Caliphate

by Hugh Kennedy

  Unfortunately for the Zubayrid cause, Kufa had already been taken over by another pretender, Mukhtār b. Abī Ubayd. Mukhtār came from the Hijazi tribe of Thaqīf, but he was not a Qurashi and never seems to have considered claiming the caliphate in his own right. He was also now an old man, having been born around the time of the Hijra. His father had been the commander of an early, and unsuccessful, Arab raid on Iraq at the very beginning of the conquests and he had deep roots in Iraq. He now proclaimed that the caliphate should belong to the Family of the Prophet. This cause was sure to arouse support in Kufa, where many still remembered the sad fate of Husayn barely five years before and were anxious to avenge his killing and restore their prestige.

  The problem for Mukhtār was that he needed to find a member of the Family who would take up the leadership and claim the caliphate. After what had happened to his father, Alī b. al-Husayn, who was living a quiet and modestly prosperous life in Medina, understandably turned him down. He did however get a more favourable response from Muhammad b. al-Hanafiya who did not come to Kufa but allowed his name to be used as a candidate for the caliphate. He was an interesting choice because, although he was a son of Alī, he was not the child of Fātima but, as his name suggests, of a woman of the Hanafi tribe. This meant that the blood of the Prophet did not flow through his veins and his acceptance was a sign that the memory of Alī himself was increasingly revered in Iraq and descent from him alone could justify a claim to the caliphate. Mukhtār proclaimed Ibn al-Hanafiya not just as caliph but as Mahdī, the first time that this title was used by a would-be leader of the community. Mahdī meant God-guided, and implied a leader who could begin a new era and make radical changes to bring in a truly Islamic government. This term was to be used frequently throughout Islamic history, usually in Shiite circles, as a symbol of hope and messianic expectation. Some later caliphs claimed to be Mahdīs, notably the Shiite Fatimid caliphs of Egypt (969–1171), but most did not and the title retained its revolutionary, even apocalyptic overtones.

  Mukhtār appealed to and based his support on the ‘weak’, the have-nots in Kufan society, those Arab Muslims who struggled along on low or non-existent incomes, and especially the non-Arab converts, the mawālī, at least 500 of whom joined his army, and he appointed one of their number to the important role of chief of police. The mawālī had plenty of grievances. Although believing Muslims, they were still treated as inferiors by the Arab leaders and in many cases were still forced to pay the jizya. They formed an important part of Mukhtār’s military forces and he came increasingly to rely on them. This alarmed and angered the noble Arabs, the ashrāf, who complained that the mawālī had been given horses, paid salaries and generally favoured. A brief conflict broke out in the city, and the nobles and their allies were driven out. Ten thousand of them promptly marched south to Basra to join the forces being assembled by Musab, Ibn al-Zubayr’s brother. From here they returned with their new allies to reconquer their home town of Kufa, which they did in April 687, Mukhtār himself being killed in the battle. His radical social experiment had been crushed by the forces of conservatism, but the memory lingered on among the marginalized and dispossessed, many of whom continued to believe that a Mahdī from the Family of the Prophet would come to usher in a more just and equal Islamic society. These people were often labelled ghulāt, or extremists, because of their radical views, both social and religious, and they made an important contribution to the Shiite ideology which was to emerge in the ninth and tenth centuries.

  With the death of Mukhtār and the dispersal of his followers there were now only two main protagonists, the forces of Ibn al-Zubayr in the Hijaz and Iraq and those of Abd al-Malik the Umayyad in Syria. On the fringes, raiding and killing but with no real possibility of taking over the major centres of power, were the Kharijites, hated by Umayyads and Zubayrids alike.

  By 691, six years after he had been proclaimed caliph, Abd al-Malik had reasserted Umayyad control over all Syria and the Syrians. He led his army in person to confront Musab and at a battle near Kufa the Syrians completely defeated the Iraqis, divided and weakened as they were by the bitter rifts which remained as a result of Musab’s killing of Mukhtār and the suppression of his movement. Only Ibn al-Zubayr himself now remained, establishing himself not in the Prophet’s city of Medina but in Mecca, the only centre of Qurashi power. A force was sent to crush him, led by a figure who was to become Abd al-Malik’s right-hand man in Iraq and a lasting symbol of strong, no-nonsense government in the Muslim tradition, Hajjāj b. Yūsuf. He pursued his campaign with ruthless efficiency, having no qualms about directing his siege engines on the Kaba. Ibn Zubayr’s forces were no match for this and he was killed, fighting bravely, in October 692. Finally the unity of the Muslim world had been restored.

  The events of this seven-year civil war are, to say the least, complex, but they are also revealing about the nature of caliphate and the different expectations various groups had of the office. The long years of fighting were essentially about who was to be caliph. None of the participants proposed to abolish the office or divide the caliphate into separate areas. Their disagreements were not about personalities or personal rivalries or, in general, about tribal differences and factionalism. They rather reflected profound and lasting social and regional differences among the Muslims. At the regional level the conflict was about where the caliphate was to be based, the Hijaz, Iraq or Syria. The location was significant because wherever the caliph was based would be the centre of power and wealth.

  Then there were the social divisions. Both Umayyads and Zubayrids were socially conservative, believing in rule through the tribal elites, whereas Mukhtār proposed a radically new social order where these distinctions would cease to matter. While Zubayrids and Umayyads stood for a caliphate which would maintain the existing social structures with security and justice for all, essentially a governmental role, many of the followers of Mukhtār hoped for a revolutionary caliph who would use his office and his status as a member of the Family of the Prophet to transform society. All these different groups were Muslim and many of the participants personally, no doubt, very devout: non-Muslims played no part in these discussions and struggles. Yet they had very different visions of what an Islamic society should look like and especially of the role and function of the caliph. Finally it should be noted that these differences were not solved and ended by discussion and compromise but by military power and strength. The Umayyads did not win because they had the most persuasive and popular arguments, but because they had the most effective military machine and military leadership.

  Abd al-Malik was now the undisputed ruler of the Muslim world, but experience of the long years of civil war and the challenge this had meant to Umayyad rule seems to have made him determined to develop a strong state structure which would prevent such problems occurring again. He abandoned Muāwiya’s tradition of exerting power through a network of alliances and informal agreements and created a more autocratic, top-down caliphate. Much of what we might call the infrastructure of Muslim government as it existed down to modern times was developed by this forceful and imaginative ruler. He began the minting of a specifically Muslim coinage, usually bearing the caliph’s name; he standardized the system of taxation and the paying of the military and the appointment of governors to provinces by investing them with banners. His right-hand man Hajjāj and a small group of trusted men, composed mostly of mawālī, formed a sort of inner cabinet. Some of these mawālī may have been Greek converts with experience of Byzantine administration and techniques, but the structures which Abd al-Malik developed were thoroughly Islamic in presentation and intention.

  The foundations of his power lay in the Syrian army. Recruited from the Arab tribesmen of greater Syria, they were organized and paid to maintain Islamic rule throughout the Muslim world. The first priority was Iraq, rich and populous and, in many cases, resistant to Syrian control. Hajjāj developed a new city called Wasit because it was between the old established garrison towns of Ba
sra and Kufa. He ruled here as governor and the Syrian army enforced his orders. What was even more galling for the Iraqis was that they were paid from the revenues of Iraq or, as people at the time put it, ‘they ate the fay, the income from taxation, of Iraq’, which most Iraqis believed should rightly be paid to them. Needless to say, there was discontent which sometimes flared into open rebellion, but the Umayyad forces were always powerful enough to defeat the rebels and maintain the caliph’s authority.

  This Syrian army, backbone of the state, needed to be paid and the caliph made an effort to standardize the different systems throughout the caliphate. In around the year 700 Abd al-Malik decreed that all government departments should use Arabic as their working language and that all records should be kept in Arabic. Until this time Greek in the west and Pahlavi (middle Persian) in the east had remained the language of much administrative activity. Now all that was swept away and so was much of the culture that went with it. No one learned Greek or Pahlavi any more because there were no longer any jobs which required them. Even the Melkite (Greek Orthodox) church was using Arabic as a liturgical language in much of the Middle East by the eighth century.

  We can be sure about the spread of Arabic because we have surviving documents from two very different areas of the Muslim world. The most numerous are from Egypt. Here government records were written on papyrus (woven reeds), which has survived in the very dry climate. Administrative documents started to be written in Arabic within a year of the initial Muslim conquest in 641, but for many years Greek was still used as well. By the eighth century, however, Arabic was clearly the only language used in the central administration in Old Cairo, though Greek sometimes still appeared in documents for local consumption. From the 750s, at the other end of the caliphate, we have a small collection of tax and legal records written in Arabic on leather. They come from a small town called Rob now in north-eastern Afghanistan, still today a remote and inaccessible area, which was conquered by Muslim armies in the first decades of the eighth century. The Arabic language and figures used in these documents would have been instantly comprehensible to scribes working at the same time in the Egyptian bureaucracy. Such was the reach of caliphal power.

  One of Abd al-Malik’s major projects was the establishment of an Islamic coinage. We have already seen how Muāwiya had attempted to introduce a new coinage without the Christian symbol of the cross and how this had been rejected by the people. Abd al-Malik, with greater resources and more determination, tackled this again. He first experimented with coins with portrait images of himself: we have surviving examples of ‘standing caliph’ coins with images of a figure standing in long robes, a straight sword buckled around his waist, with long hair, flowing beard and sporting a recognizably Arab headdress. For reasons which are unclear, this imagery was soon abandoned in favour of a purely epigraphic coinage, that is, one using only Arabic inscriptions. These varied from time to time and according to the types of coins, but they were essentially quotes from the Qur’ān or religious slogans, names of the caliphs, the place of minting and the date. The new coins came in three main types. The most valuable of these was the gold dīnār, based on the Byzantine solidus, about the size of a modern British 5-pence or 2-euro cents piece. Then there was the silver dirham, based on the old Sasanian drachm, slightly larger and thinner than a 10-pence or 2-euro piece. Finally there were copper coins, called fals (pl. fulūs), which were minted locally in different areas to much cruder designs. The gold dinars, mostly minted in Damascus, were predominantly used in the former Byzantine territories of the western half of the caliphate and the dirhams, usually minted in Wasit, in the formerly Sasanian lands of the east. Both types of coins, however, circulated throughout the caliphate. A coin minted in Damascus would be accepted without question in Bukhara or Samarqand.

  This monetary reform is interesting for all sorts of reasons. Purely epigraphic coinages continued to be used, with few exceptions, in the Islamic world down to the nineteenth century when images of rulers, on the European model, began to reappear. The memory of these ancient coins survives in modern currency, in the dinars of Jordan, Iraq, the Gulf States and Tunisia and the dirhams of Morocco. Money in general is still referred to as fulūs in modern Levantine Arabic.

  The currency was witness to the caliph’s authority. All minting of gold and silver was done by the government. The sikka, the right to have coins minted and to inscribe the ruler’s name on them, became one of the key indicators of sovereignty in the Muslim world. There were none of those private coinages minted by nobles and bishops which were so prevalent in much of western Europe in this era. The inscriptions made clear to all who could read who the ruler was. From Portugal to Central Asia, people used coins which proclaimed an Islamic state. Just as importantly, they carried the Arabic language to the remotest corners of the Muslim world, confirming its status as the language of power and rule.

  The caliph had other ways of making his presence known. Abd al-Malik erected a series of milestones along the main roads he travelled in Syria and Palestine—tall, conical pillars about two metres high with Arabic inscriptions giving both distances on the road and the name of the caliph who had commissioned them. Here again he was in some ways following the tradition of Roman milestones, many of which must have still been visible along the main roads, but he was proclaiming that this was now an Arab Muslim empire and that what had been the responsibility of the Roman imperial authorities had now been taken over by the Muslim caliph.

  The most conspicuous and lasting of Abd al-Malik’s achievements was in architecture, and here we must include the works of his son and successor Walīd I (705–15), who followed closely in his father’s footsteps. The Orthodox caliphs seem to have built nothing, certainly nothing that has survived in physical shape or written record apart from a small structure on the Temple platform in Jerusalem, which Umar is said to have ordered to be built when he cleaned the site up. We are told that mosques were erected in the garrison towns of Kufa and Basra, but we have no detailed descriptions and no surviving evidence. This was not, all in all, a very impressive record.

  Abd al-Malik changed all that with the building of the Dome of the Rock in Jerusalem. Now 1,400 years old, this astonishing building still exists in more or less its original form and it preserves much of the original decoration. This is not the place for a detailed architectural description, but something must be said about the caliph’s role in its construction. Two explanations for the building can be put forward. The first is that construction work began when Ibn al-Zubayr was ruling Mecca and that the Dome was constructed as an alternative focus for hajj. Certainly the form of the building, which is centred on the eponymous rock and surrounded by circular and octagonal aisles, seems designed for the circumambulation (tawwāf) which lay at the heart of the hajj ritual. This is not to argue that Abd al-Malik wished to replace Mecca and the Kaba, but rather to provide an alternative while Mecca lay in the power of his enemy; and who knew how long that would be?

  The second and complementary explanation is that it was built to assert the Islamic presence in Jerusalem. It looks across the valley which lies at the heart of the old city to the Church of the Holy Sepulchre, whose dome, constructed on the orders of the emperor Constantine at the beginning of the fourth century, was the grandest and most conspicuous monument in the city. The Dome of the Rock is higher, looking down on the church, and it is slightly larger. Further support is given to this idea by the gold mosaic inscription which runs around the inside of the dome. This is the earliest monumental inscription in Arabic. It is not a text from the Qur’ān but rather uses Qur’anic quotations to emphasize the oneness of God, a clear critique of the Christian doctrine of the Trinity, which Muslims often attacked for assigning partners to God (shirk). And the inscription announces for all to see and read that the building was the work of Caliph Abd al-Malik—or rather it used to: when the Abbasid caliph Ma’mūn visited the city in 832, he insisted that his own name be put up in the place of Abd al-Malik�
��s, a crude substitution which deceived no one). With its conspicuous position and its lavish decoration of marble and gold-leaf mosaic, the Dome of the Rock clearly echoed Byzantine imperial style (though of course without the images of Christ and his saints which would have adorned a Byzantine building). It was a very public proclamation of the glory and triumph of Islam and an equally public proclamation of the caliph as the builder and creator of this triumph.

  Walīd followed his father’s example. In Medina he rebuilt the Mosque of the Prophet, though nothing of his work survives there, and in Damascus be demolished the cathedral, after arranging the payment of compensation to the Christian community. Then, sometimes working, we are told, with his own hands, he set about building the magnificent mosque which is still the great architectural glory of the ancient city. A marble inscription, now lost, proclaimed his role as the builder.

  In most complex human societies, one of the ruler’s most important functions is the making of law and the passing of judgement. In the Roman Empire law was created by the emperor: ‘Whatever pleases the prince [princeps, that is, Emperor] is law’ runs the maxim. In the Byzantine Empire it was the emperor himself, from Justinian on, who issued and revised laws. In Britain law is created, at least in theory, by the Queen in Parliament. It is interesting to consider, then, whether the caliph had a similar role. Here we are confronted by a problem. The sources on which we depend date from the ninth century and after. In the ninth century it was the case that the caliph was almost completely excluded both from law-making and from judgement. Law-making, or rather law-finding, had become the preserve of the ulama, those who knew the Qur’ān and the Traditions of the Prophet, by this time accepted as the only valid sources of law. But did this apply to the Umayyads in the first half of the eighth century and did the Umayyads function as law-makers and judges?