A History of the Muslim World to 1405: The Making of a Civilization

by Vernon O Egger

  Shirkuh, Ayyub, and Saladin were members of the Kurdish ethnic group, which has long been concentrated in the mountainous areas of northeastern Iraq, northwestern Iran, and eastern Anatolia. Kurds are members of the Iranian peoples and speak dialects closely related to Persian. Saladin is the most famous Kurd in history due to his consolidation of political power, his severe crippling of crusader power, and his founding of a dynasty that ruled Egypt for several decades.

  Saladin was faced with the task of reuniting the Muslims of Syria and Egypt, for upon the death of Nur al-Din his hard-won empire collapsed into feuding city–states again. Saladin now tried to reunite them under his own control. He gained Damascus easily in 1174, and it soon became his base of operations. (He never saw Egypt again after 1179.) The areas of northern Syria and northern Iraq resisted him ferociously, however, and it was not until 1186 that he was in effective control of both Aleppo and Mosul.

  Meanwhile, he had a few minor clashes with Jerusalem, but remained on peaceful terms with that kingdom for most of the time. The notorious Reynald of Chatillon changed that relationship in the late 1180s. Reynald, master of the castle known as Karak on the Dead Sea, was a hothead who began attacking Muslim pilgrims and repeatedly violated agreements regarding the security of caravan routes that connected Egypt with the Hijaz and Syria. When Saladin demanded that Reynald pay restitution for his attacks, the latter contemptuously refused. Saladin declared war, and at the Battle of Hattin, fought in 1187 west of Lake Tiberias, Saladin destroyed the Frankish army. With most of the Frankish fighting force killed or captured, the Latin kingdom lay practically defenseless before Saladin. He took Jerusalem and several other cities, and by the end of the year, only Tyre was still in Crusader hands.

  The Third Crusade (1189–1193) was the European response to Saladin’s victory, but despite its initial all-star cast of European monarchs and the famous campaigns of Richard Lionheart, its gains were disappointing for the Crusaders. A few coastal towns were regained, including Acre, which became the new capital of the Latin kingdom, but Jerusalem remained in Muslim hands. Moreover, European chroniclers came to the shocking conclusion that Saladin conformed more closely to their ideals of chivalry than even their great hero, Richard. After months of campaigning that resulted in a stalemate, Richard and Saladin signed a truce in 1192 that provided a coastal strip for the Crusaders and gave Christian pilgrims free access to the holy places. Richard left for an eventful trip home, whereas Saladin died in 1193.

  The Ayyubids

  Saladin’s dynasty—the Ayyubids—ruled Egypt, Syria, the Hijaz, and Yemen until 1250. The Ayyubids built a powerful state based on a military core of mamluks, most of whom were Qipchaq Turks from the region north of the Black Sea and Caspian Sea. The family distributed power widely: The sultan ruled all of Egypt directly, but he allowed relatives to rule as governors of the half-dozen major Syrian cities.

  The Ayyubids oversaw a major rise in the status of Egypt in the Sunni world. Egypt had been blessed with remarkable agricultural resources for millennia, but under the Umayyads and Abbasids it had filled a distinctly secondary rank in status to Syria, Iraq, and Khorasan, which surpassed it in long-distance trade and cultural production. During the Fatimid period, when it was the center of an empire rather than the periphery of one, Egypt made significant gains. We have seen how it surpassed Baghdad as a channel for trade between the Mediterranean Sea and the Indian Ocean. Most historians believe that under Fatimid rule the majority of the Egyptian urban population had become Muslim, even though the Fatimids had not applied pressure to do so. Arabization of the country had also occurred, and the use of the Coptic language declined dramatically. The Ayyubid rulers now set out to establish Cairo as a major center of Sunni learning. They actively recruited scholars from Syria, Iraq, and Iran—all of which had heretofore produced far more scholars of note than Egypt—and their efforts were aided by the flight of scholars from Khorasan when the Mongols attacked in 1219. By midcentury, Cairo became the cultural capital of the Muslim world, a status sealed in 1258, when the Mongols destroyed what was left of long-suffering Baghdad. For almost three centuries, Cairo remained preeminent as the center of Islamic scholarship.

  Saladin’s campaigns had finally convinced Europeans that Egypt held the key to the control of Palestine. They launched two major crusades against the Ayyubids, but neither was successful. The first centered on the coastal city of Damietta during 1218–1221, the period of Chinggis Khan’s invasion of Transoxiana and Khorasan. The other was during 1249–1250 and was led by the great Louis IX of France. It, too, began at Damietta, but the Crusader army was trapped and encircled as it made its way to Cairo. It was the last of the major Crusades.

  The Crusade of Louis IX marked an important transition in Egypt’s political history. In November 1249, the Ayyubid sultan al-Salih Ayyub (1240–1249) died just as Louis and his army were marching to Cairo from their base at Damietta. His widow was a Turkish woman, Shajar al-Durr (“string of pearls”), who had been his concubine, but whom he had married when she gave birth to his son. She and two of al-Salih’s trusted advisors ruled as a triumvirate until al-Salih’s eldest son, Turanshah, could assume the throne three months later. Only a few weeks after assuming power, however, Turanshah was murdered by a group of his father’s mamluks. They then took the remarkable step of naming Shajar al-Durr to be their sultana, making her the first female to rule Egypt since Cleopatra more a millennium earlier.

  At this point, the Syrian branch of the Ayyubid family, who had been chafing under the dominance of their relatives in Cairo, seized the opportunity to assert their power. Challenging the legitimacy of Shajar al-Durr’s rule on the grounds of her gender and former slave status, they threatened to invade Egypt. The Egyptian mamluks, realizing they had created a political liability for themselves by naming a woman as their ruler, forced her to abdicate in July, and a power struggle began among various cliques within the mamluk organization. Over the next decade, many prominent individuals were murdered, including, in 1257, Shajar al-Durr herself.

  In 1260, a mamluk named Baybars seized power and ruled for seventeen years. He showed that it was possible for the system of military slavery actually to rule the country. Because the Egyptian military slaves never relinquished power to a member of the Ayyubid family and subsequently created an empire, they are the only group of mamluks whose name is honored with uppercase letters: Mamlukes (Mamluks). We shall examine their history in more detail later, but here it is appropriate to close out the history of the Crusades by noting that Baybars and his successors waged war against the few remaining Crusader outposts in Syria until 1291, when they utterly destroyed the last ones.

  Additional European military expeditions were directed against Muslim territories over the next two centuries, and most were conducted explicitly as Christian wars against Islam. They were all failures, and none of them reached “the Holy Land.” Most historians regard them in a separate category from the activity that was focused on Palestine between 1096 and 1291 and is known as “the Crusades.” The Crusades accomplished little that can be called positive. Western Europeans did become more familiar with geographical place names in the eastern Mediterranean, and they learned better techniques for building castles while residing in Syria.

  Most of the consequences of the Crusades, however, were negative. The Franks made no effort to learn Arabic or to understand Islam, and thus made no contribution to cross-cultural understanding. The Muslims themselves were not unified in a countercrusade against the Franks. Individual Muslim rulers led campaigns against the Franks out of their own ambition, while Muslims not directly affected by the Crusaders had little interest in the conflict. Not surprisingly, Muslim attitudes towards local Christians hardened as a result of the Crusades. In some areas, particularly in northern Syria, some Christians cooperated with the Crusaders, leading the Mamlukes to regard their Christian subjects in general as potential fifth columnists. The great irony of the Crusades is that, whereas they began ostens
ibly as a relief effort by western Christianity to aid eastern Christianity, they created a permanent rift between the two communities. The Fourth Crusade, in 1204, attacked and sacked Constantinople. It created an undying hostility among Orthodox Christians toward Catholics, and the wanton destruction of the attack permanently damaged the ability of the city to defend itself.

  The Loss of Andalus

  As we saw in Chapter 6, the early eleventh-century civil war in Andalus resulted in the collapse of the caliphate and its replacement by some three dozen feuding city–states under the so-called “party-kings.” The fragmentation of Muslim political and military power could not have come at a worse time for the Muslim community, because the Christian kingdoms to the north were beginning to share in the general economic expansion of eleventh-century Europe. The assertion of European power—and Christian identity—that took the form of the Crusades in the eastern Mediterranean had its counterpart in southwestern Europe in the so-called Reconquista. The military campaigns against the Muslims of Andalus were clearly not a “reconquest” in the strict meaning of the word, for these kingdoms were not heirs of the Visigothic kingdom that the Muslims had conquered in the early eighth century. However, it is important to realize that the Christians, by interpreting these campaigns as winning back territory for their people and for Christianity, had an ideological motivation—strained though it may have been—for their enterprise, whereas the Muslims did not. The Iberian Peninsula, in fact, because of its proximity to the rest of Europe, became the arena for more “crusades” than did the eastern Mediterranean.

  Provisional Solutions: The Great Berber Empires

  Had it not been for outside factors, Alfonso VI of Castile might well have brought the Reconquista to a successful conclusion at the end of the eleventh century. His stunningly easy victory at Toledo in 1085 was an ominous portent for the other, smaller Muslim principalities of Andalus. The remarkable political efflorescence of the Berbers, however, postponed the day of reckoning for most of them until the thirteenth century.

  From at least the time of the Carthaginians, the Berbers had been subject to imperial powers who imposed themselves from afar. After the Carthaginians, the Romans, Byzantines, and Arabs had taken possession of North Africa’s green and pleasant coastal plain. Some Berber groups, notably the Kharijite ministates of the eighth to tenth centuries, managed to create small, autonomous societies on the fringe of the vast desert to the south, but not until the eleventh century did a Berber empire appear. We saw in the previous chapter that the Almoravids created a huge empire in the Maghrib and then annexed Andalus. They were followed by yet another Berber empire, led by the Almohads. These two empires changed the course of history in the western Muslim world. They intensified the process of the Islamization of the Maghrib, they delayed the progress of the Reconquista by a century or more, and they set a precedent for large-scale political structures in the region.

  The Almoravids

  The key to understanding the new dynamism of the Berbers may lie in the role of the holy men, or murabitun, who extended the process of Islamization into central and southern Morocco. As we have seen, these were areas that were initially untouched by the Arabs, whose own settlements and influence extended along the Mediterranean and Atlantic plains, and along the foothills of the High Atlas. The Arabs regarded the interior of Morocco and the regions south of the Sous River as hostile, pagan territory.

  When Ibn Yasin began his crusade to reform the Sanhaja along the lines of a strict adherence to the Maliki school of the Shari‘a, this group of Berbers gained an ideological advantage comparable to that of the Arabs who swept out of the Arabian Peninsula in the 630s. Like the earlier movement, it combined the motivations of wealth and obedience to the perceived will of God. The result was a powerful complex of martial qualities: ambition, discipline, and fearlessness in the face of possible death in battle.

  With this motivated force Ibn Tashfin conquered the western Sahara, the Maghrib, and Andalus. The consequences were immense. The presence of this large political unit stimulated trade all across the region. Of particular note was the intensification of commercial links with the gold- and salt-producing areas of West Africa. In later centuries, these links led to the Islamization of that region. Morocco, which had been largely neglected under the Arabs, for the first time became a commercial and urbanized society. Andalus, for the first time since the 740s, once again became an appendage of the Maghrib.

  Unlike many rulers who used Islam as a cloak for their personal ambitions, Ibn Tashfin accorded respect and power to the ulama. He created a council for them, took them on his campaigns, and sought advice from them. The Almoravid regime was, above all else, a regime of the Shari‘a as interpreted through the Maliki tradition. The jurists in the other three major madhhabs (the Hanbali, Hanafi, and Shafi‘i) regarded the Maliki jurists as mavericks. The most influential Maliki practitioners still did not stress the importance of the prophetic Hadith to the degree of the other three major schools, preferring to rely more on their school’s own body of legal precedent.

  In the eleventh century, however, a reform movement was afoot in Andalus and in parts of the Maghrib. With the collapse of the Umayyad caliphate of Cordoba, legal scholars who wanted to reform Maliki practice by adopting the Shafi‘i consensus of emphasizing the Hadith found it easier to engage in such labor, since they could migrate to whichever of the new city–states would allow it. Both the reforming scholars and their tolerant rulers tended to be either Andalusi Berbers or indigenous converts to Islam (muwallads), since the well-established Arab families tended to be conservative in this regard. The Almoravids sided with the conservatives.

  Under Ibn Tashfin’s son, ‘Ali (1106–1143), discontent with the Almoravid regime began to mount. The expectation on the part of many Andalusis that Almoravid rule would increase the social mobility of non-Arabs to the higher political and religious positions was not fulfilled. On the contrary, the Almoravids reserved the highest military and political positions for themselves and allowed the Arab elites of Andalus to dominate the religious offices. The legal reformers were becoming increasingly frustrated with what they considered to be the narrow literalism of Maliki techniques of Qur’anic interpretation and the neglect of the Hadith in the interpretation of law. They could point to several weighty issues that they considered to be in urgent need of reform, but a relatively minor one was a powerful symbol of what they thought was deeply flawed about the current state of Maliki law as practiced by the Almoravids: The Sanhaja males who claimed to be upholding the Shari‘a were veiled, whereas their women walked about in public with their faces uncovered. The Almoravids, in turn, regarded such criticism to be an attack on the legitimacy of their political power rather than a sincere attempt to join a universal consensus regarding the methodology of determining the Shari‘a, and they began a policy of suppressing dissenters.

  Many Andalusis were also critical of the rank-and-file Sanhaja troops. Not surprisingly, many of the troops had joined the Almoravid army to escape boring and poverty-stricken peasant lives and to live a life of high adventure. Many of them now became infamous for their indiscriminate looting. Both the Muwallads and the “old” Andalusi Berbers rapidly became disillusioned with the “new,” rough Berbers who were ruling them. For Jews and Christians, the regime was even more problematic. They were frequently victims of persecution and extortion, with the result that thousands fled to the north, to Christian areas. ‘Ali accused the Jews and Christians of Andalus of secretly aiding the Christian kingdoms, and he deported thousands to Morocco.

  ‘Ali’s policies have tarred the Almoravids with the charge of being hostile to Jews and Christians, but his policy toward Jews and Christians in Andalus stands in stark contrast to his policy in North Africa. In the latter region, western European Christian mercenaries (especially Catalans, from the area of modern Barcelona, ostensibly among his bitterest enemies) served in his cavalry, many of the empire’s civil servants were Andalusi Jews and Chri
stians, and many Christian artisans worked as free laborers in the construction of mosques in Morocco. His discriminatory policies in Andalus appear to have been provoked by fears of having fifth columnists in his ranks, since the threat from the north was so great.

  The Almohads

  ‘Ali’s rule seemed secure, but during his reign a rival group of Berbers known to history as the Almohads began to challenge the Almoravid leadership. In part, this challenge was due to factional differences, for the challenge came from the Masmuda Berbers in southern Morocco. It was also, however, based on religious differences. When the Almohads replaced the Almoravids, they expanded the territory controlled by their predecessors, patronized the arts and scholarship, and left a lasting legacy to modern Morocco, Algeria, and Tunisia.

  About the time ‘Ali began to rule in 1106, a young man from southern Morocco made his way to Mecca to perform the hajj. This pilgrim, Ibn Tumart, stayed in the east for about a decade, studying with religious scholars in Saljuq-ruled Baghdad and Damascus. He returned to the Maghrib in 1118 with visions of Islamic reform (like most Muslims of the period, he does not appear to have been concerned about the recent invasion of the Franks into western Syria). The centerpiece of his program was the transcendence and oneness of God, and the rejection of pagan Berber customs that had been assimilated into Islamic practice. His emphasis on the oneness of God gained for his followers the nickname, the Almohads (al-muwahhidun, or “the unitarians”).