The Caliphate
From The Arabs; A Short History by Philip K. Hitti, 1914.
From: 632 C.E. To: 1258 C.E.
Note: This article has been excerpted from a larger work in the public domain and shared here due to its historical value. It may contain outdated ideas and language that do not reflect TOTA’s opinions and beliefs.
From The Arabs; A Short History by Philip K. Hitti, 1914.
One of the favourite themes of history is the story of young, uncultured people who overcome with their fresh strength an old civilization, only to be fascinated and ultimately weakened by the delights of the new culture to which they are exposed. This theme enters now in the story of the men from Arabia.
By the conquest of the Fertile Crescent and the lands of Persia and Egypt the Arabians came into possession of the earliest seats of civilization in the whole world. In art and architecture, in philosophy, in medicine, in science and literature, in government, the original Arabians had nothing to teach and everything to learn. And what voracious appetites they proved to have!
With sharp curiosity and latent potentialities never aroused before, these Moslem Arabians in collaboration with and by the help of their subject peoples began now to assimilate, adapt and reproduce their intellectual and aesthetic heritage. In Ctesiphon, Damascus, Jerusalem and Alexandria they viewed, admired and copied the work of the architect, the artisan, the jeweller and the manufacturer. To all these centres of ancient culture they came, they saw—and were conquered.
What we now call “Arab civilization” was Arabian neither in its origins and fundamental structure nor in its principal ethnic aspects. The purely Arabian contribution was in the linguistic and to a certain extent in the religious fields. Throughout the whole period of the caliphate the Syrians, the Persians, the Egyptians and others, as Moslem converts or as Christians and Jews, were the foremost bearers of the torch of enlightenment and learning, just as the subjugated Greeks were in their relation to the victorious Romans.
The Arab Islamic civilization was at bottom the Hellenized Aramaic and the Iranian civilizations as developed under the aegis of the caliphate and expressed through the medium of the Arabic tongue. In another sense it was the logical continuation of the early Semitic civilization of the Fertile Crescent originated and developed by the Assyro-Babylonians, Phoenicians, Aramaeans and Hebrews. In it the unity of the Mediterranean civilization of Western Asia found its final culmination.
In the first two caliphs, abu-Bakr, who ruled from 632 to 634, and Umar (634-644), we have a clear picture of the kind of man whom Moslem Arabia produced. Abu-Bakr, the conqueror and pacifier of Arabia, lived in patriarchal simplicity. In the first six months of his short reign he travelled back and forth daily from al-Sunh, where he lived in a modest household with his wife Habibah, to his capital Medina and received no stipend since the state had at that time hardly any income. All state business he transacted in the courtyard of the Prophet’s Mosque.
Simple and frugal in manner, his energetic and talented successor, Umar, who was of towering height and strong physique, continued at least for some time after becoming caliph to support himself by trade. He lived throughout his life in a style as unostentatious as that of a Bedouin sheikh.
Umar, whose name According to Moslem tradition is the greatest in early Islam after that of Muhammad, has been idolized by Moslem writers for his piety, justice and patriarchal simplicity and treated as the personification of all the virtues a caliph ought to possess. He owned, we are told, one shirt and one mantle only, both conspicuous for their patchwork, slept on a bed of palm leaves, and had no concern other than the maintenance of the purity of the faith, the upholding of justice and the ascendancy and security of Islam and the Arabians. Arabic literature is replete with anecdotes extolling Umar’s stern character. He is said to have scourged his own son to death for drunkenness and immorality. Having in a fit of anger inflicted a number of stripes on a Bedouin who came seeking his succour against an oppressor, the caliph soon repented and asked the Bedouin to inflict the same number on him. But the latter refused. So Umar retired to his home with the following soliloquy
“O son of al-Khattab! humble thou wert and Allah hath elevated thee; astray, and Allah hath guided thee; weak, and Allah hath strengthened thee. Then He caused thee to rule over the necks of thy people, and when one of them came seeking thy aid, thou didst strike him! What wilt thou have to say to thy Lord when thou presentest thyself before Him?”
It is significant that Umar died, at the zenith of his life, by the poisoned dagger of a Christian Persian slave.
Umar’s successor Uthman ruled twelve years and was struck down by Moslems during an uprising. Ali (656-661), next to reign, was acknowledged by practically the entire Moslem world, yet a party soon formed against him and the dynastic wars that were to convulse Islam from time to time and occasionally shake it to its foundation had begun. Five years later Ali was cut down with a poisoned sabre.
We should here guard against the common fallacy that the caliphate was a religious office. In this regard analogies drawn from the headship of the Holy Roman Empire and from the Catholic Church are misleading. As commander of the believers, the military office of the caliph was emphasized. As imam, leader in public prayer, the caliph could and did lead the religious service and pronounce the Friday sermon; but this was a function which the humblest of Moslems could perform.
Succession to Muhammad (khilafah) meant succession to the sovereignty of the state. Muhammad as a prophet, as an instrument of revelation, as a messenger of Allah, could have no successor. The caliph’s relation to religion was merely that of a protector and guardian. He defended the faith just as any European emperor was supposed to, suppressed heresies, warred against unbelievers and extended the boundaries of “the abode of Islam”—in the performance of all of which he employed the power of his secular arm. Not until the latter part of the eighteenth century did the notion prevail in Europe that the Moslem caliph was a kind of pope with spiritual jurisdiction over the followers of Muhammad throughout the world.
The shrewd Abd-al-Hamid II made capital of the idea to strengthen his prestige in the eyes of the European powers who had by this time come to dominate most of the Moslems in Asia and Africa. An ill-defined movement had its inception in the latter part of the last century and under the name pan-Islamism exerted special effort to bring about some unity of action to oppose the Christian powers. With Turkey as its rallying point it unduly stressed the oecumenical character of the caliphate.
The one to wrest the caliphate from Ali was a distant cousin, the shrewd Muawiyah, governor of Syria. With him the principle of sovereignty took a new turn: the caliphate became a dynasty, established on the principle of succession, rather than on the principle of casual election as heretofore.
There were to be three great dynasties in the period which our story covers: the Umayyad, which now begins in the year 661 with the caliphate of Muawiyah in Damascus; the Abbasid, in Baghdad, which endured from 750 to 1258; and the Fatimid, which ruled from 909 to 1171, with its seat in Cairo. And there was an illustrious branch of the Umayyad caliphate in Spain, from 929 to 1031 with Cordova for its capital. Of these caliphates only the Fatimid claimed descent from Ali. The dynastic principle was to introduce a semblance of political stability. Actually, however, there was seldom a long period when bloody internal warfare did not plague Islam; and there were times when a caliph, though nominally the head of an empire, did not in fact exercise control in his capital city.
Another new note which was to echo more and more loudly in Islam throughout the following centuries was also sounded in the events which accompanied Muawiyah’s rise to power. Iraq had declared Ali’s son, al-Hasan, the legitimate successor to the throne—with logic, since he was the eldest son of the deceased caliph and Fatimah, the only surviving daughter of the Prophet. But, unfortunately, this grandson of the Prophet had already sojourned too long among the fleshpots. His talents lay in fields other than administration—namely, in the boudoir. Though he died a at the age of forty-five, he had by that time succeeded in making and unmaking no less than one hundred marriages and in winning a highly individual title for himself: “the great divorcer”. Consistent, at any rate, in recognizing the true nature of his ability, he genially permitted Muawiyah to buy him off as an aspirant to the caliphate, with a lifetime subsidy.
Muawiyah was a man of unusual administrative skill. And out of chaos he developed an orderly Moslem society. His army was the first disciplined force known in Islamic warfare. Historians credit him also with being the first in Islam to institute a bureau of registry and the first to interest himself in a postal service, which was shortly to develop into a well-organized system knitting together the various parts of the empire.
In Muawiyah the political sense was developed to a degree probably higher than in any other caliph. To his Arab biographers his supreme virtue was his hilm, which might be translated as finesse, that unusual ability to resort to force only when force was absolutely necessary and to use peaceful measures in all other instances. His prudent mildness by which he tried to disarm the enemy and shame the opposition, his slowness to anger and his absolute self-control left him under all circumstances master of the situation. “I apply not my sword,” he is reported to have declared, “where my lash suffices, nor my lash where my tongue is enough. And even if there be one hair binding me to my fellow men, I do not let it break: when they pull I loosen, and if they loosen I pull.”
The following is a letter he is supposed to have forwarded to al-Hasan on the occasion of the latter’s abdication: “I admit that because of thy blood relationship thou art more entitled to this high office than I. And if I were sure of thy greater ability to fulfil the duties involved I would unhesitatingly swear allegiance to thee. Now then, ask what thou wilt.” Enclosed was a blank for al Hasan to fill in, already signed by Muawiyah. The would-be rival was naturally enchanted by such an offer.
As succeeding caliphs were to do, Muawiyah measured swords with the Byzantines and twice stretched out his strong arm against Constantinople itself. During his governorship of Syria, a Moslem fleet challenged Byzantine sea power in a sanguinary engagement off the Lycian coast in Asia Minor, registering the first great naval victory of Islam. Constantinople, then and later—until the time of the Turks—proved to be impregnable. Nor did the Arabs ever manage to obtain a permanent foothold in Asia Minor, or to span the Hellespont. It was eastward and westward, along the lines of least resistance, that their main energy was directed. In the time of Muawiyah they were again on the march.
Hitti, Philip K. The Arabs; A Short History. MacMillan & Co, 1914.
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