The Fatimid Armenians: Cultural and Political Interaction in the Near East.

• Author: WALKER, PAUL E.
• Position: Review

The Fatimid Armenians: Cultural and Political Interaction in the Near East. By SETA B. DADOYAN. Leiden: E. J. BRILL, 1997. Pp. viii + 214. HFI 115, $68.

Commencing with the wazirate of the Armenian Badr al-Jamali in the middle of the reign of al-Mustansir, large numbers of ethnic Armenians began arriving in Egypt to form the armed forces that supported not only this powerful wazir and several of his successors (whose rule amounted to a dictatorship) hut to insure by their presence the very survival of the Fatimid dynasty in the face of a Saljuk onslaught. The extent of this influx was considerable; sources suggest that well over thirty thousand Armenians took up residence in Egypt and, because many of them remained Christian, they constituted a recognizable threat to the Muslim domination of the country. Among the seven (or possibly more) Armenians who were to hold the wazirate in the century from Badr until Ruzzik b. [Tala.sup.[contains]][i.sup.[subset]], one was the Christian Bahram, who never converted, even though as wazir he was granted the title "Sword of Islam" (sayf al-Islam). These Armenians thus form a distinct chapter in Fatimid history and the ph enomenon of their participation en masse in its final phase deserves considerable scholarly attention and study.

Therefore, given the inherent interest of the subject that is implied in Professor Dadoyan's title, students of Fatimid history should be drawn to her book. What they will find in it, however, may prove disappointing and more than a little difficult to fathom. The author is not a specialist on the Fatimids nor on the Egypt of this period. Instead she wants to use the Fatimid Armenians as a major case to illustrate how heterodox and sectarian Armenians interacted with sectarian Muslims. She sees this situation as the "... last large scale phase in the perpetual alliance between the Armenian sectarians and the Muslims" (p. 1). Apparently, therefore, she understands the extensive Armenian role in Fatimid Egypt as the outcome of a natural affinity between the [Isma.sup.[subset]]ili [Shi.sup.[subset]]ites and various renegade and heterodox Armenian groupings--both at odds with the orthodoxy of their respective religious establishments.

To make that argument, she devotes substantial space to the history of pre-Fatimid Armenian heresies, going back several centuries and earlier. Fully a third of the book treats this background, without more than a vague hint as to why or what...