Abu Saʿid then attempted to get possession of Oman, but was obliged to abandon this scheme. He was slain in 301 with several other Qarmatian leaders, and was succeeded by his son Abu l-Kasam Saʿid, who held the leadership until his second son Abu Tahar, who had been designated successor, was old enough to take up the task, which happened in 305. The Qarmatian risings which take a position of considerable prominence in later history all took place under the successors of Abu Saʿid, who may be regarded as the founder of the Qarmatians as a revolutionary force, although there had been an earlier beginning of the sect as an off-shoot of the Ismaʿilians under Hamdan and his missionaries.
According to Ibn Khallikan Abu Saʿid entered Syria in 289, and in 291 he was slain in his bath by one of his eunuchs. He left six sons. It was Abu Tahar who marched on Basra in 311, occupied it without serious resistance, and plundered the city. But to these doings of the Qarmatians we shall return later.
IV
ESTABLISHMENT OF THE FATIMIDS IN NORTH AFRICA
The political career of the Fatimids centres in North Africa and Egypt, and commences with the activity of Ibn Hawshab, who himself never visited those parts. This man, whom Maqrizi calls Abu l-Kasam Hasan b. Farash b. Hawshab, and Abu l-Fera and Bibars Mansuri, referred to as Rustam b. Husayn b. Hawshab b. Zadam an-Najjar (“the carpenter”), was a follower of Ahmad whom we have seen as succeeding his father ʿAbdullah, and accompanied him on a pilgrimage to the sacred sites of the Shiʿites, the tombs of Hasan and Husayn and of several of the later Imams, all in the neighbourhood of Kufa and Samarra,—ʿAli’s own tomb is not known for certain, but is commonly believed to be at Najaf, near Kufa. Whilst there they noticed a wealthy Shiʿite of Yemen named Muhammad himself remarked by his tears and display of grief (Maqrizi i. 349). According to this Yemenite’s own account he had just read the Sura of “The Grotto” (Qur. 18), when he noticed an old man with a young companion close at hand. The old man sat down, his companion sat near, but kept on observing Muhammad, until at last he left the old man and drew near him. Muhammad asked him who he was; he gave his name as Husayn, and hearing this sacred name Muhammad could not restrain his tears. The old man observed this very attentively, and bids the young man ask him to join them. When Muhammad did so he asked who and what he was. The man replied that he was a Shiʿite, and gave his name as Hasan b. Faraj b. Hawshab. The old man said that he knew his father, and that he was a “Twelver.” Did the son hold the same views? Hasan replied that he always had held them, but that of late he had felt much discouragement (cf. extract in Quatremère, Journal asiatique, for Aug., 1836). From this a conversation commenced, and as a result Hasan was converted to acceptance of the Ismaʿilian creed. Further, Ahmad drew the conclusion that Yemen would offer a promising field for Shiʿite propaganda, and decided to send Ibn Hawshab to act as daʿi in Yemen, and about A.H. 270 (= A.D. 883) he appears there as settled in the district of the B. Musa tribe at Sana (Maq. i. 349). At first he claimed to be simply a merchant, but his neighbours soon penetrated his disguise and urged him to act openly as a Shiʿite missionary who, they assured him, would be in every way welcome (Bibars Mansuri). Thus encouraged he declared himself a Shiʿite agent, and soon gathered a considerable band of followers drawn, not only from the immediate vicinity, but also from the Qarmatians of Mesopotamia. As soon as they were strong enough Ibn Hawshab’s companions took up arms and began raids upon neighbours who had not accepted the Shiʿite creed and met with much success in obtaining plunder.
From the earliest period of Muslim history North Africa has been the favourite field of exploitation of every sect and political party which found itself in opposition to the official Khalifate, and there has always been very close intercourse between that area and South Arabia; indeed, there are even common peculiarities of dialect between the two. Thus we find that as soon as the new Ismaʿilian sect was established in Yemen, Ibn Hawshab sent two missionaries, Hulwani and Abu Sufyan (Maq. ii. 10) to preach in the province of Ifrikiya, the modern Tripoli and Tunis, where their work seems to have lain particularly amongst the aboriginal Berber population, for the Berbers were always more disposed to any heresy or rebellion which would give them a good pretext for making war against the ruling Arabs. Nothing is known of the subsequent history of these two missionaries save that after a brief career during which they seem to have made a deep impression, especially on the Katama tribe, they died. This Katama tribe lived in the broken territory north-west of the town of Constantine, in what would now be north-east Algeria.
As we shall have to refer more than once to the geography of North Africa it will be convenient here to make a brief statement of its political divisions and condition in the fourth century A.H. By North Africa we understand the whole territory lying between the land of Egypt on the east and the Atlantic on the west, bounded by the Mediterranean on the north and by the great desert on the south. Previous to the Arab invasion this land was inhabited by the Berbers or Libyans, the same who, under the name of Lebu, had constantly threatened Egypt in the days of the Pharaohs. As a race these Berbers seem to have progressed little since neo-lithic times, and were still in the condition of nomadic tribes like the Arabs of the pre-Islamic period. Their language was not Semitic, but it has many very marked Semitic affinities and, although language transmission is often quite distinct from racial descent, it seems quite probable that in this case the race bore a parallel relation to the Arab stock. This would be best explained by the supposition that both were derived from a neo-lithic race, which at one time spread along the whole of the southern coast of the Mediterranean and across into Western Asia, but that some cause, perhaps the early development of civilization in the Nile valley, had cut off the eastern wing from the rest, and this segregated portion developed the distinctive characteristics which we term Semitic.
Along the coast there had been a series of colonies, Greek, Punic, Roman, and Visigothic, but these left no permanent mark on the Berber population, language, or culture. Although at the time of the Arab invasion the country was theoretically under the rule of Byzantium, and the invaders had to meet the resistance of a Greek army, the early defeat of the Greeks brought an immediate end to Greek influence in the country, and left the Arabs face to face with the Berber tribes.