This article records tradition as it has been passed down and reported. Its sources are not yet part of the atlas's verified catalogue.
Hamza ibn Ali ibn Ahmad was born around 985 in Zuzan, a town in Khorasan under Samanid rule, and emigrated as a young man to Fatimid Egypt. There he became a missionary of a heterodox strand of Ismaili teaching during the reign of the Fatimid caliph al-Hakim bi-Amr Allah, working against active opposition from the established Ismaili clergy of Cairo.
Despite that opposition, Hamza built a parallel missionary hierarchy across Egypt and Syria, organized around belief in al-Hakim's own divinity rather than around the caliph's ordinary political authority. In 1017 he proclaimed the call that formally organized this movement, an act Druze tradition marks as the founding of the faith itself.
The proclamation placed Hamza at the center of a claim few of his contemporaries were prepared to accept, that a reigning Fatimid caliph was himself a manifestation of the divine. That claim, and the missionary structure Hamza built to carry it into Egypt and Syria, is what separated the movement he founded from the wider Ismaili tradition it grew out of, and it is why the Druze faith dates its own founding to a specific proclamation rather than to a gradual doctrinal drift.
Hamza's own path to that moment ran through Samanid Khorasan and then Fatimid Cairo, a journey from the eastern edge of the Islamic world to its political and religious center, and it was in that center, working against clergy who already held established standing there, that his missionary hierarchy took shape and his 1017 proclamation found an audience.