ONE
The Caliphs
1
THE RIGHTLY-GUIDED OR ‘PATRIARCHAL’ OR ‘ORTHODOX’ CALIPHS (AL-KHULAFĀ’ AL-RĀSHIDŪN)
11–40/632–61
| 11/632 | Abū Bakr ‘Atīq, Ibn Abī Quhāfa, al-Siddīq |
| 13/634 | Abū Hafṣ ‘Umar (I) b. al-Khaṭṭāb, al-Fārūq |
| 23/644 | Abū ‘Amr or Abū ‘Abdallāh or Abū Laylā ‘Uthmān b. ‘Affān, Dhu ’l-Nūrayn |
| 35–40/656–61 | Abu ’l-Ḥasan ‘Alī b. Abī Ṭālib, al-Imām al-Murtaḍā |
| 40/661 | Umayyad caliphs |
On the Prophet Muhammad’s death at Medina in 11/632, four of his Companions, all closely related to him either through marriage or through blood, succeeded him as temporal leaders of the infant Muslim umma or community. They assumed the title of Khalīfa or Caliph (literally, ‘he who follows behind, successor’), with responsibility for the upholding and spreading of the new faith and the well-being of Muḥammad’s people, and – at least in the case of the first three of these caliphs – general recognition as the interpreters of the faith and religious leaders of the community.
Abū Bakr was the father of the Prophet’s virgin wife and favourite, ‘Ā’isha, and was one of his oldest and most trusted supporters. It was he who imposed the authority of the capital Medina over the outlying parts of the Arabian peninsula, such as Najd, Baḥrayn, Oman (‘Umān) and Yemen, after many of the Bedouin tribes had renounced their personal allegiance to Muḥammad (the Ridda Wars). ‘Umar’s daughter Ḥafṣa was also a wife of the Prophet, and it was under ‘Umar’s vigorous direction that the martial energies of the desert Arabs were turned outside the peninsula against the Byzantine territories of Syria, Palestine and Egypt and against the Sāsānid Persian ones of Iraq and Persia. ‘Umar was also a capable organiser, and both the introduction of a rudimentary civil administration for the conquered provinces and the invention of the register or dīwān system for paying the Arab warriors’ stipends are attributed to him. It was he who abandoned the increasingly clumsy title of ‘Successor of the Successor of the Messenger of God’ in favour of the simple term ‘caliph’ and who further adopted the designation of Amīr al-Mu’minīn ‘Commander of the Faithful’, perhaps implying a spiritual as well as a purely secular, political element in his leadership.
‘Uthmān was, through his wife Ruqayya, the Prophet’s son-in-law, and was elected caliph after ‘Umar’s murder by a small council (shūrā) of the leading Companions, but his reign ended in a rebellion by discontented elements and his death in 35/656. This assassination inaugurated a period of strife and counter-strife (fitna, literally ‘temptation, trial [of the believer’s faith]’), and for this reason it was later often referred to as al-Bāb al-maftūḥ ‘the door opened [to civil warfare]’. The last of the Rightly-Guided Caliphs, ‘Alī, was doubly related to Muḥammad as his cousin and, through his marriage to Fāṭima, as his son-in-law, and as a child had been brought up with the Prophet. Thus in the eyes of certain pious circles, those who later formed the nucleus of the shī‘at ‘Alī or ‘party of‘Alī’ (or simply, the Shī‘a), he was particularly well fitted to succeed to the Prophet’s heritage. But he was never able to enforce his authority all though the Islamic lands, for Syria and then Egypt were controlled by Mu‘āwiya, governor of Syria (see below, no. 2). ‘Alī moved his capital out of the Arabian peninsula to Kūfa in Iraq, and attempted to rally the Arab tribesmen of Iraq to his side. He confronted Mu‘āwiya in battle at Ṣiffīn on the upper Euphrates in 37/657, but had no decisive success. He was murdered in 40/661 by one of the Khārijīs, a radical, egalitarian group which had seceded from ‘Alī’s army; his son al-Ḥasan half-heartedly succeeded to the caliphate in Iraq, but was speedily bought out by Mu‘āwiya and renounced his rights to the caliphate, which now passed to the Umayyads (see below, no. 2).
In later centuries, the age of the first four caliphs came to be regarded, through a somewhat romantic and pious haze, as a Golden Age when faith, justice and the pristine Islamic virtues flourished. Hence the title ‘rightly-guided’ was applied to them, thereby distinguishing them from their successors the Umayyads, who in the eyes of the religious classes came to be regarded as impious and worldly mulūk ‘kings’ rather than religiously-inspired leaders of the community.
Lane-Poole, 3–5, 9; Zambaur, 3.
EI1 ‘‘Omar b. al-Khaṭṭāb’, ‘‘Othmān b. ‘Affān’ (G. Levi Delia Vida), EI2 ‘Abū Bakr’ (W. Montgomery Watt), ‘‘Alī b. Abī Ṭālib’ (L. Veccia Vaglieri).
L. Veccia Vaglieri, ‘The Patriarchal and Umayyad caliphates’, in P. M. Holt, A. K. S. Lambton and B. Lewis (eds), The Cambridge History of Islam, Cambridge 1970, I, 57–103.
H. Kennedy, The Prophet and the Age of the Caliphs, The Islamic Near East from the Sixth to the Eleventh Century, London 1986, 50–81, with genealogical table at p. 402.
A. Noth, ‘Früher Islam’, in U. Haarmann (ed.), Geschichte der arabischen Welt, Munich 1987, 11–100.
41–132/661–750
| ⊘ 41/661 | Abū ‘Abd al-Raḥmān Mu‘āwiya I b. Abī Sufyān |
| 60/680 | Abū Khālid Yazīd I b. Mu‘āwiya |
| 64/683 | Mu‘āwiya II b. Yazīd I |
| 64/684 | Abū ‘Abd al-Malik Marwān I b. al-Ḥakam |
| ⊘ 65/685 | Abu ’1-Walīd ‘Abd al-Malik b. Marwān I, Abu ’1-Mulūk |
| ⊘ 86/705 | Abu ’l-‘Abbās al-Walīd I b. ‘Abd al-Malik |
| ⊘ 96/715 | Abū Ayyūb Sulaymān b. ‘Abd al-Malik |
| ⊘ 99/717 | Abū Ḥafṣ ‘Umar (II) b. ‘Abd al-‘Azīz |
| ⊘ 101/720 | Abu Khālid Yazīd II b. ‘Abd al-Malik, |
| ⊘ 105/724 | Abu ’l-Walīd Hishām b. ‘Abd al-Malik |
| ⊘ 125/743 | Abu ’l-‘Abbās al-Walīd II b. Yazīd II |
| ⊘ 126/744 | Abū Khālid Yazīd III b. al-Walīd I |
| ⊘ 126/744 | Ibrāhīm b. al-Walīd I, k. 132/750 |
| ⊘ 127–32/744–50 | Abū ‘Abd al-Malik Marwān II b. Muḥammad, al-Ja‘dī al-Ḥimār |
| 132/750 | ‘Abbāsid caliphs |
Mu‘āwiya followed ‘Alī and al-Ḥasan as caliph of the Muslims, having adopted the cry of ‘Vengeance for ‘Uthmān’ against ‘Alī and his regicide supporters (Mu‘āwiya and ‘Uthmān were kinsmen, both of them belonging to the Meccan clan of Umayya or ‘Abd Shams). Mu‘āwiya had governed Syria for twenty years, and had led the warfare by land and sea against the Byzantines; he consequently had a disciplined and well-trained army to set against the anarchic Bedouins of Iraq who formed the bulk of ‘Alī’s support. He thus inaugurates the first branch of the Umayyads, the Sufyānids; on the death of the ephemeral caliph Mu‘āwiya II, the caliphate passed – after a period of crisis when it seemed that leadership of the community might go to the Zubayrids, the family of another of Muḥammad’s most prominent Companions – to Marwān I, belonging to a parallel branch of the Umayyads, from whom all the subsequent caliphs of the dynasty (and also the Spanish Umayyads: see below, no. 4) descended.
The three greatest caliphs of the dynasty, Mu‘āwiya, ‘Abd al-Malik and Hishām, each reigned for some twenty years from their capital Damascus, and proved first-class administrators of the empire which the Arabs were conquering. With no precedents for a theory of Islamic government over vast territories and ethnically and confessionally heterogeneous populations, but with a dynamic leadership and a system of society which moved from early rigidity to a more flexible form, the Umayyads were necessarily innovators here. Among other things, they were concerned to adapt and to incorporate within their system of government the administrative practices of the Greeks and Persians whose former lands they now ruled over; the later Umayyad period seems to witness the introduction of several Sāsānid techniques and manners, a process which was to accelerate under the ‘Abbāsids. Military expansion proceeded apace, above all, in the reign of al-Walīd I, even though the easiest conquests had now been made and the Arab troops had to campaign in remote, often mountainous regions and in harsh climatic conditions; nor did plunder come in so easily as in the first stages of Arab conquest. All of North Africa west of Egypt was occupied, and Muslim raiders passed across the Straits of Gibraltar into Spain, subsequently surmounting the Pyrenees and raiding into late Merovingian and Carolingian France. From Egypt, pressure was exerted against the Christian kingdoms of Nubia. Beyond the Caucasus, contact was made with the Turkish Khazars, and the Greek frontiers in south-eastern Anatolia and Armenia were harried. On the eastern Persian fringes, Khwārazm was invaded and Transoxania gradually conquered for Islam against the strenuous opposition of native Iranian rulers and their Turkish allies. Finally, an Arab governor penetrated through Makrān into Sind, implanting Islam for the first time on Indian soil. All these conquests not only increased the taxative resources of the empire but also brought in large numbers of slaves and clients; the use of this labour enabled the minority of Arabs in the empire to live off the conquered lands as a rentier class and to exploit some of the economic potential of regions like the Fertile Crescent.
Yet territorial expansion and economic and administrative progress did not prevent the fall of the Umayyad régime. Within the heartlands, the caliphs faced the unceasing opposition of the Arab tribesmen of Iraq and of sectarian activists like the Khārijīs. The formation of a religious institution centred on Medina made the two Holy Cities of Arabia centres of pious opposition, especially as some of these elements favoured the claims to headship of the community of ‘Alī’s descendants, the Ahl al-Bayt or ‘House of the Prophet’, who regarded themselves as the Imāms or divinely-designated inheritors of the prophetic charge. It was not, as anti-Umayyad views which emerged under their supplanters, the ‘Abbāsids, were later to allege, that the Umayyad caliphs were mere kings, hostile to Islamic religion and introducers of the foreign practice of hereditary succession in the state. We can now discern that the Umayyads had an exalted view of the religious nature of their charge, not just as successors of the Prophet but as God’s own deputies, implied by their title Khalīfat Allāh ‘God’s Caliph’, and considered themselves fully competent to form and to interpret the nascent Islamic doctrine. But social tensions appeared within the caliphate at large. New classes, such as the Mawālī or clients, converts to Islam from the formerly subject populations, began to seek a more satisfactory social and political role within the umma commensurate with their numbers and their skills. Various discontents were skilfully exploited by members of a rival Meccan clan to the Umayyads, that of the descendants of the Prophet’s uncle al-‘Abbās. Hence after 128/746 there began in the Khurasan or eastern Persia a revolutionary movement led by an agitator of genius, Abū Muslim. The anti-Umayyad forces gained military victory and, with the claims of the ‘Alids to the imamate speedily elbowed aside, the ‘Abbāsids succeeded to the caliphate in 132/750 (see below, no. 3). In a general massacre of the defeated Umayyads, one of the few members of the family to survive was Hishām’s grandson ‘Abd al-Rahmān; he escaped to North Africa and eventually founded in Spain a fresh, much longer-lived line of Umayyads (see below, no. 4).
Lane-Poole, 4–6, 9; Zambaur, 3 and Table F; Album, 7–11.
EI1 ‘Umaiyads’ (G. Levi Della Vida).
Veccia Vaglieri, ‘The Patriarchal and Umayyad caliphates’, in The Cambridge History of Islam, I, 57–103.
H. Kennedy, The Prophet and the Age of the Caliphates. The Islamic Near East from the Sixth to the Eleventh Century, 82–123, with genealogical table at p. 403.
G. R. Hawting, The First Dynasty of Islam. The Umayyad Caliphate AD 661–750, London 1986, with genealogical table at p. xv.
A. Noth, ‘Früher Islam’, in Haarmann (ed.), Geschichte der arabischen Welt, 11–100.
132–923/750–1517
1. The caliphs in Iraq and Baghdad 132–656/749–1258
2. The caliph in Aleppo, Ḥarrān and northern Syria 659–60/1261
| ⊘ 659–60/1261 | Aḥmad b. al-Ḥasan, Abu ’l-‘Abbās al-Ḥākim I |
| 661/1262 | Transfer to Cairo |
3. The caliphs in Cairo 659–923/1261–1517
| 659–60/1261 | Aḥmad b. al-Ẓāhir, Abu ’1-Qāsim al-Mustanṣir |
| 661/1262 | Aḥmad b. al-Ḥasan, Abu ’l-‘Abbās al-Ḥākim I |
| 701/1302 | Sulaymān b. al-Ḥākim I, Abū Rabī‘a al-Mustakfī I |
| 740/1340 | Ibrāhīm b. Muḥammad al-Mustamsik, Abū Isḥāq al-Wāthiq I |
| 741/1341 | Aḥmad b. al-Mustakfī I, Abu ’l-‘Abbās al-Ḥākim II |
| 753/1352 | Abū Bakr b. al-Mustakfī I, Abu ’l-Fatḥ al-Mu‘taḍid I |
| 763/1362 | Muḥammad b. al-Mu‘taḍid I, Abū ‘Abdallāh al-Mutawakkil I, first reign |
| 779/1377 | Zakariyyā’b. al-Wāthiq I, Abū Yaḥyā al-Mu‘taṣim, first reign |
| 779/1377 | Muḥammad al-Mutawakkil I, second reign |
| 785/1383 | ‘Umar b. al-Wāthiq I, Abū Hafṣ al-Wāthiq II |
| 788/1386 | Zakariyyā’ al-Mu‘taṣim, second reign |
| 791/1389 | Muḥammad al-Mutawakkil I, third reign |
| 808/1406 | ‘Abbās or Ya‘qūb b. al-Mutawakkil I, Abu ’l-Faḍl al-Musta‘īn (also in 815/1412 proclaimed sultan, see below, no. 31, 2) |
| 816/1414 | Dāwūd b. al-Mutawakkil I, Abu ’l-Fatḥ al-Mu‘taḍid II |
| 845/1441 | Sulaymān b. al-Mutawakkil I, Abū Rabī‘a al-Mustakfī II |
| 855/1451 | Ḥamza b. al-Mutawakkil I, Abū Bakr al-Qā’im |
| 859/1455 | Yūsuf b. al-Mutawakkil I, Abu ’l-Maḥāsin al-Mustanjid |
| 884/1479 | ‘Abd al-‘Azīz b. al-Musta‘īn, Abu ’l-‘Izz al-Mutawakkil II |
| 903/1497 | Ya‘qūb b. al-Mutawakkil II, Abu ’l-Ṣabr al-Mustamsik, first reign |
| 914/1508 | al-Mutawakkil III b. al-Mustamsik, first reign |
| 922/1516 | Ya‘qūb al-Mustamsik, second reign |
| 923/1517 | al-Mutawakkil III, second reign, d. in Istanbul |
| 923/1517 | Ottoman conquest of Egypt |
The ‘Abbāsids acquired the caliphate through what might be considered from one aspect as a power-struggle between rival Meccan families, since they stemmed from the family of the Prophet’s uncle al-‘Abbās, of the Meccan clan of Hāshim; and because of this descent they were able to claim a legitimacy in the eyes of the orthodox Sunnī religious classes which the Umayyads had lacked. Even so, during the first century of their power the ‘Abbāsids had to contend with frequent revolts of the ‘Alids, descendants of the two sons of ‘Alī, al-Ḥasan and al-Ḥusayn, who were grandsons of Muḥammad and whom their partisans the Shī‘a considered as having a better title to the caliphate and imamate, one based on a specific act of divinely-inspired designation by the Prophet. In self-defence, the apologists of the ‘Abbāsids stressed the superiority of descent through males over descent through females (since the ‘Alid claim was through Muḥammad’s daughter Fāṭima), and the caliphs themselves soon adopted a system of honorific titles (alqāb, sing. laqab) when they each ascended the throne, a practice unknown to their Umayyad predecessors; these titles proclaimed dependence on God and claimed divine support for ‘Abbāsid rule. The theocratic nature of the new dynasty’s power was gradually emphasised in other ways, and the orthodox religious institution enlisted as far as possible on the side of the ‘Abbāsids. Spreading into the sphere of practical government, there were also influences from the older Persian traditions of divine rulership and statecraft; for the ‘Abbāsid Revolution, while in origin an Arab movement, began on Persian soil and took advantage of certain Persian discontents. The shifting of the capital from Damascus in Syria to Iraq, eventually to Baghdad, symbolised the new eastward orientation of the caliphate, and over the next centuries Persian material and cultural practices and influences became increasingly evident within it.
The Islamic empire had virtually reached its full extent under the Umayyads, and, under the early ‘Abbāsids, the borders of the Dār al-Islām were almost static. Only a few of the caliphs distinguished themselves as military commanders in the field – al-Ma’mūn and al-Mu‘taṣim led successful expeditions into Anatolia against the Byzantines – and in the tenth and early eleventh centuries it was the Muslims who were forced on to the defensive by the vigorous Greek emperors of the Macedonian dynasty. Already in the ninth century, the political unity of the caliphate began to dissolve. A branch of the Umayyads, a priori hostile to the ‘Abbāsids, ruled in Spain (see below, no. 4), and North Africa was in general too distant to be controlled properly. Such lines of governors as the Ṭūlūnids in Egypt (see below, no. 25) and the Ṭāhirids and Sājids in Persia (see below, nos 82, 70) still behaved as faithful vassals of Baghdad, but their existence nevertheless paved the way for largely autonomous dynasties on the far eastern fringes of the Persian world, like the Sāmānids of Transoxania and the Ṣaffārids of Sistan (see below, nos 83, 84), who forwarded taxation to Baghdad only rarely or not at all. The effective authority of the ‘Abbāsids became reduced to central Iraq, above all, in the tenth century, when an aggressive political Shī‘ism triumphed temporarily over a large part of the central and eastern lands of the caliphate. The Fāṭimids seized first North Africa and then Egypt and southern Syria (see below, no. 27), setting themselves up in Cairo as rival caliphs. In Iraq and western Persia, the Daylamī Būyids rose to power (see below, no. 75), entering Baghdad in 334/945 and reducing the ‘Abbāsids to the status of puppets, with almost nothing left save their moral and spiritual influence as heads of Sunnī Islam.
The situation was saved for the ‘Abbāsids and for Sunnī orthodoxy in general by the appearance in the Middle East in the eleventh century of the Turkish Seljuqs (see below, no. 91), but the Seljuqs, while upholders of the Sunna from the religious point of view, did not intend to let the political power of the caliphs revive to the detriment of the sultanate which they had just established. It was only in the twelfth century, when the family solidarity of the Great Seljuqs was impaired and their authority thereby enfeebled, that the fortunes of the ‘Abbāsids began to rise under such vigorous caliphs as al-Muqtafī and al-Nāṣir. This recovery in the effective power and moral influence was, however, cut short by the Mongol cataclysm, and in 656/1258 Hülegü’s Mongol troops murdered the last ‘Abbāsid caliph to rule in Baghdad (see below, no. 133).
The first three centuries of ‘Abbāsid rule (eighth to eleventh centuries AD) saw the full flowering of mediaeval Islamic civilisation. Literature, theology, philosophy and the natural sciences all flourished, with fertilising influences coming in from Persia and the Hellenistic and Byzantine cultures. Economic and commercial progress was widespread, above all in the older, long-settled lands of Persia, the Fertile Crescent and Egypt, and trade links were established with outside regions like the Eurasian steppes, the Far East, India and black Africa. Despite political breakdown at the centre and tribal and sectarian violence during the tenth and eleventh centuries, this progress in the material and cultural fields continued, and it was in this regard apt for the Swiss orientalist Adam Mez to designate the tenth century that of the ‘Renaissance of Islam’. Within the northern tier of the Middle East, incoming Turkmen nomads and subsequently-established Turkish dynasties brought extensive changes in such spheres as land utilisation and economic life, but were largely absorbed into the cultural and religious fabric of Islam; it was the Mongols, for several decades fierce enemies of Islam and bringers of a steppe way of life alien to the settled agricultural economies of the Middle East, who dealt more serious blows to the economic and social stability of Iraq and the Persian lands.
The Baghdad caliphate was thus extinguished by the Mongols, but soon afterwards the Mamlūk sultan of Egypt, Baybars (see below, no. 31, 1), himself decided to install a caliph, and invited Aḥmad al-Mustanṣir, an ostensible uncle of the last ‘Abbāsid of Baghdad, who had been held prisoner there but had been then released by the Mongols, to Cairo (659/1261), This caliph led an army in an unsuccessful bid to reconquer Baghdad, possibly dying in the attempt and certainly disappearing from further mention. Meanwhile, a further ‘Abbāsid, who seems genuinely to have been a descendant of al-Mustarshid, had in this same year been proclaimed caliph at Aleppo, with the backing of the Amīr Aqqush, as al-Ḥākim, subsequently installed in Cairo in 661/1262. The establishment of a caliph in Cairo served to legitimise Mamlūk rule and to increase Mamluk prestige in places as far apart as North Africa and Muslim India, and it was a moral weapon in the warfare against the Crusaders and the Mongols; furthermore the caliphs continued, as they had done in late ‘Abbāsid Baghdad, to act as heads of the Futuwwa or chivalric orders. But they had no practical power in the Mamlūk state, and there was certainly no idea of a division of power with the sultans. The last caliph, al-Mutawakkil III, was carried off to Istanbul in 923/1517 by the Ottoman conqueror Selīm the Grim, but the story that he then transferred his rights in the caliphate to the Turkish sultans is a piece of fiction originating in the nineteenth century.
The advent of the ‘Abbāsids in 132/749 saw a general elevation of the ruler’s status and a formalising of the court ceremonial surrounding him, possibly as a reflection of the increased permeation of Persian cultural influences into ‘Abbāsid society mentioned above. Whereas the Umayyad caliphs had been content with their simple names as ruling designations, from the accession of al-Manṣūr onwards, the ‘Abbāsid caliphs adopted honorific titles expressing divine support for their rule, for example al-Mahdī ‘the divinely-guided one’ or emphasising the ruler’s leading role in implementing God’s plan for His world, for example al-Qā’im ‘he who arises, undertakes [something]’ or al-Ẓāhir ‘he who makes prevail’, usually with a complement such as li-dīn Allāh ‘to/for God’s religion’ or bi-amr Allāh ‘in the furtherance of God’s affair/command’. Once the unity of the caliphate began to dissolve and provincial dynasties arose, lesser, local rulers began to emulate the caliphs and adorn themselves with high-flown, sonorous titles of this type, not infrequently ludicrously at variance with the actual significance of the bearers of them.
Lane-Poole, 6–8, 12–13; Zambaur, 4–5 and Table G; Album, 11–13.
EI2 ‘‘Abbāsids’ (B. Lewis).
D. and J. Sourdel, La civilisation de l’Islam classique, Paris 1968, chs 2 and 3, 61–126.
D. Sourdel, ‘The ‘Abbāsid caliphate’, in The Cambridge History of Islam, I, 104–39.
H. Kennedy, The Early Abbasid Caliphate: A Political History, London 1981.
idem, The Prophet and the Age of the Caliphs. The Islamic Near East from the Sixth to the Eleventh Century, 124–99, with genealogical table at p. 404.
T. Nagel, ‘Das Kalifat der Abbasiden’, in Haarmann (ed.), Geschichte der arabischen Welt, 101–65.
P. M. Holt, ‘Some observations on the ‘Abbāsid caliphate of Cairo’, Bulletin of the School of Oriental [and African] Studies, 47 (1984), 501–7.
S. Heidemann, Das Aleppiner Kalifat (A. D.1261). Vom Ende des Kalifates in Bagdad über Aleppo zu den Restaurationen in Kairo, Leiden 1994.