This is a book about apocalypticism, a mode of religiosity so powerful and generative that it has been implicated in a variety of major events across geographies and time periods. Apocalypticism played a significant role in the rise of major religious traditions such as Christianity and Islam. It is inexorably intertwined with the ‘founding’ of the Americas and more recently has been channelled destructively in horrific acts of violence, including the Holocaust. As a religionist, I am fascinated by the nature of apocalypticism – its mythic framework and how it is deployed to effect social transformations. This long-standing interest has led me to investigate a host of related questions. How, for instance, are apocalyptic predictions made and then reinterpreted? Who makes these predictions and where does their authority come from? How do apocalyptic orators describe heaven and hell or the damned and the saved? Why do people believe them? How does time function in apocalyptic contexts? And perhaps most importantly for this study, how does apocalypticism, despite its spectacular failure rate, not only endure, but operate to continuously reorder societies across geographies and cultures?

The rich global history of apocalypticism has been well documented. Yet in the Islamic context – where apocalypticism figures quite prominently – only a handful of studies exist on the subject.

These works – many of which are outstanding – reflect the disciplinary conventions of Islamic studies and tend to focus on specific intellectual, philological or historical trends rather than addressing wider social and theoretical questions concerning the nature of apocalypticism more broadly. This book is an attempt to address some of these wider questions using sources from an empire that was, like so many other movements in Islamic history, brought to power on the heels of an apocalyptic revolution. It examines how rulers of the Fatimid Empire (909–1171) used apocalyptic imagery to establish and maintain a substantial empire in North Africa.

Fatimid revolutionary activity capitalised on the question of Shia leadership after the disappearance of the twelfth imām in 874. From this political vacuum emerged a secret society claiming that the Shia mahdī was at hand.