Al-Hakim bi-Amr Allah became the sixth Fatimid caliph of Egypt in 996, at the age of eleven, and ruled in his own right for twenty-five years. In March of 1005 he opened a section of his own palace to the public as Dar al-Ilm, the House of Knowledge, a library and academy that taught Quran and hadith alongside logic, medicine, astronomy, and mathematics under one roof. The historian al-Maqrizi put its holdings at as many as a million and a half volumes, open to scholars regardless of sect, at a scale that dwarfed anything in the Latin West at the time.
This episode follows two threads through the same Cairo, in the same years. The mathematician Ibn al-Haytham arrived at al-Hakim's invitation to solve the Nile's flooding, failed, and, according to the medieval biographer Ibn al-Qifti, spent years feigning madness to escape a ruler who did not tolerate failure. In that confinement he wrote the Kitab al-Manazir, the Book of Optics, overturning a thousand years of assumptions by showing that we see because light enters the eye rather than something leaving it. Meanwhile, the same caliph who filled a palace with books also ordered the 1009 destruction of the Church of the Holy Sepulchre in Jerusalem, issued and reversed a long series of erratic decrees, and in his final year traded his royal dress for a wool cloak, riding out alone into the Muqattam hills east of Cairo at night. On February 13, 1021, he rode out and did not come back. The search found only his donkey and his cloak.
The episode also covers what came out of that unexplained silence, including the Druze faith's founding text, written within the year by Hamza ibn Ali, holding that al-Hakim was concealed rather than dead, and closes by correcting a common misconception: the disappearance did not break the Fatimid state. That collapse came forty years later, from provincial revolt, army mutiny, and famine, and the dynasty itself lasted until 1171.
Drawing on al-Maqrizi's chronicles, Ibn al-Athir's al-Kamil fi al-Tarikh, Ibn al-Qifti's Tarikh al-Hukama, Ibn Abi Usaybia's biographical dictionary of physicians, and modern scholarship including Paul E. Walker's Caliph of Cairo and Firas Alkhateeb's Lost Islamic History.
Content Warning: this episode discusses the destruction of a religious site, state persecution of religious minorities, and an unresolved disappearance that some sources attribute to murder.
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