Caliphate

by Hugh Kennedy

  The story is interesting in so many ways. The brilliant court culture where a quick wit and good poetic style were passports to success; the role of the women, virtually princesses and slaves as the same moment but major actors in court life; and the touching epitaph written by the author 400 years after the events but still remembering them as fresh and poignant.

  The court culture of the Abbasids in their heyday had an unrivalled variety and éclat. It was an environment in which many different talents, from many different backgrounds, could flourish. Apart from the world of theology and the disputes about the createdness of the Qur’ān, disputes which were, as we have seen, as much political as intellectual, there was no official line which had to be obeyed, no censorship of views on a whole world of matters. It was the sheer vigour and variety of this culture which makes the Abbasid caliphate such an inspiring and powerful model.

  For all its splendour, however, Abbasid culture has little resonance with modern audiences, both in the Muslim community and, more especially, beyond. In a world dominated by visual images the Abbasids have virtually nothing to offer. Abbasid Baghdad has left no traces and the detailed descriptions only mean that we can reconstruct it in our imaginations. The outlines of the great palaces at Samarra can be drawn in the dust and gravel of central Iraq, but the mud-brick of which they were built has dissolved into the soil from which it was made, while the plaster, mosaics and frescoes which covered and beautified the walls only survive in the smallest fragments. The gorgeous silks and intricate carpets which the sources constantly refer to have vanished without trace. Huge numbers of books were produced and read, but there were no illustrated manuscripts to preserve a visual image of the caliphal court. The Umayyad caliphs left their stone-built palaces in the Syrian desert which we can still admire. The courts of later medieval Iran are shown in the book-paintings so evocative of court life and the Ottomans have bequeathed not just illustrations of court life but the grand palaces in which they, their courts and their harems lived and moved. This great gap should not, however, blind us to the fact that the court of the caliphs was, in its time, the most important and the richest cultural centre on the planet.

  5

  THE LATER ABBASID CALIPHATE

  THE CALIPHS UNDER BUYID CONTROL

  The coming of Buyid rule in Baghdad from 945 lead to the almost complete collapse of the administration of the Abbasid caliphate and ushered in two generations of obscurity and impotence in which the ancient office seemed to many an irrelevant relic. A succession of caliphs lived in the remains of the Great Palace of the Caliphate (Dār al-khilāfa) on the banks of the Tigris, but much of it lay in ruins and their authority was confined within its walls. The caliph no longer had a vizier to manage his affairs since there were so few of them to manage, nor dīwāns for his administrators, for there were none, or barracks for his soldiers, for they had gone to serve other masters. He had a secretary and a modest retinue of domestic servants, an exalted title and an ancient genealogy, and that was all. Nor was his person secure: Muttaqī was deposed and blinded in 944 and Mustakfī killed in 949 when they aroused the anger of their military ‘protectors’.

  The Buyids were complete outsiders in the world of the caliphate. They came from no famous tribe and until the beginning of the tenth century the family lived in obscurity as fishermen on the shores of the Caspian Sea. By a mixture of daring and ability, they took advantage of the debacle of the caliphate and by 945 made themselves masters of western Iran, Iraq and of Baghdad itself, and with it the person of the Abbasid caliph. The Buyids ruled in Shiraz, Rayy and Baghdad, but Baghdad was always the most prestigious, if no longer the most prosperous, of their capitals. They were also Shiites, though it is not entirely clear which sect of the Shia they belonged to. This meant that they had none of the respect for the Abbasids which other politicians and generals at the time had. It might have seemed logical for them to remove the Abbasids altogether and establish a caliph from the house of Alī. They chose not to do so, partly at least because they risked choosing a man whose authority and popular appeal would supplant their own, and who could dispense with them. Instead, it suited them to maintain an Abbasid presence. It attracted some support for their regime among the non-Shia population and it also gave them a constitutional legitimacy. They ruled as supporters of the dawla (the state or dynasty, meaning the Abbasids), and they took titles which meant ‘pillar of the dynasty’, ‘support of the dynasty’ (Rukn al-Dawla, Adud al-Dawla), and so forth. Everyone knew that this was at best a polite fiction, since the Buyids made all the decisions even in Baghdad, but it served its purpose. When the Fatimids conquered Egypt in 969, they made no effort to forge a Shiite alliance with them, instead remaining as protectors of the Abbasids.

  Despite his powerlessness, the caliph could still be useful on some occasions to the Buyid rulers. In 980, when an ambassador from the rival Fatimid caliph in Cairo came to visit Adud al-Dawla, then ruler in Baghdad, the latter sought to impress him by the presence of his caliph, Tā’ī. The ambassador was led between serried ranks of troops to the presence of the caliph, hidden by a veil. When this veil was removed, the caliph could be seen, seated on a high throne surrounded by a hundred guards in brilliant robes with drawn swords. He wore the mantle of the Prophet and held his sceptre in his hands. Before him the Qur’ān of Uthmān was displayed. When the ambassador asked who this was, Adud al-Dawla replied, ‘This is the Caliph of God on earth,’ a clear rebuke to the pretensions of the Fatimids. Adud al-Dawla made a huge show of respect, kissing the caliph’s foot before being formally appointed to offices he already held: ‘I entrust you with the charge of my subjects whom God has committed to me in the east and in the west, with the exception of my personal and private property. Do you therefore assume charge of them?’ To which the Buyid replied in apparent humility, ‘God aid me in obedience to our Lord the Commander of the Faithful.’ The performance ended with the bestowal of robes of honour by the caliph.1 The ostentatious deference of Adud al-Dawla to the caliph was, as everyone knew, a charade, but the Abbasid caliphs soon began to assume a new and significant role as leaders of the Sunni community in Baghdad and the wider Muslim world.

  Important developments took place in Baghdad at this time, which have striking and unhappy parallels in our own day. In the year 900 the Sunni and Shii communities were not sharply differentiated. There were certainly enthusiastic, even fanatical, supporters of the Family of the Prophet who were prepared to risk their lives for the cause, but many Muslims were simply that, part of the broad consensus of the umma. The uncertainties caused by the collapse of government in the tenth century led men to seek the protection of other like-minded people. What had been differences in religious opinion now became differences in political life. Baghdad became divided into sectarian communities, each intent on defending its own district. The Shiites worshipped in their own mosques and developed their own, exclusive festivals, especially the celebration of the Ghadīr Khumm, the pond between Mecca and Medina where, the Shia believe, Muhammad designated Alī as his heir. Their opponents, whom we can describe as proto-Sunnis, developed a rival festival of the Cave, the cave where Muhammad and Abū Bakr had hidden together to escape the persecutions of the Meccans. Graffiti artists wrote slogans on walls, cursing some of the early caliphs. Most people in Baghdad would accept the cursing of the Syrian Umayyad Muāwiya, but when the cursing was extended to Uthmān and, even worse, Abū Bakr and Umar (for depriving Alī of his rightful inheritance), anger rapidly developed into violence.

  The Buyid regime became involved in these differences between the people, often supporting the Shia as a way of mobilizing popular forces against their enemies, who in turn began to look to the Abbasids for leadership. Until his death in 983 the greatest of the Buyid emirs, Adud al-Dawla, ruled the city with an iron hand, suppressing violence from whichever quarter it came: on one occasion he had the leaders of the Alid Shiites and the Abbasid party drowned together in the Tigris as a sign of his even-handed, no-nonsens
e justice.

  When he died, his successors fought against each other to control his inheritance. As the power of the Buyid claimants was undermined by wars among themselves and increasing financial problems, the balance between the Buyids and the Abbasid caliphs began slowly to change. Increasingly Buyids needed the support in the city which the Abbasids were sometimes able to deliver and the caliph had much more scope for public action.

  REINVENTING THE ABBASID CALIPH

  In late 991 the Abbasid caliph Tā’ī held an audience for the new ruler of Baghdad, Bahā al-Dawla. The caliph wore a ceremonial sword and sat on his throne. The Buyid approached and, as protocol demanded, bowed his head to the ground in front of the caliph before being invited to take a seat beside him: the Buyids, for all their power, were still in theory servants of the dynasty. What happened next was definitely not in the caliph’s script. The Buyid troops approached the caliph, but instead of bowing down seized him by the strap of his sword, dragged him from his throne and took him prisoner to the Dār al-mamlaka, the Buyid centre of power in the city. Here Bahā al-Dawla declared the caliph deposed and announced that the new caliph was to be Tā’ī’s cousin Qādir, who was then a refugee in the marches of southern Iraq.

  It was a public and obvious humiliation for the Abbasids (even if the deposed caliph was more fortunate than those of his predecessors who were blinded or murdered). However, even though no one probably realized it at the time, the incident marked a new beginning for the caliphate.

  We have some fairly detailed descriptions of how Qādir was accepted as caliph. There were two oaths of allegiance: the first, a private oath (bayat al-khāssa) taken among the Abbasid family and the members of the caliphal household, and the second a public oath (bayat al-āmma) taken before a more general audience. The next stage was a ceremony at which the new caliph and his Buyid sponsor swore mutual oaths of loyalty to each other. In addition, a family agreement was made by which Bahā al-Dawla’s daughter would marry the new caliph, though in the event she died before the wedding ceremony could take place. Such dynastic alliances were becoming increasingly important at this time as a way in which dynasties of outsiders, like the Buyids and later the Seljuqs, could attach themselves to the genealogy of the Quraysh and the Abbasids.

  The mention of the caliph’s name in the khutba (the Friday sermon) and on the sikka (coinage) were further acknowledgements of his status in the public eye. In the days when Umayyad and Abbasid caliphs were all-powerful, these symbols were more or less taken for granted, but by the end of the tenth century they were often contested and thereby more important. However, the Buyid army in Baghdad, demonstrating yet again the truculence with which soldiers at the time responded to their rulers, refused to allow the khutba to be made in Qādir’s name until each of them had received eighty dirhams.

  Although both sermon and coinage were significant indicators of the caliph’s acceptance beyond the region of Baghdad and its immediate surroundings, there would be no such affirmations of loyalty, of course, in the areas of Syria and Egypt rule by the Shiite Fatimids, who had their own sermons and coinage proclaiming their caliphal title. The situation in Iran was even more complex and some, notably other members of the Buyid family, resented Bahā al-Dawla’s high-handed treatment of the previous caliph. But by the year 1000 Qādir’s name was almost universally acknowledged. In 1001 his position was further secured when his son was publicly accepted as heir apparent.

  The naming of the caliph on coins is an invaluable piece of evidence for the historian. While chroniclers can make mistakes about complex events which happened long before their time, the evidence of the inscriptions on dated coins is more trustworthy and, by following them, we can trace the extent of the caliph’s recognition and note who were the local rulers who acknowledged him.

  So what real authority did this imply? From Qādir to the death of the last Abbasid caliph, Mustasim, at the hands of the Mongols in 1258, caliphs exercised some limited power at two different levels. At one level they were, in a vague, undefined but still crucial way, heads of the Sunni Muslim community. Most thinkers believed that a caliph was necessary for the maintenance of the sharīa and true Islam. In some respects the caliph was a bit like the Hidden Imam of the Twelver Shiis, powerless but essential for the performance of true religion, except that the caliph was a live human being. At another level, the later Abbasids were rulers of a principality in central Iraq with its capital at Baghdad which became increasingly important within the regional politics of greater Mesopotamia, reaching its apogee in the long reign of Caliph Nāsir (1180–1225).

  One of the ways in which Qādir could exercise real power was through the appointment of qādīs, or judges. While the appointment of local governors or military commanders was beyond his control, qādīs owed their position to the sharīa, of which the caliph could claim to be the guardian. Qādīs were often important figures in their own right because they came from influential families in their localities. In the mid-eleventh century, indeed, we find them acting as virtually independent rulers of towns. In 999 Qādir made a number of appointments in the Baghdad area, Wasit and in distant Jilan, in northern Iran. In fact, he did not limit himself to appointments but also sent letters of instruction and guidance. This was soft power to be sure, but power nonetheless.

  Within Baghdad, Qādir asserted his leadership of the Sunni community in the city. Sometimes this took the form of direct intervention in the conflicts which plagued the city. In 1007, for example, a dispute had broken out when Sunnis were accused of burning a recension of the Qur’ān which the Shiites held in great respect. The Shiites gathered in protest, publicly cursing those involved, even going so far as to proclaim allegiance to the Fatimid caliph in Cairo, but the Qādir acted to support the Sunnis, sending members of his household to help. In the end, matters quietened down and the Shiite leaders went to the caliph to apologize.

  A much more important element of Qādir’s policy was the staking of the claim to decide doctrine, and specifically Sunni doctrine, in distinction to any other forms of Muslim belief. The early Abbasid caliphs had not been, in the modern sense, Sunnis. Their claim to the caliphate was, after all, based on their membership of the extended Family of the Prophet and there was, at that time, no clearly defined body of belief which might be described as Sunni. Faced with the Shiite sympathies of his protectors the Buyids, and, much more challenging, the Fatimids claim to be the rightful caliphs of the whole Islamic world, Qādir decided to establish his leadership of the Sunni community in unambiguous terms. In 1017 he called on ‘innovators’, notably Mutazilite jurists (who believed in using philosophical logic to examine the mysteries of faith) to repent and stop their teaching. In 1029 he went much further in holding a series of public ceremonies in the Dār al-khilāfa, attended by the civil elite of Baghdad, in which a letter explaining correct beliefs and attacking Mutazilites and Shiites was read out. At the end of his life he had written a document in which he formulated Sunni beliefs in a clear and approachable way.2

  The Qādiri Epistle (Risālat al-Qādiriya) is a comparatively short document and has none of the bombastic and convoluted language of, say, Walīd II’s letter about the appointment of his heir discussed earlier. In fact, it was obviously written for public circulation and information.

  Having started, as we might expect, with an affirmation of God’s unity and eternity and a statement that He is the creator and lord of everything, Qādir denounces anthropomorphists, those who ascribe human attributes, especially speech, to God: ‘He speaks but not with organs like those of human beings.’ He also denounces in no uncertain terms anyone who believes in the createdness of the Qur’ān: ‘He who asserts that it is in any way “created” is an unbeliever whose blood it is permissible to shed, should he refuse to repent of his error when called upon to do so.’ After a general exhortation to faith, which can have no end because no one knows what God has recorded about him, he moves on to the most substantial issue which separated Sunnis from Shiis:r />
  One must love all the Companions of the Prophet. They are the best of human beings after the Prophet. The best and noblest of them after the Prophet is Abū Bakr al-Siddiq, next to him Umar [I] b. al-Khattāb, next to Umar, Uthmān b. Affān and next to Uthmān, Alī b. Abi Tālib. May God bless them and associate with them in paradise and have compassion on the souls of the Companions of the Prophet.

  He then introduces two figures who are much more controversial. The first is Muhammad’s wife Aisha, who had fought against Alī at the Battle of the Camel and whose alleged hostility to Alī made her a hate figure among the Shia: ‘He who slanders Aisha has no part or lot in Islam.’ Finally there is the first Umayyad caliph, Muāwiya, of whom ‘we should only say good things and refuse to enter into any controversy about him’. This acceptance of Muāwiya was something none of the Shia, whatever sect they belonged to, could accept.

  This uncompromising list is followed by a general plea for tolerance among Muslims: ‘We should declare no one an unbeliever for omitting to fulfil any of the legal ordinances except the prescribed prayer,’ and a quote from the Prophet: ‘Neglect of prayer is unbelief, whoever neglects it is an unbeliever and remains so until he repents and prays’, to which he adds that the neglect of other injunctions does not make one an unbeliever. This seems to be a direct refutation of the Kharijites, and no doubt others, who held that sinners (that is, those who did not agree with them) were not Muslims but heathens, whom true Muslims should put to death unless they repented: ‘Such are the doctrines of the sunna and of the community.’ Qādir then concludes with an invocation to God for forgiveness and what should perhaps be an indication of the role of the caliph: ‘Let Him make us defenders of pious exercises and let Him forgive us and all the faithful.’

  This is an interesting and impressive document, remarkable as much for what it does not say as what it does. There is no mention, for example, of the use of the Traditions of the Prophet as a source of law, no mention of fasting or the hajj or the prohibition of wine-drinking, all of which one might expect. Prayer is the only obligation absolutely incumbent on every Muslim. The reference to the caliph is understated and modest.