From revolutionary violence to state violence: The fāṭimids (297-567/909-1171)

A Hebrew maxim which has its origin in the early modern European revolutionary tradition says: “The revolution kills its sons.” This certainly sums up the experience of countless 20th-century revolutionaries, among them many Jews, who massively and enthusiastically joined the Bolshevik revolution only to be confronted later with its ugly face: Stalin's reign of terror and anti-semitism. Thus, while I was reading cAbbāsid history with Simha Sabari at Tel Aviv University (herself an ex-revolutionist in Mandatory Palestine and the Israel of the 1950s), the killing of the cAbbāsid propagandist Abū Muslim was no great surprise. For her, however, the cAbbāsids, whatever their revolutionary origins, constituted the ruling power; she was less interested in rulers than in popular protest and violence demonstrated against the rulers' oppressive economic policies and their attempts to impose a uniform dogma on their subjects. Her teaching of cAbbāsid history was a good starting point for understanding Fāṭimid history, which offers some striking parallels to the cAbbāsid rise to power.The first stage of Fāṭimid history took place among the Berbers of the Kutāma in the Lesser Kabylia mountains, which were the geographical, cultural and ethnic fringe of the 4th/10th-century Muslim world and a region more backward than Khurāsān, the cradle of the cAbbāsid revolution.