ABSTRACT
There were several occasions over the past decade for scholars with different specialities to interpret rather than describe the historical and cultural phenomenon of the Fatimids. At the time of the great colloquium celebrating Cairo's first millennium, the late Gustav von Grünebaum, Professor Bernard Lewis, and author in a more limited sense, sought to identify the reasons for Fatimid successes, failures, or simply cultural or historical peculiarities. But a more important reason may be that there is something unusual, puzzling about the Fatimids, as though they were an anomaly in the development of Islamic culture. At a time of localized, ethnocentric dynastic movements from Spain to Transoxiana, it was a pan-Islamic, Arab-centered but universal caliphate. Granting, then, a certain amount of methodological despair in dealing with this mass of uneven and unenlightening information, a number of observations can be made which are related to the hypotheses formulated around architecture.
