Even at its maximum extent the Abbasid Empire failed to contain the whole Islamic world. In Spain an independent dynasty had been founded by an Umayyad survivor, Abd al-Rahman I (r. 756–788). A grandson of the Caliph Hisham, he escaped the massacre of his kinsmen and after various adventures made his way to the peninsula. Here he persuaded feuding Arabs and Berbers to accept him as their leader, instead of the governor sent by the Abbasids. In what is now Morocco, a descendant of Ali and Fatima, Idris bin Abdullah, who escaped from Arabia after the failure of a Shiite revolt in 786, arrived at the old Roman capital of Volubilis. Here he formed a tribal coalition, which rapidly conquered southern Morocco. His son Idris II founded Fez in 808. In Tunisia (Ifriqiya) the descendants of Ibrahim Ibn Aghlab, Harun al-Rashid’s governor, who had been granted by the Fatimids in the tenth century, the chronicler Ibn Saghir wrote:
“There was not a foreigner who stopped in the city but settled among them and built in their midst, attracted by the plenty there, the equitable conduct of the Imam, his just behavior toward those under his charge, and the security enjoyed by all in person and property.” |
| At the heart of the empire, however, political and religious tensions were rife. The disputed succession between Harun’s sons Amin and Mamun led to a civil war that lasted a decade, weakening the Abbasid armies and the institution of the caliphate. Though Mamun won the war, his attempt to impose the Mutazili doctrine of the “created” Koran met with strong resistance from the populist ulama (religious scholars) grouped around Ahmad Ibn Hanbal. For the latter, who saw the divine text as “uncreated” or eternal, the doctrine of the created Koran derogated from the idea of the Koran as God’s speech. They looked to the Koran and the emerging corpus of hadiths (traditions or reports about the Prophet Muhammad) as the sole sources of religious authority, with themselves as qualified interpreters. They regarded the caliph as the executive of the will of the community, not the source of its beliefs. |
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| As the caliph’s religious authority weakened, so did his political and economic control. In cultivated regions including Iraq the system of iqta (tax-farming) built up a class of landlords at the expense of central government. In Iran and the eastern provinces Mamun’s most effective general, Tahir, established a hereditary governorate. To offset the power of the Tahirids Mamun’s successor Mutasim relied increasingly on mercenaries recruited from Turkish-speaking tribes in Central Asia — a practice that hastened the breakup of the empire and the establishment of de facto tribal dynasties. The construction of a new capital at Samarra further isolated the caliph from his subjects. By the end of the tenth century the Abbasid caliphs were mainly titular monarchs, their legitimacy challenged by claimants in the line of Ali. The most radical of these movements, the Qaramatians, fomented peasant and nomad rebellions in Iraq, Syria, and Arabia in the name of a messiah descended from Ali through his descendant Ismail bin Jaafar. In the 920s the Qaramatians, who created an independent state in Bahrain, shocked the whole Muslim world by pillaging Mecca and carrying off the Black Stone. In 969 Egypt — already semi-independent under Ibn Tulun and his successors, the Ikhshids — was taken over by the Ismaili Fatimids, who established a new caliphate under a “living imam” descended from Ali and Ismail. In northern Syria and the Upper Tigris the bedouin Arab Hamdan family — also Shiite — ruled a semi-autonomous, sometimes independent, state. In Khurasan and Transoxiana the Samanid family replaced the Tahirids as defenders of the mixed Arab-Persian high culture against incoming nomadic tribes. Even in the central heartlands of the empire — Iraq and western Iran — the caliphs were virtual prisoners of the Shiite Buyids, a warrior clan from Daylam, south of the Caspian. |
Mahmud of Ghazna crosses the Ganges. The Ghaznavids, Turkish military governors, enjoyed great renown in later times as the first to extend Muslim power into India. This image is from the Compendium of Chronicles, composed for the vizier Rashid al-Din in the early fourteenth century. |
| In Inner Asia, where the Samanids had established a flourishing capital in Bukhara, the adoption of Islam by Turkish- speaking tribes subverted the role of the Samanids as ghazis. These were frontier warriors entrusted with the defense of Islam against nomadic incursions. The practice of recruiting warrior slaves, known as mamluks or ghulams, from mountainous or arid regions hastened the disintegration of the empire. When power declined at the center, the mamluks went on to establish their own “slave-dynasties.” Thus the Ghaznavids who supplanted their former Samanid overlords in Khurasan started as slave-soldiers in the frontier region of Ghazna, south of Kabul. When the Samanid regime collapsed in 999, Mahmud of Ghazna (r. 998–1030), son of a slave governor, divided their territory with the Turkish tribe of Qarluqs, led by the Qaraqanid dynasty, which he did his best to confine to the Oxus basin in the north. Mahmud crossed the Indus Valley, establishing permanent rule in the Punjab, and conducted raids into northwestern India, plundering cities and destroying numerous works of art as idolatrous. This earned him a fearsome reputation as a ghazi against the infidel. On his western front, in the lands of “old Islam” he pushed the Buyids back almost to the frontiers of Iraq. |
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