The Khalif al-Amir left no son, but at the time of his death one of his wives was pregnant, and it was possible that she might give birth to an heir. Under these circumstances Abu l-Maymun ʿAbdu l-Hamid al-Hafiz li-dini-llah (“the guardian of the religion of God”), son of Muhammad, one of the brothers of Mustali, and consequently cousin to the late Khalif, was declared regent, and as such received the oath of allegiance from the citizens of Cairo on the very day of al-Amir’s murder, and on the same day the wazir Abu ʿAli Ahmad, son of al-Afdal, received the oath of allegiance from the troops. The regent al-Hafiz expressed his confidence that the child about to be borne to the deceased Khalif would be a son. “No Imam of this family,” he said, “dies without leaving a male child to whom he transmits the Imamate by special declaration” (Ibn Khall. 430). Although the late Khalif’s cousin was thus declared formal regent the wazir Ahmad put him in confinement and took the whole power into his own hands, and this received the ready acquiescence of the court and of the troops and people, for everyone regarded the late experiment of the Khalif acting as his own wazir as disastrous. The new wazir ruled justly and well, and restored to each the property which had been confiscated by al-Amir, so that as a ruler he was greatly esteemed. In other respects, however, his conduct throws a strange light on the conditions prevailing in the Fatimid state at this period. The Fatimids claimed to be not only rulers of Egypt, but the legitimate Khalifs in true descent from the Prophet, and also Imams divinely appointed as guides and teachers of Islam. The whole Fatimid state was bound up with this religious theory, although it was one which did not command the sympathy of the bulk of the subject population, and a distinct tendency had more than once appeared to discard it for frankly secular claims. Under the wazir Ahmad this theory on which the Fatimid claim rested was formally discarded by the government. Ahmad himself was a Shiʿite, but of the sect of the “Twelvers” and so a follower, not of the Fatimid Imam under whom he held office, but of the hidden and unrevealed Imam who, under the name of Muhammad al-Muntazir, had disappeared in 260. For the present, therefore, the Friday prayer in the mosques was offered for the invisible “al-Kaʾim,” and his name appeared on the coinage. To us such a condition seems almost incredible, even though during the time the titular head was merely regent and not fully recognised as Khalif. When al-Amir’s wife was delivered her child was a daughter, but for all that al-Hafiz remained simply regent until 526.