Saladin abolishes the Fatimid caliphate

1168

With the last Fatimid caliph al-Adid lying on his deathbed behind the palace walls of Cairo, Saladin quietly ordered the Friday sermon to be read in the name of the Abbasid caliph in distant Baghdad. Two centuries of Ismaili Shia rule in Egypt ended not with a siege or a battle but with a single sermon, and Sunni orthodoxy was restored to the Nile valley at a stroke.