by Hugh Kennedy
He describes the city of Baghdad, partly in ruins but still boasting numerous baths and congregational mosques, including the one built by Mansūr, ancient but remaining in use, and the innumerable boats in which people crossed the river since the bridge of boats had been washed away by floods. He also mentions the ‘famous Baghdad hospital’:
It is on the Tigris and every Monday and Thursday physicians visit it to examine the state of the sick and prescribe for them what they might need. At their disposal are persons who undertake the preparation of the foods and the medicines. The hospital is a large palace, with chambers and closets and all the appurtenance of a royal dwelling. Water comes into it from the Tigris.
He honours both of the tombs of the descendants of Alī, ‘may God hold him in his favour’, and also of the great Sunni legal scholars Abū Hanīfa and Ahmad b. Hanbal. He even records, without passing judgement, seeing the tomb of the famous early tenth-century mystic Hallāj, executed for heresy on the orders of Caliph Muqtadir, before turning to the caliph himself:
All the Abbasids live in sumptuous confinement in those palaces, neither going forth nor being seen, having settled stipends. A large part of these palaces are used by the Caliph himself and he has taken the high balconies, the splendid halls and the delightful gardens. Today he has no vizier, only an official called the deputy of the vizierate who attends the council which deals with the property of the Caliph and who holds the books and controls the affairs. He has an Intendant over all the Abbasid palaces and an amīn over the harem, remaining from the time of the Caliph’s father and grandfather, and all those included in the Caliph’s own harem. He appears little before the public, being busy with his affairs concerning the palaces, their guardianship, the responsibility for their locks and their inspection night and day. . . .
We saw him one day going forth, preceded and followed by the officers of the army, Turks, Daylamites and others, and surrounded by about fifty drawn swords in the hands of the men about him. . . . He has palaces and balconies on the Tigris. The Caliph would sometimes be seen in boats on the Tigris, and sometimes he would go into the desert to hunt. He goes forth in modest circumstance to conceal his state from the people, but despite this concealment his fame only increases. Nevertheless, he likes to appear before the people and show affection to them. They consider themselves fortunate in his character for in his time they have obtained ease, justice and good-living and, great and small, they bless him. We saw this Caliph Ahmad al-Nāsir, whose lineage goes back to Muqtadir and beyond him to his ancestors the (Abbasid) caliphs, may God hold them in His favour, in the western part of his balcony there. He had come down from it and went up the river in a boat to his palace further up the east bank. He is a youth in years with a beard which is short but full, is of handsome shape and good to look on, of fair skin, medium stature and comely aspect. He is about twenty-five years of age. He wore a white dress like a full-sleeved gown embroidered with gold, and on his head was a gilded qalansuwa encircled with black fur of the costly and precious kind used for royal clothes, such as that of the marten or even better. His purpose of wearing this Turkish dress was the concealment of his state, but the sun cannot be hidden even if veiled. This was the evening of 6 Safar 580 [20 May 1184] and we saw him again the following Sunday, looking down from his balcony on the west bank. It was nearby this that we lodged.
Ibn Jubayr then describes the caliph’s mosque next door to the palace, which was vast and had excellent ablution facilities. There was also a mosque of the sultan (that is the Seljuq rulers) outside the city walls where their palace had been. The Seljuqs used to control the affairs of the caliph but no longer had such influence. In another mosque, in Rusafa, were the tombs of the Abbasid caliphs ‘may God’s mercy rest on their souls’. He finishes his account with a poetic reflection on the vanished glories of Baghdad:
The state of this city is greater than can be described. But ah, what is she to what she was! Today we may apply to her the saying of the lover:
‘You are not you, and the houses are not those I knew.’
Ibn Jubayr points out the prosperity the caliph’s rule brought to the city and there is no mention of any Seljuq officials: they are a thing of the past. When he leaves Baghdad with returning pilgrims, they are accompanied by a troop of the caliph’s soldiers to protect them from the Bedouin—the caliph thereby fulfilling, at least in part, the ancient caliphal duty of safeguarding the hajj. On the other hand, there is no mention of him attending Friday prayers in his mosque, even though it was next door to his palace, or of any public receptions. Ibn Jubayr hears about him, no doubt because he asked lots of questions, and sees him in the distance, but there is no question of approaching him or having an audience.
This silver age of the Abbasid caliphate reached its apogee in the long reign of Nāsir (1180–1225), the caliph Ibn Jubayr saw as a young man. Nāsir went on to build a strong state in central and southern Iraq and to make the Abbasid caliphate an important regional power. And that is all it was. The Fatimids no longer provided a Shiite challenge to the Abbasids and the Isma’ilis were confined to their mountainous strongholds in coastal Syria and northern Iran. The revived caliphate no longer had any pretensions to universal power or wider religious authority, the Abbasid caliphs were simply one, and not necessarily the most powerful, of the dynasts who sought to expand their power in the Fertile Crescent.
DISASTER: THE MONGOL CONQUEST OF 1258
The later years of Nāsir’s reign saw the emergence of a new threat to the entire political order in the Middle East: the invasions of the Mongols. Mongol power had been growing in eastern Asia from the end of the twelfth century and by 1206 Genghis Khan ruled over a nomad empire which dominated the steppes to the north of the Great Wall of China. The Mongols posed no threat to the Islamic world until 1217 when, in response to a foolish provocation by a local eastern Iranian ruler, Genghis launched a devastating attack on Iran. Great centres of Islamic civilization like Samarqand, Merv and Nishapur were destroyed and their populations massacred or driven west as refugees. For a generation or so the conquests stalled and then, from 1256, Genghis’s grandson Hulegu renewed the push to the west. His intention was to secure Mongol control over the whole of Iran and Iraq. Two groups posed a challenge to this domination. One was the Isma’ili Assassins in their castle of Alamut in northern Iran, who had successfully resisted all the attempts of the Seljuq Turks to subdue them, and the other was the Abbasid caliphs of Baghdad.
Two centuries before, the arrival of the Seljuq Turks from the east had presented both a danger and an opportunity to the caliphs, for they were, at least nominally, converted to Islam and their rulers sought to be integrated into the Muslim political world. The caliphs could, and did, do business with them. It was a very different story with the Mongols. They were not Muslims and sought domination rather than integration. For them the Abbasid caliphs, with their claims to be leaders of the whole Muslim community, were a threat they could not allow to remain. So it was that, in 1257, Hulegu directed his forces to Baghdad.
At the end of January 1258, after a siege of more than a month, the city was stormed and Caliph Mustasim taken prisoner and brought to Hulegu’s camp. What followed became the stuff of legend, or rather a number of different legends.10 There are a few contemporary or near contemporary accounts in Arabic and Persian sources and they have very different views. One group was the pro-Abbasid Sunni historians. The first of these was our old friend Ibn al-Sāī who lived in Baghdad through the conquest and included an account of the death of the last caliph of Baghdad in his short History of the Caliphs. For him, the fall of Baghdad was the result of the treachery of Ibn al-Alqamī the vizier of the last Abbasid caliph. He was a Shiite and was determined to take revenge for an attack on the Shiite quarter of Baghdad by the Caliph’s troops. It was he who wrote to Hulegu inviting him to take the city and it was he who persuaded the unfortunate caliph, and the Sunni elites of the city, to come to Hulegu’s camp where they were all put to death, t
hough quite how is not clear: “it was reported that he (the caliph) was drowned, strangled or put in a bag and kicked until he died”. There then followed the sack of the city and the massacre of the inhabitants and “it is said that they used the books of Baghdad’s libraries to build stable for their horses”. According to later Arabic sources, the execution was carried out by having the caliph and his sons put in two great sacks and trampled to death. In the Mongol scale of values, killing a man without shedding his blood was an expression of respect. But the thirty-seventh and last Abbasid caliph of Baghdad may have missed the point of this compliment as Hulegu’s horses pounded him to extinction.
This then was the Sunni narrative; the blameless caliph was betrayed by his Shiite vizier. As might be expected a radically different story was developed in Shiite and pro-Mongol circles. The story seems to go back to the account of Nāsir al-Dīn al-Tūsi (d. 1274). He was a philosopher and scientist who had joined the Isma’ili Assassins in Alamut but later attached himself to the entourage of the Mongol Hulegu. In his account the blame for what happened lay with the vacillating caliph and his Sunni courtiers. Hulegu (“King of the World and source of peace and security”) had asked the caliph to send him troops to help in the siege of Alamut, but the caliph was persuaded to refuse because this was a ruse to deprive him of his soldiers. Hulegu was furious and the caliph tried to appease him with gifts of gold plate and other valuables. When hauled into the conqueror’s presence, the starving caliph was told to eat the gold and silver and when he said that he could not, he was reproached for his miserliness. He was then put to death in some unspecified way.
This account formed the basis of the moralising legend which appears in western sources in the late thirteenth century. The earliest surviving narrative comes from the Frenchman Jean de Joinville (d. 1317), in his biography of the crusading French king Louis IX. The story was taken up by Marco Polo and popularised, who travelled through the Middle East at the end of the thirteenth century.
In this tale, the caliph was brought before Hulegu and shown all the gold and silver plate which had been taken from his treasuries. Then Hulegu told him that he had to eat the possessions he had loved so much. When the caliph objected that they could not be eaten, Hulegu asked why he had not used them to send him gifts to dissuade him from launching an attack or to raise more soldiers to defend his city. Then the caliph was confined in prison, surrounded by his treasures, and starved to death.
The fall of Baghdad and the brutal death of its caliph were at one level simply another grim incident in an era which had witnessed more than its share of massacre and murder. As we have noted, there was no widespread and immediate sense of shock or general lamentation in the Muslim world. But later generations looking back on these events would realize that they marked the end of a long story. Never again would the caliphate be a politically independent entity; as we shall see, it would always be subordinate to Mamluk or Ottoman rulers and priorities. While the papacy has, precariously at some times, maintained its political independence to this day, the caliphate lost it in 1258 and it was never revived. With this political independence, gone too were any real aspirations to a leadership which went beyond self-interested dynastic concerns.
6
THREE AUTHORS IN SEARCH OF THE CALIPHATE
THE STATE OF the caliphate in these centuries of near powerlessness provoked considerable unease and soul-searching among intellectuals and political thinkers. Apart from a few Kharijites, everyone accepted that the community needed a caliph to govern men and keep them from going astray. Of course, an important part of this duty involved maintaining law and order, by force if necessary, so that Muslims could live together in peace and harmony. There was also a religious aspect to this office. In a memorable phrase which seems to date back to early Islam, the caliphs were said to be ‘the tent pegs of our faith’. They were needed to hold up the whole edifice of the sharīa. All qādīs and preachers, it was argued, owed their authority ultimately to the caliph. Without him no marriages would be valid, no contracts enforceable and man would be bereft of spiritual guidance.
But there was a serious problem with this idea. The Abbasid caliphs themselves lacked the power and authority to do the job effectively. What was to be done? How could the institution be reformed or repositioned to make it worthy and capable of undertaking the heavy responsibilities the community demanded of it? Many scholars contributed to this debate, but in this chapter I will concentrate on just three of the most influential participants, Māwardī (d. 1058), Juwaynī (d. 1085) and Ghazālī (d. 1111).
MĀWARDī
The first and probably the most influential of these scholars was Māwardī, whose treatise The Ordinances of Government is, among other things, an attempt to make sense of the very ambiguous position in which the caliph now found himself.1 At one level the caliph was the deputy of God on His earth, or the successor of the Prophet of God, and all men should obey him. At another level, he was the powerless inheritor of an ancient office without a single soldier under his command, entirely at the mercy of local warlords. Māwardī was an authority on these matters. He was no armchair academic but was active in the diplomatic service of Caliph Qā’im. In 1031 he was entrusted with the delicate mission of getting the baya from the powerful Buyid sovereign Abū Kalijar in Shiraz and it is probably a measure of his diplomatic abilities that he succeeded and was able to return saying that he had been well treated. Later we find him negotiating agreements between Buyid princes at the caliph’s behest; his last mission, in 1043, was to broker an agreement with the last effective Buyid sovereign, Jalāl al-Dawla, and the newly arrived Seljuk chief Tughril Beg. He thus had a keen idea of the political realities of his time.
Māwardī’s treatise is in many ways a summing up of Islamic government practice, and much of it is concerned with details of tax collection, the powers of judges and other such matters, but in the first three chapters he directly addresses the questions of the choice of the caliph and the powers he could enjoy.
He begins with a discussion of the necessity of having an imam/caliph (he uses both terms interchangeably) for the Muslim community. This can be justified on the grounds of reason—men need to be governed to prevent disorder—or on religious grounds—because it is enjoined by the Qur’ān and the authority of Tradition. Having established this point, he then turns to the issue of choosing the caliph. He lists a number of obvious qualities that the candidate must have—a sense of justice, knowledge, physical ability and so on—and finishes with the assertion that the caliph must be descended from Quraysh. He justifies this, as he does most of his assertions, by reference to the deeds and utterances of the Orthodox caliphs. For him it is enough that Abū Bakr, quoting the Prophet’s words, insisted that Quraysh were the only people entitled to the highest office.
Māwardī writes that the caliph can be chosen by election or by appointment by a predecessor but, he asks, if the caliph is to be chosen by election, who are the electors to be? Some say that all Muslims should be involved, but Māwardī looks to the choice of the Orthodox caliphs to refute this notion. Abū Bakr was chosen by a small group, Umar stipulated that there should be six in the shūra which was to choose his successor, while Alī was chosen by just one elector, Abbās (the Prophet’s uncle and ancestor of the Abbasids), who simply said, ‘Give me your hands so that I may pledge you my allegiance and let the people say, “The uncle of the Messenger of God, may God bless him and grant him salvation, has nominated his cousin.” No two persons would then disagree about you.’2
But suppose there are two equally good candidates, Māwardī considers. The choice then depends on the situation. If Muslims are being attacked, then bravery in battle should be given priority; if popular lethargy and heresy are the main problems, then intelligence should be deemed more important. Age could be used to differentiate two equal candidates, but seniority, by itself, was not a decisive qualification. Casting lots should not be used in deciding these issues. Once the electors have decided
and the candidate has agreed, then the decision cannot be undone unless the chosen candidate resigns. If two candidates are elected in different cities, then the one who was elected first has priority.
Māwardī then turns to nomination. Here the issue is whether the designated heir needs the approval of the electors. In general the answer is no, but some argue that approval is needed should the nominee be the son or, improbably, the father of the previous caliph.
The next issue is the permissibility of appointing two heirs, one to succeed the other. This had been common practice under the Umayyads and early Abbasids but had also been the cause of dispute and violence in those dynasties. However, Māwardī argues that the selection of two heirs is valid by analogy with the behaviour of the Prophet himself, who appointed no less than three commanders to succeed each other in the military expedition he sent to Mu’ta in Syria at the end of his life.
Once chosen, the caliph’s identity and title should be made known. Here Māwardī addresses the vexed issue of whether the caliph is deputy of God or successor to the Prophet of God. He, like almost all later jurists, comes down firmly on the side who see the caliph as successor of the Prophet, citing Abū Bakr’s alleged refusal of the title caliph of God as clinching evidence.
The final issue he deals with is the permissibility of removing a caliph who is wicked or inadequate. He considers three eventualities. The first is that a caliph has become unjust or fallen into heresy. In this case, the caliph must resign or be removed from office. Māwardī is very brief on this most difficult issue and he seems to be skating over it. He devotes much more space to physical incapacity as a disqualification, blindness or loss of limbs for example, yet he affirms that a eunuch can become caliph, though there is no record of this occurring in the history of the caliphate. A final sort of inadequacy is the caliph who is taken captive, whether by Muslims or non-Muslims, and here the answer depends on the nature of his captivity and his prospects of release.
