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The Fatimid Caliphate or Fatimid Empire ( / ˈfætɪmɪd /; Arabic: ٱلْخِلَافَة ٱلْفَاطِمِيَّة, romanized : al-Khilāfa al-Fāṭimiyya) was a caliphate extant from the tenth to the twelfth centuries CE under the rule of the Fatimids, an Isma'ili Shia dynasty. Spanning a large area of North Africa and West Asia, it ...
Feb 6, 2024 · Fatimid Caliphate. The Fatimid Caliphate was an Ismaili Shia caliphate of the 10th to the 12th centuries AD. Spanning a large area of North Africa, it ranged from the Red Sea in the east to the Atlantic Ocean in the west. The Fatimids, a dynasty of Arab origin, trace their ancestry to Muhammad's daughter Fatima and her husband ‘Ali b.
- Overview
- Period of expansion
- Conquest of Egypt
Fatimid dynasty, political and religious dynasty that dominated an empire in North Africa and subsequently in the Middle East from 909 to 1171 ce and tried unsuccessfully to oust the Abbasid caliphs as leaders of the Islamic world. It took its name from Fāṭimah, daughter of the Prophet Muhammad, from whom the Fatimids claimed descent.
Before the Fatimids there had been other rulers in North Africa and Egypt who had succeeded in making themselves virtually independent of the Abbasid caliphs in Baghdad, but they had been Muslims of the Sunni branch of Islam, willing to recognize the token suzerainty of the caliph as head of the Islamic community. The Fatimids, however, were the heads of a rival religious movement—the Ismāʿīlī sect of the Shiʿi branch of Islam—and dedicated to the overthrow of the existing religious and political order in all of Islam. Unlike their predecessors, they refused to offer even nominal recognition to the Abbasid caliphs, whom they rejected as usurpers. They themselves—as Ismāʿīlī imāms (spiritual leaders), descendants of the Prophet through his daughter Fāṭimah and his kinsman ʿAlī—were, in the eyes of their followers, the rightful caliphs, both by descent and by divine choice the custodians of the true faith and the legitimate heads of the universal Islamic state and community. Their purpose was not to establish another regional sovereignty but to supersede the Abbasids and to found a new caliphate in their place.
During the 9th century, Ismāʿīlī missionaries became established in many parts of the Islamic empire, preaching a doctrine of revolution against the Sunni order and the Abbasid state. After a number of unsuccessful risings, the Ismāʿīlīs were able to establish a firm base in Yemen, and from there they sent emissaries to North Africa, where they achieved their greatest success. By 909 they were strong enough for their imām, who had been in hiding, to emerge and proclaim himself caliph, with the messianic title of al-Mahdī (the Divinely Guided One). This marked the beginning of a new state and dynasty.
For the first half-century the Fatimid caliphs ruled only in North Africa and Sicily, where they had to deal with many problems. Most of their subjects were Sunnis of the Mālikī school. Others—a substantial minority—were the Khawārij, or Khārijites. Neither group was well disposed toward the Ismāʿīlī doctrines of the new rulers, and they offered stubborn resistance to them. Even among the Ismāʿīlīs themselves, a conflict soon arose between the state and the revolution—that is, between the caliph al-Mahdī (reigned 909–934) and the missionaries who had brought him to power. There also were political problems with Amazigh (Berber) tribes and neighbouring Muslim rulers, as well as a war against the Byzantines in Sicily and Italy that the Fatimid rulers had inherited from their North African predecessors.
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Egypt Since the Pharaohs
While coping with these difficulties, the Fatimids never lost sight of their ultimate aim, expansion to the east, where the centre of Abbasid strength lay. The first step was the conquest of Egypt. The first caliph, al-Mahdī, established his capital at Mahdiyyah (founded 920) on the east coast of Tunisia. His successors al-Qāʾim (reigned 934–946), al-Manṣūr (reigned 946–953), and al-Muʿizz (reigned 953–975) ruled from there. In 913–915, 919–921, and 925, unsuccessful expeditions were sent against Egypt. Finally, in 969, under the caliph al-Muʿizz, the first stage in the advance to the east was completed. Fatimid troops conquered the Nile valley and advanced across Sinai into Palestine and southern Syria. Near Al-Fusṭāṭ, the old administrative centre of Muslim Egypt, the Fatimids built Cairo, which became the capital of their empire, and in its centre a new mosque and seminary, called Al-Azhar, after Fāṭimah al-Zahrāʾ (the Resplendent), the ancestor of the dynasty.
For more than a century the Fatimid rulers in Cairo pursued their aim of establishing the universal Ismāʿīlī imamate. At times they were compelled by other problems—war on the frontiers, trouble in the Mediterranean, unrest at home or in the provinces—to reach some agreement with their Sunni rivals, but such arrangements were always temporary.
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The Fatimid caliphate was a regime at once imperial and revolutionary. At home, the caliph was a sovereign, governing a vast empire and seeking to expand it by normal military and political means. Its heart was Egypt, and its provinces at its peak included North Africa, Sicily, the Red Sea coast of Africa, Syria, Palestine, Yemen, and the Hejaz, with the two holy cities of Mecca and Medina. Control of these was of immense value to a Muslim ruler, conferring great religious prestige and enabling him to exploit the annual pilgrimage to his advantage.
The caliph was not only an emperor: he was also an imām—the spiritual head of the Ismāʿīlīs wherever they were and, according to Ismāʿīlī doctrine, the embodiment of God’s infallible guidance to humankind. As such he was the archenemy of the Sunni Abbasid order and the hope and refuge of those who wished to overthrow it. In all the lands still under Abbasid suzerainty, he commanded a great network of missionaries and agents, and he used them to gain converts for the Ismāʿīlī faith and workers for the Fatimid cause; their task was also to preach and, where possible, to practice subversion against the Sunni order and the regimes that supported it. The mission was elaborately and secretly organized under the supreme direction of the chief missionary in Cairo. In the Fatimid state the mission became in effect a third branch of the government, together with the traditional military and bureaucratic establishments; it thus approximated something otherwise lacking in the medieval Islamic world—an institutionalized state religion.
- The Editors of Encyclopaedia Britannica
Map \(\PageIndex{1}\): Map of the Fatimid Caliphate, 969 CE (CC BY-SA 3.0; User “Gabagool” via Wikimedia Commons) ‘Abd Allah al-Mahdi, founder of the Fatimids, proclaimed himself the mahdi, the precursor to the final judgement, representing an ideology that compelled people to change. Hounded by ‘Abbasid agents of persecution who sought ...
Besides elaborate funerary monuments, other surviving Fatimid structures include the Mosque of al-Aqmar (1125) as well as the monumental gates for Cairo’s city walls commissioned by the powerful Fatimid emir and vizier Badr al-Jamali (r. 1073–94).
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Jan 15, 2023 · Media in category "Maps of the Fatimid Caliphate" The following 37 files are in this category, out of 37 total. A history of all nations from the earliest times; being a universal historical library (1905) (14781479144).jpg 1,568 × 2,456; 554 KB
The Fatimid Caliphate. The most stable of the successor dynasties founded in the ninth and tenth centuries was that of the Fatimids, a branch of Shi’is. The Fatimids won their first success in North Africa, where they established a rival caliphate at Raqqadah near Kairouan and, in 952, embarked on a period of expansion that within a few years ...
