by John McHugo
A Sunni ruler took his legitimacy from the injunction in the Qur’an ‘to command the good and forbid the wrong’ – in other words, from upholding the Sharia in his dominions. This was the hallmark of a sultan, which was already the status to which most Sunni rulers aspired before 1258. The destruction of the Abbasid Caliphate thus made little difference except on the symbolic level, but on that symbolic level it was of massive importance. A century and a half before Hulegu’s execution of the last Abbasid, the great theologian and mystic Abu Hamid al-Ghazali had written a blistering polemic against the Ismailism of the Fatimids. The work is known as the Mustazhiri, because it was dedicated to al-Mustazhir, the Abbasid Caliph of the day. Al-Ghazali contrasts him, as the true imam, with the false, batini imam in Cairo. Yet he opines that there must be an imam in every age. What if there were no imam of the age? Al-Ghazali answers, ‘The conflict of wills and passions would lead to the neglect of the afterlife and the triumph of vice over virtue, and of the lowly over the learned with the consequent dissolution of religious and secular checks. So it is clear that the Imam is an indispensable necessity of men.’1 Now Sunnis would find that Ghazali had been proved wrong, and that their faith and way of life would survive the end of the caliphate.
Yet the feeling of loss caused by the sacrilegious execution of Musta‘sim, the last Abbasid Caliph and his family, was amplified by the sheer horror that Muslims (and non-Muslims) experienced if they were unfortunate enough to live in the lands conquered by the Mongols. Apart from Baghdad and large areas of Iraq, the Mongols devastated Transoxania (roughly equivalent to present-day Uzbekistan), Khorasan and much of the rest of the eastern Islamic world. This included the probably unintended destruction of irrigated agricultural land both in Iraq and in sparsely watered regions of the Iranian plateau, where much agriculture depended on carefully maintained channels such as the underground systems known as qanawat. When peasants were slaughtered or fled in terror, there was nobody left with the skills needed to maintain irrigation works.
What may have been worst of all was the sheer indifference Mongols showed to Muslim sensibilities and to Islam in general, which Muslims would have found profoundly shocking. Muslims were well used to rulers who shortened their own lives by over-indulgence in alcohol and general hedonism. In this respect, the Mongols were no different from many Abbasids and Seljuqs, to say nothing of some Umayyads. What was different about the Mongols was the disregard they had for any and all religions apart from their own shamanistic beliefs and superstitions. Individual Mongols might convert to other religions. Thus, the general Kitbogha, who was sent by Hulegu to conquer Syria, was a Nestorian Christian, but as far as the Mongols were concerned his choice of religion was purely his own affair and nothing more. Similarly, when the Mongol ruler Teguder (r. 1282–84) converted to Islam, it did not imply that he would now re-establish Islam to the place it had enjoyed before the Mongol invasions.
None of this should be seen as a sign of an anachronistically modern tolerance by the Mongols; on the contrary, it was disdainful indifference or contempt. The indigenous beliefs of the Mongols were essentially pre-monotheistic. For Teguder’s fellow Mongols, his conversion meant nothing except for an uneasy feeling in the back of their minds that he might now be reluctant to attack and plunder the territories of other Muslim rulers. In any event, he was soon deposed and executed in one of the Mongols’ many dynastic disputes that probably had nothing to do with religion. When Hulegu himself had died in 1265, he was buried with treasure to take with him into the next world, and slaves were sacrificed to accompany him there. It would not be until 1295 that the Mongols adopted Islam. This was when Ghazan, a great-grandson of Hulegu who had already converted to Islam, took power. By this time, the Mongols were coming to realise that taxation was a more efficient way to raise revenue than letting their soldiers plunder and destroy the resources of Iraq, the Iranian plateau and the other the lands they ruled. Becoming Muslims was just one way of integrating themselves into the societies of these lands. Unsurprisingly, many Muslims doubted the sincerity of their conversion.
II
After the extinction of the Fatimid Caliphate in 1171, the last Ismaili militants were the sect known as the Assassins. Hulegu besieged them in their mountain fastnesses of western Iran and crushed their resistance in 1256, two years before he turned his attention to Baghdad. The Egyptian Mamluks would take the Assassins’ strongholds in the coastal mountains of Syria in 1271–73. As we saw in Chapter Four, before the arrival of the Mongols, Sunnis had regained the dominance they had been in danger of losing to the Ismailis. Yet now that most of the eastern Islamic lands were ruled by non-Muslims they found themselves for a few decades on a level playing field with other religions and sects. They shared this playing field with Twelver Shi‘is as well as with Christians, Jews, Zoroastrians, Buddhists and others. Buddhists – or particular forms of Buddhism – seem to have initially received more favour from Mongol rulers than the other religions, but this ended when Ghazan became the Khan (ruler) of the Mongols in 1295. He expelled Buddhists and reinstituted the protected status and disabilities under the Sharia for Christians and Jews.
Despite Ghazan being a Muslim, Islam took a while to become firmly established among the Mongol leadership. Oljeitu, who was Ghazan’s brother and successor and ruled from 1304–16, had Christian and Buddhist phases before he became a Muslim, and may have faced calls to restore the old shamanism of Genghis Khan. For a while at least, he seems to have been undecided between Sunnism and Shi‘ism, but the scholar known as Allamah al-Hilli converted him to Twelver Shi‘ism. Oljeitu had the names of the twelve imams put on his coins, and he planned a mausoleum in his capital at Sultaniya to which the remains of Ali and Hussein would be brought from Iraq. But this never happened. Instead, the grand mausoleum became his own. It seems that Oljeitu’s preference for the Islam of the Twelvers brought a reaction from the Sunni majority. There were disturbances, especially in Isfahan where parts of the city were destroyed in riots.2 This is probably the reason why, after Oljeitu’s death, the Mongols reverted permanently to Sunnism. Sunnism was the sect of the majority of Muslims across the lands they ruled. After the mid-fourteenth-century break-up of the Mongol Empire centred on the Iranian plateau known as the Il-Khanate, most of the rulers who succeeded them were Sunnis.
MAP OF IRAN AND NEIGHBOURING COUNTRIES SHOWING IMPORTANT CITIES, AND WITH MODERN POLITICAL BOUNDARIES
Twelver Shi‘ism underwent significant developments in this period, and was characterised by some notable thinkers. Twelvers tended to hope that the Mongols would be their liberators from both the Abbasids and the Assassins, and it has been suggested that the vizier of the last Abbasid caliph, who happened to be a Twelver, had a part in his downfall.3 Nasir al-Din al-Tusi, the famous mathematician and medical practitioner who was also a leading Twelver religious scholar, had been imprisoned in Alamut by the Assassins before the arrival of the Mongols, and used his time there and the night skies of the high mountains to conduct astronomical observations. The Assassins sent him as their envoy to Hulegu, hoping he would negotiate with him on their behalf, but he felt no loyalty towards them. He became the chief vizier and confidant to Hulegu and his successor, Abaqa. Yet, although he did what he could to persuade the Mongols to favour the Twelvers, they suffered from the invasion, just as the Sunnis did. He was unable to save the shrines at Kazimayn or Karkh, the Twelver district of Baghdad, from destruction. On the other hand, in the lower Euphrates, the Twelvers of Hilla welcomed the Mongols, and even constructed a bridge across the river for them to use. As a result, their town and the shrines of Karbala and Najaf were spared.
Hilla developed into a pre-eminent place for Twelver learning during the Mongol period, becoming much more significant than either Baghdad or the Iranian shrine city of Qumm, where Fatima, the sister of Ali al-Rida, the Eighth Imam, is buried. The man who is probably Hilla’s most famous son was born in 1250/1, and saw the Mongols arrive when he was a boy. He came from a family of leading re
ligious scholars and his father played a role in the surrender of the town. The boy became known as Allamah al-Hilli, ‘the very erudite one of Hilla’. After studying with his father and uncle, he sat at the feet of the great Nasir al-Din al-Tusi. Allamah al-Hilli took himself to Oljeitu’s court in Tabriz in 1305, and subsequently converted him to Twelver Shi‘ism. He was able to play a role with Oljeitu similar to that which Nasir al-Din al-Tusi had played with Hulegu. So great was his learning that he earned himself a new and unprecedented title that reflected it: Ayatollah – ‘The Sign of God’.
It was Allamah al-Hilli who brought the notion of ijtihad into Twelver Shi‘ism. Hitherto, it had been a Sunni concept, and he did not try to hide his own intellectual debt to the Sunni jurist al-Shafi‘i.4 As we saw in Chapter Four, ijtihad meant the ability of a trusted scholar to use his knowledge of the Sharia to give a considered and independent judgement to reach a solution to an unanswered judicial question. A one-word and over-literal English translation for ijtihad might be ‘striving’, and the general idea is the expenditure of effort for a purpose. Allamah al-Hilli’s own definition was ‘the utmost exertion of the faculties to speculate on those questions of the law which are subject to conjecture’.5 Neither the Prophet nor the Imams exercised ijtihad, because the inspiration they received from God gave them certainty. It followed that they had no use for conjecture or speculation – and ijtihad was actually forbidden for them, since it was preferable for them to wait for divine inspiration.
It was only when there was no prophet or imam available to consider a question that had no clear answer in the Qur’an and hadith that ijtihad came into play. But that meant that it was the province of scholars, who were fallible. Two eminent scholars might easily, in good faith, give different answers to the same speculative question. There was therefore a heavy burden on their shoulders, and they should revise their opinion if they were persuaded by the thoughts of other scholars, whom they had a duty to consult. Nevertheless, if they have looked into the question in good faith and to the best of their ability, they commit no sin if they are mistaken in the ruling they make. In the absence of the Imam, kull mujtahid musib: ‘every mujtahid [i.e. a scholar who has the necessary degree of knowledge for ijtihad] is correct’.
The same applies to the unqualified laypeople who follow the teaching of a mujtahid. They, too, commit no sin when they follow his teaching, even if it is subsequently shown to have been in error on the point in question. Their consciences are clear. It is not right for laypeople to attempt ijtihad for themselves; they are neither required nor authorised to do so. They lack the necessary learning. Instead, every believer should seek out a mujtahid whom he can follow. He should choose one who is both learned and devout. If he has a choice of two mujtahids who fulfil both characteristics, he should choose the more learned.6 Yet a mujtahid’s opinions should be adhered to only while he is still alive. This followed naturally from the provisional nature of ijtihad, which, we might stress again, is only valid in the absence of the imam.
Important consequences flowed from Allamah al-Hilli’s new doctrine. It meant that the process of discerning those areas of the Sharia that are a matter of conjecture must continue in every generation. In other words, Twelver teaching will always evolve and develop in those areas in which the teaching is not fixed or ‘necessary’, because the word of the Qur’an or hadith is clear. His new ideas also had a profound effect on the status of the scholarly religious class among the Twelvers. In practice, it gave them a status as lawgivers that, in theory, their counterparts among the Sunnis did not have. Although the Twelver mujtahids exercised no sacerdotal functions, for teaching purposes they had become a priesthood whom ordinary believers must strive to follow. In time, this would have an enormous impact on Twelver Islam.
III
The Mongols of Hulegu were followed by the last great invasion by nomadic tribes from the steppes of Central Asia. Timur, also known in English as Tamerlane or Tamburlaine, was of Mongol descent and spoke a Turkish language. Unlike Hulegu, he was a Muslim. This did not, however, mean that he was any less violent as a conqueror. He became famous for leaving pyramids of skulls outside cities that had been so foolish as to resist him, and his Muslim faith gave him convenient pretexts for some of his aggressive campaigns. He succeeded in becoming the ruler of Transoxania around 1366. For a period of more than thirty years, he then expanded his rule across Central Asia and as far west as Moscow. He went on to descend on Iran, northern India (where he sacked Delhi) and then the Middle East. Between 1399 and 1402, he stormed and pillaged Baghdad, Aleppo and Damascus. In a campaign in which he defeated the nascent Ottoman Empire and carried off its sultan in a cage, he even reached the Aegean coast before returning to his capital, Samarkand. He died in 1405 shortly after setting out to conquer China.
Timur has been contrasted with Ghengis Khan, the initiator of the wave of conquests that had brought Hulegu to Baghdad.7 Ghengis Khan had been a state builder as well as a conqueror. He gave thought to such matters as the succession after his death and establishing a structure of government. Timur, by contrast, seems to have been concerned solely with his own position and power. The internal politics of his empire appear to have been geared solely towards ensuring that there could never be anyone able to challenge his position. Only limited power was ever granted to anyone else, and men he appointed were moved around so that they could not build up a local powerbase. When he died in 1405, his son Shahrukh established himself as sultan after a few years of dynastic civil war, but neither he nor his successors ever managed to gain control of the western regions of Timur’s empire. Shahrukh moved from Samarkand to Herat in what is now Afghanistan, which remained the capital until the death of the last Timurid, Husayn Bayqara, in 1506.
The tribes that accompanied Hulegu and Timur into the lands of Islam in search of grazing and plunder were taking part in a process of emigration from Central Asia that had continued for centuries, going back to pre-Islamic times. The peoples who crossed the Oxus river all had much in common. They were nomads accustomed to life on the steppe. Virtually every man could ride his horse into battle, and was proficient at firing a bow from the saddle. They thus presented formidable adversaries for the professional but cumbersome armies of the more organised states that they encountered, particularly when they also acquired expertise at siege warfare. They were hungry, quite literally. They had been pushed westwards by a combination of famine and pressure from invaders driving them out of their ancestral pasturelands.
We do not know much about the Islam adopted by the wild, uncouth and illiterate Turkic tribes that flooded into the lands of Islam over many generations, including those that would become the Ak Koyunlu or ‘White Sheep’ confederation and would be very significant for the history of Iran. Important chapters in their story are lost to history, often beyond recovery. For instance, we do not even know whether and to what extent the tribes of the Ak Koyunlu were already in Iran and eastern Anatolia before the Mongol invasions, or whether (as scholars tend to think is more probable) they came there in the wake of Hulegu. When such tribes adopted Islam, they often did not know what it involved – and often did not care. They frequently subscribed to the teachings of the Hanafi doctrinal law school, but in many instances it took them generations before they began to follow its precepts properly. It seems that for them becoming Muslim was often adopting a badge of identity more than anything else. It was probably similar to the adoption of Christianity by many of the ‘Barbarians’ who crossed the Rhine or Danube to invade the Roman Empire, and saw their conversion as a step towards becoming accepted as part of the new and richer world they had entered.
The Turkish tribes were regularly introduced to Islam by wandering Sufi ascetics and even more shadowy figures. These figures frequently preached a version of Islam that was mixed with heterodox practices and beliefs. They would have had much in common with the shamans who were the holy men of the steppes. Both shamans and Sufis worked miracles. Some Sufis could be extremely lax
in their interpretation of the Sharia. They were followers of a path to the Divine that many Muslims rejected as eccentric, dubious in terms of compliance with the Sharia, and sometimes downright blasphemous. Those Sufis who are sometimes referred to as the ‘ecstatic mystics’, such as Abu Yazid al-Bistami (d. 870s) and Husayn bin Mansur al-Hallaj (d. 922), made statements that appeared to suggest that they saw themselves as God, or at least were so consumed by the Divine Presence that they had no separate, personal consciousness. Such figures caused widespread horror, and were publicly rejected by many religious scholars. Hallaj was crucified for alleged heresy. But they were revered by later generations of Sufis who considered their only crime (if they had indeed committed any crime at all) was to make utterances that confused unenlightened, ordinary believers.