God's Armies

by Malcolm Lambert

  The actions taken by Jawhar were important for the future: the founding of the navy which was vital for the control of Egypt also carried Sicily into the Fatimid sphere, and the creation of Cairo as a capital. Cairo was purely the administrative capital and designed to give the new ruler security. It housed Jawhar’s own Berber troops, a vital praetorian guard, and had wide roads for ease of travel. Its separation from the main market areas avoided clashes with other ethnic groups. Its two great palaces impressed ambassadors and visitors and made a fitting setting for elaborate ceremonial, appropriate for a caliph who claimed world authority and held all the powers of an imam. Mosques served different purposes. Most notable was the al-Azhar mosque, designed to be the centre for worship in the Ismaili tradition and for instruction in the faith. The state owned land and gained revenues from markets. Nubian gold and the fertility of the Nile delta brought in revenues to support building and decoration, brought pay for standing armies and supported the dais still spreading the Ismaili message. Gardens separated Cairo from Fustat, which was a centre for population and economic activity.

  There was little Sunnis could expect to do because of the degradation of the natural Sunni leadership, the Abbasid caliphs in Baghdad, who reached a low point when they were in effect taken over by a loosely Shiite group, the Buyids, who in response to a power vacuum came over the mountains of Iran. They were warriors, mainly in pursuit of governmental grants to satisfy their troops, too little interested in doctrine to displace the Sunni caliphs altogether; rather, they were plunderers who damaged agriculture and put Sunni caliphs into and out of office as they pleased. These Abbasid caliphs led pampered lives in their palaces in Baghdad, while outside there was ruin. An objective surveying of the scene at the start of the eleventh century would have been justified in anticipating a full victory for the cause of the Shiites across the Muslim world. Divided they may have been, but their numbers were considerable. Iran, influenced by the Sassanians, had become a strongpoint for the Twelvers. Qarmatians had established mini-kingdoms; the fighting Shiites had adherents. Persian Buyids dominated a shrunken Sunni Abbasid caliphate and Fatimids had created a caliphate for themselves, had conquered Egypt and so gained the resources to continue to send out missionaries.

  The Sunni Response

  Change came with the death of the dominant Buyid, Baha al-Dwala, who had borrowed grand titles from the Sassanian dynasty and treated the Abbasid caliphs as puppets, confining them to a religious role. But even a puppet caliph could turn and, taking advantage of the death of Baha al-Dwala in 1012, the Abbasid caliph al-Qadir (991–1031) for the first time sought to declare the Sunni doctrinal position. As we have seen, over the centuries disputes over the caliphate had arrayed rival armies against each other, had issued in battles and killings and had had devastating effects on the descendants of Ali and Fatima – yet a full definition of the implications of Sunnism as a rival to the Shiites had never been given. In the eleventh century al-Qadir in Baghdad, long shorn of real power and lacking an army to enforce his will, saw an opportunity.

  There was no popular feeling in favour of the feeble Abbasids, but nonetheless there was a growing preference for them as a shield against shrill Shiites. Even the Buyids reacted against the claims of the Fatimids, and al-Qadir was emboldened to attack them and to cast doubt on the genealogical claims which underpinned them. The death of Baha al-Dwala in 1012 opened new opportunities, which al-Qadir was happy to take. It was the beginning of a process of defining Sunnism. In 1018 al-Qadir condemned Shiism and Mutazilism, requiring orthodox believers to venerate the Companions of the Prophet and the first four caliphs. This meant rejecting the Shiite claim that Ali had been the true choice of Muhammad as his successor and had been unjustly deprived of his position by the early caliphs.

  Al-Qadir broke with tradition by making his own decision on the succession, appointing his son; he then went further in 1029 when he issued a decree which rejected the belief that the Quran was created, once put forward by the caliph al-Mamun in the ninth century, implying a doctrinal role for Abbasid caliphs such as himself. Al-Qadir also rejected allegorical interpretation of the Quran, the stock-in-trade of Shiite missionaries. Sunnism based itself on the Quran and the hadith, the sayings and doings of the Prophet, a firm set of rulings by which Sunnism was defined. The two sides were now formally and doctrinally arrayed against each other.

  Buyids lost their power and became a spent force. Another rival power in Iran, Mahmud of Ghazna, exercising his authority from 998 to 1030, gave his support to al-Qadir, claiming that the Shiites were heretics. Al-Qadir’s son, supporting his father, helped to give more emotional force to the Sunni cause by creating shrines in their interest and suppressing those of the Shiites. Abbasid caliphs still had no land and no army but in two reigns they had asserted a claim to religious decision-making and created a definition of Sunnism.

  The Seljuq Turks

  Yet the event which more than anything else stemmed the tide flowing in favour of Shiism was the irruption into the Islamic world of nomads from the Central Asian steppe. Famine was the spur. Desperate for new territory to feed their flocks and themselves, they came with their tents and their beasts into the farthest frontiers established by the great Muslim conquests in Khurasan and Transoxania and flowed across the Islamic world. Turkish-speaking and carrying with them no mental baggage, like distinguished nomads before and after their day – such as the Arabs from the Hijaz with their folk memories of jahiliyya before Muhammad, the Mongols with their cults which puzzled Franciscan missionaries or the Ottomans carrying with them their stories of folk heroes – Seljuqs of the eleventh century had no significant history or cultural traditions. They were, so to speak, a blank slate on which Sunni convictions could be written. Merchants, missionaries and raiders of the Sunni persuasion converted them out on the frontiers, giving them the zeal of new believers. They fractured the political systems of the eleventh century. From the eastern frontiers they moved southwards into Iran, Iraq, Syria and Anatolia, barely under the control of the Seljuq dynasty from which they took their name, who did what they could to prevent opportunistic herders from damaging agricultural land. A leader from the family, Tughril Beg (1040–63) entered Baghdad peacefully with the aid of an existing Turkish presence in the area and expelled the last of the Buyids; the caliph gave Tughril Beg the title of ‘sultan’, which literally means ‘power’. Raiding by the Seljuqs began to affect Anatolia, just as the Byzantine Empire was suffering a malaise due to excessive expansion, heavy taxation and over-reliance on mercenaries.

  An attempt by the fighting Emperor Romanus IV Diogenes to challenge the nomad enemy and restore imperial authority made matters worse. He set out to a chosen battle site far on the frontier at Manzikert, north of Lake Van, where he met Alp Arslan, one of the great leaders of the Turks and nephew of Tughril Beg. Romanus miscalculated. His army lacked cohesion, he suffered desertions and his personal guard was overwhelmed. Alp Arslan had no hostile intentions on the Empire and was moving with his cavalry in the Sunni interest to attack the Shiite Fatimid power in Egypt. He gave merciful terms to Romanus, but this did nothing for the defeated leader, who was blinded and then removed from power by aristocratic opponents on the Byzantine side. There followed a ten-year civil war between these rival aristocrats who, as they battled over the leading cities of Anatolia, made use of the Seljuqs as their agents. The consequence was that a series of Byzantine strongpoints fell into the hands of a small number of Turks who, being nomads with the steppe peoples’ mastery of the horse and skills in mounted archery but with no particular capacity for siege warfare, would not normally have captured these cities. When one aristocratic leader, Alexius Comnenus, emerged as victor and in 1081 became emperor, he faced a lost Byzantine heartland in Anatolia. From the Islamic side, al-Ghazzali, the classic Sufi writer and one of the masters of Islamic thought, who did more than anyone else to give respect to the Sufi movement, was inclined to regard the nomad intervention philosophically, although he felt
its drawbacks, seeing it as an inevitable part of the Sunni rise while he was in the service of Nizam al-Mulk.‡

  In summary, the Seljuq intervention in the eleventh century brought unexpected vitality to Sunnism. Seljuq power led to the setting up of madrasas to give security to scholars and act as training places for qadis. The struggle against Shiites was far from over, but a new phase of the conflict had opened.

  * The Church of the Sepulchre and the Byzantine Emperor Justinian’s church of the Mother of God, the Nea, built in 543 and now vanished but recovered in outline by archaeologists.

  † King of the Franks in 768 and Holy Roman Emperor in 800.

  ‡ See below p. 81.

  3

  THE DOG THAT

  DID NOT BARK

  In 996 an eleven-year-old boy was playing in a tree in Bilbais in the Nile delta, where his father, the caliph al-Aziz, had been assembling troops and ships. The eunuch Barjawan, chief of the palace treasures, persuaded him to come down and told him that his father had just died, put on his head a jewelled turban and addressed the boy with the classic formula ‘Greetings to the Commander of the Faithful’. He took the title al-Hakim bi-amr Allah.

  Over the years he learned from Barjawan of the absolute powers of the Fatimid caliph who, in Shiite doctrine, had divine inspiration in all he did. By the time he was fifteen he had realised that, for all the outward respect Barjawan showed him, the eunuch was an inveterate intriguer who was steadily marginalising him. Al-Hakim’s revenge was swift. He ordered a servant to knife Barjawan to death. An edict from the head of chancery explained that Barjawan had once pleased the commander but, with a quotation from the Quran about God being ‘most knowing and most watchful’ with his servants, went on to say, ‘when the fellow went bad, he inflicted on him punishment’. This execution of Barjawan initiated a long sequence of terror with many executions, often for arbitrary reasons, some far-reaching edicts and persecution of the Peoples of the Book, the dhimmis, Christians and Jews.

  He terrified his people. Very few who held highest office under him survived: sooner or later he ordered their execution, sometimes for offences such as embezzlement, sometimes for no apparent reason – thus killing men who had given devoted service, yet often showing unusual generosity after their deaths in grants to their children. He could display the classic virtues of an Islamic leader: generosity and care for mosques and for learning, being accessible to petitioners, whatever their rank, manumitting many slaves and making generous charitable grants. He founded a House of Wisdom to make books available and to give stipends to scholars – yet he killed three professors who lived on these stipends. He loved astronomy but drove away astrologers. Over and over again real achievements were smeared by attacks of paranoia.

  A major strand of al-Hakim’s policy was his attempt to make traditional regulations effective and to enforce Fatimid principles. The empire he inherited had indeed wide bounds, but at the same time it embraced a ramshackle religious structure, especially in Egypt where Fatimid caliphs had loosely imposed their doctrines and practices on many Sunnis, and even relied on Christians and Jews for some key offices. As he took more and more responsibility from 1004 onwards, al-Hakim began issuing edicts, either traditionally Islamic or specifically Fatimid, looking back to Ali and the beginnings of the early Shiite conflicts. Two dietary regulations look simply eccentric at first sight. They are indeed minuscule and extremist, but make sense for Shiites. He prohibited the use of mulukhiyya, a herb used to flavour soups: it was a favourite herb of Muhammad’s wife, Aisha, the opponent of Ali. A modern visitor to Egypt, where it is widely used today, regards it as the one sound decision of al-Hakim. He banned a certain kind of watercress for the same reason. He acted fiercely against the use of alcohol, ordering jars of honey to be thrown into the Nile because they might be used to make mead. He destroyed grapes and prohibited the drinking of fuqqa, a fizzy, light beer – the Coca-Cola of the eleventh century – a drink disliked by Ali.

  Paranoia was fed by an uneasy awareness of the Egyptian disregard of the Quranic prohibition of alcohol. Al-Hakim’s physician, a Christian, who treated him for melancholia, drowned in 1007 as he plunged into a pond in order to sober up after heavy drinking, but was too far gone to take off his clothing and perished in the water. This could not be hushed up. It transpired that he was a member of a nocturnal drinking club, which included the caliph’s commander-in-chief and his chief justice who were in the habit of enjoying themselves secretly, together with Sunnis, Christians and Ismailis. Al-Hakim was not going to tolerate this and, despite delays and apparent forgiveness, he executed them both.

  Waves of legislation alarmed the populace. The Cursing of the Emigrants, a Shiite slogan directed against those Companions of the Prophet who were the first three caliphs before Ali, was by his order displayed in mosques and on walls. Then quite suddenly the measure was cancelled, and it was ordered that the Cursings should be taken down.

  Women were progressively exposed to very harsh restrictions, initially, it seems, sparked off by eccentric episodes in which the caliph took to riding about at night in Cairo and encouraged citizens to light up the streets. Seeing men and women getting drunk in public, he decreed that women were not to be allowed to go out in the evening. Later, restrictions were tightened: they were no longer allowed to go and reside in tents by family tombs on days of visitation of the dead. Finally in 1014 all women, bar the very young and the very old, were prohibited from going out at all. Shoemakers who made women’s shoes were prohibited from doing so and consequently were ruined. Near the end of his reign, the town of Fustat was burned and the populace devastated, perhaps because they had disobeyed al-Hakim’s edicts or attacked his reputation.

  He reversed the religious toleration of his father. The Epiphany procession with lights, attended by Muslims as well as Christians, was banned; Christians and Jews were put under pressure and forced to wear badges in public. At one stage crosses were confiscated and publicly burned. Later, Christians, no longer allowed to ride horses, were forced to wear massive wooden crosses round their necks when in public. Jews were made to wear a badge, possibly depicting a calf wrongfully worshipped by Israelites in the days of Moses. Synagogues and churches were looted and destroyed.

  The Holy Sepulchre drew al-Hakim’s attention. Massive pilgrimages went to the shrine and wealth was bestowed on it. Might such wealth go better to Muslims? Melkites, Arabic-speaking churchmen, had developed the miracle of the holy fire, lit by their patriarch at Easter. It was believed there was trickery here and that a filament was smeared with oil so that all lamps would magically be lit up simultaneously in the ritual. If Jerusalem, as a sacred place for Muslims, was to be purified then might the removal of the greatest of Christian shrines be an efficacious means to this end? Al-Hakim acted. He was nothing if not thorough. In September 1009 Constantine’s basilica of the Sepulchre was utterly destroyed, stone by stone. Only the massive pillars of the rotunda, or at least the lower portions of them, remained because they were resistant to the workers’ tools. And yet in the last six months of 1020 there were signs that he was weakening in his obduracy towards the Christians: the chronicler Yahya of Antioch records how casual personal contact with a Melkite led to some reconstruction of Christian buildings. The Copts had a similar story of restoration on a whim and personal contact.

  Eccentricities grew. Early in his reign al-Hakim had taken to riding, inspecting streets and alleys or passing into the desert, often with very limited personal security. When he rode on a donkey, mostly simply clad, he was, however oddly, echoing the simplicity of Ali. This night riding grew more frequent. In 1021, after riding into the desert at night with a young groom, he disappeared. All that was found was a hamstrung donkey and bloodstained clothing, with tears made by a knife. The likeliest account of what happened is that seven Bedouin accosted him and demanded money. In his usual generous style he promised them 5,000 dirhams. Four Bedouin went off to the Treasury with a groom as a guarantor of good faith. The remain
ing three murdered him and buried him in an unmarked grave which was never found, leading to the legend, still believed by the Druze, that al-Hakim was divine, had left his temporary body and would one day return. Al-Hakim’s formidable elder half-sister promptly took charge and saw to it that his son reigned as the next caliph. The continued vitality of commerce in Egypt sustained the regime.

  Cunning in the removal of leading personalities, al-Hakim kept some of his supporters to the end. Cancellation of non-Quranic taxes, flashes of humour, good sense in foreign affairs all saved him from deposition. Talents, political as well as intellectual, fine taste in poetry, scientific knowledge and interest, and the outline of an extreme but coherent Ismaili programme were all lost to a cruel and arbitrary temperament.

  The Silence of the West

  Muslims had destroyed the Holy Sepulchre, one of the greatest of Christian shrines, and in response Pope Sergius IV (1002–14) issued an encyclical addressed to all Christians calling on them to restore it and kill ‘the impious pagans’ who had demolished it. The encyclical aroused so little response and was issued so long before the First Crusade that it has generally been regarded as a forgery. Not so. The finest expert of his day on medieval manuscripts has demonstrated that it is authentic and that the pope was proposing to lead an Italian expedition to go to the Sepulchre and was appealing for donations.* ‘For all of us Italians,’ Sergius wrote, ‘ – whether you are Venetians or Genoese – with your financial help, wish to prepare a fleet of a thousand ships to travel across the sea to Syria to claim back the Redeemer’s tomb.’ Those who responded were enjoined neither ‘to fear the sea’s turbulence nor dread the fury of war’, because if they died they would receive the reward of eternal life.