A history of medieval islam j j saunders

THE ISMA‘ILIAN SCHISM emerging at last from the Dark Ages. The prosperity of the land was the wonder of eleventh century travellers, who describe the splendour of the mosques and palaces rising in the new capital and the crowded shops and warehouses of the admirably policed cities.

Notwithstanding its material wellbeing, the regime faced peculiar difficulties as a millenarian theocracy. Like many revolutionaries, the Fatimids in power grew conservative; their Shi‘ite tenets acquired but a slight hold on the people of Egypt and the Maghrib, who remained fundamentally Sunnite, and impatient Isma‘ili radicals were puzzled and disgusted by the failure of their CaliphImams to conquer the world and inaugurate the promised reign of justice and bliss. The tall, red-haired Aziz was the best of his race, but his liberal policy was scarcely calculated to please his Muslim subjects. Married to a Christian wife, a sister of the patriarchs of Alexandria and Jerusalem, he raised several of her coreligionists to high office, and refused even to punish a Muslim who turned Christian. To check the licence of the Berber troops whom Mu‘izz had brought to Egypt, he recruited regiments of Turkish slave soldiers, as the Abbasids had done in the previous century, but the only result was to provoke a bitter race-conflict between Berbers and Turks, and weaken the unity and discipline of the army. Dying in 996, at the age of forty-one, he left the throne to his son Hakim, then a boy of eleven, who has attained an unenviable notoriety as the Caligula or Nero of Islam.

Until Hakim came of age, the government was in the hands of Barjawan, a slave-eunuch, who broke the power of the Berber soldiery and concluded a ten years’ truce with the Byzantines. He slighted the young Caliph, and called him a lizard. Bitterly resentful, Hakim awaited his chance: in 1000, though only fifteen, he seized control and put Barjawan to death. The lizard, he remarked, had become a dragon. To the chroniclers, a dragon he certainly was: they represent him as a freakish savage, who oppressed his people by crazy laws and tortured and slew all who stood in his path. No business was to be done save at night; drinking and gambling were banned; dogs were to be killed wherever found, and women were forbidden to appear in the streets. The Caliph roamed the town at night to see that his orders were obeyed: offenders were scourged or beheaded. He launched a vicious persecution of Jews and Christians; they were made to wear a distinctive dress, and subjected to the most 137