Al-Hakim bi-Amr Allah

From Free net encyclopedia

Hakim bi-Amr Allah (Arabic الحاكم بأمر الله, literally: "Ruler by God's Command"), known as the Mad Caliph, was the sixth Fatimid Caliph in Egypt, ruling from 996 to 1021.

He was born in Egypt in 985 and succeeded his father Abu Mansur Nizar al-Aziz in 996 at the age of eleven in an initial demonstration of the Fatimid dynasty's stability, for the succession was not a foregone conclusion. Nevertheless, in his long reign as caliph he struggled with the Qarmatiyya rulers of Bahrain and extended Fatimid rule to the emirate of Aleppo. His diplomatic and missionary vehicle was the Ismaili da'wa with its organizational power center in Cairo. His most rigorous and consistent opponent was the Abbasid caliphate in Baghdad, which sought to halt the influence of Ismailism, culminating in the Baghdad Manifesto of 1011, which claimed that the line Hakim represented did not legitimately descend from Ali.

Intrigues and tensions within the army, centered around opposing factions of Turks and Berbers, the tension between the caliph and his viziers (called wasitas), and near the end of his reign the first stirrings of the Druze movement, all characterize the unrest of Hakim's reign.

Ismaili communities in North Africa were massacred by Sunni mobs led by their influential Maliki jurists.

In 1005 he founded the Dar al-‘ilm ("House of Knowledge"), with its great public library; there philosophy and astronomy were taught in addition to purely Islamic studies of the Qur'an and Hadith. In 1013 he completed the mosque in Cairo begun by his father, the Masjid al-Hakim or "Al-Hakim's Mosque - The Ruler's Mosque".

In 1009, Hakim destroyed the Church of the Holy Sepulchre in Jerusalem, then under Fatimid control, and persecuted the Christians and other dhimmis in Palestine.

Although the church was rebuilt by Byzantine emperor Constantine IX in 1048, its destruction was remembered by Christians in Western Europe for the rest of the century. Though conditions for pilgrims and Christian inhabitants improved somewhat in the Holy Land under Hakim's successors in the 11th century, the destruction of the church was used to support the First Crusade; in 1096, after the Council of Clermont, there was even a forged letter published, supposedly written by Pope Sergius IV, calling for a Crusade in 1009.

Towards the end of his reign he became increasingly erratic and feared by those around him - high ranking officials were executed frequently (including the Vizir Barjuwan), and a series of idiosyncratic laws were enacted, including the prohibition of Molokheya, a national dish in Egypt, as well as the prohibition of chess.

Hakim disappeared in 1021; he never returned from a trip to the Muqattam Hills. Although he presumably died, a very small splinter sect of Ismailis, the Druzes, claimed he had been hidden away by God and began to worship him in the mountains of Lebanon.

He was succeeded by his young son Ali az-Zahir, under the regency of his sister Sitt al-Mulk.

[edit]