Abu Abdallah al-Shi'i was an Isma'ili Shi'i missionary from Kufa who spent nearly two decades, starting in 893, living among the Kutama Berbers of North Africa's Kabylie highlands, earning their trust before ever asking them to fight. Ubayd Allah al-Mahdi was the man that mission was built around, the claimant descended from the Prophet Muhammad (peace be upon him) through his daughter Fatima and Ali ibn Abi Talib, who would become the first Fatimid caliph without ever leading a single battle.

This episode covers the founding of the Fatimid dynasty from Abu Abdallah's recruitment of the Kutama at the Hajj through the seven-year campaign that toppled the Aghlabids in 909, al-Mahdi's imprisonment and release at Sijilmasa, his proclamation as caliph in 910, and his execution of the man who had built his throne the following year. It then jumps sixty years to 969, when the Fatimid general Jawhar al-Siqilli, a formerly enslaved commander known as "the Sicilian," led an army of up to two hundred thousand men and a fortune in gold into Egypt, negotiated a peaceful surrender with the Ikhshidid delegation instead of sacking the capital at Fustat, and began laying the foundations of the city that would become Cairo.

The two halves of the story mirror each other: one man who built a dynasty and was destroyed by it, and one man who conquered a country and chose not to destroy it. Both are part of the same question about what power owes the people who hand it over.

Sources include the classical chronicles of al-Qadi al-Nu'man, al-Maqrizi, al-Tabari, Ibn Khallikan, and al-Nuwayri, alongside modern scholarship from Firas Alkhateeb's Lost Islamic History and the Institute of Ismaili Studies.

Content Warning: This episode includes a brief, non-graphic reference to a political execution.

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