Torture and State Violence under the Seljuqs (Eleventh-Thirteenth Centuries)

The Seljuqs ruled over the lands of Persia and large swaths of the Islamic world in the eleventh to thirteenth centuries. They were the leading family of a confederation of Turkish tribal nomads who had moved into the central Islamic lands from the early eleventh century onwards, conquering the Abbasid capital, Baghdad, in 1055.

Given their Central Asian pedigree, the Seljuqs initially enjoyed little prestige in terms of their Islamic credentials. However, they soon rose to become patrons of Sunni orthodoxy, facilitating what historians, though not unanimously, refer to as a ‘Sunni revival' in the eleventh and twelfth centuries. The Seljuqs' use of state violence, particularly when orchestrated in punitive rituals of power, often reveals traces of this situation.

One hears relatively little in the chronicles of the Seljuq period about the kind of violence deployed inside the dungeons of the sultan and his governors in the provinces, but there is little reason to doubt that the torturing habits of the Abbasid and Buyid rulers were continued. Certain Abbasid caliphs, such as al-Mu‘tadid (r. 892-902) and al-Qahir (r. 933-4) were notorious for the torture chambers they entertained. The extortion technique known as musa- dara, ‘the mulcting of an official of his (usually) ill-gotten gains or spoils of office',^{^[270]} ^{^[271]} appears to have been established at the Abbasid court in Baghdad from the ninth century onwards, and there are many examples of dismissed officials pressed to divulge the whereabouts of riches from Buyid, Ghaznavid and Seljuq times too. Instruments of torture that were used included a wooden box with iron nails pointing inwards, devised by the Abbasid vizier Ibn al-Zayyat (d. 847), a kind of iron maiden that, in a sad twist of irony, was applied to its inventor when he fell from grace.

In the tenth century, torturers in Baghdad used iron tongs to tear the flesh from people's upper legs, and pulled out fingernails.1⁵

Occasionally, torture became public. A chronicle devoted to the Rum Seljuqs of Anatolia, a subsidiary branch of the Seljuq family that ruled until 1307, provides an example. In 1214, the Rum Seljuq sultan ‘Izz al-Din Kay Kawus I (r. 1211-20) besieged the Christian city of Sinope on the Black Sea. When the defenders of the city refused to surrender, ‘Izz al-Din ordered that his royal prisoner and lord of Sinope, King Alexios I Megas Komnenos (r. 1204-22), be tortured in front of the city walls. This promptly caused Alexios to complain loudly to the onlookers on the ramparts:

Alexios began to wail and cry out: ‘O you godless people! Don't you see that they will kill me and, with cruelty and brutality, will make you prisoners of war? In whose interest do you continue to defend the city?' However, this had the same effect on them as the whistling of the wind on deaf rocks... The next day, the sultan ordered Alexios strung up head down and tortured until he lost his senses like an epileptic. When the inhabitants of the city saw that the predicament of [their] ruler had gone beyond all tolerable limit, they called out: ‘Let the messenger [of the sultan] come into the city! We want to talk to him.'^{^[272]}

As noted above, in the pre-Mongol period, torture was universally rejected by the Muslim jurists, and acts of torture like the one inflicted on Alexios enjoyed no backing by the religious law. As for capital punishment, very few cases of statutory punishments are mentioned in the sources of the Seljuq period. A single case of stoning on account of illegal sexual intercourse seems to have come to the attention of scholars so far. This concerns a certain high- ranking amir of the Rum Seljuq sultan Kaykhusraw II (r. 1237-46), a man named Taj al-Din. Having previously schemed with the sultan's vizier, Sa‘d al-Din Kopek, to purge the court of a number of their political enemies, Taj al-Din himself became the target of Kopek's intrigues.

Taj al-Din had raped one of the slave-girls of one of the local rulers of the sultan's domain, and Kopek quickly obtained a legal opinion (fatwa) from the ‘leading jurists and judges' that a man who acted like Taj al-Din had was to be stoned. This, however, could only be done with the consent of the sultan who, having been talked into it by Kopek, agreed to the punishment and issued an official order to carry it out. Kopek set out to apprehend Taj al-Din at Ankara.

He ordered Taj al-Din to be put in chains and occupied himself several days with claiming and cataloguing his property. Having done so, he had him brought to the [main] square of Ankara. That amir, so loveable that the bright sun, envious of his shining face, veiled itself behind a cloud, and the planet Mercury, jealous of his ability to write and speak beautifully, bit into his own envious fingers, and no man with a soul would have been capable of hitting his jasmine-like chest with [as much as] a rose-petal, - that amir he ordered to be buried in the ground up to his navel, and he ordered the common people, coercing them, to stone him and thus make his sweet soul reach paradise. Then he had all the money and jewellery he possessed brought into the treasury.^{^[273]}

Despite the involvement of legal experts, and the ostensibly Sharia-based protocol followed in implementing the punishment, the case of Taj al-Din clearly does not satisfy the strict rules of evidence laid out in the normative literature. As others have noted, the fatwa sought by Kopek functioned as a ‘legal fig leaf, while ‘the initiative comes from a misled or ill-intentioned third party and the authority comes from the sultan'.^{^[274]} ^{^[275]} As it appears, the conspicuous unholiness of the affair did not escape the chronicler, who voices an uncharacteristic amount of empathy for the victim.

Other cases of stoning under the Seljuqs concern heretics, and may best be understood in light of the Seljuqs' declared aim to promote the cause of Sunni Islam.

As an example, one might cite the case of a certain Mahmud al-Ilaqi, from the Kurdish town of Ilaq, who was active in Khurasan in the 1070s, spreading what amounted to heretical views in the eyes of the Seljuq authorities and Sunni leaders. Ilaq had been a hub of nativist Iranian prophecy in the eighth century, and Mahmud is accused, in the text that chronicles his demise, of perpetuating the teachings of two movements that were active there in the time of the Abbasid caliphate:

He claimed substantial union [with God]. He possessed fragments from the treatises of the Mubayyida and Khurramiyya... He sold such and such places in paradise, and so on. Having realised his [heretical] condition, men bore witness against him that necessitated his execution. This matter was discussed, then he was crucified and stoned to death. The first to throw stones at him while crucified were Judge Abu Muhammad, who was the city's judge, and the imam ‘Abdallah al-Saffar, the city's legal adviser. They were followed by others, who smashed him to pieces. This occurred at Merv, when Sultan Malikshah, may God have mercy on him, was there in the year 472/[1O79-8o].19

It seems no coincidence that al-Ilaqi met his violent end when the city in which he spread his teachings was visited by the sultan. Most likely, Malikshah used the occasion to show his commitment to the eradication of religious deviancy. He did so in consultation, or so it seems, with the local (Sunni) religious establishment. That the chief s judge threw the first stone tallies with the normative legal literature, which stipulates that the head of the state or his representative, the judge, must throw the first stone if the conviction is based on a confession (which one assumes had been extracted from al-Ilaqi).

Public punishment meted out by the Seljuqs was particularly violent when it was directed against heretics. The Isma‘ilis, who for large parts of the eleventh and twelfth centuries were the Seljuqs' most worrisome domestic enemies, suffered from this perhaps more than any other group.

Dozens of their supporters were immolated at Isfahan in 1101, when Sunni militias, at the encouragement of the leading local Shafi‘i jurist, threw them into ditches burning with naphtha.^{^[276]} There are also cases of post-mortem public burning of the corpses of executed Isma‘ilis.^{^[277]}1 Certain late medieval sources state that the body of the mystic ‘Ayn al-Qudat (d. 1131), after his execution in Hamadhan, was wrapped in a naphtha-soaked cloak and set on fire. ‘Ayn al-Qudat's end echoes what is perhaps the single most famous execution in the history of Islam, that of his fellowmystic, Mansur al-Hallaj, in 922. The reasons for al-Hallaj's trial and execution are exceedingly complex, and the sources are difficult to interpret. Most seem to agree, however, that al-Hallaj, under drummed-up charges of being a Qarmatian agitator,^{^[278]} was crucified alive in Baghdad and decapitated the next morning, his corpse burnt and his ashes thrown into the Tigris. On such evidence, one may be justified in speculating about a background of religious deviancy in the case of a woman condemned to immolation in Baghdad in 1136. As is reported by the chronicler Ibn al-Jawzi (d. 1201), on the night of 21/22 July, in the courtyard of the Baghdad congregational mosque, a Muslim woman was arrested because she was suspected [of religious deviancy?], although she was deemed good. A reed basket was brought and she was made to stand in it. The naphtha-thrower struck fire at it, and so the basket burned. The woman, however, managed to escape, stripped of her clothes. She was pardoned. The fire had only touched her superficially.^{^[279]}

According to a Prophetic hadith,^{^[280]} only God punishes with fire (that is, in the hereafter), and this reflects a certain predilection against punitive immolation. However, examples of public burnings, particularly of heretics, are known from the early centuries of Islam.

The fourth caliph, ‘Ali b. Abi Talib (r. 656-61), was credited with having ordered the immolation of apostates and idol-worshippers, and there are further examples from Umayyad and Abbasid times. The post-mortem immolation of executed corpses was rarely challenged by the jurists. As the jurist Ibn Hajar writes in the eighth/fourteenth century, ‘the [corpses of the] dead are burned to denigrate them, and to frighten [others] so as to not emulate them'.^{^[281]}

When the chronicles report that offenders were put on the cross (Ar. salb), involvement of judges is, as a rule, not specified. Putting someone on the cross suggested an association with Qur'an 5:33 and the crime of ‘making war on God and His messenger', and the authorities certainly benefited from the legitimacy that came with the act of salb, even if the Islamic judiciary did not actively sanction it. In fact, crucifixion is probably the most commonly mentioned form of execution in Seljuq chronicles. Often, as in the case of al-Hallaj, salb comes closer to the tying to a wooden post or to gibbeting (cf. the Persian synonym of salb, viz. bar dar kardan, ‘to put on a wooden stand') than to Roman-style nailing on a cross. When the Seljuq vizier Dargazini was ‘crucified' (suliba) in 1133, ‘the rope around his neck snapped', and he fell to the ground.^{^[282]}

Chronicles from the eleventh to the thirteenth centuries occasionally also mention other forms of capital punishment, such as trampling by elephants (especially in the East). For example, the Ghaznavid sultan Ibrahim b. Mas‘ud (r. 1059-99) had his own palace baker trampled to death for hoarding wheat and flour and thereby jeopardising the bread supply of the local populace.^{^[283]} Offenders were sometimes executed by being thrown down from heights, a discretionary or siyasa punishment meted out particularly to sodomites.^{^[284]} Finally, decapitation by the sword was probably a common, perhaps even the commonest, form of capital punishment (in the sense of talionic executions), as has been claimed,^{^[285]} but it receives relatively little attention in the chronicles.

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Source: Gordon Matthew, Kaeuper Richard, Zurndorfer Harriet (eds.). The Cambridge World History of Violence. Volume 2: AD 500-AD 1500. Cambridge University Press,2020. — 696 p.. 2020

Torture and State Violence under the Seljuqs (Eleventh-Thirteenth Centuries)

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