2 The Advent of the Fatimids

with it a new era. A largely conservatively Sunni province of the once unified 'Abbasid caliphate almost overnight became Shi'i and would no longer pay allegiance in any form to the supreme ruler in Baghdad.'

The even$ just recalled occurred in early Rajab zg6/late March gog. The victory which had brought Aba 'Abdallih and his Berber army to power gave him instant dominion over the whole ofAghlabid territory, including the areas of modem Tu- nisia, Algeria, portions of Libya, and Sicily. In realizing this achievement, however, he was not acting for himself but on behalf of an Imam who was at that triumphant moment still under house arrest, two months' march away, in the distant Maghribi town of Sijilmisa. The revolution~ought by the da'i,

though at last in possession of a vast political domain with its attendant resources, was thus incomplete. Without its Imam it

i l lacked the real reason for its existence; the appeal, the da'wa, I on which it was based, and for which it was created, depended I on the safe arrival of the Imam and the eventual proclamation /

of his caliphate and the right of his

Fatimid ancestors and de- / scendants to rule the Islamic world. But that was not to happen

1) I! for almost another ten months. Only in late Rabi' I1 zgy/Janu- I # ary of 910. did the Imam finally reach Raqqida where he was 111 proclaimed caliph with the messianic regnal name of al-MahdL2 ) i The interveningmonths were, however, critically important for 111

IIIII the new government. Abfi 'Abdallih, though long accustomed

I . For the broad general background to the Fatimid victory, see in particular MohamedTalbi, LEmirat Aghlabi&(r84-296/8oo-gog) (Paris, 1966); Farhat Dachraoui, Le Calijat Fafimidc au Maghreb, 296-364909- 973: hutoire, politique et institutions (Tunis, 1981). and most especially Heinz Halm, Das Rdch dw Mahdi: Der Auptieg der Fatimiden (875-973) (Munich, l g g ~ ) , Eng. trans. M. Bonner, TheEmfireoflheMahdi: TheRise of theFaiimids (Leiden, 1996).

e. The most recent general study of the beginning of the Ismaili movement and its relationship to the advent of al-Mahdi as imam-caliph is Halm's Reich des Mahdi but see also the important article by W. Madelung, 'Das Imamat in der fnihen ismailitischen Lehre,' Derlslem, 37 (1961): 43-135, and Farhad Daftary, The Ismli'ib: Their Histoly and Doctriner (Cambridge, iggo), especially 91-145.