by Hugh Kennedy
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 pilgrim, 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 Kaba 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 Shiite 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 Mutawakkil 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, who 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, a
t 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 Masūd, 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 Muizz 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 did, 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 Shiite rituals, as when the newly arrived caliph Muizz 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 Shiite 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 M
uslims, 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.
