Caliphate

by Hugh Kennedy

  But there was another change which made the proclamation of the caliphate both more possible and more pressing. In 909, just three years before Abd al-Rahmān became emir in Córdoba, the first Fatimid had proclaimed himself caliph in Qayrawan. This was a major development. Of course, Shiite pretenders and rebels had proclaimed themselves caliphs before, but they had always in the end been crushed and their pretensions brought to nothing. This time, however, it was obviously different. The Abbasids were in no position to even think of invading Ifriqiya and destroying this new caliphate. It was clearly here to stay. This meant that the reservations about having two caliphs at the same time were effectively out of date. And if there could be two, why could there not be three? It was evident that the Sunni Andalusis could never acknowledge the authority of, or pay allegiance to, a Shiite caliph.

  And there were more practical matters. The Fatimids and the Umayyads soon became rivals for the allegiance of the tribes of the largely Berber populations of the western Maghreb (roughly speaking modern Morocco). Clearly if there was going to be this sort of competition, the Umayyads of Córdoba needed to improve their ideological armoury to compete on equal terms. The Berber tribal leaders could now choose between two caliphs, not just a caliph and a simple emir, when they debated to whom they should offer their allegiance.

  There were aspects of this inauguration of a new caliphate which had never occurred before. The Umayyads were not claiming to be successors to the Abbasids or the Fatimids. The proclamation, as far as we can tell, did not involve cursing the Abbasids or impugning their right to rule. Unlike other caliphs, including the contemporary Abbasids and Fatimids, the Umayyads of Córdoba did not claim to be rulers or leaders of the whole Muslim umma. The boundaries of their caliphate were not formally defined, but it seems to be understood that they would include Andalus and such areas of the Maghreb that accepted their rulership.

  The Umayyads based their claim to legitimacy firstly on their descent. As their name indicated, they were indisputably members of the Prophet’s tribe of Quraysh and the genuineness of their lineage was generally accepted, by contrast to the Fatimids, whose claim to be descendants of Isma’il and hence of the Prophet Muhammad and his daughter Fātima was challenged at several points. Not only were they members of Quraysh, they were also descendants of the Umayyad caliphs. This obviously carried weight, but there is no evidence that they claimed to be reviving or restoring the old Umayyad caliphate in its whole, wide geographical extent.

  Another important claim to the caliphate was the role of the Umayyads in leading the jihād in Andalus. They were the acknowledged leaders of the Muslims against the Christian kingdoms and countries to the north and Abd al-Rahmān III had kept up and publicized this role when he was still emir. In 920 he led the Muslims in person for the first time. He went north through Toledo, where he received the allegiance of the semi-independent local leader, Lubb b. Tarbīsha, and then struck north-east to Medinaceli, taking San Esteban de Gormaz and the now deserted city of Clunia. He then pressed on to the upper Ebro valley at Tudela and marched into the heart of the Christian kingdom of Navarre, defeating its army and Leonese allies near Pamplona. In 924 he was on the move again, marching up the east coast of Andalus and receiving the allegiance of the Muslim lords of Lorca and Murcia. From there he went to the Ebro valley again and marched into Navarre, sacking the city of Pamplona and burning the cathedral.

  These, and other expeditions, had a three-fold purpose. The first and most obvious was to secure the safety of Muslim populations who had been attacked by the increasingly aggressive and powerful Christian kings of Pamplona and León, though it was noticeable that very little new territory was conquered or settled. The second objective was to meet in person and secure the allegiance of local Muslim lords, like those of Toledo, Murcia and Zaragoza, who had in effect become semi-independent in the disturbed conditions prevailing in the late ninth and early tenth centuries. The fact that Abd al-Rahmān was leading a large army against the unbelievers in the north made his demands difficult to resist. Not only would the recalcitrant nobles be defying the demands of their legitimate emir, they would also, and this was much worse, be undermining the Muslim military effort. The final purpose was to show that the emir, and the emir alone, was able to lead all the Muslims of Andalus against the non-Muslims, clearly confirming his status as leader of all the Muslims of the peninsula. Furthermore, this was a time when the Byzantines were making increasingly aggressive moves against the Syrian frontiers of the Muslim world, capturing Malatya in 934. The contrast between the Abbasid caliph, who never ventured to lead his army in the jihād and whose armies were unable to protect his Muslim subjects, and the emir of Andalus, who was fulfilling that role publicly and successfully, was plain for all to see. Of course, the other caliphal duty, that of leading and protecting the hajj, was way beyond the powers of the ruler of Córdoba, but this does not appear to have been a serious handicap.

  It was important too that they owed no allegiance to any other power, so no authority was in any position to object. Nor do they seem to have felt it necessary to ask for the approval of their subjects: there was, in fact, not even the pretence of an election. It was simply announced that the prayer was being said in the name of the caliph and letters were written to the provinces. In this rather ad hoc manner, a caliphate was founded which was to last for a century and earn the respect of the Muslim world and of posterity.

  The next question to ask is whether Abd al Rahmān’s style of rulership altered as a result of his assumption of the new title. The first and perhaps most obvious point is that he changed his name. The Umayyad emirs of Córdoba, like the Umayyad caliphs of Damascus, had simply continued to use their own names when they became caliphs, but the Abbasids, apparently from the beginning of their rule, had adopted the practice of having formal titles (Mansūr, Mahdī, etc.) by which they were usually known in official parlance and by which they appear in the historical record. The Fatimid caliphs in Tunisia imitated this practice, and so did Abd al-Rahmān III and his successors. Abd al-Rahmān himself becoming Nāsir li’dīn Allah, Victorious for the Faith of God.

  Another outward and visible change was the minting of gold coins. Whereas many of the dynasts who took power from the Abbasids in the east minted silver coins, of very variable quality, in their own names, none of them minted gold dinars. This was partly, no doubt, because they did not have access to sufficient quantities of gold to be able to do this, but also because this was generally felt to be a caliphal prerogative. The only exceptions to this rule were the Fatimids of Egypt, as we have seen, and their minting of very fine gold coins was a clear indication of their exalted status. The opening up of trans-Saharan trade routes to both the Umayyads of Córdoba, through their North African connections, and the Fatimids of Egypt had given them both access to gold, and new-found wealth.

  The proclamation of the caliphate reflected wider changes in Andalusi society. We cannot be sure of the numbers, but the late ninth and tenth centuries likely saw a rapid increase in the rate of conversion to Islam in the Iberian Peninsula, as more and more local people wished to join the Muslim community. By the time Abd al-Rahmān proclaimed his caliphate it is probable that a majority of the population were Muslims. The coming of the caliphate was a sign that he was not an emir ruling over an elite minority of Muslims but rather a caliph ruling over all Muslims in a largely Muslim society. Still, there were many distinctions and divisions within that society. Not only were there ancient tribal and regional loyalties, but there had also been considerable friction between those Muslims who claimed Arab or Berber descent and the muwalladūn, the descendants of the pre-invasion Christian and Jewish populations who had converted to Islam. In the years of the first two caliphs (912–76), loyalties to tribe and region were replaced by loyalty to the caliph and the increasingly powerful state apparatus and the distinction between Arabs and Berbers and muwalladūn became gradually irrelevant.

  In his long reign of almost fifty years, Abd
al-Rahmān’s style of government changed and evolved significantly. As we have seen, much of the power and prestige which had enabled him to claim the caliphate in the first place had been the result of his leadership of the jihād against the Christians of the north. For the first ten years of his caliphate (929–39), he continued this campaign, leading the Muslim army in person and cajoling and persuading those lords in the frontier areas, like the Ebro valley, to join him in the Muslim enterprise. In 939, however, he suffered a serious reverse. That year he led an expedition against Ramiro II, the Christian king of León. As he had done in previous years he marched through the Ebro valley, recruiting the reluctant lords of Zaragoza and Huesca to join him. He then embarked on an unsuccessful and demoralizing siege of the castle at Simancas. After this setback he turned south through rugged country to lead his army back to Muslim territory. It was here, at an unidentified place which the Arabs simply called the trench (khandaq), that he engaged a force of Christian irregulars. The Muslim army was soundly defeated, many were killed and others taken prisoner. The humiliated caliph led his shattered army south to the safety of Muslim territory at Guadalajara.

  The fundamental cause of this defeat seems to have been that the lords of the Ebro valley, ever resentful of the caliph’s attempts to control them, deserted at a crucial moment, leaving Abd al-Rahmān to his fate. This reverse resulted in a profound change in his government. In the immediate aftermath he seized and executed Fortūn b. Muhammad, lord of Huesca, one of the leaders who had betrayed him, but he made no effort to destroy the power of the other rebellious lords. He himself never led another campaign to the north, and neither, in the last twenty-two years of his reign, did he lead Muslims in jihād. Instead he retired to Córdoba where, three years before in 936, he had begun the construction of the great palace complex at Madinat al-Zahra outside the city. Here he developed a lavish caliphal style in a large palace-city whose ruins can still be seen today, with its gardens, its courts and pools and a sumptuously decorated throne hall with mosaics and marbles. He welcomed visitors and used these magnificent surroundings to display the caliphate in all its glory. The court, its luxuries and its culture attracted lords from all over the peninsula and Berber chiefs from North Africa, especially at the time of the two great īds (festivals) of the Muslim calendar. Rather than taking the caliphate on tour, so to speak, he created a court to which notables were drawn and wanted to belong, and where they wanted their sons to be educated. It was a pattern which, many centuries later, Louis XIV was to adopt in the palace and court at Versailles: autocracy by attraction rather than by the naked use of force.

  This wealthy and apparently stable state elicited much admiration at the time and nostalgia for the lost glories of Andalus has remained a minor but continuing motif in Arabic culture ever since. In recent years, in fact, there has been a renewed interest, especially in the west, in the concept of convivencia. Convivencia, ‘living together’ in Spanish, has come to be applied to the perceived situation in Andalus at the time of the caliphate when members of the three great monotheistic faiths, Muslims, Christians and Jews, lived together in harmony and, at least to some extent, shared a common culture. In the aftermath of the 9/11 attacks on New York and Washington, some commentators looked to Andalus as a historical example and, possibly, as a model showing that hostility between the faiths was not inevitable, a view most eloquently espoused in the writings of Rosa Maria Menocal of Yale University.1 Not everyone saw it this way: for Usāma b. Lādin and the ideologues of Al-Qaeda, the story of Andalus was a terrible warning. Muslims had tolerated Christian and Jewish elements in the population and allowed them rights and positions. The result was plain to see: Muslims ended up driven out of their own country and the Iberian Peninsula was permanently lost to the Dār al-Islam.

  The historical reality is a bit more mixed. It is true that there seems to have been very little active persecution of Christians in Andalus. They were allowed to continue to worship in churches and monasteries and Christian bishops played an important role in the administration of the Christian population. Caliph Nāsir used the Christian Recemundo as his ambassador to both Aachen and Constantinople, and in the next century the administration of the kingdom of Granada was largely entrusted to powerful Jewish officials.

  Relations between the faiths were not static. In the ninth century there was some opposition to Muslim rule. The so-called ‘martyrs of Córdoba’ were a pious group of Christians who courted death by openly insulting the Prophet Muhammad and the Islamic faith. Despite the intervention of the bishop of Córdoba, who was firmly opposed to the movement, and the attempts of the Muslim authorities to persuade them to recant, a number of them were put to death. In the first decades of the tenth century a rebel leader in the mountains of southern Spain, Ibn Hafsūn, attempted to rally support by claiming to be a champion of the Christians. In the period of the caliphate, however, we find nothing of this.

  There are no accounts of Christian or Jewish resistance or of any persecution at that point. The reality was probably that, with a growing proportion of the population converting to Islam, both Christians and Jews were less important and posed little threat. This position changed in the eleventh century when growing Christian military pressure from León, Castile and Navarre meant that Christians could be seen as a potential fifth column and, under the rule of the Almoravids in the early twelfth century, many of them left for the north. Although convivencia meant peaceful co-existence, it did not mean equality. Christians and Jews were second-class citizens and a peaceful coexistence was only possible as long as they accepted an inferior status. When this was no longer the case and the Muslims felt threatened, then convivencia was doomed.

  It was not only Muslims who came to pay their respects to the caliph in Córdoba and left impressed. Nāsir initiated a ‘foreign policy’, as befitted a caliph. In about 950 there began an exchange of ambassadors with the most powerful ruler in western Europe, the German emperor Otto I (938–73). Otto wanted the cooperation of the caliph against Muslim pirates who had seized the southern French city of Fréjus and used it as a base to terrorize the surrounding country and prey on shipping. No Arab source records this mission, but we know about it from a Latin account of the life of the German ambassador Abbot John of Gorze, which gives an outsider’s view of the magnificence of the caliphal court.2 John was a very undiplomatic ambassador, determined not to be impressed or intimidated, and progress was slow. He was scathingly dismissive of the local Christian bishop when he described the compromises Christians had to make to survive in Muslim-ruled Córdoba. Eventually Abd al-Rahmān sent an ambassador, a Mozarab (Arabized Christian) known by his Latin name of Recemundo or his Arabic name of Rabī b. Zayd, to Aachen. Finally, after a three-year wait in Córdoba, John was granted an audience.

  The account of this meeting, written by a fellow monk, is the only first-hand report of a pre-modern caliph we have by an outsider to the Muslim world. Before he met the caliph (who is called rex, king, throughout), John was meant to make himself ‘presentable to royalty by cutting his hair, washing his body and putting on clean clothes’. He refused, even when the caliph sent him ten pounds in coin to smarten himself up, thanking him for the gift but suggesting that it would be better spent on alms for the poor: ‘I do not despise royal gifts,’ he wrote in response, ‘but it is not permitted to a monk to wear anything other than his usual habit’, and eventually the caliph gave in, saying, ‘Even if he comes dressed in a sack, I will most gladly receive him.’

  When the day came for John to meet the caliph, he was treated to the full display of caliphal power:

  Ranks of people crowded the whole way from the lodging to the centre of the city and from there to the palace [presumably they met at Madinat al-Zahra, hence the walk along the dusty road from the city]. Here stood infantrymen with spears erect; beside them others brandishing javelins and staging demonstrations of aiming them at each other, after them others mounted on mules with their light armour; then horsemen urging o
n their steeds with spurs and shouts to make them rear up. In this startling way, the Moors hoped to put fear into our people by their various marshal displays, so strange to our eyes. John and his companions were led to the palace along a very dusty road, which the very dryness of the season alone served to stir up (for it was the summer solstice). High officials came to meet them, and all the pavement of the outer area of the palace was carpeted with most costly rugs and coverings.

  When John arrived at the cubiculum where the Caliph was seated alone, almost like a deity accessible to none or very few, he saw everything draped with rare coverings and floor-tiles stretching evenly to the walls. The Caliph himself reclined upon a most richly ornate couch. They do not use thrones or chairs as other peoples do but recline on divans [lectis] or couches when conversing or eating, their legs crossed one over the other.

  Then the Caliph signed to John to be seated. A lengthy silence ensued on both sides. Then the Caliph began: ‘I know that your heart has long been hostile to me, and that is why I refused you an audience till now. You yourself know that I could not do otherwise. I appreciate your steadfastness and your learning. I wish you to know that things which may have disturbed you in that letter were not said out of enmity towards you and not only do I now freely receive you, but I assure you that you shall have whatever you ask.’ John who, as he later told us, had been ready to say something harsh to the Caliph, since he had long harboured such resentment, now became very calm and was perfectly at ease.

  John explained to the caliph that he had now banished these hostile sentiments and the latter was

  greatly pleased with these sentiments, and talked to John about other things. Then he asked him to hand over the presents from the Emperor. [Sadly we are not told what these were.] When this was done, John instantly asked permission to leave. The Caliph asked in surprise: ‘How does this sudden change come about? Since both of us have waited so long for a sight of each other, and since we have only just met, is it right for us to part as strangers? Now that we are together, there is an opportunity for each of us to acquire a little knowledge of each other’s mind and we could meet again at greater length, and on a third occasion forge a truly firm bond of understanding and friendship. Then, when I send you back to your master, you could go there with all due honour.’ John agreed to this. They ordered the other emissaries to be brought in and the presents which they were carrying were handed over to the Caliph.