The caliphates we have been discussing so far, the Orthodox, the Umayyad and the Abbasid caliphates, all belong to, or have been adopted by, the Sunni mainstream of Islam, but there is another tradition of caliphate, equally vital and varied, which we might define as the Shi’ite.

Islamic leadership in the Shi’ite tradition is described in terms of caliphate but also of imamate. The term imam has, as has already been noted, a whole spectrum of meanings in the discussion of Islamic society. In the context of this discussion it is used virtually as a synonym for caliphate, the religio-political leadership of the Muslims. The Twelver Shi’ites produced imams but, apart from the first Alī, no caliphs; the intention certainly was that at one stage in the future, with the help of God and the support of the Shi‘a, these imams would also be caliphs. In the event this did not happen and the imams disappeared into hiding instead.

The Shi’ites are often described as heretics and it is worth pausing for a moment to see what this idea signifies in Islam. Heresy in Christianity, Islam and Judaism means believing the wrong thing in religious matters. It is the opposite of orthodoxy or right belief. Nobody ever claims they are heretics because nobody ever boasts that they believe the wrong thing and everyone thinks that they alone are orthodox. For Shi’ites of all persuasions, it is the Sunnis who are heretics. In ancient Christianity heresy was about theological issues, above all the relationship between the three persons of the Trinity and the nature of the incarnation of Christ. These abstract, and essentially unknowable, questions aroused fierce passions and, in the three centuries before the coming of Islam, a huge polemical literature was produced and much blood shed in debating them. From the eleventh century onwards the western Church was divided by another sort of heresy and that was the debate about the authority of the papacy of Rome, a controversy which in the end split the western Church from top to bottom and led to the Reformation in the sixteenth century.

The same issues still divide the Church today. The fundamental question is the role of the pope in defining true belief. For the Catholics it was clear that God’s grace provided the pope with the authority to decide on controversial aspects of belief, and in the nineteenth century it became official doctrine that the pope was infallible, that is, he could not make a wrong decision when it came to pronouncing on questions of Christian belief. Protestants, on the other hand, rejected what they saw as papal authority, or what they considered to be papal dictatorship, and believed that matters of doctrine should be debated by learned men but in the end decided by individuals and churches. Ultimately, the key relationship was the relationship of the individual believer with God.

Islam was spared much of the speculative wrangling about issues of Trinity and Incarnation because the unity of God was paramount and indisputable; indeed Muslims defined themselves as those who rejected shirk (polytheism). There were, however, still two areas in which speculative theology crossed into wrong belief or heresy.

The first of these was the nature of the Qur’ān. All Muslims agree that the Qur’ān is the word of God; whereas most, though by no means all, Christians believe the Bible contains divine utterance but also a great deal of material, such as histories, proverbs and so forth, which is obviously composed by human beings. If you do not accept the Qur’ān as the word of God, you cannot be a Muslim. The question which separates Sunnis and Shi‘as was whether the Qur’ān had existed through all eternity with God, or whether it had been authored by God at a particular moment in human history and revealed to Muhammad.

The second speculative issue which divided Muslims was that of anthropomorphism, the belief that God was in shape and form like a human (male) being, but much bigger and better. That is to say that He had arms and legs, sat literally on a throne and uttered words with His mouth in the way that we do. Nobody actually claimed to be anthropomorphist, but it was an accusation which could be levelled at Muslims who thought differently from true believers, and one which was used by the Almohads in the Maghreb to discredit the views of their enemies the Almoravids.

These were controversies which, though important at the time, were limited in scope and duration. The issue which really divided, and continues to divide the umma, is that of authority in the Muslim community. In this respect it is reminiscent of the controversies among Christians about papal supremacy, which proved equally divisive.

The Arabic word shī‘a essentially means ‘a party’ in the sense of ‘a group of supporters’. From this derives the Arabic shī‘ī, meaning an individual member of such a party, and this in turn gives us the English Shi’ite, the term I shall use. In early Islamic political discourse there were a number of shī‘as, the shī‘a of Uthmān, for example, or the shī‘a of the Abbasids, but by the tenth century the term generally referred to the party of Alī, or the party of the Family of the Prophet.

The fundamental idea to which all Shi’ites subscribe is that the Family of the Prophet has a special status in the Muslim community. This in itself was neither controversial or divisive. Most Sunni Muslims, at least in pre-modern times, would accept that the members of the Family should be honoured and perhaps given pensions or other benefits. What distinguished the Shi’ites is that they believed that the Family of the Prophet, and only it, had a God-given right to lead the Muslim community as caliphs or imams and to make decisions on matters of sharī‘a.

This belief, if accepted, gave rise to a number of further questions. Who exactly belonged to the Family of the Prophet? Clearly this included the direct blood descendants of Muhammad through his daughter Fātima, her husband Alī b. Abī Tālib and their two sons, Hasan and Husayn. But could it also include the descendants of Alī’s brother Ja‘far, or the Prophet’s paternal uncle Abbās, from whom the Abbasids were descended? Then there was the question of later descendants. Were all the offspring of Hasan and Husayn eligible to lead the community? If so, as the centuries rolled on, this provided a huge number of potential candidates – too many, in fact, for a proper choice to be made. But if the number of eligible members of the Family was to be restricted, who should do this and how? And even in the case of an imam who produced a number of sons, should it necessarily be the eldest who should succeed, or should the most able and suitable be selected? And what would happen if the presumed heir apparent seemed, God forbid, to behave in a wayward and un-Islamic way? Did this mean that he should be deposed and replaced by someone apparently more suitable as a candidate, or did it mean that God’s decisions were inscrutable to men and should be obeyed whatever the apparent situation?

Then there was the further question of what this God-given authority amounted to. Virtually all Shi’ites believe that it means that the imam should be able to interpret uncertain and controversial passages in the Qur’ān and that it is him, not the scholars of Tradition, who had the knowledge to do this. The sharī‘a of the Shi’ites is to be decided by the imam, not by the ulama or by the consensus of the community. Some took the argument further than that, saying that the imam should be able to change and even abrogate the sharī‘a because of his superior judgement.

All these questions were serious and difficult and the answers to them had important implications for the leadership of the umma, so it his hardly surprising that they gave rise to a vast literature. Some of this literature took the form of heresiographies, or accounts of all the different sects which emerged. These numbered up to seventy-three, each named after a real or imaginary founder, each advocating a particular answer to the various questions. Some of these were clearly large groups; others amounted to little more than one lone individual proclaiming his own eccentric ideas.

This proliferation of such groups can give an impression of fissiparous chaos, or perhaps even frivolity, but most of them represent answers to the major questions which the idea of the God-guided ruler gives rise to. To understand these complex developments, we have to think of them as a result of pious, honest and intelligent men trying to find meaningful answers to difficult but very fundamental questions of belief and authority in the Muslim environment.

There were other, more mundane factors which accounted for the emergence of so many different groups among the Shi’ites. At times, adherence to Shi’ism was the result of social tensions. As already explained, much of the enthusiasm for Alī and his descendants in Iraq in the early Islamic period seems to have been experienced by those who felt left out and resented their status as second-class citizens. There were also regional differences. Again, it has been pointed out that from a very early period devotion to the house of Alī went along with, and was part of, Iraqi resentment of Syrian dominance. In later centuries we find Shi’ites ruling in marginal areas of the Muslim world, the mountains of northern Iran, for example, or Yemen, where Shi’ism has emerged as a signifier of local sentiment, and the official Shi’ism of modern Iran is an inseparable part of Iranian national identity.

Among the many different strands into which Shi’ism divided, three main sects emerged. The first are the Imami or Twelver Shi’ites, who are the most numerous at the present day, comprising the Shi’ites of modern Iraq and Iran; the second are the Zaydis, now only really active in northern Yemen but a group with a long and interesting history; and the third are the Isma’ilis, the group who founded the Fatimid caliphate of Egypt (969–1171) and are now represented in a world-wide diaspora, many of whom accept the leadership of the Aga Khan.

Imami or Twelver Shi’ism

Imami or Twelver (ithnā asharī) Shi’ism is defined by the fact that it recognizes twelve imams, descended from Alī through his son Husayn. None of these imams, after Alī himself, were caliphs or attained any significant political power, though their followers certainly thought that they should. After the failure of Husayn’s attempt to seize power from the Umayyads in 680 and his death at Karbala, his son Alī (d. 712), known to later generations of Twelvers as Zayn al-Ābidīn (Ornament of the Believers), seems to have led a life of retirement. Although the biographies of these early imams were elaborated later to give an impression of continuous activity, there is no evidence that this second Alī played any part in the politics of his day or that he was respected as an authority on religious questions. The same was broadly true of his son Muhammad al-Bāqir (d. c.735). There were Shi’ite revolts in Iraq, notably that of Zayd b. Alī in Kufa in 740, but the line of the Twelver imams played no part in them. There are reports that at the time of the Abbasid revolution the organizer of the Abbasid movement in Kufa, Abū Salama, tried to interest the then imam, Ja‘far al-Sādiq (d. 765), in putting himself forward for the caliphate, but Ja‘far, perhaps wisely, declined to get involved and Abū Salama paid for his initiative with his life.

Despite this, it seems to be Ja‘far who was the first of the Twelver imams to be more than a name in the genealogy. His status was certainly developed and probably exaggerated by later Shi’ite writers, but he is said to have distinguished himself as a dispenser of legal rulings and to have attracted a following which respected these rulings not just because he was learned but, more significantly, because he was a direct descendant of Alī and of the Prophet himself. Ja‘far appears to have made it clear that one could believe in the spiritual authority of the Family without committing oneself to open rebellion. This meant that accepting the Shi’ite imam as spiritual leader did not necessitate violent opposition to the Abbasid caliphate but could be a matter of private conviction. It may have been in his time that the distinctively Shi’ite doctrine of taqiyya was developed. Taqiyya held that it was completely legal, and not blameworthy, for a man to disguise his religious belief if he felt that to proclaim it openly would put his life at risk. That meant that, although one could accept the Shi’ite imam as rightful leader of the Muslims and as a man who should be caliph in an ideal world, this did not entail rising up against existing authorities or taking violent actions.

Many looked up to Ja‘far as a divinely inspired imam and learned authority and this is probably how he saw himself. But some, known to the Arab tradition as ghulāt, which can roughly be translated as ‘extremists’, believed that Ja‘far and other imams including, rather improbably, his contemporary the Abbasid caliph Mansūr, were saviours and messiahs. Their opinions were infallible and their lives were blameless. The two strands, the scholarly and the messianic, were in some senses contradictory, but they later came together as parts of the composite image of the imam.

It was under Ja‘far’s son and generally accepted heir Mūsā al-Kāzim that Twelver Shi’ism began to be organized as a political movement. Mūsā had agents who worked for him and collected money from his followers in what would seem to be preparations of a bid for political power in his name. He is one of the two imams commemorated at the great Baghdadi Shi’ite shrine at Kazimayn, which shows that his memory lingered on. He in turn was succeeded by his son, known as Alī al-Ridā (Chosen One: hence the name Reza, the Persian form of Ridā, being a common name for Iranian men, including the last two shahs). Alī was the only one of the Twelver imams to come anywhere near political power when he was adopted as heir, briefly, by the Abbasid caliph Ma’mūn in a bid to reunite the different branches of the Family of the Prophet and to attract much needed political support in Iraq. Alī, however, died before the caliph, some said of poison administered when he became politically inconvenient. His tomb, and the shrine that developed around it, at Meshed, in north-eastern Iran, is the largest and most opulent of all Shi’ite pilgrimage sites.

He was succeeded by a boy and the imams who came after him were more or less kept under house arrest by the Abbasid authorities. When the last generally accepted imam died in 874, his young son, if he ever existed, disappeared. His followers said he was in hiding: ghayba, the Arabic word, is rather disconcertingly translated into English as ‘occultation’.

To Twelver Shi’ites this occultation of the imam meant, and still means, that there is an imam in the world, indeed there has to be an imam or Islam would not be possible, but he is hidden. It is impossible to have any direct communication with him or for him to issue any decrees. Instead, decisions have to be made by learned men on the basis of decrees passed down from Alī and the known imams. This gives enormous authority in Twelver Shi’ism to scholars, the most important of whom are known, from the nineteenth century onwards, as ayatollahs or ‘signs of God’, for their position does not depend just on their learning, as it does for Sunni scholars, but also on their status as representatives of the ‘hidden imam’. Correspondingly, the existence of the ‘hidden imam’ leaves no space for a contemporary caliph: there is, so to speak, no vacancy. This is why Twelver and other Shi’ites will never be able to accept the pretensions of modern claimants to the caliphate. The Twelver Buyids who ruled Iraq in the late tenth and early eleventh century never appointed a caliph from the Family of the Prophet and the powerful and magnificent Safavid rulers of Iran were able to take the ancient Iranian title of shah but could not proclaim themselves caliphs.

The Zaydis

The Zaydis stand in clear contrast to this quietist tradition. The essential idea behind Zaydi belief as it crystallized in the ninth and tenth centuries was that the caliph, who must, of course, be a descendant of Alī and Fātima, had to distinguish himself by taking up arms against the unjust rule of Muslims who rejected the rights of the Family of the Prophet. Any one of the numerous males of the Family was entitled to put himself forward and risk his life assuming this role. In practice, in later Zaydism, the leadership became hereditary in certain families, but that was not the guiding principle in the beginning.

In terms of political action, then, the early Zaydis were much more radical than the Twelvers. In other ways they were much closer to the Sunni mainstream. The Twelvers were Rāfidis, that is, they rejected the claims of the first three caliphs, Abū Bakr, Umar and Uthmān, believing that they had usurped the right to the caliphate which properly belonged to Alī. Some but not all Zaydis, on the other hand, were prepared to accept the legitimacy of the first two caliphs (even though they were, of course, inferior to Alī) and believed that it was only with Uthmān things began to go wrong. The Umayyads and Abbasids were, without doubt, completely illegitimate and should be violently challenged by true Zaydis. An imam who sat at home dispensing wisdom to a few peaceful followers was no imam at all and no use to anyone.

Apart from Alid descent and courage, the other quality a Zaydi imam needed to have was learning. Zaydis discussed whether this learning was different to the learning of ordinary men because of the Prophetic descent of the imam, or whether it was like other men’s learning only better. The imam was thus in a position to decide questions of sharī‘a and a fully qualified Zaydi caliph would not need to have ulama to advise him.

Zaydism takes its name from one Zayd b. Alī, a younger son of the fourth of the twelve imams. While his elder brother Muhammad al-Bāqir stayed at home, and was later accepted as a true imam by the Twelvers, Zayd led a revolt in Kufa against the Umayyads in 740. Like so many Alid revolts it was, at a practical level, a complete failure. The Kufans did not rise up en masse against Umayyad rule and Zayd was soon cut down and killed by troops sent by the governor. The revolt did produce some of the earliest political rhetoric in the Shi’ite tradition, however. Zayd had called for acceptance of himself as caliph because of his membership of the Family, but he also laid out a practical programme. As caliph he would restore to the Kufans their rights to salaries and pensions, rights which had been guaranteed by his ancestor Alī and effectively stolen by the Umayyads. His recorded speeches play on the idea of the Zaydis as righters of wrongs and champions of the dispossessed.

Zayd’s death did not spell the end of his ideas. His son Īsā took up his father’s cause and led a small, secret cell of believers in Kufa. Constantly harried by Umayyad and later Abbasid police, they nonetheless kept the flame of revolution alive and formed the core of support for the most spectacular of all the early Shi’ite revolts of the early Islamic period. Muhammad b. Abd Allah, known as ‘the Pure Soul’ (al-Nafs al-zākiyya), was not, like the twelve imams, a descendant of Husayn but of his elder brother Hasan. He was named after his ancestor the Prophet and lived in the Prophet’s city of Medina. Immediately after the establishment of the Abbasid caliphate he began preparations for revolt. His project was to restore the Islamic community to what it had been in the time of the Prophet and the earliest Muslims. Medina, which was remote from the main centres of Muslim power and population and dependent on food imported from Egypt, was a most impractical place to begin such a project. But that was not the point: the fact that it was the Prophet’s city, the city which he had defended against the enemies of Islam, was more important. It was a pious and romantic vision, pursued with courage and defended with eloquence.

We know a lot about his project because of a remarkable narrative put together by one Umar b. Shabba after the failure of the revolt, which is preserved not only in Shi’ite sources but also in the great History of the staunchly Sunni Tabarī. It is a heroic account, constantly referring back to the example of the Prophet himself and featuring a correspondence between the rebel, when he had declared himself in the Holy City, and his opponent, the Abbasid caliph Mansūr, in which each defended their right to lead the Muslim community. In the end force prevailed, as it was bound to. A small professional army, led by a cousin of the caliph, attacked the city. Muhammad defended it, as the Prophet himself had done, by digging a trench to impede the enemy, but to no avail and Muhammad was killed, fighting bravely.

In the aftermath of this and later defeats of Alid military revolts, many of the supporters of the rebellion chose to flee to avoid the inevitable punishment. Two of these fugitives had a lasting effect on the religious geography of the Muslim world, establishing a link between the Family and groups of Muslims in regions far from the centres of power and population.

One of these was the area of modern Morocco. This was a land which had been nominally conquered by the Muslims by 700, but Muslim population and government had been concentrated across the Straits of Gibraltar in Andalus and the indigenous Berber tribes had been little affected by the coming of Islam. It was into this world that Idrīs b. Abd Allah fled, hoping to escape the long arm of Abbasid authority. Idrīs was able to establish his prestige as a holy man and descendant of the Prophet, attracting a following among the Berber tribes but not able to save himself from Abbasid retribution. He died, it is said, from the effects of a poisoned tooth-pick sent by the caliph. The Idrisids, as his descendants were known, were never able to establish a lasting, stable state, but they set a pattern for rulership in the region which still has power today, a pattern in which descent from the Prophet through Idrīs (which the present king of Morocco claims) brings unique political prestige. At the same time, the Idrisid view was not strictly speaking a Shi’ite one as they did not claim to have semi-divine powers or wisdom. Nonetheless, the idea of a caliphate combining religious and political leadership remained and still remains an important part of Maghrebi political discourse.

Zaydi beliefs also spread to the mountainous provinces at the southern end of the Caspian Sea: as so often, the mountains provided a refuge for ideas which were, so to speak, driven out of the wide plains and large cities of the central Islamic world. For eight centuries this area was home to a variety of Shi’ite communities, both Zaydi and Isma’ili. The Zaydis lasted as an independent group until the sixteenth century when they were absorbed by the Imami Shi’ism of the Safavid state and disappeared from history.

Still longer lasting were the Zaydi imamates of the Yemen. Founded in the late ninth century, the Zaydi imamate survived invasions – by the Ayyubids in the twelfth century and by the Ottomans, twice, in the sixteenth and at the end of the nineteenth centuries – and continued to hold power until 1962 when the last imam was overthrown by a coup. The strongholds of the Zaydis were in the northern mountains of Yemen, around the city of Sa‘da, and their control of the ancient capital at Sana’ a and the south was always tenuous. The Houthis of this northern area, who are presently contending for power in Yemen, are Zaydis and it is surely only a matter of time before someone decides to seize the initiative, as Zaydis have always done, and revives their caliphate.

The Zaydi imamates remained a distinctly Yemeni phenomenon. The imams were, in a way, outside the tribal structure. They served as mediators, advisers, scholars and leaders of the Yemenis against invaders but not as rulers with absolute control over law and order and other aspects of everyday life: this was left in the hands of the tribes and tribal chiefs. It was a model of authority which worked well enough in Yemen for many centuries but could not be exported to other parts of the world.

The Early Isma’ilis

The last of the main Shi’ite groups we must consider are the Isma’ilis. Their importance lies partly in the number of manifestations of Isma’ili belief (Qarāmita, Fatimids, Assassins) and their extensive geographical spread (from Tunisia to Tajikistan and later into India) and long survival (the Isma’ilis emerged in the late ninth century and remain a very active part of the Muslim community today).

From our point of view, the significant feature of the Isma’ilis was that they generated the most important Shi’ite caliphate and with them we can see, as nowhere else, the advantages and problems caused by having a caliph chosen by God from the Family of the Prophet. The Imamis would have liked to have established a caliphate over the whole Muslim world in the name of the Family, but their attempts came to nothing. The Zaydis did produce effective rulers, some of them bearing the title of caliph, like the Zaydi imams of Yemen in the early modern period, but their influence was always confined to marginal and impoverished areas of the Muslim world. With the Isma’ilis, it was different: the Fatimid caliphs came to rule Egypt and much of Syria, their authority was even accepted in Baghdad for a short period and Fatimid missionaries and agents operated as far east as Afghanistan. The fundamental question we must ask is: to what extent and in what ways was this Shi’ite caliphate distinct in definition and purpose from its Sunni equivalents? Was this a radically different model or essentially the same one in a different guise?

The origins of the Isma’ili movement lie in the Imami Shi’ite environment of early ninth-century Iraq. The Isma’ili story is that the sect originates from a dispute about the succession to the imam Ja‘far al-Sādiq (d. 765) and the reasons why his eldest son did not succeed him. The roots of the dispute are unclear: either Isma’il died before his father or he was deemed unsuitable and removed from his position. In any case he did not become imam, but, it is said, he left a son, Muhammad, who was the seventh and last of the imams (hence the Isma’ilis are sometimes referred to as Seveners in distinction to the Twelvers discussed earlier).

The succession dispute goes to the heart of Shi’ite views of the imamate. For some, Isma’il’s failure, for whatever reason, to assume the succession meant that his claims were invalid. For others, however, he was God’s appointee. If he seemed to be morally defective, that was because men do not understand God’s purposes; if he died before his father, it was similarly God’s will and his son should certainly succeed.

Be that as it may, no one seems to have heard of Isma’il or his presumed heir until a century or so later when people in the villages of southern Iraq began claiming that the descendants of Isma’il were in fact the true heirs of the Family of the Prophet. This was, of course, in the aftermath of the occultation of the twelfth imam and it may have been a response to it by Shi’ites who wanted a real and present leader to follow. Shortly before 900 a man called Ubayd Allah, then living in the small central Syrian city of Salamiya, began to proclaim that he himself was a descendant of Isma’il and that people should swear allegiance to him as the living imam. Not all Isma’ilis agreed and a group of them argued that they should wait for the return of the real imam, Muhammad b. Isma’il, who was in hiding. They were known as Qarāmita (or Carmathians in western accounts) and set up a revolutionary state in eastern Arabia, pillaging the pilgrim caravans and eventually stealing, as we have seen, the Black Stone of the Ka‘ba itself. But they did not found a caliphate, nor did their leaders take the title.

Ubayd Allah, however, continued to claim the leadership, but Syria was not a suitable base to mount a rebellion. The Bedouin of the desert had ideas of their own and the settled governments in Baghdad and Egypt remained powerful enough to prevent him taking over any of the cities. He began to send out agents to investigate the possibilities of attracting support in fringe areas of the Muslim world. Yemen and Ifriqiya (modern Tunisia) were the places he selected.

His agent, Abū Abd Allah al-Shi’i, arrived in Tunisia in 893 and began to preach, not in the towns like Qayrawan and Tunis, which were the centres of Arab Muslim population, but in the Kabyle mountains of what is now western Algeria. Here, among the Berbers of the Kutāma tribe, who generally resented the rule of the Aghlabid dynasty of Qayrawan, he found a ready audience. The Kutāma Berbers were to be the military backbone of the Fatimid caliphate until well after the conquest of Egypt in 969, as the Khurasanis had been for the Abbasids. Soon after his initial success Abū Abd Allah was joined by Ubayd Allah and in 909 they conquered the ancient capital of Qayrawan and proclaimed the establishment of a caliphate.

The Fatimid Caliphate

It was the first time a Shi’ite caliphate, led by a member of the Family of the Prophet, had been able to establish itself in power anywhere in the Muslim world. It was a momentous event, but it also meant that many questions which had previously been left unanswered had to be confronted. Was this new caliphate to be a radically different institution from the Muslim governments which had preceded it, or was it to be a traditional state with, so to speak, a different management? It was fine to talk about a God-guided, infallible imam when such a figure was no more than a dream, but how would it work with a real human being wielding real power? How could there not be a sense of disillusionment when mundane matters of maintaining order and collecting taxes from reluctant payers had to be confronted. In the Arabic terminology, it was a move from da‘wa (missionary activity) to dawla (state), a move from the era of miracles and wonder to the hard realities of government.

Ubayd Allah immediately set about establishing his authority with determination. The missionary Abū Abd Allah, whose preaching had done so much to mobilize the Kutāma in the Fatimid cause, was executed, much as the Abbasid caliph Mansūr had executed Abū Muslim. There could only be one focus of authority.

The new caliph took the messianic title of Mahdī and claimed to be the true leader of the Family of the Prophet. He and his descendants were known to themselves and others as Fatimids, to emphasize their descent from Fātima and hence from the Prophet himself. As such they were his legitimate successors in a way the Abbasids could never claim to be. Mahdī was to be much more than a local leader, however: the Fatimids were to be true caliphs, rulers of the whole Islamic world. But not everyone was convinced. Unlike the Twelver imams, whose genealogy was generally accepted even by Sunnis and other hostile observers, the Fatimid lineage had some possible holes in it. How exactly was Ubayd Allah related to Muhammad b. Isma’il, who must have died a century before he appeared on the scene, and who were the intermediary stages? This weakness made the Fatimids vulnerable to challenges from their enemies. Their whole claim to power rested on descent from the Prophet. If this was false or even doubtful, then the whole enterprise was a fraud.

To assert their claim the Fatimids would need to use force. The Kutāma were formed into a regular army and paid salaries, Greek and Slav slave soldiers were recruited to serve alongside them and a navy was created. It all looked very much like a conventional Muslim state apparatus of a sort which would have been familiar to the Umayyad and Abbasid rulers.

Attempts to seize the moment by invading Egypt ended in failure and from 920 the caliphate began to develop as local rulers in Tunisia. A new capital was founded on the Mediterranean coast and called Mahdiya. The remains of it can still be visited, a fortified seaport looking on to the Mediterranean and east to Egypt. Compared with Baghdad or later Cairo, it was built on a modest scale, but both its name and the prayers which were performed in its new mosque proclaimed its role as the first capital of a new caliphate.

It was at this time too that the arrangements between the Fatimids and their non-Shi’i subjects were worked out. Most of the population of Tunisia, especially in the Holy City of Qayrawan, remained Sunnis and the Fatimids made no attempt to convert them to their Isma’ili faith. But the new capital was Isma’ili and anyone who aspired to senior posts in army or administration had to accept that the caliph was the God-guided Mahdī. In practice, this was a successful accommodation. The Fatimids made no attempt at forcible conversion and, as a result, there was little public opposition to their rule. As long as they maintained law and order, defended the people from outside attack, allowed merchants to make money and were not too aggressive in their tax collection, they were accepted without any outward opposition. The caliphs of the new dynasty were soon forced to make those messy decisions and compromises which go with political power and even their closest admirers must have wondered whether they were always, as they claimed, sinless and infallible, but good government was enough for most people.

In 969 the Fatimid general Jawhar, an ex-slave of Greek origins, conquered Egypt with his army and the Fatimid caliphate was transformed from a provincial oddity into a world power. The conquest was not a violent and destructive military invasion. The post-Abbasid Ikhshidid regime that had been overthrown had little popular support: a series of low Nile floods had resulted in widespread famine and Fatimid agents had prepared the ground well in advance, assuring all sections of society that a Fatimid takeover would be in their interests. As a result, the conquest, if not entirely peaceful, was not actively opposed by the vast majority. As Jawhar approached with his huge army of perhaps 100,000, mostly Berbers, agreements were made with the leading figures in the administration and with the chief qādī of Fustat (Old Cairo), and the military forces of the old regime were easily defeated. In July prayers were said in the venerable Mosque of Amr, the heart of the spiritual life of the country, in the name of the Fatimid caliph Mu’izz, not the Abbasid Qādir, and the rule of the Family of the Prophet over a major area of the Muslim world had triumphantly begun.

One of the first and most important actions taken by Jawhar was the foundation of the new palace city of Cairo (in Arabic Qāhira means ‘the Victorious’) in 970. The first Islamic capital of Egypt had been Fustat, now often referred to as Old Cairo, which lay just outside the walls of the old Roman fort which formed the original nucleus of settlement in the area. The new Fatimid city was separated from Fustat by open spaces and gardens and formed a distinct city, surrounded by its own walls and gates. It was designed very deliberately and its construction began according to careful astrological observations. At the centre were two vast palaces, one on each side of the main north–south street. The palaces have long disappeared, but the street is still known to this day as Bayn al-Qasrayn (Between the Two Palaces). A new mosque was built, designed for the performance of Isma’ili rites, and it still forms the core of the present Azhar mosque.

It was very much a government city, a magnificent residence for a caliph who was God’s deputy on earth and the direct descendant of His prophet Muhammad. This was no humble abode: God’s favour was demonstrated for all to see by His generosity to the ruler and the wealth and splendours which were showered upon him. There were similarities with Mansūr’s round city of Baghdad, except that palaces, rather than a mosque, lay at the centre. Elsewhere non-Fatimid life continued much as before. Fustat remained the centre of commercial life and home of the Christian and Jewish communities. It was in the old mosque of Amr that the qādī of Fustat sat dispensing Sunni law to a Sunni population. One could say the Fatimid caliphate presided over one country and two systems.

This dual system was one of the reasons for the success of the Fatimids. If they had tried to settle their Berber soldiers in the old city, there would have been inevitable tensions, riots and disturbances. If they had tried to foist their doctrines on a recalcitrant population, they would have faced the sort of resistance which forced the Abbasids to abandon the doctrine of the createdness of the Qur’ān.

The Azhar mosque is famous today as the foremost centre of Sunni religious scholarship in the whole of the Islamic world, but that was not how it began. The Fatimid caliphate was in many ways an intellectual project. From the very beginning of the state in 909 the caliphs and their advisers had worked to provide an ideological basis for the regime. This was central to the caliphate in order to justify its rule in Egypt and other areas it controlled, but also because the early Fatimid caliphs were determined to expand their authority over the whole Muslim world. Egypt was only a start and a base. Further to the east, in Iraq and Iran, they built up a network of dā‘is, missionaries who would preach to disaffected Muslims wherever they were to be found. In some cases these missionaries were sent from Cairo, in other cases they were men with Isma’ili convictions who came to Cairo to see the caliph in all his magnificence before returning to their homelands to spread the word. This network required a clear message and system of belief to sustain the missionaries in their work. In Cairo itself Isma’ili doctrine and law were taught in official sessions known as Majlis al-hikma (Assemblies of Wisdom), held twice a week on Thursdays and Fridays. No Umayyad or Abbasid caliphs had tried to instruct their subjects in this systematic way.

The fullest statement of this ideology comes in a remarkable work written by Qādī Nu‘mān (d. 974) called Da‘ā’im al-Islam (The Pillars of Islam). Composed before the Fatimid conquest of Egypt, this is, in the words of Wadad al-Qādī, ‘a clear, well-organized dogmatic exposition of the tenets of Isma’ili positive Law’.¹ The first volume deals with the seven pillars of the ibādāt according to the Isma’ilis, that is, devotion to the imams, ritual purity, prayer, alms, fasting, pilgrimage and jihād, while the second volume discusses more practical legal matters like sales, oaths, foods, marriage, divorce, thefts, testimonies and so forth. Nu‘mān treats his subject-matter very systematically, dividing each chapter into sections, and recording the legal decisions pertaining to each section in the form of Qur’anic citations and Traditions transmitted from the Prophet, Alī b. Abī Tālib and the first five imams after Alī, that is down to Isma’il’s father Ja‘far al-Sādiq.

In most cases the positive law differs little from what was the general practice of the Sunnis and Twelver Shi’ites. Devotion to the imams and ritual purity are added to the other five pillars of Islam. However, there is one very important and original difference which marks it off from similar Sunni compendia of law and that is the sources which it uses. The Qur’ān, of course, is the foundation and the Traditions of the Prophet, as recognized in Shi’ite doctrine follow. After that come traditions passed down from Alī and the imams who followed. Their words are authoritative. By contrast there is no use of traditions from the Companions of the Prophet and, of course, no citations of the great scholars of Sunni jurisprudence like Shafi’i (d. 820) or Ibn Hanbal (d. 855). It is the Prophet and his Family who decide law, not the Muslim community and its legal scholars.

The second defining feature of the work is that it became an official handbook, sanctioned and supported by the caliph and his government. It became, in fact, caliphal law. Even the strongest and greatest of the Umayyad and Abbasid caliphs, Abd al-Malik or Mansūr, had not presumed to produce an official law-book. The caliph sanctioned the law and it was to the caliph that difficult decisions should be referred. If the Abbasids had lost the struggle with the ulama for control of sharī‘a, the Fatimids had clearly won it.

The new caliphate was faced with problems of a more political nature. The object of Fatimid policy remained the takeover of the entire Muslim world, but that was obviously a long-term project. More immediate was the issue of the government of Syria and Palestine. Both had been ruled, more or less effectively, by the Tulunid and Ikhshidid dynasties which had preceded the Fatimids in Egypt, so it was natural that the new caliphs should seek to do the same. There were also other reasons to be concerned with Syria and Palestine. The first was economic. Egypt, of course, was dependent for its food supply on the Nile flood. The height of this varied from year to year, but in most years it provided sufficient water and silt for agriculture to feed the population. In other years it did not and there was no other source of water for the farmers. As the Bible describes, in the time of the pharaohs this could lead to serious famine and there was basically nothing the government, whether pharaohs or caliphs, could do about it. The agriculture of Syria, on the other hand, was dependent on rain brought in by western winds from the Mediterranean. Of course, this too was changeable, and there were good years and bad, but the system was completely different from the Egyptian one and only at the most unlucky times did harvests in Egypt and Syria fail simultaneously. Food security was an important reason for the Fatimids to seek to control Syria or at least parts of it.

The second reason was that control of Syria brought the Fatimids into direct contact with the Byzantines, the foe of Muslim governments from the time of the Prophet onwards. Campaigns against the Byzantines were the only wars in which the Abbasid caliphs had taken part and the only ones in which they had led their troops in person. The failure of the Abbasid caliphs to protect the Muslims of the frontier areas in the first half of the tenth century had been in part the cause of the loss of confidence in their leadership.

The problem was becoming urgent. In the mid-tenth century, partly because of the weakness of the Abbasid caliphs, the Byzantines were beginning to make significant inroads into Muslim territory, which culminated in their capture of the ancient city of Antioch (in modern-day Turkey) in 969, the very year in which the Fatimids established themselves as caliphs in Cairo. Muslims were driven from their homes and mosques were converted into stables. For the Fatimids, anxious to establish their caliphal status in the wider Muslim world, this was both a duty and an opportunity. If the Fatimid caliphs could be seen to defend Muslims against the infidels, the most fundamental obligation of any Muslim leader, when the Abbasids had so obviously failed, it would be an enormous boost to their prestige.

The Fatimids also seized the initiative from the faltering hands of the Abbasids regarding the protection and leadership of the hajj: both Umayyad and Abbasid caliphs had made a point of doing this. As we have seen, along with leading the jihād, this was one area of public performance in which the caliphs themselves or members of their families could be seen to be the real leaders of the Muslim community. The Abbasid caliphs were manifestly failing in their duties in this respect too. No Abbasid caliph after Hārūn al-Rashīd had made the hajj in person. From the late ninth century the pilgrims on the long and often waterless route across the Arabian desert had been attacked by Bedouin, robbed or made prisoner, and their women sold as slaves. These assaults culminated in the taking of the Black Stone from the Ka‘ba by the Qarāmita, who were often at odds with the Fatimids. It was the Fatimid caliph, still based in Tunisia, who negotiated the return of the stone to Mecca so that the pilgrimage could again be performed according to the proper rites.

Now that they ruled in Egypt, the Fatimids were able to protect the hajj by subsidizing the Bedouin so that they would not attack. The ‘official’ hajj now started not from Iraq but from Egypt and Syria. The route lay through the Hijaz and along the west coast of Arabia, or up the Nile to the great bend at Qus and across to the Red Sea ports where pilgrims would take ships to Jar or Jedda. Pilgrims from all over the Muslim world would witness the magnificence of the Fatimid caliph, travel under the protection of his banner and hear his name pronounced in the pulpits of the Holy Cities of Mecca and Medina.

The rule of the Fatimid caliphs saw a period of great prosperity in Egypt, which came to replace Iraq as the wealthiest province of the Muslim world. The maritime trade of the Indian Ocean came up the Red Sea to Egypt rather than travelling up the Persian Gulf to Basra and southern Iraq. Italian merchants from Amalfi and other ports began to arrive at Alexandria to purchase spices from the Indian Ocean area, such as pepper, cinnamon and cloves, which were so highly prized by the increasingly wealthy elites of western Europe.

The caliphs were the beneficiaries of fortunate circumstances, but they made their contribution to the prosperity of the country too, above all by providing security and an excellent coinage. Here again, they took over one of the symbols of the caliphate from the Abbasids. The minting of gold coins was clearly linked to caliphal status. When Abd al-Rahmān III proclaimed himself caliph in Córdoba in 929, one of his first acts was to begin the minting of a gold coinage. At the same time the Abbasids lost the ability to mint a gold coinage and their Buyids protectors could only issue debased and distorted versions of the old silver dirhams. Fatimid dinars, by contrast, are some of the finest and most beautiful Islamic coins ever minted, advertising to the world the splendour of this Shi’ite caliphate.

The Fatimids made Cairo the centre for great public displays of power on a scale which never seem to have occurred before in the Muslim world. We know surprisingly little of the public performance of monarchy in the Umayyad and Abbasid caliphates. We hear of audiences (majlis) where appointments were made, ambassadors received and poetry recited. The Umayyad caliphs may have visited the great mosque in Damascus which bears their name, but we never hear about it. We know Mansūr preached in the mosque in Baghdad, but it is not clear that any of his successors did. One of the immediate causes which led to the death of Mutawwakil in 861 was a change in the order of the procession to the mosque on Fridays, effectively demoting the heir apparent Muntasir, but this is the only indication we have that such a procession was part of the public life of the Abbasid caliphate.

The Fatimids, however, evolved a whole new language of public ritual. They made celebrations like the opening of the dykes at the time of the Nile flood into public events, presided over by the caliph himself or a member of his family. Here the caliph could be seen as guardian of the people and show his public concern for their welfare.

We can see something of the impact that the Fatimid caliphs had on their subjects and other Muslims from the travel account of Nāsiri Khusraw.² He was an Isma’ili from what is now Tajikistan, then as now a remote area of the Muslim world. A philosopher and intellectual, he travelled to Egypt in 1045 to visit the Fatimid court. He is one of the liveliest and most engaging of Muslim travel writers, and his writings are full of vivid first-hand accounts and personal reactions. He was hugely impressed by what he found in Cairo, both the city’s wealth and the firm but benign nature of the caliphal government. He constantly contrasted the prosperity of Egypt with the poverty of his native Iran. Of course his is a parti pris – he is writing to convince his fellow countrymen (the book is in Persian not Arabic) of the excellence of Isma’ili rule – but the picture rings true or at least gives us one version of reality.

After a vivid and eloquent description of Cairo, including the opulence of its markets and the number and splendour of its mosques, he turns to a discussion of the role of caliph, whom he often refers to as sultan.

In the year 1047 the sultan ordered general rejoicing for the birth of a son. The city and markets were so arrayed that, were they to be described, some would not believe that drapers’ and moneychangers’ shops could be so decorated with gold, jewels, coins, gold-spun fabrics and linen so that there was no room to sit down.

The people are so secure under the sultan’s reign that no one fears his agents or informants, and they rely on him neither to inflict injustice nor to have designs on anyone’s property. I saw such personal wealth there that, were I to describe it, the people of Persia would never believe it. I could discover no end or limit to their wealth, and I never saw such ease and security anywhere.

I saw one man, a Christian and one of the most propertied men in all Egypt, who was said to own untold ships, wealth and property. In short, one year the Nile failed and the price of grain rose so high that the sultan’s grand vizier summoned this Christian and said, ‘It has not been a good year. The sultan is burdened with the care of his subjects. How much can you give, either for sale or as a loan?’ The Christian replied, ‘For the happiness of the sultan and the vizier, I have enough grain in readiness to guarantee Egypt’s bread for six years’ … What a lucky citizenry and just ruler to have such conditions in their days. What wealth must there be for the ruler not to inflict injustice and for the subjects to hide nothing!

Later Nāsiri Khusraw adds: ‘The security and welfare of the people of Egypt have reached a point that drapers, moneychangers and jewellers do not even lock their shops: they just lower a net across the front and no one tampers with anything.’ Of course, we should take his account with a pinch of salt, but the point is clear: the caliph feels a responsibility for the welfare of his subjects and religion is no barrier to participation in society.

He also describes the Fatimid caliph as playing a very public role, at prayers in the mosque and leading the popular ceremonies which marked the opening of the irrigation canals at the time of the Nile flood. He saw the caliph in person:

a well-built, clean-shaven youth with cropped hair, a descendant of Husayn son of Alī. He is mounted on a camel with a plain saddle and bridle with no gold or silver and wears a white shirt, as is the custom in Arab countries, and a wide belt. The value of this [belt] alone is said to be ten thousand dirhams. On his head he has a turban of the same material and in his hand he holds a large, very costly whip. Before him walk three hundred Daylamites wearing Byzantine goldspun cloth with belts and wide sleeves as is the fashion in Egypt. They all carry spears and arrows and wear leggings. At the sultan’s side rides a parasol-bearer with a bejewelled gold turban and a suit of clothing worth ten thousand dinars. The parasol he holds is extremely ornate and studded with jewels and pearls … to his left and right are thurifers burning ambergris and aloe. The custom here is for the people to prostrate themselves and say a prayer as the sultan passes.

This was performance monarchy: the ruler, descendant of the Prophet and God’s representative on earth, guarantor of the prosperity of the country, showing himself in public to all his people.

Unlike anything recorded of the Umayyad and Abbasid caliphs, the Fatimid ruler played the generous host to his subjects:

It is customary for the sultan to give a banquet twice a year, on the two great holidays [the īd which marks the end of the fasting of Ramadan and the īd which marks the day of sacrifice at the time of the hajj ] and to hold court for both the elite and the common people, the elite in his presence and the commoners in other halls and places. I was very anxious to see one with my own eyes, so I told one of the sultan’s clerks I had met and with whom I had struck up a friendship that I had seen the courts of such Persian sultans as Sultan Mahmūd of Ghazna and his son Mas‘ūd, who were great potentates, enjoying much prosperity and luxury, and now I wanted to see the court of the Commander of the Faithful. He therefore spoke a word to the chamberlain.

The last day of Ramadan 440 [8 March 1049] the hall was decorated for the next day, which was the festival, when the sultan was to come after prayer and preside over the feast. Taken by my friend, as I entered through the door of the hall, I saw constructions, galleries and porticos which would take too long to describe adequately. There were twelve square ‘palaces’, built next to each other, each more dazzling than the last … hunting and sporting scenes [were] depicted and also an inscription in marvellous calligraphy. All the carpets and pillows were of Byzantine brocade and buqalamun [a richly embroidered fabric], each woven exactly to the measurement of its place. There was an indescribable latticework of gold along the sides. It is said that fifty thousand maunds of sugar were bought for this day for the sultan’s feast. For decoration on the banquet table I saw a confection like an orange tree, every branch and leaf executed in sugar, and thousands of images and statuettes in sugar.

The sultan’s kitchen is outside the palace and there are fifty slaves always attached to it. There is a subterranean passageway between the building and the kitchen. Every day fourteen camel loads of ice have to be provided for use in the royal kitchen. Most of the emirs and the sultan’s entourage receive allowances there and, if the people of the city make requests on behalf of the suffering, they are given something. Whatever potion or medication is needed in the city is given out from the harem and there is also no problem in the distribution of other ointments such as balsam.

In 973, four years after Jawhar had taken Cairo and established Fatimid rule, Caliph Mu‘izz came to Egypt in person for the first time. He brought with him his entire court and the coffins of his ancestors: he was moving to Egypt for good. In May he held court at the foot of the Pharos in Alexandria, which had been restored under Muslim rule and was still largely intact. Here he met with the leaders of the civil elite of Fustat and of the Bedouin tribes. He was conciliatory, saying he had only come to pursue the jihād against the infidels and safeguard the road to Mecca for pilgrims. Both these were recognized as caliphal duties to which no Muslim could object.

The safeguarding of the hajj was the easier of these two obligations and in 975 the hajj caravan was able to reach Mecca overland and the name of the Fatimid caliph was read in the pulpits of the Holy Cities. The Fatimids did not take over political authority in Mecca, which remained in the hands of a family of Alid sharīfs, as it did until the beginning of the twentieth century, but the Fatimid ruler was proclaimed as caliph in front of pilgrims from all over the Muslim world. The caliphs subsidized the hajj and provided the kiswa, but, unlike the Abbasids, they never led the hajj in person.

The jihād against the Byzantines was much more difficult and required an enormous input of resources. One of the problems was, of course, the strength of the Byzantine forces. The empire was now at the height of its medieval power and the emperor Basil II and his successors in the first half of the eleventh century were able to lead their armies deep into Syria and dominate Aleppo and the surrounding country. It was not, however, the Byzantines who were the main opponents of the Fatimids in Syria but the Bedouin tribes, who were increasingly aggressive, pushing further into the settled lands, destroying agriculture and ravaging cities. It took all the military resources of the caliphate to keep these tribes at bay and even then the Fatimid armies were only intermittently successful. On the other hand, direct conflict with the Byzantines was rare and for long periods the Fatimids and Byzantines maintained cordial diplomatic relations, much to the disgust of some of the Fatimids’ Muslim subjects.

The Fatimid caliphs raised and paid armies and appointed generals to lead them, but they never commanded them in person. The caliph remained in Cairo, always figurehead and sometimes mastermind of these expeditions but never participating. Their armies had originally been made up of Kutāma Berbers, who were by and large loyal to the caliphate and religiously committed to the Isma’ili cause. They were not the easiest troops to manage and frequently caused conflict with the population of Syrian cities like Damascus. To counterbalance this, the Fatimids began to employ increasing numbers of Turkish troops, recruited from the eastern part of the Muslim world. The greatest Fatimid general of the first half of the eleventh century, Anūshtakīn Dizbari, for example, came from the small principality of Khuttal in modern Tajikistan. There he was captured by slave raiders and taken to be sold in Kashgar, the great Muslim trading city now in western China. From there he escaped to Bukhara and was sold on to masters in Baghdad before reaching Damascus, where he came to the notice of the Fatimid governor and entered the caliph’s service.

Dizbari’s story shows how military slavery gave opportunities for social mobility and how the caliphs were always on the lookout for talented young men, whatever their background. This boy of obscure origins from a remote part of the eastern Islamic world would rise to be the second most powerful man in the great Fatimid caliphate after the caliph himself. He had either been brought up a Muslim or converted in his youth, but he did not come from an Isma’ili background. Though he no doubt accepted the claims of the caliphs to rule as members of the Family of the Prophet, his primary allegiance, and those of many of his fellow Turks, was to the caliph as a strong ruler, not the caliph as a spiritual guide. Increasingly with the coming of the Turks, the Fatimid caliphate looked less like a revolutionary new beginning and more and more like a conventional Middle Eastern state.

The Fatimids pursued their religious policies. In Egypt they only made occasional attempts to enforce typically Shi’ite rituals, as when the newly arrived caliph Mu‘izz forced the shopkeepers in Sunni Fustat to close on 10 Muharram to commemorate the death of Husayn. He also decreed that the call to prayer should be given in the particularly Shi’ite formula, which includes the words ‘Come to the best of works!’ but that was about the limit of the public proclamation of the new faith. Caliph Hākim (996–1021), in one of his periodic bursts of religious fervour, decreed the public cursing of the salaf, the first generation of Muslims, including the first three caliphs, Abū Bakr, Umar and Uthmān, and Aisha, all of whom had failed to recognize Alī’s superiority. The cursing of the salaf was extremely provocative and in contemporary Baghdad inevitably led to bloodshed. To add force to the insult, he decreed that the curses should be written on the walls of public buildings in gold letters. Like most of the caliph’s decrees this only lasted a short time and two years later he issued a general edict of tolerance specifically ordering that the offending curses should be painted out.

The Isma’ilis remained a small ruling elite and therefore needed allies among the Egyptian population. They made close links with the non-Muslim communities, the Coptic Christians and the Jews, who probably made up the majority of the population. Senior posts in the administration, particularly the all-important financial administration, were entrusted to Christians, whom the Fatimids seemed in general to prefer to Sunni Muslims. In turn the Christian bureaucrats served the caliphs loyally. A unique view of this multicultural society can be found in the material from the Cairo Geniza. The Geniza was the store room of a synagogue in Old Cairo in which the Jewish community used to deposit their papyrus and paper refuse. They believed that it was wrong to throw away any writing which might contain the name of God and, since most letters, accounts and so on usually did, they just kept everything, from elegant Fatimid royal decrees, issued by the chancery and reused when they became out of date for legal documents and letters, to scraps of paper which were little more than shopping lists or short notes sent to other members of the community. This Jewish community had many international contacts and some of the most interesting letters relate to long-distance trade, but the greatest part of the material deals with the everyday life of Jews under Fatimid rule. They reflect good times and bad, and occasionally difficult relations with the authorities, but the general impression given is one of a tolerant society in which a moderately benign government allowed different communities to manage their own affairs. There is certainly no indication of systematic persecution of the Jews or of any attempt to convert them to Islam.

It was outside Egypt that the Fatimids made real attempts to spread their religious views. The Fatimids had arrived with the intention and expectation of conquering the whole Muslim world and bringing it under the government of the Family of the Prophet. In the event, these aims were thwarted by the intractable problems of Syria and later by the coming of the Seljuqs, but the da‘wa, the Isma’ili missionary organization, remained active in areas like Iraq and Iran and many of the leading Isma’ili writers of the period were drawn from the ranks of these missionaries.

The most famous, or infamous, of the Fatimid caliphs was Hākim. He came to the throne at the age of eleven on the death of his father Azīz, in 996. At the age of fifteen he first showed his taste for absolute power by ordering the execution of his tutor and mentor Barjuwān. Having found at this early age that he could, literally, get away with murder, he allowed his autocratic impulses to go unchecked. He terrorized the leading members of the Isma’ili hierarchy, ordering the execution of many, like the family of Qādī Nu‘mān, who had served the dynasty well, and groups of the population began to ask him for guarantees for their safety, hoping, sometimes mistakenly, that it would spare them from his unpredictable violence.

The caliphate of Hākim is interesting because he took the idea of the God-guided caliph to its furthest conclusion. He made decrees and new laws entirely on his own initiative, neither taking advice nor supporting them with Traditions and precedents. No other caliph in the Sunni or Shi’ite traditions created law in this way. He seems, in fact, to have made law on a whim and some of his decrees were very strange indeed. Both contemporaries and modern historians have searched for some element of consistency and purpose in his actions. Paul Walker divides them into four categories: ‘the prohibition of food and drink, the imposition of a strict moral code, the restriction and alteration of religious practice and various modifications in the way he presented himself to his public and what he expected in return’.

In the first category we find the strict prohibition of alcoholic drinks, even for Christians to use in the sacraments. This is in accordance with generally accepted Islamic norms, but he also banned the sale and consumption of certain sorts of green vegetables and fish without scales, measures which have no support in Islamic law, or common sense.

The most important in the second group were laws strictly limiting the public movements of women.

The third category concerned relations with the non-Muslim elements in the population of the caliphate. Here again unpredictability was the most noticeable feature of his policy. He ordered that Christians and Jews should wear distinctive clothing and ride inferior animals. He embarked on a campaign of destroying churches and synagogues, including, most famously, the Church of the Holy Sepulchre in Jerusalem. By the end of his reign he had rescinded these policies and even allowed those who had converted to Islam under duress to return to their old faiths without being considered apostates.

His public appearances became rarer and in his final years he abandoned much of the pomp and display which had characterized Fatimid rule and took to riding a donkey and wearing shabby clothes. His end was as mysterious as the rest of his life. One day in 1021 he set off into the Muqattam Hills to the east of Cairo on his donkey and was never seen again. Inevitably the mystery of his disappearance gave rise to speculation that he was not really dead but was simply hidden like the Twelfth Imam; there were even those who claimed that he really was the embodiment of God on earth and would never die. (It was from these groups that the Druze faith emerged, first in Cairo and later in Lebanon and southern Syria, where it still flourishes today. But the Druze did not found a caliphate and thus their history lies beyond the scope of this book.)

The bizarre behaviour of Hākim caused something of a crisis in the Isma’ili community in Egypt and a dā‘ī from Iraq who came to Cairo at this time, Kirmānī, had to set about convincing them that the vision was still alive and that the Fatimid caliphs would still be able to unite the Muslim world under their rule. In the mid-eleventh century it seemed for a moment as if this might really happen. Important leaders of Arab tribes in Syria and Iraq had the Fatimid caliph proclaimed in the khutbas in their territory instead of the feeble Abbasid and in 1058–9 an adventurer called Basasīrī even took Baghdad in the name of the Fatimids. But these gains were based not on conquest or real power but on shifting temporary alliances. They soon broke up with the arrival of Seljuq Turkish power, firmly committed to the Sunni cause, from the late 1050s onwards. For the last century of its existence, from around 1070 to 1171, the Fatimid caliphate was competing with the claims of the Seljuqs and their Abbasid protégés. Increasingly the peculiarly Shi’ite nature of the caliphate declined and the struggle was one of great-power politics rather than fundamental differences about the nature of the caliphate. When the Crusader armies reached the east in 1097, the first Fatimid response was to see them as potential allies against the Seljuqs.

In the end, when Saladin abolished the Fatimid caliphate in 1171 and had the names of the Abbasids proclaimed in the pulpit of Cairo, the Shi’ite caliphate disappeared. It had been a bold experiment aiming to bring the whole of the Muslim world under the leadership of a caliph from the Family of the Prophet. Ultimately it succumbed because of the contradictions inevitable when a human being tries to take on the role of the infallible representative of God on earth whose every action is divinely inspired. The messy, often brutal, exigencies of government meant that many people became disillusioned with the idea. The Fatimid power became a regional power. Firmly established in Egypt, it became essentially an Egyptian empire representing Egyptian interests and as such it had little to offer the Muslims of Iraq and Iran.

Even in Egypt, though, the Isma’ili Shi’ite community disappeared with the abolition of the caliphate, though Isma’ili communities survived with the Assassins in northern Syria and northern Iran. But they were not caliphs. With the end of the Fatimids, the dream of a caliphate led by a divinely inspired leader from the Family of the Prophet was effectively dead.