Ideological Power

Discussions of ideology in Islamic history tend to focus on religion. To some ex­tent, this is as it should be: monotheist scriptural religion was the idiom of political thought in late antiquity, and other ideological structures were often understood in relation to it.

Given its importance, it makes sense to begin with the changing relationship be­tween religion and centralized power. That a unified polity under the leadership of one man was the political form for the community of the faithful never seems to have been in serious doubt among the ruling elite: the caliph was in some sense the representative on earth of God's covenant with Humanity; in turn, his covenants with other political leaders legitimated their positions. Even where a caliph's, or a dynasty's, legitimacy was contested, this was also the legitimatory basis of the re­bels' alternative candidate.^[1063]

At the outset, caliphal authority had a personal and charismatic quality; the early Muslim community was characterized both by monotheist piety and millenarian conviction.^[1064] However, with the growing scale and complexity of the Muslim polity in the wake of the early conquests, unified religious authority became impossible. Men with a particular reputation for piety, usually combined with an authoritative understanding of religious tradition, became crucial to quotidian religious life across the empire, both as independent religious scholars (‘ulama), and as judges (qadis), serving the state.^[1065] As such, they were potential alternative loci of ideological power beyond the caliph himself, and both conflict and cooperation between the caliphs and religious scholars are recorded in the sources almost from the beginning.^[1066] With the rise of mercantile and landowning local Muslim elites, for whom Islam was the idiom of local social, political, legal, and economic life, the ‘ulama to whom they looked for religious leadership began to form an ideological elite, independent of state power.^[1067]

The consequence was a decline in the religious authority of the caliphs.

The other challenge to caliphal religious authority came from charismatic and millenarian movements, which tended to locate authority in numinous individuals. Smaller resistance movements either established peripheral polities under sectarian leadership, or were crushed by the empire's coercive resources. However, when widely accepted interpretations of Islam combined with significant political grievances, they were potentially threatening to the existing order. The preemi­nent examples are the Abbasid Revolution, in 750, and the coming to power of the Fatimid caliphs in North Africa in 909 (which resembled the Abbasid Revolution in a number of ways). It is telling that both were Shi‘i in complexion: in each case, kin­ship with the Prophet trumped the charismatic authority of the incumbent rulers, and contributed to the millenarian tone of the revolution.

In the struggle for ideological hegemony, the caliphs had the advantages con­ferred by their access to more material forms of power. The first conflicts over legit­imacy within the Quraysh immediately prompted the channeling of resources into the public articulation of caliphal authority:^[1069] in the immediate aftermath of the first civil war, the first documentary attestations of the title “commander of the faithful” (amir al-muminm) on coins, on papyrus protocols, and in inscriptions appear in the name of Muawiya; ‘Abd al-Malik began the Dome of the Rock in Jerusalem even as he fought the second one.

The Abbasids' innovations reflected new ideological claims and greater capacity to articulate them. As with earlier urban centers, Baghdad was centered upon the mosque-palace complex, where the juxtaposition of the ruler's residence with the main congregational mosque expressed sacral monarchy in architectural form. However, Baghdad's scale, and its imposing round walls, introduced new symbolic resonances not seen before in Islamic architecture. In keeping with efforts to har­ness and “routinize” the millenarian atmosphere of the revolution, the city's formal name was Madinat al-Salam (“The City of Salvation”).^[1073] For the same reason, the caliphs adopted sacral epithets (laqabs), promulgated on coins, in scribal protocol, and on ceremonial robes: al-Mansur (“The One Made Victorious”) was succeeded by his son, al-Mahdi (“The Redeemer”), and then by his grandsons, al-Hadi (“The Guide”) and al-Rashid (“The Rightly-Guided”).^[1074]

All these efforts were communicative—they were directed at persuading var­ious constituencies of the caliphs' legitimacy and power. Much can be explained by the changing composition of the military and administrative elite: the Roman in­fluence in early Umayyad architecture partially reflected their dependence on the Romano-Syrian tribes; the importance of Khurasanian and Transoxianan troops and scribes to the Abbasids prompted Iranian forms of royal expression, including the round city, sacral epithets, and later, the coronation of senior commanders.^[1075] The same Persian influence can be seen in the literary output of the court—as for example in the literary production of the early Abbasid scribe, Ibn al-Muqaffa‘ (d.

However, there were other audiences, too, including non-Muslim elites beyond the borders of the Caliphate. In a world where acceptance of religious doctrine was tantamount to the acceptance of political subordination, the Umayyads' assertion of ideological difference with Christianity on coins and papyri, which circulated beyond the Caliphate's borders, affirmed their independent status.^[1077] In the Abbasid period, when Islamic hegemony was established, and coins carrying Qur'anic slogans were hoarded and imitated far beyond the Caliphate's borders, the ceremo­nial of the caliphal court inspired awe through its display of wealth and power.^[1078]

Within the empire, religious doctrine also served a related purpose: taxation, and the associated coercive controls on movement, were periodically imposed on the in­digenous rural populations not just for administrative and directly coercive reasons, but also in order to maintain the symbolic hierarchy between the ruling Muslim elite and the ruled non-Muslim majority.^[1079] Likewise, the strictures of the ninth-century “Covenant of ‘Umar,” which codified the position of non-Muslims, reflect the assim­ilation of elements of Sasanian ideas about status into Islamic culture.^[1080]

Besides religion and monarchy, ethnic identity was a third ideological idiom. Very early Islam does not appear to have been a religion that proselytized much beyond the Arabic-speaking population; in a manner reminiscent of the Ancient Near East, war was waged against the empires to the north not in order to “spread the word” but so that God would open (fataha) the resources of their territories to His believers.^[1081] Where non-Arabians were brought into the ruling elite, they often came as “clients” (mawall), sponsored by an individual, and associated with that sponsor's tribe.

Because of the numbers they could mobilize, the most potent ideological challenges to the Umayyads were those articulated in terms that could unite the non-Arabian, non-Muslim population with rebellious groups among the Muslims. The sources often refer to non-Arab rebels as mawall, and no doubt non-Arab members of the elite did take part in rebellions. However, Patricia Crone has pointed out that non-Muslims had most to gain from overthrowing the established order, and has proposed that many of these mawall were new converts who sought to use the hegemonic ideology to claim a place in the ruling elite: hence, Kharijite doctrine was adopted by the “Berbers” of North Africa at the end of the Umayyad period; at the same time, “proto-Shi‘i” and millenarian rhetoric about the rights of the family of the Prophet united Persians and Arabs in Khurasan.⁹²

When the latter group overthrew the Umayyads in 750, and installed the great­great grandsons of the Prophet's uncle al-Abbas as caliphs, the predominantly Arabian ethnic character of the imperial army and administration was brought to an end.⁹³ Very large numbers of Persian converts now held senior positions. As a consequence, mawla now became a formal title of certain ranks in the Abbasid administration—a free Muslim could be of any ethnicity and no longer needed to be tied to an Arabian tribe. Only the office of caliph remained an Arabian preserve, because of the unassailable importance of kinship with the Prophet himself.

Conversion also accelerated in the provinces during the early Abbasid period: estimates by Richard Bulliet, based on prosopographical data from Nishapur in Khurasan, suggest that mass conversion contributed to urbanization; whereas less than a sixth of the population there may have been Muslim in 750, perhaps a third were Muslim by 800, and two-thirds by 850; at the same time, Nishapur expanded from a population of a few thousand toward 100,000.

Conversion made Islam a ubiquitous language of political discourse: revolts that appealed to pre-Islamic, non-Muslim, or syncretic identities (such as those of the Mardaites in the Umayyad period, some of the early “Berber” revolts, and the revolt of Babak in the 820s and 830s) became less frequent, and resistance in the name of Islam became the norm.⁹⁴ More often than not, these rebellions were Shi‘i in complexion, largely for reasons connected to the changing relationship between the caliphs and Islamic doctrine: Abbasid attempts to assert their Shi‘i credentials during and after the revolution of 750 had been outflanked by direct descendants of the Prophet, and so they came to align themselves instead with the emergent proto­Sunni scholarly class, who did not require that the caliph be directly descended from the Prophet. In contrast, Kharijite articulations of Islam, which emphasized consensus around militant and pious leadership, seem to have thrived only in tribal contexts. Having been the focus of many rebellions in the Umayyad era, the Kharijite movement faded as an ideological force.⁹⁵