The Almohad caliph Abu Ya'qub Yusuf, ruler of Morocco, had declared in Fés, the capital, that all Jews must convert to Islam.

One Jew, Judah ha-Kohen ibn Shushan, had been arrested as a practicing Jew, found guilty, and burned alive for refusing to convert.

His pupil Moses Maimonides, whose family had left Córdoba six years earlier, had fled the country, moving to Palestine and, a few months later, Egypt, where Jews are free to practice their faith openly, though any Jew who had once submitted to Islam courts death if he relapses to Judaism.

Maimonides himself is at one point accused of being a renegade Muslim, but he is able to prove that he had never really adopted the faith of Islam and so is exonerated.

Though Egypt is a haven from harassment and persecution, Moses Maimonides had soon been assailed by personal problems.

His father dies shortly after the family's arrival in Egypt.

His younger brother, David, a prosperous jewelry merchant on whom Moses leans for support, had died in a shipwreck in 1167, taking the entire family fortune with him, leaving Moses as the sole support of his family.

He cannot turn to the rabbinate because the rabbinate is conceived of as a public service that offers its practitioners no remuneration.

Pressed by economic necessity, Maimonides had taken advantage of his medical studies and become a practicing physician.

The Fatimid kingdom of Egypt and Libya had begun to crumble internally in the mid-twelfth century; the caliphs have lost most of their power, and the viziers, at the head of a highly centralized government, have assumed much of the executive and military leadership.

Amalric in the winter of 1168 again attacks Egypt, and Shawar switches alliances again, this time going back to Shirkuh, who he had betrayed in 1164.

Shirkuh and Shawar attempt to force the Crusader garrison out of Egypt, but Amalric presses on, until his army is camped south of Fustat.

The Fatimid vizier, Shawar, fearing that the Egyptian capital (in today's Old Cairo) will be captured by the Crusaders, orders the city set afire.

The city will burn for fifty-four days.