Millennium by Holland, Tom (any book recommendations txt) 📕

suggestive of a mood of anxiety that had come to grip not merely al-Andalus, but the whole of the House of Islam.

For Cordoba, after all, was not the only capital of a caliphate – to the east, in Cairo, there ruled a family that had never ceased to imagine itself the gatekeeper of the end days. The Fatimids – the descendants of Fatima – had always sought to draw deep from the wellsprings of the mysterious. The founder of the dynasty, back in 909, had actually believed that he was the Mahdi himself, and although time – and his death — had proved him mistaken, his successors had shrugged aside any resultant sense of let-down. Instead, with a vaunting and unabashed conceit, they had continued to insist that they were supremely touched by the supernatural. The Caliph who swayed Egypt at the dawning of the fifth Muslim century was no exception. Indeed, to an unprecedented degree, al-Hakim bin-Amr Allah claimed directly to be an incarnation of God. His subjects, far from laughing this pretension to scorn, were almost universally awestruck by it. Tall, broad-shouldered and with a stare that was reported to glitter like fiery gold, al-Hakim had only to look at his subjects as he toured the streets of Cairo to send them grovelling in the dust. When he shouted, it was claimed, men had been known to drop dead of terror on the spot. Sober in his tastes, puritanical in his instincts and unstintingly imperious in ail his moods, al-Hakim was not a man readily crossed. When he claimed to have penetrated the veiled secrets of God, there were few who openly disputed it; and when he sought to shoulder the responsibilities of the Mahdi, there were even fewer who cared to obstruct him.

So it was that while the Caliphate of the Umayyads, far distant in the West, collapsed into terminal anarchy, the reign of al-Hakim was marked by titanic efforts to reorder the world and prepare it for the end days. True, some of the Caliph’s strategies, even to the most committed of his followers, could not help but appear a trifle eccentric. The selling of watercress, for instance, was solemnly banned; so too the playing of chess. Other policies, however, were more readily explicable. What objection, for instance, could a pious Muslim raise against al-Hakim’s command that all the dogs in Cairo be put to the sword and their corpses dumped out in the desert, when everyone knew the creatures to be unclean? Or indeed against his campaign to check the potentially even filthier appetites of women? A conviction that these merited regular chastisement had often been a caliphal trait: of Abd al-Rahman, for instance, it was said that he had never visited his harem without a sword and an executioner’s leather mat. Even when set against such precedents, however, al-Hakim’s terrors of where female promiscuity might lead the faithful were extreme. So too his plans to counter them. First he ordered women everywhere to be veiled when out in public; then he banned them from leaving their homes; finally he forbade them even so much as to peer out of windows or doors. Cobblers were instructed to stop making them shoes. Those whose voices disturbed the Caliph as he walked through the streets might expect to be walled up and left to starve.

These were robust measures, certainly – and yet justified, al-Hakim would no doubt have insisted, by the troubled character of the times. If it were true, as the Caliph himself appears devoutly to have believed, that a mighty convulsion in the affairs of the world was looming, then clearly there could be no excuse for delaying the purification of the House of Islam. Dogs and women, however, were the least of the Caliph’s problems. Other menaces festered infinitely more worrisome. Egypt, even in comparison with al-Andalus, still teemed with Christians and Jews. The Fatimids, not content with extorting taxes from them, as the Prophet had prescribed, had also, over the years, profited handsomely from the tribute of their expertise. Dhimmis, as a result, had come to throng the caliphal ministries – and the caliphal bedrooms. Even al-Hakim’s own mother was a Christian. What could this appear, to the pious Muslims of Egypt, but a scandal and a blasphemy? Indeed, only a year before al-Hakim’s accession, in 995, a bloody marker of their resentments had been served to the future Caliph when a mob had gone on the rampage and massacred over a hundred Christians in a single pogrom. A marker that al-Hakim, as time would prove, had noted well.

He may have been a son of a Christian, but even as a young boy of eleven, inheriting the throne while out on campaign against the infidels of Constantinople, he had believed himself implacably fated to prove the doom of his mother’s faith. As his reign progressed, dhimmis who had once basked in the radiance of caliphal favour found themselves increasingly subjected to humiliations and harassments. Christians and jews alike were forbidden to appear in public unless wearing distinctive turbans of black. As a further refinement, Christians were obliged to hang crosses around their necks, and Jews heavy blocks of wood. They were also banned from employing Muslims — a measure which immediately served to plunge most dhimmi businesses into bankruptcy. There were some, however, who lost more than their income. In 1009, the dawning of the fifth Islamic century, numerous non-Muslim officials in the imperial bureaucracy were scourged to death and their corpses fed to Cairo’s few remaining dogs. Others, under threat of torture, were obliged to convert to Islam. Yet even these outrages, in the view of the Caliph’s horrified Christians, were not the most shocking of their master’s crimes. Worse then murder or oppression, after all, was sacrilege- and al-Hakim just happened to have within his power the very holiest of their shrines.

Jerusalem, where Jesus had died and been buried, remained, under the Fatimids, a predominantly dhimmi town. True, back in