In 920, the Imam-Caliph moved into a new capital city, Al-Mahdiyah, on the Tunisian coast. At this time, Turks in Bulgaria were in a power struggle with Constantinople. Both sides quickly enriched this Fatimid Caliph in a bidding war of alliance gifts. The Fatimids took control of Sicily, then moved along the African coast into Libya.
The Fatimid towns stopped paying Abbasid taxes to Baghdad, but its psychological effect on the Caliph there was minimal. Egypt was the jewel in the Caliph’s crown, and Ibn Tulun’s dynasty had been cut off. Wealth from Egypt was again flowing north.
But in 969, the Abbasid-appointed Emir of Egypt was defeated by Fatimid forces. Egypt had been almost single-handedly feeding imperial armies for a long time. Losing Egypt meant famine among the troops; it meant sickness, desertion, and general military weakness. It wasn’t so long ago that Constantinople had lost Egypt, and now it was Baghdad’s turn.
The Fatimids captured Alexandria and pressed into the Nile Delta heartland. They set up their new government in the Islamic city of Fustat, but then began to build a city on the ruins of Rome’s old Fort Babylon. One legend suggests that the name “Cairo” was based on the planet Mars, which was high in the sky as they started construction. Astrology was cutting-edge science in 970, of course. In their new city, the Fatimids laid out a large new mosque called al-Azhar. The Imam-Caliph would preach on Fridays, just as the early Caliphs had done.
Cairo became the capital city of Shi’ite Ismaili fervor, as well as the ruling city of the Fatimids. (Fustat, left behind, gradually became a Jewish neighborhood, home to Maimonides.) Ismailis had been a minority among Shi’ites, who were a minority among Muslims, but under the Fatimids, Egypt began to send out agents to spread Ismaili theology. They organized the effort by outlining different regions that they called “islands” (jazira), like Rum (Europe), Sin (Far East), and Zanj (Southeast African coast).
They had the most lasting success in places like Yemen and Iran, where there were already many Shi’ites—and, ironically, where Eastern Christianity had been strong. They had almost no success among Turks, who as a group tended to be anti-intellectual and pragmatic. Shi’ite theology is esoteric, intellectual, and idealistic, so in those senses it is closer to the Christian model.
Of course, it was dangerous to become an Ismaili if you lived in Abbasid territory or in the city-states of pragmatic Turkic Mamluk rulers in the east. The belief system was devoutly religious and esoteric, but it necessarily implied the illegitimacy of these other rulers, too. Even so, the underlying Shi’ite feeling of many Iranian and Yemenite believers welcomed the Ismaili da’is. In order for their theology to survive life under hostile rulers, the Ismailis embraced the concept of taqqiyah, that is, that it’s acceptable to pretend to have mainstream views, pray for the Abbasid Caliph in public at the mosque, and even deny that you are an Ismaili.
The Fatimid dynasty ruled Egypt and Syria as a very small minority among the native Christian populations, and even as a minority among Muslims. During the 900s, Egyptians were still mostly Christian. If there are numbers to estimate how many had converted to Islam, I can’t find them, but definitely the following century had some really big waves of conversion that hadn’t happened yet. Let’s guess that 20% were Muslims, 5% Jews, and 75% Christians. In rural Egypt, over 90% were still Christians.
The Fatimids had conquered the Abbasid emir’s army, but they still needed some popular support for their rule. They couldn’t rock the boat with harsh or large changes, and they also had to court the favor of all intellectuals and landowners. This meant that they had to show fairness and even favoritism toward Jews and Christians. For this reason, the Fatimid period was a great time for rebuilding synagogues and churches, and for taking a rest period from persecution. Many Christians and Jews worked in the government.
Imam-Caliph al-Aziz (975-996) liked to sponsor three-way interfaith debates. He called this gathering a majlis, the word now used for a parliament. A famous Coptic legendary miracle came out of one of the majlis debates. A rabbi challenged the Caliph to make the Christians prove Jesus’ saying that “if you have faith the size of a mustard seed, you can move a mountain.” The Caliph, perhaps amused, but more likely sincerely interested, gave the Patriarch three days to come up with a mountain-moving solution. If the Christian scriptures were proven false, they would be demoted and persecuted.
The Coptic Patriarch, who was a Syrian monk named Afraham, called for a universal fast. The Patriarch had a vision that told him a one-eyed tanner would move the mountain. This man was called Simon, and he was indeed very pious. As Jews, Christians and Muslims gathered around one of Cairo’s nearby hills to watch, the Christians led by Simon prayed, and then Mt. Moqattam moved. The Caliph rewarded them with permission to rebuild more churches. During the reign of Caliph al-Aziz, the Coptic Church began to write books in Arabic and to translate older Greek and Coptic books. From this point on, Coptic and Greek stayed in the liturgy, but they wrote books and treatises only in Arabic.
Fatimid armies pushed into Palestine and Syria, intent on taking over the entire empire if they could (and thus restoring a member of Muhammad’s immediate family to universal leadership). Abbasid Baghdad was controlled by a Shi’ite family, the Buyids, for a while. It must have seemed like Shi’ite theology was finally having the comeback it deserved. This raises the question: why isn’t Shi’ite theology the majority opinion now? Why didn’t Fatimids succeed in their project? Basically, in addition to the ordinary vagaries of empires, Shi’ites have a tendency to split over which son of an Imam is the heir. One son may rule, while another is revered by a splinter group. Shi’ites are united by an idea — that the Prophet’s immediate family had special access to Allah — but they fracture into hostile factions.
- A Short History of the Ismailis by Farhad Daftary
- The Lost History of Christianity by Philip Jenkins
- The Coptic Christian Heritage by Lois M. Farag