tenth century, most were relatively new converts to Islam. Bolstered by long-festering
local discontent, one of them became “commander of commanders” in 945.
Thereafter, the Buyids, with help from their own Turkish mercenaries, dominated the
region south of the Caspian Sea, including Baghdad (once again the home of the
caliphs) itself. Yet already by the end of the tenth century, other local men were
challenging Buyid rule in a political process—the progressive regionalization and
fragmentation of power—echoed elsewhere in the Islamic world and in parts of
Western Europe as well.
The most important of the new regional rulers were the Fatimids. They, like the
Qaramita (and, increasingly in the course of time, the Buyids), were Shi‘ites, taking
their name from Muhammad’s daughter Fatimah, wife of Ali. The Fatimid leader
claimed not only to be the true imam, descendant of Ali, but also the mahdi, the
“divinely guided” messiah, come to bring justice on earth. Because of this, the
Fatimids were proclaimed “caliphs” by their followers—the true “successors” of the
Prophet. (See the list of Fatimid caliphs on p. 342.) Allying with the Berbers in North
Africa, by 909 the Fatimids had established themselves as rulers in what is today
Tunisia and Libya. Within a half-century they had moved eastward (largely
abandoning the Maghreb to the Zirids), to rule Egypt, southern Syria, and the
western edge of the Arabian Peninsula.
The Fatimids looked east rather than west because the east was rich and because
Sunnis, hostile to Shi‘ite rule, dominated the western regions. The most important of
these Sunni rulers were the Umayyads at Córdoba. Abd al-Rahman III (r.912–961)
took the title caliph in 929 as a counterweight to the Fatimids, although he claimed to
rule only all of al-Andalus, not the whole Islamic world. An active military man
backed by an army made up mainly of Slavic slaves, al-Rahman defeated his rivals
and imposed his rule not only on southern Iberia (as his predecessors had done) but
also in northern regions (near the Christian kingdoms) and in the Maghreb. Under al-
Rahman and his immediate successors, al-Andalus became a powerful centralized
state. But regional Islamic rulers there worked to undermine the authority of the
Umayyads, so that between 1009 and 1031 bitter civil war undid the dynasty’s
power. After 1031, al-Andalus was split into small emirates called taifas, ruled by
local strongmen.
Thus in the Islamic world, far more decisively than at Byzantium, newly
powerful regional rulers came to the fore. Nor did the fragmentation of power end at
the regional level. To pay their armies, rulers often resorted to granting their
commanders iqta—lands and villages—from which the iqta-holder was expected to
