The Fatimids

The Fatimids: Portrait of a Dynasty, by Delia Cortese. London: Reaktion Books, 2025. 439pp. ISBN: 978-1836390190.

Reviewed by: Farhad Daftary, The Institute of Ismaili Studies                                            

Representing the second most important Shiʿi Muslim community, the Ismailis have had a long and complex history dating to the formative period of Islam. The Ismailis appeared on the historical scene on the death of Imām Jaʿfar al-Ṣādiq in 148/765. Soon they began to organise a revolutionary movement, known as the daʿwah, to overthrow the religio-political order of the Sunni ʿAbbāsids. The rapid success of the early Ismaili daʿwah culminated in the establishment of the Fāṭimid caliphate in 297/909 in North Africa. The Ismaili imams now ruled over this flourishing state as Fāṭimid caliphs until 567/1171 when the Fāṭimid dynasty was uprooted by Ṣalāḥ al-Dīn, founder of the Sunni state of the Ayyūbids.

The Fāṭimid period was also the “golden age” of Ismailism, when the Ismailis had for the first time a state of their own and Ismaili thought and literature reached their summit. It was during this period that the Ismaili dāʿīs, or religio-political propagandists, produced their classical treatises on a wide range of ẓāhirī and bāṭinī topics, as well as taʾwīl or esoteric interpretation of the Qurʾān, making major contributions to Islamic thought and culture. However, until the middle of the 20th century, the Ismailis and their Fāṭimid imam-caliphs had continued to be studied and judged almost exclusively on the basis of evidence collected, or fabricated, by their adversaries, notably the Sunni polemicists and heresiographers. This situation began to change drastically from the 1930s, when a large number of genuine Ismaili manuscript sources became accessible to scholars.