803 - 015 - The New Political And Social Order

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The New Political And Social Order

The basic political facts make it hard to grasp that beneath the surface of events, this was also a period of reconstruction and the creation of new governmental and societal institutions. Everywhere the legacy of the Islamic caliphate and the heritage of Persian concepts of imperial monarchy were blended with Turkish concepts of political chieftaincy, law, and world conquest. While regimes came and went, while conquerors succeeded each other, the system of governing came to be fixed in similar modes. The Seljuk period (1040–1200) was particularly important in this regard. Seljuk institutions, first formed in Khurasan and western Iran and Iraq, were carried westward to Syria, Egypt, and Anatolia. Later Mongol and post-Mongol period governments added additional elements from their historical heritage to the synthesis of new institutions.

During the period when nomadic chieftains ruled, authority often passed to atabegs, guardians for princes who had not yet reached the age of majority. The Armenian-born convert Badr al-Din Lulu, for example, served as vizier to the last Zangid prince of Mosul in 1222 and then became regent of the city from 1234 until his death in 1259. Badr al-Din is depicted on a frontispiece from a multivolume copy of Kitab al-Aghani (The Book of Songs), al-Isfahani’s collection of early Islamic poetry, made in 1219.

The caliphate, although deprived of administrative and military power, retained its symbolic importance as the emblem of a Muslim world order and as the bearer of ultimate guarantees for religious belief, justice, and political order. For centuries all provincial governors and warlords looked to the caliphs for recognition of their right to rule. Even after the extinction of the Abbasid line in 1258, regional substitutes emerged. The Mamluks in Egypt crowned a survivor of the Abbasid family as their caliph. Great warlords claimed implicitly and explicitly to embody the caliphate in their own persons. The Ottoman sultans considered themselves caliphs, and the Safavids regarded themselves as descendants and embodiments of the Shiite imams.

At the same time, the conquerors and warlords cultivated a parallel non-Muslim concept of authority. They gave themselves such titles as shah, malik, and sultan, all supreme rulers. They recalled historical tribal genealogies to guarantee their descent from famous rulers of the past; they patronized court cultures replete with poets, scientists, philosophers, theologians, artists, and architects. They built magnificent mosques, tombs, colleges, minarets, caravanserais, and palaces in the fashion of past Middle Eastern rulers, to say by their patronage of culture that they were the protectors and overlords of the domain of human civilization. They sponsored religious activities, schools, worship, and charities, and gave gifts and pensions to scholars and holy men. In practice, they made themselves patrons of religion and necessary to the success of Islam.

The governments established after the fall of the Abbasid empire were of two principal types. The most common, represented by the Qarakhanids, Seljuks, and Mongols, were nomadic chieftaincies transformed into monarchies. The nomadic chief ruled by virtue of his conquests or descent from conquerors. He was supported by a coalition of aristocratic lineages that was entitled to share in the spoils of victory. Nomadic states commonly divided their territories into domains for the leading members of the ruling family. Family chieftains and the guardians of chieftains who were still underage (known as atabegs) became the provincial governors and tributaries of the reigning sultans. The nomadic populations constituted a military elite that was commonly moved toward the frontiers, both to further the conquest of new lands and to prevent further harm to the agricultural and urbanized societies that had become part of the chieftain’s domains. The post-Abbasid states were typically built on the support of tribal populations that extended the reach of the ruling circle beyond that of the governing family coalition.

Although the empires were conquered by nomadic peoples, they were ruled from the center by quite different elites. Turkish chieftains commonly built up a governing apparatus that made them independent of their own nomadic supporters. Adopting historic mechanisms of rule, they created court complexes of family retainers, servants, noble companions, military officers, and high-ranking administrators that constituted the political elite of their regimes. The sultans built up slave military corps to serve as praetorian guards and to serve in battle against both foreign enemies and their own nomadic supporters. These slaves were the best trained, best equipped, and were thought to be the most loyal subjects of the ruler.

The court and the slave military apparatus were supported by a tax-collecting administration. Post-Abbasid rulers continued to use the bureaucratic techniques of their predecessors, maintaining scribal staffs for record-keeping, tax collection, correspondence, and payment of salaries and pensions, but bureaucratic administration greatly shrunk in the post-Abbasid era. Economic regression cut into the cash flows that were essential for a centralized administration and forced post-Abbasid governments to rely more and more heavily on decentralized forms of administration. The most common method came to be the direct assignment of iqtas — tax revenues from specific territories paid as salaries to military officers and often collected directly from the peasants. The iqta system bypassed the cumbersome process of tax collection, sale of produce, and redistribution of the revenues in the form of cash salaries, but it also gave direct access to and control of the land to the warlords. This was a quasi-feudal system of government, but one in which the central government retained authority over the land and the right to grant and withdraw grants of land made in return for military service. It was not feudal in the European sense because in principle assignment of a benefice did not imply ownership of the land, or judicial, administrative, or personal control of the peasants. In practice, it often meant just that.

The second type of regime was the purely military slave elite. In the case of the Ghaznavids in Afghanistan or the Mamluks in Egypt, the slave officers themselves overthrew dynastic rulers and built governments solely of slaves, from ordinary soldiers to the heads of states. The slave regimes, however, functioned in much the same manner as the nomadic chieftaincies in terms of court, military, and bureaucratic structures.

These regimes faced two political problems. The first problem was the tendency toward progressive decentralization of power. Control of the provinces had to be delegated to family members and nomadic chieftains. Iqtas had to be assigned to the military leaders. The weakness of the bureaucratic apparatus prevented close control over these assignments. The result was usurpation of power at both provincial and local levels and the establishment of independent micro-regimes, sometimes even hereditary regimes, within the nominal territories of the state. The second problem was the paradoxical relationship of the sultans and the central government to the nomadic forces. The nomads conquered the new territories, but they soon came into conflict with their own chieftains. The royal and would-be royal families wanted to centralize power, protect the conquered and settled populations from damage, and tax the productive economies, while the nomadic interest lay in obtaining booty, lands for pasturage, and freedom from government control. In the early phases of a conquest, sultans channeled the nomadic migrations toward the frontiers; but as each wave of conquerors settled, nomadic populations and their royal chieftains commonly came into conflict over territory, privileges, and taxation. Rulers tried to reduce the once conquering peoples into docile subjects. The success, power, and longevity of their regimes depended in good measure on the balance of central and nomadic powers.

In many respects the critical achievement of the ephemeral post-Abbasid regimes was cultural. Each ruler maintained a court as the center of literary, artistic, and religious production, as an indispensable sign of his legitimacy and his claims to equal status with other rulers. In the post-Abbasid period not only Baghdad but also Samarqand, Bukhara, Ghazna, Nishapur, Isfahan, Mosul, Damascus, Cairo, Fez, Córdoba, and many other cities became important centers of Muslim learning, art, and literature. Political fragmentation fueled an extraordinary outburst of cultural creativity. Many local courts became patrons of architectural construction and producers of books and illustrated manuscripts as well as patrons of such luxury objects as fine pottery, metalware, rugs, glass, and other finely crafted materials. Courts were also often patrons of scientific research, philosophical speculation, literature, poetry, history, and religious subjects.|

Moreover, the courts commonly patronized very similar, often the same, versions of culture. Poets, writers, and philosophers made their livings by moving from court to court, creating the same achievements in different places. Skilled craftsmen, seeking refuge from the Mongols, fled Mesopotamia for Cairo in the middle of the thirteenth century, reviving the old regional arts in a new location. Sometimes conquerors forcibly transferred skilled artists to their new capitals, as did the Turkic conqueror Timur when he tried to build the glory of Samarqand. Also, rulers demanded similar products. Copies of the History of Alexander the Great or the tales of the Kalila wa Dimna were translated and illustrated for numerous courts, such as Samanid Bukhara, Timurid Samarqand, and Mamluk Cairo. By these processes a common culture of kings emerged, and with it the concept of the family of kings and the brotherhood of rulers who had the same responsibilities, the same status, and a common lifestyle.

Thus, out of the conquest and fragmentation there developed broad zones of common culture. In the courts of the Samanids and Ghaznavids a new Irano-Islamic language and Persian culture developed. It was characterized by the preservation of the literary legacy of ancient, pre-Islamic Iran, and it was deeply influenced by caliphal Arabic poetry and by the translation of literary and religious classics from Arabic into Persian. The new language had its own standard metrical forms for odes and the common Sufi love and wine poems. A standard architectural form for mosques and madrasas also developed — a building arranged symmetrically around a central dome, constructed of brick and decorated with tiles and muqarnas (a decorative element that resembles a stalactite).

The new Persian language, literature, and artistic style quickly became the common cultural idiom of all the former eastern lands of the caliphate, including Iran, Transoxiana, and inner Asia, and they eventually reached into newly conquered Islamic lands in India and the East Indies. This Irano-Islamic culture in turn fostered the creation of a new Turko-Persian culture. The Qarakhanid rulers of Transoxiana, followed by the Mongols and the Timurids, sponsored the translation of Persian classics into Turkic languages. Variants spread throughout inner Asia under Mongol and Chagatay rule and later became the basis of Ottoman culture. Meanwhile, Arabic literature derived from the caliphal era and from Islamic religious studies became the common language and literary medium of the former western territories of the Arab-Islamic empire, from Iraq to the Atlantic Ocean. Just as certain political institutions had become by imitation and diffusion the common forms of state organization among the numerous regimes of the interregnum era, so too a common high culture had emerged in Arabic, Persian, and Turkic versions, despite intense decentralization in all the domains of Middle Eastern Islam.

The Persian language became the cultural idiom both of all the former lands of the eastern caliphate and of the newly conquered regions of the Indian subcontinent. Arabic texts, such as Ibn Bakhtishu’s bestiary, Manafi al-Hayawan (The advantages of animals), were translated into Persian, as in this illustrated copy made at Maragha in northwest Iran in the 1290s.

The political upheavals of the intermediate era were also the impetus for a correspondingly profound transformation of the social organization of Middle Eastern populations. Throughout the region, the subject population was exposed to extraordinary danger from marauding armies, economic hardship, rapid changes of political overlords, the decline of older landowning and bureaucratic elites, and the imposition of new foreign rulers. In response, people throughout the region drew together in defensive movements and created a new communal structure. This new order was based on Islam.

Paradoxically, the Abbasid empire in many ways delayed the diffusion of Islam to the mass of Middle Eastern populations. Although the empire was the official sponsor and protector of Islam and promoted Islamic law and worship, the new religion remained nonetheless the religion of a minority. The Abbasid empire accepted the existing Christian, Jewish, and Zoroastrian communities, accepted the authority of church elites, and cooperated with non-Muslim administrators, landowners, and bankers in the management of the empire. The political system had thus removed the worldly incentives for conversion to Islam.

With the breakup of the Abbasid empire, however, the old social elites were swept away. Churches could no longer protect their peoples, landowning families were dispossessed, and the administration crumbled. The result was a vacuum of leadership into which was drawn the only surviving elite element — Muslim scholars (ulama), teachers, preachers, and holy men. The Karramiya (a religious movement that combined theological principles, Sufi practices, and a social mission) established networks of khanaqas or Sufi residences, which eventually became the basis of community organization and conversion in eastern Iran. Sufis in western Iran, for example, under the leadership of the Sufi preacher Shaykh Abu Ishaq al-Kazeruni (963–1033), began to convert Zoroastrian villagers to Islam. Town quarters became organized under the aegis of Islamic schools of law, Shi’i communities, or Sufi and other religious leadership. By the twelfth century the majority of Middle Eastern populations was identified with Islam; its communal leaders were Muslim ulama and Sufis; Christians, Jews, and Zoroastrians had become demographic as well as political minorities everywhere.

The newly Islamized populations were provided with new forms of communal organization. These forms had their origins in the earlier Islamic period. As early as 660, Muslims had begun to divide into two camps: the Sunnis, supporters of the existing Umayyad and later Abbasid caliphates, and the Shiites, who opposed the established regimes and held that only the descendants of Ali had the right to the leadership of the Muslims. In the tenth century the Shi’ites, by then deprived of the living imams, codified their tradition in books of hadith, law, and theology, and elaborated a ritual calendar focused on the veneration of the tombs of Ali at An-Najaf (in southern-central Iraq) and Husayn (who was massacred by Umayyad troops at Karbala in 680) at Karbala (in central Iraq).

Among the Sunnis a variety of small religious communities took form as people gathered around readers of the Qur’an, reciters of the hadith, scholars of law, and theologians and mystics, to whom they looked for religious inspiration and guidance. The legal schools evolved from informal discussion groups of scholars, students, and judges into quasi-administrative bodies producing codes of law under state patronage, staffing the judiciary, carrying on legal instruction, administering communal and intestate properties, and providing informal leadership and instruction for the common people. By the ninth century the Hanbali school (founded by the theologian and jurist Ahmad ibn Hanbal) was already an organized pressure group trying to impose its concept of Islam on the caliphate.

With the breakup of the Abbasid empire, the legal schools were modified to become the basis of a mass Islamic society. Provided with endowments, the schools created permanent institutions known as madrasas (teaching colleges and residences) as the basis of their activities. The colleges provided buildings, residences, libraries, kitchens, and stipends for both teachers and students. The ulama also assumed a larger role in their communities. They often married into local landowning and administrative families and organized gangs, quarters, and sectarian associations under their leadership. The ulama also represented the urban populations to the conquerors, providing local administration and justice, arranging for local security, public works, taxation, charities, and other services.

At the same time, a new form of Islamic communal organization under Sufi auspices came into being. Sufis had for centuries coalesced around charismatic holy men, sometimes taking up residence in khanaqas provided to shelter them and facilitate their meetings, worship, and instruction. In the twelfth century Sufi organizations, partly under the influence of the legal schools and of state support, became more formal still. The authority of shaykhs over disciples became absolute; the rituals of devotion and transmission of authority were more elaborate, as Sufis adapted the khirqa (the transmission of the robes of the master) and the silsila (the chain of masters and disciples going back to the Prophet himself) as the badges of their affiliation. Soon Sufis became organized in tariqat (brotherhoods), as disciples and lieutenants created new branches to whom they transmitted their particular forms of worship. The transmission of dhikr (the meditational method of concentrating the soul on the veneration of God) was the defining quality of each brotherhood. As Sufi brotherhoods became more formally organized, they took on more important social roles. In towns and villages throughout the Middle East lay Muslims came to the Sufis for supplementary worship, for spiritual consolation, healing, and charity, and for political mediation of problems between the people and the governments or between factional and tribal rivals. Alongside the legal schools, Sufi communities emerged as a basic organizing social force among Muslims.

Sufism, or Islamic mysticism, emerged as a basic socializing force during this period. The authority of shaykhs became absolute, and they passed their authority to their disciples, who were organized into brotherhoods. The shrine of Shaykh Nimatullah Vali (d. 1431) at Mahan, for example, became a major Sufi center for southeastern Iran and India.

Sufism also provided the rationale for a looser type of communal organization. The tombs of famous ancestors and Sufi masters came to be venerated as the providers of miraculous help, and shrines emerged as a focus of Muslim worship. Descendants of sainted Sufis, and their lineages and brotherhoods, became custodians of the holy places to which thousands of people would come, seeking the intercession of the buried holy men and the transmission of baraka (God’s power through the Sufi to his needy clients). Shrines became the focus of pilgrimages and fairs. In many parts of Iran, Sufi brotherhoods organized military defense and resistance to predatory nomadic clans and governing chieftains. Often espousing a mix of Shi’i and Sunni views — or from the perspective of the governments and the urban ulama, heretical teachings — Sufi movements became the expression of religio-political protest against abusive elites.

The consolidation of Shi’ite sectarian communities, Sunni schools of law, and Sufi lineages, brotherhoods, and shrine communities thus provided a communal structure for Muslims throughout the Middle East. In this period of upheaval, Islamic authority and Islamic religious bodies provided the basis for community order and solidarity. A new mass Middle Eastern society based on Islam had come into being.

The New Political And Social Order

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