Download PDF | Khalid Yahya Blankinship - The End of the Jihad State - the Reign of Hisham Abd al-Malik and the Collapse of the Umayyads-State University of New York Press (1994).
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Introduction
The Importance of the Umayyad Caliphate and Its Collapse The early Muslim state or caliphate, first centered in al-Madlna and then in Syria, constituted one of the largest unitary empires that mankind has ever known. Starting from small beginnings in western Arabia, the Muslim state rapidly grew enormous, uniting a territory stretching from Spain to China and from Yaman to the Caucasus under the rule of the Muslim caliph within a single century. As a result of this expansion, the Muslim caliphate surpassed the Roman and Chinese empires in land area, perhaps being exceeded only by that of the Mongols in pre-modern times. Although precise information for its population is lacking, the Muslim state also undoubtedly would rank high on the list of pre-modern states in that regard as well, owing to its sheersize.1 Like all other multinational empires, the Muslim state reached its greatest extent through a series of military campaigns.
These are referred to in Muslim literature as "the openings" (al-futiih or alfutuhat). This terminology is directly comparable to the American expression "opening up," as in "the opening up of the West" in reference to the extension of Euro-American conquest and settlement westward to the Pacific Ocean in the nineteenth century. In this case, as in those of the Romans, the Mongols, the Spanish, and others including the Muslim Arabs, expansion became an ideological imperative justified on moral grounds.2 In the case of the Muslim caliphate, this imperative was the establishment of God's rule in the earth, for that was the sole legitimate sovereignty. God's rule was to be established by those kinds of efforts that He had ordained, which included armed struggle in His path. Such armed struggle became known as jihad3 and remained the most salient policy of the caliphate down to the end of Umayyad rule in 132/750. Most significantly, the jihad called for a mass mobilization of Muslim manpower that played an important role in the caliphate's success. Indeed, the persistence of the Muslim movement forward on all fronts, for nearly a century, can only be explained if this basic doctrine of early Muslim ideology is taken into account. Many other peoples have shared the desire for wealth and the wish to escape poverty and overpopulation, insufficient explanations which have been offered for the astonishing rapidity and extent of the early Islamic conquests. Such a persistent dedication to armed struggle as exhibited by the early Muslims required an ideological belief to back it, even if worldly expectations also played a role.
After all, the Muslim fighters, especially in the earliest period, were not professional soldiers but, nevertheless, carried out the jihad continuously, despite numerous debacles and defeats. Being partly inspired by a belief is not, of course, unique to the Muslims. For example, the Mongols, from an early stage in their conquests, were also propelled by the belief that they were destined to rule the whole earth.4 However, in the case of Islam, the work of conquest through jihad was first for God, second for the reward of the other world for those who sacrificed their property and their lives in God's path, and only third for worldly rewards for God's warriors who survived.5 Unlike the Mongols, whose empire was founded by a warrior chieftain, the Muslims did not fight to establish the rule of a particular person or his family, for Islam was taught by a spiritual leader who was, above all, a prophet rather than a warrior. While the Muslims' inspiration for fighting in God's path had spiritual roots, it is clear that the material success of their early conquests in this world helped to strengthen their belief in the rightness of their pursuit ofjihad. Fighting in God's path succeeded brilliantly against an exhausted Sasanid Persia, a seriously divided East Roman or Byzantine empire, a weak Visigothic Spain, and a Sind alienated from its rulers when the early Arab Islamic strength had not yet spent itself. The great amounts of booty gained, helped finance the continuing struggle to advance on various fronts.
As a result, the Islamic state grew accustomed to financing itself through booty to a considerable extent. However, despite the enormous size of the caliphate and the ideology of jihad that supported it, the universal caliphate did not endure for centuries like the Roman and the Chinese empires, but suffered a sudden and unexpected disruption after which it was never reconstituted. This came about before the end of the rule of the Umayyad family in 132/750. Because of this disruption, which began with the civil wars of 122-32/740-50 and culminated in the replacement of the Umayyads with the 'Abbasids, three major results emerged.
First, the political unity of Islam and the Muslims, which is strongly insisted upon in the Qur'an,6 was immediately and forever sundered after 122/740. Although the 'Abbasids continued the caliphate and maintained the unity of most of the caliphal domain, 'Abbasid rule never extended far west of modern Tunisia,7 so that the lands in the modern countries of Algeria, Morocco, Spain, and Portugal were lost. While most of these lands had been acquired by the caliphate under the Umayyads only forty or so years earlier, their separation nevertheless constituted a huge loss. Furthermore, they were not simply lost to the caliphate but immediately became Muslim states outside of it.
This decisively ended the political unity of the Muslims and undermined the legitimacy of the 'Abbasids by denying the universality of their rule, thus contributing to the eventual disintegration of their domain. 'Abbasid rule was eventually replaced with an ever-shifting kaleidoscope of separate Muslim polities that prevail to this day. Second, the jihad stopped on all frontiers, also from 122/740, with only a couple of exceptions. Just as the Umayyad collapse spelled the end for Muslim unity in a single state, so it also meant the end of the universal jihad, immediately and forever. Under the Umayyads, the Muslim caliphate had rarely concluded even temporary truces with non-Muslim polities; under the 'Abbasids, such truces would become frequent, leading in time to exchanges of embassies, and finally a diplomatic mosque in Constantinople.8 Under the Umayyads, the frontiers had frequently been expanded right through the time of the caliph Hisham (105-25/724-43), but the 'Abbasids made only minor local frontier expansions, and otherwise suffered from continuous territorial losses to new, parochial Muslim entities that presaged the political division of the medieval Muslim world. This political division created a doubt about who could authorize and lead jihad, which, as a universal campaign to claim the earth for God's rule, ended with the fall of the Umayyad caliphate.
Third, the end of the Umayyad state fundamentally changed the way Muslims looked at the world, thus helping to shape the future course ofIslam. Without expansion as a main cause, the Muslims had to turn their attention inward to the internal ordering of their own society. The principle of the equality of the believers of all different origins and stations in life was strengthened.9 Although the establishment of an Islamic government remained an ideal, respect for the actual rulers continued to dwindle, as the 'Abbasids discovered to their chagrin, and the Muslim religious leadership became more and more dissociated from the government in fact, if not in theory.
With the failure of the universal war jihad, more emphasis began to be placed on the peaceful spiritual quest,10 even though the concept of religiously sanctioned warfare remained "on the books," to be invoked if needed. By this peaceful transformation, the doors were opened for the already extant spiritual element of Islam to undergo a continuous elaboration persisting to this day, a development which has greatly enhanced the attractiveness of Islam to non-Muslims and thus facilitated its spread in the world. In view of its spectacular and defining importance, we must carefully consider the causes of the downfall of the Umayyad caliphate. Although these causes have been seen in the internal situation in the caliphate, in tribal or ethnic conflict, regional rivalry, and schismatic religious movements, the external context of the caliphate must also be, as it has not usually been, taken into account. In particular, it is necessary to scrutinize in greater detail the reign of Hisham b. 'Abd al-Malik, who witnessed with frustration the end of his family's venerated jihad policy in his own lifetime, and to pay special attention to the little-studied external relations of his reign.
The Problem ofthe Reign of Hisham
Most modern historical opinion considers the reign of Hisham to have been one of the more successful in the Umayyad period.11 This opinion owes mainly to the belief that, as a personally sober, serious, and apparently hardworking ruler, Hisham delivered his enormous realm undiminished and undamaged to his successor, despite severe pressures on it from many sides. In fact, he even enlarged it on several fronts; for example, the Muslims reached farther than ever before in France, the Caucasus, and India during his rule. Likewise, the Muslim tradition about Hisham has pictured him as a conscientious and efficient, if severe and tightfisted, administrator.12 And, medieval Muslim historians unite with the moderns in concurring that, rather than the rule of Hisham, it was more the brief rule of the prodigal al-Walld b. Yazld (125-26/743-44) that exacerbated underlying problems, leading to a series of revolutions and civil wars which ended with the collapse of Umayyad rule altogether. Thus, the modern historian Hugh Kennedy has stated, "It should not be thought that collapse was inevitable or that another Hisham could not have sustained the empire,"13 and, "The Umayyad regime had never been as strong as it had been under Hisham only a decade before the final collapse.
Others have sought longer-term causes for the Umayyads' fall in the social conditions of the times rather than in the personal qualities of the caliph. But, it is worthwhile to note that modem western, as well as medieval Muslim historical opinion has been sufficiently impressed by the apparent zenith of Islamic expansion under Hisham to look for these deeper reasons almost entirely in the internal problems of the Islamic state: tribal, regional, and sectarian. Outwardly, this appears reasonable enough, for after all, the Syrian Arabs of the metropolis did start the civil wars of the Third Fitna (126-34/744-52) by killing al-Walld II. Then, while the Syrians fought among themselves to establish power, the 'Abbasids relied on provincial Khurasanis who had responded to their call for the government of a righteous imam. Most modern historical analyses expand on these bits of information. Thus, Wellhausen found the dissatisfaction of the growing class of non-Arab Muslims with their second-class status, especially in Khurasan, to have been the prime cause of the Umayyads' downfall, along with the tribal strife among the Arabs themselves.15 Shaban has emphasized the assimilation of the Arab tribes in Khurasan to local interests as providing a model for solving the problem of equitable integration for all Muslims in the state, a process which led the newly integrated revolutionaries to oppose the Umayyads' Arab tribal state, leading to its downfall.16 Crone considers the main cause of the Umayyads' fall to be the appearance of a class of generals who no longer needed the dynasty's tribally based regime.17
Curiously, all three of these share a social explanation for the entirely military events of the civil wars of the Third Fitna. However, a close examination of the evidence suggests quite another view that also takes into account the structure of the relations of the Umayyad caliphate, but also looks at those relations outside its borders as well as within. The various internal problems which beset the Umayyads, including tribal strife, regionalism, and revolutionary movements with a religious coloring, were mostly long standing. Though severe, these previously had been and still might have been compassed, deflected and overcome, even in Hisham's reign, given enough time, concentration of effort, and political wisdom. But what made that impossible was an unprecedented series of military disasters inflicted on the caliphate by outside powers during this reign. It was mainly this combination of spectacular military defeats that started the Umayyad rule hurtling toward its sudden downfall, rather than any new or worsening set of internal problems. Even the sage Hisham was incapable of doing much to remedy the situation and gradually lost control over the course of events, though it was left to his successors to feel the full force of the deluge. If reponsibility is to be assessed with the benefit of hindsight for this outcome, it may best be assigned to the unbending Umayyad adherence to their traditional policy of expansion through war against the non-Muslims, a policy that was entirely continued by Hisham,18 though now with disastrous results.
The expansion policy was a fundamental pillar of the state ideology, informed as it was by the belief in jihad, the military struggle against the non-Muslims until they either embraced Islam or agreed to pay tribute on their persons in exchange for protection (jizya), a belief derived originally from the Qur'an itself19 and pursued ever since, almost without a break, by the successive caliphal governments. By the time of Hisham, the Muslim state not only faced a growing reluctance to fight on the part ofsome ofits own troops, who preferred to settle down to enjoy the many fruits of victory.20 But also, it faced, more ominously, a wall of strong peoples on all sides, against whom the caliphate unavailingly hurled its troops in the renewed campaigns to advance the frontiers that followed the death of TJmar II. They faced not only a reinvigorated Byzantium shorn of most of its non-Greek provinces, but also relatively unurbanized, poor, and unorganized peoples at the fringes of civilization, the Central Asian Turks, the Khazars, the Berbers (these had never been completely islamized), and the Franks. Besides these, they also faced an important front againstseveral civilized kingdoms in India. Fighting against all these opponents turned out to be materially unrewarding. Each of these except the Franks had been partially subdued by the earlier blows of the first Muslims they had encountered. Each seemed to have learned from adversity in the interim and now dealt the Islamic state one or more severe defeats during Hisham's reign.
The Turks and the Khazars even forced the Muslims onto the defensive. It would appear, in fact, that the reaction of each of these peoples to the Muslim onslaught reached its peak at the same time, overburdening the capacity of the Muslim state to respond. Of course, it is true that the military debacles of Hisham's reign did not precipitate the downfall of the Islamic state itself. The caliphate's central areas remained safe and unravaged. In fact, the caliphate actually succeeded in overcoming its external opponents to some extent, renewing the offensive even before the end of Hisham's reign against the Turks, Khazars, and Berbers and keeping up warfare against the Byzantines and the Indians. This persistence is what has given a false impression of the effects of these campaigns on the state. Since the caliphate did not disappear but instead continued to triumph for a while over certain of its foes into 'Abbasid times, it is assumed that the wars of Hisham were merely further stages in the hard but steady process of Muslim military success. Since the results of Hisham's debacles were not immediately fatal to the Muslim state, their possibly dominant role in the dynasty's downfall has not been considered. But actually, though Hisham's hard-fought wars did not directly bring about the Umayyads' downfall, they nonetheless immediately created three fatal difficulties. First, the expense of carrying on continuous warfare and replacing lost military units brought huge new burdens to a state treasury that had to some extent depended on a steady flow of booty from campaigns, a flow which had by then been greatly curtailed because new conquests had stopped.
The state's dependence on booty was compounded by the lack of a sufficient administrative infrastructure that would enable it to tax its subjects efficiently. As a result of this situation, the increased military burdens contributed to an unexampled financial crisis which compelled the state to impose severe methods of financial retrenchment, including various forms of stricter accounting and taxation as well as cost-cutting measures and restrictions on spending. Naturally, these fiscal measures created a good deal of discontent, provoking violent resistance in many areas within the caliphate. Furthermore, the stricter financial measures were often ineffective, or at least insufficient, so that the financial crisis persisted. Second, the continuous harsh campaigning and accompanying military disasters had, to a considerable extent, weakened the enthusiasm of the troops for fighting. This was especially the case when the fighting was not only unrewarding in material terms, but also militarily useless or, worse, disastrous, as was usually the case with campaigning under Hisham. Just as success had strengthened the spirit ofjihad earlier, failure now weakened the will to perform it. This unprecedented weakening of the will to carry out the principles of the state ideology first showed itself on those fronts where the fighting had been the hardest, particularly Khurasan, where it is best documented. But, it was present on other fronts as well. Naturally, as the men began to feel bitter over their hard lot, they increasingly made invidious comparisons about how their situation was worse than that of troops on other fronts who received the same pay but had it easier. Under Hisham, the reluctance of such troops to go out on campaigns at all forced the caliph to introduce Syrian troops to defend the various provinces.
This made the local troops evenmore hostile to the central government, because it introduced interlopers who threatened to make the locals superfluous and to take over their locally privileged positions. But, while some of the provincial troops thus became furious about the Syrian domination, the dominant group, the YamanI Syrians, themselves bore the greater losses in the military catastrophes of Hisham's reign, especially those that occurred later. By upsetting the two-party tribal balance in the empire between the Yaman and the Mudar in favor of the latter, the Yaman's losses created the third fatal weakness in the Umayyad state, the collapse of the dynasty's main support, that of the Syrian army units identified with the Yaman tribal grouping. In particular, the severe losses suffered by the YamanI Syrians in North Africa from 122/740 undermined the Yaman's claim to be the basis of Umayyad power, a claim which they had maintained since their victory over the Mudari Qays grouping at Marj Rahit in 64/684. Their losses also appear to have created a military vacuum in Syria at the end of Hisham's reign. Though the Syrian army continued to exist, its remaining forces were now almost entirely dispersed, especially in North Africa. This situation greatly enhanced the position of the geographically unified Jaziran army adjacent to Syria on the Byzantine front. This force was now probably more dominated than ever before by Jaziran Mudari units. This Mudari dominance of al-Jazira stemmed from the loss of many Syrian Yamanls in Adharbayjan with al-Jarrah al-Hakami in the disaster of 112/730, as well as to the subsequent withdrawal of the Syrian Yamanls of Hirns from the Byzantine front, along with some Mudarls of Qinnasrln, for service in North Africa. Furthermore, their disastrous losses may have given the surviving Syrians less stomach for further fighting. These Syrian military reverses, as well as the regime's fiscalism, strengthened the resolution of the Syrian Yaman tribes to further elaborate their own political program, first clearly adumbrated in the caliphates of Sulayman and 'Umar II.
These tribes pushed furiously for its adoption, even by violent means, partly out of belief in reform for its own sake, and partly in a desperate effort to save themselves from the weakness of their position by broadening their power base. From this resolve issued the killing of Hisham's successor alWalld II, who had stuck unrepentantly to the outmoded traditional policy of the Umayyad house but had nevertheless managed to alienate even its members. Once the Umayyads' legitimacy once destroyed by the Yaman's military coup against al-Walid II, it was left to the only two significant surviving army groups in the empire, the Jazlran and the Khurasan!, to fight it out to see whose preferences would dominate. The KhurasanTs' victory established the 'Abbasid regime. The isolated Syrian Yamani remnants in Spain and North Africa were thereby left out in the cold, while Spain, Morocco and Algeria were foreversundered from the caliphate as a result of the 'Abbasids' victory elsewhere. To summarize, at the outset of Hisham's reign, it could not have been expected that the Umayyad state would unravel so quickly. By the end of the reign, the deterioration was nakedly exposed for all to see. Therefore, as far as the Umayyads are concerned, it was in the reign of Hisham that their fate was decisively sealed rather than before or after it. The Muslim power with its united state survived, but the dynasty did not, except as an exile state in Spain with an entirely different elite.
This outcome stemmed, above all, from an unprecedented series of military defeats inflicted on the caliphate mostly by non-Muslim outside powers during Hisham's reign. These defeats overburdened the Islamic state's military capacity, which led, in turn, to a serious financial crisis, a weakening of the will to fight in the provincial armies, and huge losses in the Yamanldominated Syrian army, until then the main prop of the state. This situation exacerbated pre-existing tribal and provincial rivalries which had only just been controlled, causing them to break out again with a renewed virulence that swept away the Umayyad dynasty itself.
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