Part 1

Transcriber’s Note: The original printing of this book had numerous errors, including basic mistakes like misnumbering the chapters, and the occasional transposition of lines of text. Efforts have been made to fix these but it is possible some may remain.

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ALBERUNI: =India=. An Account of the Religion, Philosophy, Literature, Geography, Chronology, Astronomy, Customs, Laws, and Astrology of India, about A.D. 1030. BY DR. EDWARD C. SACHAU.

ARNOLD (Sir E.): =Indian Poetry and Indian Idylls=. Containing ‘The Indian Song of Songs,’ from the Sanskrit of the Gita Govinda of Jayadeva; Two Books from the ‘Iliad of India’ (Mahabharata); ‘Proverbial Wisdom,’ from the Shlokas of the Hitopadesa, and other Oriental Poems.

BARTH (Dr. A.): =The Religions of India=. Authorised Translation by REV. J. WOOD.

BIGANDET (B. P.): =Life or Legend of Gaudama, the Buddha of the Burmese=; With Annotations, the Ways to Neibban, and Notice on the Phongyies or Burmese Monks.

BEAL (Prof. S.): =Life of Hiuen-Tsiang=. By the Shamans HWUI LI and YEN-TSUNG. With a Preface containing an Account of the Works of I-Tsing.

BEAL (Prof. S.): =Si-Yu-Ki=: Buddhist Records of the Western World. Translated from the Chinese of Hiuen-Tsiang.

BOULTING (Dr. W.): =Four Pilgrims=: I., Hiuen Tsiang; II., Sæwulf; III., Mohammed ibn abd Allah; IV., Ludovico Varthema of Bologna.

COWELL (Prof. E. B.): =Sarva-Darsana-Samgraha=; or, Review of the Different Systems of Hindu Philosophy. BY MADHAVA ACHARYA. Translated by Prof. E. B. COWELL, M.A., and Prof. A. E. GOUGH, M.A.

DOWSON (Prof. J.): =Classical Dictionary of Hindu Mythology and Religion, Geography, History, and Literature=.

EDKINS (Dr. J.): =Chinese Buddhism=: A Volume of Sketches, Historical, and Critical. New and Revised Edition.

ROCKHILL (W. W.): =The Life of the Buddha and the Early History of his Order=. Derived from Tibetan works in the Bkahhgyur and Bstan-hgyur. Followed by notices on the early history of Tibet and Khoten.

HAUG (Dr. M.): =Essays on the Sacred Language, Writings, and Religion of the Parsis=.

WEBER (Dr. A.): =History of Indian Literature=. Translated by JOHN MANN, M.A., and THEODORE ZACHARIAE, Ph.D. Fourth Edition.

O’LEARY (De Lacy): =Arabic Thought and its Place in History=.

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KEGAN PAUL, TRENCH, TRUBNER & CO., LTD.

A SHORT HISTORY OF THE FATIMID KHALIFATE

BY DE LACY O’LEARY, D.D. _Lecturer in Aramaic and Syriac, Bristol University Author of “Arabic Thought and its Place in History”_

LONDON: KEGAN PAUL, TRENCH, TRUBNER & CO., LTD. NEW YORK: E. P. DUTTON & CO. 1923

Printed in Great Britain by John Roberts Press Limited, London.

INTRODUCTORY NOTE

The following pages present a brief outline of the history of the Fatimid Khalifs who were ruling in Egypt at the time of the First and Second Crusades. Too often the student of European history gleans his knowledge of the oriental powers with which the West was brought into contact by the Crusades from western Christian writers, who do not fairly or truly describe those powers, and do not set forth clearly the strong and weak points which are so important in interpreting the actual forces with which the Crusaders were brought into contact. These pages are drawn from the Arabic and Persian historians so as to present a picture which, though inaccurate in some points, nevertheless shows the other side not perceived by the historians who wrote the narrative of the Crusades from a western standpoint. Directly, therefore, they supplement the western history, but are still more important in their indirect bearing as an effort has been made to show the rise and development of the Fatimid Khalifate and sect as a rival to the orthodox Abbasid Khalifate of Baghdad, which is most essential to the right understanding of the world into which the Crusaders penetrated, whilst at the same time it shows a curious and important phase of Muslim tendencies which are not without a bearing on the later history of Islam. The present essay does not claim to be an original study in a field hitherto unexplored, but simply aims at bringing together in an accessible form material which will be of service to the student of mediaeval western history and to those who are interested in the development of Islam, and to do so with such comments as will enable it to be co-ordinated with contemporary European history.

CONTENTS

CHAP. PAGE

I THE SHIʿITES OR SCHISMATICS OF ISLAM 1

II THE ISMAʿILIAN SECT 12

III THE QARMATIANS 39

IV THE ESTABLISHMENT OF THE FATIMIDS IN NORTH AFRICA 51

V THE FATIMID KHALIFS OF KAIRAWAN 74

VI THE SECOND FATIMID KHALIF, AL-QAʾIM 88

VII THE THIRD FATIMID KHALIF, AL-MANSUR 91

VIII THE FOURTH FATIMID KHALIF, AL-MOʿIZZ 93

IX THE FIFTH FATIMID KHALIF, AL-ʿAZIZ 115

X THE SIXTH FATIMID KHALIF, AL-HAKIM 123

XI THE SEVENTH FATIMID KHALIF, AZ-ZAHIR 189

XII THE EIGHTH FATIMID KHALIF, AL-MUSTANSIR 193

XIII THE NINTH FATIMID KHALIF, AL-MUSTALI 211

XIV THE TENTH FATIMID KHALIF, AL-AMIR 218

XV THE ELEVENTH FATIMID KHALIF, AL-HAFIZ 222

XVI THE TWELFTH FATIMID KHALIF, AZ-ZAFIR 227

XVII THE THIRTEENTH FATIMID KHALIF, AL-FAʿIZ 233

XVIII THE FOURTEENTH FATIMID KHALIF, AL-ʿADID 235

XIX THE FATIMID KHALIFATE IN ITS RELATION TO GENERAL HISTORY 246

XX THE LATER HISTORY OF THE ISMAʿILIAN SECT 257

BIBLIOGRAPHY 262

INDEX 266

I

THE SHIʿITES OR SCHISMATICS OF ISLAM

Islam appears first on the page of history as a purely Arab religion: indeed it is perfectly clear that the Prophet Mohammed, whilst intending it to be the one and only religion of the whole Arab race, did not contemplate its extension to foreign communities. “Throughout the land there shall be no second creed” was the Prophet’s message from his death-bed, and this was the guiding principle in the policy of the early Khalifs. The Prophet died in A.H. 11, and within the next ten years the Arabs, united under the leadership of his successors, extended their rule over Egypt, Syria, Mesopotamia, and Persia. To a large extent it was merely an accident that this rapid expansion of Arab rule was associated with the rise of Islam. The expanding movement had already commenced before the Prophet’s ministry, and was due to purely secular causes to the age long tendency of the Arabs,—as of every race at a similar stage of economic and social development,—to over-spread and plunder the cultured territories in their vicinity. The Arabs were nomadic dwellers in a comparatively unproductive area, and had been gradually pressed back into that area by the development of settled communities of cultivators in the better irrigated land upon its borders. These settled communities evolved an intensive agriculture, and thus achieved great wealth and an advanced state of civilization which was a perpetual temptation to the ruder nomads who, able to move over great distances with considerable rapidity, were always inclined to make plundering incursions into the territories of the prosperous agricultural and city states near at hand. The only restraint on these incursions was the military power of the settled communities which always had as its first task the raising of a barrier against the wild men of the desert: whenever the dyke gave way, the flood poured out. In the seventh century A.D. the restraining powers were the Roman Empire and the Kingdom of Persia, and both of these, almost simultaneously, showed a sudden military collapse from which, in the natural course of events they would, no doubt, have recovered after a short interval; but the Arabs poured in at this moment of weakness, just as the Teutonic and other groups of central Europe had broken through the barriers of the western half of the Roman Empire; and at that moment, in the course of their incursion, they received a new coherence by the rise of the religion of Islam and, by the racial unity thus artificially produced, became more formidable.

In their outspread over Egypt and Western Asia the Arabs adopted the policy, partly deduced from the Qurʾan and partly based on the tradition of the first Khalif’s conduct in Arabia, of uncompromising warfare against all “polytheists,”—the creed of Islam was a pure unitarianism, and could contemplate no toleration of polytheism,—but of accommodation with those possessed of the divine revelation, even in the imperfect and corrupt form known to Christians and Jews. These “People of the Book” were not pressed to embrace Islam, but might remain as tribute-paying subjects of the Muslim rulers, with their own rights very fully secured. In all the conquered lands the progress of the Muslim religion was very gradual, and in all of them Christian and Jewish communities have maintained an independent continuous existence to the present day. Yet for all this there were very many conversions to the religion of the ruling race, and these were so numerous that within the first century of the Hijra the Arabs themselves were in a numerical minority in the Church of Islam. The alien converts, socially and intellectually developed in the culture of the Hellenistic world or of semi-Hellenistic Persia, were very far in advance of the ruling Arabs who were little better than half savages at the commencement of their career of conquest: and the unexpected inclusion of this more cultured element acted as a leaven in the Islamic community, and forced it to a rapid and somewhat violent evolution. It is wonderful that Islam had sufficient vigour and elasticity to be able to absorb such fresh elements and phases of thought, but that elasticity had its limits, and at a very early date sects began to form whose members the orthodox felt themselves unable to recognise as fellow Muslims.

These early sects which were generally regarded as heretical were, in most cases, reproductions of older pre-Islamic Persian and Mesopotamian religious systems, with a thin veneer of Muslim doctrine, and, in the second century of the Hijra, when they became most prominent, they were strongly tinctured with Hellenistic philosophical speculations which had already exercised a potent influence in Mesopotamia and Persia. In theory these sects were “legitimist” in their adherence to the principle of hereditary descent. Orthodox Islam accepted as a constitutional principle the leadership of an elected _khalif_ or “successor,” a natural development of the tribal chieftainship familiar to the pre-Islamic Arabs. Amongst them the chief was elected in a tribal council, in which great weight was given to the tried warriors and aged men of experience, but in which all had a voice, and choice was made on what we should describe as democratic lines, and this remained the practice in the earlier age of Islam. Such a constitutional theory was no great novelty to those who had lived under the Roman Empire, but was entirely repugnant to those educated in Persian ideas, and who had learned to regard the kingship as hereditary in the sense that the semi-divine kingly soul passed by transmigration at the death of one sovereign to the body of his divinely appointed successor. This had been the Persian belief with regard to the Sasanid kings, and the Persians fully accepted Yazdegird, the last of these, as a re-incarnation of the princes of the semi-mythical Kayani dynasty to which they attributed their racial origin and their culture. Yazdegird died in A.H. 31 (= A.D. 652), and his death terminated the male line of the Persian royal family, but it was generally believed that his daughter, Shahr-banu, was married to Husayn, the son of the fourth Khalif ʿAli, so that in his descendants by this Persian princess the claims of Islam and of the ancient Persian deified kings were combined. Historically the evidence for this marriage seems to be questionable, but it is commonly accepted as an article of faith by the Persian Shiʿites.

At a quite early date the house of ʿAli began to receive the devoted adherence of the Persian converts. That ʿAli himself had been prominent as a champion of the rights of alien converts to equality in the brotherhood of Islam, and still more his harsh treatment by Muʿawiya, the founder of the ʿUmayyad dynasty, caused his name to serve as a rallying point for all those who were disaffected towards the official Khalifate. It is now the general Shiʿite belief that ʿAli, the cousin and son-in-law of the Prophet, was his chief companion and chosen successor, the three preceding Khalifs being no more than usurpers who had kept him out of his just rights, and whose wrong doing he had borne with exemplary patience. ʿAli himself does not seem to have taken so pronounced a view, but he certainly regarded himself as injured by his exclusion from the Khalifate. It is not true to say with Muir (_Caliphate_, p. 301), that the idea of a divine Imamate or “leadership” was entirely the invention of later times because, as early as A.H. 32, in the reign of ʿUthman, the Jewish convert ʿAbdu b. Saba of Yemen,—a district which had been conquered by the Persian king Nushirwan, and settled by Persians for nearly a century before the coming of Islam, and so thoroughly impregnated with Persian ideas,—preached the divine right of ʿAli. This view he maintained afterwards when ʿAli was Khalif, in spite of ʿAli’s own disapproval, and at ʿAli’s murder in A.H. 40, he reiterated it in a more pronounced form: the martyred Khalif’s soul, he said, was in the clouds, his voice was heard in the thunder, his presence was revealed in the lightning: in due course he would descend to earth again, and meanwhile his spirit, a divine emanation, was passed on by re-birth to the imams his successors.

Certainly the tragedy of Kerbela, which centred in the pathetic sufferings and death of ʿAli’s son, Husayn, as he was on his way to claim the Khalifate, produced a tremendous wave of pro-ʿAlid feeling: indeed a popular martyr was the one thing needed to raise devotion to the house of ʿAli to the level of an emotional religion, though many, no doubt, supported the ʿAlid claims simply because they formed the most convenient pretext for opposing the official Khalifate, and yet remaining outwardly within the fold of Islam.

After the death of Husayn there were three different lines of ʿAlids which competed for the allegiance of the legitimist faction, those descended from (i.) Hasan, and (ii.) Husayn, the two sons of ʿAli by his wife Fatima, the daughter of the Prophet, and both therefore representing the next of kin to the Prophet who left no son, and (iii.) the house of Muhammad, the son of ʿAli, by another wife known as the Hanifite. Of these three we may disregard the descendants of (i.) Hasan, who ultimately migrated to Maghrab (Morocco), and became the progenitors of the Idrisid dynasty and of the Sharifs of Morocco: they formed a very moderate branch of the Shiʿite faction, adopted many practices of the orthodox or Sunni party, and had no part in the peculiarly Persian developments of the Asiatic Shiʿites. The first ʿAlid faction to become prominent was (iii.) the partisans of Muhammad, the son of the Hanifite, who were formed into a society by Kaysan, a freedman of ʿAli, for the purpose of avenging Hasan and Husayn. They recognised a succession of four Imams or valid commanders, ʿAli, Hasan, Husayn, and Muhammad, the son of the Hanifite, and maintained that, at Husayn’s death, Muhammad became _de jure_ the Khalif and the divinely appointed head of the Church of Islam. Muhammad himself entirely disowned these partisans, but that was a detail to which they paid no attention. At Muhammad’s death in A.H. 81 this party, “the Kaysanites” as they were called, recognised his son Abu Hashim as the fifth Imam until A.H. 98, when he died childless after bequeathing his claims to Muhammad b. ʿAli b. ʿAbdullah (d. A.H. 126), who was not of the house of ʿAli at all, and who became the founder of the ʿAbbasid dynasty which obtained the Khalifate in A.H. 132. It was under Abu Hashim that the party, now changed in name from Kaysanites to Hashimites, became an admirably organised conspiracy which contributed more than anything else to the overthrow of the ʿUmayyad Khalifs. Throughout the Muslim dominions there was deep and ever-increasing dissatisfaction with the ʿUmayyads, who represented an arrogant _parvenu_ Arab aristocracy, ruling over races who enjoyed an older and richer culture, and were by no means effete. The Hashimites seized hold of this discontent and sent out their missionaries (_daʿi_, plur. _duʿat_) in all directions disguised as merchants and pilgrims who relied upon private conversations and informal intercourse rather than public preaching, and thus began that unostentatious but effective propaganda, which has ever since been the chief missionary method of Islam. Hashimite teaching centered in the doctrines of _tawakkuf_ or the theory of a divinely appointed Imam, who alone was the rightful Commander of the faithful and their authoritative teacher, of _hulul_ or the incarnation of the Divine Spirit in the Imam, and of _tenasukhu l-Arwah_ or the transmigration of that Spirit from each Imam to his valid successor, doctrines alien to Islam proper. With the death of the Abu Hashim this party passed over to the service of the ʿAbbasids to whom it was a source of great strength, and at their accession to the Khalifate it ceased to exist as a sect.

The most important sect, or group of sects, of the Shiʿites was (ii.) the faction which recognised Husayn as the third Imam, and his son, ʿAli Zayn al-Abidin (d. 94 A.H.) as his successor, the son of the Imam and of the royal princess of Persia. But at al-Abidin’s death this party split into two, some following his son Zayd (d. 121), others his son Muhammad al-Bakir (d. 113). The former or Zaydite party established itself for a considerable period in North Persia, and still maintains itself in South Arabia. Zayd himself was the friend and pupil of the Muʿtazilite or rationalist leader Wasil ibn ʿAta, and the Zaydites have generally been regarded as more or less free thinkers. The majority of the Shiʿites, however, recognised Muhammad al-Bakir as the fifth Imam, and after his death Jaʿfar as-Sadiq (d. 148) as the sixth, though here again there was a schism, some regarding Abu Mansur, another son of Muhammad al-Bakir, as the sixth Imam. Abu Mansur seems to have been one of the first ʿAlids to endorse the divine rights claimed for them by their followers, and did so in an extreme form, asserting that he had ascended to heaven and obtained supernatural illumination. At this time all the extremer Shiʿites regarded the Imam as an incarnation of the Divine Spirit passed on from ʿAli, and many believed that ʿAli was the true prophet of God whose office had been fraudulently intercepted by Muhammad.

The Mansuris, however, were a minor sect, the majority of the Shiʿites followed Jaʿfar who was Imam at the time of the ʿAbbasid revolution. He was one of those who were deeply influenced by the traditions of Hellenistic philosophy and science, and was the author of works on chemistry, augury, and omens: he is usually credited with being the founder, or at least the chief exponent, of what are known as _batinite_ views, that is to say, the allegorical interpretation of the Qurʾan as having an esoteric meaning, which can only be learned from the Imam who is illuminated by divine wisdom, and who alone is able to reveal its true sense. The inner meaning thus revealed was usually a more or less imperfect reproduction of Aristotelian doctrine as it had been handed down by the Syriac writers. Like his brother, Abu Mansur Jaʿfar fully endorsed the doctrine of a divine Imamate and the transmigration of the Divine Spirit, then tabernacled in himself, and it seems probable that Van Vloten (_Recherches sur la domination arabe_, 1894, pp. 44-45) is right in suggesting that the general promulgation of these beliefs amongst the Shiʿites was largely due to the labours of the Hashimite missionaries.

The contemporary establishment of the ʿAbbasids made a far-reaching change in the conditions of Islam. The Arabs began to take a secondary place, and Persian influences became predominant. In 135 the noble Persian family of the Barmecides began to furnish _wazirs_ or Prime Ministers to the Khalifate, and controlled its policy for a period of fifty-four years. Nearly all important offices were given to Persians, and a distinct anti-Arab party was formed, known as the _Shuʿubiyya_, which produced a prolific controversial literature which expressed the hatred stored up under generations of ʿUmayyad misrule: the Arab was held up to derision, his pretensions to aristocratic descent were contrasted with the much more ancient genealogies of the Persian nobles, and he was portrayed as little better than an illiterate savage. In literature, in science, in Muslim jurisprudence and theology, and even in the scientific treatment of Arabic grammar, the Persians altogether surpassed the Arabs, so that we must be careful not to talk of Arab philosophy, Arab science, etc., in the history of Muslim civilization, but always of Arabic philosophy, etc., remembering that it was not the science and philosophy of the Arabs, but that of the Arabic speaking people, amongst whom only a small minority were actually of Arab race: and this applies to the “golden age” of Arabic literature (A.H. 132-232). On the other hand it must be remembered that, indirectly and unintentionally, the ʿUmayyads had helped towards this result. It was under their rule that the Arabic language had been introduced into the public administration, and in due course replaced Greek and Persian in all public business, so that it became the common speech of all Western Asia, or at least a common medium of intercourse between those who used various languages in their private life, and thus the brilliant intellectual and literary renascence was rendered possible by a wide exchange of thought.