n.2.xv. AND THE INVASION OF DONGOLA 163

In 782 an Ommayyad usurper in the Sa'id proclaimed himself

Khalifa of Islam and met with repeated successes before he was

caught and executed. His head was sent to the true Khalifa at Baghdad.

XIII Two years later began the most serious period of Kaysite

rebellions. The beginning of the ninth century witnessed the most

serious of these and was also a period of very acrimonious theological

disputation. Apart from the main schism between the supporters of

the different claimants to the Khalifate, Sunni and Shi'a, divergent

schools of theology and law had arisen. At Baghdad the Hanifite

doctrines were prevalent, but those of the Imam Malik ibn Anas held

the field in Egypt and westwards during the latter part of the eighth and in the ninth centuries, and were especially patronized by the

rival Ommayyad dynasty established in Spain. But at the beginning

of the ninth century the Imam el Shafa'i came to Fostat and his

teaching thenceforth began gradually to acquire the predominance which is assured to it in Egypt at the present day—a predominance which, it may be noted, has never extended to the Sudan nor seriously

rivalled the hold which the doctrines of Malik obtain in that country and along the north coast of Africa outside Egypt ^.

XIV As regards the more secular disturbances, a culminating point was reached about 831 a.d.^, when practically all the Copts through-

out Lower Egypt followed the lead of the Beni Kays and Beni Lakhm and other rebellious Arabs and broke into an insurrection which lasted for nearly a year and compelled the Khalifa to visit Egypt in person. He made a speedy end of the revolt and so crushed

the Copts that henceforth they ceased to be of any great moment. Lane-Poole says^:

From this date [832 a.d.] begins the numerical preponderance of the Muslims over the Christians in Egypt, and the settlement of the Arabs in the villages and on the land instead of, as heretofore, only in the great

cities. Egypt now became, for the first time, an essentially Muhammadan country.

XV The Bega meanwhile* had been giving trouble by their con-

tinual depredations, and the Khalifa had sent 'Abdulla ibn el Gahm

against them. A treaty was finally concluded in 831 a.d., the year of

the final Coptic revolt, at Aswan, between 'Abdulla and the Bega

chief Kanun ibn 'Abd el 'Aziz^. The chief provision of the treaty was that the portion of the Bega country that lay between Aswan on

^ See Lane-Poole, loc. cit. p. 31, and Sir R. K. Wilson, Digest..., p. 19.

- Makrizi, Khetdt, i, 232; Lane-Poole, loc. cit. p. 37. ^ Loc. cit. p. 38.

* Makrizi, loc. cit. ii, 565-566, and cp. Budge, n, 187-188.

'' From his name evidently he was a convert to Islam.