Caliphate
Page 8
To begin with we must be clear what sort of law we are talking about. The caliph or his representatives (governors, or emirs) had effective control over what we might call criminal and political offences. Highway robbers, violent criminals and, above all, those who rebelled against the caliph and his government were all summarily punished by the ruler and his officers. This was, however, only a small part of the law. All those issues that can be described as part of sharīa, family law, laws of contract, laws regulating slavery and the complex rules of inheritance were typical of the issues in which law was found by the ulama and cases decided by the qādī, or judge, in his court. This meant that there were whole areas of deciding and enforcing law which lay outside the caliph’s authority, potentially weakening his overall power.
The evidence of the pre-ninth century, such as it is, suggests that the caliph did, at that stage, have the position of ultimate and supreme judge and did have the power in certain circumstances to make and decide law. It comes from letters and poems of the period. The role of the caliph as judge was supported in the Qur’ān where God tells David: ‘We have appointed you caliph on earth so judge among the people with truth’ (38.25). The poets of the Umayyad court took it for granted that the caliph was a judge. In the words of the great Umayyad poet Farazdaq (d. c.729), the caliphs were ‘imams of guidance and beaters of skulls’. Another poet, Ahwas, said of the caliph Sulaymān that he had been appointed by God ‘so judge and be just’; and Jarīr, the great rival of Farazdaq as court poet, said, ‘He is the caliph, so accept what he judges for you in truth’.
Abd al-Malik held formal courts acting as qādī and a page would recite poetry on legal justice before business got underway.3 In a complex and well-reported case we are told how different caliphs responded to the legal problems which arose from the ownership of churches in Damascus and of the attempts of successive caliphs to resolve the issues. Enough evidence exists to show that Umayyad caliphs acted as judges, but it is also clear that they could decide laws. Abd al-Malik wrote instructions to his governors about how to deal with cases of slave girls in whom a defect had been discovered after purchase and Caliph Hishām wrote to his qādī in Egypt to clear up complex points about dowries. Above all, Umar II made a complex decree about the taxing of non-Muslims and converts which has been preserved in full. He did not ask the ulama or consult the Traditions of the Prophet, he made a decision according to his understanding of law and of the equity of the situation and wrote to his governors ordering them to enforce it. Nobody objected that he was acting beyond his powers. Provincial governors and private individuals would write to caliphs like Abd al-Malik seeking their rulings on difficult questions: what to do with a slave who slanders a freeman; is it permissible to revoke a will in which a slave has been manumitted? All these are complex points of law and the caliph was expected to resolve them. His decisions were remembered, perhaps to be used as precedents for future cases.
The caliph could also be credited with almost miraculous powers: for the poet Akhtal (d. c.710), he was ‘the caliph of God through whom rain was sought’, while for Farazdaq he was simply ‘the shepherd of God on earth’. Hajjāj, Abd al-Malik’s right-hand man, considered that the caliph was superior to the Prophet himself and Khālid al-Qasri, Hajjāj’s successor in Iraq, expressed much the same sentiments about Walīd I, sentiments which would certainly have seemed blasphemous to many later and modern Muslims, but which seem to have been unchallenged at the time.
In many ways the caliphates of Abd al-Malik and his son Walīd I represent the high-water mark of caliphal power and prestige. He was deputy of God on earth, commander of the army, leader of the Muslims in jihād and hajj, minter of coins, chief judge and law-maker. Only his obligations to God and his deference to the stipulations of the Qur’ān meant that his powers were more restricted than those of the most absolute Roman emperor.
THE LATER UMAYYAD CALIPHS AND THE FALL OF THE DYNASTY
The death of Walīd I in 715 was followed by the short reigns of one of Abd al-Malik’s other sons, Sulaymān (715–17), and of his nephew Umar II (717–20), both of whom died young of natural causes. Abd al-Malik had made elaborate arrangements for his succession and no less than four of his sons and one nephew became caliph without any overt opposition. The legality of the caliph designating his heirs was accepted as part of the natural order of things.
Sulaymān, named of course after the great biblical King Solomon, has a reputation in the Arabic sources for luxurious living and generous expenditure, but no one seems to have thought that this made him unworthy of the caliphate.
He was followed by the most enigmatic of the Umayyad caliphs, Umar II. Umar was not the son of Abd al-Malik but of his brother, Abd al-Azīz, the long-time governor of Egypt. He spent much of his youth in the Hijaz where he had the reputation of being something of a playboy. As caliph, however, he adopted a puritanical and pious persona, perhaps in imitation of his namesake, Umar I. He has a reputation in later sources of being ‘the good Umayyad’ and of rejecting the oppressive policies of his dynasty, and of ruling according to God’s book and His sunna (ordinances as laid out in the practice of the Prophet and his words).
There was certainly some truth in this. He attempted to break away from the factionalism which increasingly divided the Umayyad ruling class and to make appointments from many different groups across the whole spectrum of the Muslim elite. The important city of Kufa, for example, was governed by a descendant of Umar I in an attempt to win over its resentful and recalcitrant population. He also made a bold move to solve one of the major social problems which had emerged in the caliphate: the tax status of the mawālī converts. Under the rule of Hajjāj in Iraq, converts continued to be taxed as if they were non-Muslims, Hajjāj being concerned about the damage that would be done to state revenues if they escaped paying the kharāj, the land tax which non-Muslims paid on their property, and were required to pay only the alms tax obligatory on all Muslims. In order to reduce the damage done to the treasury, he also decreed that, on conversion, their lands should become the property of their communities, and so still liable for the land tax. It was an ingenious attempt to reconcile the fiscal demands of the state with the teachings of Islamic law. It also shows Umar II as legislator, deciding major issues of policy on the basis of his own judgement.
Umar II also seems to have been the only Umayyad caliph to make an effort to safeguard the rights of his non-Muslim subjects. It was this most pious of caliphs who ruled that churches in Damascus which had been taken over by Muslims should be returned to Christians because they had been taken unjustly according to the original surrender agreements which had been made at the time of the Muslim conquests—a ruling which aroused considerable anger among Muslims who hated to see Christian worship restored in what had been mosques. For Umar, the rule of law and the adherence to solemn agreements was more important. According to a tradition after his death in 720 he was buried near the shrine of St Simeon Stylites, the greatest Christian holy place in Syria. This was not because he was a secret Christian, but probably because he saw Christian holy men of the pre-Islamic period as servants of God in the monotheistic tradition which united Christians and Muslims.
With Umar’s premature death his reforms were undone or allowed to lapse and strong authoritarian government was re-established under the last great Umayyad caliph, Hishām (724–43). Hishām had a reputation for running a puritanical, even miserly, court from his new base at Rusafa in northern Syria, but he also spent very substantial sums of money on public works like the irrigation canal he ordered to be dug to improve the water supply of the expanding city of Mosul in northern Iraq.
Among the Arabic historical sources of the period reflecting on different aspects of caliphal power is a story dating from the reign of the short-lived caliph Yazīd II (720–24), which says much about the prestige and power of his position.4 At this time the Muslim settlers in the frontier province of Cilicia (now in southern Turkey), which bordered the Byzantine Empire
, were having problems with the lions which made travelling between the Muslim outposts hazardous (wild lions, smaller than African lions but still dangerous, were found in the Middle East as late as the fifteenth century) and they wrote about this to Yazīd. Now it happened that, shortly before this, Muslim armies had conquered much of the province of Sind. There they had encountered numerous water buffaloes, which seem to have been unknown in the Middle East before then. The conquering Arab general had sent some 4,000 of the beasts to Iraq where they throve in the marshes of the south of the country. The caliph ordered that the buffaloes, with their Sindi keepers, be transferred to Cilicia, a hot and well-watered area where, apparently, they frightened the lions away. In other words, if you had a problem with lions you turned to the caliph and asked him to do something about it. And he did, mobilizing the resources of the vast Muslim empire to resolve the problem—or at least that is what we are told.
On Caliph Hishām’s death in 743 the Umayyad caliphate entered a seven-year crisis of assassination and civil war from which it was unable to recover. A detailed history of this crisis is beyond the scope of this volume, but some salient points can be noted.
Hishām was succeeded, in accordance with family arrangements made long before, by his nephew Walīd II. If Umar II was the ‘good Umayyad’ in later memory, Walīd II was definitely the bad one. Before becoming caliph, he had lived the life of a hedonistic hellraiser well away from the court of his severe uncle. The two did not get on well and Hishām was, rightfully, anxious about the fate of the caliphate when his wayward nephew succeeded.
Walīd II built a series of palaces in the steppe lands bordering the Syrian desert, which are some of the most conspicuous and memorable legacies of the Umayyad caliphate. The Umayyad caliphs did not in general live in towns and visited their ‘capital’ in Damascus only on occasions. Abd al-Malik, like Muāwiya before him, lived what was essentially a transhumant life. The summer was spent in the high plains of the Biqa valley around Baalbek, in what is now Lebanon. In the autumn they passed through Damascus but preferred to stay at a Christian monastery, Dayr Murrān, on the hills overlooking the city rather than at the Palace of the Green Dome Muāwiya had built in the city centre. The winter was spent in the milder climate of the Jordan valley, often at Sinnabra at the south end of the Sea of Galilee. Later caliphs chose different bases. Sulaymān founded a new royal city at Ramla in Palestine while Hishām established his court in the northern Palmyrena.
The ruins of many of their palaces still survive. They resemble in many ways Roman villas in their scale and architecture, a series of courtyards surrounded by colonnades, and often a reception hall where the caliph or prince would sit on a throne in an apse to receive and impress guests. There would always be a bathhouse and a court mosque. Many were decorated with paintings and mosaics and there was no inhibition in these private environments about the portrayal of human beings and animals. A number of the palaces were also the centres of agricultural estates and game parks, and elaborate irrigation schemes were constructed to keep the gardens green and the water flowing in the baths.
The Umayyads were exceptional in their living arrangements and no later rulers of Syria emulated their example. The Abbasids built huge palaces in the centres of towns. Why, then, did the Umayyads adopt this style? An idea which was prevalent in much western scholarship in the twentieth century was that this represented a sort of nostalgia for the Bedouin life of their ancestors. In this romantic vision they were free sons of the desert, in contrast to their Abbasid successors, oriental despots lurking in their gigantic palaces along the Tigris. Perhaps again they wished to keep their hedonistic lifestyles of wine, hunting and dancing girls, what Robert Hillenbrand memorably described as their ‘dolce vita’, away from the censorious eyes of their disapproving subjects.5
Other explanations are more down to earth. The Umayyad caliphs were able to keep hold of power because they enjoyed the support of the leaders of the Syrian Bedouin tribes. Some at least of these palaces were used to maintain these links, the ruler or prince going to the desert margins in those wonderful weeks of spring which the Arabs called rabī, when the steppe is green with grass and bright with flowers. Here he could entertain them with parties, poetry and the luxuries of the bathhouse while hearing their grievances and encouraging them to support his plans. Other historians have pointed out the financial advantages of these developments. Islamic taxation law offers tax breaks to those who bring new lands under cultivation. Even for princes of the blood, it was more profitable to bring new lands under the spade and plough than to acquire properties in already cultivated areas. There is no doubt an element of truth in all these explanations and the life of the ‘desert castles’ has given a stylish romantic gloss to the Umayyad caliphs which later monarchs have lacked.
None of the caliphs cultivated this lifestyle more assiduously than Walīd II. It is to him that we owe the building of Qusayr (little castle) Amra in the Jordanian desert east of Amman. It is a small building which consists of an audience hall with a bathhouse attached. The scale is intimate, with no sleeping accommodation or other living areas. Presumably the people who came to enjoy the facilities pitched their tents around it. What distinguishes Qusayr Amra from other more or less similar complexes is the survival of a whole programme of fresco wall-paintings. These are executed with fluent, confident brushwork which suggests that they were part of a developed art form rather than a one-off. The subjects depicted are various and not all understood. There is a serious element which shows us the prince in his alcove and the portraits of kings whom the Islamic armies had defeated, including naturally the Byzantine emperor and the Sasanian king, but also Roderick, king of the Visigoths in distant Spain. Another series in the ceiling vaults shows us the building of the palace and the preparation of materials. Most of the rest consists of vigorous and lively depictions of the pleasures of bath and hunt. The prince as mighty hunter is shown dispatching the onagers (wild asses) which have been driven towards him for slaughter, while on the opposite walls scantily clad girls dance and sing. These paintings have long been attributed to the patronage of Walīd, but recently, in one of those moments which archaeologists dream of but seldom experience, an inscription has been uncovered which says plainly that it was built by Walīd b. Yazīd, that is, Walīd before he became caliph.
The stories about Walīd were numerous. He was an accomplished Arabic poet in his own right and attracted poets and singers to his court. He is said to have behaved in a brazen and scandalous way. When he went on the hajj, he brought his singing girls with him and, they said, had wine-drinking parties in the Kaba itself. At the same time the caliph held a very definite view of his office. We have a letter in which he announces to the governors of the provinces of the empire that he has appointed his two sons, Hakam and Uthmān, as his heirs. It was clearly composed by a chancery scribe, but it is one of the few documents in which we can see how an Umayyad caliph himself viewed his office.
The letter amounts to some eight pages of closely printed text in the translation provided by Crone and Hinds.6 It is written in an elaborate and repetitive style which cannot have made easy reading then or now, but the message that it is the duty of all Muslims to obey the caliph is clear and repeatedly rammed home. He begins by describing how God sent prophets to mankind until prophethood eventually reached Muhammad. When Muhammad himself passed away, God appointed caliphs to implement His decrees, establish His practice (sunna), administer justice and keep men away from forbidden things. The caliphate was ‘part of the completion of Islam and the perfection of those mighty favours by which God makes His people obliged to him’. At no point does the writer contemplate the possibility that the caliph may commit an error, or that resistance to his authority could possibly be justified; this would be to challenge God. The caliph was, in fact, both judge and interpreter of God’s law and it was God, not any gathering or consensus of men, who had established him in this position. The function and duty of his subjects was absolute
obedience and, if they strayed from this path, bad things, very bad things, would happen to them in this world and the next.
This is a theory of rulership which seems very similar the divine right of kings familiar from western European political practice. The letter finishes by explaining how the caliph, in order to avoid any doubt or uncertainty, has decided to appoint his two sons as heirs, Uthmān to succeed his elder brother Hakam in due course of time. Here again there is no question of the caliph taking advice or consulting. He alone has decided this and it will be done.
Not everyone was as impressed by his God-given authority as the caliph himself. Many within the Umayyad elite in Syria were shocked by Walīd’s flagrant behaviour, while his political enemies used it as a pretext to garner support for themselves. They mobilized and found the caliph in one of his desert residences at Bakhra, just south-west of Palmyra: the ruins, abandoned and neglected, can still be seen. He was virtually unprotected and they stormed the building, killing him as he was reading the Qur’ān, like Uthmān before him. The caliph may have been unpopular, and his conduct outrageous, but inevitably the assassination solved nothing and the Umayyad caliphate soon began to disintegrate into rancour and civil war.
Something of the criticism which was directed at the Umayyads can be seen in an angry polemical sermon delivered by a Kharijite leader, Abū Hamza, in the Hijaz around the year 747. In this he gives a potted history of the caliphate, beginning with Abū Bakr, who fought the ridda and acted according to the Qur’ān and sunna. Next came Umar, whose achievements included paying the stipends of the Muslims, establishing the garrison cities and the dīwāns, organizing the night-time prayers during Ramadan and decreeing eighty lashes as the penalty for drinking wine. But things then began to go wrong. Uthmān never measured up to the standards set by Abū Bakr and Umar and got worse as time went on; Alī acted well until he agreed to the arbitration (at Siffin), after which he achieved nothing. Muāwiya was cursed by Muhammad and made the servants of God slaves and his dīn (religion) was a cause of corruption. Yazīd was no better, following his bad example and ‘a sinner in his belly and his private parts’. Things only got worse with Abd al-Malik, who made Hajjāj his imam, leading him to hell-fire; Walīd was a stupid fool; Sulaymān, like Yazīd I, was concerned only with food and sex. Umar II provided a brief interlude in this catalogue of depravity: he had good intentions but was unable to act upon them. Yazīd II was back to the old Umayyad model with picturesque detail added. He dressed up in expensive clothes and