Caliphate

by Hugh Kennedy

  Below them in the social scale were a host of ordinary tribesmen with no particular claim to elite status on either ground. These included men who, although they were now Muslims, had joined the cause late or who had failed to play a significant role in the armies of the conquests. Despite their membership of the community, their rewards were small and they had every reason to feel excluded from the benefits others enjoyed. This resentment was real among the first generation but must have become even more strongly felt in the generations which followed, when the elite enjoyed their high status not because of what they themselves had done but because of what their fathers and grandfathers before them had achieved.

  At the bottom of the heap were the non-Arab converts to Islam. Many of these were Iranians of some social standing whose lives had been turned upside down by war and conquest and, in many cases, capture and slavery as well. In order to become Muslims, they attached themselves to an Arab-Muslim tribe or prominent individual and became their mawālī (sing. mawlā). This is a word which has no exact English translation. It can mean that they became clients of the tribe, accepting its leadership and supporting its political activities. It can also refer to freedmen, people who had been slaves but had been freed by their masters and converted to Islam. (To add to the confusion the term mawlā is used in later Arabic to mean lord or master but it is the earlier sense with which we are concerned here.) These mawālī felt that they too were Muslims equal to any others and entitled to their tax advantages, especially not paying the jizya or poll tax, a privilege which was the right of all Muslims.

  It was a heady brew of rivalries and conflicts, fuelled by strong feelings of injustice. Islam promised so much in terms of equality in religion and membership of the community. It was easy to feel resentful and angry at the failure of the new order to deliver. The fundamental problem was one of resources. Iraq was the richest area of the Middle East and the revenues the Islamic government could extract were huge, but they were never enough to satisfy the demands of all these various constituencies. Inevitably there would be winners and losers; the question was who they would be.

  Alī set about trying to mobilize the military energies of these people to enforce his caliphal authority over the recalcitrant Muāwiya in Syria. It was not easy to persuade men of such different backgrounds and outlooks as the tribal aristocrat Ashath b. Qays and the pious early Muslim Mālik al-Ashtar to march in the same army and accept his leadership. He did, however, have two planks to his platform which won over many. The first was the hostility of Iraqi Muslims towards the Syrians and their fear that Syrian domination would lead to their exclusion from positions of power. Modern discussions of the conflict which developed between the supporters of Alī and Muāwiya have tended to concentrate on the religio-political issues which divided them from each other, proto-Sunnis supporting Muāwiya and proto-Shiis supporting Alī. The early Arabic sources which describe these events lay just as much stress on the regional nature of the conflict: it was the ahl (people) of Iraq against the people of Syria. Of course, this did not mean all the people of Iraq and all the people of Syria, but the Arab Muslims of Iraq and the Arab Muslims of Syria with, perhaps, some of their mawālī. The rest, the Christians, Jews and Zoroastrians who formed the majority of the population, were neither consulted nor asked to participate in what was an inter-Muslim conflict.

  Most of the people of Iraq could relate to this appeal, but Alī and his advisers tried to attract more support, and perhaps more committed support, in ways which were ultimately more divisive of Iraqi opinion. Alī’s policy was a bold attempt to cut across the social divisions which so disturbed the Muslims of Iraq in general and Kufa in particular. He stressed the role of the caliph as imam, that is, religious leader of the community. As caliph, he was not to be a tyrannical tax-gatherer or a guardian of existing vested interests but a charismatic figure who would inspire and guide the believers in the formation of a truly Islamic community and bring justice to all Muslims. It was a powerful vision which staked new ground for the function and importance of the caliphate.

  Alī’s policies at this moment were, no doubt, a combination of idealism and practical considerations—he needed to recruit for his army— but they had enormous long-term implications. The first was that Alī, the Family of the Prophet, and after them the Shiite leaderships of later years, were firmly identified with Iraqi interests and particularly the interests of the Muslim inhabitants of the southern Iraqi towns of Kufa and Basra, areas in fact which are still Shiite today, 1,200 years later. The second and even more important implication was that the Family of the Prophet and later Shiite leaders became firmly identified with the interests of the deprived and excluded in Muslim society, those who felt that their rights had been ignored and trampled on by dominant elites. Of course, this has not always been the case. There were times, for example in Fatimid Egypt in the eleventh century, when the Shiite leadership was firmly in support of the Shiite caliph. But this theme of concern for the poor and marginalized in Muslim society is a thread which has runs through much Shiite preaching from the proto-Shiis of late seventh-century Iraq to Ayatollah Khomeini in late twentieth-century Iran and Ayatollah Sistani in Iraq even as I write these words.

  In the spring and summer of 657 Alī led his Iraqi forces up the Euphrates valley to invade Syria. At the same time Muāwiya mobilized his Syrian supporters and came to meet them. The two armies faced each other at a place called Siffin, just up the river from Raqqa. They did not immediately engage in an all-out battle. Despite all the issues which divided them, there was a profound reluctance among many to fight their fellow Muslims if it could be avoided. There were a number of bloody skirmishes, notably over access to water in the burning heat of the Syrian summer, and there were contests of poetry as the propagandists on both sides tried to inspire their fellows and denigrate their enemies, but there were also negotiations. In July or August a real battle seemed to be developing, but the Syrian troops attached copies of the Qur’ān to their lances, demanding that there be an arbitration according to the book of God, and Alī felt that he had no option but to accept. An arbitration date was set for the next year and it was agreed that the two arbitrators, one from each side, should meet in the small town of Udhruh, now a ruined archaeological site in southern Jordan. So far so clear.

  What was much less clear was the question of what exactly was going to be arbitrated. Was it a debate about whether Alī or Muāwiya was going to be caliph, a sort of two-man shūra, or was the issue simply that of the punishment of Uthmān’s killers and the circumstances under which Muāwiya might accept Alī as caliph? By the time the two arbitrators did meet, events had moved on so quickly that any discussions they may have had were rendered irrelevant.

  THE KHARIJITE ALTERNATIVE

  Many of Alī’s supporters were dismayed by what had happened, seeing their leader as a victim of a Syrian trick or, even worse, as having agreed to put his God-given authority to the judgement of two men. When he returned to Iraq, his uneasy coalition began to break up. Some of the tribal nobles began to enter into negotiations with the Syrian leader. Much more threatening than that, at the other end of the political spectrum, many of his more radical supporters abandoned him and went out to camp in a separate place, announcing that arbitration belonged only to God and implying that the issue should have been decided on the battlefield.

  These dissenters became known as Kharijites (Ar. khawārij). They have survived as a sect down to the present day, notably in Oman and parts of southern Algeria. How the name originates is quite unclear. The word khārijī means literally one who goes out, but the often quoted explanation that they went out from Alī’s camp seems feeble. More attractive is the historian Andrew Marsham’s suggestion that it related to the verses in the Qur’ān which urge Muslims to ‘go out’ (on the jihād) rather than stay at home.6 Kharijites were associating with the militant activists among the earliest Muslims. They have never constituted more than a small percentage of the Muslim populatio
n. but they are important in the history of the caliphate because they developed theories of the office, how the caliph or imam (they used both terms to describe their leaders) should be chosen and what they should do, which were radically different from the concepts of both Sunni and Shii.

  The Kharijites split from the emerging consensus over two main issues. The first was that they believed the caliph should be chosen from all the Muslims as the most pious and meritorious of them. Quraysh descent was absolutely not required and any Muslim, no matter how humble his social origins, could be considered for office. Some said that even a slave could be chosen, and it is alleged that a few even argued that women were eligible, though this point of view never seems to have been widely accepted. They generally agreed that Abū Bakr and Umar were lawful caliphs, but only because they were the best men of their time, not because of any Qurashi descent, and they completely rejected Uthmān and all subsequent claimants. When others had their doubts, the Kharijites were proudly unrepentant of the role some of them played in the murder of Uthmān, seeing it as entirely justified, even necessary, because of his deviation from proper Islamic behaviour. Quite how the choosing of the new leader was going to take place was not really specified: certainly there was no discussion of the practicalities of either election or shūra. It was sort of taken for granted that the most meritorious would emerge and be accepted by the community. If the caliph they chose went astray or proved to be corrupt and tyrannical then he should be corrected, first by being warned that his conduct was unacceptable and, if this failed, by being deposed or killed. Patricia Crone shows how this could be pushed to its logical conclusion and beyond:

  When Nadja b. Āmir, founder of the Najdiya group of Kharijites, did various things of which his followers disapproved they demanded that he repent, which he did. But then a group of them regretted having asked him to repent and told him: ‘We were wrong to ask you to repent for you are an imam. We have repented of it so now you should repent of your repentance and demand that those who asked you to repent should repent of having done so. If you don’t, we will separate from you.’ So he went out and announced to the people that he repented of his repentance. His followers then began to quarrel among themselves.7

  So there you have it: the caliph/imam being held to account in a lively exchange of views but nonetheless respected for his position. In one sense it was a conditional and contractual vision of monarchy, rare in Islamic political thought, though the rules and mechanisms by which conditionality might be put into practice are left unclear and the issue was not whether the caliph/imam did what was beneficial for the community but whether he was acting in agreement with God’s law.

  According to the Kharijites, the caliph/imam had the authority to decide matters of law and religious practice, but he should do so in consultation with the scholars in the community and it was the community which could judge whether he had acted in accordance with God’s law. The caliph, in fact, was to lead by consent to command and he had no God-given authority.

  The other main idea in Kharijite ideology was that those who sinned grievously should no longer be considered as Muslims, no matter what they said, but were rather heathens, kuffār (sing. kāfir). All true believers should hunt these kuffār down and kill them, and sell their women and children into slavery. Among the sins which could mean that you were treated as a kāfir was, of course, refusal to accept the authority of the Kharijite community and its views of the caliphate. This ideology of takfīr, considering those you disagreed with to be non-Muslim, even if they claimed to be good Muslims, seems to have originated with the Kharijites at this time, but has been adopted by other groups right down to the present and is the basis of the attitude of Islamic State towards Muslims who disagree with them.

  Kharijite views were no mere debating point: these people meant action. Their defection from Alī’s camp led to a collapse of his military effort against Muāwiya and it was a Kharijite who assassinated Alī in 661 (they had intended to assassinate Muāwiya too, for they hated both of them equally, but the attempt failed).

  The Kharijite movement also had a strong social basis to it, although this was never spelt out in their ideology. It gained its recruits among those who rejected not just the caliphates of Uthmān and Alī but the whole norms and behaviour of settled life which most Muslims had adopted after the great conquests and the migrations which followed. Many of their followers left the newly established garrison cities and led a wandering life, half nomads, half brigands, in the deserts of Arabia and southern Iran. To some they were romantic figures, harking back to the days of freedom when there were no taxes and no law-enforcement agencies, and their poetry, of which a great deal survives, was full of the spirit of the Jābiliyya, or pre-Islamic times, glorifying the Bedouin warrior and the life of travel and camp, raid and battle, albeit within a Muslim framework.

  The movement divided into a number of groups. Two of these, known after their first leaders as the Azāriqa and Najdiya, abandoned the urban life entirely and went out to terrorize their opponents and to raid settled communities. Unsurprisingly they came into conflict with the Umayyad authorities and both of them were violently suppressed, the Najdiya in Arabia in 693 and the Azāriqa in Iran in 699. The Ibādiya, by contrast, developed a position that enabled them to live together with their non-Kharijite neighbours and accept a secular authority while waiting and hoping for the arrival of a truly Kharijite imam. This quietist attitude enabled them to survive in parts of Algeria and Oman right down to the present day.

  The assassination of Alī in 661, followed as it was by the assumption of power of Mu‘āwiya, the first Umayyad caliph, marked the end of an era marked by violence and division; but the thirty years since the death of the Prophet Muhammad had also been a period of astonishing achievements. Arab Muslims had conquered almost all of what we might describe as the central Middle East, from the eastern borders of Iran to southern Tunisia. The governments of the caliphs had also set up systems which ensured that Arab-Muslim government lasted after the initial conquests were over. The caliphs and the idea of caliphate played a key role in this achievement. The nature of the office was still undefined and the method of choosing the leader hardly explored. But this uncertainty encouraged flexibility.

  Many different groups had their own ideas about who the caliph should be and what he could do, but no one, apart possibly from some small groups of Kharijites, argued that the caliphate was unnecessary and could be abolished. The concept offered the opportunity for diverse groups to develop it as they saw fit, but fundamentally presented an ideal of rulership which combined political and military leadership with spiritual guidance. It could also offer a leadership which was responsive to the needs of Muslims but was also, and crucially, respectful of what were seen to be God’s decrees. The history of the caliphate of the Orthodox period raised almost all the main issues about powers and personalities which have dominated the discussions of the nature and potential of the office ever since.

  2

  THE EXECUTIVE CALIPHATE: THE RULE OF THE UMAYYADS

  MU‘ĀWIYA AND THE ESTABLISHMENT OF THE UMAYYAD CALIPHATE

  The first of the Umayyad caliphs, Muāwiya b. Abī Sufyān, came to the caliphate in 661 almost by default. The death of Alī at the hands of a Kharijite assassin and his own lucky survival meant that he was in a much stronger position than any of his potential rivals. He was fully in charge in Syria and led a powerful and effective army. His enemies were demoralized, defeated and divided. Soon after Alī’s death he led his forces to Iraq where he made agreements with many of the prominent figures, including the most important tribal leaders, and with Hasan, Alī’s son, who might have been a catalyst for opposition. Hasan was paid considerable sums of money and withdrew to the Hijaz where he lived a life of comfortable retirement. His younger brother Husayn seems to have been less reconciled to Muāwiya’s rule but bided his time as long as the Umayyad leader lived.

  These events inaugurated the Umayyad caliphate, which
was to last until 750. By any normal standards of historical judgement, it was a period of huge success. The boundaries of the Islamic world were vastly extended: in the west with the conquest of modern Morocco and then, from 711 to 716, most of modern Spain and Portugal, and in the east with the conquests of Central Asia between 705 and 715 and Sind (southern Pakistan) in 712. Not only did Umayyad armies conquer these areas, but they governed them effectively. In the distant Iberian Peninsula, known to Muslims as Andalus, governors were appointed and dismissed on the orders of the caliphs in Damascus and Syrian armies were sent to quell disturbances. At the same time a regular administration and tax system, building on the foundations laid by Umar, were developed, coins were minted using the Arabic language and Muslim religious formulae. The first great Islamic buildings, including the Dome of the Rock and the Umayyad Mosque in Damascus, buildings we can still see and enjoy, were erected. The Umayyads led the Muslim jihād against the Byzantine Empire and they enabled and secured the hajj to Mecca, either leading it in person or sending members of their family to do so.