Baber Johansen

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military slaves of their guards; from the beginning of the tenth century
on, they were unable to prevent the fragmentation of the empire and to
preserve its civil administration. Their main function became a symbolic
one: they represented the unity of the Muslim political community and
the principle of legitimate authority, based on the genealogy that linked
them to the Prophet. Since the ninth century, not only traditionalists and
jurists, but increasingly also theologians, had agreed that only the first
four successors of the Prophet were Caliphs who exerted the functions of
religious guides and lawgivers and that the Umayyad and Abbasid rulers
had no claim to be successors of the Prophet in his religious qualities. 27
According to Patricia Crone, this development led, in the tenth century,
to a "distinct secularization of the political order." 28 None of the rulers,
be they caliphs, kings or sultans, was able any longer to govern the whole
Muslim world. Its political unity was lost. Kings and sultans exerted
effective political power but enjoyed legitimacy only insofar as they took
an oath of allegiance to the caliphs who, in turn, confirmed their political
power. Their rule had no effect on the religious status of their subjects.
People no longer followed the religious or legal confession of the Muslim
princes who ruled over the region in which they lived. The jurists of the
period held that rulers, in principle, are not lawgivers but are obliged to
obey the law of Islam, which thus acquired a constitutional quality. In
eleventh-century Baghdad, jurists close to the caliph tried to construct the
norms for a public law that regulated the relations of authority between
the caliphs, the other rulers, the different magistrates and their subjects
under Islamic law. 29
From the ninth century on, traditions from the Prophet were increasingly
considered a material source of Muslim law. ShÁfiÝÐ’s RisÁla, written (in
its last version) in the early ninth century, is instrumental in this
development. It assigns to the Prophet’s normative praxis the status of
the most authoritative "explanation" of the text of the revelation and puts
it on the same rank with the QurÞÁn. 30 In the last third of the ninth
century, the six canonical collections of traditions recognized as
authentic Îadīth by BukhÁrÐ, Muslim, TirmidhÐ, Ibn MÁja, NisÁÞÐ, and