Jawhar ibn ʿAbd Allah (1), the commander who built Cairo al-Muʿizziyya, was of Byzantine stock (2) and was known as al-Katib. His master al-Muʿizz (3) ibn al-Manṣur ibn al-Qāʾim ibn al-Mahdi—who claimed Fatimid descent—sent him from Ifriqiya to seize Egypt after its army fell into disorder upon the death of Kāfūr al-Ikhshīdī. The troops had set up Aḥmad ibn ʿAlī al-Ikhshīdī over them, but they failed to unite behind him, and some of them appealed to al-Muʿizz for help. Al-Muʿizz therefore dispatched his freedman Jawhar in Rabīʿ al-Awwal 358 AH. Jawhar reached Cairo in Shaʿbān of that year with one hundred thousand fighting men and twelve hundred chests of money to finance the expedition. The populace was alarmed and sought a pledge of safety; he granted it, yet the army was not content and marched out to fight him. He routed them, renewed the amān for the inhabitants, and on Tuesday, the eighteenth of Shaʿbān, entered the city. He traversed Miṣr, encamped on the site of present-day Cairo, and that very night laid the foundations of the two palaces. On the following Friday he mounted the pulpit, removed the Abbasids from the sermon, substituted the name of his master, mentioned the Twelve Imams, and ordered the addition “Come to the best of deeds” in the call to prayer. Outwardly he showed kindness to the people and every Saturday (4) would sit with the vizier Jaʿfar ibn al-Furāt and the judge. He strove to perfect the new city, completed its congregational mosque with remarkable speed, and delivered the inaugural sermon there in 361 AH; that mosque is the present-day al-Azhar.
He then sent Jaʿfar ibn Fallāḥ to Syria, which was taken for al-Muʿizz. Al-Muʿizz himself arrived in 362 AH, as noted earlier (5), and took up residence in the two palaces. Jawhar’s rank with him remained exalted until the commander died in the present year. His office and prestige then passed to his son al-Ḥusayn, known as the “Commander of Commanders,” the foremost of the emirs serving al-Ḥākim ibn al-ʿAzīz ibn al-Muʿizz. Al-Ḥusayn was later killed by al-Ḥākim in 401 AH, and slain with him was his brother-in-law, the judge ʿAbd al-ʿAzīz ibn al-Nuʿmān. I believe this judge to be the author of “al-Balāgh al-Akbar” and “al-Nāmūs al-Aʿẓam,” works containing disbelief of a kind to which even Iblīs never attained. Abū Bakr al-Bāqillānī refuted that book—may Allah have mercy on him.
[Then the year 382 AH began.]
On the tenth of Muḥarram that year, the vizier Abū al-Ḥasan ʿAlī ibn Muḥammad ibn al-Kawkabī—known as Ibn al-Muʿallim, who had taken control of the sultan’s affairs—issued an edict to the inhabitants of al-Karkh and Bāb al-Ṭāq from among the Rāfiḍites, forbidding them to engage in any of the innovations they used to practise on ʿĀshūrāʾ: hanging coarse sackcloth, closing their shops, and wailing over al-Ḥusayn,