Читать книгу A Short History of the Fatimid Khalifate онлайн

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A new development in the teaching of the sect took place under Husayn, or possibly commenced under his father Ahmad. ʿAbdullah had been content to describe himself as the “Mahdi” or guide, who was to lead men to the Imam, who was Ismaʿil, or his son Muhammad; he made no claim to be himself a descendant of the Imam. Probably it was a later theory that the Imam was “concealed” only in the sense that he had to hide himself from the ʿAbbasid Khalif. Later still, when a Fatimid Khalif was actually ruling in Cairo, the claim to descent from ʿAli through ʿAbdullah and his family became a matter of heated controversy.

Historians differ very much as to how far the Fatimids succeeded in proving their ʿAlid descent, and contemporary opinion was quite as varied. Abu l-Hasan Muhammad Masawi, commonly known as Radi, born at Baghdad in 359 and dying in 406, was himself an undoubted descendant of Husayn the son of ʿAli, and was official keeper of the records of ʿAlid genealogy. As Abu l-Feda notes (Ann. Mosl., ii. 309) he, in one of his poems, fully admits the legitimate descent of the Fatimids of Egypt from ʿAli, and the actual passage is extant (cf. Diwan of Radi, Beirut, p. 972): but in 402 this same Radi joined with other ʿAlids and certain canonists in a proclamation denouncing the Fatimids and declaring their claimed genealogy as baseless. It is natural to suppose that in this he was actuated by fear or complaisance, and this difficulty meets us throughout; the whole question was so much a matter of current political controversy that it was practically impossible to get anything like an unbiassed opinion. Maqrizi, the leading Egyptian authority of a later age, was strongly pro-Fatimid, but he claims the noble rank of sayyid on the ground of descent from ʿAli through the Fatimids, and so is prejudiced in their favour. He argues that the ʿAlid descent of the Fatimids was never attacked by the acknowledged ʿAlids who then existed in considerable numbers (Maq. i., 349), an argument which is far from being true.