Hasan, therefore, by 1094 led a movement opposed to both the Saljuqs and the Fatimids. Because of Hasan’s highly publicized activism, he attracted the support of Isma‘ilis throughout Iran and Syria, and he soon came to rule over what was in effect a Nizari “state.” It was not a territorial country with borders, but rather was composed of widely scattered fortresses, together with surrounding farms, villages, and, in a few cases, towns. These fortresses were located in eastern and southern Iran, the Elburz and Zagros mountain ranges, and northern Syria. Although occasionally a local Isma‘ili leader might disagree with a policy adopted at Alamut, most of the time the various Nizari communities worked together with remarkable coordination. Hasan and his seven successors were commonly referred to as the Lords of Alamut. Alamut itself developed a reputation not only for terror, but also for being an intellectual center. As we shall see, Nizaris were remarkably active in the cultural life of the twelfth and thirteenth centuries. Alamut housed one of the world’s greatest research libraries of the period and hosted many scholars–Twelver Shi‘ites and Sunnis as well as Isma‘ilis.
The Muslim West
The Muslim lands bordering the western Mediterranean enjoyed a halcyon period during the second half of the tenth century. The eleventh century, on the other hand, witnessed a profound change in the fortunes of the region. A combination of internal conflicts and foreign invaders threatened the very existence of the western wing of the Dar al-Islam and led to the permanent loss of Sicily and parts of Andalus.
Norman Invasions of Muslim Territory
A major theme in the history of the western Mediterranean basin in the eleventh century was the irruption into the area of a people known as the Normans. The Normans, more famous for William the Conqueror’s exploits of 1066 at Hastings, had made a name for themselves years earlier in the warmer climes of the Mediterranean. It would have taken a keen eye at the time to discern in the bloody conquests of those brutal and avaricious knights the first inklings of a newly empowered Europe. In fact, however, they were the vanguard of an expansive Europe that was undergoing an economic revival and a “baby boom.” Abundant food, commerce, cities, and education were finally coming to western Europe. The wealth and power of that society expressed itself in the military expeditions of the eleventh century by the knights of the Norman conquests, the Reconquista, and the Crusades. The earliest triumphs were by the Normans, and they inflicted territorial losses on the Muslims that have lasted to the present.
Beginning in the early eleventh century, small groups of Norman adventurers began entering southern Italy in search of their fortune. In that welter of small, feuding states they had been able to sell their services to local lords and then to take over from their erstwhile masters. Confounding their contemporaries, who assumed that, as cavalrymen, they were strictly land based, some of them took advantage of Zirid weakness as early as 1034 and began occupying port cities in Ifriqiya. Of much greater interest to them, however, was Sicily, which had the appeal both of proximity to the Italian peninsula and of prosperity.
Sicily had been under Muslim control for two centuries. The Aghlabids had slowly conquered the island from the Byzantines during the period 827–878. During that period, Sicily served as a base for Muslim raids into Italy, the most famous of which was the sack of the basilicas of St. Peter and St. Paul in 848. In 909–910, the Fatimids conquered the Aghlabids and thereby became the masters of Sicily. By mid-century, when the great Fatimid general Jawhar was preoccupied with reestablishing control over the Berbers of Ifriqiya and with planning the conquest of Egypt, the island had become in effect an autonomous province under a local Muslim dynasty.
Throughout its two centuries as a Muslim-controlled island, Sicily played an important political and cultural role. Like every other Mediterranean state of the period, its relations with its neighbors, Christian and Muslim alike, included piracy, wars, trade agreements, and cultural exchanges. The island’s agriculture, like that of Andalus, achieved unprecedented prosperity as a result of new irrigation techniques, the breaking up of large land holdings, and the introduction of new crops such as citrus fruits, sugar cane, new vegetables, and date palms. Castles, palaces, mosques, and gardens patterned after Iranian models changed the landscape, and poetry, law, and Qur’anic studies flourished. Sicilian Christians and Jews assumed the typical status of dhimmis, paying the poll tax, but allowed freedom of worship.
After about 1040, two developments led to the destruction of Muslim Sicily. First, the authority of the ruling Muslim dynasty was eroded, and Sicily fragmented politically. Then, in the 1060s, Robert Guiscard and his brother Roger began consolidating Norman power in southern Italy and eventually formed an alliance with the pope. They conquered Byzantine territories in the peninsula, and then in 1081 Robert began an anti-Byzantine campaign in the Balkans that was stopped by the Byzantine emperor only with Venetian help. Meanwhile, Roger, acting as his brother’s vassal, began conquering Sicily in 1061. As in the case of the Muslim conquest of the island two centuries earlier, the task required several decades. It was finally completed in 1090. Roger’s son, Roger II, brought about the unification of the Norman territories of Sicily and the Italian mainland in 1127, creating the new Kingdom of Sicily. The first Normans were intrigued by Islamic civilization, and under Norman patronage a flourishing synthesis of Islamic, Jewish, and Christian civilization occurred. In the twelfth century, however, the Reconquista and Crusades created a hostile climate for Muslims and Jews. Sicily was lost to the Dar al-Islam.
The “Hilali Invasion” of Ifriqiya
Muslims in Ifriqiya were concerned about a Norman conquest there, as well. Over a period of twenty-six years after 1034, the Normans methodically captured Tripoli, Jerba, Sfax, Sousse, Mahdiya, and Tunis. Whatever the Norman ambitions in Ifriqiya were, however, the invaders soon learned that a large-scale conquest was out of the question. The Norman army was not large enough to garrison all the cities and had to make alliances with local tribes. Moreover, the foreigners soon learned that the region was not as prosperous as it had been earlier. Ifriqiya still had the aura of its former glory under the Aghlabid (800–909) and Fatimid (910–973) regimes, which had stimulated a lucrative, long-distance caravan trade across the Sahara. Their lavish courts had placed a premium on luxury goods, and their possession of Sicily facilitated commerce with European ports. The creation of a network of merchants from Europe to Ghana had made merchants in many ports in Ifriqiya wealthy during the ninth and tenth centuries.
Sicily, however, became autonomous during the Fatimid wars to suppress the Berber revolts of the mid-tenth century, and its commercial links with Ifriqiya were loosened. Subsequently, the departure of the Fatimid court for Egypt in 973 diverted much of the Saharan trade from Ifriqiya to the much larger metropolitan area of Fustat–Cairo. Thus, by the eleventh century, Ifriqiya was already feeling the effects of a decline in the long-distance trade that had crossed the region. Information about the Norman presence in Ifriqiya is sketchy, but it is clear that the seizure of the port cities after 1034 was accompanied by raids into the hinterland and agreements with local tribes to secure cities for them. Agriculture may well have suffered from the raids and from the free hand given to the local nomads.
The diversion of the trade routes to Egypt, the Norman capture of the most important ports, and the crisis in Sicily after the Norman conquest began in 1061 might well have been sufficient to leave a permanent scar on the economic history of North Africa. All those developments, however, have been overshadowed in the annals and in epic poetry by yet another incident at midcentury. In 1051, the Zirid leader of Ifriqiya, whose regime had ruled an autonomous province under the Fatimids for decades, bowed to the pressure of his Maliki ulama and publicly humiliated the Fatimids by declaring his allegiance to the Abbasid caliph. In view of the Abbasid caliph’s abject weakness in both religious and political affairs at the time (these were the last days of the Shi‘ite Buyid regime in Baghdad), this declaration was particularly galling to t
he Fatimid court, and was viewed as a blatant insult. According to legend, the Fa-timid wazir persuaded Imam al-Mustansir to punish the disloyal Zirid ruler and simultaneously rid his realm of a domestic problem: He encouraged a number of bedouin tribes that were posing a threat to villages in the Nile valley to migrate into Ifriqiya. The Banu Hilal and the Banu Sulaym were the most famous of the bedouin tribes that migrated westward.
The “Hilali invasion” has long been blamed for the economic catastrophe that undoubtedly occurred in Ifriqiya during the eleventh century. It has inspired Arab epic poetry and shaped our historical understanding of the period. Recent research on the economy of the era and the impact of the Norman raids has modified that picture considerably. There is no evidence that the Fatimids actually sent bedouin into Ifriqiya. The Banu Hilal and Banu Sulaym were Arab tribes grazing their herds to the west of the Nile, and they seem to have migrated west about the time that the Zirids made their declaration. The Banu Sulaym settled in Cyrenaica (eastern Libya), but the Banu Hilal continued to Ifriqiya. There they harassed the Zirids during the 1050s, forcing the ruling family to abandon Qayrawan and move to the better-fortified city of Mahdiya.
Other Arab tribes continued to move into the coastal plain of North Africa. Some stayed north along the Mediterranean coast, and others migrated along the eastern slopes of the High Atlas into southern Morocco. These incursions coincided with continued Norman raids along the coast of Ifriqiya. From Ifriqiya to Morocco, agriculture on the coastal plains was disrupted; the city of Qayrawan was largely abandoned and its economic and cultural influence plummeted; and Arab tribesmen feuded among themselves and with Berber tribes, making travel and commerce even riskier than before. The Normans soon drove the Zirids out of Mahdiya and captured the city. They also conquered Tunis, and contracted with a Berber chief to rule the city for them. They now controlled the important ports from Tripoli to Tunis.
The Arab nomads were no doubt destructive, just as they were in many other regions of the Dar al-Islam at one time or another. Their impact now seems to have been cumulative, however, rather than decisive. They were one factor, along with the slowing of long-distance trade and the Norman invasions, that led to the economic decline of North Africa. On the other hand, regardless of the precise economic role of this second Arab invasion, it did have a significant cultural legacy. It accomplished what the Umayyad conquest of North Africa had not: the gradual displacement of Berber by Arabic as the lingua franca of the North African coastal plain. The growing number of powerful Arab tribes caused their language and customs slowly to become dominant on the coastal plain, so that the region became in many ways a cultural extension of the Arab East. The majority use of Berber became confined to the mountains and the desert regions.
A Berber Empire
The Maghrib west of Ifriqiya was the largest area in the Dar al-Islam without a major state during the three centuries between the time of the Great Berber Revolt of 740 and the middle of the eleventh century. During that period the region witnessed the rise of numerous petty principalities such as Tahart, Sijilmasa, Tlemcen, and Fez. Most were Berber, while Fez was the notable Arab-led mini-state. By the middle of the eleventh century, however, a religious movement among a Berber tribe in southern Morocco gave rise to the Almoravid Empire, a state that would play a major role in the geopolitics of the era and help to lay the foundation for modern Morocco.
The seventh-century Arab conquest in North Africa had followed closely the contours of the areas of Roman settlement. In order to protect those areas from Berber incursions and from Byzantine naval attacks, Arab leaders established garrisons in forts along the lines of settlement and along the coast. Such forts in Andalus and in Ifriqiya came to be known as ribats. Often local citizens would supplement the regular soldiers in the forts as a civic and religious duty. During the ninth century, the long campaign by the Aghlabids to conquer Sicily had intensified this process, as garrisons kept a watch for signs of the Byzantine fleet, which occasionally attacked in retaliation. The men who lived in the forts—and especially the civilians who did so—were known as murabitun (sing. murabit). Thus, in the coastal areas of the western Mediterranean, as along many other frontiers of the Dar al-Islam (including the Andalusi– Christian frontier and the Turkish–Byzantine frontier), “warriors for the faith” had become a familiar feature of daily life.
As the military threat receded along the coasts, the ribats of Ifriqiya lost their military importance, and their combined military–religious function evolved into a religious one. They often developed into centers where men came to strengthen their devotional life through prayer and spiritual exercises. In Morocco, the process was almost the reverse: The term ribat had been used for centers of religious instruction since the ninth century, even in cases where there had not been a fort. Because they were usually situated in tribal markets or on former religious sites, they were nodes of interaction among mutually suspicious groups and the spiritual leaders tried to play a mediating role. Clashes did happen, however, and so the ribats of Morocco became fortified after having been set up for religious purposes. They were fortified religious schools.
From the late ninth century on, many of the murabitun felt compelled to move from the coasts of the Atlantic and Mediterranean into the Atlas Mountains and into the plains along the desert edge, where they could spread their faith among Berber villagers. There, because of their isolation from the trade routes, many of the Berbers had never encountered Islam or were only vaguely familiar with the rituals and doctrines of the faith. The murabitun taught the fundamentals of the faith, made charms and amulets for the sick and the lovelorn, and served as spiritual advisors. For many of the secluded villages, the murabitun were the first tangible contact with the world of Islam that they had ever experienced.
It was among the Sanhaja Berbers, who lived south of the High Atlas Mountains and north of the Senegal and Niger rivers, that a spiritual movement began that would transform the history of both the Maghrib and Andalus. The Sanhaja had been only lightly Islamized by the early eleventh century, but one of their chieftains returned from the pilgrimage to Mecca about the year 1035, accompanied by a young religious teacher. The teacher, ‘Abdullah ibn Yasin, imposed a strict religious and moral discipline upon his followers and began to implement the Maliki law code in their affairs. Because of his emphasis upon the importance of the Shari‘a, his movement—at least in the eyes of its critics—developed a tendency towards legalism. For a decade, the leaders of the new movement fought to spread their version of Islam among fellow Sanhaja groups. They closed taverns, destroyed musical instruments, and abolished illegal taxes. Because their religious fervor reminded others of the men of the ribat, they became known as al-murabitun, a term which has been anglicized as Almoravids.
During the 1050s, the movement began expanding into southern Morocco, and it gained a new leader in 1061 in the figure of Ibn Tashfin. He was a remarkable military and political leader, and under him the movement enjoyed tremendous expansion. In 1062 he established Marrakesh as his capital, and by 1069 he had control of Morocco. By 1082, his rule extended from the Sahara to the Mediterranean, and from the Atlantic to Algiers. For the first time in history this area was subject to a single political authority. Later in the decade, the power of this new state expanded into Andalus, as we shall see later in this chapter.
The Collapse of the Umayyad Caliphate of Andalus
The strong rule of ‘Abd al-Rahman III (912–961) provided hope to some (and fear to others) that a powerful central government had at last been established in Andalus. Events were soon to demonstrate once again, however, that stability in the peninsula was dependent upon the personality of a charismatic ruler. By the last quarter of the century, the number of converts to Islam had swelled dramatically compared to a few decades earlier, and so had the number of Berbers and Slavs, both brought in by ‘Abd al-Rahman III and his successor to bolster their armies. The society became splintered into factions. Arab tribes maintained feuds whose
origins were often obscure, the social cleavage between Arab and non-Arab Muslims persisted, and Berbers who had been born in Andalus resented the arrival of recent Berber immigrants. Outbreaks of violence among the various ethnic groups became frequent, and the most commonly heard complaint was that of the arrogance of the Arabs. Many of the “Arabs” of Andalus in fact had mothers who were eastern European slave girls, but they continued to trace their origin patrilineally, and thus claimed high status by virtue of their Arab lineage.
When a weak ruler came to the throne in 1002, the stage was set for the various cleavages in society to widen irrevocably. The civil war that many had anticipated broke out in 1009 and did not end until 1031. By the conclusion of the conflict, the withered authority of the Umayyad dynasty had altogether disintegrated. The traditional political fragmentation of the peninsula reasserted itself, and the Umayyad caliphate’s authority was replaced by over three dozen independent Muslim city–states. Arab historians have called the rulers of these tiny states muluk al-tawa’if, or “partykings,” suggesting that they were the instruments of one interest group or another. Some of these party-kings were Arabs; others were Berbers and Slavs. A branch of the Zirid family that ruled Ifriqiya went to Andalus to fight on behalf of the caliph during the civil war, but wound up taking control of Granada in 1012 and ruled it until 1090. The Zirids of Granada became famous for their alliance with the Jewish Nagrella family, which provided the chief administrators for the state.
A History of the Muslim World to 1405 Page 29