There is no doubt that al-ʿAziz, in appointing Barjawan as tutor intended him to act as regent until the young prince was old enough to assume the power himself, although Ibn ʿAmmar and the Qadi Muhammad b. Nuʿman were associated with him as guardians. But at this point Ibn ʿAmmar, the acknowledged leader of the Katama party in Cairo, seized the office of _Wasita_ or chief minister, to which was united the office of _sifara_ or secretary of state, ejecting Isa b. Nestorius, and assumed the title of _Amin ad-Dawla_ or “the one trusted in the empire.” This was the first time that the term “empire” was employed in the Fatimid state and, as De Sacy points out (_Druses_ i. cclxxxv.), its use shows the appearance of a new tendency. So far the Fatimids had been the leaders of a sect of which the Imam was supreme pontiff: circumstances had enabled the sect to establish a state, first in Ifrikiya, then in Egypt, but it retained, at least in theory, a quasi-religious character, and its professed duty was to maintain the divine right of the Mahdi and his descendants. It seems, however, that by this time there were some who had out-grown this sectarian point of view and desired the Fatimid state to pose frankly as a secular power. The Berber tribe of Katama appears to have been the centre of this change of view; they considered no doubt that they had been the conquerors of Ifrikiya and of Egypt, and by their conquest had established a Berber monarchy: why should the fruits of this conquest be laid at the feet of an Arab dynasty whose supernatural claims they no longer believed?—the Fatimid Khalifs had given no evidence of miraculous powers, but were evidently ordinary human beings whose kingdom had been secured by the ready credulity of their forefathers. Ibn ʿAmmar comes forward as the leader of what we may term the secular party, and his programme seems to have been to dispense with the religious claims of the Fatimids, and to treat Egypt and its subject provinces simply as a _dawla_ or temporal kingdom. No doubt these views had been gathering force for some time past, and certainly al-ʿAziz had been more prominent as the secular ruler and had allowed the sectarian propaganda to drop into the background, but his death and the accession of a child Khalif offered exceptional opportunities for modifying the policy of the state. De Sacy suggests that Ibn ʿAmmar’s party was disposed to get rid of the young sovereign and to establish a purely Berber government, a suggestion which has every appearance of probability. With the disappearance of the divinely appointed Mahdi and the end of the Fatimid line the country would be set free from the peculiar religious views of the Ismaʿiliya, which were an actual barrier to the progress of the state and alienated from it the bulk of the subject population. It seems a very probable picture of the tendencies prevailing at the moment and rests upon rather