Jafar al-Hajjib

Abu'l-Fadl Jafar ibn Ali al-Hajjib ( Arabic أبو الفضل جعفر بن علي الحاجب, DMG Abūʾl-Faḍl Ǧaʿfar ibn ʿAli al-Ḥāǧib ; * 874 in Askar Mukram ; † after 953) was a slave and official of the first caliphs from the Fatimid dynasty .

biography

Jafar was born as a slave to the hidden imams of the Ismailis , apparently in Askar Mukram , since he was a milk brother of his future master, the Imam al-Mahdi , who was expected by the Ismaili Shia and who was only a few months older. Probably with this he was brought to Salamiyya , Syria, shortly after 882 , where the Ismaili mission, organized underground, had its headquarters.

From 901 Jafar belonged to the small retinue of the Mahdi on his flight to the Maghreb after his identity had been revealed by the government of the Abbasid caliphs . In April 905, the provincial capital of Egypt, al-Fustat Misr , sent him back to the unsafe Salamiyya to recover the Mahdi’s hidden assets. In late 905 he was able to rejoin the imam's entourage in Tripoli, Libya . He spent the following four years with him in exile in Sidschilmasa and was here on August 26, 909 a witness of the emergence of the Mahdi from obscurity. And after he was proclaimed the first caliph of the Fatimid dynasty in Raqqada a few weeks later , Jafar was appointed to the court office of a chamberlain (ḥāǧib) . He was still living in al-Mansuriya in 953 , meanwhile released, when Caliph al-Mu'izz took office at the age of seventy-eight. It seems unlikely that he lived to see the Caliph's court move to Egypt in 973.

plant

In old age, Jafar dictated his life story (Sīrat Ǧaʿfar al-Ḥāǧib) to the chronicler Muhammad ibn Muhammad al-Yamani , thus leaving posterity with a detailed eyewitness account of the events surrounding the establishment of the Fatimid caliphate. The chronicler dedicated the work to the caliph al-Aziz (975–996); it has been edited and translated by Vladimir Ivanov and Marius Canard , among others .

• Vladimir Ivanov, Muhammad b. Muhammad al-Yamānī: Sīrat al-ḥājib Jaʿfar b. ʿAli wa-khurūj al-Mahdi min Salamiyya wa-wuṣūluh ilā Sijilmāsa wa-khurūjuh minhā Raqqāda, in: Bulletin of the Faculty of Arts of the University of Egypt, Vol. 4 (1936), pp. 107-133.
• Marius Canard, L'autobiographie d'un chambellan du Mahdî ʿObeidallâh le Fâṭimide, in: Hespéris, Vol. 39 (1952), pp. 279–329. (archive.org)

literature

• Heinz Halm , The Empire of the Mahdi. The rise of the Fatimids (875–973). Beck, Munich 1991, ISBN 3-406-35497-1 .

Remarks

1. ↑ See Halm, p. 63.
2. ↑ See Halm, p. 88 f.
3. ↑ See Halm, p. 144.
4. ↑ See Halm, p. 302.