Caliph's Guard
The Muslim response to the Crusades was initially muted and
disunited. The inhabitants of the region were shocked by the incursions and
horrified by the violence and barbarous habits of the newcomers, but those with
the military skills - the Saljuq princes and their atabeys - could not surmount
their political differences to fight against them. The impassioned plea of the
religious scholar al-Sulami, who went to Baghdad to beg the Saljuq sultan and
‘Abbasid caliph for assistance, fell on deaf ears. It was not until the
ambitious atabey of Mosul and Aleppo, Imad al-Din Zangi, and his son Nur al-Din
began to create a larger Muslim enclave straddling northern Syria and Iraq that
a counter-offensive conceptualized as a jihad began. During the late 1120s Imad
al-Din consolidated his control over his domains. By the 1130s he was pushing
southwards in Syria and northwards towards the Crusader county of Edessa. Its
fall in 1144 triggered the Second Crusade in 1148, which failed to achieve its
main goal, namely the capture of Damascus. Instead the Zangids managed to
consolidate their control of the Orontes valley from Aleppo down to Hama, Homs
and finally Damascus, creating a unified Muslim bloc adjacent to the Crusader
principalities on the coastal strip of the Levant.
In the 1160s both the Crusaders and the Zangids began to
view Egypt, where the Fatimid caliphate was fading fast, as the next prize.
During the early 1160s Amalric, the Latin king of Jerusalem, threatened Egypt
repeatedly but was forced back by the approach of Zangid forces each time. In
1167 the Zangids tired of the game and Nur al-Din sent one of his Kurdish
commanders, Shirkuh, into Egypt to occupy it. He was accompanied by his nephew,
Salah al-Din al-Ayyubi, better known in Europe as Saladin. When Shirkuh died
soon after, Salah al-Din assumed the Zangid command in Egypt. He consolidated
his position by assuming the role of chief minister to the Fatimid caliph but
soon, under pressure from Nur al- Din, he suppressed the Fatimid caliphate. In
1171 the sermon at the Friday Prayer in Cairo was dedicated to the Zangids,
Saljuqs and ‘Abbasids after over two centuries during which it had been offered
to the Shi’i Fatimids. The termination of the Fatimid caliphate was the end of
an era: the Umayyad caliphs of Cordoba had been gone for over a century, their
palaces alternately sacked by unpaid Berber soldiers and irate Cordoban
townspeople, while the ¡¥Abbasid caliphs resided in the twilight world of
Baghdad and left the real business of government to politico-military dynasts
such as the Zangids. It was only a matter of time before they too would
disappear from the Muslim political stage.
In Egypt power passed to Salah al-Din and his descendants,
the Ayyubids, who soon extended their control over Syria at the expense of
their former Zangid patrons and the Latin kingdoms. In 1187 Salah al-Din
achieved his greatest victory when he defeated the Crusaders at the Battle of
Hattin and recaptured Jerusalem. The fall of Jerusalem triggered the Third
Crusade (1190-92), which engendered the romantic European image of the
encounter between Richard the Lionheart and Salah al-Din but, in fact, led to
little gain for either side. In the truce of 1192 the Muslims kept Jerusalem
but the Crusaders retained their strategically more important coastal base of
Acre. Salah al-Din died the following year. Although he was eulogized as a holy
warrior by some of his contemporaries, in subsequent centuries other heroes
loomed larger: his Zangid master Nur al-Din, and the later Ayyubid slave
soldier Baybars, who helped halt the Mongol advance through Syria in 1260 and
then, having become Mamluk sultan, dedicated annual military campaigns from
Egypt to dislodging the last remaining Latins from the Levantine coast until
his death in 1277. The task was finally completed when the Mamluk sultan
Qalawun recaptured Acre in 1291.
During the last decades of the caliphate the ‘Abbasids made
a startling comeback in the shape of al-Nasir (r. 1180-1225), an ambitious
caliph who attempted to claw back some real power from the various condottieri
who passed through Baghdad and extricate himself from Saljuq clutches. On the
political front he managed to ally himself with the rulers of Khwarazm in
Transoxania and kill the last Saljuq sultan, Tughril, and then avoid
Khwarazmian ‘protection’ by making an alliance with the Ghurids of Afghanistan.
Having achieved some freedom of political action, he set about restoring the
authority of the caliphate by developing an integrative version of Islam which
brought together Sunnism and Shi’ism under the umbrella of Sufism (Islamic
mysticism). He gave his religious programme an institutional framework in the
form of the futuwwa, a term literally meaning ¡¥young men¡¦ but used in this
era for groups of men bound by a common moral or honour code and loyal to a
particular master or leader. In some contexts futuwwa were little more than
urban gangs or militias, but al-Nasir reformed the organization, took over its
headship himself, and made it into an empire-wide hierarchy, a military order
in the service of the caliph.
However, al-Nasir could not turn back the clock. It had
become normal throughout the Islamic world for locally based warrior sultans to
rule in the place of the universal caliph, who had become a symbol rather than
a reality for the majority of Muslims. In other words, political plurality had
become a fact of life. It is for this reason that the final demise of the
‘Abbasid caliphs in 1258 at the hands of the invading Mongols did not cause
more distress. The Mongols had arrived in force in Transoxania in 1222, a few
years before the death of al-Nasir, to punish the ruler of Khwarazm for having
killed a Mongol ambassador. Chinghiz Khan swept through Transoxania and
Khurasan, burning, pillaging and destroying cities. Their inhabitants were
given a choice - surrender or die - and those who thought the Mongols were
bluffing did not live to tell the tale. Although the numbers of deaths given in
the chronicles are hugely inflated, they convey the utter desolation caused in
the region by this punitive attack. The Mongol conquest of the Middle East,
which was directed by Chinghiz Khan’s grandson Hulegu, took place 30 years
later. As the Mongols advanced, most cities surrendered quickly to avoid the
fate of those who had paid the penalty for resisting the clan of Chinghiz Khan.
The Mongols reached Baghdad in 1258, took the city and killed the ‘Abbasid
caliph. A member of the ‘Abbasid family made it to Cairo, where the new Mamluk
sultan willingly set him up as a latter-day caliph, but his status was not
widely recognized outside Mamluk domains in Egypt and Syria.
The arrival of the Mongols radically altered the political
geography of the Middle East by drawing a line through the heartlands of the
‘Abbasid caliphate. The eastern Islamic lands from Iraq through Iran to
Khurasan and Transoxania became part of the vast Mongol empire, while the
western half of the region, Syria, the Arabian peninsula, Egypt and the rest of
North Africa were divided up between a number of Muslim regimes, the majority
of whom accepted that they were sultans rather than potential caliphs. The
cultural legacy of earlier centuries nonetheless lived on, and it is to the
society and culture of the ‘Abbasid age that we now turn.
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