Caliphate

by Hugh Kennedy

  He had chosen his son Muhammad as his heir in 1154 and had him publicly acknowledged. In the Almohad tradition Muhammad had rendered himself unsuitable for the position by drinking wine and other lapses. In the last years of his life, another brother, Umar, had become the caliph’s chief adviser and he was with Abd al-Mu’min when he died in Rabat. Umar now kept his death a secret while he arranged the succession, not of Muhammad, but of his own full brother Abū Yaqūb Yūsuf, who was then governor of Seville. Yūsuf and Umar shared the same mother. They effectively took power and pushed their other brothers aside. From then on only the descendants of Umar and Yūsuf counted in power and succession.

  The new caliph was a rather unusual character among the military and political leaders of his time. He was around twenty-five years old and had some political experience as governor of Seville and military experience serving in his father’s armies. He was, however, a very different man from his father. He was bookish and intellectual, but he was not a natural military leader and at crucial moments seemed to lose his nerve and fail to take advantage of opportunities. We can observe his caliphate in action because we have part of a very full chronicle compiled by an Andalusi bureaucrat working for the Almohad government in Seville, Ibn Sāhib al-Salāt. His chronicle is full of lively, first-hand observations and enables us to see Almohad society and the interaction of personalities with rare intimacy.

  Like his Umayyad predecessor Hakam II, Yūsuf built up a most impressive library. As caliph, he had ample authority to do so and sensible men did not refuse his request for books. A private collector in Seville remembered how this was done:

  The Commander of the Faithful came to hear of my collection so he sent Kāfūr the Eunuch with a selected group of slaves to my house when I was in the government offices and knew nothing about it. He ordered him not to frighten anyone in the house and not to take anything except books and threatened him, and those with him, with the direst punishments if the people of the house lost so much as a pin. I was told about this while I was in the office and I thought he intended to confiscate all my property so, almost out of my mind, I rode to my house. There was the eunuch Kāfūr standing at the door and the books were being brought out to him. When he saw that I was obviously terrified he said, ‘Don’t panic!’ and added that the caliph sent me his greetings and had mentioned me favourably, and he carried on smiling until I relaxed. Then he said, ‘Ask the members of your household if anyone has frightened them or if anything is missing,’ and they replied, ‘No one has frightened us and nothing is missing.’ Kāfūr then said we were free to go. Then he himself went into the library store and ordered that all the books be removed. When I heard this, all my anxiety disappeared.1

  The caliph’s interest in books was certainly genuine and other members of the Almohad elite seem to have shared his enthusiasm, but he was taken away from his studies by the need to assert Almohad control over those parts of eastern Spain ruled by Ibn Mardanīsh and to unite the Muslims against the persistent Christian aggression. Unlike his firm action in appropriating his subjects’ books, he was less resolute in leading the Muslim armies. It was not until 1171, eight years after his accession, that he finally crossed the Straits as caliph and landed in Seville. He decided to launch a major campaign to retake the small frontier town of Huete, south-east of Toledo, which had recently been captured by the Christians. It was a modest objective, but a large army of Almohad and Arabs was assembled and in the summer of 1172 the siege of the little town began.

  What happened next is related by one of the Spanish Muslim commanders, engaged in the campaign Ibn Azzūn:

  When I was fighting with the Christians in the tower, which was the heart of their resistance in the city of Huete, and victory and triumph over them were within our grasp, I saw none of the valiant Almohad soldiers or commanders who were supporting me. I ran in person to the caliph who was in session with his brother and the talba of the court discussing questions of religious dogma. I said to him, ‘My lord caliph! Send me reinforcements for I am on the point of victory!’ I only wanted him to show himself on horseback so that the people and all the people would see him and they would enter the city there and then. But he did not answer me and carried on with what he was doing. I realized that the intention of the jihād had been corrupted and that the expedition had failed. I returned, despairing of victory and very preoccupied and thoughtful.2

  As Ibn Azzūn predicted, the campaign was a failure. The huge army broke up and retreated with nothing achieved. The caliph himself returned to Marrakesh, leaving his ineffective deputies to try to organize the defence of Andalus. He busied himself with the politics of Morocco and the eastern half of his caliphate in Tunisia. It was not until 1183 that he came back to Andalus. The next year he attempted a campaign to reconquer Lisbon, which had been conquered by the Portuguese in 1147. His second attempt at leading the jihād was even less successful than the first. In an abortive attempt to take the city of Santarem on the river Tagus, a sortie by the defenders caught the caliph and his followers by surprise. He himself, conspicuous in the red tent which marked his post, was wounded and died shortly afterwards.

  His successor, who took the ancient and majestic title of Mansūr, was much less of an intellectual and much more of a warrior. His regime was less interested in intellectual activity and he devoted himself to defending Andalus against the Christians and led the last substantial Muslim victory over Christian forces when he defeated King Alfonso VII of Castile at Alarcos in 1195.

  The early decades of the thirteenth century brought home the vulnerabilities of Andalus and the inability of the Almohad caliphate to deal with them. When Mansūr died in in January 1199 he was succeeded by his son, then only seventeen years old, who took the title (ironically given what was to come) of Nāsir, the Victorious. The first decade of his reign was spent in North Africa, stabilizing the situation in Tunisia by entrusting the country to a prominent Almohad family, the Hafsids, who later established themselves as independent rulers, taking the title of caliph. In 1211 the young caliph assembled an army at Rabat and crossed the Straits to Seville. In 1212 he was faced by a Christian expedition which included King Alfonso VIII of Castile, King Pedro II of Aragón and numerous other Christian notables, including French barons. This display of Christian unity was supported by Pope Innocent III, always eager to encourage crusading.

  The Christians made their way through the rugged mountains of the Sierra Morena and encountered the Almohad army, led by the caliph in person, at Las Navas de Tolosa on 16 July 1212. It is unclear why the Muslim army performed so badly; at the time there were stories of disputes within the ranks and resentment at Nāsir’s erratic and sometimes cruel leadership. By nightfall the battle was over, the Almohad army broke in full flight and the caliph rushed to the safety of the fortified city of Jaén. From there he returned to Marrakesh where he died shortly afterwards. Some said he was murdered by his dissatisfied officers. Meanwhile the magnificent banner of the caliphs was taken north by the victorious Castilians and placed in the monastery of Las Huelgas outside Burgos where it can still be seen today, a genuine relic of the Almohad caliphate.

  The Battle of Las Navas de Tolosa spelt the end of the Almohad caliphate as a successful protector of the Muslims of Andalus. The defeat of the army and the death of the caliph led to rivalry and strife among the Almohad elite in Marrakesh, which allowed the Christians to consolidate and advance. The ancient capital of Córdoba, seat of the Umayyad caliphs, fell to Fernando III of Castile in 1236, and Seville twelve year later in 1248. At that point the majority of the territory and population of Andalus were lost to Christian rule and the caliphate disappeared from European territory. The Almohads now retreated to Morocco, but the various pretenders to the caliphal title fought each other and the Berber tribes increasingly rejected their authority. In 1269 the last caliph of the dynasty, Wāhid, was ignominiously murdered by a slave in Marrakesh. Neither the Nasrid kings of Granada, who ruled what remained of Andalus from their
stronghold in the southern mountains until 1492, nor the Merinids, who came to control most of Morocco, aspired to the caliphal title. The attempt to unify the Muslims of the west in an independent caliphate had failed and there was never to be another in later centuries.

  THE CULTURE OF THE ALMOHAD CALIPHATE

  Before leaving the Almohad caliphate, we should remember the important cultural legacy which survived long after it had disappeared. The dynasty were great patrons of architecture. In the beginning, as we saw, they built a new mosque in their mountain stronghold at Tinmal. As rulers of Marrakesh they constructed a new mosque in the old town. The ruins of the mosque at Rabat show the scale of Almohad architectural ambitions, but perhaps the finest surviving example of their work can be seen in Seville, the capital of their Andalusi domains. Apart from some work in the courtyard, the mosque has been replaced by the late Gothic cathedral, but the minaret, now a bell-tower called the Giralda, still remains in all its glory as the symbol of the city.

  We have already seen that the caliph Abū Yaqūb Yūsuf was an eager collector of books. He was also a committed supporter of writers and thinkers and can perhaps be numbered with the Abbasid Ma’mūn and the Umayyad of Córdoba Hakam II among caliphs who were genuine intellectuals. There was an established tradition of philosophical thought and discussion in Andalusi cultural life, but there were also strong currents, notably among the conservative legal scholars, who were fiercely opposed to questioning or even discussing anything which might touch on issues of faith. It was caliphal patronage which enabled the flame of enquiry to burn brightly in the last quarter of the twelfth century.

  Yūsuf’s main intellectual adviser was the writer and philosopher Abū Bakr b. Tufayl. Ibn Tufayl was born in Guadix, north-east of Granada, and first attracted attention as a physician. In 1154 he secured an appointment as secretary to the governor of Tangier, who was a member of the ruling dynasty. From there he graduated to becoming Yūsuf’s doctor and adviser until his death in Marrakesh. Ibn Tufayl is best remembered for his philosophical story Hayy b. Yaqzān, about a young man growing up alone on a desert island and finding wisdom for himself, a book that has been widely translated and commented on and was one of the earliest classical Arabic texts to be translated into English, by Edward Pococke at Oxford in 1671.

  Ibn Rushd, known in the western tradition as Averroes, was born in 1126. He came from an old family of religious scholars and jurists from Córdoba and was introduced as a young man to the caliph by Ibn Tufayl. When he first met Abū Yaqub he was given a sort of interview in which the caliph asked such questions as whether the sky has existed from all eternity or whether it had a beginning. Encouraged by Ibn Tufayl, Ibn Rushd went on to display his immense philosophical and religious learning. The caliph was impressed and encouraged the young scholar to comment on and explain the texts of Aristotle, which he himself had difficulty in understanding. He also appointed him qādī of Seville and later Córdoba, offices which, Ibn Rushd complained, kept him away from his books. The death of Abū Yaqūb and the accession of Mansūr in 1184 led to a change of atmosphere at court. The new caliph’s main concern was the jihād against the Christians and later in his reign he responded to demands in conservative circles that Ibn Rushd’s kind of philosophical speculation should be forbidden. Ibn Rushd was summoned to a sort of inquisition before the chief jurists of Córdoba and his work was condemned and his books ordered to be burned, though he himself was unharmed and simply exiled to the little town of Lucena. In the end he retired to Marrakesh where he was free to return to his writing and where he died in 1198.

  Ibn Rushd is an important figure in his own right because of the advances he made in the understanding of and commenting on Aristotle; but his influence was mainly felt in western Europe, while as a thinker he was largely neglected in Andalus where the caliphal patronage of intellectual life died in the chaotic circumstances of the thirteenth century. Even before his death, his works were being translated into Latin, usually at the city of Toledo, by now of course under Christian rule, where scholars from northern Europe came down to take advantage of the new Arabic learning. The writings of Ibn Rushd also had a major impact on the teaching of philosophy and logic in the newly developing universities of Paris, Oxford and Salamanca. Such characteristically ‘Averroist’ ideas as the eternal existence of the world and the possibility of attaining true happiness in this world, by philosophical contemplation of course, led to Averroism being linked to atheism and as such condemned by the Church for much the same reasons as it was attacked by rigorist Muslims. On the other hand, in Dante’s Divine Comedy he escapes the Inferno, like other non-Christian sages, and spends his eternity in Limbo.

  The detailed philosophical arguments need not concern us here. The flow of ideas from classical Greek to Arabic in Abbasid Baghdad in the ninth century, and their flourishing in Almohad Andalus in the twelfth, brought them to the attention of western scholars long before translations directly from the Greek were available in the fifteenth century. In terms of philosophy, medicine and science, Averroism had a profound influence on the intellectual history of Christendom. This kind of intellectual enquiry, if not always initiated by the caliphs themselves, was at least given crucial support by men like the Abbasids Mansūr and Ma’mūn and the Almohad Abū Yaqūb Yūsuf.

  We should remember the great caliphs of the Almohad dynasty for all sorts of reasons, and the encouragement of enlightened learning and the defence of philosophers and others against their enemies are not the least of these.

  10

  THE CALIPHATE UNDER THE MAMLUKS AND OTTOMANS

  THE COLLAPSE OF the Almohad caliphate in the thirteenth century spelt the end of attempts to build a caliphate which would embrace the whole of the Muslim west. True, there were dynasties like the Hafsids of Tunisia (1229–1534), who appropriated the title, but their power was too local to enable them to present themselves as real caliphs beyond the borders of their own statelets. In the east, however, the idea of the caliphate was too entrenched and its history too venerable for it to disappear completely. Baghdad may have fallen and the Abbasid caliph may have died a horrible death, but attempts were still made to revive or at least continue the office in one form or another.

  ABBASID CALIPHS, COURTIERS OF THE MAMLUKS

  The tragic death of the last Abbasid caliph of Baghdad at the hand of the Mongols and the devastation of his capital city in 1258 marked the abrupt end of the caliphate which had begun more than 600 years previously with the oath of allegiance to Abū Bakr in 632, and which had continued, with ups and downs, ever since. Never again would a caliph lead the Muslims in prayer, defend them against the unbelievers or safeguard their hajj. Never again would the palace of the caliph be a centre of power, wealth and culture.

  But the idea of caliphate never completely died. Four years after the catastrophe, a distant cousin of the last caliph of Baghdad made his way, aided by the Bedouin tribes of the Syrian desert, to Cairo where he made contact with the Mamluk sultan Baybars. Baybars was a formidable figure both militarily and politically, and the Mamluks (slave soldiers) who formed his army were a strong military force, the only army, in fact, which was capable of resisting the Mongols in open battle. In 1260, at the Battle of Ayn Jalut in Palestine, they had put an end to Mongol ambitions to invade Egypt. The Mamluks set up a quasi-dynastic rule in Egypt and Syria which was to last until the Ottoman conquest of 1517 and was the strongest and most stable state in the Islamic world in this period. However, in spite of his powerful position, Baybars was also vulnerable and lacking in a convincing claim to the sultanate. The Mamluks, after all, were by origin no more than Turkish slaves, newly imported from the steppes of what is now southern Russia. They had no ancient status in the Muslim world, no legitimating discourse to convince Muslims of their right to lead. Furthermore, Baybars himself had only become ruler after the murder of his Mamluk predecessor Qutuz.

  The arrival of the fugitive Abbasid was therefore an opportunity not to be missed. He was appointed c
aliph in 1262, Baybars and his courtiers taking a baya to him, and was given the caliphal title of Hākim. He in turn preached a sermon praising the sultan and exhorting Muslims to obey him and support him in the Holy War against both Crusaders and Mongols. Hākim on the Nile enjoyed very little of the pomp his predecessors had had on the Tigris. He had no court of his own, no vizier, no military guard, just a tower in the citadel to live in and tutors to improve his religious education. He became in effect a part of the Mamluk sultan’s entourage, enjoying some respect but no real power.

  Hākim reigned (but did not rule) for forty years until his death in 1301, long after Baybars and his immediate successors had perished. He was succeeded by a continuous line of some seventeen Abbasid caliphs until the last one was deported to Istanbul in 1517 at the time of the Ottoman conquest.

  Clearly, successive Mamluk sultans felt that to have an Abbasid caliph at court was useful, but what exactly did this functionary do? His main purpose was to legitimize the accession of a new sultan. The Mamluk sultanate was never formally hereditary (unlike, of course, the Abbasid caliphate) and frequently passed from one ruler to another through violence and assassination. The caliph’s function was basically to approve a usurper. In most cases the new ruler took a baya to the caliph, though sometimes, especially in the fifteenth century, it seems to have been the caliph who took a baya to the sultan, a curious reversal of the traditional protocol. The caliph’s other function was to impress other Muslim leaders, as when Berke, khan of the Golden Horde (the Mongol rulers of Russia) and a new convert to Islam, sent a delegation to the court at Cairo in 1257. The caliph delivered a khutba in Berke’s name and a diploma of investiture was passed to his ambassadors.

  Only on one occasion did a caliph actually acquire a political role, and that was when, in 1412, a group of Mamluk emirs bidding for power set up the Abbasid caliph Mustaīn as sultan. Needless to say, when the caliph attempted to wield power himself, his backers hastily sent him packing back to his luxurious quarters in the citadel.