Download PDF | Andrew Marsham - Rituals of Islamic Monarchy_ Accession and Succession in the First Muslim Empire (2009).
361 Pages
Introduction
This book is a history of the rituals by which the first Muslim monarchs were formally acknowledged. Like the Christian Roman emperor and the Iranian King of Kings, the caliph of the first Muslim empire was acclaimed by his followers and received oaths of allegiance from them. He appeared before them enthroned in both religious and royal settings, bearing the insignia of his office. That the caliph was a ‘monarch’, and in some senses a ‘king’, perhaps does not need to be restated.1 However, the emphasis in much of Islamic political thought on the notion of ‘kingship’ (mulk) as mere earthly, or temporal power, in contrast to the legitimate authority of the ‘caliphate’ (khilāfa), which is derived from God, can obscure the important continuities between caliphal authority and that of ancient Near Eastern monarchy.2
Because of this distinction in the Islamic tradition, ‘monarchy’ is probably a better description of the caliphate than ‘kingship’; it encompasses the shared cultural heritage with ancient Near Eastern rulership, while acknowledging the distinctive semantic and conceptual transformations of that heritage that took place in Islam. The monarchs of Rome, Iran and Islam each represented temporal and sacral authority in an imperial context – they were both ‘king’ and ‘priest’ of a preeminent, divinely sanctioned world power. In Islam, a division of roles between the caliph and his Muslim subjects eventually led to ‘classical’ Sunni orthodoxy (that is, the four main schools of medieval Sunni Islam), in which the right to interpret God’s law (sharīʿa) came to reside not exclusively in the person of the caliph, but rather in God’s community as a whole. However, this does not invalidate the parallel with Rome and Iran, where an unstable division of authority between ‘church’ and ‘state’ was also maintained. Furthermore, there is very good evidence that during the first centuries of Islam many held the caliph – as the representative of God on earth – to have far greater sacerdotal status and legislative power than later orthodoxies would allow.3 Indeed, what distinguishes rightful monarchy from mere secular power is the performance of symbolic acts of communication that establish recognition of the monarch’s sacred status as a divinely favoured ruler.4 ‘Ritual’ is used throughout this book in this sense of the communicative performance of gestures and other symbolic exchanges.5
One of the most important of these acts of symbolic communication, indeed, arguably the ritual sine qua non of monarchy, is the ceremony of inauguration or accession.6 This ceremony, which usually entails a sequence of ritual acts, is variously referred to by one element in the sequence – as unction, enthronement, coronation, acclamation or investiture. A form of the same rituals was very often used to establish the succession through the recognition of a ‘crown prince’, ‘co-emperor’ or ‘heir apparent’. This book seeks to establish what was distinctive about this inaugural ritual in early Islamic monarchy, and how it evolved during the formation, consolidation and decline of the first Muslim empire (between c. 630 and c. 865 CE).
Iran, Rome and Arabia in late antiquity
In the centuries before Islam, the Near East was dominated by the two imperial powers of Iran and Rome. Sasanian Iran (after the Sasanian dynasty that ruled Iran from 224 to 650 CE) was a predominantly inland empire, centred on the Iranian plateau, which stretches between the Zagros mountains in the west and Transoxiana and Afghanistan in the east. However, its agrarian heartlands lay below the plateau to the west, in the fertile lowlands around the Tigris and the Euphrates, as did the administrative capital, at Ctesiphon (near modern Baghdad). To the south, the Persian Gulf connected the empire with Africa and South Asia. In contrast, Rome’s geography was maritime; it controlled the Mediterranean coasts of Europe, North Africa and the Near East and the southern coast of the Black Sea. By the mid-to-late sixth century, on the eve of Islam, the territorial centre of gravity of the Roman empire lay in the east – in the Balkans, Asia Minor, Egypt, North Africa and the Levant. Its capital was at ‘New Rome’, or Constantinople (modern Istanbul), on the Balkan side of the Bosphorus straits between the Black Sea and the Mediterranean.7 Conflict between Rome and Iran had fluctuated in the centuries before Islam, but had escalated during the sixth and early seventh centuries. For strategic reasons, this led to Roman and Iranian involvement with the tribes of the Arabian Peninsula, who controlled the southern end of their heavily fortified land border, which ran north–south through the ‘Fertile Crescent’ – the arch of fertile land that linked Roman Oriens (modern Israel, Palestine, Syria and Lebanon) with the plains of the Tigris and the Euphrates in Sasanian Iraq.
The armies of Rome and Iran could not operate effectively in the deserts to the south of the Fertile Crescent, and so both empires cultivated client allies among the tribes who controlled the steppes leading out of the Arabian Peninsula.8 Since the third century CE, the Sasanian kings of Iran had supported the Naṣrid kings, who led the tribal federation of the Banū Lakhm from their capital at al-Ḥīra (on the southern, Arabian, side of the Euphrates).9 In the later sixth century, Iran had also intervened in the far south of the Arabian Peninsula, installing client rulers over the South Arabian kingdom of Ḥimyar. Many of those on the eastern Arabian littoral also paid homage to Iran, and there is even some evidence that Sasanian representatives may have sought to tax the remote west Arabian settlement of Mecca, where Muḥammad was born. In contrast, Rome had made alliances with a sequence of nomadic tribal federations. In the sixth century the emperor Justinian (r. 527–65) increased Rome’s patronage of the Jafnid clan that led the wider tribal grouping of the Banū Ghassān, partly in order to counteract the military effectiveness of Iran’s Naṣrid allies at al-Ḥīra. Authority over the tribes of Roman Oriens was delegated to these Jafnid kings.
Rome did not intervene directly in South Arabia, but a Christian ally, the king of Aksum, in Ethiopia, was an important influence on both southern and western Arabia.10 The prolonged political, economic and cultural influence of Rome and Iran on the periphery of the Arabian Peninsula before Islam would be reason enough to make the history of Roman and Iranian royal accession and succession important to the study of the same aspect of early Islamic society. What makes the political cultures of the two empires doubly significant is that the Muslim empire was formed by the conquest and colonisation of all the Iranian empire and much of the Roman empire; Islamic political culture originated on the remote margins of the Roman and Iranian late antique Near East but developed at its centre.
Royal accession in Iran
In Sasanian Iran, the king was a descendant of the gods, blessed and made victorious by them, who protected his subjects from enemies and so was recognised by them as their ruler, the ‘King of Kings’.11 Sasanian claims to divinely ordained kingship were expressed in figural form in the giant rock reliefs that some of the kings had carved in their ancestral territory of Fars, in south-west Iran. In these early Sasanian tableaux, the King of Kings and the senior Zoroastrian deity, Ahura Mazda, face one another, either standing or on horseback. The King of Kings receives the royal diadem from the god, the circular form of which is seen between the two imposing figures, each of whom grasps it with his right hand.
Agnatic bloodline was also essential to Iranian monarchy. At least by the late sixth century, the Sasanians claimed descent from their ancient Achaemenid forebear, Darius III (r. 336–330 BCE) and, ultimately, from the mythical Kayanid kings of Iran.13 The importance of the king’s more immediate, lineage is evident in the continuous power of the descendants of the first Sasanian king, Ardashir (r. 224–c. 240 CE), for almost all the 400 years before Islam (‘Sasanian’ derives from Ardashir’s grandfather, Sasan). However, although heredity was a prerequisite for royal power, it was divine favour, victory and acclamation by the priesthood and nobility, sometimes preceded by prior designation by the former king, that confirmed each Sasanian king’s status. The balance between the importance of these elements at any given accession depended in part upon specific circumstances and, given their symbolic dimension, in part upon the observer’s perspective. Two of the fullest sources for Sasanian accession and succession give quite different emphases. The Paikuli inscription (c. 293) commemorates the accession of Narseh I (r. 293–302) and records Narseh’s victory in a conflict over the succession against his nephew, the ‘usurper’ Bahrām III.14 Here, it is divine favour, bloodline, election, acclamation and enthronement that make the Iranian king. According to the inscription, the usurper Bahrām III had been crowned without proper consultation with the Iranian princes and, worse yet, with the help of the Zoroastrian demon Ahriman and other devils. A coalition of Iranian notables, led by Narseh, deposed and defeated the usurper. An assembly then convened in Narseh’s presence at Paikuli for the formal recognition of him as the King of Kings. Messages were sent out ‘to the hargbed (perhaps ‘chief tax official’15) [and the landholders and the princes and] the grandees and the nobles and the houselords [and the others?]’.
Narseh reminded these notables how the founder of the Sasanian dynasty, Ardashir I, had been succeeded by his son, Shapur I (r. c. 240–c. 272), because, ‘in [the royal] family, [no other?] king [was?] greater(?) [and better?], except Ardashir, King of Kings’. Narseh then asked them if they knew of anyone superior to his father, Shapur I, who might now govern the empire. They did not, and so Narseh asked if anyone more suitable than he, Narseh, were known to them, and again the ‘hargbed [and the landholders and the princes and the grandees and the nobles and the Persians] and the Parthians’ responded that Narseh’s lineage, divine favour, fortune, wisdom, courage and victory made him the best candidate; at which point he ‘ascended the throne’.16 In contrast, the Letter of Tansar, which probably reflects late-sixth-century Sasanian ideas,17 emphasises the importance of the clerical elite in confirming the king’s choice of successor and then in acclaiming him and crowning him as such before his precursor’s death (perhaps similar to the process by which the unfortunate Bahrām III had come to power):
That night [having affirmed the king’s choice of heir] they will set the crown and throne in the audience-room and the groups of noblemen will take up their positions in their own places. The mobad (‘chief priest’) with herbads (‘religious officials’) and nobles, the illustrious and the pillars of the realm, will go to the assembly of the princes; and they will range themselves before them and will say, ‘We have carried our perplexity before God Almighty and He has deigned to show us the right way and to instruct us in what is best.’ The mobad will cry aloud, saying, ‘The angels have approved the kingship of such-a-one, son of such-a-one. Acknowledge him also, ye creatures of God and good tidings be yours!’ They will take up that prince and seat him on the throne and place the crown on his head . . .18 The emphasis on the special role of the mobad and the religious officials may be prescriptive rather than descriptive; how important the priests were in making the king may have been exaggerated by the Letter’s clerical author. However, both the acclamation and coronation by the elite parallel the ritual forms described in the Paikuli inscription. Iranian monarchy was a variant of the ancient Eurasian pattern of sacral kingship, in which divine favour, victory, prior designation, heredity and popular acclamation were the foundations of legitimate authority.
Royal accession in Rome
In Rome, the basic elements of royal legitimacy resembled those in Iran, but their relative importance differed. Most notably, the bloodline of the ruling family was given far less emphasis.19 Without agnatic descent restricting claims to the throne, power was often its own justification; no one dynasty held the emperorship in Constantinople for more than three generations in the fifth and sixth centuries.20 Recognition through the election and acclamation of the army, senate and people as someone victorious and favoured by God was what made the emperor. The acclamation took place either at the ceremonial parade ground of the Hebdomen, outside the city, or at the chariot arena of the Hippodrome, within it. If the acclamation had taken place at the Hebdomen, it was followed by the emperor’s ceremonial entry into the city as a victorious soldier, which ended at the church of Hagia Sophia. If the acclamation had occured at the Hippodrome (as it tended to from the late fifth century), then the emperor simply processed from the palace that adjoined it to Hagia Sophia. During the acclamation ceremonies, the new emperor was crowned with a torque by a ‘first commander’ (campiductor); then the patriarch placed the ‘imperial cloak’ (chlamys) on the emperor’s shoulders and the diadem or crown on his head. When dynastic succession did take place, a process not unlike the coronation of the nominated successor of the Sasanian king helped to bring it about: a relative was named as co-ruler, crowned by the emperor and then acclaimed by the senate, army and people, to rule alongside the emperor as his junior or his equal. However, the same process could equally be used to designate a non-relative as a successor, and sometimes it was not used at all.21 With the Christianisation of the Roman empire during and after the fourth century CE, the emperors claimed to represent God’s authority on earth. This idea is expressed in the military oath (sacramentum), sworn by recruits into the Roman army: They swear by God, Christ, the Holy Spirit, and also by His Imperial Majesty which by God’s command all men should love and venerate. For faithful loyalty and watchful devotion should be pledged to the emperor who received the name Augustus, as though they were pledged to God in bodily presence. Both civilian and military serve God when they love him who reigns at God’s behest.22 The theoretical basis of this monotheist dimension of royal authority was Old Testament kingship. Whereas the New Testament presented no clear model for temporal monarchy, the historical books of the Old Testament, suitably ‘dejudaised’, provided the pattern for divinely sanctioned authority.23 Furthermore, the tensions in the Bible between the legitimatory principles of divine choice, popular election and hereditary succession paralleled the conflicting principles of succession in the Roman empire.24 Like Saul, the first king of the Old Testament, the late antique Roman emperor was chosen by God (1 Samuel 9: 16, 10: 24), from Whom all legitimate authority derived; in 574 Justin II told his adoptive son, Tiberius: ‘It is not I who gives you the crown, but God by my hand.’ 25 However, like Saul, the emperor was also acclaimed by ‘the people’, and ‘made king’ by them (1 Samuel 10: 24, 11: 15). On the other hand, God could bless a whole dynasty, as He had blessed the progeny of David (2 Samuel 7: 12–16). Despite this blessing for a family of kings, each new member of the dynasty still needed to be designated as a crown prince or king, like Solomon, and acclaimed as such by God’s people, in a renewal of the covenant between God and David (1 Kings 1.43–8; Ps. 132). When the imperial capital of Constantinople was delivered from a siege in August 626, a contemporary source has it that the city’s patriarch gave a speech invoking Old Testament kingship, through the words of the prophet Isaiah: ‘Thus speaks the Lord our God: I will defend this city to save it for me and for my servant David’ (Isaiah 37: 35). For our emperor is a new David in his piety to God and his clemency to his subjects. And the Lord will crown him with victories like David, and his son who reigns with him, making him wise and peaceable like Solomon, and bestowing on him and his father, piety and orthodoxy. Ask this, prophet, from the God of Solomon who knows no jealousy, and beseech the Virgin, whom you foresaw with the eyes of the mind to be truly the Mother of God, and proclaimed in words of prophecy (cf. Isaiah 7: 14, 40: 9), to save the city forever and its people . . .26 The emperor Heraclius’ son, to whom the speech refers, is ‘Heraclius the new Constantine’, who had been crowned as basileus (here, ‘co-emperor’) by his father in 613, at the unprecedentedly young age of 8 months. Two more sons were eventually crowned as co-emperors: Heraclonas and David, who had been born in 630, the year of Heraclius’ triumphal entry into Jerusalem, the city of the biblical David.27 Nine silver plates portraying the events from the biblical account of David’s life, most l ikely manufactured under Heraclian patronage, are further evidence of the importance of the archetypal divinely elected dynasty.28 Heraclius’ descendants retained control of the empire for seventy years after his death, and were the first in a series of dynasties that ruled the Byzantine empire after the seventh century.
The origins of the Muslim empire
In 622 (year 1 of the Islamic lunar calendar) Muḥammad became the leader of a group of monotheist believers at the oasis of Yathrib (later Medina). The oasis was located in the Ḥijāz, in central West Arabia, on the remote fringes of the imperial world to the north. By c. 630 Muḥammad’s community dominated the Ḥijāz and also exerted influence over much of the rest of the Arabian Peninsula, including the nomadic tribes of its interior – not least by virtue of having gained control of an important shrine at Mecca. Muḥammad died in 632, after some tentative raids to the north. His successors continued to direct the Arabian tribes outwards, against the empires of Rome and Iran. In a series of spectacular military victories, Roman Egypt (Ar. Miṣr) and Oriens (that is, the Levant and Syria, Ar. Bilād al-Shām) and most of the Iranian empire fell to Muslim control by c. 650.29 These territories were to form the core of the Muslim empire, which was ruled by the Umayyad dynasty from Syria for most of the period c. 660–750 and from Iraq by the Abbasid dynasty after 750; both dynasties were descendants of the tribal grouping to which Muḥammad had belonged, the Quraysh. It is not surprising that, although Islam began in Arabia, the Muslim empire came to be centred outside it, in the ‘Fertile Crescent’ of post-Roman Syria and post-Sasanian Iraq. This region provided the material and cultural resources to sustain an imperial state, which were not available in Arabia itself. However, despite the influence of the heritage of the defeated empires, Muslim accession rituals remained distinct from their Roman and Iranian precursors in some important respects. The differences were in large part a function of the unique circumstances of the first formative years of the Muslim empire in the Arabian Peninsula, which lay outside the direct influence of the great powers to the north and had its own distinctive variants on the cultural patterns of the Near East. This Arabian heritage exerted a determinative influence on the way that the political cultures of the conquered empires were reshaped after the conquests. The main political institution in pre-Islamic Arabia was the pledged covenant under oath. This is an ubiquitous cultural form, but it had a particular importance in pre-Islamic Arabia, where, in the absence of a powerful state, kinship and pledged agreements were the only basis for security. Most of the Peninsula could be inhabited only by nomadic and semi-nomadic pastoralists, who tended to resist domination or exploitation by settled powers. Settled communities existed at oases, on the coasts and in the highlands, but these polities also tended to have a tribal political structure, based upon kin and covenant. The main exception was South Arabia, where agriculture and trade did support the institutions of state power. In central Arabia, however, the pledged word was almost the only expression of political obligation. As in other ancient and late antique Eurasian polities, sanctions were imposed on those who broke the pledge: a patron deity (or deities) was named as a guarantor for the covenant, and their anger would bring disaster upon a perjurer. Where an agreement was made between two equals (as was often the case in Arabia), divine displeasure was often the only viable sanction that could be brought to bear on a treaty-breaker. In unequal agreements, one party might claim to be representative of a god or gods; even then, however, there was a mutuality to the agreement, in that those who pledged their allegiance to the deity’s earthly representative expected protection and rewards in return.30 Such pledged agreements became the means of agreeing upon religio-political leadership in early Islam. The argument of the first part of this book is that the precise form of the early Islamic oath of allegiance reflects the fusion of late antique African and Near Eastern Judaeo-Christian monotheism with much older Arabian religious and political customs. After the adoption of Christianity by the Roman empire in the fourth century CE, Arabia witnessed a number of syntheses of existing Arabian religio-political traditions with late antique monotheism. Because Judaeo-Christian monotheism preserved a version of ancient Near Eastern ideas about political contract in its representation of God’s relations with Humanity as a king’s covenant with his people, it was inherently compatible with existing Arabian traditions concerning the foundation of political communities under the patronage of a deity, or deities. The most successful of these syntheses was that set out in the Qurʾān in the seventh century, and, as a result, we know most about it, but it was not the first. On both the northern fringes of Arabia and in the southern highlands, earlier Judaeo-Christian variants of Arabian kingship had developed. All of them were overtaken by the great success of the early seventhcentury West Arabians. In early Islam, as in late antiquity in general, military power was explicitly understood to have a sacral dimension. The charismatic authority of the Prophet Muḥammad and of his immediate successors as representatives of God was legitimated by the continued military success of the Muslims. As a consequence, the Muslims’ particular monotheist variant on the ancient cultural form of the pledge or oath became so thoroughly imbued with sacred significance that, like many other aspects of Islamic religious practice, it could easily be reinvented or transformed only in ways that invoked monotheism in general, and the memory of the practice of the first Muslim community in particular. It is ultimately for this reason that the accession ceremony of the monarch of the Muslim empire is almost always referred to in the extant sources, not as a ‘coronation’ or ‘investiture’, or by some other term, but as a ‘pledge of allegiance’ (Ar. bayʿa).31 Nonetheless, the ritual of the bayʿa was reinvented and transformed. The continued importance of military power in what was, in c. 700, still an empire of armed tribesmen organised for continual conquest meant that the pledge of allegiance continued to have a practical importance – the allegiance of the tribal armies was affirmed through oaths of loyalty. However, already by 700 the empire stretched from Carthage in North Africa to Balkh in Afghanistan. Whereas, in the first years of rapid conquest, the rewards of victory and colonisation in the name of God had been sufficient to unite the polity, mechanisms for confirming political authority in each generation that might have worked in relatively small Arabian polities could not continue to function on an imperial scale. Some form of hereditary monarchy, acceptable to the military elites and sanctioned in religious terms, was perhaps inevitable if the political unity of the Muslims (an ideological imperative in the new religious dispensation) was to be retained. The complex interactions between Arabian–Islamic culture and the indigenous cultures of the Fertile Crescent and Iran out of which ‘classical’ Islam began to emerge in the eighth and ninth centuries are far from fully understood, but some of the consequences of these interactions are evident in the evolution of the rituals of caliphal succession and accession.
Rituals of Islamic monarchy: The Umayyads and Abbasids
The consolidation of the Muslim empire took place under two dynasties of caliphs: the Umayyads (c. 660–750), who ruled from the former Roman diocese of Oriens (‘Syria’), and the Abbasids (after 750), who ruled from the former Sasanian capital province of Asōrestān (Iraq). Because the Umayyads ruled from post-Roman Syria, with armies predominantly recruited from the nomad population of that region, they drew heavily upon the symbolism of Roman royal authority and on the customs of nomadic Syria. They combined an Arabian emphasis on agnatic kinship – the ‘tribe’ – with notions of divinely ordained monarchy rooted in the Old Testament, the Qurʾān and Arabian tradition. However, the Umayyads failed to capture the Roman capital of Constantinople. (The last siege was in 717.) This meant that Roman imperial symbolism was never entirely the Umayyads’ own, whereas all the cultural resources of the heartlands of Sasanian Iran were available to them. There is good evidence for the growing influence of Iranian political culture at the later Umayyad caliphal court, as the caliphs sought stronger institutions for imperial government. Civil war within the Umayyad dynasty and its armies brought about conditions in which rival claims to power could thrive. The ‘Abbasid Revolution’ of 747–50 installed a new dynasty of caliphs, who ruled from post-Sasanian Iraq, not post-Roman Syria, and whose military support depended at first upon armies drawn from the mixed Arab and Iranian population of Khurasan (modern northeast Iran/north-west Afghanistan), whom they garrisoned in Iraq. In the Abbasid empire, acclamation by these armies was enormously important to gaining and retaining the caliphate (just as the Syrian army had been crucial to the succession in Umayyad times). However, the Abbasid rulers also established much more effective instruments of state power. Under the Abbasids, even more than under the Umayyads, the process of acclamation took place not just through oaths and pledges of allegiance (with both ‘Arabic–Islamic’ and ‘Iranian’ precedents), but also through the full panoply of royal ritual and ceremonial. The leadership of war and religious rites, rituals of procession, reception and audience in the cities and aulic and sacerdotal rituals in palaces and mosques were all occasions for the communication of status, loyalty and authority. The political culture of post-Sasanian Iran exerted a very great influence on the Abbasids, not least through the large numbers of non-Arabians who were drawn into the service of the dynasty at the caliphal court in Iraq. At the same time, the legitimatory paradigm of a (still highly contested) Arabic–Islamic religious tradition remained hegemonic; the Abbasid Revolution had been an Islamic revolution, which explicitly sought to bring in a millenarian golden age of rule by ‘the family of the Prophet Muḥammad’, and this continued to be the basis of early Abbasid claims to world rule. (In the east, local secession from Abbasid rule was, it is true, sometimes initially expressed as pre-Islamic Iranian revivalism, but even this was almost completely replaced by Islamic rebellion by the mid-ninth century.) Within this Islamic paradigm, the historical memory of the conduct of the Prophet and the earliest Muslims became increasingly normative, especially as it was remembered in the garrrison cities of Basra and Kufa, in the Abbasid heartlands of Iraq, and in the ‘Prophet’s City’ of Yathrib (Madīnat al-Nabī, or Medina), in what was now the holy land of the Ḥijāz. The elaboration of ideas of covenant and allegiance within an increasingly normative Islamic discourse, in which the status of the Prophet Muḥammad as the unique model for proper Islamic practice was widely accepted, came to be reflected in the invocation of his example in Abbasid caliphal ceremonial. This marks a shift from Umayyad accession rituals, in which general articulations of Arabian monotheism were more prominent than explicit invocations of the model of the Prophet. Two further consequences of the evolution of Arabic–Islamic political culture at the Umayyad and Abbasid courts in the eighth and ninth centuries are particularly evident in the sources. First, inheritance and bloodline, which were important in Near Eastern culture in general and in Arabian tribal culture in particular, retained great importance in the evolving Islamic tradition. Eventually, the idea of the kin-group of the Prophet having a unique claim to the leadership of the Muslims became very widespread. (However, as in Rome and Iran, heredity was necessary but not sufficient, and acclamation and even election by the ‘people’, through the oath of allegiance, were also required.) Finally, the importance of literacy in the articulation of caliphal power grew rapidly from late Umayyad times (730s and after). This was an aspect of the establishment of an effective apparatus of empire, which saw Arabian tribal custom become a fully imperial ceremonial, managed and interpreted by a bureaucracy of ideologues and jurists.
The sources and their analysis
The trajectory of the history of the first Muslim empire has shaped the available evidence for the political rituals of the rulers of that empire.32 Early Islamic culture inherited the predominantly oral culture of pre-Islamic central and West Arabia, and so the emergence of written Arabic sources for Islam, in the eighth and ninth centuries, is itself evidence of the transformation of Arabic–Islamic society after the conquest of the Near East.33 The beginning of the written Arabic–Islamic tradition occurred in the early-to-mid-eighth century, approximately halfway through the period examined in this book. Parts I and II are concerned with preIslamic Arabia and early Islam (c. 550–c. 660) and the Umayyad caliphate (c. 660–750), respectively, when Arabic historical writing had scarcely begun (and from when it is certainly not extant in an unmediated form). Parts III and IV cover the early Abbasid period (750–809) and middle Abbasid period (809–865), during which time the earliest extant Arabic sources were composed. The very different source material for the four periods has determined the approach taken to the history of ritual in each section. Because of the absence of early sources, there will always be many historical questions about the origins and early development of the earliest Muslim polity, that will remain unanswered (Part I, c. 550–c. 660). However, there is good corroborative evidence for the barest outlines of the much later Islamic account of events in contemporaneaous accounts in Syriac and Armenian from outside the Arabian Peninsula. That is, we can be certain that the Arabian conquests of the Near East, which took place in the 630s, 640s and 650s, were closely connected to a West Arabian monotheist religious movement, in which the figure of the Prophet Muḥammad (d. 632) was very important.34 Chapter 1 seeks to situate the formation of this earliest Muslim polity in the context of what is known of pre-Islamic Arabian political culture in archaeology, inscriptions and the later Arabic tradition. Chapter 2 addresses the beliefs of Muḥammad and his community through the evidence of the Qurʾān. Chapter 3 presents what evidence there is for rituals of loyalty and leadership in the ‘conquest society’ of the early-to-mid-seventh century. With the consolidation of the structures of Muslim empire under the Umayyad dynasty of monarchs (Part II, c. 660–750), the evidential situation improves. There are, however, almost no detailed descriptions of Umayyad accession rituals in the Arabic–Islamic tradition. This is only partially a function of the Umayyads having been overthrown by the Abbasids in 750. The tribal basis of Umayyad power, in which consultation among the ruling tribe decided the succession, did not demand much written communication, and this predominantly oral court culture does not seem to have generated royal annals. For this reason, it is rarely possible to discuss specific accession rituals in detail. The only exception for the early Umayyad period is due to the chance survival of a description of an accession outside the Arabic historical tradition, in a contemporaneous Syriac source that describes the accession of Muʿāwiya (r. c. 660–80). This, and the succession to Muʿāwiya, is the subject of Chapter 4. However, because the Umayyads remained heavily reliant on nomad armies for their power, they did patronise the media of royal interaction with the nomads. In literary terms, this meant panegyric court poetry. Verse had been enormously important in pre-Islamic Arabian culture, and it retained its status in public discourse about legitimacy and authority under Islam. A well-established oral tradition also meant that poetry could be remembered and transmitted to later generations. Because of this cultural status, and because poetry’s rhyme and metre make it relatively difficult for a later transmitter to invent or modify, it is potentially contemporaneous evidence for the Umayyad court, albeit preserved only in much later collections. Umayyad poetry is used in Chapter 5 to reconstruct aspects of ideas about the pledge of allegiance in the early Umayyad period (c. 680–c. 710). ‘Non-caliphal’ perspectives can be derived from the poetry of the Umayyads’ rivals, and from the later Islamic legal tradition. The earliest extant collections of legal texts were made in the late eighth century and most were composed in the ninth and tenth centuries. The traditions they preserve are thus not secure evidence for the context to which they are attributed (in most cases, the time of the Prophet Muḥammad), but the later context in which they did originate can sometimes be identified quite precisely and is itself sometimes quite early. In the case of the oath of allegiance, some material almost certainly originates in the context of the second civil war (683–92) and its aftermath, which saw the Marwanid branch of the Umayyad dynasty take power. This legal material can be juxtaposed with early poetry to give a fuller picture of late-seventh and early eighth-century ideas. Alongside poetry, the Umayyads also used the economic and cultural resources of the empire to articulate their claims to authority through the media of precious metal coins, inscriptions and monumental architecture. Thus, it is from this period that one can properly speak of ‘Islamic monarchy’, in the sense of a dynastic autocracy, sacralised through ritual in state-sponsored palaces and mosques.35 Chapter 6 assembles the evidence for the establishment of dynastic succession under the Marwanid branch of the Umayyads and its relationship to the tribal structures of political power in the Marwanid state. Chapter 7 uses the same evidential corpus to assemble the evidence for Marwanid ritual and ceremonial – location, participation and material culture. The later Marwanid period saw the growing use of literacy in the articulation of royal power and authority. Writing had become increasingly important in Islamic society as a whole, and, from c. 730, the caliphs sponsored prose as an important medium for the articulation of their legitimacy. The ninth- and tenthcentury sources preserve versions of ‘state letters’ produced by the secretaries of the caliph Hishām (r. 724–43) and his successors.36 These state letters include communications sent between the caliph and his provincial governors concerning rituals of accession and succession, as well as what are essentially scripts for public performance in the congregational mosques. This important break in the evidence for the promulgation of caliphal authority is the subject of Chapters 8 and 9. The character of the historical traditions about the period after the Abbasid Revolution is quite different from those for earlier periods. Evidence for the early Abbasid period (Part III, 750–809) is still secondary, in that it is extant only in the same ninth- and tenth-century compilations of earlier material. Important sources include al-Balādhurī’s (d. 892) Ansāb al-ashrāf (‘Genealogies of the Nobles’) and al-Ṭabarī’s (d. 923) Taʾrīkh al-rusul wa’l-mulūk (‘History of the Prophets and Kings’). However, the early Abbasid period falls within the lifetime of the first major compilers of written Arabic history, upon whom these later authors relied, such as al-Wāqidī (d. 823), al-Haytham b. ʿAdī (d. 821–4) and al-Madāʾinī (d. c. 830–50). Many of these writers were close to the Abbasid court, and record acounts from other, earlier courtiers. Whereas the historian of Umayyad accession ritual has to work in quite general terms, looking for patterns and themes in fragmentary evidence, accounts of particular Abbasid rituals of accession and succession survive (albeit, usually from a metropolitan, court perspective; the provinces and the army are not well represented in the sources). This permits the study of specific rituals of accession and succession in their historical context, and, for this reason, most of Parts III and IV is structured reign by reign, in order to highlight the distinctive features of each ritual and how the historical record of that ritual was shaped by the agendas of those who remembered it. Indeed, the survival of detailed accounts of Abbasid accession and succession by members of the imperial elite in itself reflects the importance of ritual in Abbasid court culture in general and in the legitimation of the caliph in particular. Both the frequent survival of more than one version of events, and the general tendency to make even polemical accounts of accessions seem realistic,37 mean that we can be fairly certain of the basic symbolic elements of Abbasid ritual in Iraq and can often reconstruct particular rituals in some detail. Chapters 10 and 11 address the reigns of al-Manṣūr and al-Mahdī (754–75 and 775–85) and al-Hādī and al-Rashīd (785–6 and 786–809). The later tradition preserves many copies of documents from the early Abbasid period. Attempts to negotiate about the succession generated a series of contractual documents, examples of which are extant from 776, 802 and 805. These ‘dispositive documents’ share features with Islamic contract law as it was evolving in the cities of Abbasid Iraq and so cast light on the early Abbasid understanding of the contractual dimension of the succession and on the growing importance of the written text in caliphal ceremonial. The evidence of these texts is presented at the end of Part III, in Chapter 12. The middle Abbasid period (Part IV, 809–65) is the first period of Islamic history for which there is a substantial corpus of extant near-contemporaneous evidence for events at the caliphal court: most of the major sources for the history of the caliphate (such as those named above) were composed during or soon after this period. These often include ‘official’ material from what appear to be royal annals; we first hear of an ‘office of historical records’ (dīwān al-sīra) at the beginning of the ninth century.38 This fuller evidence still presents significant problems of interpretation,39 but the greater detail of the accounts permits a more detailed understanding of the metropolitan rituals of this period, especially after the move to the new Iraqi capital of Samarra (836–92), which is archaeologically extant. Chapters 13, 14 and 15 cover the periods 809–47, 847–61 and 861–5. Among the copies of documents from the middle Abbasid period, two nearidentical texts, recorded by al-Ṭabarī, stand out as particularly important. These are the two oaths of allegiance said to have been composed for the accessions of al-Muntaṣir (r. 861–2) and al-Muʿtazz (r. 865–9), respectively. They are the first extant documents composed for the pledge of allegiance to a caliph on his accession and are translated and analysed in Chapter 16. As he does in earlier periods of caliphal history, al-Ṭabarī uses these records of formal covenants before God to highlight the disastrous consequences of failure to fulfil them; there is an irony to his presentation of the solemn covenant texts for succession and accession and a polemical value to his focus on the basis of the authority of the caliphate in Islamic law.40 However, selection and juxtaposition are quite different from emendation and invention, and there is good evidence that al-Ṭabarī was quite a scrupulous compiler. Al-Ṭabarī is quite typical of the authors of the extant evidence for the first Muslim empire. Like him, most of the compilers of our sources lived in Iraq in the ninth or tenth century, and many were also religious and legal scholars. These sources not only ‘look back’ to the seventh and eighth centuries from a ninth- or tenth-century vantage point, but also do so from what is often a ‘pious’ or ‘scholarly’ perspective. Hence, their emphasis on the pledge of allegiance (bayʿa), modelled on the practice of the Prophet and the first caliphs, as being legally constitutive of the caliphate may in part be a back projection of later, ‘scholarly’ ideas into earlier periods – later ideas that sometimes seek to extract tidy legal theories from messy past Realpolitik. 41 In contrast, the historical–anthropological approach taken in this book does not assume that an internally consistent theory of the caliphate ought to be uncovered through an examination of the history of inaugural ritual during the first 230 or so years of the Muslim empire but, rather, that power and authority were continually contested through the media of competing, evolving and often contradictory symbolic systems, out of which normative ‘orthodoxies’ eventually emerged. However, to identify contention, reinvention and transformation is not to suggest that the early history of Islamic political culture was entirely discontinuous. On the contrary, there tends to be a profound conservatism in the forms of political institutions over the très longue durée. 42 Although the significance and purpose of the pledge of allegiance changed with the historical context, the prominence of such pledges in the extant accounts for rituals of accession and succession is not simply a trick of their perspective, but also a function of the pledges’ genuine importance; Arabian cultural heritage in general, and the legacy of West Arabian monotheism in particular, exerted a determinative influence over the development of Islamic political culture in the first Muslim empire. For this reason, Part I situates the formation of the first Muslim polity in the context of pre-Islamic Arabian religio-political culture.
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