We shall present a full account of this under the year 400 AH (1), the time when the leading authorities among the scholars set down in writing that these people were impostors, lying in their claim to be Fāṭimids. Most of their rulers were outright heretics, among them al-Ḥākim—may Allah curse him—who, like Pharaoh, sought to proclaim his own divinity. He never dared state it openly, yet he persisted until he was slain—may Allah curse him—in the vilest manner ever seen beneath the sky (2).
Their common folk displayed Rāfiḍī leanings in imitation of, and out of fear of, their rulers. For roughly a hundred years or more in Damascus the call to prayer included the phrase ḥayya ʿalā khayr al-ʿamal (“come to the best of deeds”), and in the lands of Egypt it remained so until the end of their reign. As for their doctrines and the evidence that lays bare their true nature, they are exactly as Qāḍī Abū Bakr al-Bāqillānī explained in the book he composed to refute one of their judges, a work entitled al-Nāmūs al-Aʿẓam wa-l-Balāgh al-Akbar. In that book the judge committed blasphemies whose stench never even reached Iblīs; indeed, the Devil himself might have learned from him things that had never crossed his mind. Qāḍī Abū Bakr—may Allah have mercy on him—replied in his own work, Kashf al-Asrār wa-Hatk al-Astār, two large and immensely beneficial volumes, where he wrote: “These are a people who outwardly profess Rāfiḍī beliefs while inwardly hiding pure unbelief.”
Among those who died roughly in the 300s was the poet al-Ṣanawbari (3), Aḥmad ibn Muḥammad ibn Mazzār, Abū Bakr al-Ḍabbī al-Ṣanawbari al-Ḥalabī.
The ḥāfiẓ Ibn ʿAsākir said: He was an accomplished poet. He transmitted from ʿAlī ibn Sulaymān al-Akhfash, and he cited a number of the poet’s delightful verses, among them the following (4):
Neither sleep do I know, nor waking distress—
Only one still alive can tell of the two.
My tears, after so long competing,
Have grown weary and can no longer race.
I have a sovereign whose very image,
Since it first appeared, has made all eyes pray to it.
I resolved to kiss the fire of his cheek,
But feared that, should I draw near, I would be burned.
He also said (5):