Between 1058 and 1072CE, the Fatimid state in Egypt and Syria experienced a combination of famine and civil war that devastated the Fatimid state as a whole and the city of Fustat/Cairo in particular. These events changed forever the political structure of the Fatimid state, led to the partial destruction of Fustat, and seem to have wrought profound demographic changes throughout the country. Despite the apparent importance of these events, little research has been done to analyze them. Some of this neglect has to do with the fact that many of the traditional sources for the Fatimid period are written later and are not forthcoming about the events of this crisis or the people involved. What I propose to do in this paper is to explore this crisis from a variety of perspectives using the available narrative and, to a lesser extent, documentary sources, as well as paleo-climatological studies. I hope to illustrate that while this crisis had climatological dimensions, it was fundamentally a political crisis that left scars on elites and non-elites alike. In examining the intellectual establishment of Fatimid Cairo through the lives and writings of intellectuals who lived through the 1060s this paper traces a variety of intellectual reactions that vary by community and by individual. In general there is a sense of a tightening of communal bonds and increased defensiveness in all communities, although there are differences in how this is expressed. Although the social aspects of this crisis are the hardest to trace, there is a sense ordinary life went on throughout the crisis despite the profound hardships visited on non-elites by the political and environmental troubles. This adds to the hypothesis that the crisis was a political crisis that was more difficult to manage for those most closely connected to the Fatimid government. Finally, this paper looks at the differences between the expressions of the crisis in various parts of the Fatimid state and finds that while the effects of the crisis on Cairo/Fustat are evident, areas outside of Cairo experienced the crisis in widely divergent ways.