Fatimid dynasty

Fatimid dynasty, political and religious dynasty that dominated an empire in North Africa and subsequently in the Middle East from 909 to 1171 ce and tried unsuccessfully to oust the Abbasid caliphs as leaders of the Islamic world. It took its name from Fāṭimah, daughter of the Prophet Muhammad, from whom the Fatimids claimed descent.

Before the Fatimids there had been other rulers in North Africa and Egypt who had succeeded in making themselves virtually independent of the Abbasid caliphs in Baghdad, but they had been Muslims of the Sunni branch of Islam, willing to recognize the token suzerainty of the caliph as head of the Islamic community. The Fatimids, however, were the heads of a rival religious movement—the Ismāʿīlī sect of the Shiʿi branch of Islam—and dedicated to the overthrow of the existing religious and political order in all of Islam. Unlike their predecessors, they refused to offer even nominal recognition to the Abbasid caliphs, whom they rejected as usurpers. They themselves—as Ismāʿīlī imāms (spiritual leaders), descendants of the Prophet through his daughter Fāṭimah and his kinsman ʿAlī—were, in the eyes of their followers, the rightful caliphs, both by descent and by divine choice the custodians of the true faith and the legitimate heads of the universal Islamic state and community. Their purpose was not to establish another regional sovereignty but to supersede the Abbasids and to found a new caliphate in their place.

Period of expansion

During the 9th century, Ismāʿīlī missionaries became established in many parts of the Islamic empire, preaching a doctrine of revolution against the Sunni order and the Abbasid state. After a number of unsuccessful risings, the Ismāʿīlīs were able to establish a firm base in Yemen, and from there they sent emissaries to North Africa, where they achieved their greatest success. By 909 they were strong enough for their imām, who had been in hiding, to emerge and proclaim himself caliph, with the messianic title of al-Mahdī (the Divinely Guided One). This marked the beginning of a new state and dynasty.

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For the first half-century the Fatimid caliphs ruled only in North Africa and Sicily, where they had to deal with many problems. Most of their subjects were Sunnis of the Mālikī school. Others—a substantial minority—were the Khawārij, or Khārijites. Neither group was well disposed toward the Ismāʿīlī doctrines of the new rulers, and they offered stubborn resistance to them. Even among the Ismāʿīlīs themselves, a conflict soon arose between the state and the revolution—that is, between the caliph al-Mahdī (reigned 909–934) and the missionaries who had brought him to power. There also were political problems with Amazigh (Berber) tribes and neighbouring Muslim rulers, as well as a war against the Byzantines in Sicily and Italy that the Fatimid rulers had inherited from their North African predecessors.

Conquest of Egypt

While coping with these difficulties, the Fatimids never lost sight of their ultimate aim, expansion to the east, where the centre of Abbasid strength lay. The first step was the conquest of Egypt. The first caliph, al-Mahdī, established his capital at Mahdiyyah (founded 920) on the east coast of Tunisia. His successors al-Qāʾim (reigned 934–946), al-Manṣūr (reigned 946–953), and al-Muʿizz (reigned 953–975) ruled from there. In 913–915, 919–921, and 925, unsuccessful expeditions were sent against Egypt. Finally, in 969, under the caliph al-Muʿizz, the first stage in the advance to the east was completed. Fatimid troops conquered the Nile valley and advanced across Sinai into Palestine and southern Syria. Near Al-Fusṭāṭ, the old administrative centre of Muslim Egypt, the Fatimids built Cairo, which became the capital of their empire, and in its centre a new mosque and seminary, called Al-Azhar, after Fāṭimah al-Zahrāʾ (the Resplendent), the ancestor of the dynasty.

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For more than a century the Fatimid rulers in Cairo pursued their aim of establishing the universal Ismāʿīlī imamate. At times they were compelled by other problems—war on the frontiers, trouble in the Mediterranean, unrest at home or in the provinces—to reach some agreement with their Sunni rivals, but such arrangements were always temporary.

The Fatimid caliphate was a regime at once imperial and revolutionary. At home, the caliph was a sovereign, governing a vast empire and seeking to expand it by normal military and political means. Its heart was Egypt, and its provinces at its peak included North Africa, Sicily, the Red Sea coast of Africa, Syria, Palestine, Yemen, and the Hejaz, with the two holy cities of Mecca and Medina. Control of these was of immense value to a Muslim ruler, conferring great religious prestige and enabling him to exploit the annual pilgrimage to his advantage.

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The caliph was not only an emperor: he was also an imām—the spiritual head of the Ismāʿīlīs wherever they were and, according to Ismāʿīlī doctrine, the embodiment of God’s infallible guidance to humankind. As such he was the archenemy of the Sunni Abbasid order and the hope and refuge of those who wished to overthrow it. In all the lands still under Abbasid suzerainty, he commanded a great network of missionaries and agents, and he used them to gain converts for the Ismāʿīlī faith and workers for the Fatimid cause; their task was also to preach and, where possible, to practice subversion against the Sunni order and the regimes that supported it. The mission was elaborately and secretly organized under the supreme direction of the chief missionary in Cairo. In the Fatimid state the mission became in effect a third branch of the government, together with the traditional military and bureaucratic establishments; it thus approximated something otherwise lacking in the medieval Islamic world—an institutionalized state religion.

The primary tasks of the mission were the formulation and dissemination of Ismāʿīlī doctrine. Ismāʿīlī theology supplied the arguments by which the Fatimids denied the Abbasid claim to the caliphate and asserted their own, and it was thus a powerful weapon in their armoury. First in Tunisia and then in Egypt, a series of distinguished theologians wrote what became the classical formulations of Ismāʿīlī doctrine. The Fatimids also founded great libraries and colleges, whose functions were to train missionaries to go out into the field and to provide further instruction for the converts sent to Cairo for this purpose.

The work of the mission was only a part—albeit an important one—of the Fatimid grand strategy against the Sunni empire. In this strategy, the universal aims of the Ismāʿīlī faith and the imperial purposes of the Fatimid state met and merged. Linked with these actions was a great commercial expansion and an economic policy aimed at developing the Red Sea trade between Asia and the Near East, to the detriment of the alternative route through the Persian Gulf, which was controlled by the Sunni powers. In the course of this effort, the Fatimids extended their rule down both shores of the Red Sea, established their supremacy in Yemen, and sent missionaries to eastern Arabia, to Central Asia, and to India.