Islam: A Guide for Jews and Christians - Electric Scotland

146 t CHAPTER SIX
sive military families who filled the post and exercised its functions
until the arrival in Baghdad of the Saljuq Turks.
The coexisting caliphate and sultanate have been called “superimposed
monarchies” in that both offices possessed a power that
was at the same time personal and absolute. The sultan had to be
invested by the caliph with his sovereignty—he was constitutionally
the caliph’s delegate—but once in possession of such sovereignty,
the sultan’s power was in fact unlimited. There was, of
course, the Islamic law by which the sultan too was bound. But
that point was largely moot since there was no instrument to guarantee
its observance in the face of such sovereignty. What most
severely limited the sultanate, however, was its failure to achieve
the ecumenical status of the caliphate. While there was only one
caliph, with the occasional anticaliph, there were in fact many sultans
in the Abode of Islam, and within their domains their own
amirs waxed powerful on the feudal system of land grants. But if
the sultan could not speak for Islam, and if the caliph had long
since ceased to do so, there were others who as a class were beginning
to find their voice, the ulama, or scholars of the sharia.
The Ottomans and a Universal Caliphate
The Abbasid caliph went down in the destruction of Baghdad by
the Mongols in 1258. In Syria and Egypt, however, the Mamluk
sultans—the Mamluks were military slaves who promoted themselves
to sovereignty in Egypt in 1250 and held it until they were
unseated by the Ottomans in 1517—turned back the Mongol advance.
In the sequel, they provided themselves with an Abbasid
“survivor” of the Mongol debacle in Baghdad and so could claim
to possess, no matter what later historians might think, a legitimate
caliph of their own in Cairo.
Note: There were other survivors of other debacles. The original
Muslims invaders of Spain in the early seventh century were mixed
Berber and Arab bands, and once they had stabilized Muslim control
of at least central and southern Iberia, al-Andalus, as the Muslim