Islam: A Guide for Jews and Christians - Electric Scotland

THE UMMA t 147
territory was called, was ruled by a series of amirs, military men
turned governors, and often rivals, who ruled in the name of the caliph
in Damascus. In 750 the Umayyads of Damascus were overturned
by a rival dynasty, the Abbasids, who engineered a wholesale
massacre of the house of Umayya. There was a survivor, however, one
Abd al-Rahman, who made his way, amidst almost legendary travail,
to Spain in 756. He seized power there and gradually unified the Muslim
domains into a single amirate based in Cordoba. It was a brilliant
time, and the greatest of the Spanish Umayyad line was Abd al-Rahman
III (912–961), who in 929 declared that henceforward he should
be regarded not as amir but as caliph and Commander of the Faithful.
There was a caliph in Baghdad, an Abbasid, but the gesture was not
directed so much to Baghdad as to Abd al-Rahman’s closer and far
more dangerous enemies, the Fatimid Ismailis, whose caliph-Imam
ruled all of North Africa from Qairwan and who were contesting
control of the Mediterranean with the Umayyads of Spain. The Spanish
caliphate finally expired, without much remark, in 1031.
The Ottoman Turks were not so nice in their pretensions, perhaps,
and when in 1517 they absorbed the Mamluk sultanate into
their own burgeoning domains—they already possessed Anatolia
and a good part of the Balkans—they simply asserted that the caliphate
had been bequeathed to them. Thus the reigning member
of the house of Osman was both sultan and padishah, the political
sovereign of the Ottoman Empire, but also caliph and Commander
of the Faithful for the entire Muslim community, as they would
claim to be for the next four hundred years.
Though the office continued and the caliph enjoyed a degree of
spiritual auctoritas, already by the tenth century his actual political
power was limited to what might be called the caliphal states in
Iraq. By the next century even that had disappeared, and the only
real power in the Abode of Islam rested in the hands of the various
amirs who ruled, sometimes carefully in the caliph’s name, at other
times carelessly or defiantly not. Muslim theorists eventually made
a place for this usurpation of power, as we have seen, under the
rubric of the sultanate, but so strong was the notion of a single and