Died 1001 | ||
Abu'l-Fadl Ja'far ibn al-Fadl ibn al-Furat (921–1001) was a member of the bureaucratic Banu'l-Furat dynasty, who served as vizier of the Ikhshidids of Egypt from 946 until the end of the dynasty in 969, and continued serving the Fatimids after that.
Life
Abu'l-Fadl Ja'far was born in 921, the scion of a bureaucratic dynasty, the Banu'l-Furat, that had occupied senior posts in the fiscal bureaucracy of Baghdad since the reign of Caliph al-Mu'tadid (892–902) and had gone on to become one of the two major factions within the Abbasid administrative elite in the first decades of the 10th century. Ja'far's father was al-Fadl ibn al-Furat (died 938), who had held several posts in the fiscal ministries of the Abbasid Caliphate, and had served as vizier for a few months in 932 and in 937, before retiring to Egypt, ruled since 935 by Muhammad ibn Tughj al-Ikhshid. There Ja'far became vizier in 946, succeeding his father's old political rival, Abu Bakr Muhammad ibn Ali al-Madhara'i. Ja'far held the post continuously under the Ikhshidid emirs Unujur (r. 946–961) and Ali (r. 961–966), as well as under Abu al-Misk Kafur, who, after having long served as the power being the throne, became emir in his own right (r. 966–968).
After Kafur's death in 968, Ja'far remained in office, but faced a critical situation. The succession passed to the infant son of Ali, Ahmad, and Ja'far, in alliance with the ghulam Shamul, leader of the army, seemed set to secure the role of regent over the under-age ruler. Ja'far managed to neutralize a potential rival in Yaqub ibn Killis by arresting and forcing him to flee to the Fatimid court, but his position was unstable: he lacked a power-base outside the bureaucracy, Fatimid agents stirred up trouble among the bedouin, the army was divided into mutually antagonistic factions (the Ikhshidiyya, recruited by Muhammad ibn Tughj, the Kafuriyya, recruited by Kafur, and the Saqaliba or Rum, European/Byzantine slave-soldiers), and the treasury was empty due to a series of low Nile floods that had caused famine. In the end, mutinous troops sacked his own palace, forcing Ja'far to go into hiding. He was then arrested in autumn 968 on the orders of al-Hasan ibn Ubayd Allah ibn Tughj, uncle and prospective regent for the young emir. In early 969, however, when Hasan left for his province of Palestine, he was released and appointed governor of Egypt. In this capacity he supervised the negotiations with the Fatimid general Jawhar al-Siqilli during the conquest of Egypt later in the year.
Ja'far continued in office for a while under Jawhar as governor, but was dismissed by the Fatimid caliph al-Mu'izz (r. 953–975) in favour of his rival Ibn Killis. Following the death of Ibn Killis in 991, he was again offered the post of vizier, but resigned after a few months. He died in 1001. As the historian of the vizierate, Dominique Sourdel, writes, Ja'far "left behind him the reputation of a generous patron of poets and scholars [...] but also that of an eccentric who had acquired a collection of snakes and scorpions which terrified his neighbours".
His son Abu'l-Abbas was appointed vizier by the Fatimid caliph al-Hakim (r. 996–1021) in 1014/5, but executed after a few days.