THE FATIMID EMPIRE

In the year 1000, in the midst of the so-called Shi’ite century of Islam, the Sevener Shi’ite imam and caliph al-Hakim bi amr Allah, ‘He Who Rules in Accordance with God’s Command’, had his tutor and regent, the white eunuch Barjawan, assassinated in the royal palace city of al-Qahira, ‘the Victorious’, from which Cairo takes its name. From then until his disappearance in 1021, he presided over an empire intended to restore the religious and political unity of the Muslim community under its true leaders, the descendants of Muhammad, of his cousin and chosen successor ’Ali, and his daughter Fatima, divinely appointed to the imamate or supreme authority for the faith, and destined to the caliphate or lieutenancy of God and His Prophet as commanders of the faithful. In the course of the tenth century, his Fatimid dynasty had risen to power, first in North Africa and then in Egypt and Syria, while the original Arab empire under the older ’Abbasid dynasty of caliphs had finally disintegrated under the weight of its own excessive taxation. The ’Abbasids themselves had survived at Baghdad, but as the purely nominal rulers of the Muslim world, traditionally recognized but no longer obeyed by the independent princes of their former provinces. At Baghdad itself, moreover, they were under the protection of the Buyid or Buwayhid dynasty of western Iran and Iraq. Like the Fatimids, the Buyids were also Shi’ites or partisans of the fourth caliph ’Ali, in preference to the ’Abbasids who claimed descent from the Prophet’s uncle. They did not therefore recognize the Fatimids as true heirs to the empire of the faith, but rather the Hidden Imam of the Twelver Shi’ites, who had vanished into ghayba or supernatural occlusion in 874.