al-Amir

Abū ʿAlī al-Mansūr ibn al-Mustaʿlī ( Arabic أبو علي المنصور بن المستلي, DMG Abū ʿAlī al-Manṣūr ibn al-Mustaʿlī ; * 1096 ; † October 7, 1130 ) was under the ruler name al-Āmir bi-ahkām Allāh ( Arabic الآمر بأحكام الله, DMG al-Āmir bi-aḥkām Allāh ) the tenth caliph of the Fatimids and twentieth Imam of the Shia of the Mustali Ismailis , today's Tayyibites .

The al-Aqmar mosque in Cairo was completed in 1125.

Life

Prince Mansur was the eldest of three sons of the caliph al-Mustali , his mother was a sister of the ruling vizier al-Afdal Shahanshah . He was five years old when, on the day of his father's death on December 11, 1101, the vizier proclaimed him the new caliph with the ruler name "who commands according to God's counsels" (al-Āmir bi-aḥkām Allāh) . For this purpose he was married to a daughter of the vizier, who intended to further consolidate his de facto unlimited power.

Twenty years later, on the afternoon of December 11, 1121, the vizier was stabbed in the street by several assassins with daggers during the festivities on the last day of Ramadan , whereupon he died that night. Officially, the murder was charged with an assassination squad of the Nizari Ismailis, the Persian-Syrian Ismailitenschia that split off from the Imam caliphs ruling Cairo in 1094 , with the vizier bearing a decisive share of responsibility. Although the Nizarites celebrated the murder in public and noted it on their success lists, this version of the crime has already been questioned by contemporaries. Probably behind the murder was actually the ambitious favorite of the vizier Ibn al-Bata'ihi , who was present at the crime and was able to advance to the post of ruling viceroy on the same day, while the old vizier was still struggling with death. Al-Amir was assigned an active role in this overthrow, as he might have hoped to emancipate himself from the almighty vizier he hated. In the days that followed, several al-Afdal supporters and family members were eliminated in order to complete the coup.

Al-Amir and his new vizier took the murder as an occasion for a propaganda campaign against the lookout of renegade Nizarites. In December 1122 he convened a council of all family members of the Fatimids and the religious authorities of his Shia in his palace, in which the right to exist of the Nizarites was to be discussed. In 1094 the Nizarites had separated from the Imam-Caliphs ruling Egypt in the person of the Fatimids by invoking Prince Nizar (X 1095) as the legal 19th Imam, while his younger brother al-Mustali was actually only a usurper should be. At the council, al-Amir called on several informants who certified the legality of the succession of his father in the imamate, which in turn could deny the legality of the hidden imam line of the Nizarites and deny their Shia the right to exist. This judgment was recorded in the so-called "Amir'schen Guideline" (al-Hidāya al-Āmiriyya) , which the caliph received in a letter to the head of the Nizari Ismailis in the Persian Alamut , Hassan-i Sabbah († 1124) let. Furthermore, the followers of the Ismaili Mustali-in were Syria in the 1123 published missives "The turning of the compelling flashes - refuting the arguments of the wicked" (Īqā' ṣawā'iq al-irġām fī idḥāḍ ḥuǧaǧ Ūlā'ika l-li'ām) informed of that judgment. In this same pamphlet the Nizarites were denigrated as "hashish people" (ḥašīšiyya) , which is the oldest known testimony of this term in relation to the Nizarites. From then on, these were to be known as " assassins " , especially in the historiography of the neighboring Christian crusader states .

In 1124 the heavily fortified port city of Tire was conquered by the Crusaders of the Kingdom of Jerusalem , with which the Fatimids had lost their last base on the Levant coast . From then on, their rule was limited to Egypt and parts of Yemen . On October 3, 1125 al-Amir finally had his "trustworthy" (al-maʾmūn) vizier Ibn al-Bata'ihi imprisoned and executed three years later. From then on he led the affairs of government personally and filled the ministerial posts from his own authority. As the new supreme minister, he had initially appointed a Christian monk in 1126 , which, however, led to serious unrest, which prompted him to quickly remove and execute that monk.

When his guidance was published in 1122, a written statement from the leaders of the Nizarites, expected by al-Amir, failed to materialize. On October 7th, 1130, he rode out to visit his lover, who lived in an estate on an island in the Nile. Only a narrow bridge led to the island, around which he had to leave his bodyguard behind. A Nizarite assassination squad positioned there took advantage of this to pull the caliph from his horse and stab him, whereupon he died that same day. The assassination of al-Amir ushered in the fall of the Fatimid caliphate, since his rule was only followed by incapacitated caliphs, who were under the influence of several viziers who ultimately led the country into anarchy in bloody party battles. Egypt was conquered in 1171 by Syrian troops led by Saladin , who ended the Shiite caliphate and put the country back under the religious suzerainty of the Sunni caliph of Baghdad .

Even in the Shia of the Mustali Ismailis, al-Amir's end had led to permanent disintegration, because he had left behind only one son, Abu al-Qasim at-Tayyib , who was only a few months old . Al-Amir's cousin al-Hafiz was able to usurp the throne of the caliphate and made the young prince disappear in 1130, which led to another split in the Shia. A surviving son of the vizier al-Afdal, who apparently wanted to repay his family's loss of power to the Fatimids, was involved in these events. The numerically thinned following of the Ismailis in Egypt followed the Imamat des al-Hafiz, but that of Yemen recognized the successor of Prince Tayyib as the rightful one and declared him their 21st Imam. Due to his disappearance, he was given the title of a hidden imam, whose unknown descendants are still considered to this day as the imams of the Tayyibites who have been removed from the world and continue to exist in Yemen and especially in India ( Bohras ).

literature

• Farhad Daftary : The Ismāʿīlīs: Their History and Doctrines. Cambridge University Press, 1990, pp. 243-248.
• Asaf Ali Asghar Fyzee : al-Hidayatu'l-amiriya, Being an Epistle of the Tenth Fatimid Caliph al-Amir bi-ahkāmi'l-lāh. London 1938.
• Heinz Halm : Caliphs and Assassins. Egypt and the Middle East at the time of the First Crusades 1074–1171. Munich 2014, pp. 131–132, 141–177, 182–184.
• Jerzy Hauziński: Three Excerpts Quoting a Term al-ḥašīšiyya . In: Rocznik Orientalistyczny , Volume 69, (2016), pp. 89-93.
• Samuel M. Stern: The Epistle of the Fatimid Caliph al-Āmir (al-Hidāya al-Āmiriyya): its date and its purpose . In: The Journal of the Royal Asiatic Society of Great Britain and Ireland , 1950, pp. 20-31.
• Samuel M. Stern: The succession of the Fatimid Imam al-Āmir, the Claims of the Later Fatimids to the Imamate, and the Rise of Ṭayyibī Ismailism . In: Oriens , Volume 4, 1951, pp. 193-255.
• Paul E. Walker: Succession to Rule in the Shiite Caliphate . In: Journal of the American Research Center in Egypt , Volume 32 (1995), pp. 239-264.

predecessor	Office	successor
al-Mustali	Ruler of Egypt ( Fatimid dynasty) 1101–1130	al-Hafiz