WHILE THE ABBASID dynasty lasted until 1258, when it was finally defeated by the Mongols, the early period from 750 to 945 marks in many ways the apogee of the power and prestige of the caliphate. When modern commentators look for a classic caliphate to demonstrate what caliphate has been and could be, they frequently look to the Abbasids in their period of greatest power and glory. For the conservative scholar and jurist Ibn Kathīr (d. 1373) for instance, writing in Damascus more than a century after the last Abbasid caliph of Baghdad had been killed by the Mongols, the Abbasids were still the caliphs par excellence, the only true embodiment of the office. The legacy and memory persist to the present day. To give just one example, the choice of the colour black as a symbol and sort of uniform by the present ISIS caliphate in the Jazira province is a clear and direct reference to the Abbasids, who adopted black as the official colour for court dress, an attempt in fact to position this new caliphate as inheriting the role and prestige of their predecessors.
In this chapter I will investigate how the Abbasids came to represent the caliphate, how they eventually succeeded and what powers they claimed. Finally we must consider the nature of and reasons for the break-up of the caliphate in the tenth century and what this meant for both the past and the future of the institution.
THE ABBASID REVOLUTION AND ITS AFTERMATH
The Abbasid family, perhaps fifty in number by this time, were descendants of the Prophet’s paternal uncle, Abbās b. Abd al-Muttalib, and therefore members of the Family of the Prophet. This was a very important relationship, all the more so because Muhammad’s own father died young and Abbās was in many ways his guardian and protector. At the same time they were not Muhammad’s biological descendants. Since his blood did not flow in their veins, they constantly had to counter the claim that they were, in a sense, imposters.
Abbās’s son Abd Allah figures frequently as a much respected authority of the Traditions of the Prophet, a reputation which may, of course, owe much to the political success of his descendants. He was not, however, one of the six members of the shūra chosen by Umar to elect the caliph after his death and he does not seem to have played a notable role in the Muslim conquests. The family enjoyed a quiet prosperity under the Umayyad caliphs and the remains of their palace have been uncovered by archaeologists at Humayma, in southern Jordan. Compared with the residences of the ruling dynasty, it is a modest structure, with rooms built around a single courtyard. And there is a small mosque outside, clearly identified by its orientation and its mihrab (prayer niche). Ornamental ivories, probably originally attached to pieces of furniture, suggest a degree of wealth and comfort but not extravagant opulence. Along with its agricultural possibilities—the family cultivated olives—the property at Humayma had one other advantage: it lay on the main route from Syria to the Hijaz and the Holy Cities. Plenty of people passed by and the Abbasids must have been well informed about what was going on.
Until around 720 they seem to have played no active political role and attracted no followers, but at this time Muhammad b. Alī, then the leading member of the family, began to make contact with disillusioned Muslims in the distant north-eastern province of Khurasan. He argued that the Abbasids were members of the Family of the Prophet and had a good claim to lead the Muslim people.
The Abbasid claim to the caliphate, as it was articulated after they had come to power, was based on three arguments. The first was, of course, their membership of the Family of the Prophet. This carried some weight, but many Muslims who wanted the rule of the Family to bring about change thought that the ruler should be a descendant of Alī and Fātima themselves. The second idea was that of nass, designation by a previous caliph or claimant. Mukhtār, the rebel in Kufa, had tried to establish an Alid caliphate in the name of Muhammad b. al-Hanafiya, a descendant, as already noted, of Alī but not of Fātima. The attempt had failed and Muhammad died in obscurity, but he left a son called Abū Hāshim, who inherited a claim of sorts to the caliphate. He was himself childless and the story goes that, perhaps travelling through Humayma, he designated Muhammad b. Alī as his successor. It was, to say the least, a flimsy claim, even if the chain of events was true, but, put together with other arguments, it could carry some weight.
The third point, put forward after the Abbasids had achieved power, was essentially an argument based on action rather than inheritance. It was they who had dealt with the impious Umayyads and, above all, they who had avenged the blood of the martyred Husayn: it was therefore the Abbasids, rather than the direct descendants of Alī, who could rightfully claim the caliphate. They laid considerable emphasis on themselves as the ‘Hāshimiya’. This term may in part be a reference to their supposed designation by Abū Hāshim, but it had a wider significance as well. An earlier Hāshim, who died before the coming of Islam, was the ancestor of the Alids and the Abbasids, but not, and this was the crucial factor, of the Umayyads. By claiming to be the Hāshimiya they were staking their claim to be part of the same kin as their Alid cousins.
None of these arguments would have been of much use if they had not been backed by the prospect of military force, and this is where the Khurasanis came into the picture. Khurasan was the name given to the vast north-eastern province of the Muslim world. In modern political geography it includes north-east Iran, Afghanistan and the Muslim areas of the Central Asian republics, including Bukhara, Samarqand and the Farghana valley. This huge and diverse province was ruled by Umayyad governors from the great ancient city of Merv, now in modern Turkmenistan. Although it was remote from the centres of Muslim power, a substantial number of Arabs lived there, almost all of them Iraqis sent or encouraged to settle in the frontier cities of the province. This meant that, in contrast with western and central Iran, there was by now a large Muslim population, which included Arabs but also a substantial number of mawālī, non-Arab converts to Islam. As this was a frontier province, many of the Muslims were used to bearing arms and experienced in warfare.
Quite how the Abbasid connection with Khurasan began is not clear, but from 720 onwards there were increasing contacts between the family based in Humayma and disaffected Muslims, Arab and mawālī alike, in the province, more than a thousand miles away. The leadership in Khurasan was taken by a mysterious and charismatic man known as Abū Muslim. His origins are uncertain, but it seems most likely that he was a former slave from Iraq who was sent to Khurasan by the Abbasids. The point, made by the simplicity of his name, was that he was neither clearly Arab nor clearly non-Arab and he had no tribal or family links. He was simply a Muslim everyman to whom all sections of Khurasani society could relate. This was a fundamental part of the Abbasid appeal.
The movement in favour of an Abbasid caliphate was fortunate in its timing. In 743 Hishām, the last of the great Umayyad caliphs, died and the next year his successor Walīd II was murdered. The regime began to disintegrate, plagued by infighting between different factions. Meanwhile Abū Muslim was managing to persuade large numbers of men to rally to the cause of a campaign to replace the Umayyads as caliphs, not openly naming the Abbasids at this stage but calling for a ‘chosen one from the Family of the Prophet’. No doubt many imagined that this meant a descendant of Alī and Fātima, and Abū Muslim did not disabuse them.
The movement tapped into a whole spectrum of grievances against the Umayyads. It appealed to Arabs who felt that their interests had been disregarded by the powerful governor Nasr b. Sayyār, mawālī who resented being treated as second-class Muslims, Khurasanis of all backgrounds who no longer wanted to be ruled by a distant government in Syria which collected taxes but seemed to give nothing in return, and pious Muslims who hoped that the coming of the rule of the Family of the Prophet would begin a new era of truly Islamic rule by God-guided caliphs. Abū Muslim marshalled the disparate forces and in 747 was powerful enough to attack and take possession of Merv, the capital of the province. Nasr b. Sayyār was driven out and the new Abbasid army began to march through Iran to take over the rest of the Muslim world. This was no mere provincial rebellion, it was a revolutionary movement which intended to bring radical change to the whole Muslim community.
The last Umayyad caliph, Marwān II (744–50), was a tough and experienced soldier, but the Umayyad armies were exhausted by many years of fighting; their leaders were divided and Syria itself had recently been ravaged by a terrible earthquake which had left many of its cities in ruins. In a series of battles the Umayyad armies were defeated and Marwān was pursued through Syria to Egypt where he was cornered and killed in a skirmish on the edge of the Nile delta.
Now the real political manoeuvring began. It was centred on Kufa where an Abbasid agent called Abū Salama, who had acted as a link between the Abbasids in Humayma and Abū Muslim in Khurasan, attempted to hold the ring. Even at this stage, the movement was still calling for an unnamed ‘Chosen One’. Meanwhile members of the Abbasid family travelled to Kufa. Abū Salama prevaricated: it is possible that he intended a new shūra to choose who the new caliph would be. But Abū Muslim, who had remained in Khurasan, was having none of it. He ordered men he trusted in the army to kill Abū Salama and arranged the public proclamation of an Abbasid as caliph.
Abū’l-Abbās, known as Saffāh, was proclaimed caliph in the great mosque in Kufa. A public bay
a was held and large numbers came and touched hands with the new caliph in person to accept him as their leader. He began to preach, but had to step down when the fever from which he was suffering overcame him.
What purports to be the text of this sermon has been preserved. Whether this is actually what was said we can never know, but it gives the fullest justification of caliphate which has come down to us from the early Islamic period, and serves as a real manifesto for the new dynasty. After praising God, Abū’l-Abbās explains that God has created the Abbasids, ‘the leaders of Islam, its cave and its fortress, and made us to uphold it, protect it and support it’. The sermon goes on to establish that the Abbasids are indeed ‘the kin of God’s Messenger. He created us from the ancestors of the Prophet, causing us to grow from his tree’, and follows with a number of quotations from the Qur’ān emphasizing the importance of the Family of the Prophet. Of course, the Abbasids could not claim, and never did claim, to be descended from Muhammad, but they argued that the Family of the Prophet was wider than his blood descendants. The sermon attacks the ‘Sabā’iyyah’, a derogatory term for those who claim that only the direct descendants of Alī and Fātima have any claim to the caliphate. Abū’l-Abbās then explains how, after the Prophet’s death, his companions took authority and ruled by mutual agreement, leading the conquests and distributing the ‘inheritance of the nations’ (the profits of the conquests) justly. Then the Umayyads came and appropriated the resources of the Muslims, ‘tyrannizing and oppressing those entitled to it’. God put up with them for some time, but then ‘He took revenge on them at our hands. . . . He vouchsafed our victory and established our authority in order to grant benefit to those who had grown feeble on the earth.’ Finally Abū’l-Abbās goes on to praise the people of Kufa for their steadfastness to the cause of the Family of the Prophet against the oppressors and he ends by promising them all a pay rise of a hundred dirhams. Then he stepped down because the fever made it impossible for him to go on.
The new caliph’s place on the pulpit was taken by his uncle Dāwūd, who continues in a much more rhetorical vein:
Now are the dark nights of this world put to flight, its covering lifted. Now light breaks in the earth and in the heavens, and the sun rises from the springs of the day while the moon ascends from its appointed place. . . . Rule has come back to where it originated, among the people of the house of your Prophet.
He denies that the Abbasids are claiming the caliphate for reasons of financial gain: ‘We did not rebel seeking this authority to grow rich in silver and in gold, nor to dig a canal nor build a castle’, an implicit criticism here of Umayyad building and land-reclamation projects. He stresses that the Umayyads had taken the payments which rightly belonged to the Muslims of Iraq. But now things would be different:
You are under the protection of God’s Messenger . . . and the protection of Abbās. We will rule you according to what He has sent down and treat you in accordance with His book and act with the commoner and elite among you following the practice of God’s Messenger.
He then attacks the Umayyads for their impiety and tyranny: ‘God’s punishment came upon them like a night raid when they were sleeping [a classic trope of Bedouin poetry]. They were torn all to tatters, and thus may an oppressive people perish!’ After claiming again that he has restored the rights of the people of Kufa and Khurasan, he extolls this nephew the new caliph:
He has made manifest among you a caliph of the house of Hāshim, brightening your faces and making you to prevail over the army of Syria, transferring the sovereignty and the glory of Islam to you. He has graced you with an imam [caliph] whose gift is justice and granted him good government. . . . So know the authority is with us and will not depart from us until we surrender it to Jesus son of Mary [at the end of the world], God’s blessing be upon him. Praise be to God, Lord of the universe, for that with which He has tried us and entrusted to us.1
The sermon, or rather political speech, is a tour de force of Arabic rhetoric which also makes important points. According to Dāwūd, the Abbasids have come to power by God’s will and because they are of the Family of the Prophet (albeit not his direct descendants). They had avenged the wrongs done of the Family. He also stresses the fact that power has passed to the Kufan and Khurasani Muslims, away from the Syrians, and that they will now get their just rewards, including that hundred dirham pay rise. They will rule according to the will of God and the words of the Qur’ān: nothing more specific in terms of policy is mentioned.
The moment of triumph was followed by a period of consolidation. Members of the extensive Abbasid family were appointed to lead armies and to govern the provinces of Iraq, Syria and Egypt. Most of the remaining members of the Umayyad family were rounded up and massacred, except for one who fled to North Africa and eventually to Spain, where he set up an independent Umayyad state which eventually became the caliphate of Córdoba. By the time Saffāh died, four years later in 754, the Abbasids had established their control over the entire Muslim world apart from North Africa and the Iberian Peninsula.
The coming of the new regime left many questions unanswered. Would the caliphate be hereditary in the Abbasid family? What, if any, would be the role of the Alids? Would the new caliphate be a military state as the Umayyad one had been, and would the Khurasani army simply take over the role that the Syrians had played under the Umayyads? All this remained to be decided.
The new caliphate looked very different from that of the Umayyads. Black banners had been raised in the east to usher in the new era and two centuries later Muslim tourists in the city of Merv were still shown the house in which the first robes had been dyed black when the revolution first began. Black was to be the distinctive colour of Abbasid court dress for the next two centuries, and wearing it a sign of allegiance to the dynasty.
The Abbasids developed a very distinctive style of court dress, something which, as far as we know, was unknown under the Orthodox and Umayyad caliphs. Apart from black robes, one of the features was a hat called a qalansuwa. We have no clear or realistic depictions of this headgear, but it seems to have been a tall, conical hat, sometimes supported on the inside by sticks to prevent it collapsing. People remarked that it looked like a tall black jar. The qalansuwa was of Persian origin. It had been elite wear in the late Sasanian court and was adopted or revived by the Abbasids. Like court dress through the ages, the most important features of it were that it was impractical and expensive, therefore indicating high status. It was also uncomfortable: one story tells of a courtier returning from the palace to his house and throwing off court dress in relief only to have to put it on again when he was summoned back by the caliph. When the caliph Amīn dreamt that the wall on which he was sitting was attacked by one of his enemies, the fact that his black qalansuwa fell off was an indication of the disasters which were to follow. The qalansuwa appears to have been abandoned at the beginning of the tenth century, along with many other features of what had by then become traditional Abbasid court style. It is also at least possible that it is the ultimate origin of the camelaucum, the tall, conical papal tiara which seems to appear in the eighth and ninth centuries.
Another innovation of the new regime was the giving of caliphal titles, called laqab. The Orthodox caliphs and the Umayyads had simply been known by their given names, Umar, Uthmān, etc. The first Abbasid caliph seems to have been given the title Saffāh, meaning either ‘the Generous’ or ‘the Blood-shedder’, though it is not clear that he bore the title in his own lifetime. His successor Mansūr certainly was known by his title rather than by his (very common) given name of Abd Allah. Every subsequent Abbasid caliph was given a title. These names usually meant ‘Victorious’, ‘God-guided’ or similar meanings. Among the thirty-seven Abbasid caliphs who reigned before 1258, no name was ever used twice. This led to the invention of more and more elaborate, and sometimes virtually unpronounceable, verbal forms to ring the changes.
This pattern was adopted by other dynasties which claimed the caliphal title. The Fatimids in Tunisia and later Egypt used titles from the beginning and the Fatimids have both a Mansūr and a Mahdī among their earliest caliphs. When the Umayyads proclaimed their caliphate in Córdoba in 929 they too chose such titles, as did the later Almohads in the west. Even if caliphs, like some of the later Abbasids, were virtually powerless and commanded little or no respect, they always had high-sounding official names.
The formality of court life was emphasized by its architectural setting. There had never been any question that the Abbasids would not base themselves in Iraq. Khurasan, the homeland of the troops who had brought them to power, was too remote to be an effective capital and clearly Syria was out of the question. Iraqis had always looked to the Family of the Prophet for political leadership, even if they usually understood these to be Alids rather than Abbasids. There were good economic reasons too for basing the caliphate in Iraq. Until the tenth century Iraq was the richest and most productive area of the Muslim world. The regime would be stronger and more secure for being able to take advantage of this prosperity.
The second Abbasid caliph, Mansūr, began the construction of the first royal city in Islam specifically designed for the performance of monarchy. Baghdad was founded in 762 as a deliberate act of policy by the caliph. In the twelve years which followed the change in regime the Abbasid court moved around from one site to another in central Iraq before settling on the site of the small village of Baghdad. Mansūr chose the site because of its position at the hub of the waterways of Iraq. The Tigris and Euphrates are closest together here and the two rivers were connected by a network of canals. Grain could come from the plains of the Jazira and dates from Basra, all by river. This access to river transport allowed the city to expand way beyond the resources of its immediate hinterland.
Mansūr created a striking setting for his caliphate in an impressive round city, surrounded by high walls pierced by four gates. At its centre was a great mosque and a palace surmounted by a tall dome. At the beginning this seems to have been a city with markets and tradesmen, but it soon became a court city, the residence of the ruler and his entourage and security services, the guard (haras) and police (shurta). Outside the walls, on both banks of the Tigris, a thriving metropolis grew as the people came from all over the caliphate to offer goods and services to the court and the well-paid soldiers and bureaucrats. The caliph allowed his favourite courtiers to make fortunes by developing land for the construction of markets and residential quarters. Mansūr’s original city lay on the west bank of the Tigris, but he encouraged his son and heir, Mahdī, to build on the east bank and here too there were mosques and palaces. A masonry bridge over the swift-flowing river was out of the question so three bridges of boats were constructed. As well as these there were countless small boats on the river and the connecting canals. It must have seemed like a Middle Eastern Venice. By the middle of the ninth century Baghdad seems to have had a population of around 500,000, though of course no statistics were kept, and it may well have been the most populous city on the planet.
The Madinat al-Salam (City of Peace), as the capital was officially known, served as a model and inspiration for later caliphal capitals, notably Cairo. God’s caliph should have a residence which reflected his power and wealth for all to see. It was essential for the caliphate to have strong economic as well as political and religious foundations. Only then could the caliph reward his faithful followers and pay an army to ward off the attacks of rivals and defend the frontiers as well as funding such public displays of piety as the hajj and the kiswa (the great cloth which covered the Kaba and which was renewed every year). Without a strong economy, the caliphate would lack the power and awe without which it would not be able to perform its functions of leadership and enforcement. The Abbasid caliphate and the city of Baghdad were closely linked: when the caliphate declined, the city did too.
Mansūr was not just the chief architect of the city, he was also the chief architect of the political structure of the state. Anyone who had supported the revolution imagining that it would begin a new era of government by pious and humble members of the Family and their advisers was in for a big disappointment. Mansūr constructed a state caliphate which was very similar to that of the Umayyads. The caliph was an autocrat who ruled through a powerful and well-paid military. The ruling family was given the most prestigious governorates and allowed to make vast fortunes. Mansūr even employed some of the army chiefs who had served the Umayyads before, although he was unwilling to tolerate any potential rivals. Abū Muslim, the great general and organizer of the revolution, was clearly one such potential rival. Persuaded to leave his Khurasani stronghold and come west to Iraq on his way to the hajj, he was lured to the caliph’s camp (this was before the building of Baghdad) and separated from his loyal troops. Then, in the presence of the caliph, he was killed by the palace guards and his body rolled up in a carpet in a corner of the royal tent while his head was displayed to his followers. The man to whom the Abbasids owed so much was brutally slain when he seemed to be a challenge to the power of the regime, much as the first Fatimid caliph in Tunisia killed the missionary who had brought the Berber troops to support him. Abū Muslim’s name went down in history as a victim of ungrateful tyrants, but Mansūr remained caliph, his authority strengthened.
Mansūr was also deeply suspicious of the Alids, knowing, as did everybody else, that they had a better claim to represent the Family of the Prophet, and he used his security forces to keep them under close surveillance. In 762, just as he was involved in the construction of Baghdad, one of them, Muhammad b. Abd Allah, known as ‘the Pure Soul’, a descendant of the Prophet seeking to rule in the city of the Prophet, launched a bid to establish a caliphate in Medina. Mansūr was having none of it and used his powerful army to crush the rebellion by force and kill its leader.
Mansūr was succeeded by his son and heir, Mahdī, who had been designated by his father. The Abbasids never adopted a formal policy of hereditary succession, but in fact this is what it amounted to. Not necessarily the eldest, but certainly one of the sons or brothers of the reigning caliph would be chosen and the baya would be arranged among the leading men of the state to confirm it. The right of the caliph to nominate his heir seems to have been generally accepted, though there were vigorous and sometime violent disputes about which of the sons should be selected. The choice of the name is significant. Mahdī had been used, especially in early Shiite circles, to denote the rightly guided, almost messianic figure whose role it would be to lead the faithful to salvation. The Abbasids here were trying to pre-empt the Shiite challenge by arguing that the Mahdī was the real ruler now, not some figure to be hoped and yearned for at some undetermined future date. Whereas Mansūr had seen his role as the enforcer of Abbasid rule, Mahdī seems to have tried to develop his claim to be a spiritual guide. In his personal life he did not drink alcohol, though he made no efforts at general prohibition. In his public life he played the Muslim ruler, taking measures against Christians and the Sabian pagans of northern Syria and building mosques. He persecuted a group known as the Zindīqs, who seem to have been dualist heretics (who believed in two gods, one good and one evil). A number of them were executed, a rare example of the caliph defending Islamic orthodoxy with violence. He also tried to conciliate the Alids, inviting them to court and giving their supporters in Medina positions in the army. No doubt some were pleased, but these were hardly revolutionary measures and certainly not enough to win over the diehards for whom the Abbasids could never be the real leaders of the Family.
Mahdī was killed comparatively young, apparently in a hunting accident, in August 785. He had already nominated two of his sons as heirs, with the intention that they should succeed one after the other. The Umayyads had made similar provisions. Given the trouble that these complex arrangements gave rise to, it is curious that caliphs persisted in them. It was a classic recipe for family strife. No doubt part of the reason was the need for ‘an heir and a spare’. At a time when men frequently died young and suddenly, it was important to have watertight arrangements to secure a smooth transition of power within the dynasty, not allowing outsiders to make mischief. There also seems to have been a desire to accommodate different factions at court. Each son who was named heir would attract a constituency of supporters who would want to make sure that their man succeeded and the reigning caliph may have wanted to give many different groups a stake in the future of the dynasty. What history did show, however, was that such arrangements were, to say the least, problematic because, almost inevitably, the new caliph would wish to nominate his own son to succeed instead of his brother and would be urged to do so by his courtiers and army officers.
Mahdī nominated two of his sons and it was only the sudden and, some suggested, suspicious death of the eldest in September 786 after a reign of little more than a year which prevented violent strife. Even in this short period he had begun to make moves to nominate his own sons. In the event the younger brother, Hārūn, who would be called Hārūn al-Rashīd, was able to succeed without open opposition in 786.
HĀRŪN AL-RASHĪD AND HIS SUCCESSORS
Hārūn al-Rashīd could be described as the greatest caliph of them all. Certainly, in terms of popular imagination, he has a presence and name recognition that none of the others have attained, even rulers like Mansūr who were arguably much greater leaders and politicians. He is, for example, the only one of the Abbasids who is generally known by his given name as well as his title. Any book on the caliphate has to investigate the man and his reputation.
Hārūn’s reputation as a great and mighty ruler is to some extent a product of the disasters which followed his death—disasters that were largely, it must be said, of his making. The long civil war between his sons, and the catastrophic effect this had in Baghdad, meant that his reign was looked back on as a sort of golden age before things started to go wrong. It was a period and environment in which some of the greatest classical Arabic poets of all time, including Abū Nuwās (d. 813) and Abū’l-Atāhiya (d. 825), to name only two, were writing. It was also the time when the glittering and cultivated Barmakid viziers (from Ar. wazīr, meaning chief adviser) held court, and when their power was brutally destroyed by caliphal decree, some said by caliphal whim, it became a proverbial example of the arbitrary power of rulers and the unavoidable workings of fate. This all feeds into the Arabian Nights image of Hārūn.
The Nights, as they have come down to us, date from the later Middle Ages, but they are a product of many centuries of evolution. One strand is a series of narratives about the Abbasid court and in particular the court of Hārūn. Though they are clearly not strictly historical, they give a lively and vivid image of how the Abbasid court at its height was imagined by subsequent generations. A typical story begins with the caliph summoning his vizier Jafar the Barmakid one night and saying, ‘I want to go down to the city to ask the common people about the governors who have charge of them, so as to depose any of them they complain about and promote those to whom they are grateful.’2 And so the adventure begins with the two of them, accompanied by the general factotum and executioner Masrūr, meeting a poor old fisherman who recites a poem about his misfortunes, and one improbable event follows another. The caliph is often shown as the symbol of stern but fair justice, who can put anything right with his commands, but also as a man who enjoys jokes, disguise, wine-drinking, poetry and the company of women, both his beloved wife Zubayda and a number of slave girls who strive to please him. He is accompanied by a small caste of actors, Jafar and Masrūr, the crafty judge Abū Yūsuf and the outrageous poet Abū Nuwās, who were real historical people of the age, but we should not imagine that the events are historical. Instead this world of rich fabrics, chests of gold dinars, exquisite food and wine and beautiful women and boys testifies to the grip the Abbasid court held on the popular imagination, for, as the princess-storyteller Shahrazad says at the end of one such narrative, ‘Where is such generosity to be found now, after the passing of the Abbasid caliphs, may Almighty God have mercy on them all?’3 And not just in the Middle East. It was the nineteenth-century English poet Alfred Lord Tennyson who coined the phrase ‘the golden prime of Harun al-Rashid’ to describe this period. Many people nowadays who want to see the return of a caliphate must have, at least at the back of their minds, the image of Hārūn as a stern but just autocrat, ruling Muslims with a benign if sometimes heavy hand.
It is a hard image to live up to and the historical Hārūn al-Rashīd, as far as we can recover him, did not always succeed. He was an inexperienced youth when he succeeded his brother after the latter’s unexpected death. In his first years he was guided by his mother Khayzurān (Slender Reed). Khayzurān was the first of a number of powerful women who exercised enormous power as queen mothers guiding their young sons, and Hārūn was her favourite son.
The rich and glamorous Barmakid family also attempted to guide the young Hārūn. Their literary and philosophical salons were home to much of the cultural and intellectual activity that made the Baghdad of Hārūn so famous. Their story also illustrates the diversity of the Abbasid court, which attracted intelligent and ambitious people from all over the Muslim world and did not discriminate against non-Arabs or people from the remotest provinces. Far from being Arabs, they came originally from the ancient city of Balkh, now in northern Afghanistan. The family were hereditary priests and guardians of a great Buddhist temple, whose remains can still be seen outside the ruined city walls. At the time of the Abbasid revolution they, like many other Khurasanis, joined the cause, converted to Islam and rapidly rose in the ranks of the Abbasid administration, not as soldiers but as accountants, perhaps making use of the newly imported Indian mathematical notation which was now being studied in the Muslim world and which we now know as Arabic numerals.
In the next generation Yahya the Barmakid became a major figure at court, acting as tutor and mentor to the young prince, while his son Jafar became his close friend and constant companion. When Hārūn succeeded as caliph, the Barmakids came into their own, and their generous patronage of poets and thinkers often overshadowed that of the caliph himself. It was a magnificent but perilous position and, after some fifteen years of this tutelage, Hārūn seems to have tired of them. One day, apparently out of the blue, though many know-alls claimed that they had seen it coming, he ordered the arrest of the family, including the old and revered Yahya who had done so much for him, and, even more shocking, the immediate execution of Jafar. We are given poignant accounts of how the young man, on confronting the executioner Masrūr, his former companion in adventure, assumes that there has been a mistake and then, when Masrūr persists, begs to be allowed to see Hārūn to plead for his life. The caliph was unrelenting, absolutely refusing to speak to his old friend, and the next day Jafar’s head and body were displayed for all to see on the main bridge of boats which united the two sides of the city, a spectacle for the common people to gawp at. It was a terrifying demonstration of arbitrary power: the court of the caliphs was a place of luxury and entertainment, and a potential source of vast wealth, but it could also be a place of danger and sudden death. For centuries after, moralists could point to the tragic events as perfect warning against ‘putting your trust in princes’.
In two aspects Hārūn did fulfil the duties of the caliphal position more assiduously than any of his predecessors or successors: the leading of the summer expeditions against the Byzantines and that of the hajj. The expeditions against the Byzantines were the only campaigns in which the Abbasid caliphs participated. It was an opportunity for the caliph to show himself as the military leader of the Muslims. His army would be clearly visible in the frontier provinces of Syria and the Jazira and volunteers would come to join from all over the Islamic world. It was also the period when traditionalists like Ibn Mubārak (d. 797) were establishing the religious theory and legal basis of jihād. The caliph’s actions were consistent with a growing body of opinion among ordinary Muslims. In June 806, for example, he is said to have assembled 135,000 men, regulars and volunteers, and though we should treat such large numbers with some scepticism, this was clearly a very significant expedition and triumphantly showed the caliph as the Commander of the Faithful. He wore a qalansuwa with the words ‘Warrior for the Faith and Pilgrim’ (ghāzī, hajj) embroidered on it for all to see.4
He also sought to exert Muslim naval power in the Mediterranean by organizing a large-scale attack on Cyprus, though in fact the military results were comparatively modest, and in southern Anatolia the little town of Heracleia was seized, its inhabitants imprisoned and taken back to Syria, but no attempts were made to expand Muslim territory north of the Taurus Mountains on a regular basis. The caliph did commemorate his triumph by starting work on a great public victory monument in a new settlement which he called Hiraqla after his conquests on the Euphrates in Syria. Only the rectangular foundations remain today and it is not clear that it was ever completed, but it was certainly intended to be a lasting and visible monument to Hārūn’s military achievements on the main route from Baghdad and his second capital at Raqqa to the Byzantine frontier.
Hārūn was equally committed to the celebration of the hajj. He made the pilgrimage to Mecca no less than nine times in his twenty-three-year reign. This was more than any caliph before him. He was also the last reigning caliph, of any dynasty, who ever made the sacred journey. These pilgrimages were very grand affairs: much of the government and the political elite accompanied him, and he had the opportunity to demonstrate his leadership and his piety in front of Muslims from all over the Islamic world. It was superb publicity. One small but significant example of such display is found in an account of the hajj made by his father Mahdī. At this time the hajj was in high summer, and the heat in Mecca stifling, but one of his most wealthy courtiers, his cousin Muhammad b. Sulaymān, contrived to present the caliph with ice to cool his drinks. He had done this, we must presume, by ordering that ice be collected in the Zagros Mountains of western Iran in the winter, kept in underground ice-houses, and then wrapped in straw for insulation and put in boxes to be carried across the desert for the caliph’s enjoyment. So the caliph appeared before his people not just as a sovereign enjoying the plenitude of power but virtually as a miracle worker who could defy the laws of nature.
The caliph and his family invested heavily in the hajj in other ways, notably the construction of the pilgrim route known as the Darb Zubayda, named after his favourite wife. In Umayyad times the main hajj route had been from Syria through the Hijaz, and Umayyad caliphs had, from time to time, made efforts to clear it and make it easier for pilgrims. When the Abbasids moved the centre of power to Iraq, the hajj became much more difficult and the long route across the deserts of central Arabia was a real challenge. Hārūn and his mother spent large sums of money on clearing stones from the path (the results can still be seen in aerial photographs today) and building water cisterns and small forts and way-stations along the route. Not only was it the biggest civil-engineering project of the early Islamic period, but it is virtually the only example we have of the Abbasid government spending money on this sort of infrastructure. Inscriptions were put up to commemorate the pious benefactions of different members of the ruling family and the fact that the road is still referred to as the Darb Zubayda (Zubayda’s Road) today shows how widely known the name was.
The ‘golden prime’ of Hārūn al-Rashīd came to an end with his death in 809. Despite the image sometimes projected of a stern and wise elder statesman, Hārūn was only in his late forties when he died. Of the great Abbasid caliphs, only Mansūr reached the age of sixty, and many of the others died in their thirties and forties, all still young men by our standards. Hārūn left behind him an arrangement for the succession which was to prove disastrous for the Abbasids and the caliphate in general. In a great gathering in Mecca at the hajj of 803 he had arranged that his (and Zubayda’s) son Amīn should be caliph and in effective charge of Baghdad, Iraq and the western Islamic world, while another son, Ma’mūn, was to rule in Khurasan and eastern Iran, and, more problematically, was to be Amīn’s heir.
It took only two years for war to break out between the brothers. Ma’mūn’s forces, led by the brilliant commander Tāhir b. Husayn, swept westwards, defeated Amīn’s much larger armies and were soon at the outskirts of Baghdad. From August 812 to September 813 the great city was besieged and much of it ruined by the fighting between rival militias claiming to support either Amīn or Ma’mūn but in many cases simply taking advantage of the chaos to enrich themselves. Especially damaging were the large swing-beam catapults, which both sides used and which killed and demolished indiscriminately. The conflict produced a remarkable literature of protest poetry, angry and sad in equal measures at the damage these armed groups caused to the ordinary people of the city. It is eerily reminiscent of the situation in the city 1,200 years later as different militias fought for control in 2006 and 2007.
At the heart of the storm was Caliph Amīn, finally holed up in his great-grandfather Mansūr’s imposing round city with his enemies all about him. He knew he could not hold out, but the dilemma was choosing to whom he should give himself up with the best chance of saving his life. The account of what happened on the night of 25 September 813, when he made his decision, is one of the most dramatic and moving narratives in the whole of early Arabic historical writing. The doomed caliph wanted to hand himself over to an old family retainer, Harthama b. Ayan, who was serving with Ma’mūn’s forces, but this was vigorously opposed by Tāhir, worried that there would be a reconciliation between the brothers and he would be deprived of the fruits of his victory. In the end a compromise was arranged: Amīn would surrender himself to Harthama, but the caliphal regalia, the staff, mantle and signet ring of the Prophet, should be surrendered to Tāhir ‘for that’, they argued, ‘is the caliphate’. We hear little in sources about these relics. They were seldom referred to and never seem to have been displayed in public yet they had, it would seem, a very important symbolic value.
Events turned out very differently. Amīn rode down to the dark shore of the Tigris to meet Harthama’s boat, but Tāhir had stationed men there to upset it, pitching Amīn and his rescuers into the water. He swam ashore but was soon captured by Tāhir’s men and taken to a safe house where he was locked up in a bare room with only some rugs and cushions. What happened next is narrated in the voice of one of his courtiers who had been picked up at the same time. It is an interesting story, for in it our perspective on the caliph is radically altered. In accounts of Amīn when his father was alive and in the early days of his own reign he is depicted as idle, stupid and frivolous, constantly shown up by his wiser and more mature brother Ma’mūn. But in his final hours, like Shakespeare’s Richard II, he acquires a dignity he has never had before and, by the time he was murdered by a group of Persian soldiers from Ma’mūn’s army in the small hours of the morning, he has become a martyr, trying to fend off the swords of his murderers with the cushions left in the room. ‘I am the cousin of the Prophet of God!’ he cries. ‘May God avenge my blood.’ The death of a caliph was always a terrible thing. Uthmān, Walīd II and Amīn all had their failings, but their murders were seen by most Muslims as horrible crimes and their deaths only unleashed more suffering.
After the death of Amīn it took some six years for Ma’mūn, with the aid of his eastern Iranian supporters, to establish control over the whole caliphate, though even then Tunisia was never recovered by the Baghdad government and independent rulers appeared in the Maghreb as they had in Spain fifty years before. Ma’mūn brought with him a whole new elite of eastern Iranian aristocrats and Turkish mercenary soldiers. Turks from Central Asia (modern Turkey was not settled by Turkish speakers until the end of the eleventh century) were renowned for their hardiness in warfare and their skill in horsemanship: they made formidable professional soldiers. Apart from the caliph himself, and some members of his immediate family, virtually no one who had served under Hārūn al-Rashīd was accepted into the new ruling class and their children and grandchildren mostly disappeared into the seething mass of the Baghdad population. The new elite brutally deposed their predecessors. In Egypt, for example, it was decreed that the Arabs of the old army of the province should be dropped from the payroll and replaced by Turkish soldiers, newly arrived from the east, with little knowledge of Islam or the Arabic language of the Egyptians over whom they ruled and whose taxes paid their salaries.
In the short run the policy was effective. The new army suppressed revolts efficiently and the power of the caliphs was largely unchallenged, but in the long run the changes were fatal to the caliphal office and the unity of the Muslim community it symbolized. There was now a huge gap between ordinary rulers and the caliph and his advisers, hidden behind the forbidding walls of the vast palaces they built along the banks of the Tigris. The caliph could no longer count on the support and allegiance of the wider Muslim community.
Along with a new ruling elite and army, the new regime brought new ideas. Ma’mūn, as we shall see in the next chapter, was a genuine intellectual with a keen interest in science and philosophy, but not all his ideas were popular with his subjects. The most contentious of his moves was to support the doctrine of the ‘createdness’ of the Qur’ān. Muslims accepted that the Qur’ān was indeed the word of God—no one disputed that—but some held that it had been created by God at a particular moment in time, that is when God revealed it to Muhammad through the mouth of the angel Gabriel. The opponents of this view were convinced that the Qur’ān had existed in all eternity, coeval with God, and that it had simply been presented to mankind at the time of Muhammad’s revelation. At first sight this looks like an obscure difference over a point of doctrine which is intrinsically unknowable. Yet it provoked a storm of opposition which, in the end, did enormous damage to the reputation and power of the caliphs.
People objected to the doctrine because it could be argued that if the Qur’ān was created in time, it could be interpreted in view of changing conditions. Perhaps, even, new revelations would come to light. And it would fall to the caliph to judge on these matters. People also objected to the way in which Ma’mūn asserted the right of the caliph to make judgements and decisions on such questions of belief. Previous caliphs, Umayyads and Abbasids alike, had claimed the right to adjudicate on difficult points of Islamic law, but this was different. It was a bold move by the caliph to assert his right to define doctrine, very much as the popes of the high Middle Ages were to do in western Europe.
Many of the leaders of the opposition to the doctrine came from families which had been prominent in the army and bureaucracy of the early Abbasid regime but who had now lost their status and their salaries. Discontent had only increased when Ma’mūn’s successor, the military caliph Mutasim, moved the capital from Baghdad to his newly founded city of Samarra, eighty miles north, where he established the centre of government. In part, the opposition to the new doctrine was based in Baghdad, at least in part a product of the resentment of its inhabitants with the moving of the capital and the losses that this entailed.
The new regime was determined to push through this new ideology. All employees of the government had to support it; prisoners taken by the Byzantines in frontier warfare and wanting to be ransomed had to agree that the Qur’ān was created before the authorities would pay for their freedom. For the only time in the long history of the office, a caliph had taken it upon himself to decide on a major theological issue and to enforce his opinion on anyone who wanted to play an important part in the military or civilian hierarchy. In order to do this an inquisition (mihna) was set up to examine and, if necessary, punish those who objected. Again, this was the first and last time such a body was set up by a caliph.
The policy aroused enormous opposition, especially in Baghdad. The most vocal advocate of opposition was Ahmad b. Hanbal. Ibn Hanbal was a jurist and polemicist who argued forcefully that any decisions about Islamic law and practice should be based on the Traditions of the Prophet and nothing else. The guardians and interpreters of the Traditions were the scholars who collected and studied them, the professionals in fact. No caliph or ruler could acquire the amount of information or memorize the number of Traditions required to make an intelligent judgement.
There was a minor popular rebellion in Baghdad, though it was easily suppressed by government forces. The more general opposition, fuelled by the writings and preaching of the Hanbalites, persisted stubbornly. In the end Caliph Mutawakkil (847–61) and his advisers decided to abandon the losing struggle and the doctrine of the createdness of the Qur’ān was quietly dropped while a raft of measures, including the stigmatization of religious minorities, was introduced to demonstrate the caliph’s commitment to Islamic values. The whole incident shaped the political and above all the religious role of the caliph from then on. The powers of judgement which the Orthodox caliphs, the Umayyads and the early Abbasids had assumed as a matter of course were lost to the professional jurists. Their power and authority came not from the caliph or any government official but from the respect of their fellow jurists and the approbation of the public, who sought and valued their fatwas (legal opinions). The caliph had become a ruler without powers of legislation in many of the matters which affected his subjects most closely.
This ideological debacle was followed by political collapse. The caliphs had moved to Samarra and lived in great palaces surrounded by high fortress-like walls, seldom, as far as we know, appearing in public. They were surrounded by the Turkish troops who formed their guard. In 861 Mutawakkil was murdered in his palace during one of the wine-drinking sessions which were a conspicuous feature of his reign. The reasons lay in the jealousy of his son and heir, who feared that he was being replaced by his brother, and the Turkish guards, who equally felt that their status was being undermined by other groups in the army. As in the cases of Uthmān, Walīd II and Amīn, the killing of the caliph opened the door to tragedy and disaster. The new caliph had little time to enjoy his status, and in the claustrophobic and murderous world of Samarra caliphs succeeded each other with terrifying rapidity, killed in most cases by Turkish soldiers whose salaries they had been unable to pay.
From 861 to 870 the caliphs were largely isolated by the power struggles in Samarra. Meanwhile, in the rest of the Islamic world, people found that they could do without a ruling and effective caliph. In Egypt the local governor Ibn Tūlūn, himself of Turkish descent, simply took over the province, the first independent ruler of Egypt, it has been said, since Cleopatra, and ushered in a time of peace and prosperity which contrasted markedly with the mayhem in Iraq. Most of eastern Iran was taken over by a family of military adventurers called the Saffarids. They were Muslims, to be sure, but they were also Persians who knew no Arabic (they had to have panegyrics written in the New Persian language so that they could understand, and enjoy, the praises of the poets). Their allegiance was to Islam, not to the powerless caliph.
The anarchy came to an end in 870 with a new and largely powerless caliph in Samarra and, more importantly, his brother, who took the quasi-caliphal title of Muwaffaq (though he never became caliph himself). He succeeded because he had close relations with commanders of the Turkish military, but he ruled over a very diminished realm. Only central Iraq and some areas of Syria and western Iran remained to the caliphs. Muwaffaq began to regain the territory lost to the government. The first task was to recover southern Iraq, which had been taken over by a group of rebels known as the Zanj. The Zanj were East African slaves who had been imported into southern Iraq by rich landowners to help clear the salt which had accumulated on the irrigated fields and was making agriculture impossible. It was terrible work in the baking hot, shadeless fields and it is not surprising that social revolt broke out—the only mass slave revolt in Middle Eastern history. It seems that their leader was an Arab who claimed to be a member of the Family of the Prophet and, ideologically, this was a Shiite rebellion, with the Family once more casting themselves as leaders of the oppressed. Muwaffaq, however, chose to portray it as an anti-Islamic, essentially pagan movement. This enabled him to claim that his men were fighting a jihād, led by the Abbasid family, to save Islam. The long-drawn-out campaign was described in detail in a long narrative account commissioned by Muwaffaq and his victories were widely publicized by letters and from the pulpits.
In the end the rebels were conquered and the revived Abbasid caliphate was established as an important regional power, ruling over Iraq and parts of Iran and Syria. In 905 they even reconquered Egypt for a short while. Furthermore, many of the other regional powers found it useful to have diplomas of investiture from the caliph to establish their legitimacy, even if the banner and the diploma which came from Baghdad (now again the capital) were simply recognizing a fait accompli.
THE DISASTROUS REIGN OF CALIPH MUQTADIR
This modest revival, which might in turn have led to a more widespread acceptance of Abbasid rule in the Islamic world, came to a halt in the reign of Caliph Muqtadir (908–32). He succeeded his brother Muktafī as a result of a court intrigue. The problem was that he was a boy who had barely entered his teens, very much under the influence of his powerful and controlling mother, known to all as Sayyida (Lady). Many disapproved of the appointment of an inexperienced youth to this highest office, but, for a small and powerful clique led by the vizier Ibn al-Furāt, his young age was his chief attraction: he could be managed and manipulated. The reign was an almost unmitigated disaster. The administration was paralysed by repeated financial crises and frequent changes of vizier.
Meanwhile the Byzantines, taking advantage of the chaos, were beginning to capture Muslim-held towns on the frontier and, perhaps even worse, the pilgrimage caravans were attacked by a Bedouin group following a Shiite ideology known as the Qarāmita or Carmathians. Male pilgrims were massacred, their women and children sold into captivity. Even Mecca itself, under nominal Abbasid rule, was not safe: the city was sacked, the corpses of massacred inhabitants were thrown into the sacred well Zamzam and the Black Stone was wrenched from the fabric of the Kaba and stolen by the rebels. The Abbasid could do nothing to fulfil the most central obligation of the caliph: to protect the frontiers of Islam and ensure the safety of the hajj. The end came when Muqtadir, still a comparatively young man, was killed in battle fighting the chief of the army who was supposed to be protecting him. In the confused period which followed, power was assumed by a series of military adventurers who took the title of Emir of Emirs, a title which implied complete control over all aspects of the secular administration but which carried no religious implications. Not only did they take over the remains of the army, they took over all the civil bureaucracy as well, abolishing the vizierate and leaving the caliph a powerless figurehead in his vast palace beside the Tigris. The failure of the Abbasid caliphate was clear for every Muslim to see.
Despite, or perhaps because of, this political weakness, there seems to have been an attempt by the Abbasid administration to develop the role of the caliph as leader of the Muslims in relation with the non-Muslim world. After the initial Arab conquests of the seventh and early eighth centuries which established the great caliphate, the caliphs conducted little foreign policy. Those who lived beyond the borders of the Dār al-Islam (House of Islam), in the unchartered and barbarous wastes of the Dār al-Harb (House of War), were too insignificant and too poor to be of much interest. The Byzantine Empire was the only power with which the caliphs could deal on anything like equal terms, but their sporadic negotiations over truces and exchanges of prisoners hardly amounted to diplomacy.
In the tenth century there were signs that this was changing. Whether this was a deliberate policy on the part of Caliph Muqtadir and his advisers to expand and publicize the caliph’s role as a spokesman for the umma, or whether it was chance, is difficult to know. But sources preserve two narratives which show the ruler in this role and the very fact that these narratives were elaborated points to a measure of official interest if nothing more.
The first of these narratives gives the fullest description of Abbasid ceremonial during the reception of two ambassadors from the Byzantine Empire in June 917. They had come to ask for a truce on the frontier and an exchange of prisoners, fairly routine business, but the vizier Ibn al-Furāt decided to make a great show of it. The envoys were given lodgings and provided with all they required. When the day for audience came
the vizier gave orders that the soldiers should line the streets the whole way from the palace of Said [where they were staying] to his own palace and that his own retainers and troops with the vice-chamberlains posted in the palace should form a line from the doorway of the palace to the reception room. A vast saloon with a gilt roof in a wing of the palace called the Garden Wing was splendidly furnished and hung with curtains resembling carpets. 30,000 dinars was spent on new furniture, carpets and curtains. No mode of beautifying the palace or increasing the magnificence of the occasion was neglected. The vizier himself sat on a splendid prayer carpet with a lofty throne behind him and serving men in front and behind and left and right while the saloon was filled with military and civil officials. The two envoys were then introduced, having seen on their way such troops and crowds as might fill them with awe.
When they entered the public apartments, they were told to sit down in the veranda, the apartment being filled with troops. They were then taken down a long passage which took them to the quadrangle of the Garden which led them to the room in which the vizier was seated. The magnificence of the room and of its furniture and the crowd of attendants formed an impressive spectacle. They were accompanied by an interpreter and the prefect of police and his whole force. They were made to stand before the vizier whom they saluted, their words being translated by the interpreter, and the vizier made a reply which was also interpreted. They made a request for the redemption of the captives and asked for the vizier’s help in obtaining the agreement of Muqtadir. He informed them that he would have to interview the caliph on the subject, and would have to act according to the instructions he received. . . . They were dismissed and led out by the same route they had come in, soldiers still lining the road in full dress and perfect equipment. The uniform consisted of royal satin tunics, with close-fitting caps over which were satin hoods pointed at the top.5
The interview with the caliph himself followed the same pattern. The envoys were led to the palace through streets lined with uniformed soldiers.
When they reached the palace they were taken into a corridor which led into one of the quadrangles, thence they turned into another corridor which led to a quadrangle wider than the first and the chamberlains kept leading them through corridors and quadrangles until they were weary with walking and quite bewildered. These corridors and quadrangles were all crowded with retainers and servants. Finally they approached the saloon in which Muqtadir was to be found, where all the officers of state were standing according to their different ranks, while Muqtadir was seated on his imperial throne, with the vizier Ibn al-Furāt standing near him and Mu’nis the eunuch [commander of the army] with his officers next to him stationed on his right and left. When they entered the saloon they kissed the ground and stationed themselves where they were told to stand by Nasr the Chamberlain. They then delivered their master’s letter, proposing a ransoming of prisoners and asking for a favourable response. The vizier replied for the caliph that he accepted the proposal out of compassion for the Muslim prisoners and the desire to set them free and his zeal to obey God and deliver them. . . . When the envoys left the imperial presence they were presented with precious cloaks adorned with gold and turbans of the same material and similar honours were bestowed on the interpreter, who rode home with them.
Each of the envoys was given a private present of 20,000 silver dirhams. The account then goes on to relate how Mu’nis was given the enormous sum of 170,000 gold dinars from the Baghdad treasury to effect the ransoming.
The account is interesting for the insight it gives into the role of the caliph and the manipulation of the caliphal image. A broadly similar one is repeated in several Arabic sources but not in any Byzantine ones. The great display of troops in Baghdad, the elaborate ceremonial in the palace and the publicity which followed were designed to impress the Muslim population with the splendour and power of the caliph and his concern for the welfare of Muslims. It was also the last hurrah of Abbasid power. Within only a few years Ibn al-Furāt and the caliph were dead and the huge palace had become the scene of murder and mayhem as different factions fought for control over the increasingly powerless caliphate.
The second narrative preserves the record of caliphal diplomacy outside the lands of Islam. It is also the earliest first-person travel narrative in Arabic literature.6 It describes the travels of one Ibn Fadlān, an agent of the Baghdad government, who travelled to Central Asia and in the Volga region of what is now Russia on a diplomatic mission. Ibn Fadlān’s account, discovered in a manuscript in Mashad, Iran, only in 1923, is now mostly read for his exceptional, even lurid, description of the customs of a people who he refers to as the Rus, which seems to be the earliest eyewitness description of the ancestors of the Russians. However, the account is also revealing as a record of the travels and reactions of a caliphal official at a time when his master’s power was visibly waning. We know almost nothing about the author except what he tells us incidentally in his narrative. He was clearly a bureaucrat of some standing and education but not important enough to appear in any of the general narrative sources of the period.
The mission set out in response to a letter which had been sent to the caliph by the king of the Volga Bulgars, who had converted to Islam. He professed his loyalty to the caliph and said that his name would be proclaimed in the Friday sermons in the Bulgar lands. He asked that the caliph send him men who could teach him and his followers about Islamic law and the correct performance of prayer and other rituals. He also asked for money to build a castle (hisn) to defend him against his enemies in this land of felt yurts and wooden huts. The connection between monotheism and masonry is one that we find in many places in Celtic, Slavic and Scandinavian Europe at the time. The king wanted proper religion and new technology, both important aspects of being modern in the early tenth century, and for him, at least, the caliph was the proper person to ask. In western Christendom it would probably have been the pope.
The court in Baghdad decided to send a mission and the expedition set out on 21 June 921. It was to be a long journey. The men eventually arrived at the court of the Bulgar king on the Volga river eleven months later, on 12 May 922, having travelled about 3,000 miles, meaning that they must have averaged about ten miles a day. Given the political uncertainties and the terrible winter weather they encountered, this was a pretty impressive record. Their route lay through the Zagros Mountains and along the northern edge of the central Iranian desert to Bukhara, where the Samanid emir held court in the name of the caliph but in reality as an independent ruler. From there they headed for the fertile province of Khwarazm (modern Khorezm) on the delta of the river Oxus at the south end of the Aral Sea. These were the last outposts of Muslim settlement and civilization and from here they had to strike out into the unknown.
The first stages of the journey were easy enough, through the cultivated lands of central Iraq and along the old Khurasan road, which led through the mountains to the Iranian plateau. As they approached the ancient city of Rayy (just south of modern Tehran), in the narrow gap between the great desert to the south and the mountains to the north, they became aware, if they were not already, of the limitations of the power of the caliph. Rayy and the other towns on the route were under the control of the Zaydi Shiite imams, based in Daylam at the southwest corner of the Caspian Sea. These Shiite rulers were not simply usurpers of caliphal power but men who rejected the legitimacy of the Abbasids and their right to be considered leaders of the umma. The members of the mission were obliged to hide their identity and mingle with the rest of the caravan.
It must have been with considerable relief that they reached Nishapur and the protection of the Samanid army. They pushed on east to Merv, where they changed camels for the journey across the waterless desert to the Oxus. After crossing the river they passed through the trading town of Paykant and the well-watered villages of the Bukhara oasis until they reached the capital. Here they were on friendly territory. The Samanid vizier, a man called Jayhānī, was a cultivated bureaucrat and a man with a keen interest in geography. He made arrangements for a residence for the party and ‘appointed someone to attend to our needs and concerns and made sure that we experienced no difficulty in getting what we wanted’. He also arranged for them to have an audience with the Samanid emir Nasr b. Ahmad in person. They discovered, apparently to Ibn Fadlān’s surprise, that he was a beardless boy. Young though he may have been, he was well trained in diplomatic niceties. He greeted them and invited them to sit down. ‘How was my master (mawlā) the Commander of the Faithful when you left him? May God give him long life and cherish him and his retinue and his spiritual companions.’ ‘He was well,’ they replied. He said, ‘May God increase his well-being!’ That was the easy part: now they had to get down to business and it was here that the limitations of the authority of the caliph in this distant but important province became apparent.
The next stop was Khwarazm where the emir was a vassal of the Samanids. The welcome they received was mixed. They were greeted warmly and given a place to stay, but the governor was suspicious about their desire to meet the king of the Bulgars: if anyone should represent the Muslims to these infidels, it should be the Samanid emir in Bukhara, not the distant and virtually powerless caliph in Baghdad. He argued that the mission was too dangerous and that he should write to the emir, who would in turn write to the caliph to consult him. It was clearly a delaying tactic which would almost certainly have prevented the mission from continuing, but Ibn Fadlān and his companions persisted: ‘We have the letter of the Commander of the Faithful,’ they said. ‘Why do you need to consult?’ In the end they were allowed to proceed into the bitter cold of the steppe: our author paints a vivid picture of the cold and suffering they endured, so different from the heat of Baghdad.
When they finally approached the camp of the king of the Bulgars in May 922, they were met first by a guard of honour of the king’s sons and then by the monarch himself, who dismounted and prostrated himself, giving thanks to God. They were led to the camp and assigned their own yurts while the king prepared to give them a ceremonial welcome. After four days they were granted an audience. They presented the king with two standards symbolizing the conferment of office, a saddle and a black turban. Ibn Fadlān then read out the caliph’s letter, insisting that all stood to hear it. ‘Peace be upon you,’ he read. ‘On your behalf I praise God—there is no other god but Him.’ And he then ordered them to return the greeting of the Commander of the Faithful, which they duly did. Next began the present-giving—perfumes, garments and pearls and a robe of honour for the queen who, in complete contrast to Muslim court protocol, was sitting by the king’s side.
An hour later there was another audience in the royal yurt. On the king’s right were seated vassal kings while the envoys were placed on his left. His sons sat before him while he himself sat at the centre on a throne covered with Byzantine silk. A ceremonial meal followed with the king cutting choice bits of meat, first for himself and then for his guests. Then the king drank a toast in mead speaking of his joy in his master (mawlā) the Commander of the Faithful, ‘may God prolong his life’.
Ibn Fadlān also gave instruction in the performance of prayers. Before he came, blessings were called on the kings from the minbar at Friday prayers, but Ibn Fadlān advised that ‘God is the king and he alone should be accorded that title from the minbar. Your master, the Commander of the Faithful, for example, is satisfied with the phrase, “Lord God, keep in piety your slave and caliph the imam Jafar al-Muqtadir bi-llah, Commander of the Faithful,” as this is proclaimed from all the minbars in east and west.’ He also drew attention to the hadīth in which the Prophet says that Muslims should not exaggerate his importance in the way in which the Christians exaggerated the importance of Jesus son of Mary, and that He was simply the slave of God and his messenger.
Naturally the king then asked what should be proclaimed from the pulpit on Friday. ‘Your name and the name of your father,’ was the reply. ‘But my father was an unbeliever,’ he said, ‘and I do not wish to have his name proclaimed from the minbar. Indeed I do not wish to have my own name mentioned, because it was given to me by an unbeliever. What is the name of my master (mawlā), the Commander of the Faithful?’
‘Jafar,’ Ibn Fadlān replied.
‘Am I permitted to take his name?’
‘Yes.
‘Then I take Jafar as my name and Abd Allah as the name of my father. Tell this to the preacher.’
Ibn Fadlān did as instructed and the proclamation during the sermon on Friday became, ‘Lord God, keep in piety your slave Jafar b. Abd Allah, the amīr of the Bulghars, whose master is the Commander of the Faithful.’
Many in the Muslim world held Muqtadir in contempt. Youthful and inexperienced, his failure to live up to the achievements of his Abbasid ancestors was coming close to making a mockery of the office of caliph. Yet for the king of the Bulgars the caliph represented the Muslim world in a very personal way. His master was not the umma, not the religious scholars, not Muslims in general, but the caliph in person.
THE BREAK-UP OF THE ABBASID CALIPHATE
The break-up of the caliphate was a long and complex business, but the reasons for it need to be explored. Any discussion of a future or revived caliphate at the present day must address why the Abbasid dynasty, despite its political power and its connections with the Family of the Prophet, disintegrated when it did. The problems of holding together a multicultural Muslim world becoming ever more diverse under a single leadership were never fully resolved and will form a major and intractable challenge to anyone wishing to revive the office in the future.
One reason has been touched on above: the growing alienation of the caliphs from the mass of the Muslim population. This was partly physical, as the caliphs increasingly isolated themselves within the walls of their palaces, but also ideological, as the governing elite initially tried to enforce belief in the createdness of the Qur’ān. Even though this policy had been abandoned, it had left a deep and lasting rift between the caliphs and the religious leaders who were respected and consulted by the mass of Muslims. This alienation was compounded by the failure of the Abbasid caliphs in the first half of the tenth century to perform the most obvious public duties of the office, to defend the frontiers of the Muslim world, especially against the Byzantines, and to protect and lead the hajj.
But there were other more long-term problems. The first was the economic collapse of Iraq and especially of Iraqi agriculture. At the time of the Muslim conquests Iraq had been the richest province of the caliphate in terms of tax revenue (the only figures we have). It yielded four times as much as Egypt, the next richest area, and five times as much as Syria and Palestine together. During the early Islamic period this situation changed, partly due to environmental factors like the increasing salinization and exhaustion of the soil, and partly because repeated civil wars and disturbances damaged the complex irrigation systems which carried water to the fields. This culminated in 935, when the greatest of the canals, the Nahrawan, which dated to pre-Islamic times, was breached by a military adventurer for short-term tactical gains and never subsequently repaired.
The tax revenues of Iraq were what enabled the Abbasids to pay the armies which enforced their authority and the bureaucrats who collected the revenues. As revenues declined inexorably, there were repeated army mutinies until the armies of the caliphs spent most of their energies fighting rival military groups and trying to extort money from the caliphs themselves.
There was another factor which was, in a way, more positive, and that was the conversion of an increasingly large proportion of the population of the caliphate to Islam. It can be argued that the break-up of the caliphate was the inevitable result of the success of Islam as a popular religion. This is a very difficult process to measure. We can be certain that there were no Muslims in these areas before the Arab conquests. Conversion was slow in the seventh and early eighth centuries but after that gathered pace, especially in the tenth century. By the year 1100, and before in some places, it is likely that 50 per cent of the population were Muslims of one group or another.
These new Muslims were not, in the main, Arabs. They probably never went to Baghdad (except if they passed through on the road from Iran to the Holy Cities) and they had no contact with the caliphs. As has already been mentioned, groups like the Saffarid rulers of much of Iran in the late ninth century were Muslims but not Arabs. Their loyalties lay with fellow Muslims in the provinces where they originated and the caliphate was for them at best an irrelevance and at worst a source of vexatious tax demands. New Muslims had no reason to support an institution which had little or nothing to offer them.
This did not mean that the Muslim world divided into separate political units with no contact between them. Arabic was widely used as the language of religious and philosophical discussion. Merchants traded across borders with little or no interference from government; administrators wandered from one court to another looking for lucrative employment. In many ways the umma was a united commonwealth: it was just that the caliphs had no significant role in this.