was essential was that they be paid out of the wealth of the land. Failure to do so in times of low Niles and shortages led to mutiny, and crucially helped to bring the dynasty to the verge of extinction in the fi tna and shidda , 1066–74, the event that transformed the regime from the civilian to the military.
The charisma of the Fatimids, their Imamate and Caliphate, nevertheless enabled their dynasty to survive for another hundred years through the necessary legitimacy it conferred upon those who ruled in its name and on its behalf. That legitimacy was an enduring aspect of the dynasty’s patrimonial state, but one which at the same time conformed to a different model, that of the Theatre State, described by Clifford Geertz with reference to the pre- Islamic Hindu- Buddhist monarchy in Indonesia. What he called the Exemplary Centre, in which the monarch was the representative of heaven on earth, presiding over a population of Graded Spirituality, from those closest to those furthest away from him, manifested itself in the theatrical performance of ritual ceremony for which the capital was a stage. It is a scenario enacted by the Fatimids in the manner described by Paula Sanders in her Ritual, Politics and the City in Fatimid Cairo , where ever more elaborate feasts and splendiferous processions celebrated not only the Islamic but also the Christian and specifi cally Egyptian calendars relating to the Nile. On one level, it was the equivalent of the Roman ‘bread and circuses’, but on another, it was a spectacular enactment of the dynasty’s mission to rule in the name of God. 35
V In evaluating these modern attempts to make sense of the past, it is as well to remember that despite the many claims for Ibn Khaldun that he was out of his time as a precursor of modern sociology, he was, as Robert Irwin has conclusively shown, a man very much of his time, one with a different mentality from that of the present, which we have to understand. 36 Given the truism that ‘the past is a foreign country’, however, the following collection deals in more detail with aspects of Egyptian and Fatimid history that are more generally covered in ‘The Fatimid Empire’, my contribution to The Edinburgh History of the Islamic Empires . 37 It is divided into six sections, as follows: I ‘Writing the History of Egypt for the New Cambridge History of Islam ’ is an overview of its history from the Arab conquest to the Ottomans. II ‘The Way of the Peasant’ and ‘Population and Conversion to Islam in the Mediaeval Period’ consider the evolution of the population with particular reference to the Fatimid period. III The ‘Execution of Ibn Badūs’ and the ‘Execution of al- Yāzūrī’ deal with the politics of the Men of the Pen, the ministerial class which controlled the Wazirate in the name of the Imam- Caliph from the death of al- Hakim in 1021 to the outbreak of the fi tna and shidda in 1066. IV ‘Translation’, ‘The Diplomacy of Empire’, ‘The Ifrīqiyan Sijill ’ and ‘The Poetry of Disaster’ deal with diplomacy and the role of offi cial letters as instruments of state, and their employment in Fatimid relations with the Zīrid rulers of Ifrīqiya down to the fi nal crisis in the 1050s. V ‘Badr al- Jamālī and the Fatimid Renascence’, ‘Al- Karāza al- Marqusīya: the Coptic Church in the Fatimid Empire’ and the ‘Origins of the Mamluk Military System in the Fatimid Period’ deal with the takeover of government by Badr al- Jamali, his imperial policy and his military reforms. VI ‘The Muslim Response to the First Crusade’, ‘The Battles of Ramla’ and ‘The Fatimids and the Counter- Crusade’ consider the importance of the Crusades for the Fatimids down to Saladin and the end of the dynasty. I should like to thank the editors and publishers of the journals and books in which the articles were fi rst published, namely Peeters, BREPOLS, and the Bulletin of the School of Oriental and African Studies, for their kind permission to reproduce them in this collection.
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