Umayyad Caliphate

“ Their arrogant and factious spirit had its focus in Al-Kufa and in Al-Basra; in both these cities, indeed, it had already under 'Omar shown itself; for even he had not been able effectually to curb their insolence. The Arabs were impatient of control, partly because the success of Islam was due to their arms; partly because, in the brotherhood of the Faith, all Believers, specially those of Arab blood, stood on equal ground. The power of the Caliph, indeed, as successor to the Prophet, was absolute, uncontrolled by any constitutional authority whatever. ”

“ Abroad his rule was equally successful, and extended the boundaries of Islam in all directions.
'Amr. His death, 43 A.H.
'Amr held the government of Egypt during the rest of his long life, which, indeed, had been one of the most eventful in this history. No man influenced more than he the fortunes of the Caliphate. Brave in the field, astute in counsel, coarse and unscrupulous in word and deed, it was mainly to 'Amr that Mu'awiya owed his ascendency over 'Ali, and the eventual establishment of the Umeiyad dynasty. ”

“ Al-Kufa and Al-Basra, unique in their own origin, had a singular influence on the destinies of the Caliphate and of Islam at large. The vast majority of the population were of pure Arabian blood. The tribes which, scenting from afar the prey of Chaldæa and Persia, kept streaming into Chaldæa from every corner of Arabia, settled chiefly there. ”

“ With him expired the eastern Caliphate of the Abbasids, which had lasted 524 years, from the entry of Abuʽl-Abbas into Kufa.
In vain, three years later, did Abu’l-Qasim Ahmad, a scion of the race of the Abbasids, who had taken refuge in Egypt with Bibars the Mameluke sultan, and who had been proclaimed caliph under the title al-Mostanṣir billāh (“he who seeks help from God”) , make an effort to restore a dynasty which was now for ever extinct. At the head of an army he marched against Bagdad, but was defeated and killed before he reached that city. ”

“ Khalid retired to Hims, and did not long survive. His manner of life when in the full tide of prosperity, may be gathered from the brief notice that in the Plague, from which he fled with his family to the desert, he is said to have lost no fewer than forty sons. Soon after, in the eighth year of 'Omar's caliphate, he died. ”

“ Every petty amir then tried to seize sovereign power for himself, and the people groaned under the consequent anarchy. Weary of these commotions, the Arabs of Spain at last came to an understanding among themselves for the election of a caliph, and their choice fell upon one of the last survivors of the Omayyads, Abdarrahmān b. Moawiya, grandson of the caliph Hishām. This prince was wandering in the deserts of Africa, pursued by his implacable enemies, but everywhere protected and concealed by the desert tribes, who pitied his misfortunes and respected his illustrious origin. ”

“ Such Moslems as were under Turkish authority were not affected by the Caliphate of their Sultan. The relation of subjects to their rulers in Mohammedan realms not subordinated to Turkey were even less affected; and least of all did the matter signify to those followers of Islam ruled by non-Mohammedans. These are numerous and have steadily increased during the last centuries. An effective Caliphate, however explained, presupposes the political unity of all the faithful. ”

“ Verily, but for my promise to Mu'awiya, who bade me stay the sword, I had not left here a single soul alive!" Then he threatened the leading citizens with death if they refused to acknowledge Mu'awiya as their Caliph; and so, fearing for their lives, all took the oath of allegiance to the Umeiyad ruler. Passing on to Mecca, the same scene was enacted by the imperious envoy there, and with the same result.1 Then marching south to the Yemen, he committed great atrocities there upon the adherents of 'Ali. The governor, a son of Al-'Abbas, escaped to his cousin 'Ali at Al-Kufa. ”

“ It was indeed a thing of which the brave old Caliph might proud. ‘The Arabs,’ so the tradition runs, ‘were on all sides rising in rebellion. Apostasy and disaffection began to raise their heads; Christians and Jews to stretch out their necks; and the Faithful were left like a flock of sheep without a shepherd—their Prophet gone, their numbers few, and their foes a multitude.’ It was in face of all this that Abu Bekr sent off beyond recall his only force, and left Medîna open and, to the outward eye, defenceless. ”

“ Next came a series of official and officious publications, all based on the hypothesis that the Turkish Sultan-Caliph is the man who, under all circumstances, controls the political policy of the Mohammedans.
Taking all these points into consideration, it becomes hardly needful to reply to the question as to how the Shereef of [Pg 34] Mecca might, perhaps, try to become a rival of the Sultan Mehmed Reshad as a pretender to the Caliphate.
A Caliphate, no matter who holds the dignity, is wholly incompatible with modern political conditions. ”

“ After some days spent at Rabadza, the Caliph returned to Medîna.
Islam must be reimposed on all Arabia.
The army by this time was refitted. The tithes had begun to come in from many neighbouring tribes in token of submission. Medîna was no longer in peril, and the citizens breathed freely. But a heavy burden still lay upon the Caliph. Islam was to be the faith of all Arabia;—‘Throughout the peninsula there shall be no second creed,’ was the behest of Mahomet on his death-bed. False prophets must be crushed; rebels vanquished ”

“ The imprecations against the memory of 'Ali, his house, and his adherents, still formed part of the public service; and so indeed, they continued to do throughout the Umeiyad Caliphate, except during the Caliphate of 'Omar. ”

“ The second cause, though less threatening to Islam, was more insidious, and fraught with greater danger to the Caliphate and the person of Othmân himself. Had the Coreish rallied loyally around the throne, the Arab factions might have been nipped in the bud. But the weakness of Othmân, and the partiality with which he favoured his own friends and relatives, stirred the jealousy of the house of Hâshim, which began vaunting the claims of Aly and the Prophet’s family, and depreciating the Omeyyad branch to which the Caliph belonged. ”

“ The Abbasids, on the contrary, were a Persian dynasty, under which the Arab tribal system, as regulated by Omar, fell to pieces; the Persians of Khorasan were the real rulers, and the government became despotic as in the days of Chrosroes.” The reign of Abuʽl-Abbas and the first part of that of Mansur had been almost a continuation of the former period. But now his equals in birth and rank, the Omayyads and the Alids, had been crushed; the principal actors in the great struggle, the leaders of the propaganda and Abu Moslim were out of the way; the caliph stood far above all his subjects ”

“ Al-Kufa, and Mu'awiya, his point for the present gained, to Damascus. As 'Ali entered Al-Kufa, he heard wailing on every side. A chief man, whom he bade to pacify the mourners, answered: "O Caliph, it is not as if but two or three had been slain; of this clan alone hard by, an hundred and four score lie buried at Siffin. There is not a house but the women are weeping in it for their dead." ”

“ This opinion is supported by neither Mohammedan law nor by Mohammedan history. Mecca and Medina have known periods when, for instance, they were in the hands of [Pg 36] the unbelieving Karmathians, when again they submitted to the heretical Fatimide-Caliphs, when all relations with the seat of the Caliphate were suspended, when the Wahhabis drove the Turks from the Holy Land; on none of these occasions did it occur to a single Moslem to question the right of the Caliph to his dignity. The Caliphate and the Holy Land have, more than once, existed independently of each other. ”

“ Months passed, and things did not mend at Al-Kufa. Most of the leading men, whose influence could have kept the populace in check, were away on military command in Persia; and the malcontents, in treasonable correspondence with the Egyptian faction, gained head daily. In an unlucky moment, Sa'id planned a visit to Medina, there to lay his troubles before the Caliph. ”

“ Both the Christian and the Moslem pontiff was the real temporal sovereign of a small state; each claimed to be spiritual sovereign over the whole of the Faithful; each was recognized as such by a large body, but rejected by others. But in truth the spiritual recognition of the Abbaside caliphs was more nearly universal in their last age than it had ever been before." With the fall of Bagdad fell the caliphate as a temporal sovereignty; but it survived, or was resurrected, in its spiritual functions, to become merged, a little later, in the supremacy of the sultan of the Ottoman Turks. ”

“ But the disintegration of the Caliphate was an idea which had as yet hardly entered into the minds of the Faithful. The unity of Islam, established by the precedent of the quarter of a century, was still, and long continued to be, the ruling sentiment of the nation. ”

“ It was this which made the Arabic speaking community of Islam so favourable a medium of cultural transmission. The 'Umayyad period was a marking time during which this common life was being evolved, and with it was evolved necessarily the bitterness of sectarian and faction divisions which always result when divergent types are in too close contact with one another. ”

“ In modern Europe, owing to the popularity of The Arabian Nights, the word Caliphate naturally suggests Baghdad ; but the Abbasid dynasty, with that city as capital for nearly the whole of its duration, was at no time in control of the whole Moslem community ; the family which they had displaced founded a dynasty in Spain and North Africa, and presently felt strong enough to resume the title of Caliph, and ere longTyet another Caliphate was established in Egypt. It is an accident that the fame of these Caliphates has found little echo in modern Europe. ”

“ Such, then, was the magnificent province lying between the Desert and mountain range of Persia—the cradle of civilization and the arts—which now attracted the Muslim arms. The first to oppose them was Hormuz, Satrap of the Delta, a tyrant hated by his Arab subjects. To him, as master of the tribes gathering in front, Khalid addressed a letter in the haughty type of Muslim summons: "Accept the Faith and thou art safe; else pay tribute, thou and thy people; which if thou refusest, thou shalt have thyself to blame. A people is already on thee, loving death even as thou lovest life2." ”

“ Excepting raids of little import, Syria had for some time enjoyed rest, when suddenly in the second year of 'Othman's caliphate, Mu'awiya was startled with by the approach of an army from Asia Minor, which he had not the means to oppose. Help was ordered from the eastern provinces, and 8000 volunteers soon joined the Syrian army. Thus reinforced, the Arabs repulsed the Byzantine attack. ”

“ Mohammedism, fierce and militant, conduced to those upheavals of migration and conquest which since the seventh century have so often transformed the political geography of the Old World. The vast empire of the Caliphate, from its starting point in Arabia, spread in eighty years from the Oxus River to the Atlantic Ocean.1183 The rapid rise and spread between 1745 and 1803 of the Wahaby clan and sect, the Puritans of Islam, which resulted for a time in their political and religious domination of much of Arabia from their home in the Nejd, recalls the stormy conquests of Mohammed's followers. ”

“ So Bagdad, or properly “the round city” of Mansur, on the western bank of the Tigris, was built as the capital. Strictly it was a huge citadel, in the centre of which was the palace of the caliph and the great mosque. But around this nucleus there soon grew up the great metropolis which was to be the centre of the civilized world as long as the Caliphate lasted. [30] The building lasted three years and was completed in the year 149 (A.D. 766) . That year is really the beginning of the new era. “The Omayyads,” says the Spanish writer Ibn Ḥazm, “were an Arabic dynasty ”

“ Arabia ever since the year 1200 A.D.—ever thought of such a thing. It is improbable that even foreign influence could prevail on a Shereef of Mecca to attempt to gamble for the Caliphate. They all know too well how little chance of success there would be in such an attempt, and they feel themselves limited by tradition and by their resources to the Hijaz. ”

“ Museilima, we are told, deceived the people by pretended miracles, counterfeited the language of the Koran, and
1 See Life of Mohammad, p. 477. 28
instituted prayers like those of Mohammad. In short, his religion was but a wretched travesty of Islam. Though strongly supported by his own people both as their Prophet and their Ruler, he now felt that the meshes of Abu Bekr began to close round him. The Caliph's Generals were steadily reclaiming the coast of the Persian Gulf, and Khalid whom he dreaded most was not far behind. ”

“ This caliph was buried in Damascus, where he had established the seat of the caliphate; and that city always retained this prerogative of dignity so long as the Ommiyades, or defenders of Moawiyah reigned. In the time of the Abbasides it was transferred to Anbar, Haschemyah, and Bagdad. The inscription of Moawiyah’s seal was, “Every work hath its reward,” or as others say, “There is no strength but in God.” ”

“ Omar died in 644, and under his successor, Othman, the Arabian conquests were extended in Northern Africa. Othman dying in 656, the claims of Ali were warmly supported, but not universally recognised, many looking to Muawia as an acceptable candidate for the caliphate. This was especially the view of the Syrian Muham-medans, and in 661 Muawia I. was elected caliph. He promptly transferred the capital from Medina to Damascus, and became in fact the founder of a dynasty known as the Ommayads, the new caliph being a descendant of the famous Arabian chieftain Ommayad. ”