page_title: Jawdhar
section_title: Under al-Mansur
hierarchical_section_title: Jawdhar / Under al-Mansur
caption_attribution_description: Français&#160;: Grande mosquée de Mahdia, vue à partir du toit d'El Borj Kebir, Tunisie
context_page_description: Jawdhar, surnamed al-Ustadh, was a eunuch slave who served the Fatimid caliphs al-Qa'im, al-Mansur, and al-Mu'izz as chamberlain and de facto chief minister until his death. He was an extremely powerful figure in the Fatimid court, and the accession of al-Mansur was probably due to his machinations. His collected documents and letters were published after his death by his secretary as the Sirat al-Ustadh Jawdhar, and form one of the main historical sources for the governance of the Fatimid state in the period.
context_section_description: According to the official Fatimid accounts, al-Qa'im died on 17 May 946, at a critical moment for the Fatimid Caliphate, when a large-scale rebellion under the Berber preacher Abu Yazid had overrun Ifriqiya and was threatening al-Mahdiya itself. He was succeeded not by his oldest son, but by the younger Isma'il, who became the new caliph as al-Mansur (r. 946–953). Jawdhar insists in his memoirs that he was the trustee of al-Mansur's secret nomination as his father's heir already at the time of al-Qa'im's own accession in 934, but modern historians of the Fatimid period, such as Heinz Halm and Michael Brett, suspect that al-Mansur's unheralded rise to power was the result of a palace intrigue headed by none other than Jawdhar, with the participation of other figures from al-Qa'im's harem. 
  Jawdhar himself played a prominent role in safeguarding al-Mansur's position: the new caliph ordered the confinement of all his uncles and brothers to the palace under Jawdhar's supervision. Halm qualifies his role as "majordomo", and when al-Mansur managed to break the siege of al-Mahdiya and pursued the retreating rebels inland, Jawdhar remained behind in charge of al-Mahdiya. When al-Mansur defeated the rebel forces on 13 August 946, Jawdhar read the victory dispatch before the congregation at the Great Mosque of Mahdiya.
  When the rebel leader was finally defeated and captured on 15 August 947, al-Mansur, in the dispatch announcing his victory, set Jawdhar free. For the next quarter-century, writes the historian Michael Brett, Jawdhar would be "the iron man of the administration" as the caliph's right-hand man, a position which earned him considerable antipathy, and few friends. Apart from the agents appointed from his own entourage, his only political allies among the wider Fatimid elites were the Kalbid emirs of Sicily.
caption: The Fatimid-era Great Mosque of al-Mahdiya
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