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| Mosque of al-Hakim, Cairo |
To some this blue-eyed boy was the Nero or Caligula of the Arab world: unstable and mercurial. His mother was a Christian, and he had two Christian uncles who served as patriarchs. Yet, al-Hakim himself was a Shiite, and set about persecuting Christians and Jews. He helped precipitate the first Crusade by demolishing the Church of the Holy Sepulchre (Jesus' tomb) in Jerusalem in 1009, one of Christendom's holiest shrines.
As Nero had murdered his teacher Seneca, so, too, al-Hakim, all of fifteen years old, had his teacher the eunuch Barjawan butchered as they walked in the palace garden one day. He took frequent strolls through the streets of Cairo accompanied by a burly Black slave named Masoud. Shopkeepers caught cheating their customers were publicly sodomized on the spot by Masoud. Masoud's name entered the folklore of the city such that when Cairenes jokingly wished to express irritation with one another, they might say, "If you don't stop giving me a hard time, "I'll bring Masoud!" (Desmond Stewart, Great Cairo: Mother of the World (Cairo: The American University in Cairo Press, 1981, 73-74)
Fond of riding at night in the Muqqatim hills on the edge of the desert east of the city, al-Hakim failed to return one night, murdered, some say, at the instigation of his sister, Sitt al-Mulouk, whom the caliph had charged with being unchaste. Others, members of the Druze sect, which regarded al-Hakim as divine and in whose name the sect was later established, maintained he had not been murdered, but taken up into heaven. The name "Druze" derives from al-Hakim's chief theologian, al-Darazi, a Syrian who founded the sect after fleeing Cairo and returning to Syria following the caliph's death. Al-Hakim, an Ismaili Shiite, had, according to a belief of his sect, regarded himself as an incarnation of God. Today's Druze still cling to this belief.
After al-Hakim, immature youths who became caliphs were not permitted to exercise power; it was exercised in their names by viziers who, in some cases, even assumed the royal title malik.