Abd Allah al-Mahdi Billah
Abū Muḥammad ʿAbd Allāh ibn al-Ḥusayn, better known by his regnal name al-Mahdī biʾllāh, was the founder of the Isma'ili Fatimid Caliphate, the only major Shi'a caliphate in Islamic history, and the eleventh Imam of the Isma'ili branch of Shi'ism.
He was born as Saʿīd ibn al-Ḥusayn in Askar Mukram to a family that led the secret Isma'ili missionary network, propagating on behalf of the hidden imam, Muhammad ibn Isma'il, who would return as the prophesied Islamic messiah. Orphaned at a young age, he moved to Salamiya, the family's base of operations, where he was adopted by his uncle. In the mid-890s Sa'id succeeded to the leadership of the expanding, which had expanded and gained adherents across the then Muslim world. However, his claims of not merely being a trustee of the hidden imam, but of him and his ancestors holding the imamate itself, led in 899 to a schism in the Isma'ili movement: those who did not recognise his claims split off to become the Qarmatians. The schism was followed by uprisings of pro-Isma'ili Bedouin in Syria in 902–903, launched without his consent by over-eager supporters, who aimed to force him to come forward as the. The Bedouin uprising was suppressed by the Abbasids, but drew the attention of the Abbasid Caliphate's authorities to him, forcing him to abandon Salamiya, and flee first to Ramla, then Fustat in Egypt, and finally Sijilmasa in what is now Morocco. There he remained, living as a merchant, until one of his missionaries, Abu Abdallah al-Shi'i, at the head of the Kutama Berbers overthrew the Aghlabid dynasty of Ifriqiya in 909.
Proclaimed caliph and assuming power in Ifriqiya in January 910, he proclaimed his right to conquer the world in the name of God, but soon fell out with Abu Abdallah and other leading missionaries, who were disappointed that he was not the semi-divine they had been propagating for. Al-Mahdi was able to purge these dissidents, but had to overcome a series of revolts against his authority, either due to opposition to the exactions of the Kutama, the backbone of his power, or due to disillusionment of his followers with his failure to realise the Isma'ili millennialist promises. The state that al-Mahdi built, although underpinned by a messianic ideology, was otherwise conventionally organised, and relied heavily on the personnel of the previous Aghlabid regime and the swords of the Kutama. His expansionist aims achieved only moderate success: two invasions of Egypt were beaten back by the Abbasids, leaving only the Cyrenaica in his hands, while the war with the Byzantine Empire in southern Italy was characterised by raids for plunder and slaves, and did not result in any lasting successes. In the west, his repeated attempts to impose Fatimid rule over the unruly Berbers were challenged not only by Berber rivalries, but also by the Umayyads of al-Andalus, and only secured temporary success. In 921 he moved his court to the newly built fortified palace city of Mahdiya on the Tunisian coast, and spent the rest of his life there. After his death in 934, he was succeeded by his only son, al-Qa'im.
Early life
Origin
The origin, identity and early history of the man who founded the Fatimid Caliphate is obscure, and even his name and the place and date of his birth are disputed. According to his official biography, he was born in Askar Mukram, in the Persian province of Khuzistan, on 31 July 874, or exactly one year earlier according to a different tradition. Other traditions report that he was born in Baghdad or Kufa in Iraq, or the town of Salamiya, on the western edge of the Syrian Desert. His original name most likely was Sa'id ibn al-Husayn, although in later life he insisted that is real name was Ali, and Sa'id was just a cover name.His father died in 881/2, and Sa'id was sent to be fostered by his uncle, Abu Ali Muhammad, also known as Abu'l-Shalaghlagh, at Salamiya. On his journey he was joined by Ja'far, a boy who was a few months older than Sa'id and had been reared with him by the same wet-nurse. He became a eunuch and Sa'id's close confidant and chamberlain, and is one of the main sources about his life. A younger brother, known only as Abu Muhammad, did not follow Sa'id to Salamiya.
Early Isma'ilism and Salamiya
Abu'l-Shalaghlagh and Sa'id lived the life of a wealthy merchant household, but in secret the family headed an underground political and religious movement, the Isma'ili . This movement was part of the wider Imami branch of the Shi'a, which held that the leadership of the Muslim community was entrusted by God to a singular, divinely invested and guided imam. The first such imam was Ali ibn Abi Talib, the son-in-law of the Islamic prophet Muhammad and fourth caliph, who according to the Shi'a had been designated as successor by Muhammad, only for this instruction to be ignored by the latter's Companions, who chose Abu Bakr as caliph instead. Shi'a doctrine holds that the imamate was the birthright of Ali's descendants via Fatima, Muhammad's daughter. The Imamis hold that the existence of an imam at all times is a necessity for the world's existence, as the imam is the proof of God, and has the sole authority and divine inspiration to interpret God's revelation; indeed, the imam is considered to be infallible, at least in doctrinal matters. The Imamis especially held that the imamate was the preserve of the Husaynid line of the Alids, where it could only be passed in hereditary succession from father to son via an explicit act of designation by the previous imam, a choice that is held to have been ordained by God.In 765, a succession conflict gave rise to the split of the Imami Shi'a, into Isma'ilis and Twelvers: the sixth imam, Ja'far al-Sadiq, died without a clear successor. Al-Sadiq had most likely designated his second son, Isma'il—after whom the Isma'ilis are named—but according to most accounts, Isma'il predeceased his father. Some of al-Sadiq's followers then held that the designation automatically passed on to Isma'il's son, Muhammad, or even that al-Sadiq had designated his grandson while he lived, while others claimed that Isma'il himself was not dead and merely in hiding to escape persecution by the ruling Abbasid Caliphate. Most of al-Sadiq's followers, however, followed Isma'il's younger brother, Musa al-Kazim, and his descendants, becoming the Twelver branch of Shi'ism. According to his followers, Muhammad ibn Isma'il fled the Hejaz and went into concealment, to escape both Abbasid persecution as well as the hostility of his uncle's supporters. He died sometime in Khuzistan, after which the fate of the Isma'ili movement is obscure, until it re-emerged in the late ninth century.
During the second half of the ninth century, a wave of millennialist expectations spread in the Muslim world, coinciding with a deep crisis of the Abbasid Caliphate: the Anarchy at Samarra in the 860s, followed by the Zanj Rebellion, enfeebled the Abbasid regime, allowing the rise of breakaway and autonomous regimes in the provinces. Belief in a messiah of Alid descent, the or , who would usher in the end times, was widespread in the early Islamic world. According to the various traditions heralding his coming, the would rapidly overthrow the Abbasid Caliphate and destroy their capital Baghdad, restore the unity of the Muslims, conquer Constantinople, ensure the final triumph of Islam and establish a reign of peace and justice. Thus the leader of the Zanj uprising claimed Alid descent, and proclaimed himself as the, the restorer of heavenly justice to those downtrodden and disenfranchised. As the historian Michael Brett comments, "the Mahdist expectations were focused upon the coming of a more and more mysterious, increasingly supernatural, ultimately eschatological figure in the form of a second Muhammad destined to complete the history of the world". For the Isma'ilis, the expected was none other than their hidden imam, Muhammad ibn Isma'il.
While the imam remained hidden, however, he was represented towards his followers by an agent, living proof of the imam's existence, the . That was the role claimed, according to later sources, by Sa'id's great-grandfather, Abdallah al-Akbar. Leaving his native Askar Mukram, after some wanderings Abdallah al-Akbar had settled in Salamiya, from where he and his successors directed the growth of the. According to later Isma'ili tradition and the reconstruction of modern scholars, Abdallah al-Akbar was in turn succeeded in 827/8 by his son Ahmad, followed by Ahmad's son, Abu'l-Shalaghlagh. It is possible, however, that the origins of the Salamiya-based movement were far more recent than that, and that it had come about only following the start of the anti-Alid and anti-Shi'a policies adopted by the Abbasids under Caliph al-Mutawakkil. These policies led not only to a series of Alid/Shi'a uprisings in the decades that followed, but also the increasing persecution of the Twelver imams until the disappearance and supposed "occultation" of the last Twelver imam in 874. It is exactly this period which saw the Isma'ili message of the imminent return of Muhammad ibn Isma'il as the gain traction, aided by dissatisfaction among the Twelver adherents with the political quietism of their leadership, and above all the vacuum left by the occultation, that removed a visible and accessible imam as a source of loyalty and religious guidance.
Despite its activity, this stage of the Isma'ili movement is scarcely covered in later Isma'ili sources, and most of what happened in the last decades of the ninth century, culminating in the "Qarmatian schism" of 899, has been reconstructed and elaborated by a succession of modern scholars—chiefly Vladimir Ivanov, Samuel Miklos Stern, Wilferd Madelung, and Heinz Halm—using mostly anti-Fatimid polemic works. According to this version, Isma'ili s, led by Hamdan Qarmat and his brother-in-law Abdan, spread their network of agents to the area around Kufa in the late 870s, and from there to Persia and Khurasan, while a particularly important role was played by Yemen, whence the Isma'ili agent Ibn Hawshab sent missionaries to Sindh, Bahrayn, and Ifriqiya.
In medieval sources as well as modern accounts building on them, all this activity is attributed to a single unified movement, a "secret revolutionary organisation carrying on intensive missionary efforts in many regions of the Muslim world" according to Wilferd Madelung. This was the movement headed by Abu'l-Shalaghlagh at Salamiya. The true head of this movement remained hidden even from the senior missionaries, and a certain Fayruz functioned as chief missionary and 'gateway' to the hidden leader. Brett however cautions that this "grand conspiracy theory of Fatimid origins" reflects mostly the bias of later sources, pro-Fatimid as well as anti-Fatimid, and that it obscures a reality of multiple, separately evolving millennarian movements that existed at the time, and whose political or doctrinal relation to one another is now difficult to reconstruct. According to Brett, the movement at Salamiya was one of many, and only after the establishment of the Fatimid Caliphate were these movements united into a single coherent network, retrospectively, by Fatimid and anti-Fatimid propaganda alike. Indeed modern scholars point out the existence of independent strands of Isma'ili thought in the eastern regions of the Islamic world, propagated by missionaries like Abu Hatim al-Razi in Adharbayjan and Muhammad ibn Ahmad al-Nasafi in Khurasan; it was only later, during the second half of the 10th century, that some of these Isma'ili communities were reconciled to Fatimid leadership, with the official Fatimid doctrine coming to incorporate many of their teachings.