released from his prison and restored as regent. Whether Abd al-Majid had previously harboured designs on the caliphate or not, the lack of an heir to al-Amir meant that the continuation of the Fatimid dynasty and the Isma'ili imamate required that he succeed as imam and caliph, since according to Isma'ili doctrine, "God does not leave the Moslem Community without an Imam to lead them on the right path". This was done in a decree () on 23 January 1132, whereby Abd al-Majid assumed the title ("Keeper of God's Religion"). For the first time in the Fatimid dynasty, power was not passed from father to son. This radical departure from established practice had to be addressed and justified. Thus the proclaimed al-Hafiz's right to the imamate, likening it to the sun, which had been briefly eclipsed by al-Amir's death and Kutayfat's usurpation, but had now reappeared in accordance with the divine purpose. No reference to any son of al-Amir was made. Al-Hafiz claimed that he had secretly received the designation () as successor by al-Amir, and that Caliph al-Mustansir had foreseen this event. Earlier examples of breaks in the direct succession of the imamate, chiefly the designation by Muhammad of his son-in-law Ali ibn Abi Talib, were brought up to buttress his claim. Al-Hafiz's accession produced a major schism in the Musta'li branch of Isma'ilism, between the adherents of the imamate of al-Tayyib (the "Tayyibis"), pitted against supporters of al-Hafiz and his successors (the "Hafizis"). Al-Hafiz was largely accepted by the Isma'ili faithful in the Fatimid-ruled domains in Egypt, Nubia, and the Levant, but rebuffed by some of the Isma'ili communities abroad. Most notably, this was the case in the only other major Isma'ili-ruled region, Yemen, where the hitherto staunchly pro-Fatimid Sulayhid dynasty broke up. The Sulayhid queen, Arwa, upheld the rights of al-Tayyib, whose birth had been announced to her in a letter by al-Amir, while the regional dynasties of the Hamdanids and the Zurayids recognized al-Hafiz's claims. The issue was not merely political, but, given the pivotal role of the imam in the Isma'ili faith, also intensely religious. In the words of Stern, "on it depended the continuity of institutional religion as well as the personal salvation of the believer". As Stern emphasizes, the issue was "not so much the person of the claimant that weighed with his followers [...] (this is, of course, obvious in the case