Caliphate

by Hugh Kennedy

  He also sought to exert Muslim naval power in the Mediterranean by organizing a large-scale attack on Cyprus, though in fact the military results were comparatively modest, and in southern Anatolia the little town of Heracleia was seized, its inhabitants imprisoned and taken back to Syria, but no attempts were made to expand Muslim territory north of the Taurus Mountains on a regular basis. The caliph did commemorate his triumph by starting work on a great public victory monument in a new settlement which he called Hiraqla after his conquests on the Euphrates in Syria. Only the rectangular foundations remain today and it is not clear that it was ever completed, but it was certainly intended to be a lasting and visible monument to Hārūn’s military achievements on the main route from Baghdad and his second capital at Raqqa to the Byzantine frontier.

  Hārūn was equally committed to the celebration of the hajj. He made the pilgrimage to Mecca no less than nine times in his twenty-three-year reign. This was more than any caliph before him. He was also the last reigning caliph, of any dynasty, who ever made the sacred journey. These pilgrimages were very grand affairs: much of the government and the political elite accompanied him, and he had the opportunity to demonstrate his leadership and his piety in front of Muslims from all over the Islamic world. It was superb publicity. One small but significant example of such display is found in an account of the hajj made by his father Mahdī. At this time the hajj was in high summer, and the heat in Mecca stifling, but one of his most wealthy courtiers, his cousin Muhammad b. Sulaymān, contrived to present the caliph with ice to cool his drinks. He had done this, we must presume, by ordering that ice be collected in the Zagros Mountains of western Iran in the winter, kept in underground ice-houses, and then wrapped in straw for insulation and put in boxes to be carried across the desert for the caliph’s enjoyment. So the caliph appeared before his people not just as a sovereign enjoying the plenitude of power but virtually as a miracle worker who could defy the laws of nature.

  The caliph and his family invested heavily in the hajj in other ways, notably the construction of the pilgrim route known as the Darb Zubayda, named after his favourite wife. In Umayyad times the main hajj route had been from Syria through the Hijaz, and Umayyad caliphs had, from time to time, made efforts to clear it and make it easier for pilgrims. When the Abbasids moved the centre of power to Iraq, the hajj became much more difficult and the long route across the deserts of central Arabia was a real challenge. Hārūn and his mother spent large sums of money on clearing stones from the path (the results can still be seen in aerial photographs today) and building water cisterns and small forts and way-stations along the route. Not only was it the biggest civil-engineering project of the early Islamic period, but it is virtually the only example we have of the Abbasid government spending money on this sort of infrastructure. Inscriptions were put up to commemorate the pious benefactions of different members of the ruling family and the fact that the road is still referred to as the Darb Zubayda (Zubayda’s Road) today shows how widely known the name was.

  The ‘golden prime’ of Hārūn al-Rashīd came to an end with his death in 809. Despite the image sometimes projected of a stern and wise elder statesman, Hārūn was only in his late forties when he died. Of the great Abbasid caliphs, only Mansūr reached the age of sixty, and many of the others died in their thirties and forties, all still young men by our standards. Hārūn left behind him an arrangement for the succession which was to prove disastrous for the Abbasids and the caliphate in general. In a great gathering in Mecca at the hajj of 803 he had arranged that his (and Zubayda’s) son Amīn should be caliph and in effective charge of Baghdad, Iraq and the western Islamic world, while another son, Ma’mūn, was to rule in Khurasan and eastern Iran, and, more problematically, was to be Amīn’s heir.

  It took only two years for war to break out between the brothers. Ma’mūn’s forces, led by the brilliant commander Tāhir b. Husayn, swept westwards, defeated Amīn’s much larger armies and were soon at the outskirts of Baghdad. From August 812 to September 813 the great city was besieged and much of it ruined by the fighting between rival militias claiming to support either Amīn or Ma’mūn but in many cases simply taking advantage of the chaos to enrich themselves. Especially damaging were the large swing-beam catapults, which both sides used and which killed and demolished indiscriminately. The conflict produced a remarkable literature of protest poetry, angry and sad in equal measures at the damage these armed groups caused to the ordinary people of the city. It is eerily reminiscent of the situation in the city 1,200 years later as different militias fought for control in 2006 and 2007.

  At the heart of the storm was Caliph Amīn, finally holed up in his great-grandfather Mansūr’s imposing round city with his enemies all about him. He knew he could not hold out, but the dilemma was choosing to whom he should give himself up with the best chance of saving his life. The account of what happened on the night of 25 September 813, when he made his decision, is one of the most dramatic and moving narratives in the whole of early Arabic historical writing. The doomed caliph wanted to hand himself over to an old family retainer, Harthama b. Ayan, who was serving with Ma’mūn’s forces, but this was vigorously opposed by Tāhir, worried that there would be a reconciliation between the brothers and he would be deprived of the fruits of his victory. In the end a compromise was arranged: Amīn would surrender himself to Harthama, but the caliphal regalia, the staff, mantle and signet ring of the Prophet, should be surrendered to Tāhir ‘for that’, they argued, ‘is the caliphate’. We hear little in sources about these relics. They were seldom referred to and never seem to have been displayed in public yet they had, it would seem, a very important symbolic value.

  Events turned out very differently. Amīn rode down to the dark shore of the Tigris to meet Harthama’s boat, but Tāhir had stationed men there to upset it, pitching Amīn and his rescuers into the water. He swam ashore but was soon captured by Tāhir’s men and taken to a safe house where he was locked up in a bare room with only some rugs and cushions. What happened next is narrated in the voice of one of his courtiers who had been picked up at the same time. It is an interesting story, for in it our perspective on the caliph is radically altered. In accounts of Amīn when his father was alive and in the early days of his own reign he is depicted as idle, stupid and frivolous, constantly shown up by his wiser and more mature brother Ma’mūn. But in his final hours, like Shakespeare’s Richard II, he acquires a dignity he has never had before and, by the time he was murdered by a group of Persian soldiers from Ma’mūn’s army in the small hours of the morning, he has become a martyr, trying to fend off the swords of his murderers with the cushions left in the room. ‘I am the cousin of the Prophet of God!’ he cries. ‘May God avenge my blood.’ The death of a caliph was always a terrible thing. Uthmān, Walīd II and Amīn all had their failings, but their murders were seen by most Muslims as horrible crimes and their deaths only unleashed more suffering.

  After the death of Amīn it took some six years for Ma’mūn, with the aid of his eastern Iranian supporters, to establish control over the whole caliphate, though even then Tunisia was never recovered by the Baghdad government and independent rulers appeared in the Maghreb as they had in Spain fifty years before. Ma’mūn brought with him a whole new elite of eastern Iranian aristocrats and Turkish mercenary soldiers. Turks from Central Asia (modern Turkey was not settled by Turkish speakers until the end of the eleventh century) were renowned for their hardiness in warfare and their skill in horsemanship: they made formidable professional soldiers. Apart from the caliph himself, and some members of his immediate family, virtually no one who had served under Hārūn al-Rashīd was accepted into the new ruling class and their children and grandchildren mostly disappeared into the seething mass of the Baghdad population. The new elite brutally deposed their predecessors. In Egypt, for example, it was decreed that the Arabs of the old army of the province should be dropped from the payroll and replaced by Turkish soldiers, newly arrived from the east, with lit
tle knowledge of Islam or the Arabic language of the Egyptians over whom they ruled and whose taxes paid their salaries.

  In the short run the policy was effective. The new army suppressed revolts efficiently and the power of the caliphs was largely unchallenged, but in the long run the changes were fatal to the caliphal office and the unity of the Muslim community it symbolized. There was now a huge gap between ordinary rulers and the caliph and his advisers, hidden behind the forbidding walls of the vast palaces they built along the banks of the Tigris. The caliph could no longer count on the support and allegiance of the wider Muslim community.

  Along with a new ruling elite and army, the new regime brought new ideas. Ma’mūn, as we shall see in the next chapter, was a genuine intellectual with a keen interest in science and philosophy, but not all his ideas were popular with his subjects. The most contentious of his moves was to support the doctrine of the ‘createdness’ of the Qur’ān. Muslims accepted that the Qur’ān was indeed the word of God—no one disputed that—but some held that it had been created by God at a particular moment in time, that is when God revealed it to Muhammad through the mouth of the angel Gabriel. The opponents of this view were convinced that the Qur’ān had existed in all eternity, coeval with God, and that it had simply been presented to mankind at the time of Muhammad’s revelation. At first sight this looks like an obscure difference over a point of doctrine which is intrinsically unknowable. Yet it provoked a storm of opposition which, in the end, did enormous damage to the reputation and power of the caliphs.

  People objected to the doctrine because it could be argued that if the Qur’ān was created in time, it could be interpreted in view of changing conditions. Perhaps, even, new revelations would come to light. And it would fall to the caliph to judge on these matters. People also objected to the way in which Ma’mūn asserted the right of the caliph to make judgements and decisions on such questions of belief. Previous caliphs, Umayyads and Abbasids alike, had claimed the right to adjudicate on difficult points of Islamic law, but this was different. It was a bold move by the caliph to assert his right to define doctrine, very much as the popes of the high Middle Ages were to do in western Europe.

  Many of the leaders of the opposition to the doctrine came from families which had been prominent in the army and bureaucracy of the early Abbasid regime but who had now lost their status and their salaries. Discontent had only increased when Ma’mūn’s successor, the military caliph Mutasim, moved the capital from Baghdad to his newly founded city of Samarra, eighty miles north, where he established the centre of government. In part, the opposition to the new doctrine was based in Baghdad, at least in part a product of the resentment of its inhabitants with the moving of the capital and the losses that this entailed.

  The new regime was determined to push through this new ideology. All employees of the government had to support it; prisoners taken by the Byzantines in frontier warfare and wanting to be ransomed had to agree that the Qur’ān was created before the authorities would pay for their freedom. For the only time in the long history of the office, a caliph had taken it upon himself to decide on a major theological issue and to enforce his opinion on anyone who wanted to play an important part in the military or civilian hierarchy. In order to do this an inquisition (mihna) was set up to examine and, if necessary, punish those who objected. Again, this was the first and last time such a body was set up by a caliph.

  The policy aroused enormous opposition, especially in Baghdad. The most vocal advocate of opposition was Ahmad b. Hanbal. Ibn Hanbal was a jurist and polemicist who argued forcefully that any decisions about Islamic law and practice should be based on the Traditions of the Prophet and nothing else. The guardians and interpreters of the Traditions were the scholars who collected and studied them, the professionals in fact. No caliph or ruler could acquire the amount of information or memorize the number of Traditions required to make an intelligent judgement.

  There was a minor popular rebellion in Baghdad, though it was easily suppressed by government forces. The more general opposition, fuelled by the writings and preaching of the Hanbalites, persisted stubbornly. In the end Caliph Mutawakkil (847–61) and his advisers decided to abandon the losing struggle and the doctrine of the createdness of the Qur’ān was quietly dropped while a raft of measures, including the stigmatization of religious minorities, was introduced to demonstrate the caliph’s commitment to Islamic values. The whole incident shaped the political and above all the religious role of the caliph from then on. The powers of judgement which the Orthodox caliphs, the Umayyads and the early Abbasids had assumed as a matter of course were lost to the professional jurists. Their power and authority came not from the caliph or any government official but from the respect of their fellow jurists and the approbation of the public, who sought and valued their fatwas (legal opinions). The caliph had become a ruler without powers of legislation in many of the matters which affected his subjects most closely.

  This ideological debacle was followed by political collapse. The caliphs had moved to Samarra and lived in great palaces surrounded by high fortress-like walls, seldom, as far as we know, appearing in public. They were surrounded by the Turkish troops who formed their guard. In 861 Mutawakkil was murdered in his palace during one of the wine-drinking sessions which were a conspicuous feature of his reign. The reasons lay in the jealousy of his son and heir, who feared that he was being replaced by his brother, and the Turkish guards, who equally felt that their status was being undermined by other groups in the army. As in the cases of Uthmān, Walīd II and Amīn, the killing of the caliph opened the door to tragedy and disaster. The new caliph had little time to enjoy his status, and in the claustrophobic and murderous world of Samarra caliphs succeeded each other with terrifying rapidity, killed in most cases by Turkish soldiers whose salaries they had been unable to pay.

  From 861 to 870 the caliphs were largely isolated by the power struggles in Samarra. Meanwhile, in the rest of the Islamic world, people found that they could do without a ruling and effective caliph. In Egypt the local governor Ibn Tūlūn, himself of Turkish descent, simply took over the province, the first independent ruler of Egypt, it has been said, since Cleopatra, and ushered in a time of peace and prosperity which contrasted markedly with the mayhem in Iraq. Most of eastern Iran was taken over by a family of military adventurers called the Saffarids. They were Muslims, to be sure, but they were also Persians who knew no Arabic (they had to have panegyrics written in the New Persian language so that they could understand, and enjoy, the praises of the poets). Their allegiance was to Islam, not to the powerless caliph.

  The anarchy came to an end in 870 with a new and largely powerless caliph in Samarra and, more importantly, his brother, who took the quasi-caliphal title of Muwaffaq (though he never became caliph himself). He succeeded because he had close relations with commanders of the Turkish military, but he ruled over a very diminished realm. Only central Iraq and some areas of Syria and western Iran remained to the caliphs. Muwaffaq began to regain the territory lost to the government. The first task was to recover southern Iraq, which had been taken over by a group of rebels known as the Zanj. The Zanj were East African slaves who had been imported into southern Iraq by rich landowners to help clear the salt which had accumulated on the irrigated fields and was making agriculture impossible. It was terrible work in the baking hot, shadeless fields and it is not surprising that social revolt broke out—the only mass slave revolt in Middle Eastern history. It seems that their leader was an Arab who claimed to be a member of the Family of the Prophet and, ideologically, this was a Shiite rebellion, with the Family once more casting themselves as leaders of the oppressed. Muwaffaq, however, chose to portray it as an anti-Islamic, essentially pagan movement. This enabled him to claim that his men were fighting a jihād, led by the Abbasid family, to save Islam. The long-drawn-out campaign was described in detail in a long narrative account commissioned by Muwaffaq and his victories were widely publicized by letters and from th
e pulpits.

  In the end the rebels were conquered and the revived Abbasid caliphate was established as an important regional power, ruling over Iraq and parts of Iran and Syria. In 905 they even reconquered Egypt for a short while. Furthermore, many of the other regional powers found it useful to have diplomas of investiture from the caliph to establish their legitimacy, even if the banner and the diploma which came from Baghdad (now again the capital) were simply recognizing a fait accompli.

  THE DISASTROUS REIGN OF CALIPH MUQTADIR

  This modest revival, which might in turn have led to a more widespread acceptance of Abbasid rule in the Islamic world, came to a halt in the reign of Caliph Muqtadir (908–32). He succeeded his brother Muktafī as a result of a court intrigue. The problem was that he was a boy who had barely entered his teens, very much under the influence of his powerful and controlling mother, known to all as Sayyida (Lady). Many disapproved of the appointment of an inexperienced youth to this highest office, but, for a small and powerful clique led by the vizier Ibn al-Furāt, his young age was his chief attraction: he could be managed and manipulated. The reign was an almost unmitigated disaster. The administration was paralysed by repeated financial crises and frequent changes of vizier.