Fatimids Fighting over Jerusalem: An Interreligious or Intrareligious Matter?

Abstract

ABSTRACT This study presents an Islamic vision of Jerusalem marked not so much by interreligious conflict but by intrareligious or sectarian concern. It does so by reexamining the decision of the Ismāʿīlī Fāṭimid caliph al-Ḥākim to destroy the Church of the Holy Sepulchre in the year 1009 as recorded in al-Maqrīzī’s Lessons for True Believers in the History of the Fatimid Imams and Caliphs. In the process, it considers the influence that a mosque built in honor of the second caliph ʿUmar b. al-Khaṭṭāb, conqueror of Jerusalem, may have had during the Fāṭimid era. The article also considers another significant event in Jerusalem recorded by the Crusader-era bishop William of Tyre, in which the Fāṭimid caliph al-Mustanṣir, fearing a Sunnī Saljūq advance on the city, forced the Christians of Jerusalem to build part of the city wall in the early 1060s. The work also looks briefly at the The Pillars of Islam, the main legal work of the formative Fāṭimid jurist al-Qāḍī al-Nuʿmān, to help demonstrate the connection between intrareligious and interreligious tension present in Fāṭimid thought. More generally, this article engages with and adds to a growing body of literature on religious identity formation, which seeks to understand the process of how a community goes about forming its religious identity in the context of surrounding influences as well as through its internal development.