Dhimmis, as a result, had come to throng the caliphal ministries – and the caliphal bedrooms. Even al-Hakim’s own mother was a Christian. What could this appear, to the pious Muslims of Egypt, but a scandal and a blasphemy? Indeed, only a year before al-Hakim’s accession, in 995, a bloody marker of their resentments had been served to the future Caliph when a mob had gone on the rampage and massacred over a hundred Christians in a single pogrom. A marker that al-Hakim, as time would prove, had noted well.He may have been a son of a Christian, but even as a young boy of eleven, inheriting the throne while out on campaign against the infidels of Constantinople, he had believed himself implacably fated to prove the doom of his mother’s faith. As his reign progressed, dhimmis who had once basked in the radiance of caliphal favour found themselves increasingly subjected to humiliations and harassments. Christians and Jews alike were forbidden to appear in public unless wearing distinctive turbans of black. As a further refinement, Christians were obliged to hang crosses around their necks, and Jews heavy blocks of wood. They were also banned from employing Muslims – a measure which immediately served to plunge most dhimmi businesses into bankruptcy. There were some, however, who lost more than their income. In 1009, the dawning of the fifth Islamic century, numerous non-Muslim officials in the imperial bureaucracy were scourged to death and their corpses fed to Cairo’s few remaining dogs. Others, under threat of torture, were obliged to convert to Islam. Yet even these outrages, in the view of the Caliph’s horrified Christians, were not the most shocking of their master’s crimes. Worse then murder or oppression, after all, was sacrilege – and al-Hakim just happened to have within his power the very holiest of their shrines.Jerusalem, where Jesus had died and been buried, remained, under the Fatimids, a predominantly dhimmi town. True, back in the first century of the Islamic Empire, when the Umayyads had ruled as the masters of a unified Caliphate, a mosque and a mighty dome had both been built on the site of the obliterated Jewish Temple: imperious symbols of Muslim dominance. Nevertheless, as a native of the city who frequented them grumbled, “Everywhere the Jews and Christians have the upper hand, and the mosques are void of either congregation or assembly of learned men.”19 One unhappy consequence of this, so Muslims liked to believe, was the appalling standard of hygiene in the public baths: “Nowhere will you find any filthier.”20 Another, even more distressing, was the sheer ostentation in Jerusalem of dhimmi rituals. The Jews, for instance, deprived of their ancient sanctuary on the Temple Mount, had relocated their place of public prayer to the Mount of Olives, directly across the valley from the city’s most famous mosque; but even the Jews were less offensively in Muslim faces than were the Christians. Almost seven centuries had passed since the Emperor Constantine, arriving in Jerusalem, had ordered the building of a great basilica over the site of Christ’s tomb; and still it stood there, the Church of the Holy Sepulchre, a place of such awesome and refulgent sacredness that there was nowhere in all Christendom, not even in Rome, that could possibly rival it. To Christians “from across the entire face of the world,”21 in the West as well as the East, it was, quite simply, beyond compare: “the heart of the earth.”22But to al-Hakim, it was a standing provocation. Plans for its destruction were first drawn up at the end of 100723 – one year after a star of exceptional brightness, blazing suddenly in the constellation of Scorpio, had served to reassure the Caliph that he was indeed touched by the divine. Nevertheless, even with his workmen primed, al-Hakim had no intention of hurrying. Naturally, as befitted a would-be guardian of the end days, he knew that timing was everything. Not until 1009 itself – the Muslim year 400 – were the demolition teams finally set to work. “The Church of the Dungheap,” *as Muslims derisively termed Constantine’s great basilica, was first stripped of all its treasures and furnishings, and then, right the way down to the bedrock, dismantled brick by brick. The very tomb of Christ was hacked about and “assaulted by a prodigious fire.”24 All the church’s magnificence was methodically demolished and left as dust.In mosques everywhere, it is said, lengthy prayers of joy were raised, and the praises of the Caliph were of an unparalleled extravagance.25Meanwhile, as reports of what had been done spread beyond the frontiers of the Caliphate, and into the heartlands of Christendom, so the rumours that swept the appalled Christians of the West grew ever more confused and terrifying. Some claimed, rather farfetchedly, that the entire outrage had been plotted by the Jews of Orléans, who had sent letters to al-Hakim, encouraging him in his act of desecration. Others named the Caliph the King of Babylon, who in ancient times had destroyed King Solomon’s Temple. Others noted how the heavens had broadcast their revulsion at the sacrilege, frowning upon the world, and inflicting upon mankind “severe dry spells, very much rain, many plagues, severe famines and numerous failures of the sun and moon”26 – and drew their own conclusions.And as they looked to the skies they hugged their souls and wondered what, in an age marked by such prodigies, sinful humanity should do.