Caliphate

by Hugh Kennedy

  Zaydi beliefs also spread to the mountainous provinces at the southern end of the Caspian Sea: as so often, the mountains provided a refuge for ideas which were, so to speak, driven out of the wide plains and large cities of the central Islamic world. For eight centuries this area was home to a variety of Shiite communities, both Zaydi and Is-ma’ili. The Zaydis lasted as an independent group until the sixteenth century when they were absorbed by the Imami Shiism of the Safavid state and disappeared from history.

  Still longer lasting were the Zaydi imamates of the Yemen. Founded in the late ninth century, the Zaydi imamate survived invasions—by the Ayyubids in the twelfth century and by the Ottomans, twice, in the sixteenth and at the end of the nineteenth centuries—and continued to hold power until 1962 when the last imam was overthrown by a coup. The strongholds of the Zaydis were in the northern mountains of Yemen, around the city of Sada, and their control of the ancient capital at Sana’a and the south was always tenuous. The Houthis of this northern area, who are presently contending for power in Yemen, are Zaydis and it is surely only a matter of time before someone decides to seize the initiative, as Zaydis have always done, and revives their caliphate.

  The Zaydi imamates remained a distinctly Yemeni phenomenon. The imams were, in a way, outside the tribal structure. They served as mediators, advisers, scholars and leaders of the Yemenis against invaders but not as rulers with absolute control over law and order and other aspects of everyday life: this was left in the hands of the tribes and tribal chiefs. It was a model of authority which worked well enough in Yemen for many centuries but could not be exported to other parts of the world.

  THE EARLY ISMA’ILIS

  The last of the main Shiite groups we must consider are the Isma’ilis. Their importance lies partly in the number of manifestations of Isma’ili belief (Qarāmita, Fatimids, Assassins) and their extensive geographical spread (from Tunisia to Tajikistan and later into India) and long survival (the Isma’ilis emerged in the late ninth century and remain a very active part of the Muslim community today).

  From our point of view, the significant feature of the Isma’ilis was that they generated the most important Shiite caliphate and with them we can see, as nowhere else, the advantages and problems caused by having a caliph chosen by God from the Family of the Prophet. The Imamis would have liked to have established a caliphate over the whole Muslim world in the name of the Family, but their attempts came to nothing. The Zaydis did produce effective rulers, some of them bearing the title of caliph, like the Zaydi imams of Yemen in the early modern period, but their influence was always confined to marginal and impoverished areas of the Muslim world. With the Isma’ilis, it was different: the Fatimid caliphs came to rule Egypt and much of Syria, their authority was even accepted in Baghdad for a short period and Fatimid missionaries and agents operated as far east as Afghanistan. The fundamental question we must ask is: to what extent and in what ways was this Shiite caliphate distinct in definition and purpose from its Sunni equivalents? Was this a radically different model or essentially the same one in a different guise?

  The origins of the Isma’ili movement lie in the Imami Shiite environment of early ninth-century Iraq. The Isma’ili story is that the sect originates from a dispute about the succession to the imam Jafar al-Sādiq (d. 765) and the reasons why his eldest son did not succeed him. The roots of the dispute are unclear: either Isma’il died before his father or he was deemed unsuitable and removed from his position. In any case he did not become imam, but, it is said, he left a son, Muhammad, who was the seventh and last of the imams (hence the Isma’ilis are sometimes referred to as Seveners in distinction to the Twelvers discussed earlier).

  The succession dispute goes to the heart of Shiite views of the imamate. For some, Isma’il’s failure, for whatever reason, to assume the succession meant that his claims were invalid. For others, however, he was God’s appointee. If he seemed to be morally defective, that was because men do not understand God’s purposes; if he died before his father, it was similarly God’s will and his son should certainly succeed.

  Be that as it may, no one seems to have heard of Isma’il or his presumed heir until a century or so later when people in the villages of southern Iraq began claiming that the descendants of Isma’il were in fact the true heirs of the Family of the Prophet. This was, of course, in the aftermath of the occultation of the twelfth imam and it may have been a response to it by Shiites who wanted a real and present leader to follow. Shortly before 900 a man called Ubayd Allah, then living in the small central Syrian city of Salamiya, began to proclaim that he himself was a descendant of Isma’il and that people should swear allegiance to him as the living imam. Not all Isma’ilis agreed and a group of them argued that they should wait for the return of the real imam, Muhammad b. Isma’il, who was in hiding. They were known as Qarāmita (or Carmathians in western accounts) and set up a revolutionary state in eastern Arabia, pillaging the pilgrim caravans and eventually stealing, as we have seen, the Black Stone of the Kaba itself. But they did not found a caliphate, nor did their leaders take the title.

  Ubayd Allah, however, continued to claim the leadership, but Syria was not a suitable base to mount a rebellion. The Bedouin of the desert had ideas of their own and the settled governments in Baghdad and Egypt remained powerful enough to prevent him taking over any of the cities. He began to send out agents to investigate the possibilities of attracting support in fringe areas of the Muslim world. Yemen and Ifriqiya (modern Tunisia) were the places he selected.

  His agent, Abū Abd Allah al-Shi’i, arrived in Tunisia in 893 and began to preach, not in the towns like Qayrawan and Tunis, which were the centres of Arab Muslim population, but in the Kabyle mountains of what is now western Algeria. Here, among the Berbers of the Kutāma tribe, who generally resented the rule of the Aghlabid dynasty of Qayrawan, he found a ready audience. The Kutāma Berbers were to be the military backbone of the Fatimid caliphate until well after the conquest of Egypt in 969, as the Khurasanis had been for the Abbasids. Soon after his initial success Abū Abd Allah was joined by Ubayd Allah and in 909 they conquered the ancient capital of Qayrawan and proclaimed the establishment of a caliphate.

  THE FATIMID CALIPHATE

  It was the first time a Shiite caliphate, led by a member of the Family of the Prophet, had been able to establish itself in power anywhere in the Muslim world. It was a momentous event, but it also meant that many questions which had previously been left unanswered had to be confronted. Was this new caliphate to be a radically different institution from the Muslim governments which had preceded it, or was it to be a traditional state with, so to speak, a different management? It was fine to talk about a God-guided, infallible imam when such a figure was no more than a dream, but how would it work with a real human being wielding real power? How could there not be a sense of disillusionment when mundane matters of maintaining order and collecting taxes from reluctant payers had to be confronted. In the Arabic terminology, it was a move from dawa (missionary activity) to dawla (state), a move from the era of miracles and wonder to the hard realities of government.

  Ubayd Allah immediately set about establishing his authority with determination. The missionary Abū Abd Allah, whose preaching had done so much to mobilize the Kutāma in the Fatimid cause, was executed, much as the Abbasid caliph Mansūr had executed Abū Muslim. There could only be one focus of authority.

  The new caliph took the messianic title of Mahdī and claimed to be the true leader of the Family of the Prophet. He and his descendants were known to themselves and others as Fatimids, to emphasize their descent from Fātima and hence from the Prophet himself. As such they were his legitimate successors in a way the Abbasids could never claim to be. Mahdī was to be much more than a local leader, however: the Fatimids were to be true caliphs, rulers of the whole Islamic world. But not everyone was convinced. Unlike the Twelver imams, whose genealogy was generally accepted even by Sunnis and other hostile observers, the Fatimid lineage had some
possible holes in it. How exactly was Ubayd Allah related to Muhammad b. Isma’il, who must have died a century before he appeared on the scene, and who were the intermediary stages? This weakness made the Fatimids vulnerable to challenges from their enemies. Their whole claim to power rested on descent from the Prophet. If this was false or even doubtful, then the whole enterprise was a fraud.

  To assert their claim the Fatimids would need to use force. The Kutāma were formed into a regular army and paid salaries, Greek and Slav slave soldiers were recruited to serve alongside them and a navy was created. It all looked very much like a conventional Muslim state apparatus of a sort which would have been familiar to the Umayyad and Abbasid rulers.

  Attempts to seize the moment by invading Egypt ended in failure and from 920 the caliphate began to develop as local rulers in Tunisia. A new capital was founded on the Mediterranean coast and called Mahdiya. The remains of it can still be visited, a fortified seaport looking on to the Mediterranean and east to Egypt. Compared with Baghdad or later Cairo, it was built on a modest scale, but both its name and the prayers which were performed in its new mosque proclaimed its role as the first capital of a new caliphate.

  It was at this time too that the arrangements between the Fatimids and their non-Shii subjects were worked out. Most of the population of Tunisia, especially in the Holy City of Qayrawan, remained Sunnis and the Fatimids made no attempt to convert them to their Isma’ili faith. But the new capital was Isma’ili and anyone who aspired to senior posts in army or administration had to accept that the caliph was the God-guided Mahdī. In practice, this was a successful accommodation. The Fatimids made no attempt at forcible conversion and, as a result, there was little public opposition to their rule. As long as they maintained law and order, defended the people from outside attack, allowed merchants to make money and were not too aggressive in their tax collection, they were accepted without any outward opposition. The caliphs of the new dynasty were soon forced to make those messy decisions and compromises which go with political power and even their closest admirers must have wondered whether they were always, as they claimed, sinless and infallible, but good government was enough for most people.

  In 969 the Fatimid general Jawhar, an ex-slave of Greek origins, conquered Egypt with his army and the Fatimid caliphate was transformed from a provincial oddity into a world power. The conquest was not a violent and destructive military invasion. The post-Abbasid Ikhshidid regime that had been overthrown had little popular support: a series of low Nile floods had resulted in widespread famine and Fatimid agents had prepared the ground well in advance, assuring all sections of society that a Fatimid takeover would be in their interests. As a result, the conquest, if not entirely peaceful, was not actively opposed by the vast majority. As Jawhar approached with his huge army of perhaps 100,000, mostly Berbers, agreements were made with the leading figures in the administration and with the chief qādī of Fustat (Old Cairo), and the military forces of the old regime were easily defeated. In July prayers were said in the venerable Mosque of Amr, the heart of the spiritual life of the country, in the name of the Fatimid caliph Mu’izz, not the Abbasid Mutī, and the rule of the Family of the Prophet over a major area of the Muslim world had triumphantly begun.

  One of the first and most important actions taken by Jawhar was the foundation of the new palace city of Cairo (in Arabic Qāhira means ‘the Victorious’) in 970. The first Islamic capital of Egypt had been Fustat, now often referred to as Old Cairo, which lay just outside the walls of the old Roman fort which formed the original nucleus of settlement in the area. The new Fatimid city was separated from Fustat by open spaces and gardens and formed a distinct city, surrounded by its own walls and gates. It was designed very deliberately and its construction began according to careful astrological observations. At the centre were two vast palaces, one on each side of the main north–south street. The palaces have long disappeared, but the street is still known to this day as Bayn al-Qasrayn (Between the two Palaces). A new mosque was built, designed for the performance of Isma’ili rites, and it still forms the core of the present Azhar mosque.

  It was very much a government city, a magnificent residence for a caliph who was God’s deputy on earth and the direct descendant of His prophet Muhammad. This was no humble abode: God’s favour was demonstrated for all to see by His generosity to the ruler and the wealth and splendours which were showered upon him. There were similarities with Mansūr’s round city of Baghdad, except that palaces, rather than a mosque, lay at the centre. Elsewhere non-Fatimid life continued much as before. Fustat remained the centre of commercial life and home of the Christian and Jewish communities. It was in the old mosque of Amr that the qādī of Fustat sat dispensing Sunni law to a Sunni population. One could say the Fatimid caliphate presided over one country and two systems.

  This dual system was one of the reasons for the success of the Fatimids. If they had tried to settle their Berber soldiers in the old city, there would have been inevitable tensions, riots and disturbances. If they had tried to foist their doctrines on a recalcitrant population, they would have faced the sort of resistance which forced the Abbasids to abandon the doctrine of the createdness of the Qur’ān.

  The Azhar mosque is famous today as the foremost centre of Sunni religious scholarship in the whole of the Islamic world, but that was not how it began. The Fatimid caliphate was in many ways an intellectual project. From the very beginning of the state in 909 the caliphs and their advisers had worked to provide an ideological basis for the regime. This was central to the caliphate in order to justify its rule in Egypt and other areas it controlled, but also because the early Fatimid caliphs were determined to expand their authority over the whole Muslim world. Egypt was only a start and a base. Further to the east, in Iraq and Iran, they built up a network of dāis, missionaries who would preach to disaffected Muslims wherever they were to be found. In some cases these missionaries were sent from Cairo, in other cases they were men with Isma’ili convictions who came to Cairo to see the caliph in all his magnificence before returning to their homelands to spread the word. This network required a clear message and system of belief to sustain the missionaries in their work. In Cairo itself Isma’ili doctrine and law were taught in official sessions known as Majlis al-hikma (Assemblies of Wisdom), held twice a week on Thursdays and Fridays. No Umayyad or Abbasid caliphs had tried to instruct their subjects in this systematic way.

  The fullest statement of this ideology comes in a remarkable work written by Qādī Numān (d. 974) called Daā’im al-Islam (The Pillars of Islam). Composed before the Fatimid conquest of Egypt, this is, in the words of Wadād al-Qādī, ‘a clear, well-organized dogmatic exposition of the tenets of Isma’ili positive Law’.1 The first volume deals with the seven pillars of the ibādāt according to the Isma’ilis, that is, devotion to the imams, ritual purity, prayer, alms, fasting, pilgrimage and jihād, while the second volume discusses more practical legal matters like sales, oaths, foods, marriage, divorce, thefts, testimonies and so forth. Numān treats his subject-matter very systematically, dividing each chapter into sections, and recording the legal decisions pertaining to each section in the form of Qur’anic citations and Traditions transmitted from the Prophet, Alī b. Abī Tālib and the first five imams after Alī, that is down to Isma’il’s father Jafar al-Sādiq.

  In most cases the positive law differs little from what was the general practice of the Sunnis and Twelver Shiites. Devotion to the imams and ritual purity are added to the other five pillars of Islam. However, there is one very important and original difference which marks it off from similar Sunni compendia of law and that is the sources which it uses. The Qur’ān, of course, is the foundation and the Traditions of the Prophet, as recognized in Shiite doctrine follow. After that come traditions passed down from Alī and the imams who followed. Their words are authoritative. By contrast there is no use of traditions from the Companions of the Prophet and, of course, no citations of the great scholars of Sunni jur
isprudence like Shafi’i (d. 820) or Ibn Hanbal (d. 855). It is the Prophet and his Family who decide law, not the Muslim community and its legal scholars.

  The second defining feature of the work is that it became an official handbook, sanctioned and supported by the caliph and his government. It became, in fact, caliphal law. Even the strongest and greatest of the Umayyad and Abbasid caliphs, Abd al-Malik or Mansūr, had not presumed to produce an official law-book. The caliph sanctioned the law and it was to the caliph that difficult decisions should be referred. If the Abbasids had lost the struggle with the ulama for control of sharīa, the Fatimids had clearly won it.

  The new caliphate was faced with problems of a more political nature. The object of Fatimid policy remained the takeover of the entire Muslim world, but that was obviously a long-term project. More immediate was the issue of the government of Syria and Palestine. Both had been ruled, more or less effectively, by the Tulunid and Ikhshidid dynasties which had preceded the Fatimids in Egypt, so it was natural that the new caliphs should seek to do the same. There were also other reasons to be concerned with Syria and Palestine.

  The first was economic. Egypt, of course, was dependent for its food supply on the Nile flood. The height of this varied from year to year, but in most years it provided sufficient water and silt for agriculture to feed the population. In other years it did not and there was no other source of water for the farmers. As the Bible describes, in the time of the pharaohs this could lead to serious famine and there was basically nothing the government, whether pharaohs or caliphs, could do about it. The agriculture of Syria, on the other hand, was dependent on rain brought in by western winds from the Mediterranean. Of course this too was changeable, and there were good years and bad, but the system was completely different from the Egyptian one and only at the most unlucky times did harvests in Egypt and Syria fail simultaneously. Food security was an important reason for the Fatimids to seek to control Syria or at least parts of it.