Caliphate

by Hugh Kennedy

  Among both Muslims and western scholars the general assumption was that the real title was, and always had been, successor of the Prophet of God. In 1986, however, two scholars of the Islamic Middle East at Cambridge, Patricia Crone and Martin Hinds, published a short but very important book in which they convincingly demonstrated, from a whole variety of textual and numismatic evidence, that the title meant deputy of God from the beginning. The idea that it meant successor, they argue, was introduced by ninth-century ulama (religious scholars) as an attempt to downgrade the office in the great struggle between caliphs and scholars of that time to control the making of law and the establishment of Islamic norms.3

  Caliph was not the only title used for the first leaders. From very early on we have references to the caliph as Amīr al-Mu’minīn, usually translated as Commander of the Faithful. Amīr (often emir in English) means commander or prince. It was a title often given to military leaders and local rulers in the years which followed the break-up of the Abbasid caliphate at the beginning of the tenth century and is still used as a royal title today in the Gulf States. The Mu’minīn element is more problematic: would it not have been much more logical and appropriate to use the word Muslims and describe the leader as Amīr al-Muslimīn? Mu’minīn, however, could be used to describe not just Muslims but also non-Muslims who had entered into a binding peace agreement with them. Unlike the word caliph, the title of Commander of the Faithful does not appear in the Qur’ān so we can find no guidance there, but the use of the term in later texts suggests that it was used very early on and dates from a time when the Muslims fought alongside non-Muslim allies. Whatever its origins and original implications, the title became inextricably linked to that of caliph: not just Umayyads and Abbasids but Fatimids and Almohads and many other rulers who claimed the caliphal title also described themselves as Commanders of the Faithful.

  We also find the use of the title imam. Imam means essentially anyone who stands in front or leads. It often describes the prayer leader in a mosque. It is also used, especially among the Shia, to describe the ruler of the whole Muslim community and, as such, is often a synonym for caliph.

  THE REIGNS OF ABŪ BAKR AND UMAR, THE FIRST CALIPHS

  The first four caliphs, Abū Bakr (632–4), Umar b. al-Khattāb (634–44), Uthmān b. Affān (644–56) and Alī b. Abī Tālib (656–61), are described in the Arabic sources as Rāshidūn, usually translated into English as ‘Orthodox’. This is a usage dating from the time when most Sunni Muslims could agree that these four were righteous and God-guided rulers, even if things had started to go wrong under their Umayyad and later successors. The term serves as a convenient and widely accepted way of designating the four unrelated and very different rulers.

  The historical sources provide a huge variety of information about the four men because the events of these early years had significant and lasting consequences for the development of the Islamic community: crucially, they laid the basis of the division between Sunni and Shiite Muslims, which was to grow in the next four centuries. In the Sunni tradition, they emerge as very distinctive personalities: Abū Bakr the dignified and affable old man, Umar the organizer and stern moralist, Uthmān a good man fatally flawed by his predilection for his own family, and Alī a true ruler but vacillating and overwhelmed by events. These characteristics probably do reflect their real personalities, but they also serve to make points about the nature of caliphal government and later ages looked back to the first caliphs’ reigns as examples of both good government and how things could go wrong. The Orthodox caliphs figure prominently in modern discussions about the caliphate.

  All four had important issues to tackle. The first was to secure the continued existence of the Islamic community after the death of its founder and establish the position of its ruler. In the time of Umar, the most obvious priority was managing the great Arab conquests of the Middle East initiated under Abū Bakr and continued through Umar’s reign. By the time of his death in 644, Muslims armies had conquered Syria, Iraq and Egypt, and in the first half of Uthmān’s reign most of Iran and large swathes of North Africa had been added to the list. It was the caliphs, from their capital in the Prophet’s city of Medina, who organized and dispatched the armies which brought down the great East Roman and Persian empires, though none of the caliphs led the Muslim armies in person.

  Conquest did not mean that all the peoples of these areas became Muslim: it simply meant that they were forced to accept the political authority of the new Arab-Muslim ruling class. The conversion of the majority of populations to Islam was a much slower and more peaceful process, which probably took four or five centuries. It was a great achievement, which completely reshaped the ancient world and whose consequences are still very much with us today. Organizing the armies was, in a sense, the easy bit. More problematic was the administration of these rich and varied areas once they had come under Arab-Muslim control. And the most complex task was managing the Muslim elite and trying to keep the fierce rivalries which developed from splitting the Muslim world apart.

  As soon as he became leader in 632, Abū Bakr was confronted with a major challenge. In the last two years of his life, the Prophet had attracted followers from all over the Arabian Peninsula. They came in delegations to pledge allegiance to him as the Messenger of God and as leader of an increasingly powerful tribal federation with whom it was important to keep on good terms. They often agreed to pay an alms tax (sadaqa or zakat). With the Prophet’s death many of them repudiated the agreements made, arguing that they had pledged allegiance to Muhammad in person, not to his successors or the community in Medina. Others said that they wanted to continue to be Muslims but not to pay the tax. Yet others chose prophets of their own, like Musaylima in eastern Arabia, arguing that if Quraysh had a prophet, then it was only fair that they should have one too. In the Muslim tradition this movement was known as the ridda, or rejection.

  Such a moment could have seen the break-up of the umma and a return to the fragmentation and anarchy which had characterized Arabia before the coming of Islam. However, Abū Bakr, ably supported by Umar, decided that this was not to be and initiated a series of military campaigns, often led by Khālid b. al-Walīd, a member of the old aristocracy of Quraysh and later venerated in history and legend as the ‘Sword of Islam’. The campaigns were pursued without mercy and were swiftly successful. By the end of Abū Bakr’s short reign in 634, the tribes of Arabia were effectively brought back under the control of Medina. In doing so, Abū Bakr and Umar had established a new principle: there was no going back on acceptance of Islam. The rejectionist, or apostate (Arabic murtadd), could and should be killed by any righteous Muslim. The ridda also led to the emergence of a new class of Muslims. If the muhājirūn and Quraysh more generally were the elite of the community with the ansār in a subordinate but still important position, the rejectionists who had been brought back to the community in the wars were third-class citizens. This became significant later with the division of assets and spoils which followed the great Arab conquests.

  Abū Bakr died peacefully in his old age. In his two-year reign he had accomplished a great deal. There is no explicit evidence that he ever held the title of caliph, but early Muslims certainly believed he had and his achievements and reputation meant that the office became established among them. He also acquired among writers and poets of the Umayyad period and later the informal title of Siddīq, the Truthful or Trustworthy, reflecting the respect in which his memory was held by most Muslims.

  The great Arab conquests were essentially a continuation of the wars against the rejectionists. This is not the place to rehearse the details of the various campaigns and battles, but a few aspects should be noted. Initially, from around 634, there were two main fronts, Syria and Iraq. Syria had been the object of the first tentative expeditions at the end of the Prophet’s life. This was pursued after his death, and the conquest of Syria was achieved by comparatively small numbers of members of the Muslim elite and tribes from the Hijaz
in western Arabia, sometimes in alliance with other tribes already established in Syria, some of whom were, and continued to be, Christians. It was they who defeated the Byzantine armies at the Battle of Yarmuk in 636 and brought to an end 1,000 years of rule by Greek-speaking elites in Syria and Palestine. In contrast, Iraq was conquered in the main by larger numbers of tribesmen from northern and eastern Arabia and as far south as Oman. The leadership of the campaigns was mostly entrusted to members of Quraysh such as Sad b. Abī Waqqās, who commanded the army which defeated the Persians at the decisive Battle of Qādisiyya, also in 636, and drove them out of Iraq. But most of the rank and file of the army came from non-elite groups and, in some cases, from those who had originally joined the rejectionists. This was to lead to continuous and sustained conflict between Iraqi and Syrian Arab Muslims, a conflict which ultimately led to the end of the Orthodox caliphate.

  Another significant aspect of these conquests is that they were organized military expeditions. They were not a mass migration of barbarian tribesmen into a rich and civilized Middle East but armies recruited from volunteers who came to Medina and were assigned to various commanders and sent off in different directions. The overall management of this enterprise fell to the caliphs, above all Umar, who in the ten years of his rule masterminded the most important military operations.

  The expeditions of conquest succeeded on a scale which must have been beyond the expectations of even the most optimistic of the early Muslims. In a few short years they had come to control large areas of territory and a numerous population in towns and villages, hamlets and farms, a desirable but unfamiliar resource base. How then were these lands to be administered and how were Muslims to be justly rewarded for their part in the victorious campaigns? At first, especially in Iraq, there was something of a free-for-all as individual commanders tried to seize estates and lands themselves. Umar, however soon put a stop to this and it is a measure of the authority and prestige already enjoyed by the caliph that he was able to do so.

  Instead, he instituted a system in Iraq in which the conquered lands and the revenues which could be collected from them were kept as an undivided resource (fay is the Arabic word), the proceeds of which should be used to support the Arab tribesmen. These were not to be allowed to spread out throughout the conquered territory but were settled in specially founded new towns (Ar. misr, pl. amsār). The first of them were Kufa in central Iraq, south of modern Baghdad, and Basra at the head of the Gulf. They were followed by Fustat (Old Cairo) and Qayrawan in Tunisia, Mosul in northern Iraq and Shiraz in south-western Iran. Their names and the payments to which they were entitled were written in lists called dīwāns. None of these have survived in their original form, but their existence shows that firm government control had been established over the movements and settlements of the Arabs.

  The new arrangements instituted by Umar had a profound and lasting effect on Muslim society. Much of this was positive. The presence of large numbers of soldiers, dependent on salaries paid by the government, was a major factor in the emergence of that vibrant market economy characteristic of the early Islamic world. It also meant that the government had to use coins and maintain a bureaucracy which was both literate and numerate. This in turn led to the development of a class educated in Arabic with the opportunity and knowledge to invest in writing and other intellectual activities.

  At the same time, however, the arrangements gave rise to continuous conflicts over the distribution of resources. These arose at different levels. Within communities, they developed between early converts to Islam, who enjoyed precedence (sābiqa) and hence higher salaries, and later joiners and former rejectionists, who were on very low levels of reward. Then there were conflicts between those who believed that all the money raised in a province, say Kufa for example, should be spent in that province and those who argued that the surplus after paying salaries should be forwarded to the government of the caliph in Medina or, under the Umayyads, Damascus. The fact that the system had been inaugurated by the caliph Umar, as was later confirmed by Alī, gave it a quasi-religious authority. Those who believed that they had a right to all the tax revenues of the province, which should be distributed in the ways laid down by Umar, saw this not just as their earthly rights (dunya) but as part and parcel of their religious faith (dīn), and when the Umayyads tried to change the arrangements in the interests of more efficient government they were seen not only as mean and grasping, but as impious and anti-Islamic.

  Another lasting legacy for which the caliph is remembered is the so-called ‘pact of Umar’. This is not so much a written document drawn up and signed by the caliph as a series of rules and guidelines which emerged concerning the status of his non-Muslim subjects, Jews, Christians, Zoroastrians and others. The basic outline of these agreements were that non-Muslims would be able to retain their faith, their worship and their places of worship, along with their personal property and their family possessions. There were, however, restrictions whose exact nature varied from one version of the pact to another. These mostly involved the prohibition of the building of new churches (and sometimes the repair of the old), of public religious processions, of expressing criticism of Islam and of bearing weapons. At times non-Muslims were also obliged to wear distinctive dress and forbidden to ride horses. Most importantly, the pact imposed the payment of a poll tax ( jizya). Non-Muslims were referred to as protected peoples (dhimmi) and their security and freedom of worship were assured. At the same time they were definitely second-class citizens. Members of the minority communities were particularly keen to ascribe the arrangements to Umar because they were in a sense guaranteed by the authority and pious reputation of the great caliph.

  Umar died in 644 at the hands of an assassin, a Persian slave, who killed him for personal reasons. In many ways he can be seen as the founding father of the caliphate. Although, as with Abū Bakr, there is no direct contemporary evidence that he bore the title, Arabic sources are virtually unanimous in saying that he did. He was certainly a well-known figure. When an Arab wanted to date a graffito bearing his name carved on a rock in western Arabia, he said simply that it was the year when Umar died, as if he were a personality who could be referred to without formality or explanation.4 Umar’s reputation survives in the Sunni Islamic tradition as the great law-giver, incorruptible and stern, quick to condemn extravagance or pretension among his governors and generals. His memory survives in anecdotes of his own rejection of the pomp and circumstance of rulership, describing how he slept in the corner of a mosque wrapped in his cloak, approachable to all. We also hear how Persians came as envoys or prisoners and, accustomed as they were to the formality and ostentatious display of the Persian court, were amazed, even incredulous, at the simplicity of his dress and style of living. These stories must reflect a historical reality, the personality of the real Umar, but they were also preserved and no doubt elaborated as a paradigm of Islamic monarchy and a clear rebuke to the extravagance and grandeur of later rulers.

  Umar is admired not just in the Muslim tradition but in completely different cultures. Edward Gibbon, in eighteenth-century Britain, writes of him:

  The abstinence and humility of Omar were not inferior to the virtues of Abubeker [Abū Bakr]: his food consisted of barley-bread or dates; his drink was water; he preached in a gown that was torn or tattered in twelve places; and a Persian satrap, who paid his homage as to the conqueror, found him asleep among the beggars on the steps of the mosch of Medina. Oeconomy is the source of liberality, and the increase of the revenue enabled Omar to establish a just and perpetual reward for the past and present services of the faithful. Careless of his own emolument, he assigned to Abbas, the uncle of the prophet, the first and most ample allowance of twenty-five thousand drachms or pieces of silver. Five thousand were allotted to each of the aged warriors, the relics of the field of Beder [Battle of Badr, 624, the first of Muhammad’s military victories], and the last and the meanest of the companions of Mahomet was distinguished by the annual rewar
d of three thousand pieces. . . . Under his reign, and that of his predecessor, the conquerors of the East were the trusty servants of God and the people; the mass of public treasure was consecrated to the expenses of peace and war; a prudent mixture of justice and bounty maintained the discipline of the Saracens, and they united, by a rare felicity, the dispatch and execution of despotism, with the equal and frugal maxims of a republican government.5

  Gibbon’s perspective, steeped as he was in the writings of classical historians, may ring strangely in our ears and the reference to republican government is improbable, but it is striking how the views of an Enlightenment savant mirror, in his own language, the views of Muslims through the ages.

  There was yet another side to this image, a more religious, even messianic aspect, which is difficult to understand after all these centuries. Like Abū Bakr before him and Uthmān after, Umar decided to spend his reign in the Hijaz, almost always in the Prophet’s city of Medina. He did, however, make one exception. The city of Jerusalem played an important part in early Islamic lore. It is said that the first Muslims prayed in this holy city before Muhammad changed the direction of Muslim prayer, the qibla, to Mecca. It was from Jerusalem, not Mecca, that the Prophet is said to have begun his miraculous journey through the heavens in order to be shown the full glory of God’s creation from the site on the Temple Mount, later covered by the Dome of the Rock. When in 638 it was apparent that the Muslim forces, having conquered Damascus and most of the rest of Syria and Palestine (only the coastal city of Caesarea still held out against them), were on the verge of taking Jerusalem, then a city under Byzantine rule, Umar set out for the north. When he reached Jerusalem he accepted the surrender of the city from the venerable Christian Patriarch Sophronius.