attempting a fresh invasion of Egypt was conceived, and preparations made for its execution; but it was delayed, it is said at the request of the caliph’s mother, who wished to make a pilgrimage to Mecca first; and her honourable treatment by Kāfūr when she passed through Egypt induced the caliph to postpone the invasion till that sovereign’s death.
In August 972 Moʽizz resolved to follow Jauhar’s pressing invitation to enter his new capital Cairo. With his arrival there the centre of the Fatimite power was transferred from Mahdia and Kairawān to Egypt, and their original dominion became a province called al-Maghrib, which immediately fell into the hands of a hereditary dynasty, the Zeirids, acknowledging Fatimite suzerainty. The first sovereign was Bulukkīn, also called Abu’l-Futūḥ Yūsuf, appointed by Moʽizz as his viceroy on the occasion of his departure for Egypt: separate prefects were appointed for Sicily and Tripoli; and at the first the minister of finance was to be an official independent of the governor of the Maghrib. On the death of Bulukkīn in 984 he was succeeded by a son who took the royal title al-Manṣūr, under whose rule an attempt was made by the Kutāma, instigated by the caliph, to shake off the yoke of the Zeirids, who originated from the Sanhaja tribe. This attempt was defeated by the energy of Manṣūr in 988; and the sovereignty of the Fatimites in the Maghrib became more and more confined to recognition in public prayer and on coins, and the payment of tribute and the giving of presents to the viziers at Cairo. The fourth ruler of the Zeirid dynasty, called Moʽizz, endeavoured to substitute ʽAbbāsid suzerainty for Fatimite: his land was invaded by Arab colonies sent by the Fatimite caliph, with whom in 1051 Moʽizz fought a decisive engagement, after which the dominion of the Zeirids was restricted to the territory adjoining Mahdia; a number of smaller kingdoms rising up around them. The Zeirids were finally overthrown by Roger II. of Sicily in 1148.
After the death of al-Ādid, the last Fatimite caliph in Egypt, some attempts were made to place on the throne a member of the family, and at one time there seemed a chance of the Assassins, who formed a branch of the Fatimite sect, assisting in this project. In 1174 a conspiracy for the restoration of the dynasty was organized by ʽUmarah of Yemen, a court poet, with the aid of eight officials of the government: it was discovered and those who were implicated were executed. Two persons claiming Fatimite descent took the royal titles al-Moʽtaṣim billah and al-Ḥāmid lillah in the years 1175 and 1176 respectively; and as late as 1192 we hear of pretenders in Egypt. Some members of the family are traceable till near the end of the 7th century of Islam.
The doctrines of the Fatimites as a sect, apart from their claim to the sovereignty in Islam, are little known, and we are not justified in identifying them with those of the Assassins, the Carmathians or the Druses, though all these sects are connected with them in origin. A famous account is given by Maqrīzī of a system of education by which the neophyte had doubts gently instilled into his mind till he was prepared to have the allegorical meaning of the Koran set before him, and to substitute some form of natural for revealed religion. In most accounts of the early days of the community it is stated that the permission of wine-drinking and licentiousness, and the community of wives and property formed part of its tenets. There is little in the recorded practice of the Fatimite state to confirm or justify these assertions; and they appear to have differed from orthodox Moslems rather in small details of ritual and law than in deep matters of doctrine.
Authorities.—F. Wüstenfeld, Geschichte der Fatimiden Chalifen (Göttingen, 1881); E. Mercier, Histoire de l’Afrique Septentrionale (Paris, 1888); M. J. de Goeje, Mémoire sur les Carmathes de Bahrain et les Fatimides (2nd ed., Leiden, 1886); P. Casanova, “Mémoire sur les derniers Fatimides,” Mém. Miss. archéologique au Caire, vol. vi.; for the lives of ʽObaidallah and Abū Yazīd, Cherbonneau in the Journal Asiatique, sér. iv. vol. 20, and sér. v. vol. 5. See also Egypt: History, sect. Mahommedan. (D. S. M.*)
FAUBOURG, the French name for a portion of a town which
lies outside the walls, hence properly a suburb. The name
survives in certain parts of Paris, such as the Faubourg St Antoine,
and the Faubourg St Germain, &c., which have long
since ceased to be suburbs and have become portions of the
town itself. The origin of the word is doubtful. The earlier
spelling faux-bourg, and the occurrence in medieval Latin of
falsus-burgus (see Ducange, Glossarium, s.v. “Falsus-Burgus”),
was taken as showing its obvious origin and meaning, the sham
or quasi-borough. The generally accepted derivation is from
fors, outside (Lat. foris, outside the gates), and bourg. It is
suggested that the word is the French adaptation of the Ger.
Pfahlbürger, the burghers of the pale, i.e. outside the walls
but within the pale.
FAUCES (a Latin plural word for “throat”; the singular faux is rarely found), in anatomy, the hinder part of the mouth, which leads into the pharynx; also an architectural term given by Vitruvius to narrow passages on either side of the tablinum, through which access could be obtained from the atrium to the peristylar court in the rear.
FAUCHER, LÉONARD JOSEPH [Léon] (1803–1854), French politician and economist, was born at Limoges on the 8th of September 1803. When he was nine years old the family removed to Toulouse, where the boy was sent to school. His parents were separated in 1816, and Léon Faucher, who resisted his father’s attempts to put him to a trade, helped to support himself and his mother during the rest of his school career by designing embroidery and needlework. As a private tutor in Paris he continued his studies in the direction of archaeology and history, but with the revolution of 1830 he was drawn into active political journalism on the Liberal side. He was on the staff of the Temps from 1830 to 1833, when he became editor of the Constitutionnel for a short time. A Sunday journal of his own, Le Bien public, proved a disastrous financial failure; and his political independence having caused his retirement from the Constitutionnel, he joined in 1834 the Courrier français, of which he was editor from 1839 until 1842, when the paper changed hands. Faucher belonged in policy to the dynastic Left, and consistently preached moderation to the more ardent Liberals. On resigning his connexion with the Courrier français he gave his attention chiefly to economic questions. He advocated a customs union between the Latin countries to counterbalance the German Zollverein, and in view of the impracticability of such a measure narrowed his proposal in 1842 to a customs union between France and Belgium. In 1843 he visited England to study the English social system, publishing the results of his investigations in a famous series of Études sur l’Angleterre (2 vols., 1845), published originally in the Revue des deux mondes. He helped to organize the Bordeaux association for free-trade propaganda, and it was as an advocate of free trade that he was elected in 1847 to the chamber of deputies for Reims. After the revolution of 1848 he entered the Constituent Assembly for the department of Marne, where he opposed many Republican measures—the limitation of the hours of labour, the creation of the national relief works in Paris, the abolition of the death penalty and others. Under the presidency of Louis Napoleon he became minister of public works, and then minister of the interior, but his action in seeking to influence the coming elections by a circular letter addressed to the prefects was censured by the Constituent Assembly, and he was compelled to resign office on the 14th of May 1849. In 1851 he was again minister of the interior until Napoleon declared his intention of resorting to universal suffrage. After the coup d’état of December he refused a seat in the consultative commission instituted by Napoleon. He had been elected a member of the Academy of Moral and Political Science in 1849, and his retirement from politics permitted a return to his writings on economics. He had been to Italy in search of health in 1854, and was returning to Paris on business when he was seized by typhoid at Marseilles, where he died on the 14th of December 1854.
His miscellaneous writings were collected (2 vols., 1856) as Mélanges d’économie politique et de finance, and his speeches in the legislature are printed in vol. ii. of Léon Faucher, biographie et correspondance (2 vols., 2nd ed., Paris, 1875).
