Jerusalem: The Biography

  After Ibn Tulun’s son and heir was assassinated by his eunuchs, 11 a Turkish strongman Muhammad ibn Tughj, known by the Central Asian title of prince – al-Ikhshid – came to rule Egypt and Jerusalem. The political instability intensified religious competition. In 935, an annexe to the Holy Sepulchre was forcibly converted into a mosque. Three years later, Muslims attacked Christians celebrating Palm Sunday, looting and damaging the Church. The Jews were now split between the traditional Rabbanites, led by the scholar-judges known as the gaons, who lived by the Talmud, the oral traditions, and the Karaites, a new sect who rejected any law except the Torah (hence their name means the ‘readers’) and believed in a return to Zion.* These Turkish rulers favoured the Karaites, and just to complicate matters there was also a new community of Khazars† with their own synagogue in the Jewish Quarter. When the Ikhshid died in 946, aged sixty-four, he was buried in Jerusalem and his power passed to a negro eunuch whose soubriquet derived from his taste for perfume and make-up.

  Abul-Misk Kafur, who was to rule Egypt, Palestine and Syria for over twenty years, was an Ethiopian slave bought as a child by the Ikhshid. Deformed, obese and malodorous, he splashed on so much white camphor and black musk that his master renamed him after them. His rise began when some exotic animals arrived for the Ikhshid. All the other servants rushed to admire them, but the African boy never took his eyes off his master, awaiting the slightest command. The Ikhshid appointed him tutor to his sons, then commander of the armies that conquered Palestine and Syria, and finally regent with the title of the Master. Once in power, the eunuch cultivated Islamic piety, restoring the walls of the Temple Mount, while patronizing the arts. However, to the north, the Byzantines had been reinvigorated by a succession of outstanding soldier-emperors who raided southwards towards Syria, threatening to take Jerusalem, which set off anti-Christian riots. In 966, Kafur’s governor started to squeeze the Christians, demanding ever-greater payments from Patriarch John, who appealed to Kafur. But when John was caught corresponding with Constantinople, the governor, supported by the Jews (who hated Byzantines), attacked the Sepulchre and burned the patriarch at the stake.

  In Cairo, the fragrant eunuch was now ailing. After the death of the last of the Ikhshids, Kafur ascended the throne in his own right. The first Muslim king to be born a slave – or for that matter to be a eunuch – employed a Jewish minister who would become the mastermind of an Islamic revolution and of a new empire over Jerusalem.12

  20

  THE FATIMIDS: TOLERANCE AND LUNACY

  969–1099

  IBN KILLIS: THE JEWISH VIZIER AND THE FATIMID CONQUEST

  The son of a Jewish merchant from Baghdad, Yaqub ben Yusuf, known as Ibn Killis, had enjoyed a rollercoaster career, from bankrupt mountebank in Syria to financial adviser to Kafur in Egypt. ‘Were he a Muslim,’ said Kafur, ‘he’d have been the right man for vizier [chief minister].’ Ibn Killis took the hint and converted, but the eunuch died, being buried in Jerusalem, * and Ibn Killis was imprisoned. Having bribed his way out of jail, he secretly travelled westwards to the Shiite kingdom in modern Tunisia ruled by the Fatimid family. The ever-flexible Ibn Killis converted to Shia and advised the Fatimid caliph Muizz that the time was ripe to take Egypt.13 In June 969, Muizz’s general Jawhar al-Siqilli conquered Egypt and then advanced north to take Jerusalem.14

  PALTIEL AND THE FATIMIDS: JEWISH DOCTOR-PRINCES AND THE LIVING IMAMS

  The messianic Fatimids, the new masters of Jerusalem, were unlike any other Islamic dynasty for they not only declared themselves caliphs, they were also sacred kings, the Living Imams, almost suspended between man and heaven. Visitors to their courts were shown through courtyards of increasingly eye-watering luxury before they came to a gold-curtained throne at which they prostrated themselves and the curtains were drawn to reveal the Living Imam in golden robes. Their sect was secretive, their beliefs mystical, redemptionist and esoteric, and their rise to power mysterious, clandestine and filled with adventure. In 899, a rich merchant in Syria, Ubayd Allah, declared himself the Living Imam, direct descendant of Ali and Fatima, the Prophet’s daughter, via the Imam Ismail, hence they were known as Ismaili Shiites. His secret agents, the so-called dawa, fanned out across the east, conquering Yemen and converting some Berber tribesmen in Tunisia; but the Abbasids tried to kill him, so he vanished. Some years later, he or someone claiming to be him reappeared in Tunisia as al-Mahdi, the Chosen, founding his own caliphate which started to conquer a new empire with a sacred mission: to overthrow the false Abbasids of Baghdad and redeem the world. In 973, the Caliph Muizz, now ruler of swathes of north Africa, Sicily, Egypt, Palestine and Syria, moved to his new capital, al-Qahira al-Muizziyya – the Conquest of Muizz, known today as Cairo.

  His successor, Aziz, appointed their consigliere, Ibn Killis, as grand vizier, chief minister of the empire which he ruled until his death almost twenty years later. Apart from his immense wealth – he owned 8, 000 female slaves, he was a scholar who debated religion with Jewish and Christian clerics and his career personifies the tolerance of the Fatimids, being sectarians themselves, towards Jews and Christians that was immediately felt in Jerusalem.

  The Jews in Jerusalem were divided, poor and desperate, while their Egyptian brethren flourished under the Fatimids. They started to provide the doctors for the caliphs of Cairo: these were more than just royal physicians. They tended to be scholar-merchants who became influential courtiers and were usually appointed chief of the Jews of the Fatimid empire, a post known as the nagid, the prince. A Jew of mysterious origins named Paltiel was probably the first of these doctor-courtier-princes. A protégé of Jawhar, the Fatimid conqueror of Jerusalem, he immediately intervened to help the Jews in the Holy City.

  After years of Abbasid neglect and the inconsistent patronage of Turkish rulers, Jerusalem was diminished and unstable. The constant wars between the caliphs of Cairo and Baghdad discouraged pilgrims; Bedouin raids sometimes overran the city for short periods; and in 974, the dynamic Byzantine Emperor John Tzimiskes captured Damascus and galloped into Galilee, promising his ‘intent to deliver the Holy Sepulchre of Christ our God from the bondage of the Muslim’. He was close; Jerusalem waited, but he never came.

  The Fatimids encouraged the pilgrimages of their fellow Ismailis and Shiites to the Mosque of Jerusalem but the wars against Baghdad cut off the city from Sunni pilgrims. The very isolation of Jerusalem somehow intensified her sanctity: Islamic writers now compiled more popular anthologies of Jerusalem’s ‘merits’ – the Fadail – and they gave her new names: she was still Iliya and Bayt al-Maqdis, the Holy House, but she now became al-Balat, the Palace, too. Yet Christian pilgrims were becoming richer and more numerous than the ruling Muslims – Franks sailed from Europe and rich caravans arrived every Easter from Egypt.

  The Jews too looked to their saviours in Cairo where Paltiel now persuaded the Caliph to pay a subsidy to the impoverished gaon and Academy of Jerusalem. He won the right for Jews there to buy a synagogue on the Mount of Olives, to gather close to Abolsom’s Pillar and also to pray at the Golden Gate on the eastern wall of the Temple Mount. At festivals the Jews were allowed to encircle the old Temple seven times but their main synagogue remained ‘the inner altar of the sanctuary at the western wall’: the Cave. The Jews had been scarcely tolerated under the Abbasids but now, poor as they were, they had more freedom than they had enjoyed for two centuries. Sadly, the Rabbanites and Karaites, who were specially favoured by the Fatimids, fellow sectarians, held separate services on the Mount of Olives that led to scuffles and soon these threadbare scholars were at war with each other in the dusty, ramshackle synagogues and holy underground caverns of Jerusalem. And their freedoms only exacerbated Muslim frustration.

  When Paltiel died in 1011, his son brought his body to be buried in Jerusalem but the rich cortège was attacked by Muslim ruffians. Even after Paltiel, the Jews of Cairo despatched caravans with money to fund the Academy and a mystical sect called the Mourners of Zion who prayed for the restorati
on of Israel, in effect, religious Zionists. But the help was never enough: ‘the city is widowed, orphaned, deserted and impoverished with its few scholars,’ wrote a Jewish Jerusalemite in a fundraising letter. ‘Life here is extremely hard, food scarce. Help us, save us, redeem us.’15 Now the Jews were ‘a pitiful assembly, constantly harassed’.

  Yet the Sunni Muslims were increasingly scandalized by the excesses and liberties of the infidels. ‘Everywhere, the Christians and Jews have the upper hand,’ grumbled Muqaddasi, the travel writer whose very name means ‘Born in Jerusalem’.

  MUQADDASI: THE JERUSALEMITE

  ‘All the year round, never are her streets empty of strangers.’ Around 985, at the height of Fatimid rule, Muhammad ibn Ahmed Shams al-Din al-Muqaddasi had come home to the city he called al-Quds, the Holy.* Now in his forties, he had been travelling for twenty years, ‘seeking knowledge’ through travel that was so much part of the training of every Islamic savant, combining piety with the scientific observation practised in the House of Wisdom. In his masterpiece The Soundest Divisions for Knowledge of the Regions, he reveals his irrepressible curiosity and sense of adventure:

  There is nothing that befalls travellers of which I did not have my share except begging and grievous sin. At times I’ve been pious, at times I’ve eaten impure foods. I’ve been close to drowning, my caravans have been waylaid on the highroad. I’ve spoken to kings and ministers, accompanied the licentious, been accused of being a spy, thrown into jail, I’ve eaten porridge with mystics, broth with monks and pudding with sailors. I’ve seen war in battleships against the Romans [Byzantines] and the ringing of church bells at night. I’ve worn the robes of honour of kings and many times I’ve been destitute. I’ve owned slaves and carried baskets on my head. What glory and honour I’ve been granted. Yet my death was plotted more than once.

  Wherever he was, nothing dimmed his pride in Jerusalem:

  One day, I sat in the council of the judge in Basra [in Iraq]. Egypt [Cairo] was mentioned. I was asked: which city is nobler? I said: ‘Our city.’ They said: Which one is sweeter? ‘Ours.’ They said: Which is better? ‘Ours.’ They said: Which is more bountiful? ‘Ours.’ The council were surprised at this. They said, ‘You are a man of conceit. You have claimed that which we cannot accept from you. You are like the owner of the camel during the Haj.

  Yet he was honest about Jerusalem’s faults: he admitted that ‘the meek are molested and the rich are envied. You won’t anywhere find baths more filthy than those in the Holy City, nor heavier fees for their use.’ But Jerusalem produced the best raisins, bananas and pinenuts; she was the city of many muezzins calling the faithful to prayer – and no brothels. ‘There’s no place in Jerusalem where you cannot get water or hear the call to prayer.’

  Muqaddasi described the holy places on the Temple Mount dedicated to Mary, Jacob and the mystical saint, Khidr.* Al-Aqsa was ‘even more beautiful’ than the Church of the Holy Sepulchre but the Dome was peerless: ‘At the dawn when the light of the sun first strikes the Dome and the drum catches the rays, then is this edifice a marvellous sight and one such that in all of Islam I have not seen the equal, neither in pagan times.’ Muqaddasi was only too aware that he lived in two Jerusalems – the real and the celestial – and this was the place of the Apocalypse: ‘Is she not the one that unites the advantages of This World with those of the Next? Is this not to be the sahira – the plain – of marshalling on the Day of Judgement where the Gathering Together and the Appointment will take place? Truly Mecca and Medina have their superiority but on the Day of Judgement, they will both come to Jerusalem and the excellence of them all will be united here.’

  Yet Muqaddasi still complained about the lack of Sunnis and the noisy confidence of Jews and Christians: ‘scholars are few and Christians numerous and rude in public places.’ The Fatimids after all were sectarians and local Muslims even joined in with Christians’ festivals. But things were about to take a terrifying turn: by the time Muqaddasi died at the age of fifty in 1000, a child had succeeded to the throne of the Living Imam who would seek to destroy Christian and Jewish Jerusalem.16

  HAKIM: THE ARAB CALIGULA

  When the Caliph Aziz lay dying, he kissed his son and then sent him away to play. Soon afterwards he died, and no one could find the eleven-year-old Living Imam. After frantic searching, he was discovered inauspiciously at the top of a sycamore tree. ‘Come down, my boy,’ a courtier begged the child. ‘May God protect you and us all.’

  The gorgeously clad courtiers gathered at the bottom of the tree. ‘I descended,’ recalled the new caliph, Hakim, and the courtier ‘placed on my head the turban adorned with jewels, kissed the ground before me, and said: “Hail to the Commander of the Believers, with the mercy of God and his blessing.” He then led me out in that attire and showed me to all the people, who kissed the ground before me and saluted me with the title of Caliph.’

  Son of a Christian mother whose brothers were both patriarchs, Hakim grew into a broad-shouldered youth, his blue eyes speckled with gold. At first, advised by ministers, he pursued his family’s Ismaili mission, tolerating Jews and Christians. He adored poetry and founded his own House of Wisdom in Cairo for the study of astronomy and philosophy. He prided himself on his asceticism, eschewing the diamond turban for a plain scarf, and he even traded jokes with poor Cairenes in the streets. But when he started to rule in his own right, there were soon signs that this mystical autocrat was unbalanced. He ordered the killing of all the dogs in Egypt, followed by all the cats. He forbade the eating of grapes, watercress and fish without scales. He slept by day and worked at night, ordering all Cairenes to follow his strange hours.

  In 1004, he started arresting and executing Christians, closing churches in Jerusalem and converting them into mosques. He banned Easter and the drinking of wine, a measure aimed at Christians and Jews. He ordered Jews to wear a wooden cow necklace to remind them of the Golden Calf, and bells to alert Muslims of their approach. Christians had to wear iron crosses. Jews were forced to choose between conversion or leaving the country. Synagogues were destroyed in Egypt and in Jerusalem. But it was the growing popularity of a Christian ritual that drew Hakim’s attention to Jerusalem. Every Easter Christian pilgrims from the West and East poured into Jerusalem to celebrate the city’s own Easter miracle: the Descent of the Holy Fire.17

  On Holy Saturday, the day after Good Friday, thousands of Christians spent the night in the Church of the Holy Sepulchre where the Tomb was sealed and all lamps extinguished until, amid emotional scenes, the patriarch entered the Tomb in the darkness. After a long interval of spine-tingling anticipation, a spark seemed to descend from above, a flame flickered, brightness flared and the patriarch emerged with a mysteriously lit lamp. This sacred flame was distributed from candle to candle through the crowd to screams of joy and acts of wild abandon. The Christians regarded this relatively new ritual, first mentioned by a pilgrim in 870, as divine confirmation of Jesus’ Resurrection. The Muslims believed this was a spectacle of fairground hucksterism achieved by trickery – the smearing of the wire holding the lamp with resinous oil. ‘These abominations’, wrote a Muslim Jerusalemite, ‘make one shudder with horror.’18

  When Hakim heard about this and observed the sheer wealth of the Christian caravan setting out for Jerusalem, he burned the Jewish Quarter of Cairo – and ordered the total destruction of the Church of the Holy Sepulchre. In September 1009, his henchmen obliterated the Church ‘stone by stone’, ‘razed it completely except those parts impossible to destroy’, and started to demolish the city’s synagogues and churches. Jews and Christians pretended to convert to Islam.

  The caliph’s antics convinced some Ismailis that ‘Hakim had the personified God within him’. In the frenzy of his own holy revelations Hakim did not discourage this new religion, and started to persecute Muslims; he banned Ramadan and terrorized Shiites as well as Sunnis. He became so hated by Muslims that he needed the support of the Christians and Jews in Cairo, whom he allowed to reb
uild their synagogues* and churches.

  By this time, the psychopathic caliph was wandering in trances through the streets of Cairo, often heavily medicated by doctors. Hakim purged his court, ordering the killing of his own tutors, judges, poets, cooks and cousins, and the cutting off of the hands of female slaves, often himself playing the butcher.

  HAKIM: THE VANISHING

  Finally, in the middle of one night in February 1021, the demented caliph, still only thirty-six years old, rode out of Cairo into the hills and vanished so mysteriously that his devotees were convinced ’Hakim was not born of woman and did not die’. Since his donkey and some bloodied rags were discovered, he had probably been murdered by his sister who arranged the succession of his little son, Zahir. Hakim’s devotees were slaughtered by the Fatimid troops, but a few escaped to found a new sect which survives to this day as the Druze of Lebanon.19

  The scars of Hakim’s insanity never healed in Jerusalem: the Church of Constantine was never fully rebuilt in its original form. As if Hakim was not bad enough, an earthquake in 1033 devastated the city, shattering the Byzantine walls and the Umayyad palaces; the old Umayyad Aqsa collapsed in ruins; the Jewish Cave was damaged.

  Caliph Zahir, who revered Jerusalem, restored the tolerance of his ancestors, promising protection to both the Jewish sects, and on the Temple Mount he rebuilt al-Aqsa, the inscription on its delicately decorated triumphal arch linking himself, his Jerusalem and the Night Journey of the Prophet, though his mosque was far smaller than the original. He rebuilt the city walls, but around a smaller city, roughly as we see it today, leaving Mount Zion and the ruined Umayyad palaces outside.