By contrast, the Sunni caliphal dynasties increasingly accentuated their worldly power by means of constructing finer palace complexes, devising ornate ceremonies, and taking on the trappings of a monarchy in general. Some of the early Abbasid caliphs did make at least implicit claims for more than mere temporal power: al-Mahdi (775–785); al-Hadi, “the Guide” (785–86); and al-Ma’mun (813–833)—who introduced the title of Imam for all subsequent Abbasid caliphs—were obviously attempting to compete with the Shi‘ite doctrine of the Imamate. But they never took the task seriously enough to initiate a doctrinal change.
The true status of the Sunni caliphate became clear as early as 756, when the new Umayyad regime in Andalus refused to recognize the Abbasid caliph. Rather than being considered apostates for having rejected God’s deputy, the Umayyads of Andalus were considered political rebels. Moreover, the Umayyad princes of Andalus did not feel compelled at the time to claim the caliphate for themselves, but claimed only the title of amir, leaving the relationship between the Muslims of Andalus and the caliph in suspension. The Abbasid caliph had no political or economic claim on the Muslims of Andalus and had no way of imposing religious doctrines or rituals on them. Andalusis in effect had no caliph, and yet were not the less Muslim for that. Thus, with the beginning of the partition of the first Umayyad empire, the Abbasid caliphate revealed itself to be a dynastic monarchy, despite its appeal to Islamic legitimacy. The seizure of Egypt in 868 by Ibn Tulun and of large parts of Iran by the Saffarids in the 870s only confirmed the fact that challenges to the economic and political authority of the caliph had consequences no different from that of challenges to any other ruler.
In the early tenth century, two new caliphates, one in North Africa and the other in Andalus, arose to contest the monopoly of an increasingly beleaguered Abbasid caliphate. By the middle of that century, the Abbasid caliph was a mere figurehead for a military regime that administered affairs in Iraq and western Iran. After three centuries, Muslim society was further away than ever from achieving a synthesis between Islamic political ideals and Islamic political practice. The Umma had fragmented into such conflicting groups that a consensus regarding the structure and functioning of governance appeared impossible. Kharijites argued that a caliph was not even necessary if God’s law was being followed; the various Shi‘ite groups agreed that the Abbasids and Umayyads should not be caliphs but disagreed over who should replace them as the Imam/caliph; the Fatimids, the one Shi‘ite faction that did install its chosen Imam, soon settled into Egypt, but did surprisingly little to transform their society; and Sunnis were dispersed throughout the three competing caliphates as well as in several autonomous provinces whose rulers paid only lip service to the Abbasid caliph.
Shi‘ite scholars were greatly preoccupied with defining the meaning and importance of the Imam, who was central to their whole belief system. Sunnis, however, devoted surprisingly little scholarship to the topic of the caliph. Most references to the office appear in the work of legal scholars who were trying to connect the implementation of the Shari‘a to his office. The first major systematic work that analyzed the nature of the Abbasid caliphate appeared only in the eleventh century, from the pen of al-Mawardi (d. 1058). His The Rules of Governance was written during the caliphate of al-Qa’im (1031–1075), who began asserting some independence of action against his Buyid amir. Al-Mawardi’s book boldly declared that the caliph was still the chief executive of the Umma and was entrusted by God for a wide range of responsibilities: the protection of the traditional interpretation of Islam from the designs of innovators; the enforcement of the provisions of the Shari‘a; the defense of the borders of the Dar al-Islam; combating unbelievers until they accept Muslim rule; the levying of taxes; the regulation of public expenditure; the appointment of qualified people to public office; and the regulation of public expenditure. Most of these functions, of course, were performed by the Buyid amir, but al-Mawardi blithely argued that this was due to the fact that the caliph had the prerogative of delegating his powers; if these responsibilities were usurped or otherwise corrupted, the caliph had the right of summoning aid to restore his rightful powers.
Al-Qa’im welcomed the advent of Tughril Bey, but any anticipated liberation from the restricted role that the Shi‘ite Buyids had imposed upon him turned out to be chimerical. The Sunni Saljuqs were no more willing than the Shi‘ite Buyids to allow al-Qa’im or any other caliph to reassert the power of his Abbasid predecessors. The cleavage between al-Mawardi’s vision and political reality continued under the Saljuqs. Their leaders adopted the title of sultan, which derives from the Arabic word sultah, meaning “power.” The Sultan claimed to wield power at the pleasure of the caliph, just as the Buyid amirs had. Resigning themselves to the fact that it was unlikely that the caliph would be actively involved in their governance, Sunni jurists accepted al-Mawardi’s idea of the delegation of powers by the caliph to justify the system that was in place. Scholars such as al-Ghazali (d. 1111), who was born the year that al-Mawardi died, insisted upon obedience to governmental authority in the absence of a regularly constituted caliphate. His widely quoted argument was that the anarchy that would result from a rebellion against an unjust ruler would be more detrimental to the purposes of God than the ruler himself was.
We do not have a clear understanding of how Andalusi Muslims viewed the religious authority of their Umayyad caliph. At any rate, their caliphate disintegrated early in the eleventh century, and during its span of less than a century, it had almost no effect on the lives of Muslims outside the Iberian Peninsula. The Fatimid caliphate, although in theory invested with a high degree of religious and political authority, shrank to insignificance within a century of its conquest of Egypt. Although the Abbasid caliphate under al-Nasir did manage to regain control over a small state in Iraq for a short time during the twelfth and thirteenth centuries, it played no active role in most Muslims’ lives after the ninth century. This is quite an important point, because many general history books portray the Abbasid caliphate as though it led a powerful empire until 1258 and discuss Hulagu’s destruction of the caliphate as though it had dire repercussions throughout the Muslim world. These are highly misleading concepts, as should be clear by now.
The Abbasid caliphate did, in fact, play an important symbolic role in the lives of large numbers of Sunnis in the Muslim East (and to a lesser extent in North Africa). Despite the caliph’s actual weakness from the early tenth century on, Sunni religious teachers taught that he was the supreme head of all the Muslims. He represented to the faithful an unbroken line of succession of authority and served as a symbol of Muslim unity from the time of the Prophet himself. He continued to serve as a source of legitimacy for many provincial rulers, as many Muslim rulers from the Maghrib to India sought an official document from the caliph, certifying that they had been “appointed” or “delegated” to rule on behalf of the caliph. These same rulers usually minted coins bearing the name of the caliph as well as themselves, and at the Friday sermon they ordered that the name of the caliph be recited. The weaker the caliph was militarily, the more convenient they found it to acknowledge his theoretical suzerainty. The fall of the Abbasid caliphate in Baghdad was no doubt troubling for many Muslims in the East. Its resurrection in Cairo shortly thereafter under the patronage of the Mamlukes seems to have assuaged most of the anxieties, however.
Conclusion
The enormous ambitions of the Arab empire of the early eighth century had been radically scaled down by Abbasid times. There was no single “Islamic” empire even at the start of the Abbasid period, due to the loss of much of North Africa and of Andalus, and by the end of the ninth century, most of the remainder of the old Umayyad empire had slipped from Baghdad’s control, as well. The chances that the physical dimensions of the original Arab-dominated empire could have remained intact, of course, were practically non-existent. The breathtaking size of that empire challenged any attempts to provide security, and the plethora of cultures that the con
quests had brought together complicated the task of identifying a common interest. And yet, a culture grew up across the breadth of the Muslim world that facilitated travel, commerce, scholarship, and technological innovation.
Perhaps the most interesting and ultimately determining feature of the Muslim commonwealth was that, in the absence of a single leader who combined both religious and temporal authority, the importance of the legal schools and their scholars became magnified. In an unusual development, the “law” that most people felt compelled to obey was not developed by their government, but by independent scholars: the jurists. A few of them served as qadis for the various rulers, but most remained private citizens, engaging in frequent discussion with others like themselves in order to attempt to reach agreement on the finer points of living the godly life. Some of them traveled widely, sharing thoughts with other jurists in distant parts of the Dar al-Islam. As a rule, they were much more respected than government officials themselves. As we have seen, the rulers developed their own set of commercial and criminal laws to supplement the Shari‘a, but these had little impact on the majority of Muslims. Muslims expected their governments to enforce the Shari‘a, but they knew that governments had not created it—it came ultimately from God, mediated through the jurists. A tension existed between the governments and the interpreters of the law that would shape Muslim history for centuries to come.
NOTES
1.
Richard Bulliet, Conversion to Islam in the Medieval Period: An Essay in Quantitative History. Cambridge, Massachusetts: Harvard University Press, 1979.
FURTHER READING
For a good discussion of the concept of a Muslim commonwealth see Garth Fowden, Empire to Commonwealth: Consequences of Monotheism in Late Antiquity. Princeton, New Jersey: Princeton University Press, 1993, passim, and Hugh Kennedy, The Prophet and the Age of the Caliphates: The Islamic Near East from the Sixth to the Eleventh Century. London and New York: Longman, 1986, pp. 200–211.
Frontiers and Identities
Bonner, Michael. Aristocratic Violence and Holy War: Studies in the Jihad and the Arab–Byzantine Frontier. New Haven, Connecticut: American Oriental Society, 1996.
Brauer, Ralph W. Boundaries and Frontiers in Medieval Muslim Geography. Transactions of the American Philosophical Society. Vol. 85, Pt. 6. Philadelphia: The American Philosophical Society, 1995.
Chabbi, J. “Ribāt,” in The Encyclopedia of Islam, New Edition. Vol. VIII. Leiden: E.J. Brill, 1995.
Goitein, S.D. A Mediterranean Society. Vol. I. Berkeley, California: University of California Press, 1967.
Hambly, Gavin R.G., ed. Women in the Medieval Islamic World: Power, Patronage, and Piety. New York: St. Martin’s Press, 1998.
Imber, Colin. Ebu’s-su‘ud: The Islamic Legal Tradition. Stanford, California: Stanford University Press, 1997.
Lewis, Bernard. Race and Slavery in the Middle East: An Historical Inquiry. New York: Oxford University Press, 1990, p. 14.
Mélikoff, I. “Ghāzī.” in The Encyclopedia of Islam, New Edition. Vol. II. Leiden: E.J. Brill, 1983.
Peters, Rudolph. Jihad in Classical and Modern Islam: A Reader. Princeton, New Jersey: Markus Wiener, 1996.
Wink, Andre. Al-Hind: The Making of the Indo–Islamic World. Vol. I: Early Medieval India and the Expansion of Islam, 7–11e. Leiden: E.J. Brill, 1990.
The City and the Countryside
Abu-Lughod, Janet L. “The Islamic City—Historic Myth, Islamic Essence, and Contemporary Relevance.” International Journal of Middle East Studies, 19 (1987), pp. 155–176.
Ahsan, Muhammad Manazir. Social Life Under the Abbasids. London and New York: Longman, 1979.
Brown, L. Carl, ed. From Madina to Metropolis: Heritage and Change in the Near Eastern City. Princeton, New Jersey: The Darwin Press, 1973.
Burns, Robert J. Islam Under the Crusaders. Princeton, New Jersey: Princeton University Press, 1973.
Hourani, Albert, and S.M. Stern, eds. The Islamic City: A Colloquium. Oxford: Bruno Cassirer, 1970.
Insoll, Timothy. The Archaeology of Islam. Oxford: Blackwell Publishers, 1999.
Lambton, Ann K.S. Continuity and Change in Medieval Persia: Aspects of Administrative, Economic, and Social History, 11th–14th Century. Albany, New York: State University of New York Press, 1988.
Wheatley, Paul. The Places Where Men Pray Together: Cities in Islamic Lands, Seventh Through the Tenth Centuries. Chicago and London: University of Chicago Press, 2001.
Conversion
Bulliet, Richard. Conversion to Islam in the Medieval Period: An Essay in Quantitative History. Cambridge, Massachusetts: Harvard University Press, 1979.
Gervers, M. and R.J. Bikhazi, eds. Conversion and Continuity: Indigenous Christian Communities in Islamic Lands, Eighth to Eighteenth Centuries. Toronto: Pontifical Institute of Mediaeval Studies, 1990.
Levtzion, Nehemiah. Conversion to Islam. New York: Holmes & Meier, 1979.
Lorenzen, David N., ed. Religious Change and Cultural Domination. El Colegio de Mexico, 1981.
The Issue of Authority in the Muslim World
Fowden, Garth. Empire to Commonwealth: Consequences of Monotheism in Late Antiquity. Princeton, New Jersey: Princeton University Press, 1993.
Kennedy, Hugh. The Prophet and the Age of the Caliphates: The Islamic Near East from the Sixth to the Eleventh Century. London and New York: Longman, 1986.
Mikhail, Hanna. Politics and Revelation: Mawardi and After. Edinburgh: Edinburgh University Press, 1995.
Safran, Janina M. The Second Umayyad Caliphate: The Articulation of Caliphal Legitimacy in Al-Andalus. Cambridge, Massachusetts: Harvard University Press, 2000.
PART THREE
Mongol Hegemony, 1260–1405
The Mongol conquests dwarfed those of the Arabs, which had occurred some six centuries earlier. Between 1206 and 1260, the Mongols subjugated northern China, Central Asia, Iran and Iraq, eastern Anatolia, the Caucasus, and the vast steppe region from Mongolia to the area now occupied by eastern Poland. By 1279, they completed the conquest of southern China, as well. On the one hand, then, the achievement is greater than the Arabs on sheer scale. On the other hand, the Mongols did not create a civilization, and most of their conquests were lost within three generations.
The Mongols are not easy to dismiss as a destructive, one-time wonder, however. Despite the fact that they soon lost control of their possessions, their legacy was remembered, revered, and emulated for centuries thereafter throughout much of the vast region they had conquered. In western and central Europe, too, the legacy lingered, but in a peculiar fashion: Rumors that a great force to the east had brutalized part of the Muslim world during 1219–1222 sparked hope in Europe that a potential ally, perhaps even a Christian king, existed in the east that would help to destroy Islam. This was the origin of the legend of Prester John, a great Christian king in the East with whom the Europeans should join forces against Islam. The hope was so strong that when, in 1238, the Nizari Imam at Alamut and the Abbasid caliph in Baghdad jointly dispatched an embassy to Europe, appealing for help against the Mongols, they were rebuffed. Europe, particularly in the person of the Pope, was pursuing a diametrically opposed policy of attempting to form a great Christian alliance with the Mongol Great Khan—whom some thought to be Prester John—against the world of Islam. Even the crushing Mongol defeat of European knights three years later at Liegnitz did not dissipate the fantasy of Prester John, who continued to fascinate and lure Europeans for hundreds of years to come.
But the Mongols were not only the stuff of memory and legend. They transformed the world. These horsemen from the steppes who destroyed so many cities quickly began to rebuild urban economies once they assumed power. Few of their leaders appear to have appreciated the importance of agriculture, and that sector usually languished as a result. Long-distance trade, on the other hand, flourished as never before. From the Pacific to the Black Sea, bandits were held in check, caravanserais were constructed, and diplomatic contacts were established. The fam
ous career of the Venetian Marco Polo in the last third of the thirteenth century would be unthinkable without the Mongols. He and his father and uncle traveled from Constantinople to Beijing and back with less fear for their lives or property than they would have felt had they journeyed anywhere in the Mediterranean basin. Taking advantage of the pax Mongolica, Venice quickly established a vast trade network that extended from the Pacific to Scandinavia.
The Mongol Empire affected the histories of all its neighbors as well as of peoples beyond their immediate reach. The history of a large part of the Muslim world was irrevocably altered. The Mongols and their desperately ambitious scion Timur Lang dominated western Asia for only a century and a half, but Mongol hegemony had such a profound influence on the course of Muslim history that it merits a separate section in this book. Chapter 10 establishes the historical framework for the period. It examines the history of the three Mongol states whose rulers eventually converted to Islam, traces the rise of three other powerful Muslim states during this period, and explores the destructive effects of the plague and Timur Lang on western Asia. Chapter 11 examines the cumulative effects of these and other events on Muslim intellectual and religious life. The evidence undermines the widely held view that the Mongol era caused Islamic civilization to decline. Despite frequent outbreaks of political chaos and the long-lasting economic depression of some regions, Islamic culture continued to thrive and break new ground in a wide variety of fields. More striking still, the period marks a transition from an era of several centuries during which the frontiers of the Muslim world had remained largely static to an age of remarkable expansion. In many respects, the period of Mongol hegemony marks the beginning of a golden age of Muslim history.
A History of the Muslim World to 1405 Page 44
