Kafur was a talented general and artistic patron, but he fell out with the poet al-Mutanabbi (who mocked him when Kafur did not appoint him minister).* Kafur protected Christians and Jews, including his treasurer Yakub ibn Killis, a Jew who converted to Islam. But when Ibn Killis lost out in a court intrigue, he fled to the Fatimiyya, joining the talented, cosmopolitan entourage of Caliph al-Muizz. Al-Muizz ordered his paladin, Jawar the Slav, a blond freedman enslaved in eastern Europe who had been given to al-Muizz’s father, to crush all resistance as far as the Atlantic. Jawar sent a tank of fish to al-Muizz to demonstrate the job was done. As long as Kafur lived, Egypt would not fall, but on his death it lay open. In 969, Jawar stormed into Egypt, where he and al-Muizz* founded a new city that they called the Conqueror, al-Qahirah – Cairo.
Egypt was just a step towards the liquidation of the godless usurpers of Baghdad and the infidels of Constantinople. Jawar advanced into Syria, but was thrown back. Ibn Killis, the Jewish vizier, was reappointed by al-Muizz’s son al-Aziz, ‘tall, with red hair and blue eyes’ – his mother was al-Muizz’s favourite slave singer Durzan, nicknamed the Tweeter. Al-Aziz’s partnership with Ibn Killis, whom he called Yakub, was almost familial; there were rows, and Ibn Killis was fined and fired but always reappointed. Ibn Killis was so rich that he had his own guards of 4,000 male slaves, a harem of 5,000 and built a mosque and university named al-Azhar (the Shiites called Fatima al-Zahra – the Luminous).
The dynasty ruled magnificently, creating a court designed to impress, projected by resplendent dress and spectacular processions. Cairo, initially just a few palaces and the al-Azhar mosque and university, only gradually became the capital, while Fustat and Alexandria thrived on the trade between the Mediterranean and the Indian Ocean. Ibn Killis was the first of a line of Jewish converts who served as viziers. Egyptian Jews were a powerful and numerous community, led by the family of Rais al-Yahud – chief of the Jews, appointed by the caliphs – who served as royal doctors as well as advisers. Families of Jewish merchants of Fustat traded across a tricontinental Afro-Eurasian span from Egypt to Seville, Sijilmasa to Samarkand to Constantinople, al-Mahdiya to Kyiv, India and China. Some 400,000 documents, found in the Genizah* of Fustat’s Ben Ezra Synagogue, reveal a web of Jewish family businesses at the centre of an almost global market. Jewish as well as Coptic merchants became vastly rich.
Loathing the Sunni Abbasiya even more than the Christians, al-Muizz and Ibn Killis invaded Syria, capturing Jerusalem and Damascus, bringing them to the Roman border. But here Ibn Killis encountered the ferocious energy of Basil the Bulgar Slayer. The Shiites so hated the Sunnis that in 987 the vizier signed a truce with Roman Emperor Basil II to allow him to destroy Baghdad. The Round City temporarily fell to the Shia, but not for long.
When Ibn Killis was ailing, al-Aziz cried, ‘O Yakub! If you’d recover, I’d sacrifice my son.’ In 991, Ibn Killis died and al-Aziz turned his jihad against Constantinople’s ally Aleppo. In April 995, Basil halted his advance. In 996, al-Aziz, now forty, collapsed near the front and summoned his eleven-year-old son al-Hakim. The boy recalled, ‘I kissed him, and he pressed me to his bosom, exclaiming: “How I grieve for you … beloved of my heart. Go and play; I’m fine.”’ Al-Hakim was climbing a sycamore when he heard his father’s
‘When I descended,’ recalled al-Hakim, ‘he [Barjawan] placed on my head the turban adorned with jewels, kissed the ground before me, and said: “Hail to the Commander of the Believers.” The people kissed the ground before me.’ As he followed his father’s cortège Hakim’s inheritance of sacred omnipotence in a time of feverish millenarian expectation was enough to go to a sensitive boy’s head.
THE CALIGULA OF CAIRO, THE LADY OF POWER AND THE BULGAR BLINDER
