Shia North Africa

For the past few weeks I've been very interested in the Fatimid Caliphate. As far as I can tell they were very lenient on other religions and sects which really didn't allow their religion, Shia Islam to spread. So, could the Fatimids have somehow spread Shia Islam in North Africa? With this Shia influence also surviving to this day like in Iran and Iraq.
 
It would be relatively hard : you didn't have much of a massive Isma'ilist presence in Egypt historically at the end of the Fatimid Caliphate, after all.

First, you'd need to count with an already present religious infrastructure in North Africa, and boy, this is a mess of ibadis, zaidis, malikis, sufris, isma'ilis (to quote only the most noticable ones). These were not only established since the VIIIth century, but served as the basic structure on which Arabo-Berber states grew on. It would require for Fatimids to war endlessly against local Berber dynasties (a bit like the fiscal-religious revolt of Abu Yazid IOTL) that they can't really hope to win decisively.

Eventually, they'd be content (would they not enter in Egypt, which meant they get relatively disinterested on Ifriqyia and Maghrib) with a religious influence on the higher layers.
Remember, indeed, that the radical distinction between Sunni and Shi'it Islam is relatively recent : up to the classical Middle-Ages, you had a lot of mutual influences between orthodox and heterodox Islamic teachings, the differenciation itself coming from the Fatimid caliphal revendication, which made both Abassids and Umayyads more prone to define which was orthodox, and which wasn't.

What worked in Iran and Iraq, was mostly due IMO, to the presence of imperial structures already present in modern-era Persia, allowing an easier religious-social policy. In Ifriqiya and even more Maghrib...that's another story (even if malikism clearly dominated thanks to the succession of maliki dynasties.

A, slightly better, PoD for a Shi'i Maghrib and Ifriqiya, may be an Idrissid-wank. Idrissids didn't do that well IOTL, in spite of good bases and ressources at hand. Idriss II managed to defeat most of powerful ibadi and sufri communities, and the downfall of the caliphate-wannabee state were (as usual) the succession wars.

I'm not sure how we could get rid of the heavy tribal features and the political unstability of Arabo-Islamic dynasties, but with a longer living Idriss II that would manage to hold its own against Aghlabids and Umayyads, you might see a greater presence of Zaidi Islam, which is part of the proto-Shi'a ensemble, in North Africa. If you manage to screw hard enough the Umayyad Emirate, then you'd screw Maliki school in the region as well.

As far as I can tell they were very lenient on other religions and sects which really didn't allow their religion, Shia Islam to spread
Mostly because they didn't have much of a choice in the matter : Near-East and North Africa was a religious mess (altough on different grounds) on which Islam represented at best a relative majority by the XIth century for what matter Near-East, and Isma'ilism a tiny, tiny minority in North Africa.

Rather than lenient, as you did have regular outbursts of religious authority, maybe it's better to talk of "rough tolerence", such as it existed in Latin States.
 
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