[This is the second and final of two articles about the Mad Caliph. For Part I, click here]
Fatimid Caliph Al Hakim bi Amr Illah was thrust on the throne at an early age. Soon as he took personal control of the caliphate, he began to do bizarre things that earned him the nickname by which he is better known: “The Mad Caliph”. Religious persecutions – not just of his realm’s religious minorities, but of its religious majority as well – were just the start of it. Below are some more interesting facts about this fascinating madman.
The Mad Caliph’s Bizarre Reign
At some point, Caliph Al Hakim reasoned that a wave of nighttime burglaries and assaults was caused by dark and empty streets. So he decided to insure that streets should not be dark and empty at night. The Mad Caliph made all merchants install lanterns on their store fronts, ordered their businesses to operate only at night. To ensure that they stayed open at night, he prohibited commerce during the daytime. The owner of any shop that opened during the day was severely punished. Al Hakim reversed his nighttime-only commerce decree when he saw women, out shopping at the only time when they or anybody else could shop now, in the streets at night.
Al Hakim thought that was shameful, so he banned women from the streets at night. Then he extended the ban to prohibit women from walking the streets during the day. Then he got carried away, and prohibited shoemakers from making women’s shoes, so women couldn’t walk the streets at all. It was around that time that a rebellion erupted that attracted tens of thousands of subjects fed up with their Mad Caliph. Led by an Abu Raghwa, the rebels won a series of victories and marched on to Al Hakim’s capital, Cairo, which they besieged. The Mad Caliph’s throne tottered, but as seen below, he did not fall.
Creative Punishments, and Weird Laws
In one of his lucid moments, the Mad Caliph got some of his key lieutenants to fake a defection to the rebels. They then double crossed and led them into an ambush that ended in a decisive victory for Al Hakim. The rebels’ leader Abu Raghwa was captured. To humiliate him, Al Hakim had him paraded through Cairo, riding a camel facing backwards, wearing a dunce’s cone, with a monkey trained to hit his head with a stick whenever the crowd cheered. Whatever else can be said about the Mad Caliph, the man was creative.
Al Hakim also adopted one of history’s most bizarre consumer protection practices, ever. He reportedly used to walk through Cairo’s markets accompanied by a giant African slave named Masoud, looking for dishonest merchants. Whenever he came across a merchant cheating his customers, Al Hakim would order Masoud to sodomize the crook publicly, right then and there. To this day, people in Cairo threaten to “bring Masoud” to merchants suspected of trying to cheat them. Al Hakim’s weirdness also extended to banning mulukhiyah, a jute dish that was and remains a standby of Egyptian cuisine. To be fair, as seen below, it was not just because he thought the gooey and gelatinous dish was disgusting.
The Mad Caliph’s Quest to Become a God
Mulukhiyah is green, a color associated with Sunnis. The dish was transformed in the Mad Caliph’s day into a culinary symbol of protest against him, against the Shiite Fatimid Caliphate, and against Shiites in general. So the ban on mulukhiyah was intended to reduce internal strife. He also began to lay the groundwork for declaring himself a god – or an avatar of godhood.
Unsurprisingly, that upset most of his subjects, Muslims, Christians, and Jews alike, what with all of them being monotheists. The Mad Caliph’s reign of terror and error came to an end in mysterious circumstances before he cemented his divinity. He often rode out of the palace at night on his donkey, accompanied only by a single slave. He would wander Cairo’s nighttime streets, then head out to the desert to gaze at the stars and enjoy the solitude, before returning to the palace. One night in February, 1021, Al Hakim went out on his nightly donkey-back ride, and never came back.
The Mad Caliph’s Legacy
Foul play was suspected. By then the Mad Caliph had upset and terrorized most of his subjects. That included his relatives, some of whom were prime suspects in his disappearance. During his reign, he had reportedly signed more than 18,000 death sentences against those who upset him for reasons that ranged from the serious to the trivial. Many more faced extrajudicial executions. The mystery of Al Hakim’s disappearance has never been solved. Most of his subjects breathed a sigh of relief, but some genuinely missed the Mad Caliph and grieved his absence. Towards the end of his reign, a religious sect known as the Druze had formed, and it deified him as God manifest. To this day, some Shiites see Al Hakim as an important religious figure, while the Druze, who now number up to two million adherents throughout the Middle East, continue to view him as a divine incarnation.
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Some Sources & Further Reading
Encyclopedia Britannica – Al Hakim, Fatimid Caliph
History Halls – Bizarre Rulers: The Mad Caliph’s Mad Reign
Ibn Iyas – Flowers in the Chronicles of the Ages [Arabic]
