Fatimid Caliphate: Salamiya's Secret Missionaries to Saladin's Quiet Coup

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The Fatimid Caliphate began as an underground Ismaili Shia movement in the ninth century, run from a secret headquarters at Salamiya on the edge of the Syrian desert. Its undercover missionaries, the da'is, spread across an Abbasid world strained by slave revolts, fragmentation and heavy taxes. The most successful, Abu Abdallah al-Shi'i, spent years turning the Kutama Berbers of the Algerian mountains into a disciplined army that swept away the Aghlabid rulers in 909. The hidden leader Abdallah was rescued from Morocco, took the throne and declared that he was himself the Mahdi, a doctrinal shift that drove the Qarmatians into revolt and led him to execute Abu Abdallah. In 969 the general Jawhar, a former enslaved man from Sicily, took Egypt and founded al-Qahira, Cairo, named for Mars, along with the Al-Azhar mosque.

Ruling a Sunni majority with large Coptic and Jewish communities, the Fatimids promoted on administrative skill, and their first vizier, Yaqub ibn Killis, was a Jewish convert. Trade reached down the Red Sea to Song China. Caliph al-Hakim, enthroned at 11 in 996, issued erratic decrees, ordered the Church of the Holy Sepulchre demolished and vanished one night, and believers in his concealment formed the Druze faith. Imported Turkish, Sudanese and Armenian troops fought turf wars in Cairo until Badr al-Jamali restored order in the 1070s and the military viziers sidelined the caliphs. The Nizaris split away, the Seljuks took Syria and the Crusaders arrived in 1099. In September 1171 Saladin, vizier to a sickly teenage caliph, simply dissolved the caliphate after 260 years.

• Abdallah barely escaped Abbasid agents on his journey across North Africa before his triumphant arrival.
• To guard against his own movement, the new caliph built a fortified capital at Mahdia on a Tunisian peninsula.
• Al-Hakim's decrees included banning certain foods, forbidding shoemaking and making people work at night.
• A Fatimid vizier ordered the old city of Fustat burned rather than let the Crusaders take it.
• Saladin halted the Shia call to prayer, replaced Ismaili judges and ended Ismaili lectures at Al-Azhar.