Da'ud ibn al-Adid

Daoud ibn al-Adid (also spelled Dawud and Da'ud; ), known by the regnal name of al-Ḥāmid liʾllāh among his followers, was the 25th imam of Hafizi Isma'ilism, and pretender to the Fatimid Caliphate. Daoud was the oldest son of the last Fatimid caliph, al-Adid. When al-Adid died in 1171, Daoud was a child. He was not allowed to succeed to the throne by the all-powerful vizier, Saladin, who inaugurated his own Ayyubid regime instead. Like the rest of his family, Daoud spent the rest of his life until his death in 1207/8 in captivity, despite occasional revolts and conspiracies by Fatimid sympathizers. He is reported to have had a son, Sulayman Badr al-Din, conceived in secret, who became the last Hafizi imam. Life Daoud was the oldest son of the last Fatimid caliph, al-Adid li-Din Allah. Like his immediate predecessors, al-Adid would be little more than a figurehead monarch, effectively a puppet in the hands of courtiers and strongmen who disputed with one another over the spoils of the tottering Fatimid regime. The last and most notable of these strongmen was Saladin, who became vizier and the de facto ruler of Egypt in March 1169. Fall of the Fatimid Caliphate Under pressure from his Syrian overlord, Nur al-Din, Saladin began to undermine the religious foundations of the Fatimid regime, undermining Fatimid-sponsored Hafizi Isma'ilism and restoring Sunni supremacy in Egypt. This culminated on 10 September 1171, when the Shafi'i jurist Najm al-Din al-Khabushani publicly proclaimed the name of the Sunni Abbasid caliph, al-Mustadi, instead of al-Adid's, and read out a list of the Fatimids' crimes. When al-Adid died a few days later, on 13 September 1171, Saladin proclaimed the Fatimid caliphate as abolished. Officially, according to the medieval Egyptian historian al-Maqrizi, this was because al-Adid had failed to designate Daoud (an infant at the time) as heir.