The Fatimids: Trade, Golden Age and Decline
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Question
What was the Karimi merchant guild?
Answer
A powerful group of Muslim traders who carried spices and goods between India, Yemen and Fatimid Egypt; the state taxed and protected their trade rather than running it directly.
Question
Why did the Fatimids redirect trade through the Red Sea after 969?
Answer
To move Indian Ocean trade away from the 'Abbasid-controlled Persian Gulf and through Egypt instead, boosting Fatimid customs revenue via the port of Aydhab.
Question
What role did the vizier play in Fatimid government?
Answer
The chief minister who ran day-to-day administration, finance and the army on the caliph's behalf, especially important when caliphs were young or weak.
Question
What was the da'wa?
Answer
The Fatimid network of Isma'ili religious missionaries who spread support for the Fatimid caliph as the true imam, even in lands the Fatimids did not directly rule.
Question
When and by whom was the Dar al-'Ilm founded, and what was it?
Answer
Founded in 1005 by al-Hakim; a Cairo institution combining a major library with public lectures on law, science and Isma'ili theology.
Question
What was the al-shidda al-uzma?
Answer
The 'great calamity' — a severe famine caused by low Nile floods in the 1060s that devastated Egypt's food supply and tax base, coinciding with army factional conflict.
Question
Name two internal causes of Fatimid decline.
Answer
Succession crises with weak or child caliphs, and violent factionalism between Turkish and African/Berber army regiments.
Question
Name two external causes of Fatimid decline.
Answer
Seljuk Turkish expansion into Fatimid Syria from the 1070s, and the First Crusade's capture of Jerusalem in 1099.
Question
What is al-Hakim (996–1021) remembered for?
Answer
Unpredictable rule, including destroying the Church of the Holy Sepulchre (1009), but also founding the Dar al-'Ilm and patronising scholars like ibn al-Haytham.
Question
What is significant about al-Mustansir's reign (1036–1094)?
Answer
The longest Fatimid reign, spanning the empire's greatest territorial extent in the 1040s–50s and then its sharp decline through famine, army civil war and loss of Syria.
Question
How did the Fatimid caliphate end, and in what year?
Answer
In 1171, the vizier Saladin abolished the Fatimid caliphate and restored Sunni 'Abbasid authority in Egypt.
Question
Compare al-Hakim and al-Mustansir as Fatimid caliphs.
Answer
al-Hakim ruled briefly and unpredictably but founded a lasting institution (Dar al-'Ilm); al-Mustansir ruled far longer, presiding over both the empire's peak and the start of irreversible decline.
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Topic 21.2 hub
The Fatimids (909–1171)
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