g “Every soul shall taste death and you will be paid in full only on the Day of Resurrection,” says the Koran. The Muslims created a geography of Apocalypse around Jerusalem. The forces of evil perish at the Golden Gate. The Mahdi—the Chosen—dies when the Ark of the Covenant is placed before him. At the sight of the Ark, the Jews convert to Islam. The Kaaba of Mecca comes to Jerusalem with all those who ever made the pilgrimage to Mecca. Heaven descends on the Temple Mount with Hell in the Valley of Hinnom. The people assemble outside the Golden Gate on the Plain—al-Sahira. Israfil the Archangel of Death (one of the Dome’s gates is named after him) blows his trumpet: the dead (especially those buried close to the Golden Gate) are resurrected and pass through the gate, the portal to the End of Days (with its two little domed Gates of Mercy or that of Repentance), to be judged in the Dome of the Chain where the scales of justice hang.
h An imam is the leader of a mosque or community, but in Shia, imams can be spiritual leaders, chosen by God and blessed with infallibility. The Twelver Shiites of Iran believe in the first twelve imams descended from Muhammad’s son-in-law Ali and his daughter Fatima and that the Twelfth Imam was “occulted”—hidden by God—and will return as the Madhi, the Chosen messianic redeemer of Judgement Day. The Islamic Republic of Iran was founded by Ayatollah Khomeini on this millenarian expectation: the clergy rule only until the Imam’s return.
CHAPTER 19
The Abbasids: Distant Masters
750–969
CALIPH SAFFAH: THE SLAUGHTERER
Abu al-Abbas declared himself caliph and invited the Umayyads to a banquet to declare his peaceful intentions. In the midst of the feast, the waiters drew out clubs and swords and butchered the entire family, tossing the bodies into the lamb stew. The Slaughterer himself died soon afterwards but his brother Mansur, the Victorious, systematically murdered the Alid family and then liquidated the overmighty Abu Muslim too. His perfumier, Jamra, later told how Mansur kept the keys of a secret storeroom which was to be opened only on his death. There his son later found a vaulted chamber filled with the bodies, each meticulously labelled, of the family of Ali from old men to infants, whom Mansur had killed, all preserved in the hot dry air.
Wiry with brown, weather-beaten skin and saffron-dyed hair, Mansur was the real father of the Abbasid dynasty that ruled for many centuries, but his power-base was to the east: he moved his capital to his new Round City, Baghdad.
Soon after seizing power, Mansur visited Jerusalem. There he repaired the damaged Aqsa, but paid for this work by melting the gold and silver doors of the Dome of the Rock given by Abd al-Malik. Mansur’s successors no longer bothered to visit. Just as the city diminished in the Islamic world,a a Western emperor revived the Christian fascination with Jerusalem.7
THE EMPEROR AND THE CALIPH:
CHARLEMAGNE AND HAROUN AL-RASHID
On Christmas Day 800, Charles the Great, known as Charlemagne, the King of the Franks, who ruled most of modern France, Germany and Italy, was crowned emperor of the Romans by the pope in Rome. This ceremony marked the new confidence of the popes and their Western Latin-based Christianity that would become Catholicism—and their growing differences with the Greek-speaking Orthodox of Constantinople. Charlemagne was a merciless warrior-king hacking his way to ever-greater power, yet he was also fascinated with history, and as devout as he was ambitious: he saw himself as the heir to the missions of Constantine and Justinian to become the universal holy Roman emperor, and as a latter-day King David—and both these aspirations led to the Holy City. So earlier on the same Christmas Day, it was said that a delegation sent by the Patriarch of Jerusalem had presented him with the keys of the Holy Sepulchre. Rome and Jerusalem in one day was no mean feat.
This was not a bid for possession because the patriarch had the blessing of Jerusalem’s ruler, Caliph Haroun al-Rashid whose reign, recounted in the Thousand and One Nights, was the apogee of the Abbasid empire. Charlemagne and the caliph had been exchanging envoys for three years: Haroun was probably keen to play off the Franks against his enemies in Constantinople and Jerusalem’s Christians needed Charlemagne’s help.
The caliph sent Charlemagne an elephant and an astrolabe water clock, a sophisticated device that showed off Islamic superiority—and alarmed some of the primitive Christians as a contraption of diabolical sorcery. The two emperors did not sign a formal treaty, but Christian property in Jerusalem was listed and protected, while Charlemagne paid the entire poll tax for the city’s Christians—850 dinars. In return Haroun allowed him to create a Christian quarter around the Holy Sepulchre, with a convent, library and pilgrims’ hostel, staffed by 150 monks and seventeen nuns. “The Christians and pagans,” noted one pilgrim, “have this kind of peace between them.” This generosity generated the story that Charlemagne had covertly visited Jerusalem, making him the heir of Heraclius, and playing into the mystical legend of the Last Emperor whose reign would herald the End Days. This was widely believed, particularly in the age of the Crusades, but Charlemagne never did visit Jerusalem.8
When Haroun died, the civil war between his sons was won by Maamun. The new caliph was an enthusiastic student of science, founding the famous literary-scientific academy, the House of Wisdom, commissioning a world map and ordering his sages to calculate the circumference of the globe.b In 831, arriving in Syria to organize a campaign against Constantinople, Maamun probably visited Jerusalem, where he built new gates on the Temple Mount, but he erased Abd al-Malik’s name in the Dome to emphasize the superiority of the Abbasids and had it replaced with his own. He did not just take his name, he also purloined his gold from the Dome which remained a grey lead colour for over a thousand years. It got its gold back in the 1960s—but Abd al-Malik never got his name back and Maamun’s remains there to this day.9
This sleight of hand did not alter the slippage of Abbasid power. Just two years later, a peasant rebel leader was welcomed in Jerusalem by all three religions until, in 841, he pillaged the city, at which most of the inhabitants fled. The Sepulchre was saved only by a bribe from the patriarch. But the Arab caliphs had lost their grip. In 877, Ahmed ibn Tulun, the son of a Turkish slave who had become ruler of Egypt under the nominal aegis of the caliph, retook Jerusalem.10
KAFUR: THE SCENTED EUNUCH
Ibn Tulun was one of the Turks who gradually replaced the Arabs as the power in the Islamic empire. Maamun’s successor Mustasim had started to recruit slave boys—they were known as ghulam, pageboy—from among the newly Muslim Turkish horse-archers of Central Asia. These warriors of Asiatic appearance became first the praetorian guard, then the strongmen of the caliphate.
After Ibn Tulun’s son and heir was assassinated by his eunuchs,11 a Turkish strongman Muhammad ibn Tughj, known by the Central Asian title of prince—al-Ikhshid—came to rule Egypt and Jerusalem. The political instability intensified religious competition. In 935, an annexe to the Holy Sepulchre was forcibly converted into a mosque. Three years later, Muslims attacked Christians celebrating Palm Sunday, looting and damaging the Church. The Jews were now split between the traditional Rabbanites, led by the scholar-judges known as the gaons, who lived by the Talmud, the oral traditions, and the Karaites, a new sect who rejected any law except the Torah (hence their name means the “readers”) and believed in a return to Zion.c These Turkish rulers favoured the Karaites, and just to complicate matters there was also a new community of Khazarsd with their own synagogue in the Jewish Quarter. When the Ikhshid died in 946, aged sixty-four, he was buried in Jerusalem and his power passed to a negro eunuch whose soubriquet derived from his taste for perfume and makeup.
Abul-Misk Kafur, who was to rule Egypt, Palestine and Syria for over twenty years, was an Ethiopian slave bought as a child by the Ikhshid. Deformed, obese and malodorous, he splashed on so much white camphor and black musk that his master renamed him after them. His rise began when some exotic animals arrived for the Ikhshid. All the other servants rushed to admire them, but the African boy never took his eyes off his master,
awaiting the slightest command. The Ikhshid appointed him tutor to his sons, then commander of the armies that conquered Palestine and Syria, and finally regent with the title of the Master. Once in power, the eunuch cultivated Islamic piety, restoring the walls of the Temple Mount, while patronizing the arts. However, to the north, the Byzantines had been reinvigorated by a succession of outstanding soldier-emperors who raided southwards towards Syria, threatening to take Jerusalem, which set off anti-Christian riots. In 966, Kafur’s governor started to squeeze the Christians, demanding ever-greater payments from Patriarch John, who appealed to Kafur. But when John was caught corresponding with Constantinople, the governor, supported by the Jews (who hated Byzantines), attacked the Sepulchre and burned the patriarch at the stake.
In Cairo, the fragrant eunuch was now ailing. After the death of the last of the Ikhshids, Kafur ascended the throne in his own right. The first Muslim king to be born a slave—or for that matter to be a eunuch—employed a Jewish minister who would become the mastermind of an Islamic revolution and of a new empire over Jerusalem.12
a Jerusalem’s importance lessened as Mecca’s grew: if Jerusalem had perhaps at one point approached Mecca and Medina as part of the haj—“You shall only set out for the three mosques Mecca, Medina, and al-Aqsa,” declared one of the hadith of al-Khidri—now under the Abbasids, Jerusalem was reduced to a ziyara, a pious visit.
b The Abbasids, particularly Maamun, regularly requested copies of Greek classics from the Byzantines, securing for posterity Plato, Aristotle, Hippocrates, Galen, Euclid and Ptolemy of Alexandria. The Arabs developed an entire new vocabulary of science that entered the English language: alcohol, alembic, alchemy, algebra, almanac, are just some of the words thus borrowed. Al-Nadim’s famous Index shows that they also produced 6,000 new books. Paper was now replacing parchment scrolls: in one of history’s decisive battles, the Abbasids had defeated an invasion by the Chinese Tang emperors, ensuring the Middle East would be Islamic not Chinese and also capturing the secrets of Chinese paper-makers.
c The Jewish communities of the world were ruled by the two hereditary gaons of the Jerusalem Academy and the Babylonian/Iraqi Academy, whose seat was in Baghdad. The Karaites spread throughout the Jewish world, building up large communities from the Crimea to Lithuania that survived up to the Holocaust, when most of them were annihilated. This led to one of the strangest anomalies of the Nazi repression: in the Crimea, some Karaites were of Turkic rather than Semitic origin, so the Nazis actually ordered the protection of this Jewish sect.
d The Khazars—shamanist Turkic nomads, ruling the steppes from the Black Sea to Central Asia—formed the last Jewish state before the creation of Israel. In about 805, their kings converted to Judaism, taking names such as Manasseh and Aaron. When the Jerusalemite writer Muqaddasi passed through Khazaria he laconically observed, “Sheep, honey and Jews exist [there] in large quantities.” By the 960s, this Jewish empire was in decline. However, writers from Arthur Koestler to the recent Shlomo Sand have claimed that much of European Jewry are actually descended from these Turkic tribesmen. If true, this would undermine Zionism. But modern genetics refutes the theory: the two latest surveys suggest that modern Jews, both Sephardic and Ashkenazi, are around 70 percent descended from Middle Eastern genes of 3,000 years ago and around 30 percent from European stock.
CHAPTER 20
The Fatimids:
Tolerance and Lunacy
969–1099
IBN KILLIS: THE JEWISH VIZIER
AND THE FATIMID CONQUEST
The son of a Jewish merchant from Baghdad, Yaqub ben Yusuf, known as Ibn Killis, had enjoyed a rollercoaster career, from bankrupt mountebank in Syria to financial adviser to Kafur in Egypt. “Were he a Muslim,” said Kafur, “he’d have been the right man for vizier [chief minister].” Ibn Killis took the hint and converted, but the eunuch died, being buried in Jerusalem,a and Ibn Killis was imprisoned. Having bribed his way out of jail, he secretly travelled westwards to the Shiite kingdom in modern Tunisia ruled by the Fatimid family. The ever-flexible Ibn Killis converted to Shia and advised the Fatimid caliph Muizz that the time was ripe to take Egypt.13 In June 969, Muizz’s general Jawhar al-Siqilli conquered Egypt and then advanced north to take Jerusalem.14
PALTIEL AND THE FATIMIDS: JEWISH DOCTOR-PRINCES AND THE LIVING IMAMS
The messianic Fatimids, the new masters of Jerusalem, were unlike any other Islamic dynasty for they not only declared themselves caliphs, they were also sacred kings, the Living Imams, almost suspended between man and heaven. Visitors to their courts were shown through courtyards of increasingly eye-watering luxury before they came to a gold-curtained throne at which they prostrated themselves and the curtains were drawn to reveal the Living Imam in golden robes. Their sect was secretive, their beliefs mystical, redemptionist and esoteric, and their rise to power mysterious, clandestine and filled with adventure. In 899, a rich merchant in Syria, Ubayd Allah, declared himself the Living Imam, direct descendant of Ali and Fatima, the Prophet’s daughter, via the Imam Ismail, hence they were known as Ismaili Shiites. His secret agents, the so-called dawa, fanned out across the East, conquering Yemen and converting some Berber tribesmen in Tunisia; but the Abbasids tried to kill him, so he vanished. Some years later, he or someone claiming to be him reappeared in Tunisia as al-Mahdi, the Chosen, founding his own caliphate which started to conquer a new empire with a sacred mission: to overthrow the false Abbasids of Baghdad and redeem the world. In 973, the Caliph Muizz, now ruler of swathes of north Africa, Sicily, Egypt, Palestine and Syria, moved to his new capital, al-Qahira al-Muizziyya—the Conquest of Muizz—known today as Cairo.
His successor, Aziz, appointed their consigliere, Ibn Killis, as grand vizier, chief minister of the empire which he ruled until his death almost twenty years later. Apart from his immense wealth—he owned 8,000 female slaves, he was a scholar who debated religion with Jewish and Christian clerics and his career personifies the tolerance of the Fatimids, being sectarians themselves, towards Jews and Christians that was immediately felt in Jerusalem.
The Jews in Jerusalem were divided, poor and desperate, while their Egyptian brethren flourished under the Fatimids. They started to provide the doctors for the caliphs of Cairo: these were more than just royal physicians. They tended to be scholar-merchants who became influential courtiers and were usually appointed chief of the Jews of the Fatimid empire, a post known as the nagid, the prince. A Jew of mysterious origins named Paltiel was probably the first of these doctor-courtier-princes. A protégé of Jawhar, the Fatimid conqueror of Jerusalem, he immediately intervened to help the Jews in the Holy City.
After years of Abbasid neglect and the inconsistent patronage of Turkish rulers, Jerusalem was diminished and unstable. The constant wars between the caliphs of Cairo and Baghdad discouraged pilgrims; Bedouin raids sometimes overran the city for short periods; and in 974, the dynamic Byzantine Emperor John Tzimiskes captured Damascus and galloped into Galilee, promising his “intent to deliver the Holy Sepulchre of Christ our God from the bondage of the Muslim.” He was close; Jerusalem waited, but he never came.
The Fatimids encouraged the pilgrimages of their fellow Ismailis and Shiites to the Mosque of Jerusalem but the wars against Baghdad cut off the city from Sunni pilgrims. The very isolation of Jerusalem somehow intensified her sanctity: Islamic writers now compiled more popular anthologies of Jerusalem’s “merits”—the Fadail—and they gave her new names: she was still Iliya and Bayt al-Maqdis, the Holy House, but she now became al-Balat, the Palace, too. Yet Christian pilgrims were becoming richer and more numerous than the ruling Muslims—Franks sailed from Europe and rich caravans arrived every Easter from Egypt.
The Jews too looked to their saviours in Cairo where Paltiel now persuaded the Caliph to pay a subsidy to the impoverished gaon and Academy of Jerusalem. He won the right for Jews there to buy a synagogue on the Mount of Olives, to gather close to Abolsom’s Pillar and also to pray at the Golden Gate on the eastern wall of the T
emple Mount. At festivals the Jews were allowed to encircle the old Temple seven times but their main synagogue remained “the inner altar of the sanctuary at the western wall”: the Cave. The Jews had been scarcely tolerated under the Abbasids but now, poor as they were, they had more freedom than they had enjoyed for two centuries. Sadly, the Rabbanites and Karaites, who were specially favoured by the Fatimids, fellow sectarians, held separate services on the Mount of Olives that led to scuffles and soon these threadbare scholars were at war with each other in the dusty, ramshackle synagogues and holy underground caverns of Jerusalem. And their freedoms only exacerbated Muslim frustration.
When Paltiel died in 1011, his son brought his body to be buried in Jerusalem but the rich cortège was attacked by Muslim ruffians. Even after Paltiel, the Jews of Cairo despatched caravans with money to fund the Academy and a mystical sect called the Mourners of Zion who prayed for the restoration of Israel, in effect, religious Zionists. But the help was never enough: “the city is widowed, orphaned, deserted and impoverished with its few scholars,” wrote a Jewish Jerusalemite in a fundraising letter. “Life here is extremely hard, food scarce. Help us, save us, redeem us.”15 Now the Jews were “a pitiful assembly, constantly harassed.”
Yet the Sunni Muslims were increasingly scandalized by the excesses and liberties of the infidels. “Everywhere, the Christians and Jews have the upper hand,” grumbled Muqaddasi, the travel writer whose very name means “Born in Jerusalem.”
MUQADDASI: THE JERUSALEMITE
“All the year round, never are her streets empty of strangers.” Around 985, at the height of Fatimid rule, Muhammad ibn Ahmed Shams al-Din al-Muqaddasi had come home to the city he called al-Quds, the Holy.b Now in his forties, he had been travelling for twenty years, “seeking knowledge” through travel that was so much part of the training of every Islamic savant, combining piety with the scientific observation practised in the House of Wisdom. In his masterpiece The Soundest Divisions for Knowledge of the Regions, he reveals his irrepressible curiosity and sense of adventure:
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