With the proclamation of his caliphate in January 910, al–Mahdī, the first of the Fātimid rulers, celebrated the culmination of a clandestine struggle that had deep roots and varying fortunes in many Islamic territories far from the north African scene of his ultimate triumph. His rise to power occurred not in the eastern areas of Iran and Iraq, where his immediate ancestors were born, or at his recent headquarters at the town of Salamiya in north central Syria, or in the Yemen or any of the other regions where his followers had been active. Al–Mahdī was already recognized as the supreme religious leader, the imam, of the Ismā‘īlī Shi‘ites by his loyal adherents, but he had not, until then, governed a politically defined realm; nor had there been in Islam as a whole another Shi‘ite caliph except for ‘Alī ibn Abī Tālib two and a half centuries earlier. Al–Mahdī’s ascension was, in his own view and that of his followers, a restoration, a revolution in which the wrongs of 250 years were redressed by the combining at last of the divinely sanctioned imamate and the caliphate in one office. He would henceforth guide the Islamic community as God had always intended, and as his ancestors the Prophet Muhammad and Muhammad’s sole legitimate heir ‘Alī had done. His immediate goal was to return Islam to its true and proper form by bringing those who most loved the family of the prophet back into positions of authority. He would, moreover, fight against the enemies of Islam both abroad and at home; the ‘Abbāsid usurpers were thus served notice that their own claim to rule would no longer be without a rival.