A Short History of the Fatimid Khalifate

De Lacy O'Leary

• Publisher: Routledge
• Year: 2013
• eBook ISBN: 9781136375521
• Edition: 1
• Topic: Social Sciences
• Subtopic: Ethnic Studies
• Index: Social Sciences

First published in 2000. This is Volume IV of six of the Oriental series looking at Arabic History and Culture. It was written in 1923, and includes a brief outline of the history of the Fatinlid Khalifs who were ruling in Egypt at the time of the First and Second Crusades.

I

The Shi‘ites or Schismatics of Islam

ISLAM appears first on the page of history as a purely Arab religion: indeed it is perfectly clear that the Prophet Mohammed, whilst intending it to be the one and only religion of the whole Arab race, did not contemplate its extension to foreign communities. “Throughout the land there shall be no second creed” was the Prophet’s message from his death-bed, and this was the guiding principle in the policy of the early Khalifs. The Prophet died in A.H 11, and within the next ten years the Arabs, unifed under the leadership of his successors, extended their rule over Egypt, Syria, Mesopotamia, and Persia. To a large extent it was merely an accident that this rapid expansion of Arab rule was associated with the rise of Islam. The expanding movement had already commenced before the Prophet’s ministry, and was due to purely secuiar causes to the age long tendency of the Arabs,—as of every race at a similar stage of economie and social development,—to over-spread and plunder the cultured territories in their vicinity. The Arabs were nomadic dwellers in a comparatively unproductive area, and had been gradually pressed back into that area by the development of settled communities of cultivators in the better irrigated land upon its borders. These settled communities evolved an intensive agriculture, and thus achieved great wealth and an advanced state of civilization which was a perpetual temptation to the ruder nomads who, able to move over great distances with considerable rapidity, were always inclined to make plundering incursions into the territories of the prosperous agricultural and city states near at hand. The only restraint on these incursions was the military power of the settled communities which always had as its first task the raising of a barrier against the wild men of the desert: whenever the dyke gave way, the flood poured out. In the seventh century A.D. the restraining powers were the Roman Empire and the Kingdom of Persia, and both of these, almost simultaneously, showed a sudden military collapse from which, in the natural course of events they would, no doubt, have recovered after a short interval; but the Arabs poured in at this moment of weakness, just as the Teutonic and other groups of central Europe had broken through the barriers of the western half of the Roman Empire; and at that moment, in the course of their incursion, they received a new coherence by the rise of the religion of Islam and, by the racial unity thus artificially produced, became more formidable.

In their outspread over Egypt and Western Asia the Arabs adopted the policy, partly deduced from the Qur‘an and partly based on the tradition of the first Khalif’s conduct in Arabia, of uncompromising warfare against all “polytheists,”—the creed of Islam was a pure unitarianism, and could contemplate no toleration of polytheism,—but of accommodation with those possessed of the divine revelation, even in the imperfect and corrupt form known to Christians and Jews. These “People of the Book” were not pressed to embrace Islam, but might remain as tribute-paying subjects of the Muslim rulers, with their own rights very fully secured. In all the conquered lands the progress of the Muslim religion was very gradual, and in all of them Christian and Jewish communities have maintained an independent continuous existence to the present day. Yet for all this there were very many conversions to the religion of the ruling race, and these were so numerous that within the first century of the Hijra the Arabs themselves were in a numerical minority in the Church of Islam. The alien converts, socially and intellectually developed in the culture of the Hellenistic world or of semi-Hellenistic Persia, were very far in advance of the ruling Arabs who were little better than half savages at the commencement of their career of conquest: and the unexpected inclusion of this more cultured element acted as a leaven in the Islamic community, and forced it to a rapid and some-what violent evolution. It is wonderful that Islam had sufficient vigour and elasticity to be able to absorb such fresh elements and phases of thought, but that elasticity had its limits, and at a very early date sects began to form whose members the orthodox felt them-selves unable to recognise as fellow Muslims.

These early sects which were generally regarded as heretical were, in most cases, reproductions of older pre-Islamic Persian and Mesopotamian religious systems, with a thin veneer of Muslim doctrine, and, in the second century of the Hijra, when they became most prominent, they were strongly tinctured with Hellenistic philosophical speculations which had already exercised a potent influence in Mesopotamia and Persia. In theory these sects were “legitimist” in their adherence to the principle of hereditary descent. Orthodox Islam accepted as a constitutional principle the leadership of an elected khalif or “successor,” a natural development of the tribal chieftainship familiar to the pre-Islamic Arabs. Amongst them the chief was elected in a tribal council, in which great weight was given to the tried warriors and aged men of experience, but in which all had a voice, and choice was made on what we should describe as democratie lines, and this remained the practice in the earlier age of Islam. Such a constitutional theory was no great novelty to those who had lived under the Roman Empire, but was entirely repugnant to those educated in Persian ideas, and who had learned to regard the kingship as hereditary in the sense that the semi-divine kingly soul passed by transmigration at the death of one sovereign to the body of his divinely appointed successor. This had been the Persian belief with regard to the Sasanid kings, and the Persians fully accepted Yazdegird, the last of these, as a re-incarnation of the princes of the semi-mythical Kayani dynasty to which they attributed their racial origin and their culture. Yazdegird died in A.H. 31 (= A.D. 652), and his death terminated the male line of the Persian royal family, but it was generally believed that his daughter, Shahr-banu, was married to Husayn, the son of the fourth Khalif ‘Ali, so that in his descendants by this Persian princess the claims of Islam and of the ancient Persian deified kings were combined. Historically the evidence for this marriage seems to be questionable, but it is commonly accepted as an article of faith by the Persian Shi‘ites.

At a quite early date the house of ‘Ali began to receive the devoted adherence of the Persian converts. That ‘Ali himself had been prominent as a champion of the rights of alien converts to equality in the brother-hood of Islam, and still more his harsh treatment by Mu‘awiya, the founder of the ‘Umayyad dynasty, caused his name to serve as a rallying point for all those who were disaffected towards the offiical Khalifate. It is now the general Shi‘ite belief that ‘Ali, the cousin and son-in-law of the Prophet, was his chief companion and chosen successor, the three preceding Khalifs being no more than usurpers who had kept him out of his just rights and whose wrong doing he had borne with exemplary patience. ‘Ali himself does not seem to have taken so pronounced a view, but he certainly regarded himself as injured by his exclusion from the Khalifate. It is not true to say with Muir (Caliphate, p. 301), that the idea of a divine Imamate or “leadership “was entirely the invention of later times because, as early as A.H. 32, in the reign of ‘Uthman, the Jewish convert ‘Abdu b. Saba of Yemen,—a district which had been conquered bv the Persian king Nushirwan, and settled by Persians for nearly a century before the coming of Islam, and so thoroughly impregnated with Persian ideas,—preached the divine right of ‘Ali. This view he maintained afterwards when ‘Ali was Khalif, in spite of ‘Ali’s own disapproval, and at ‘Ali’s murder in A.H. 40, he reiterated it in a more pronounced form : the martyred Khalifs soul, he said, was in the clouds, his voice was heard in the thunder, his presence was revealed in the lightning: in due course he would descend to earth again, and meanwhile his spirit, a divine emanation, was passed on by re-birth to the Imams his successors.

Certainly the tragedy of Kerbela. which centred in the pathetic sufferings and death of ‘Ali’s son, Husayn, as he was on his way to claim the Khalifate, produced a tremendous wave of pro-’Alid feeling: indeed a popular martyr was the one thing needed to raise devotion to the house of ‘Ali to the level of an emotional religion, though many, no doubt, supported the ‘Alid claims simply because they formed the most convenient pretext for opposing the official Khalifate, and yet remaining outwardly within the fold of Islam.

After the death of Husayn there were three different lines of ‘Alids which competed for the allegiance of the legitimist faction, those descended from (i.) Hasan, and (ii.) Husayn, the two sons of ‘Ali by his wife Fatima, the daughter of the Prophet, and both therefore representing the next of kin to the Prophet who left no son, and (iii.) the house of Muhammad, the son of ‘Ali, by another wife known as the Hanifite. Of these three we may disregard the descendants of (i.) Hasan, who ultimately migrated to Maghrab (Morocco), and became the progenitors of the Idrisid dynasty and of the Sharifs of Morocco: they formed a very moderate branch of the Shi‘ite faction, adopted many practices of the orthodox or Sunni party, and had no part in the peculiarly Persian developments of the Asiatic Shi‘ites. The first ‘Alid faction to become prominent was (iii.) the partisans of Muhammad, the son of the Hanifite, who were formed into a society by Kaysan, a freedman of ‘Ali, for the purpose of avenging Hasan and Husayn. They recognised a succession of four Imams or valid commanders, ‘Ali, Hasan, Husayn, and Muhammad, the son of the Hanifite, and maintained that, at Husayn’s death, Muhammad became de jure the Khalif and the divinely appointed head of the Church of Islam. Muhammad himself entirely disowned these partisans, but that was a detail to which they paid no attention. At Muhammad’s death in A.H. 81 this party, “the Kaysanites” as they were called, recognised his son Abu Hashim as the fifth Imam until A.H. 98, when he died childless after bequeathing his claims to Muhammad b. ‘Ali b. ‘Abdullah (d. A.H. 126), who was not of the house of ‘Ali at all, and who became the founder of the ‘Abbasid dynasty which obtained the Khalifate in A.H. 132. It was under Abu Hashim that the party, now changed in name from Kaysanites to Hashimites, became an admirably organised conspiracy which contributed more than anything else to the overthrow of the ‘Umayyad Khalifs. Throughout the Muslim dominions there was deep and ever-increasing dissatisfaction with the ‘Umayyads, who represented an arrogant parvenu Arab aristocracy, ruling over races who enjoyed an older and richer culture, and were by no means effete. The Hashimites seized hold of this discontent and sent out their missionaries (da‘i, plur. du‘at) in all directions disguised as merchants and pilgrims who relied upon private conversations and informal intercourse rather than public preaching, and thus began that unostentatious but effective propaganda, which has ever since been the chief missionary method of Islam. Hashimite teaching centered in the doctrines of tawakkuf or the theory of a divinely appointed Imam, who alone was the rightful Commander of the faithful and their authoritative teacher, of hulul or the incarnation of the Divine Spirit in the Imam, and of tenasukhu l-Arwah or the transmigration of that Spirit from each Imam to his valid successor, doctrines alien to Islam proper. With the death of the Abu Hashim this party passed over to the service of the ‘Abbasids to whom it was a source of great strength, and at their accession to the Khalifate it ceased to exist as a sect.

The most important sect, or group of sects, of the Shi‘ites was (ii.) the faction which recognised Husayn as the third Imam, and his son, ‘Ali Zayn al-Abidin (d. 94 A.H.) as his successor, the son of the Imam and of the royal princess of Persia. But at al-Abidin’s death this party split into two, some following his son Zayd (d. 121), others his son Muhammad al-Bakir (d. 113). The former or Zaydite party established itself for a considerable period in North Persia, and still maintains itself in South Arabia. Zayd himself was the friend and pupil of the Mu‘tazilite or rationalist leader Wasil ibn ‘Ata, and the Zaydites have generally been regarded as more or less free thinkers. The majority of the Shi‘ites, however, recognised Muhammad al-Bakir as the fifth Imam, and after his death Ja‘far as-Sadiq (d. 148) as the sixth, though here again there was a schism, some regarding Abu Mansur, another son of Muhammad al-Bakir, as the sixth Imam. Abu Mansur seems to have been one of the first ‘Alids to endorse the divine rights claimed for them by their followers, and did so in an extreme form, asserting that he had ascended to heaven and obtained supernatural illumination. At this time all the extremer Shi‘ites regarded the Imam as an incarnation of the Divine Spirit passed on from ‘Ali, and many believed that ‘Ali was the true prophet of God whose office had been fraudulently intercepted by Muhammad.

The Mansuris, however, were a minor sect, the majority of the Shi‘ites foliowed Ja‘far who was Imam at the time of the ‘Abbasid revolution. He was one of those who were deeply influenced by the traditions of Hellenistic philosophy and science, and was the author of works on chemistry; augury, and omens: he is usually credited with being the founder, or at least the chief exponent, of what are known as batinite views, that is to say, the allegorical interpretation of the Qur‘an as having an esoteric meaning, which can only be learned from the Imam who is illuminated by divine wisdom, and who alone is able to reveal its true sense. The inner meaning thus revealed was usually a more or less imperfect reproduction of Aristotelian doctrine as it had been handed down by the Syriac writers. Like his brother, Abu Mansur Ja‘far fully endorsed the doctrine of a divine Imamate and the transmigration of the Divine Spirit, then tabernacled in himself, and it seems probable that Van Vloten (Recherches sur la domination arabe, 1894, pp. 44–45) is right in suggesting that the general promulgation of these beliefs amongst the Shi‘ites was largely due to the labours of the Hashimite missionaries.

The contemporary establishment of the ‘Abbasids made a far-reaching change in the conditions of Islam. The Arabs began to take a secondary place, and Persian influences became predominant. In 135 the noble Persian family of the Barmiecides began to furnish wazirs or Prime Ministers to the Khalifate, and controlled its policy for a period of fifty-four years. Nearly all important offices were given to Persians, and a distinct anti-Arab party was formed, known as the Shu‘ubiyya, which produced a prolific controversial literature which expressed the hatred stored up under generations of ‘Umayyad misrule : the Arab was held up to derision, his pretensions to aristocratie descent were contrasted with the much more ancient genealogies of the Persian nobles, and he was portrayed as little better than an illiterate savage. In literature, in science, in Muslim jurisprudence and theology, and even in the scientific treatment of Arabic grammar, the Persians altogether surpassed the Arabs, so that we must be careful not to talk of Arab philosophy, Arab science, etc., in the history of Muslim civilization, but always of Arabic philosophy, etc., remembering that it was not the science and philosophy of the Arabs, but that of the Arabic speaking people, amongst whom only a small minority were actually of Arab race : and this applies to the “golden age” of Arabic literature (A.H. 132–232). On the other hand it must be remembered that, indirectly and unintentionally, the ‘Umayyads had helped towards this result. It was under their rule that the Arabic language had been introduced into the public administration, and in due course replaced Greek and Persian in all public business, so that it became the common speech of all Western Asia, or at least a common medium of intercourse between those who used various languages in their private life, and thus the brilliant intellectual and literary renascence was rendered possible by a wide exchange of thought.

We may rightly refer to this period as a renascence, for it meant quickening into new and other life the embers of the later Hellenistic culture, and especially of the Aristotelian philosophy and medical and natural science, which had never quite died away in Western Asia, but had been checked by its passage into Syriacspeaking and Persian-speaking communities, amongst whom the language in which the original authorities were written was only imperfectly known. Thus Hellenism suffered a phase of provincialism, which came to an end when Arabic appeared as a more or less cosmopolitan language, and thought began to be exchanged by different races and social groups. Under the early ‘Abbasids, and especially under the Khalif al-Ma’mum (A.H. 198–218), there was a vast amount of translation from Greek into Arabic until the greater part of Aristotle, of the neo-Platonic commentators on Aristotle, of Galen, some parts of Plato, and other material, were freely accessible to the Muslim world; whilst at the same time translations were made from Indian writers on mathematics, medicine, and astronomy, some directly from the Sanskrit, and others from old Persian versions.

As a result the philosophical speculations of the Greeks began to act as a solvent upon Islamic theology, and from this doctrinal discussions and controversies arose which, on the one side, produced a series of rationalistic heresies, and on the other side laid the foundations of an orthodox Muslim scholasticism. Long before this Hellenistic influences had permeated Persia and Mesopotamia, and these now revived and resulted in a philosophical presentation of religion which, under the veil of allegorical explanations of the Qur‘an, was really undermining orthodox doctrine, and heading towards either pantheism or simple agnosticism. With these tendencies the pro-Persian party was particularly associated. The Khalifs who, in spite of Arab birth, were most devoted tc Persian ideas, largely because the Persians were subtle courtiers and were the champions of absolutism, were amongst those most ardent in promoting the study of Greek philosophy; and the Imams, such as Ja‘far and his brother Zayd, were even more devotedly attached to this type of philosophical speculation which was acting as a powerful solvent on the traditional beliefs of orthodox Islam.

At Ja‘far’s death another schism took place, indeed the perpetual sub-division into new sects has always been a salient characteristic of the Shi‘iya. Ja‘far had nominated his son Isma‘il as his successor, but afterwards disinherited him because he had been found in a state of intoxication and chose as heir his second son, Musa al-Oazam. There were some, however, who still adhered to Isma‘il, and refused to admit that his father had power to transfer the divinely ordained succession at will; they asserted indeed that the son’s drunkenness was itself a sign of his superior illumination as showing that he knew that the ritual laws of the Qur‘an were not to be taken literally, but had an esoteric meaning which did not appear on the surface. Musa, the seventh Imam as generally reckoned, and his son, ‘Ali ar-Rida (p. 202), the “two patient ones,” suffered harsh treatment at the hands of the contemporary ‘Abbasid rulers; they were brought from Madina by Harun ar-Rashid so as to be under the observation of the court, and in 148 Musa was poisoned by the wazir Ibn Khalid. His son ‘Ali married the daughter of the Khalif Ma’mun, and was intended to be the heir to the throne. But Ma’mun very nearly provoked civil war by his strong Shi‘ite sympa...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Half Title
• Title Page
• Copyright
• Contents
• Introductory Note
• Chapter I. The Shi‘ites or Schismatics of Islam
• Chapter II. The Isma‘ilian Sect
• Chapter III. The Qarmatians
• Chapter IV. The Establishment of the Fatimids in North Africa
• Chapter V. The Fatimid Khalifs of Kairawan
• Chapter VI. The Second Fatimid Khalif, Al-Qa‘im
• Chapter VII. The Third Fatimid Khalif, Al-Mansur
• Chapter VIII. The Fourth Fatimid Khalif, Al-Mo‘izz
• Chapter IX. The Fifth Fatimid Khalif, Al-‘Aziz
• Chapter X. The Sixth Fatimid Khalif, Al-Hakim
• Chapter XI. The Seventh Fatimid Khalif, Az-Zahir
• Chapter XII. The Eighth Fatimid Khalif, Al-Mustansir
• Chapter XIII. The Ninth Fatimid Khalif, Al-Mustali
• Chapter XIV. The Tenth Fatimid Khalif, Al-Amir
• Chapter XV. The Eleventh Fatimid Khalif, Al-Hafiz
• Chapter XVI. The Twelfth Fatimid Khalif, Az-Zafir
• Chapter XVII. The Thirteenth Fatimid Khalif, Al-Fa‘iz
• Chapter XVIII. The Fourteenth Fatimid Khalif, Al-‘Adid
• Chapter XIX. The Fatimid Khalifate in its Relation to General History
• Chapter XX. The Later History of the Isma‘ilian Sect
• Bibliography
• Index