The setting of Shiʿite Rulers, Sunni Rivals, and Christians in Between is the multi-religious environment of Palestine and Egypt in the eleventh century, when both territories were ruled by the Ismaili Shiite Fatimid Caliphate, sworn enemy of the Sunni Abbasids in Baghdad. The author lays out several chief lines of inquiry, which concern especially the place of Christians in the Fatimid realms. How did the “sectarian milieu” affect Fatimid “identity formation” (1–2)? Did the principles expounded in Ismaili Shiite legal writings guide Fatimid policy toward the state's Christian dhimmīs (non-Muslim protected subjects)? Did sectarian conflict between Sunnis and Shiites affect the Fatimids’ treatment of Christians?
Overall, the book is structured less as a systematic investigation of these questions than as an analytical overview of four major textual sources related to Shiism and the Fatimids, with observations relevant to the book's major questions interspersed along the way. Chapter 1, a sizeable introduction, lays out those questions and describes the sources the following chapters will study. It also takes up a series of historiographical matters, such as the late Shahab Ahmed's theorization of Islam as an object of analysis, the direct utility of which to the book's concerns is not always evident. Given the book's focus on sectarianism, the introduction's discussion of sociological approaches to that topic is welcome. Surprisingly, the book does not engage with the already significant scholarship on how to conceive of sects and religious communities in the Fatimid Caliphate, particularly Marina Rustow's Heresy and the Politics of Community: The Jews of the Fatimid Caliphate (Ithaca: Cornell University Press, 2008).
Each of the following four chapters takes one textual source as its focus. Chapter 2 is curious in comparison to the others, as it is concerned with a product not of the Ismaili Shiite milieu of North Africa, but of the Twelver Shiite milieu of Iraq. The text at hand is the Nahj al-balāgha, a collection of sermons and writings attributed to ʿAlī b. Abī Ṭālib, the revered first Imam of all Shiite traditions. The author rightly points out that many texts contained in the Nahj must have been in circulation among the North African Ismailis as well as the Iraqi Twelvers. But from this vantage point the book might have made better use of the Nahj as a supplementary source to be consulted alongside Ismaili works rather than as the centerpiece of its own chapter.
Ismaili writings take center stage in Chapter 3, which examines the Daʿāʾim al-islām, the most important extant Ismaili juristic work produced under the Fatimids. The author notes that the text exhibits a negative view of ʿAlī's opponents in the conflicts that beset the earliest Muslim community, as is to be expected of a Shiite text. More germane to the book's wider concern with sectarianism is the observation that the Daʿāʾim, like the law of the Twelver Shiites but unlike that of the Sunnis, considers various forms of contact with non-Muslims to be ritually polluting.
The book follows that observation in Chapter 4, which looks at how a chronicle by a major Egyptian Muslim author of the fourteenth and fifteenth centuries, al-Maqrīzī, depicted the Fatimid caliphs’ treatment of their Christian subjects. No obvious connections are evident between the minutiae of Ismaili law and Fatimid policy, despite the book's suggestion of “indirect effects” of the former on the latter (115). For example, that the Fatimids enacted policies against the memory of the Shiite Imams’ enemies does not seem to be inspired by specific juristic rulings in the Daʿāʾim, but is rather a manifestation of a bedrock Shiite theological tenet that also influenced Ismaili legal thought.
Chapter 4 effectively highlights a number of interesting episodes in the Fatimids’ relations with their Christian subjects that have not received as much attention as the policies of the caliph al-Ḥākim, infamous for ordering the destruction of the Church of the Holy Sepulchre. But one wishes that this chapter had engaged with the very rich primary source materials beyond al-Maqrīzī available for the study of the Fatimids’ dhimmī policy. Chief among these are documentary sources, such as the petitions to and responsa of several Fatimid caliphs related to the Monastery of St. Catherine at Mt. Sinai, published in S. M. Stern, Fāṭimid Decrees: Original Documents from the Fāṭimid Chancery (London: Faber and Faber, 1964), which the book mentions on p. 48 but does not discuss. Similarly, Cairo Genizah scholarship on the Jewish communities of the Fatimid realms could have been mined for essential comparative data.
Chapter 5 seeks to offer a contrasting perspective to that surveyed in Chapter 4 by examining a Christian-authored Arabic chronicle, the Kitāb taʾrīkh al-dhayl of Yaḥyā b. Saʿīd al-Anṭākī, a Melkite (that is, an Arabophone Chalcedonian Orthodox Christian). The chapter also takes up a short, problematic text contained in a nineteenth-century Melkite manuscript. Like the preceding chapter, this one is valuable in highlighting little-studied reports on the Fatimids’ interactions with their Christian subjects. As in Chapter 4, the choice of source material limits the scope of the analysis. Since the chapter's goal is to consider Christian views of Fatimid policy, perhaps the History of the Patriarchs of Alexandria, the major Arabic chronicle of the Coptic Church that has plenty to say about life under the Fatimids, might have been examined alongside al-Anṭākī's text.
Shiʿite Rulers, Sunni Rivals, and Christians in Between offers a collection of noteworthy commentary on key sources related to the Christians of the Fatimid realms, a worthy subject for a monograph and one on which much work remains to be done. The author has ample scope to pursue further systematic study of this topic with the full breadth of available materials in his future work.
