Ubaydallah al-Mahdi
Ubaydallah al-Mahdi was the hidden imam of the Ismaili mission who came out of hiding in 909 to be proclaimed caliph at Raqqada in Ifriqiya, after a Berber army raised by his missionary had destroyed the Aghlabid emirate for him, and who in twenty-five years made the first Shia caliphate a state, with a new capital on the sea at Mahdia, a fleet, a treasury and a claim to the whole Muslim world that his descendants pursued to Cairo. The Abbasids and the Sunni historians called him an impostor and his line the Ubaydids, and the argument about whether he descended from Ali and Fatima or from a Jewish or Persian family in Syria has never closed. He was born about 873 at Askar Mukram in Khuzistan or at Salamiya in Syria, where the Ismaili leadership had lived in secret for a century directing a network of missionaries from Yemen to the Maghreb. When the Qarmatians broke with him in 899 over his claim to be the imam in person, and the Abbasid police began to look for him, he left Syria for Egypt and then, disguised as a merchant, for the Maghreb, and was arrested and held at Sijilmasa in the far west. His missionary Abu Abdallah al-Shii had meanwhile converted the Kutama Berbers of the Kabylie and led them against the Aghlabids of Kairouan, who fled in March 909. Abu Abdallah marched to Sijilmasa, freed his imam, and brought him to Raqqada, where he was proclaimed Commander of the Faithful and al-Mahdi, the rightly guided one whom the Shia awaited, in January 910. Within a year he had the missionary killed for doubting him. He crushed a Kutama revolt, sent two expeditions to take Egypt, in 914 and 919, which reached Alexandria and the Fayyum and were beaten back, and took Sicily's allegiance and raided the Italian coast. Mahdia, on a peninsula south of Kairouan, was begun in 916 and occupied in 921, walled against the Berbers behind as much as the Byzantines in front; it is the first purpose-built capital of a Muslim dynasty in the west. He died there in March 934, and his son al-Qaim, his grandson al-Mansur and his great-grandson al-Muizz, who took Egypt, followed in order.
- Lived: 873 CE – 934 CE
- Nationality: Arab
- Roles: caliph, monarch, founder
