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And only a few believed with him.
And they are few
And few of My servants are very thankful.
Quran: Sura 11, Verse 49, Sura 38, Verse 24 and Sura 34, Verse 13.
The Shia Fatimid Caliphate had emerged in about the year 910 in North Africa among the Berber tribes. Its imams claimed descent from the Prophet Muhammad’s daughter Fatima. By 915 they had added Sicily to their nascent empire and by 969 they had conquered Egypt. They founded Cairo, ‘the victorious’, and it was soon enough a centre of high culture and a producer of exquisite artwork in ivory, crystal and metal which was exported to Venice and Spain. Its universities and the great college mosque of al-Azhar were also manufacturing propaganda aimed at the Shiites of Iran and Iraq as the Fatimids began their assault on the Sunni Saljuq Sultanate and the Abbasid Caliphate of Baghdad.
The Fatimids obtained full control of Arabia and the Red Sea, and Syria fell to their forces in the 990s. In 996 the Caliph al-Hakim looked likely to complete the Shiite conquest of the entire Islamic world as his vast armies took Kufa and Mosul. Al-Hakim is infamous in the West for his destruction of the Church of the Holy Sepulchre in 1009, a crime against Christians that made its way into Pope Urban II’s call for Holy War at Clermont in 1095, as well as his somewhat bizarre edicts requiring the deaths of all the dogs in Cairo, the forbidding of women to walk in the streets and the requirement for all Jews to wear bells and for Christians to wear large crucifixes of nearly half a metre in length at all times, but his death triggered a loss of drive for the caliphate and by the late 1020s economic crises and army mutinies had weakened the state to such an extent that in 1025 the black African troops of the Fatimid infantry were reduced to eating dogs just to survive.
A long defensive war ensued against the Sunni Saljuq Sultanate in the second half of the eleventh century for possession of Syria and Palestine and by 1092 the Fatimids held only the coastal cities, and only those by virtue of the Egyptian navy.
The long conflict left Syria nearly broken and plague and famine punished the region in repeated waves in this time, but worse was to come.