Fourteenth-century vellum depicting the sultan Alp-Arslan, the second ruler of the Seljuq dynasty. Ms Or 20 f.138r/Edinburgh University Library, Scotland/With kind permission of the University of Edinburgh/The Bridgeman Art Library
During this period, migrating peoples once again played a major role, perhaps greater than that of the Arabs during the 7th and 8th centuries. No other civilization in premodern history experienced so much in-migration, especially of alien and disruptive peoples, or showed a greater ability to assimilate as well as to learn from outsiders. Nowhere has the capacity of a culture to redefine and incorporate the strange and the foreign been more evident. In this period, which ends with the death in 1405 of Timur (Tamerlane), the last great tribal conqueror, the tense yet creative relationship between sedentary and migratory peoples emerged as one of the great themes of Islamicate history, played out as it was in the centre of the great arid zone of Eurasia. Because this period can be seen as the history of peoples as well as of regions, and because the mobility of those peoples brought them to more than one cultural region, this period should be treated group by group rather than region by region.
As a general term, “migrating” peoples is preferable because it does not imply aimlessness, as “nomadic” does; or herding, as “pastoralist” does; or kin-related, as “tribal” does. “Migrating” focuses simply on movement from one home to another. Although the Franks, as the Crusaders are called in Muslim sources, differed from other migrating peoples, most of whom were pastoralists related by kinship, they too were migrating warriors organized to invade and occupy peoples to whom they were hostile and alien. Though not literally tribal, they appeared to behave like a tribe with a distinctive way of life and a solidarity based on common values, language, and objectives. Viewing them as alien immigrants comparable to, say, the Mongols helps to explain their reception: how they came to be assimilated into the local culture and drawn into the intra-Muslim factional competition and fighting that was under way in Syria when they arrived.
For almost 400 years a succession of Turkic peoples entered eastern Islamdom from Central Asia. These nearly continuous migrations can be divided into three phases: Seljuqs (1055–92), Mongols (1256–1411), and neo-Mongols (1369–1405). Their long-term impact, more constructive than destructive on balance, can still be felt through the lingering heritage of the great Muslim empires they inspired. The addition of tribally organized warrior Turks to the already widely used Turkic slave soldiery gave a single ethnic group an extensive role in widening the gap between rulers and ruled.
The Seljuqs were a family among the Oghuz Turks, a label applied to the migratory pastoralists of the Syr Darya–Oxus basin. Their name has come to stand for the group of Oghuz families led into Ghaznavid Khorasan after they had been converted to Sunni Islam, probably by Sufi missionaries after the beginning of the 11th century. In 1040 the Seljuqs’ defeat of the Ghaznavid sultan allowed them to proclaim themselves rulers of Khorasan. Having expanded into western Iran as well, Toghrïl Beg, also using the title “sultan,” was able to occupy Baghdad (1055) after “petitioning” the ‘Abbasid caliph for permission. The Seljuqs quickly took the remaining Buyid territory and began to occupy Syria, whereupon they encountered Byzantine resistance in the Armenian highlands. In 1071 a Seljuq army under Alp-Arslan defeated the Byzantines at Manzikert north of Lake Van; while the main Seljuq army replaced the Fatimids in Syria, large independent tribal bands occupied Anatolia, coming closer to the Byzantine capital than had any other Muslim force.
Fourteenth-century vellum depicting the sultan Alp-Arslan, the second ruler of the Seljuq dynasty. Ms Or 20 f.138r/Edinburgh University Library, Scotland/With kind permission of the University of Edinburgh/The Bridgeman Art Library
The Seljuqs derived their legitimacy from investiture by the caliph, and from “helping” him reunite the ummah; yet their governing style prefigured the emergence of true alternatives to the caliphate. Some of their Iranian advisers urged them to restore centralized absolutism as it had existed in pre-Islamic times and in the period of Marwanid‘Abbasid strength. The best-known proponent was Nizam al-Mulk, chief minister to the second and third Seljuq sultans, Alp-Arslan and Malik-Shah. Nizam al-Mulk explained his plans in his Seyasat-nameh (The Book of Government), one of the best-known manuals of Islamicate political theory and administration. He was unable, however, to persuade the Seljuq sultans to assert enough power over other tribal leaders. Eventually the Seljuq sultans, like so many rulers before them, alienated their tribal supporters and resorted to the costly alternative of a Turkic slave core, whose leading members were appointed to tutor and train young princes of the Seljuq family to compete for rule on the death of the reigning sultan. The tutors were known as atabegs. More often than not, they became the actual rulers of the domains assigned to their young charges, cooperating with urban notables (a‘yan) in day-today administration.
Although Nizam al-Mulk was not immediately successful, he did contribute to long-term change. He encouraged the establishment of state-supported schools (madrasahs); those he personally patronized were called Nizamiyyahs. The most important Nizamiyyah was founded in Baghdad in 1067. There Nizam al-Mulk gave government stipends to teachers and students whom he hoped he could subsequently not only appoint to the position of qadi but also recruit for the bureaucracy. Systematic and broad instruction in Jama‘i-Sunni learning would counteract the disruptive influences of non-Sunni or anti-Sunni thought and activity, particularly the continuing agitation of Isma‘ili Muslims. In 1090 a group of Isma‘ilis established themselves in a mountain fortress at Alamut in the mountains of Daylam. From there they began to coordinate revolts all over Seljuq domains. Nominally loyal to the Fatimid caliph in Cairo, the eastern Isma‘ilis confirmed their growing independence and radicalism by supporting a failed contender for the Fatimid caliphate, Nizar. For that act they were known as the Nizari Isma‘ilis. They were led by Hasan-e Sabbah and were dubbed by their detractors the hashishiyyin (assassins) because they practiced political murder while they were allegedly under the influence of hashish.
Nizam al-Mulk’s madrasah system enhanced the prestige and solidarity of the Jama‘i-Sunni ulama without actually drawing them into the bureaucracy or combating anti-Sunni agitation, but it also undermined their autonomy. It established the connection between state-supported education and office holding, and it subordinated the spiritual power and prestige of the ulama to the indispensable physical force of the military emirs. Nizam al-Mulk unintentionally encouraged the independence of these emirs by extending the iqta‘ system beyond Buyid practice. He regularly assigned land revenues to individual military officers, assuming that he could keep them under bureaucratic control. When that failed, his system increased the emirs’ independence and drained the central treasury.
The madrasah system had other unpredictable results that can be illustrated by al-Ghazali, who was born in 1058 at Tus and in 1091 was made head of the Baghdad Nizamiyyah. For four years, to great admiration, he taught both fiqh and kalam and delivered critiques of falsafah and Isma‘ili thought. According to his autobiographical work Al-Munqidh min al-dalal (The Deliverer from Error), the more he taught, the more he doubted, until his will and voice became paralyzed. In 1095 he retreated from public life, attempting to arrive at a more satisfying faith. He undertook a radically skeptical reexamination of all of the paths available to the pious Muslim, culminating in an incorporation of the active, immediate, and inspired experience of the Sufis into the Shari‘ah-ordered piety of the public cult. For his accomplishments, al-Ghazali was viewed as a renewer (mujaddid), a role expected by many Muslims to be filled by at least one figure at the turn of every Muslim century.
In the 12th century Muslims began to group themselves into tariqah, fellowships organized around and named for the tariqah (“way” or “path”) of given masters. Al-Ghazali may have had such a following himself. One of the first large-scale orders, the Qadiriyah, formed around the teachings of ‘Abd al-Qadir al-Jilani of Baghdad. Though rarely monastic in the European sense, the activities of a tariqah often centred around assembly halls (called khanqah, zawiyah, or tekke) that could serve as places of retreat or accommodate special spiritual exercises. The dhikr, for example, is a ceremony in which devotees meditated on the name of God to the accompaniment of breathing exercises, music, or movement, so as to attain a state of consciousness productive of a sense of union with God. Although shortcuts and excesses have often made Sufism vulnerable to criticism, its most serious practitioners have conceived of it as a disciplined extension of Shari‘ah-minded piety, not an escape. In fact, many Sufis have begun their path through supererogatory fulfillment of standard ritual requirements.
Thousands of tariqahs sprang up over the centuries, some associated with particular occupations, locales, or classes. It is possible that by the 18th century most adult Muslim males had some connection with one or more tariqahs. The structure of the tariqah ensued from the charismatic authority of the master, who, though not a prophet, replicated the direct intimacy that the prophets had shared with God. This quality he passed on to his disciples through a hierarchically ordered network that could extend over thousands of miles. The tariqahs thus became powerful centripetal forces among societies in which formal organizations were rare; but the role of the master became controversial because followers often made saints or intercessors of especially powerful Sufi leaders and made shrines or pilgrimage sites of their tombs or birthplaces. Long before these developments could combine to produce stable alternatives to the caliphal system, Seljuq power had begun to decline, only to be replaced for a century and a half with a plethora of small military states. When the Frankish Crusaders arrived in the Holy Land in 1099, no one could prevent them from quickly establishing themselves along the eastern Mediterranean coast.
At the Council of Clermont in 1095 Pope Urban II responded to an appeal from the Byzantine emperor for help against the Seljuq Turks, who had expanded into western Anatolia just as the Kipchak Turks in the Ukraine had cut off newly Christian Russia from Byzantium. The First Crusade, begun the next year, brought about the conquest of Jerusalem in 1099. The Christian Reconquista (Reconquest) of Spain was already under way, having scored its first great victory at Toledo in 1085. Ironically, modern historiography has concentrated on the Crusades that failed and virtually ignored the ones that succeeded. In the four centuries between the fall of Toledo and the fall of Granada (1492), Spanish Christians replaced Muslim rulers throughout the Iberian Peninsula, although Muslims remained as a minority under Christian rule until the early 17th century. In the 200 years from the fall of Jerusalem to the end of the Eighth Crusade (1291), western European Crusaders failed to halt the Turkish advance or to establish a permanent presence in the Holy Land. By 1187 local Muslims had managed to retake Jerusalem and thereby contain Christian ambitions permanently. By the time of the Fourth Crusade (1202–04) the Crusading movement had been turned inward against Christian heretics such as the Byzantines.
The direct impact of the Crusades on Islamdom was limited largely to Syria. For the century during which western European Christians were a serious presence there, they were confined to their massive coastal fortifications. The Crusaders had arrived in Syria at one of its most factionalized periods prior to the 20th century. Seljuq control, never strong, was then insignificant; local Muslim rule was anarchic; the Seljuq regime in Baghdad was competing with the Fatimid regime in Egypt; and all parties in Syria were the target of the Nizari Isma‘ili movement at Alamut. The Crusaders soon found it difficult to operate as more than just another faction. Yet the significance of the Crusaders as a force against which to be rallied should not be underestimated any more than should the significance of Islamdom as a force against which Christendom could unite.
The Crusaders’ situation encouraged interaction with the local population and even assimilation. They needed the food, supplies, and services available in the Muslim towns. Like their Christian counterparts in Spain, they took advantage of the enemy’s superior skills, in medicine and hygiene, for example. Because warfare was seasonal and occasional, they spent much of their time in peaceful interaction with their non-Christian counterparts. Some early-generation Crusaders intermarried with Arab Muslims or Arab Christians and adopted their personal habits and tastes, much to the dismay of Christian latecomers. An intriguing account of life in Syria during the Crusades can be found in the Kitab al-I‘tibar (“Book of Reflection”), the memoirs of Usamah ibn Munqidh (1095–1188). Born in Syria, he was a small boy when the first generation of Franks controlled Jerusalem. As an adult, he fought with Saladin (Salah al-Din Yusuf ibn Ayyub) and lived to see him unite Egypt with Syria and restore Jerusalem to Muslim control. In this fine example of Islamicate autobiographical writing, Usamah draws a picture of the Crusades not easily found in European sources: Christians and Muslims observing, and sometimes admiring, each others’ skills and habits, from the battlefield to the bathhouse. Although the Franks in Syria were clearly influenced by the Muslims, the Crusades seem to have contributed relatively little to the overall impact of Islamicate culture on Europe, even though they constituted the most prolonged direct contact.
Although the Crusaders never formed a united front against the Muslims, Syrian Muslims did eventually form a united front against them, largely through the efforts of the family of the emir Zangi, a Turkic slave officer appointed Seljuq representative in Mosul in 1127. After Zangi had extended his control through northern Syria, one of his sons and successors, Nur al-Din (Nureddin), based at Aleppo, was able to tie Zangi’s movement to the frontier warrior (ghazi) spirit. This he used to draw together urban and military support for a jihad against the Christians. After taking Damascus, he established a second base in Egypt. He offered help to the failing Fatimid regime in return for being allowed to place one of his own lieutenants, Saladin, as chief minister to the Fatimid caliph, thus warding off a Crusader alliance with the Fatimids. This action gave Nur al-Din two fronts from which to counteract the superior seaborne and naval support the Crusaders were receiving from western Europe and the Italian city-states. Three years before Nur al-Din’s death in 1174, Saladin substituted himself for the Fatimid caliph he theoretically served, thus ending more than 200 years of Fatimid rule in Egypt. When Nur al-Din died, Saladin succeeded him as head of the whole movement. When Saladin died in 1193, he had recaptured Jerusalem (1187) and begun the reunification of Egypt and Syria; his successors were known, after his patronymic, as the Ayyubids. The efforts of a contemporary ‘Abbasid caliph, al-Nasir, to revive the caliphate seem pale by comparison.
Painting of the surrender of Richard I before Saladin after the Battle of Hattin in 1187. DEA/G. Dagli Orti/Getty Images
The Ayyubids ruled in Egypt and Syria until around 1250, when they were replaced first in Egypt and later in Syria by the leaders of their own slave-soldier corps, the Mamluks. It was they who expelled the remaining Crusaders from Syria, subdued the remaining Nizari Isma‘ilis there, and consolidated Ayyubid holdings into a centralized state. That state became strong enough in its first decade to do what no other Muslim power could: in 1260 at ‘Ayn Jalut, south of Damascus, the Mamluk army defeated the recently arrived Mongols and expelled them from Syria.
The Mongols were pagan, horse-riding tribes of the northeastern steppes of Central Asia. In the early 13th century, under the leadership of Genghis Khan, they formed, led, and gave their name to a confederation of Turkic tribes that they channeled into a movement of global expansion, spreading east into China, north into Russia, and west into Islamdom. Like other migratory peoples before them, Arabs, Imazighen, and Turks, they had come to be involved in citied life through their role in the caravan trade. Unlike others, however, they did not convert to Islam before their arrival. Furthermore, they brought a greater hostility to sedentary civilization, a more ferocious military force, a more cumbersome material culture, a more complicated and hierarchical social structure, and a more coherent sense of tribal law. Their initial impact was physically more destructive than that of previous invaders, and their long-term impact perhaps more socially and politically creative.
The first Mongol incursions into Islamdom in 1220 were a response to a challenge from the Khwarezm-Shah ‘Ala’ al-Din Muhammad, the aggressive reigning leader of a dynasty formed in the Oxus Delta by a local governor who had rebelled against the Seljuq regime in Khorasan. Under Genghis Khan’s leadership, Mongol forces destroyed numerous cities in Transoxania and Khorasan in an unprecedented display of terror and annihilation. By the time of Genghis Khan’s death in 1227, his empire stretched from the Caspian Sea to the Sea of Japan. A later successor, Möngke, decided to extend the empire in two new directions. From the Mongol capital of Karakorum, he simultaneously dispatched Kublai Khan to southern China (where Islam subsequently began to expand inland) and Hülegü to Iran (1256). Hülegü had already received Sunni ambassadors who encouraged him to destroy the Isma‘ili state at Alamut. This he did and more, reaching Baghdad in 1258, where he terminated and replaced the caliphate. The ‘Abbasid line continued, however, until 1517. The Mamluk sultan Baybars I, shortly after his defeat of the Mongols, invited a member of the ‘Abbasid house to “invest” him and to live in Cairo as spiritual head of all Muslims.
The Mongol regimes in Islamdom quickly became rivals. The Il-Khans controlled the Tigris-Euphrates valley and Iran; the Chagatai dominated the Syr Darya and Oxus basins, the Kabul mountains, and eventually the Punjab; and the Golden Horde was concentrated in the Volga basin. The Il-Khans ruled in the territories where Islam was most firmly established. They patronized learning of all types and scholars from all parts of the vast Mongol empire, especially China. Evincing a special interest in nature, they built a major observatory at Maragheh. Just as enthusiastically as they had destroyed citied life, they now rebuilt it, relying as had all previous invaders of Iran on the administrative skills of indigenous Persian-speaking bureaucrats. The writings of one of these men, ‘Ata Malek Joveyni, who was appointed governor in Baghdad after the Mongol capture of that city in 1258, described the type of rule the Mongols sought to impose. It has been called the military patronage state because it involved a reciprocal relationship between the foreign tribal military conquerors and their subjects. The entire state was defined as a single mobile military force connected to the household of the monarch; with no fixed capital, it moved with the monarch. All non-Turkic state workers, bureaucratic or religious, even though not military specialists, were defined as part of the army (asker); the rest of the subject population, as the herds (ra‘iyyah). The leading tribal families could dispose of the wealth of the conquered populations as they wished, except that their natural superiority obligated them to reciprocate by patronizing whatever of excellence the cities could produce. What the Ghaznavids and Seljuqs had begun, the Mongols now accomplished. The self-confidence and superiority of the leading families were bolstered by a fairly elaborate set of tribal laws, inherited from Genghis Khan and known as the Yasa, which served to regulate personal status and criminal liability among the Mongol elite, as did the Shari‘ah among Muslims. In Il-Khanid hands, this dynastic law merely coexisted but did not compete with Shari‘ah; but in later Turkic regimes a reconciliation was achieved that extended the power of the rulers beyond the limitations of an autonomous Shari‘ah.
For a time the Il-Khans tolerated and patronized all religious persuasions—Sunni, Shi‘ite, Buddhist, Nestorian Christian, Jewish, and pagan. But in 1295 a Buddhist named Mahmud Ghazan became khan and declared himself Muslim, compelling other Mongol notables to follow suit. His patronage of Islamicate learning fostered such brilliant writers as Rashid al-Din, the physician and scholar who authored one of the most famous Persian universal histories of all time. The Mongols, like other Islamicate dynasties swept into power by a tribal confederation, were able to unify their domains for only a few generations. By the 1330s their rule had begun to be fragmented among myriad local leaders. Meanwhile, on both Mongol flanks, other Turkic Muslim powers were increasing in strength.
The Ala’i Gate (left), built in 1311, and the five-story Qutb Minar, Delhi. Frederick M. Asher
To the east the Delhi Sultanate of Turkic slave-soldiers withstood Mongol pressure, benefited from the presence of scholars and administrators fleeing Mongol destruction, and gradually began to extend Muslim control south into India, a feat that was virtually accomplished under Muhammad ibn Tughluq. Muslim Delhi was a culturally lively place that attracted a variety of unusual persons. Muhammad ibn Tughluq himself was, like many later Indian Muslim rulers, well-read in philosophy, science, and religion. Not possessing the kind of dynastic legitimacy the pastoralist Mongols had asserted, he tied his legitimacy to his support for the Shari‘ah, and he even sought to have himself invested by the ‘Abbasid “caliph” whom the Mamluks had taken to Cairo. His concern with the Shari‘ah coincided with the growing popularity of Sufism, especially as represented by the massive Sufi Chishti tariqah. Its most famous leader, Nizam al-Din Awliya’, had been a spiritual adviser to many figures at court before Muhammad ibn Tughluq came to the throne, as well as to individual Hindus and Muslims alike. In India, Sufism, which inherently undermined communalism, was bringing members of different religious communities together in ways very rare in the more westerly parts of Islamdom.
To the west the similarly constituted Mamluk state continued to resist Mongol expansion. Its sultans were chosen on a nonhereditary basis from among a group of freed slaves who acted as the leaders of the various slave corps. At the death of one sultan, the various military corps would compete to see whose leader would become the next sultan. The leaders of the various slave corps formed an oligarchy that exercised control over the sultan. Although political instability was the frequent and natural result of such a system, cultural florescence did occur. The sultans actively encouraged trade and building, and Mamluk Cairo became a place of splendour, filled with numerous architectural monuments. While the Persian language was becoming the language of administration and high culture over much of Islamdom, Arabic alone continued to be cultivated in Mamluk domains, to the benefit of a diversified intellectual life. Ibn al-Nafis (died 1288), a physician, wrote about pulmonary circulation 300 years before it was “discovered” in Europe. For Mamluk administrative personnel, al-Qalqashandi composed an encyclopaedia in which he surveyed not only local practice but also all the information that a cultivated administrator should know. Ibn Khallikan composed one of the most important Islamicate biographical works, a dictionary of eminent men. Shari‘ah-minded studies were elaborated: the ulama worked out a political theory that tried to make sense of the sultanate, and they also explored the possibility of enlarging on the Shari‘ah by reference to falsafah and Sufism.
However, in much the same way as al-Shafi‘i had responded in the 9th century to what he viewed as dangerous legal diversity, another great legal and religious reformer, Ibn Taymiyyah, living in Mamluk Damascus in the late 13th and early 14th century, cautioned against such extralegal practices and pursuits. He insisted that the Shari‘ah was complete in and of itself and could be adapted to every age by any faqih who could analogize according to the principle of human advantage (maslahah). A Hanbali himself, Ibn Taymiyyah became as popular as his school’s founder, Ahmad ibn Hanbal. Like him, Ibn Taymiyyah attacked all practices that undermined what he felt to be the fundamentals of Islam, including all forms of Shi‘ite thought as well as aspects of Jama‘i-Sunni piety (often influenced by the Sufis) that stressed knowledge of God over service to him. Most visible among such practices was the revering of saints’ tombs, which was condoned by the Mamluk authorities. Ibn Taymiyyah’s program and popularity so threatened the Mamluk authorities that they put him in prison, where he died. His movement did not survive, but, when his ideas surfaced in the revolutionary movement of the Wahhabiyyah (Wahhabism) in the late 18th century, their lingering power became dramatically evident.
Farther west, the Rum Seljuqs at Konya submitted to the Mongols in 1243 but survived intact. They continued to cultivate the Islamicate arts, architecture in particular. The most famous Muslim ever to live at Konya, Jalal al-Din Rumi, had emigrated from eastern Iran with his father before the arrival of the Mongols. In Konya, Jalal al-Din, attracted to Sufi activities, attached himself to the master Shams al-Din. The poetry inspired by Jalal al-Din’s association with Shams al-Din is unparalleled in Persian literature. Its recitation, along with music and movement, was a key element in the devotional activities of Jalal al-Din’s followers, who came to be organized into a Sufi tariqah—named the Mevleviyah (Mawlawiyyah) after their title of respect for him, Mevlana (“Our Master”). In his poetry Jalal al-Din explored all varieties of metaphors, including intoxication, to describe the ineffable ecstasy of union with God.
It was not from the Rum Seljuqs, however, that lasting Muslim power in Anatolia was to come, but rather from one of the warrior states on the Byzantine frontier. The successive waves of Turkic migrations had driven unrelated individuals and groups across central Islamdom into Anatolia. Avoiding the Konya state, they gravitated toward an open frontier to the west, where they began to constitute themselves, often through fictitious kinship relationships, into quasi-tribal states that depended on raiding each other and Byzantine territory and shipping. One of these, the Osmanlis, or Ottomans, named for their founder, Osman I (ruled 1281–1324), was located not on the coast, where raiding had its limits, but in Bithynia just facing Constantinople. In the mid-1320s they won the town of Bursa and made it their first capital. From Anatolia they crossed over into Thrace in the service of rival factions at Constantinople, then began to occupy Byzantine territory, establishing their second capital at Edirne on the European side. Their sense of legitimacy was complex. They were militantly Muslim, bound by the ghazi spirit, spurred on in their intolerance of local Christians by Greek converts and traveling Sufis who gravitated to their domains. At the same time, ulama from more-settled Islamic lands to the east encouraged them to abide by the Shari‘ah and tolerate the Christians as protected non-Muslims. The Ottomans also cast themselves as deputies of the Rum Seljuqs, who were themselves originally “deputized” by the ‘Abbasid caliph. Finally they claimed descent from the leading Oghuz Turk families, who were natural rulers over sedentary populations. Under Murad I (ruled c. 1360–89) the state began to downplay its warrior fervour in favour of more conventional Islamicate administration. Instead of relying on volunteer warriors, Murad established a regular cavalry, which he supported with land assignments, as well as a specially trained infantry force called the “New Troops,” Janissaries, drawn from converted captives. Expanding first through western Anatolia and Thrace, the Ottomans under Bayezid I (ruled 1389–1402) turned their eyes toward eastern and southern Anatolia. Just as they had incorporated the whole, they encountered a neo-Mongol conqueror expanding into Anatolia from the east who utterly defeated their entire army in a single campaign (1402).
Timur (Tamerlane) was a Turk, not a Mongol, but he aimed to restore Mongol power. He was born a Muslim in the Syr Darya valley and served local pagan Mongol warriors and finally the Chagatai heir apparent, but he rebelled and made himself ruler in Khwarezm in 1380. He planned to restore Mongol supremacy under a thoroughly Islamic program. He surpassed the Mongols in terror, constructing towers out of the heads of his victims. Having established himself in Iran, he moved first on India and then on Ottoman Anatolia and Mamluk Syria, but he died before he could consolidate his realm. His impact was twofold: his defeat of the Ottomans inspired a comeback that would produce one of the greatest Islamicate empires of all time, and one of the Central Asian heirs to his tradition of conquest would found another great Islamicate empire in India. These later empires managed to find the combination of Turkic and Islamic legitimacy that could produce the stable centralized absolutism that had eluded all previous Turkic conquerors.
The Turkic conqueror Timur (1336–1405), remembered for the barbarity of his conquests from India and Russia to the Mediterranean Sea and for the cultural achievements of his dynasty, began his rise as the leader of a small nomad band. By guile and force of arms, he established dominion over the lands between the Oxus and Jaxartes rivers (Transoxania) by the 1360s. He then, for three decades, led his mounted archers to subdue each state from Mongolia to the Mediterranean. He was the last of the mighty conquerors of Central Asia to achieve such military successes as leader of the nomad warrior lords, ruling both agricultural and pastoral peoples on an imperial scale. The poverty, bloodshed, and desolation caused by his campaigns gave rise to many legends, which in turn inspired such works as Christopher Marlowe’s Tamburlaine the Great.
The name Timur Lenk (Turkish: “Timur the Lame”), as Timur was known, was a title of contempt used by his Persian enemies, which became Tamburlaine, or Tamerlane, in Europe. Timur was heir to a political, economic, and cultural heritage rooted in the pastoral peoples and nomad traditions of Central Asia. He and his compatriots cultivated the military arts and discipline of Genghis Khan and, as mounted archers and swordsmen, scorned the settled peasants. Timur never took up a permanent abode. He personally led his almost constantly campaigning forces, enduring extremes of desert heat and lacerating cold. When not campaigning he moved with his army according to season and grazing facilities. His court traveled with him, including his household of one or more of his nine wives and concubines. He strove to make his capital, Samarkand, the most splendid city in Asia, but when he visited it he stayed only a few days and then moved back to the pavilions of his encampment in the plains beyond the city.
Timur was, above all, master of the military techniques developed by Genghis Khan, using every weapon in the military and diplomatic armory of the day. He never missed an opportunity to exploit the weakness (political, economic, or military) of the adversary or to use intrigue, treachery, and alliance to serve his purposes. The seeds of victory were sown among the ranks of the enemy by his agents before an engagement. He conducted sophisticated negotiations with both neighbouring and distant powers, which are recorded in diplomatic archives from England to China. In battle, the nomadic tactics of mobility and surprise were his major weapons of attack.
Timur’s most lasting memorials are the Timurid architectural monuments of Samarkand, covered in azure, turquoise, gold, and alabaster mosaics; these are dominated by the great cathedral mosque, ruined by an earthquake but still soaring to an immense fragment of dome. His mausoleum, the Gur-e Amir, is one of the gems of Islamic art. Within the sepulchre he lies under a huge, broken slab of jade. The tomb was opened in 1941, having remained intact for half a millennium. The Soviet Archaeological Commission found the skeleton of a man who, though lame in both right limbs, must have been of powerful physique and above-average height.
Bronze statue in Tashkent, Uzbekistan, showing Timur on his horse. Tim Graham/Getty Images
Timur’s sons and grandsons fought over the succession when the Chinese expedition disbanded, but his dynasty survived in Central Asia for a century in spite of fratricidal strife. Samarkand became a centre of scholarship and science. It was here that Ulugh Beg, his grandson, set up an observatory and drew up the astronomical tables that were later used by the English royal astronomer in the 17th century. During the Timurid renaissance of the 15th century, Herat, southeast of Samarkand, became the home of the brilliant school of Persian miniaturists. At the beginning of the 16th century, when the dynasty ended in Central Asia, his descendant Babur established himself in Kabul and then conquered Delhi, to found the Muslim line of Indian emperors known as the Great Mughals.
When the Fatimids conquered Egypt in 969, they left a governor named Ziri in the Maghrib. In the 1040s the dynasty founded by Ziri declared its independence from the Fatimids, but it too was challenged by breakaways such as the Zanatah in Morocco and the Hammadids in Algeria. Gradually the Zirids were restricted to the eastern Maghrib. There they were invaded from Egypt by two Bedouin Arab tribes, the Banu Halil and the Banu Sulaym, at the instigation (1052) of the Fatimid ruler in Cairo. This mass migration of warriors as well as wives and children is known as the Hilalian invasion. Though initially disruptive, the Hilalian invasion had an important cultural impact: it resulted in a much greater spread of the Arabic language than had occurred in the 7th century and inaugurated the real Arabization of the Maghrib.
When the Arab conquerors arrived in the Maghrib in the 7th century, the indigenous peoples they met were the Imazighen (Berbers; singular Amazigh), a group of predominantly but not entirely migratory tribes who spoke a recognizably common Afro-Asiatic language with significant dialectal variations. Amazigh tribes could be found from present-day Morocco to present-day Algeria and from the Mediterranean to the Sahara. As among the Arabs, small tribal groupings of Imazighen occasionally formed short-lived confederations or became involved in caravan trade. No previous conqueror had tried to assimilate the Imazighen, but the Arabs quickly converted them and enlisted their aid in further conquests. Without their help, for example, Andalusia could never have been incorporated into the Islamicate state. At first only Imazighen nearer the coast were involved, but by the 11th century Muslim affiliation had begun to spread far into the Sahara.
One particular western Saharan Amazigh confederation, the Sanhajah, was responsible for the first Amazigh-directed effort to control the Maghrib. The Sanhajah were camel herders who traded mined salt for gold with the black kingdoms of the south. By the 11th century their power in the western Sahara was being threatened by expansion both from other Amazigh tribes, centred at Sijilmassa, and from the Soninke state at Ghana to the south, which had actually captured their capital of Audaghost in 990. The subsequent revival of their fortunes parallels Muhammad’s revitalization of the Arabs 500 years earlier, in that Muslim ideology reinforced their efforts to unify several smaller groups. The Sanhajah had been in contact with Islam since the 9th century, but their distance from major centres of Muslim life had kept their knowledge of the faith minimal. In 1035, however, Yahya ibn Ibrahim, a chief from one of their tribes, the Gudalah, went on hajj. For the Maghribi pilgrim, the cultural impact of the hajj was experienced not only in Mecca and Medina but also on the many stops along the 3,000-mile (4,828 km) overland route. When Yahya returned, he was accompanied by a teacher from Nafis (in present-day Libya), ‘Abd Allah ibn Yasin, who would instruct the Imazighen in Islam as teachers under ‘Umar I had instructed the Arab fighters in the first Muslim garrisons. Having met with little initial success, the two are said to have retired to a ribat, a fortified place of seclusion, perhaps as far south as an island in the Sénégal River, to pursue a purer religious life. The followers they attracted to that ribat were known, by derivation, as al-murabitun (Arabic: “those who are garrisoned”). The dynasty they founded came to be known by the same name, or Almoravids in its Anglicized form. In 1042 Ibn Yasin declared a jihad against the Sanhajah tribes, including his own, as people who had embraced Islam but then failed to practice it properly. By his death in 1059, the Sanhajah confederation had been restored under an Islamic ideology, and the conquest of Morocco, which lacked strong leadership, was under way.
A consultative body of ulama took over Ibn Yasin’s spiritual role. His successor as military commander was Abu Bakr ibn ‘Umar. While pursuing the campaign against Morocco, Abu Bakr had to go south, leaving his cousin Yusuf ibn Tashufin as his deputy. When Abu Bakr tried to return, Ibn Tashufin turned him back to the south, where he remained until his death in 1087. Under Ibn Tashufin’s leadership, by 1082, Almoravid control extended as far as Algiers. In 1086 Ibn Tashufin responded to a request for help from the Andalusian party kings, unable to defend themselves against the Christian kingdoms in the north, such as Castile. By 1110 all Muslim states in Andalusia had come under Almoravid control.
Like most other Jama‘i-Sunni rulers of his time, Ibn Tashufin had himself “appointed” deputy by the caliph in Baghdad. He also based his authority on the claim to bring correct Islam to peoples who had strayed from it. For him, “correct” Islam meant the Shari‘ah as developed by the Maliki faqihs, who played a key role in the Almoravid state by working out the application of the Shari‘ah to everyday problems. Like their contemporaries elsewhere, they received stipends from the government, sat in the ruler’s council, went on campaign with him, and gave him recommendations (fatwas) on important decisions. This was an approach to Islam far more current than the one it had replaced but still out of touch with the liveliest intellectual developments. During the next phase of Amazigh activism, newer trends from the east reached the Maghrib.
A second major Amazigh movement originated in a revolt begun against Almoravid rule in 1125 by Ibn Tumart, a settled Masmudah Amazigh from the Atlas Mountains. Like Ibn Yasin, Ibn Tumart had been inspired by the hajj, which he used as an opportunity to study in Baghdad, Cairo, and Jerusalem, acquainting himself with all current schools of Islamic thought and becoming a disciple of the ideas of the recently deceased al-Ghazali. Emulating his social activism, Ibn Tumart was inspired to act on the familiar Muslim dictum, “Command the good and forbid the reprehensible.” His early attempts took two forms, disputations with the scholars of the Almoravid court and public chastisement of Muslims who in his view contradicted the rules of Islam. He went so far as to throw the Almoravid ruler’s sister off her horse because she was unveiled in public. His activities aroused hostility, and he fled to the safety of his own people. There, like Muhammad, he grew from teacher of a personal following to leader of a social movement.
Like many subsequent reformers, especially in Africa and other outlying Muslim lands, Ibn Tumart used Muhammad’s career as a model. He interpreted the Prophet’s rejection and retreat as an emigration (hijrah) that enabled him to build a community, and he divided his followers into muhajirun (“fellow emigrants”) and ansar (“helpers”). He preached the idea of surrender to God to a people who had strayed from it. Thus could Muhammad’s ability to bring about radical change through renewal be invoked without actually claiming the prophethood that he had sealed forever. Ibn Tumart further based his legitimacy on his claim to be a sharif (descendant of Muhammad) and the mahdi, not in the Shi‘ite sense but in the more general sense of a human sent to restore pure faith. In his view Almoravid students of legal knowledge were so concerned with pursuing the technicalities of the law that they had lost the purifying fervour of their own founder, Ibn Yasin. They even failed to maintain proper Muslim behaviour, be it the veiling of women in public or the condemning of the use of wine, musical instruments, and other unacceptable, if not strictly illegal, forms of pleasure. Like many Muslim revitalizers before and since, Ibn Tumart decried the way in which the law had taken on a life of its own, and he called upon Muslims to rely on the original and only reliable sources, the Qur’an and Hadith. Although he opposed irresponsible rationalism in the law, in matters of theological discourse he leaned toward the limited rationalism of the Ash‘arite school, which was becoming so popular in the eastern Muslim lands. Like the Ash‘arites, he viewed the unity of God as one of Islam’s fundamentals and denounced any reading of the Qur’an that led to anthropomorphism. Because he focused on attesting the unity of God (tawhid), he called his followers al-Muwahhidun (Almohads), “Those Who Attest the Unity of God.” Ibn Tumart’s movement signifies the degree to which Maghribis could participate in the intellectual life of Islamdom as a whole, but his need to use the Tamazight language for his many followers who did not know Arabic also illustrates the limits of interregional discourse.
By 1147, 17 years after Ibn Tumart’s death, Almohads had replaced Almoravids in all their Maghribi and Andalusian territories. In Andalusia their arrival slowed the progress of the Christian Reconquista. There, as in the Maghrib, arts and letters were encouraged. An example is an important movement of falsafah that included Ibn Tufayl, Ibn al-‘Arabi, and Ibn Rushd (Latin Averroës), the Andalusian qadi and physician whose interpretations of Aristotle became so important for medieval European Christianity. During the late Almohad period in Andalusia the intercommunal nature of Islamicate civilization became especially noticeable in the work of non-Muslim thinkers, such as Moses Maimonides, who participated in trends outside their own communities even at the expense of criticism from within. By the early 13th century, Almohad power began to decline; a defeat in 1212 at Las Navas de Tolosa by the Christian kings of the north forced a retreat to the Maghrib. But the impact of Almohad cultural patronage on Andalusia long outlasted Almohad political power. Successor dynasties in surviving Muslim states were responsible for some of the highest cultural achievements of Andalusian Muslims, among them the Alhambra palace in Granada. Furthermore, the 400-year southward movement of the Christian-Muslim frontier resulted, ironically, in some of the most intense Christian-Muslim interaction in Andalusian history. The Cid could fight for both sides; Muslims, as Mudejars, could live under Christian rule and contribute to its culture; Jews could translate Arabic and Hebrew texts into Castilian. Almohads were replaced in the Maghrib as well, through a revolt by their own governors—the Hafsids in Tunis and the Marinid Amazigh dynasty in Fès. There too, however, Almohad influence outlasted their political presence: both towns became centres, in distinctively Maghribi form, of Islamicate culture and Islamic piety.
As the Maghrib became firmly and distinctively Muslim, Islam moved south. The spread of Muslim identity into the Sahara and the involvement of Muslim peoples, especially the Tuareg, in trans-Saharan trade provided several natural channels of influence. By the time of the Marinids, Hafsids, and Mamluks, several major trade routes had established crisscrossing lines of communication: from Cairo to Timbuktu, from Tripoli to Bornu and Lake Chad, from Tunis to Timbuktu at the bend of the Niger River, and from Fès and Tafilalt through major Saharan entrepôts into Ghana and Mali. The rise at Timbuktu of Mali, the first great western Sudanic empire with a Muslim ruler, attested the growing incorporation of sub-Saharan Africa into the North African orbit. The reign of Mansa Musa, who even went on pilgrimage, demonstrated the influence of Islam on at least the upper echelons of African society.
The best picture of Islamdom in the 14th century appears in the work of a remarkable Maghribi qadi and traveler, Ibn Battutah (1304–1368/69 or 1377). In 1325, the year that Mansa Musa went on pilgrimage, Ibn Battutah also left for Mecca, from his hometown of Tangiers. He was away for almost 30 years, visiting most of Islamdom, including Andalusia, all of the Maghrib, Mali, Syria, Arabia, Iran, India, the Maldive Islands, and, he claimed, China. He described the unity within diversity that was one of Islamdom’s most prominent features. Although local customs often seemed at variance with his notion of pure Islamic practice, he felt at home everywhere. Despite the divisions that had occurred during Islam’s 700-year history, a Muslim could attend the Friday worship session in any Muslim town in the world and feel comfortable, a claim that is difficult if not impossible to make for any other major religious tradition at any time in its history. By the time of Ibn Battutah’s death, Islamdom comprised the most far-flung yet interconnected set of societies in the world. As one author has pointed out, Thomas Aquinas (c. 1224–74) might have been read from Spain to Hungary and from Sicily to Norway, but Ibn al-‘Arabi (1165–1240) was read from Spain to Sumatra and from the Swahili coast to Kazan on the Volga River. By the end of the period of migration and renewal, Islam had begun to spread not only into sub-Saharan Africa but also into the southern seas with the establishment of a Muslim presence in the Straits of Malacca. Conversion to Islam across its newer frontiers was at first limited to a small elite, who supplemented local religious practices with Muslim ones. Islam could offer not only a unifying religious system but also social techniques, including alphabetic literacy, a legal system applicable to daily life, a set of administrative institutions, and a body of science and technology—all capable of enhancing the power of ruling elements and of tying them into a vast and lucrative trading network.
The period of migration and renewal exposed both the potentiality and the limitations of government by tribal peoples. This great problem of Islamicate history received its most sophisticated analysis from a Maghribi Muslim named Ibn Khaldun (1332–1406), a contemporary of Petrarch. His family had migrated from Andalusia to the Maghrib, and he himself was born in Hafsid territory. He was both a faylasuf and a qadi, a combination more common in Andalusia and the Maghrib than anywhere else in Islamdom. His falsafah was activist; he strove to use his political wisdom to the benefit of one of the actual rulers of the day. To this end he moved from one court to another before becoming disillusioned and retiring to Mamluk Cairo as a qadi. His life thus demonstrated the importance and the constraints of royal patronage as a stimulant to intellectual creativity. In his Muqaddimah (the introduction to his multivolume world history) he used his training in falsafah to discern patterns in history. Transcending the critiques of historical method made by historians of the Buyid period, such as al-Mas‘udi, Ibn Miskawayh, and al-Suli, Ibn Khaldun established careful standards of evidence. Whereas Muslim historians conventionally subscribed to the view that God passed sovereignty and hegemony (dawlah) from one dynasty to another through his divine wisdom, Ibn Khaldun explained it in terms of a cycle of natural and inevitable stages. By his day it had become apparent that tribally organized migratory peoples, so favoured by much of the ecology of the Maghrib and the Nile-to-Oxus region, could easily acquire military superiority over settled peoples if they could capitalize on the inherently stronger group feeling (‘asabiyyah) that kinship provides. Once in power, according to Ibn Khaldun, conquering groups pass through a phase in which a small number of “builders” among them bring renewed vitality to their conquered lands. As the family disperses itself among sedentary peoples and ceases to live the hard life of migration, it becomes soft from the prosperity it has brought and begins to degenerate. Then internal rivalries and jealousies force one member of the family to become a king who must rely on mercenary troops and undermine his own prosperity by paying for them. In the end, the ruling dynasty falls prey to a new tribal group with fresh group feeling. Thus did Ibn Khaldun call attention to the unavoidable instability of all premodern Muslim dynasties, caused by their lack of the regularized patterns of succession that were beginning to develop in European dynasties.