Jerusalem: The Biography

This sleight of hand did not alter the slippage of Abbasid power. Just two years later, a peasant rebel leader was welcomed in Jerusalem by all three religions until, in 841, he pillaged the city, at which most of the inhabitants fled. The Sepulchre was saved only by a bribe from the patriarch. But the Arab caliphs had lost their grip. In 877, Ahmed ibn Tulun, the son of a Turkish slave who had become ruler of Egypt under the nominal aegis of the caliph, retook Jerusalem.¹⁰

KAFUR: THE SCENTED EUNUCH

Ibn Tulun was one of the Turks who gradually replaced the Arabs as the power in the Islamic empire. Maamun’s successor Mustasim had started to recruit slave boys – they were known as ghulam, pageboy – from among the newly Muslim Turkish horse-archers of Central Asia. These warriors of Asiatic appearance became first the praetorian guard, then the strongmen of the caliphate.

After Ibn Tulun’s son and heir was assassinated by his eunuchs, ¹¹ a Turkish strongman Muhammad ibn Tughj, known by the Central Asian title of prince – al-Ikhshid – came to rule Egypt and Jerusalem. The political instability intensified religious competition. In 935, an annexe to the Holy Sepulchre was forcibly converted into a mosque. Three years later, Muslims attacked Christians celebrating Palm Sunday, looting and damaging the Church. The Jews were now split between the traditional Rabbanites, led by the scholar-judges known as the gaons, who lived by the Talmud, the oral traditions, and the Karaites, a new sect who rejected any law except the Torah (hence their name means the ‘readers’) and believed in a return to Zion.^* These Turkish rulers favoured the Karaites, and just to complicate matters there was also a new community of Khazars^† with their own synagogue in the Jewish Quarter. When the Ikhshid died in 946, aged sixty-four, he was buried in Jerusalem and his power passed to a negro eunuch whose soubriquet derived from his taste for perfume and make-up.

Abul-Misk Kafur, who was to rule Egypt, Palestine and Syria for over twenty years, was an Ethiopian slave bought as a child by the Ikhshid. Deformed, obese and malodorous, he splashed on so much white camphor and black musk that his master renamed him after them. His rise began when some exotic animals arrived for the Ikhshid. All the other servants rushed to admire them, but the African boy never took his eyes off his master, awaiting the slightest command. The Ikhshid appointed him tutor to his sons, then commander of the armies that conquered Palestine and Syria, and finally regent with the title of the Master. Once in power, the eunuch cultivated Islamic piety, restoring the walls of the Temple Mount, while patronizing the arts. However, to the north, the Byzantines had been reinvigorated by a succession of outstanding soldier-emperors who raided southwards towards Syria, threatening to take Jerusalem, which set off anti-Christian riots. In 966, Kafur’s governor started to squeeze the Christians, demanding ever-greater payments from Patriarch John, who appealed to Kafur. But when John was caught corresponding with Constantinople, the governor, supported by the Jews (who hated Byzantines), attacked the Sepulchre and burned the patriarch at the stake.

In Cairo, the fragrant eunuch was now ailing. After the death of the last of the Ikhshids, Kafur ascended the throne in his own right. The first Muslim king to be born a slave – or for that matter to be a eunuch – employed a Jewish minister who would become the mastermind of an Islamic revolution and of a new empire over Jerusalem.¹²

THE FATIMIDS: TOLERANCE AND LUNACY

969–1099

IBN KILLIS: THE JEWISH VIZIER AND THE FATIMID CONQUEST

The son of a Jewish merchant from Baghdad, Yaqub ben Yusuf, known as Ibn Killis, had enjoyed a rollercoaster career, from bankrupt mountebank in Syria to financial adviser to Kafur in Egypt. ‘Were he a Muslim,’ said Kafur, ‘he’d have been the right man for vizier [chief minister].’ Ibn Killis took the hint and converted, but the eunuch died, being buried in Jerusalem, ^*

and Ibn Killis was imprisoned. Having bribed his way out of jail, he secretly travelled westwards to the Shiite kingdom in modern Tunisia ruled by the Fatimid family. The ever-flexible Ibn Killis converted to Shia and advised the Fatimid caliph Muizz that the time was ripe to take Egypt.¹³ In June 969, Muizz’s general Jawhar al-Siqilli conquered Egypt and then advanced north to take Jerusalem.¹⁴

PALTIEL AND THE FATIMIDS: JEWISH DOCTOR-PRINCES AND THE LIVING IMAMS