The Fatimid Caliphate
Fatimid Caliphate: Abu Abdallah, a Shi’ite propagandist, led an uprising against the Aghlabid masters of Ifriqiya at the beginning of the tenth century. After beating them in 910, he backed Ubaidallah al-Mahdi, who was seen as the Messiah and wanted to bring Shi’ite rule to all of Muslimdom.
By calling himself caliph (Muhammad’s successor), Ubaidallah publicly questioned the legitimacy of the Abbasid family, which had been in power for more than one hundred years. Ubaidallah and his family placed great importance on their relationship with Fatima, Muhammad’s daughter, who later married Ali. The Shi’a believed Ali was Muhammad’s real heir, so they called themselves Fatimids.
The Kutama Berbers, who were the core of Abu Abdallah’s army, got into a fight with the Fatimids when the new rulers wouldn’t let the area be pillaged. Other Fatimid practices also turned off people who might have been friends. A large force necessitated a lot of taxes, which was annoying for the egalitarian Berbers. Additionally, the new government adhered to strict Shi’ite beliefs, such as the belief that Ali’s descendants should hold power.
When Ubaidallah ordered the killing of Abu Abdallah in 911, they lost all hope and started to rebel. Other people who were opposed to the Fatimids joined the rebels. These included traders who didn’t like how the dynasty took over their profitable trade routes, as well as an Aghlabid pretender in Sicily. Ubaidallah put down the rebellion with the help of Berbers, who were promised looting in exchange for their obedience.
The subsequent capture of Qairawan’s religious center, whose leaders had shown no desire to give up Sunni beliefs, made it clear to the Fatimids that that city would always be hostile. Shi’ite Islam also didn’t make big gains with the general public. Because Qairawan was hostile and the Fatimids wanted to expand their movement beyond Ifriqiya, Ubaidallah decided to build a new capital city on a peninsula on the province’s eastern coast. This city is called Mahdiyya.
In order to facilitate further westward expansion, the Shi’ite masters demolished Qairawan and constructed a city on the coast that gazed eastward toward the Muslim heartlands, the location of the Fatimids’ ideal state. The Fatimids did not ignore the lands to their west, though. The Fatimids’ efforts to take over other parts of the Maghrib gave the rebellious Berbers of Ifriqiya a place to vent their anger, and they helped the economy by taking control of more trans-Saharan trade hubs in North Africa in the middle of the tenth century.
But the Umayyad masters of the Iberian Peninsula were determined to stop the Fatimids from spreading. This turned much of the Maghrib into a battlefield where Berbers working for both the Fatimids and the Spanish Umayyads fought each other. During this time of Fatimid expansion, Kharajism, a Muslim ideology that promotes equality between men and women that had gained a lot of support in North Africa, came back into style.
Not long after Ubaiadallah died in 934, a conservative leader named Abu Yazid led a Kharaji uprising near Tozeur. The Fatimids arrested Abu Yazid, but he managed to escape and spearheaded a new revolt ten years later, seizing control of Tunis and Qairawan. In 947, they executed him due to his inability to seize Mahdiyya and quell the revolt. When Abu Yazid died, the Kharaji threat in Ifriqiya stopped, but the problems he had caused made the Fatimid leaders start to plan the difficult process of moving their government to the east.
In 969, the Fatimid Caliphate moved their capital to the newly built city of al-Qahira (Cairo), following successful military advances into the Nile Valley. They did not give up their interests in the Maghrib, though. Instead, they made Buluggin ibn Ziri, a Berber tribe leader and longtime Fatimid ally, ruler of the area. The main thing he had to do was hold out against the Spanish Umayyads and their Zanata Berber friends.
Buluggin and those who came after him played a game of cat-and-mouse with their old masters to see how independent they could really be. The Fatimids didn’t want to spend a lot of money to stop the Zirids from achieving their goals, but they also didn’t want to give up their old lands to their vassals. Instead, they pushed the Kutama Berbers to rise up, which kept the Zirids from focusing too much on their relationship with Cairo.
When Buluggin died in 984, his family split up the large Fatimid estate. His son Hammad inherited the lands in the middle Maghrib, west of Ifriqiya. By the early 1100s, he had made it into a separate state. In Ifriqiya, Hammad’s relatives didn’t like his aspirations, but they knew that he protected them from attacks by the Zanata and the Spanish Umayyad. As the threat of direct Fatimid intervention in North Africa went away, the Zirids took over an agricultural and commercial economy that was doing very well.
They worked hard to keep Ifriqiya stable and effectively controlled the caravan routes. This earned them the support of craftsmen and businessmen in cities that relied on agriculture and trade for their income, especially those from Mansuriyya, a suburb of Qairawan that became the Zirids’ political and economic center. However, at the start of the eleventh century, trade across the Sahara began to slow down.
The Zirids weren’t able to boost this trade as much as the Fatimid Caliphate had. The Fatimids needed the trade’s cash and other luxury goods to pay for their big plans and its slaves to build their army. But the rise of the Almoravid confederation in the western Maghrib and the Fatimids’ continued trade interests in Sub-Saharan Africa were both to blame for the fall of trade. These factors shifted caravan routes away from Ifriqiya.
When the king of Zirid, Muiz, officially cut ties with the Fatimids in 1049, it was for economic as well as political reasons. The Fatimids were angry that their vassals were betraying them, so Ifriqiya was no longer a big part of their plans. To punish them, they made some Arab bedouin groups leave Egypt and move to the Maghrib, even though they knew that a huge flood of nomads would cause chaos there. In 1052, the Bedouins badly defeated the Zirid forces in a fierce fight at Haidaran, northwest of Qairawan.
After five years, they got rid of Qairawan, ending their control over the middle part of the province. The Zirids hid in Mahdiyya, a fortress on the coast. For the next hundred years, they had loose control over the coasts of Ifriqiya from this fortress.
Also Read: The Great Mamluk Dynasty in Egypt
