THREE AUTHORS IN SEARCH OF THE CALIPHATE
THE STATE OF the caliphate in these centuries of near powerlessness provoked considerable unease and soul-searching among intellectuals and political thinkers. Apart from a few Kharijites, everyone accepted that the community needed a caliph to govern men and keep them from going astray. Of course, an important part of this duty involved maintaining law and order, by force if necessary, so that Muslims could live together in peace and harmony. There was also a religious aspect to this office. In a memorable phrase which seems to date back to early Islam, the caliphs were said to be ‘the tent pegs of our faith’. They were needed to hold up the whole edifice of the sharī
a. All qādīs and preachers, it was argued, owed their authority ultimately to the caliph. Without him no marriages would be valid, no contracts enforceable and man would be bereft of spiritual guidance.
But there was a serious problem with this idea. The Abbasid caliphs themselves lacked the power and authority to do the job effectively. What was to be done? How could the institution be reformed or repositioned to make it worthy and capable of undertaking the heavy responsibilities the community demanded of it? Many scholars contributed to this debate, but in this chapter I will concentrate on just three of the most influential participants, Māwardī (d. 1058), Juwaynī (d. 1085) and Ghazālī (d. 1111).
MĀWARDī
The first and probably the most influential of these scholars was Māwardī, whose treatise The Ordinances of Government is, among other things, an attempt to make sense of the very ambiguous position in which the caliph now found himself.1 At one level the caliph was the deputy of God on His earth, or the successor of the Prophet of God, and all men should obey him. At another level, he was the powerless inheritor of an ancient office without a single soldier under his command, entirely at the mercy of local warlords. Māwardī was an authority on these matters. He was no armchair academic but was active in the diplomatic service of Caliph Qā’im. In 1031 he was entrusted with the delicate mission of getting the baya from the powerful Buyid sovereign Abū Kalijar in Shiraz and it is probably a measure of his diplomatic abilities that he succeeded and was able to return saying that he had been well treated. Later we find him negotiating agreements between Buyid princes at the caliph’s behest; his last mission, in 1043, was to broker an agreement with the last effective Buyid sovereign, Jalāl al-Dawla, and the newly arrived Seljuk chief Tughril Beg. He thus had a keen idea of the political realities of his time.
Māwardī’s treatise is in many ways a summing up of Islamic government practice, and much of it is concerned with details of tax collection, the powers of judges and other such matters, but in the first three chapters he directly addresses the questions of the choice of the caliph and the powers he could enjoy.
He begins with a discussion of the necessity of having an imam/caliph (he uses both terms interchangeably) for the Muslim community. This can be justified on the grounds of reason—men need to be governed to prevent disorder—or on religious grounds—because it is enjoined by the Qur’ān and the authority of Tradition. Having established this point, he then turns to the issue of choosing the caliph. He lists a number of obvious qualities that the candidate must have—a sense of justice, knowledge, physical ability and so on—and finishes with the assertion that the caliph must be descended from Quraysh. He justifies this, as he does most of his assertions, by reference to the deeds and utterances of the Orthodox caliphs. For him it is enough that Abū Bakr, quoting the Prophet’s words, insisted that Quraysh were the only people entitled to the highest office.
Māwardī writes that the caliph can be chosen by election or by appointment by a predecessor but, he asks, if the caliph is to be chosen by election, who are the electors to be? Some say that all Muslims should be involved, but Māwardī looks to the choice of the Orthodox caliphs to refute this notion. Abū Bakr was chosen by a small group, Umar stipulated that there should be six in the shūra which was to choose his successor, while Alī was chosen by just one elector, Abbās (the Prophet’s uncle and ancestor of the Abbasids), who simply said, ‘Give me your hands so that I may pledge you my allegiance and let the people say, “The uncle of the Messenger of God, may God bless him and grant him salvation, has nominated his cousin.” No two persons would then disagree about you.’2
But suppose there are two equally good candidates, Māwardī considers. The choice then depends on the situation. If Muslims are being attacked, then bravery in battle should be given priority; if popular lethargy and heresy are the main problems, then intelligence should be deemed more important. Age could be used to differentiate two equal candidates, but seniority, by itself, was not a decisive qualification. Casting lots should not be used in deciding these issues. Once the electors have decided and the candidate has agreed, then the decision cannot be undone unless the chosen candidate resigns. If two candidates are elected in different cities, then the one who was elected first has priority.
Māwardī then turns to nomination. Here the issue is whether the designated heir needs the approval of the electors. In general the answer is no, but some argue that approval is needed should the nominee be the son or, improbably, the father of the previous caliph.
The next issue is the permissibility of appointing two heirs, one to succeed the other. This had been common practice under the Umayyads and early Abbasids but had also been the cause of dispute and violence in those dynasties. However, Māwardī argues that the selection of two heirs is valid by analogy with the behaviour of the Prophet himself, who appointed no less than three commanders to succeed each other in the military expedition he sent to Mu’ta in Syria at the end of his life.
Once chosen, the caliph’s identity and title should be made known. Here Māwardī addresses the vexed issue of whether the caliph is deputy of God or successor to the Prophet of God. He, like almost all later jurists, comes down firmly on the side who see the caliph as successor of the Prophet, citing Abū Bakr’s alleged refusal of the title caliph of God as clinching evidence.
The final issue he deals with is the permissibility of removing a caliph who is wicked or inadequate. He considers three eventualities. The first is that a caliph has become unjust or fallen into heresy. In this case, the caliph must resign or be removed from office. Māwardī is very brief on this most difficult issue and he seems to be skating over it. He devotes much more space to physical incapacity as a disqualification, blindness or loss of limbs for example, yet he affirms that a eunuch can become caliph, though there is no record of this occurring in the history of the caliphate. A final sort of inadequacy is the caliph who is taken captive, whether by Muslims or non-Muslims, and here the answer depends on the nature of his captivity and his prospects of release.
Having discussed the qualifications required and the method of choosing the caliph, in his second chapter Māwardī considers the appointment of viziers. He looks at two different types. The first is the vizierate of delegation (tafwīd), in which the caliph essentially entrusts all his functions to an official who acts for him in every respect. Here Māwardī is giving a legal framework to a situation in which the caliph’s real power has been usurped by officials, as with the Buyid emirs of his own day. In the second case (tanfīdh), the caliph simply appoints a vizier to execute his orders, whose role is therefore that of a prime minister, as it was at the time when the early Abbasids enjoyed real power. In the next chapter he turns his attention to the appointment of provincial governors. Here again he distinguishes two sorts of appointments. For the first, the caliph can choose whom to appoint and the official thereby entrusted with the office can be dismissed and recalled. This was the practice in the Umayyad and early Abbasid periods. The second kind is what Māwardī calls appointment by usurpation or coercion. In this case the caliph is obliged to give his approval to a local governor who has already seized power for himself. In this way Māwardī provides a legal stratagem by which the theoretical sovereignty of the caliph over the politically fragmented Muslim world can be maintained. In both the discussions of the vizierate and the governors we can see him devising a constitutional order which will safeguard the status of the caliph in an era of change. It is a synthesis which has been extremely influential in many subsequent discussions of caliphate.
JUWAYNĪ
Abd al-Malik al-Juwaynī came from a very different background from that of Māwardī. His family originated from the small eastern Iranian town of Juvayn and his father had gone to Nishapur in 1016 to take up a position at a madrasa there. The young Juwaynī was brought up in this academic atmosphere and at the age of just nineteen succeeded to his father’s position. In 1053 he left for Baghdad, still the greatest intellectual centre in the Muslim world, where he probably met Māwardī and certainly read his Ordinances. He may also have met Caliph Qā’im, then in the process of negotiating his relationship with the newly arrived Seljuq sultans. He went on to spend four years studying and teaching in Medina and Mecca. In 1063 he returned to Khurasan at the invitation of Nizām al-Mulk, at that time consolidating his position as vizier to the Seljuq sultan Alp Arslān, who appointed him as a professor in the Nizamiyya madrasa he had founded in the city, and Juwaynī remained there until his death.
Juwaynī wrote his political treatise Ghiyāth al-umam (Succour of the Nations) between 1072 and 1085 when the politics of the eastern Islamic world were dominated by the Seljuq sultan Malik Shāh and his all-powerful vizier Nizām al-Mulk. The Seljuqs wielded much political influence, but they needed caliphal recognition and wanted to extend their dominance even further. Above all, they wanted to found a dynasty which would combine the caliphate and the sultanate, that is, the religious and secular aspects of Islamic government. To that end the Abbasid caliph Muqtadī married the daughter of Malik Shāh and produced a son called Jafar, who Malik Shāh was determined would be Commander of the Faithful. In 1092 Malik Shāh ordered the reigning caliph to resign and leave the city, paving the way for Jafar to succeed him. In the event Malik Shāh died young and Nizām al-Mulk was assassinated and the whole scheme collapsed as the Seljuq princes and their supporters fought each other for the succession.
Juwaynī had been dead for seven years by this time, but his treatise could serve as the intellectual justification for the Seljuqs’ plans. His ideas about the role of the caliphate differed fundamentally from Māwardī’s. For Māwardī, with his Baghdadi education and background, Abbasid descent was a key element of the caliphate. The aim must be to restore the dignity of the caliphate and establish a system whereby the various sultans and emirs would function as subordinates to the caliph, even though much of the day-to-day power rested with them. For Juwaynī, with his eastern Iranian background, Abbasid descent was at best irrelevant and at worst a distraction which prevented the effective ruling of the community. The caliph should be chosen from the strongest and most powerful men among Muslims, no matter what his genealogical origins. Both caliphate and sultanate should be united under the rule of this new mighty caliph: the fact that the blood of the Family of the Prophet did not run in his veins was of no importance.
Juwaynī examines many of the points raised by Māwardī but often draws different conclusions. He begins his discussion of the qualifications for the caliphate, which he generally refers to as the imamate, by dismissing Shii claims that the choice was dependent on designation by God; the Prophetic Traditions advanced by them to support this idea are false because if they were genuine, the Sunnis would accept them too. This leaves Juwaynī in favour of the idea of election. The electors should be free men with experience in law, government and administration. Like Māwardī, he accepts the possibility of choice by just one elector, but for him the key qualification for this elector is that he has power and authority, what he calls shawkat. Although he does not say so, this allows the possibility that a powerful Seljuq ruler may quite legally appoint a caliph.
Juwaynī then examines the qualities which the caliph must possess: first of all, a caliph should be sound in body and mind, attributes all authorities agree on. As for Qurashi descent, Juwaynī finds that the Tradition quoted in favour of this has a weak transmission and he concludes that such descent is by no means essential. Although a caliph should ideally be learned in law so that he can make decisions and give guidance, he can, if he is not, rely on the ulama, with whom he should work in partnership. Juwaynī stresses that leadership and authority are required attributes for the caliph to be able to maintain the unity of the umma, organize armies and defend the frontiers. Here Juwaynī is breaking new ground: such attributes are not the result of being caliph but qualifications for the office. As Wael Hallaq, the great modern scholar of Islamic law puts it:
Military and political power in Juwaynī’s view take precedence over any other consideration, for power constitutes the only means by which the sovereign can properly run the affairs of the Community. A powerless ruler must therefore be replaced by a powerful one: ‘If the imam loses his power and the flock disavow him for no obvious reason . . . and if his supporters abandon him’ . . . he must be deposed and ‘the imamate should be entrusted to an imam whom people obey’.3
The roles of caliph and sultan would be combined in the person of this one strong leader. Juwaynī makes it clear that the powerless ruler he has in mind is the Abbasid caliph Qā’im.
There seems to be a veiled encouragement to the Seljuq vizier Nizām al-Mulk to take over the caliphate. This would have been a very radical departure from the tradition and practice of the community but would be justified by Juwaynī’s arguments. He praises the role of the Seljuqs, their organization of government and their leadership of the jihād, and argues that a usurper who has the power and the qualifications to lead the umma should be accepted. He should also include the ulama into the government structure because, Juwaynī says, they are the heirs of the Prophet and the guardians of the sharīa.
The implications of Juwaynī’s views on the caliphate were nothing short of revolutionary. Taken to their logical conclusion, they suggest that military power and true belief are the only meaningful qualifications for the office and that, rather than being a divinely appointed ruler, the caliph should simply be the most powerful military figure, owing his rulership to the consensus of the Muslim community. Authority over secular affairs but also over the true maintenance of religion and sharīa should belong to him as of right.
Juwaynī’s ideas were a product of his time and his close association with the Seljuqs and Nizām al-Mulk. He died in 1085 before they could be put into practice, but the debacle following the deaths of Malik Shāh and his vizier changed the balance of power between the Abbasid caliphs and Seljuq would-be sultans dramatically, and while Seljuq princes fought each other for the sultanate the Abbasid caliphs slowly recovered a measure of control.
GHAZĀLĪ
The third of our authors was also the most popular and widely read. Ghazālī was a pupil of Juwaynī’s and like him came from an eastern Iranian background. He too enjoyed the support of Nizām al-Mulk, and he was appointed to an important teaching post at the Nizamiyya madrasa in Baghdad in 1091, just a year before Nizām’s death. In 1095 he went through what has been described as a spiritual crisis and abandoned his successful academic career to return to his native Khurasan to concentrate on his Sufi and spiritual writings and it was here that he died in 1111.
Ghazālī produced an extensive body of work, and discussions of the caliphate, not always entirely consistent, feature in many of his books, but I shall concentrate on one of them, the Book of Mustazhir (Kitāb al-Mustazhiri), written in early 1095 when he was still in post in Baghdad and dedicated, as the title implies, to the reigning Abbasid caliph, Mustazhir (1094–1118). He explains that he was commissioned by the caliph to write a book which would refute the claims of the Shiite Isma’ilis to the caliphate. This was an issue of pressing importance: Malik Shāh and Nizām al-Mulk were dead, the Seljuqs were bitterly divided and both the Isma’ili Fatimids of Egypt and the Isma’ili Assassins of northern Iran were poised to take advantage of the chaos.
In his volume Ghazālī sets out first and foremost to challenge Isma’ili ideas of the caliphate. For the Isma’ilis, the caliph was the deputy of God and the only person qualified to interpret God’s revelation; questions of sharīa were to be decided by him alone, and not by jurists. The Fatimid caliph in Egypt was the one and only caliph admissible, and all mankind should obey him.
Ghazālī proceeds to demolish these ideas, elaborating an alternative legitimacy for the Abbasid caliphs. He maintains that there has to be a caliph to make the sharīa effective: he is God’s caliph and the mainspring for all that is right. Without a caliph all public functions would be void and the whole fabric of sharīa in danger of collapse. This argument is based on the consensus of the umma, the actions of the Companions of the Prophet, who chose a caliph immediately on his death to safeguard the unity and future of the community, and the fact that there can only be one caliph, not a shūra, because that is the only way of preventing chaos.
The next question is the choice of the caliph. Having dismissed the Shii idea of divine appointment Ghazālī looks at mechanisms of election. Here he dismisses the idea of any sort of public participation, even one restricted to people of virtue and religious probity, and opts instead for having a single elector. The essential quality of this one elector is that he has power and authority to make the rule of the caliph effective. Ghazālī adopts the concept of shawkat already used by Juwaynī to express that combination of force and awe which is essential to enforce obedience, for a caliph who cannot command obedience is no use to anyone. It is God who provides and sustains this shawkat, thus expressing His support for the choice.
The implications of this doctrine are far-reaching. It comes very close to arguing that ‘might is right’, since political power is confirmed by God. In more practical terms, for Ghazālī’s own age, it means that nomination by one Seljuq sultan, if that Seljuq sultan has shawkat, is completely legal. The problem, of course, is what happens if there is no figure who possesses this quality. Ghazālī does not appear to deal with this, except to suggest that two or three men might combine to, as it were, produce sufficient shawkat to enforce the authority of the caliph they choose. Such a system may well have seemed viable and workable when Malik Shāh was sultan and his all-powerful vizier Nizām al-Mulk (the one Juwaynī seems to have wanted as caliph) had all the shawkat needed. When they both died in 1092, just three years before Ghazālī was writing, there was no one else who could take their place, though he may have believed and hoped that one such would emerge.
Ghazālī goes on to discuss the qualities needed to be caliph. Some of these are uncontroversial, such as soundness of mind and body, and maleness (no discussion here), but he also insists, like Māwardī but unlike Juwaynī, on descent from the Quraysh. Then he describes a set of qualities which are acquired rather than innate. The first, which he calls najda, is a show of strength:
A plentiful supply of equipment, seeking help of armies, the tying of banners and standards, possessing the ability, through the help of parties and followers, to subdue rebels and wrongdoers, to fight against infidels and those who are inordinately proud, to still the manifestation of discords and to stop the flow of the accumulated swell of trying afflictions before their evil becomes apparent and the harm they cause becomes widespread. This is what is meant by najda.
As the translator Carole Hillenbrand notes,4 the passage is full of verbal conceits and rhetorical flourishes, but the basic meaning is clear: a caliph who cannot perform these functions is, for Ghazālī, no true caliph. In a long excursus, he explains how in his day the Turks, who made up most of the armies, were, for all their conflicts and disobedience, the source of the najda of Mustazhir’s caliphate.
The last three qualities a caliph needs are competence (kifāya), piety (wara) and knowledge (ilm). Piety is difficult to combine with the exercise of power and depends on strict adherence to justice. As far as knowledge is concerned, the caliph does not need to be an outstanding scholar for he can ask the advice and opinion of the ulama. This is in contrast to the Isma’ili concept of a caliph who makes legal decisions on the basis of divine inspiration alone and who cannot err.
Ghazālī’s overwhelming concern is to create a strong caliphate which will assure stability and unity within the Sunni world and make it able to resist attacks of the Isma’ili Shiis, whom, like his patron Nizām al-Mulk, he hates with a visceral passion. To achieve this, he needs to create a framework for cooperation between the caliph and the Turkish military, even if the Turks are sometimes (and, in fact, increasingly) themselves a source of disorder in the state.
All three authors were wrestling with the problems of reconciling the theoretical claims of caliphate and imamate with the realities of political power in their own time. The collapse of the Abbasid caliphate had led to a profound questioning of the nature of the office. All three agreed that a caliph was necessary for the proper ordering of the Muslim community. Beyond that these three pious and intelligent Muslims came to very different conclusions. For Māwardī the important thing was to restore the power and prestige of the Abbasid caliphate, while Juwaynī thought that the Abbasids were an irrelevant anachronism and that if the caliphate was to function it should pass to the most militarily powerful and effective ruler of the time, provided, of course, that he was a pious Muslim. Ghazālī tried to find a compromise, combining military power with spiritual leadership. The main point that we can take from this discussion is that, as early as the eleventh and twelfth centuries there were profound differences among leading Sunni Muslim intellectuals as to what the caliphate could and should be. There was no one definitive answer or model.