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Rh from Tyre named Allaqah had the effrontery to declare his city independent and to strike money in his own name. For a time he defied the Egyptian army and with the aid of a Byzantine flotilla stood against the Egyptian fleet. But at last he had to surrender his besieged city and suffer flaying and crucifixion. His skin was filled with hay and exhibited in Cairo.

Al-Hakim revived the humiliating disabilities imposed by Umar II and al-Mutawakkil on Christians and Jews, who fared well under the other Fatimids. Although his mother and his vizir were Christians, al-Hakim reactivated earlier regulations requiring distinguishing garments and in 1009 added that when Christians were in public baths they should display a five-pound cross dangling from their necks, and Jews an equally weighty frame of wood with jingling bells. In the same year he demolished several Christian churches, including that of the Holy Sepulchre in Jerusalem. By way of implementing the koranic prohibition against wine, he ordered all grapevines uprooted. He invited those members of the tolerated sects who were unwilling to abide by his regulations to profess Islam or else emigrate to the Byzantine empire. Apparently in his time, almost four centuries after Muhammad, the Christians in Egypt and Syria were still folly as numerous as the Moslems.

Other edicts of al-Hakim show strange contradictions. He built an academy in Cairo only to destroy it with its professors three years later. He legislated against sexual immorality and went so far as to prohibit the appearance of women in the Cairo streets. He issued edicts against banquets and music and included certain dishes and chess playing. Like several other descendants of Ali, he was considered divine by extreme admirers. The first to offer him public divine veneration was a Persian called al-Darazi (the tailor), from whom the Druze sect took its name. Basic in the Druze system is the doctrine of the incarnation of the deity in human form, the last and most important mani- Rh