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The Fatimid Caliphate was a caliphate extant from the tenth to the twelfth centuries AD under the rule of the Fatimids, an Isma'ili Shi'a dynasty. Spanning a large area of North Africa and West Asia, it ranged from the western Mediterranean in the west to the Red Sea in the east. The Fatimids trace their ancestry to the Islamic prophet Muhammad's daughter Fatima and her husband, ‘Ali ibn Abi Talib, the first Shi‘a imam. The Fatimids were acknowledged as the rightful imams by different Isma‘ili communities as well as by denominations in many other Muslim lands and adjacent regions. Originating during the Abbasid Caliphate, the Fatimids conquered Ifriqiya and established the city of al-Mahdiyya. The Fatimid dynasty ruled territories across the Mediterranean coast and ultimately made Egypt the center of the caliphate. At its height, the caliphate included—in addition to Egypt—varying areas of the Maghreb, Sicily, the Levant, and the Hejaz.
Ramla or Ramle is a city in the Central District of Israel. Today, Ramle is one of Israel's mixed cities, with significant both Jewish and Arab populations.
Abu Ali al-Mansur, better known by his regnal name al-Hakim bi-Amr Allah, was the sixth Fatimid caliph and 16th Ismaili imam (996–1021). Al-Hakim is an important figure in a number of Shia Ismaili sects, such as the world's 15 million Nizaris and 1–2 million Musta'lis, in addition to 2 million Druze.
Sophronius, called Sophronius the Sophist, was the Patriarch of Jerusalem from 634 until his death. He is venerated as a saint in the Eastern Orthodox and Catholic Churches. Before rising to the primacy of the see of Jerusalem, he was a monk and theologian who was the chief protagonist for orthodox teaching in the doctrinal controversy on the essential nature of Jesus and his volitional acts. He is also renowned for negotiation of surrender of Jerusalem to the Muslim caliph Umar ibn al-Khattab.
Jund Filasṭīn was one of the military districts of the Umayyad and Abbasid province of Bilad al-Sham (Levant), organized soon after the Muslim conquest of the Levant in the 630s. Jund Filastin, which encompassed most of Palaestina Prima and Palaestina Tertia, included the newly established city of Ramla as its capital and eleven administrative districts (kura), each ruled from a central town.
Abū al-Ḥasan ʿAlī ibn al-Ḥākim, better known with his regnal name al-Ẓāhir li-Iʿzāz Dīn Allāh, was the seventh caliph of the Fatimid dynasty (1021–1036). Al-Zahir assumed the caliphate after the disappearance of his father al-Hakim bi-Amr Allah.
Sitt al-Mulk was a Fatimid princess. After the disappearance of her half-brother, the caliph al-Hakim bi-Amr Allah, in 1021, she was instrumental in securing the succession of her nephew Ali az-Zahir, and acted as the de facto ruler of the state until her death on 5 February 1023.
Abu’l-Qāsim ʿAlī ibn Aḥmad al-Jarjarāʾī was a Fatimid official of Iraqi origin, who served as the Fatimid vizier from 1027 until his death on 27 March 1045.
Hamza ibn Ali ibn Ahmad was an 11th-century Persian Ismai'li missionary and founding leader of the Druze. He was born in Zozan in Greater Khorasan in Samanid-ruled Persia, and preached his heterodox strand of Isma'ilism in Cairo during the reign of the Fatimid caliph al-Hakim bi-Amr Allah. According to Hamza, al-Hakim was God made manifest. Despite opposition from the established Isma'ili clergy, Hamza persisted, apparently being tolerated or even patronized by al-Hakim himself, and set up a parallel hierarchy of missionaries in Egypt and Syria. Following al-Hakim's disappearance—or, most likely, assassination—in February 1021, Hamza and his followers were persecuted by the new regime. Hamza himself announced his retirement in his final epistle to his followers, in which he also promised that al-Hakim would soon return and usher the end times. Hamza disappeared thereafter, although one contemporary source claims that he fled to Mecca, where he was recognized and executed. His disciple Baha al-Din al-Muqtana resumed Hamza's missionary effort in 1027–1042, finalizing the doctrines of the Druze faith.
Hafizi Isma'ilism was a branch of Musta'li Isma'ilism that emerged as a result of a split in 1132. The Hafizis accepted the Fatimid caliph Abd al-Majid al-Hafiz li-Din Allah and his successors as imams, while the rival Tayyibi branch rejected them as usurpers, favouring the succession of the imamate along the line of al-Hafiz's nephew, al-Tayyib.
Al-Mu'ayyad fid-din Abu Nasr Hibat Allah b. Abi 'Imran Musa b. Da'ud ash-Shirazi was an 11th-century Isma'ili scholar, philosopher-poet, preacher and theologian of Persian origin. He served the Fatimid Caliph-Imām al-Mustansir Billah as a Da'i in varying capacities, eventually attaining the highest rank of Bab al-Abwab "The Gate of Gates" and Da'i al-du'at "Chief Missionary" in the Fatimid Da‘wah. In his theological and philosophical writings he brought the Isma'ili spiritual heritage to its pinnacle.
Sunni Islam is a major religion in Palestine, being the religion of the majority of the Palestinian population. Muslims comprise 85% of the population of the West Bank, when including Israeli settlers, and 99% of the population of the Gaza Strip. The largest denomination among Palestinian Muslims are Sunnis, comprising 98–99% of the total Muslim population.
The known history of Gaza spans 4,000 years. Gaza was ruled, destroyed and repopulated by various dynasties, empires, and peoples. Originally a Canaanite settlement, it came under the control of the ancient Egyptians for roughly 350 years before being conquered and becoming one of the Philistines' principal cities. Gaza became part of the Assyrian Empire around 730 BC. Alexander the Great besieged and captured the city in 332 BC. Most of the inhabitants were killed during the assault, and the city, which became a center for Hellenistic learning and philosophy, was resettled by nearby Bedouins. The area changed hands regularly between two Greek successor-kingdoms, the Seleucids of Syria and the Ptolemies of Egypt, until it was besieged and taken by the Hasmoneans in 96 BC.
Abu al-Hasan Ali ibn Ahmad al-Sammuqi, better known as Baha al-Din al-Muqtana, was an 11th-century Isma'ili missionary, and one of the founders of the Druze religion. His early life is obscure, but he may have been a Fatimid official. By 1020 he was one of the chief disciples of the founder of the Druze faith, Hamza ibn Ali. The disappearance of Fatimid caliph al-Hakim bi-Amr Allah, considered by the Druze to be the manifestation of God, in 1021, inaugurated a period of anti-Druze persecution. Al-Muqtana took over the leadership of the remnants of the Druze movement in 1027, and led the missionary activity of the widely scattered Druze communities until 1042, when he issued his farewell epistle, in which he announced his retirement and the closing of the divine call due to the imminence of the end times. The Druze have been a closed community ever since. Al-Muqtana's epistles comprise four of the six books of the Druze scripture, the Epistles of Wisdom.
Mufarrij ibn Daghfal ibn al-Jarrah al-Tayyi, in some sources erroneously called Daghfal ibn Mufarrij, was an emir of the Jarrahid family and leader of the Tayy tribe. Mufarrij was engaged in repeated rebellions against the Fatimid Caliphate, which controlled southern Syria at the time. Although he was several times defeated and forced into exile, by the 990s Mufarrij managed to establish himself and his tribe as the de facto autonomous masters of much of Palestine around Ramlah with Fatimid acquiescence. In 1011, another rebellion against Fatimid authority was more successful, and a short-lived Jarrahid-led Bedouin state was established in Palestine centred at Ramlah. The Bedouin even proclaimed a rival Caliph to the Fatimid al-Hakim, in the person of the Alid Abu'l-Futuh al-Hasan ibn Ja'far. Bedouin independence survived until 1013, when the Fatimids launched their counterattack. Their will to resist weakened by Fatimid bribes, the Bedouin were quickly defeated. At the same time Mufarrij died, possibly poisoned, and his sons quickly came to terms with the Fatimids. Among them, Hassan ibn Mufarrij al-Jarrah managed to succeed to his father's position, and became a major player in the politics of the region over the next decades.
Abu'l-Qasim al-Husayn ibn Ali al-Maghribi, also called al-wazir al-Maghribi and by the surname al-Kamil Dhu'l-Wizaratayn, was the last member of the Banu'l-Maghribi, a family of statesmen who served in several Muslim courts of the Middle East in the 10th and early 11th centuries. Abu'l-Qasim himself was born in Hamdanid Aleppo before fleeing with his father to Fatimid Egypt, where he entered the bureaucracy. After his father's execution, he fled to Palestine, where he raised the local Bedouin leader Mufarrij ibn Daghfal to rebellion against the Fatimids (1011–13). As the rebellion began to falter, he fled to Iraq, where he entered the service of the Buyid emirs of Baghdad. Soon after he moved to the Jazira, where he entered the service of the Uqaylids of Mosul and finally the Marwanids of Mayyafariqin. He was also a poet and author of a number of treatises, including a "mirror for princes".
The Church of the Holy Sepulchre, churches, synagogues, Torah scrolls and other non-Muslim religious artifacts and buildings in and around Jerusalem, were destroyed starting on 28 September 1009 on the orders of the Fatimid Caliph Al-Hakim bi-Amr Allah, known by his critics as "the mad Caliph" or "Nero of Egypt". His son, the Fatimid Caliph Al-Zahir, allowed the Byzantines to rebuild the Church of the Holy Sepulchre in 1027–28. The construction of a much diminished ensemble was wrapped up by 1048. This was the second of the two times the church was seriously damaged, the first being in 614 during the Byzantine–Sasanian War of 602–628.
The Jarrahids were an Arab dynasty that intermittently ruled Palestine and controlled Transjordan and northern Arabia in the late 10th and early 11th centuries. They were described by historian Marius Canard (1888–1982) as a significant player in the Byzantine–Fatimid wars in Syria who "created for themselves, in their own best interests, a rule of duplicity, treason and pillage". They were the ruling family of the Tayy tribe, one of the three powerful tribes of Syria at the time; the other two were Kalb and Kilab.
Abū Muḥammad al-Ḥasan ibn Ṣāliḥ al-Rūdhabārī, also known by his title ʿAmid al-Dawla, was the vizier of the Fatimid Caliphate in 1024–1027, during the reign of Caliph al-Zahir.
The Diocese of Gaza was a bishopric in the Holy Land. Its episcopal see was the city of Gaza and it is now a vacant Latin Catholic titular see.
References
- 1 2 3 Masalha, Nur (24 February 2022). Palestine Across Millennia: A History of Literacy, Learning and Educational Revolutions. Bloomsbury Publishing. pp. 122–123. ISBN 978-0-7556-4296-0 . Retrieved 16 January 2024.
- 1 2 Heyer, Friedrich (2000). 2000 Jahre Kirchengeschichte des Heiligen Landes: Märtyrer, Mönche, Kirchenväter, Kreuzfahrer, Patriarchen, Ausgräber und Pilger (in German). LIT Verlag Münster. pp. 137–138. ISBN 978-3-8258-4955-9 . Retrieved 16 January 2024.
- 1 2 3 Noble, Samuel (17 December 2010). "Sulayman al-Ghazzi". In Thomas, David; Mallett, Alexander (eds.). Christian-Muslim Relations. A Bibliographical History. Volume 2 (900-1050). BRILL. pp. 618–622. ISBN 978-90-04-21618-1 . Retrieved 16 January 2024.
- ↑ Reynolds, Daniel (2021). "Death of a Patriarch: Early Islamic Palestine". In Pohl, Walter; Kramer, Rutger (eds.). Empires and Communities in the Post-Roman and Islamic World, C. 400-1000 CE. Oxford University Press. p. 205. ISBN 978-0-19-006794-6 . Retrieved 22 January 2024.
- 1 2 3 4 Noble, Samuel; Treiger, Alexander (15 March 2014). The Orthodox Church in the Arab World, 700–1700: An Anthology of Sources. Cornell University Press. pp. 160–163. ISBN 978-1-5017-5130-1 . Retrieved 15 January 2024.