Despite having ruled Egypt almost exactly a thousand years ago, with the last Fatimid ruler being deposed by the Ayyubid sultan Salah al-Din (Saladin) in 1171 CE, the mediaeval Fatimid Dynasty has left many remarkable monuments behind it that can still be seen today.
Not only did the Fatimids found the city of Al-Qahira, or Cairo, the “City Victorious,” in 969 CE after their successful invasion of the country from North Africa, but they were also responsible for a building programme that outshone almost anything previously attempted, with some of their monuments still standing in Islamic Cairo.
While the palaces that once stood in what is now Al-Mu’izz li-Din Allah Street in Islamic Cairo have long since disappeared, their memory is still enshrined in the popular name of part of it, bayn al-qasrayn, or “between the two palaces,” which provides the title of the first novel in Egyptian Nobel laureate Naguib Mahfouz’s famous Cairo Trilogy that is largely set in this district.
The street itself is named after the Fatimid ruler Al-Mu’izz, conqueror of Egypt, and nearby stand the remains of the Fatimid city walls with their three famous gates of Al-Nasr, Al-Futuh, and, at the other end of Al-Mu’izz li-Din Allah, Zuweila, all commissioned by the Fatimid vizier or chief minister in the second half of the 11th century.
The nearby Al-Azhar Mosque, built in 970-972, is a Fatimid foundation, as are other mosques in the district including the Mosque of Al-Hakim, completed under the reign of the Fatimid ruler Al-Hakim bi-Amr Allah, and the Al-Aqmar Mosque, built in 1124.
Yet, as UK-based historian Delia Cortese notes in her comprehensive new book The Fatimids: Portrait of a Dynasty, aside from references to their building programme and of course to the foundation of their new royal city of Cairo, the Fatimids are possibly less well remembered today than the Ayyubid or Mameluke Dynasties that succeeded them.
Salah al-Din is famous for having defeated the European Crusaders, liberating Jerusalem in 1187, while the Mameluke sultans that ruled Egypt between 1250 and their defeat at the hands of the Ottomans in 1517 were responsible not only for saving Cairo from the kind of destruction meted out by invading Mongol armies on Baghdad but also for constructing some of its most magnificent historic buildings.
The Fatimids may have suffered by comparison to their successors. They have also suffered at the hands of subsequent historians since few official records from Fatimid Egypt have survived, and nothing of the magnificence that the mediaeval chroniclers attributed to it. The Fatimids, unique among all Egypt’s Islamic dynasties, were Shia and not Sunni Muslims, and the Fatimid rulers took the title of caliph in competition with the Sunni caliphs in Baghdad. Subsequent Sunni historians may therefore have been reluctant to dwell on their achievements.
Cortese has none of this reluctance, however, and for her the Fatimids “have shaped the world in which we live in more significant and unexpected ways than we might realise.” Her aim is to “share with broader audiences” – hers is a book for the general reader – “the Fatimids’ rich political, religious, social and cultural histories and to explore the heritage they left behind.”
“For more than 250 years the Fatimid imam-caliphs – as their Ismaili [a variety of Shia] followers called their leaders – first from North Africa and later from Egypt, rivalled the Sunni Abbasid caliphs of Baghdad and the Umayyads of Cordoba [in Spain], as well as the Christian Byzantine emperors of Constantinople,” she writes.
“Across its duration the Fatimid imperial power, whether exercised directly or indirectly, stretched from North Africa, Egypt, Sicily, Syria and Palestine to the Arabian Peninsula and parts of Central and South Asia. By establishing Cairo as the empire’s headquarters, Egypt was transformed from a provincial backwater of the Abbasid caliphate into the centre of the Islamic and Mediterranean worlds.”
Expansion: The origins of the Fatimids are uncertain, and Cortese spends the first chapters of her book uncovering them, tracing their roots to Syria.
From here, the Fatimid movement spread to North Africa where it found fertile ground for expansion in the last third of the 9th century. “Overnight, a Sunni western province of the Abbasid empire, comprising today’s Tunisia, Algeria, part of Libya, and Sicily, became Shia-ruled and independent of Baghdad,” Cortese says, placing the emphasis not only on the military means by which this was done but also on the methods used to spread Fatimid ideas.
Once a Fatimid state had been established in what is now Tunisia centred on its new capital at Mahdiyya, an office in charge of spreading the movement’s ideas was established called the da’wa. “What had been, prior to 909 [with the proclamation of the Fatimid caliphate], a covert network of da’is [agents] camouflaged as traders, the da’wa was now a systematic operation at the heart of the regime,” Cortese says, charged with spreading its anti-Abbasid religious message and part of a “imperial project whose completion was intended to culminate with the conquest of Baghdad and Constantinople.”
While the establishment of the Fatimid state in North Africa was an important part of this project, the eyes of the regime were always turned eastwards, she adds, meaning that “by 966 systematic plans were underway to launch the military operation that would enable the transfer of the whole Fatimid regime infrastructure from Ifriqiya [North Africa] to Egypt.” This duly began in February 969 when the Fatimid general Jawhar ibn Abdallah, charged with the conquest of Egypt by the Fatimid caliph Al-Mu’izz, set out from Raqqada in Tunisia.
“The Fatimid army travelled 16 km a day, with Barqa [in Libya] being the last major stop for provisions before reaching Alexandria in mid-May,” Cortese says. Panic set in at the then Egyptian capital at Fustat, as the “largest army Egypt had seen since Alexander the Great’s expedition” to the country in antiquity closed in on the demoralised local forces, receiving their surrender in July.
Jawhar issued an amnesty (aman), described by Cortese as “a Fatimid religious-political manifesto and a commitment to tolerance for all subjects irrespective of religious persuasion,” and began building a garrison city next to Fustat that was later to become Al-Qahira, the royal city of Egypt’s new Fatimid rulers.
Al-Mu’izz himself did not arrive in Egypt until 973, proceeding across North Africa accompanied by a “convoy of tens of thousands of camels, horses, and donkeys carrying people, objects, textiles, armour, and furniture.” He arrived in Alexandria before taking a boat down the Nile to Cairo, where Jawhar had already laid out the city according to the model of Mahdiyya.
“Two royal palaces were built facing each other… [and] the central axis that divided the city into two parts, stretching between the Futuh and Zuwayla gates, coincides with today’s Al-Mu’izz li-Din Allah Al-Fatimi Street in Old Cairo,” Cortese writes. “Halfway along the street there is an opening known as Bayn al-Qasrayn that was originally the open space that separated the two palaces.”
“The Great [Eastern] Palace, the first to be built in Cairo, was built to Al-Mu’izz’s specifications as a private residence… As for the Small [Western] Palace, its construction began under Al-Mu’izz’s successor. The area where it stood is now dominated by the Mameluke Qalawun Complex, built in the 13th century with repurposed Fatimid-era masonry.”
Flourishing: Al-Mu’izz himself did not enjoy his new realm for long, dying in 975 at the age of 44. The throne then passed to his son Abu Mansur Nizar, who took the name of Al-Aziz bi-Allah.
It was during the latter’s 20-year reign that the Fatimids reached the peak of their achievements, Cortese says, commenting that “a combination of fortuitous circumstances, skillful administration, and favourable geopolitical changes transformed Egypt into an international magnetic for economic, social, and cultural life.”
Their new capital served as a stage on which to advertise the Dynasty, she adds, pointing to the Fatimid sponsorship of religious festivals, along with their establishment of traditions that survive until the present day, such as baking kahk biscuits in Ramadan, which the Fatimid rulers “took to new heights.”
However, she does not mention the tradition, often also attributed to the Fatimids, of decorating streets and houses with lanterns during Ramadan. This is sometimes traced to Cairo residents greeting Al-Mu’izz with lanterns when he arrived in the city in 973 or possibly to an edict of a later Fatimid ruler, Al-Hakim, who is said to have instructed residents to mark the holy month by lighting the streets with lanterns hanging from their houses.
Al-Hakim receives a chapter of his own in Cortese’s book, as befits his stature as one of the Dynasty’s most famous rulers. The son of Al-Aziz, Al-Hakim became caliph on the death of his father when he was just 11 years old, inaugurating a trend among the Dynasty’s subsequent rulers who also acceded to the throne as children. In Al-Hakim’s case, this meant that he was at least at first under the thumb of either his sister, the formidably named Sitt al-Mulk (“mistress of the realm”), or of Barjawan, his vizier.
However, he eventually threw off their tutelage and began to strike out on his own, gaining a reputation for decrees that Cortese says can be hard to make sense of. “He ordered the killing of all dogs,” she writes, and “he also prohibited chess playing… He prohibited the drinking of alcoholic honey wine and forbade the consumption of mulukhiyya.” Some of these decrees may have been guided by religious concerns, while others may have had to do with practical considerations, she says, suggesting that the ban on mulukhiyya may have safeguarded Egypt’s export trade.
“The booming export economy of the Fatimids needed a constant supply of jute to make sacks and packaging. Since the jute was made with the stalks of the mature mulukhiyya plant, forbidding the consumption of this vegetable might have been intended to safeguard the availability of primary material for industrial and commercial purposes.”
While Al-Hakim’s reputation in life was mixed, he achieved a new importance with his disappearance. “The end of Al-Hakim’s reign was marked by a general sense of socio-political confusion, economic uncertainty, and the presence of religious agitators,” Cortese writes. “On the night of 13 February 1021 he left the palace with two attendants,” heading for the Muqattam hills overlooking Cairo. He never returned, and his body was never found.
Secular historiography necessarily diverges from Ismaili and Druze understandings of Al-Hakim as imam-caliph and therefore divinely guided or transcendent, interpretations that remain central to these communities today and leading to the reverence in which he is held.
Unusually detailed at over 600 pages, Cortese’s book is a welcome introduction to the Fatimids for the English-speaking reader. As well as including information about the Dynasty’s political and economic achievements, it includes a chapter about Egypt’s cultural life under Fatimid rule and one about their legacy, even tracing references to the Fatimids in contemporary films and fiction.
There is also a chapter on “being a woman in the age of the Fatimids” containing much intriguing information on this topic as well as useful rules of thumb on how to research the lives of women in the mediaeval past owing to more than usually large lacunae in the source material.
Delia Cortese, The Fatimids: Portrait of a Dynasty, London: Reaktion, 2025, pp604.
* A version of this article appears in print in the 5 February, 2026 edition of Al-Ahram Weekly
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