The Venture of Islam, Volume 2: The Expansion of Islam in the Middle Periods

By Marshall G. S. Hodgson

The Venture of Islam has been honored as a magisterial work of the mind since its publication in early 1975. In this three-volume study, illustrated with charts and maps, Hodgson traces and interprets the historical development of Islamic civilization from before the birth of Muhammad to the middle of the twentieth century. This work grew out of the famous course on Islamic civilization that Hodgson created and taught for many years at the University of Chicago.

In the second work of this three-volume set, Hodgson investigates the establishment of an international Islamic civilization through about 1500. This includes a theoretical discussion of cultural patterning in the Islamic world and the Occident.

"This is a nonpareil work, not only because of its command of its subject but also because it demonstrates how, ideally, history should be written."—The New Yorker

• Language: English
• Publisher: University of Chicago Press
• Release date: May 15, 2009
• ISBN: 9780226346878

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The Venture of Islam

Conscience and History in a World Civilization

MARSHALL G. S. HODGSON

VOLUME TWO

THE EXPANSION OF ISLAM

IN THE MIDDLE PERIODS

THE UNIVERSITY OF CHICAGO PRESS

CHICAGO AND LONDON

Some of the material in these volumes has been issued in a different form in Introduction to Islamic Civilization (volumes 1, 2, 3, Copyright © 1958, 1959 by The University of Chicago), in A History of Islamic Civilization (Copyright © 1958 by Marshall G. S. Hodgson), and in an earlier version of The Venture of Islam (volumes 1, 2, Copyright © 1961 by Marshall G. S. Hodgson).

The University of Chicago Press, Chicago 60637

The University of Chicago Press, Ltd., London

© 1974 by The University of Chicago

All rights reserved. Published 1974

Paperback edition 1977

Printed in the United States of America

ISBN: Vol. 1: 0-226-34683-8 (paper);

Vol. 2: 0-226-34684-6 (paper);

Vol. 3: 0-226-34681-1 (cloth); 0-226-34685-4 (paper)

978-0-226-34687-8 (electronic)

LCN: 73-87243

13  12  11  10  09  08  07  06  05  04    10  11  12  13  14

CONTENTS

VOLUME II

List of Charts

List of Maps

BOOK THREE: The Establishment of an International Civilization

I. Prologue to Book Three

I. The Formation of the International Political Order, 945–1118

II. The Social Order: Mercantile Interests, Military Power, Liberty

III. Maturity and Dialogue among the Intellectual Traditions, c. 945–1111

IV. The Ṣûfism of the Ṭarîqah Orders, c. 945–1273

V. The Victory of the New Sunnî Internationalism, 1118–1258

VI. The Bloom of Persian Literary Culture and Its Times, c. 1111–1274

VII. Cultural Patterning in Islamdom and the Occident

BOOK FOUR: Crisis and Renewal: The Age of Mongol Prestige

Prologue to Book Four

I. After the Mongol Irruption: Politics and Society, 1259–1405

II. Conservation and Courtliness in the Intellectual Traditions, c. 1258–1503

III. The Visual Arts in an Islamic Setting, c. 1258–1503

IV. The Expansion of Islam, c. 1258–1503

A Selective Bibliography for Further Reading

Glossary of Selected Terms and Names

Index to Volume II

CHARTS

VOLUME II

BOOK THREE

The Islamic Earlier Middle Period, 950–1250, with Reference to Events in the Oikoumene

Comparative Chronology: The Transition into the Middle Periods, 945–1118

Chronology of the Individual States, 945–1118

Muslim Belles-Lettrists, Scientists, Philosophers, and Theologians, 945–1111

Types of Muslim Esoteric Elitism

Filiation of the Ṭarîqahs and Their Founders, 945–1273

Ṣûfîs of the Earlier Middle Period, 945–1273

The Age of Sunnî Triumph, 1118–1258

The Classical Persian Belles-Lettrists to 1291, with a Few Arabic Writers

Muslim Philosophers and Theologians in the Early Middle Period, 1111–1274

BOOK FOUR

The Islamic Later Middle Period, 1250–1500, with Reference to Events in the Oikoumene

The Ages of Mongol Prestige, 1258–1405, and of the Timurîs, 1405–1500

Early Growth of the Ottoman Empire, 1300–1453

Later Learnèd Men, 1300–1506

Islamic Expansion in Africa and Southeast Asia

MAPS

VOLUME II

The age of the Fâṭimid Dynasty

The western Mediterranean

Sâmânids, Bûyids, and Ḳara-khanids

The Ghaznavids and the Seljuk empire

Trade routes through the Afro-Eurasian Arid Zone and the Southern Seas

The Crusading period in Syria and Anatolia

The Murâbiṭs and Muwaḥḥids

The central Islamic lands in the early thirteenth century

Mongol expansion, mid-thirteenth century

The spread of Islam to 1250

The Mongol Powers in Hülegü’s time, 1255–65

The central Mediterranean through India, fourteenth century

Growth of the Ottoman empire to 1503

The conquests of Tîmûr, 1370–1405

The expansion of Islam, 1250–1500

Malaysia and Indochina

The Sûdânic lands

The northern regions

BOOK THREE

The Establishment of an International Civilization

All truth is a shadow except the last, except the utmost; yet every truth is true in its own kind. It is substance in its own place, though it be but shadow in another place….

—Isaac Pennington

PROLOGUE TO BOOK THREE

The Middle Periods of Islamicate history

After 945 CE, the most characteristic traits of the classical ‘Abbâsî world, with its magnificent caliphal empire and its Arabic-language culture, were gradually altered so greatly that we must set off a major new era. The world of al-Manṣur, of Hârûn al-Rashîd, of al-Ma’mûn, still readily discernible in its outlines in the time of al-Muqtadir (908–932), was scarcely recognizable five or six generations later. Baghdad gradually became a provincial town and the very name of the caliphate eventually disappeared. During the five centuries after 945, the former society of the caliphate was replaced by a constantly expanding, linguistically and culturally international society ruled by numerous independent governments. This society was not held together by a single political order or a single language of culture. Yet it did remain, consciously and effectively, a single historical whole. In its time, this international Islamicate society was certainly the most widely spread and influential society on the globe. (We shall refer to the period before about 1250 as the Earlier Middle Period; to the period from then to about 1500 as the Later Middle Period.)

So far as there has been any common image of Islamicate culture, it has tended to be that of the Middle Periods—the periods after the pre-Islamic traditions in the Nile-to-Oxus region had died out (with the decline of the dhimmî population to markedly minority status), but before the Oikoumenic context (in terms of which the Islamicate culture was formed) began to be disrupted by the basic social transformation of one of its regions, the Occident. Taken narrowly, this means the time between the mid-tenth century at the collapse of the classical caliphate, under whose auspices the culture had been taking form, and the end of the fifteenth century, when a new world geographical balance gave its first intimations with the opening up of the wider oceans by Occidentals. The period of the High Caliphate tends to be seen through the image formed of it in the Middle Periods; those elements of its culture are regarded as normative that were warranted sound by later writers. More important, the problems that we have seen as distinctive of the Islamicate culture as such—the problems of political legitimation, of aesthetic creativity, of transcendence and immanence in religious understanding, of the social role of natural science and philosophy—these become fully focused only in the Middle Periods.

This way of seeing Islamicate culture is partly legitimate. To the end of the High Caliphal Period, the Islamicate culture was still in process of formation; it was still winning the population to Islam and transforming the Irano-Semitic traditions into the new form which only after 945 was ready to be carried through large parts of the hemisphere. And by the sixteenth century, quite apart from the first glimmerings of the Occidental transformation yet to come, new tendencies within Islamdom had reached a point where—at least in the three main empires then formed—in many ways, the problems we see at the start of the Middle Periods were at least transposed; even before being superseded by the radically new situation in the Oikoumene that supervened by the eighteenth century. The Middle Periods form a unity which encompasses the bulk of the time of fully Islamicate life. But it must be recognized that the Earlier Middle Period, up to the mid-thirteenth century, differed in its historical conditions rather importantly from the Later Middle Period, the period after the Mongol conquest had introduced new political resources, and the rather sudden collapse of the previously expanding Chinese economy produced—or reflected—a deterioration in the mercantile prosperity of the mid-Arid Zone. What was to be so different in the sixteenth century was well launched in the Later Middle Period.

The Earlier Middle Period was relatively prosperous. By Sung times (which began about the end of the High Caliphal Period), the Chinese economy was moving from a primarily commercial expansiveness into the early stage of a major industrial revolution, in which industrial investment was increasing at a fast and accelerating rate in certain areas, especially in the north, while in the south new methods were multiplying the agricultural productivity. The Chinese gold supply multiplied enormously with new mines opened up, and its trade to the Southern Seas (the Indian Ocean and the adjoining seas eastward) naturally increased in quantity and quality as well. Conceivably in part in response to the increased supply of gold, traceable to China, the pace of commerce and of urban activity was speeded up elsewhere also, most notably in the Occident of Europe, itself newly intensifying agricultural exploitation of its cold and boggy north by use of the mouldboard plough. In such circumstances, the Islamicate lands, still at the crossroads of hemispheric commerce, would find their commercial tendencies, over against the agrarian, still further reinforced; the results were not necessarily the most favourable, in the long run, even for commerce, yet they would allow the Muslims to demonstrate the strength and expansiveness of their social order.

The precariousness of agrarianate prosperity

Opportunities for cultural expression within a society are increased with the diversity and differentiation of social institutions through which individuals can find expression. Institutional differentiation, in turn, depends on a high level of investment, not only in the ordinary economic sense but in the sense of investment of human time—of specialized effort and concern—such as makes possible, for instance, cumulative investigation in science. But high investment presupposes prosperity, in the sense not merely of a well-fed peasantry (though in the long run this may be crucial) but of a substantial surplus available for other classes, allowing them both funds and leisure to meet specialized needs. Hence while prosperity cannot assure cultural creativity, in the long run it is a presupposition for it.

The opportunities for Muslims to take full advantage of the potentialities for prosperity and creativity offered by the Oikoumenic situation were limited by a feature of any society of the agrarianate type: that is, the precariousness of any prosperity, and of the complexity of institutions that tends to come with sustained prosperity, if it rose above a minimum institutional level. Once an urban-rural symbiosis was achieved on a subsistence level, so that agriculture could hardly proceed normally without the intervention of urban products and even urban management, almost no historical vicissitude short of a general natural disaster was likely to reduce the society to a less complex level than that. But many events might ruin any further complexity, beyond this level, that might have arisen in a society, any complexity of institutions either imaginative or especially material; and might force the society (at least locally) down nearer to the basic economic level of urban-rural symbiosis.

Massive assault from less developed areas, whose masters were not prepared to maintain the sophisticated pattern of expectations that complex institutions depend on, could reduce the level of intellectual and economic investment and with it the level of institutional complexity of a more developed area, if that area was not so highly developed as to possess unquestionably stronger force than peoples less developed. Gibbon noted this point in comparing the predicament of the agrarianate-level Roman empire with the Occident of his day, which could not be conquered except by people who had themselves adopted its technical level. As Gibbon also noted, internal pressures also could reduce the level of complexity. Spiritual, social, or political imbalances might cripple a ruling élite and its privileged culture in several ways: they could evoke outright disaffection in less privileged classes—a disaffection that might be expressed in a drive for social and spiritual conformity to populistic standards, as well as in outright rebellion; or they could result in paralysis within the ruling élites themselves, which could hasten political collapse and military devastation. Then could emerge a militarized polity, with despotism at the point of military power and anarchy at the margins, neither of which served to support delicate balances among institutions.

Complex institutions might survive many a conquest and much serious internal tension, and more often than not the ravages of warfare or the damages of political mismanagement could be repaired if they did not recur too continuously for too long. But in the long run, such resiliency depended on a high level of prosperity, which in turn depended on a balance of many favourable circumstances which were not necessarily self-perpetuating. Too much political failure could undermine the very resources with which ordinary political failure could be counteracted. The disturbance of this balance in any way could lower the level of social complexity or even occasionally reduce it, at least locally, to the minimum economic base-level of society of the agrarianate order.

To some degree, in some periods and areas in Islamdom in the Middle Periods, this precariousness of agrarianate-level prosperity did make itself felt. On the whole, the prosperity of much of Islamdom evidently declined especially in the later part of the Middle Periods, and a limit was presumably put to further development of institutional complexity. In some cases, there was a retrogression; though the impression that has been prevalent among historians, that there was a general retrogression proceeding through the Middle Periods, is probably incorrect. We have far too little evidence, as yet, to define precisely what happened. In any case, there was clearly no economic expansion within most Muslim lands comparable to what took place in western Europe or in China during the first part of the Middle Periods. This fact forces the student of the society to confront two questions. First, the great political question, in many cases, must be: how was the inherent threat of political disintegration to be met? Second, if any general consequences of hemispheric economic activity are to be looked for, we must often inquire what sorts of social orientation were encouraged as a result in the mid-Arid Zone, rather than expecting an overall higher level of investment and of institutional differentiation.

But though such questions must repeatedly be posed, economic precariousness is not yet the same as general economic decadence. Documentable decline in prosperity often turns out to have been local rather than general. Moreover, the effect of any economic decline on cultural activity and institutional complexity may be temporary; if a new (lower) level of resources is stabilized, prosperity on that base can again be a very effective foundation for cultural activity. It must be recognized that, at least in some fields, effectively high levels of prosperity were often reached in Islamdom. An agrarianate economic base-level was almost never fully reverted to, and even in the most unprosperous periods and regions a certain amount even of economic development was taking place. Meanwhile, in many parts of Islamdom some portions of the Middle Periods were very prosperous indeed, even if sometimes on a quantitatively narrower base than once. Such prosperity led to high creativity; probably at least as high as in most periods and most areas of the Oikoumene before the Modern Technical Age.

On cultural unity

Between 950 and 1100 the new society of the Middle Periods was taking form. A time of disintegration for the classical ‘Abbâsî patterns was thus a time of institutional creativity from the perspective of the Middle Periods themselves. By the beginning of the twelfth century, the main foundations of the new order had been laid; between 1100 and 1250 it flowered, coming to its best in those fields of action most distinctive of it.

This society was at the same time one and many. After the decline of the caliphal power, and with the subsequent rapid enlargement of the Dâral-Islâm, not only Baghdad but no other one city could maintain a central cultural role. It was in this period that Islam began to expand over the hemisphere: into India and Europe, along the coasts of the Southern Seas and around the northern steppes. There came to be considerable differentiation from one Muslim region to another, each area having its own local schools of Islamicate thought, art, and so forth. In the far west, Spain and the Maghrib were often more or less united under dynasties sprung from the Berber tribes of the Maghrib hinterland; these countries had a common history, developing the art which is known from the Alhambra palace at Granada, and the philosophical school of Ibn-Ṭufayl and Ibn-Rushd (Averroës). Egypt and Syria, with other east Arab lands, were commonly united under splendid courts at Cairo; they eventually became the centre of specifically Arabic letters after the decline of the Iraq with the Mongol conquests (mid-thirteenth century). The Iranian countries developed Persian as the prime medium of culture, breaking away seriously from the standards of the High Caliphal Period, for instance in their magnificent poetry. Muslims in India, opened up to Islamicate culture soon after 1000, also used Persian, but rapidly developed their own traditions of government and of religious and social stratification, and their own centres of pilgrimage and of letters. Far northern Muslims, ranged around the Eurasian steppes, likewise formed almost a world of their own, as did the vigorous mercantile states of the southern Muslims ranged around the Indian Ocean.

Yet it cannot be said that the civilization broke up into so many separate cultures. It was held together in virtue of a common Islamicate social pattern which, by enabling members of any part of the society to be accepted as members of it anywhere else, assured the circulation of ideas and manners throughout its area. Muslims always felt themselves to be citizens of the whole Dâr al-Islâm. Representatives of the various arts and sciences moved freely, as a munificent ruler or an unkind one beckoned or pressed, from one Muslim land to another; and any man of great stature in one area was likely to be soon recognized everywhere else. Hence local cultural tendencies were continually limited and stimulated by events and ideas of an all-Muslim scope. There continued to exist a single body of interrelated traditions, developed in mutual interaction throughout Islamdom. Not only the cultural dialogue that was Islam as such, but most of the dialogues that had been refocused under its auspices in the Arabic language, continued effective even when more than one language came to be used and Arabic was restricted, in the greater part of Islamdom, to specialized scholarly purposes.

But the unity of the expanded Islamdom of the Middle Periods did not hold in so many dimensions of culture as it had, in the greater part of Islamdom, under the High Caliphate. The Islamicate society as a whole had initially been a phase of the Irano-Semitic society between Nile and Oxus, building on the everyday cultural patterns of its underlying village and town life. In the Islamicate lettered and other high-cultural traditions we find a greater break with the past than in most traditions of everyday life in the region; yet the Irano-Semitic high-cultural traditions, of which the Islamicate formed a continuation, had always been nurtured by the humbler regional traditions of everyday life. But as Islamdom expanded extensively beyond the Nile-to-Oxus region, the cultural break became more total. The everyday culture of the newer Muslim areas had less and less in common with that in the original Irano-Semitic lands. Not only language differed, and many patterns of home life. such as cuisine or house building, but also formative features like agricultural technique, and even much of administrative and legal practice.

What was carried throughout Islamdom, then, was not the whole Irano-Semitic social complex but the Islamicized Irano-Semitic high cultural traditions; what may be called the ‘Perso-Arabic’ traditions, after the two chief languages in which they were carried, at least one of which every man of serious Islamicate culture was expected to use freely. The cosmopolitan unity into which peoples entered in so many regions was maintained independently of the everyday. culture, and on the level of the Perso-Arabic high culture; its standards affected and even increasingly modified the culture of everyday life, but that culture remained essentially Indic or European or southern or northern, according to the region.

Indeed, even between Nile and Oxus local cultural patterns had varied greatly and the Islamicate unity prevailed only limitedly on the local, everyday level. Customary law could be as distant in Arabia itself from the Shari’ah law of the books as in the remotest corner of the hemisphere. Yet the Irano-Semitic core region continued to be distinguishable within the wider Islamdom. There the Islamicate society and its specifically high culture, because of its original relation to local conditions and patterns, had deep local roots as compared to the areas in which the Perso-Arabic tradition meant a sharp break especially with the high culture of the past and had little genetic connection with the everyday levels of culture. We may call this central region the ‘lands of Old Islam’, though the point is not the priority of Islam there but its continuity with earlier traditions; Islam in the Maghrib was almost as old as between Nile and Oxus, yet the Islamicate culture was not much founded in the Latin culture which had preceded it there and the Maghrib cannot be regarded as part of its core area. Throughout the Middle Periods, the lands from Nile to Oxus maintained a cultural primacy in Islamdom which was generally recognized. Muslims from more outlying areas were proud to have studied there and, above all, emigrants from those lands, men whose mother tongue was at least a dialect of Persian or Arabic, had high prestige elsewhere. The social patterns and cultural initiatives of the core area were accorded a certain eminence even when not followed.

The Middle Periods, then, which pre-eminently represent Islamicate culture to us, suffered two pervasive cultural limitations: despite considerable prosperity, their high culture was repeatedly threatened with a reduction of economic and social investment toward minimal agrarianate levels; and in the increasingly wider areas of Islamdom outside the region from Nile to Oxus, the Islamicate high culture was always tinged with alienness. These facts pose underlying problems, which may not be the most important historical problems for the student of the Middle Periods, but which are never quite to be escaped. Why should such weaknesses have appeared in the civilization at all? But then why, despite them, the tremendous cultural vigour, power, and expansiveness of Islam and the Islamicate civilization throughout these periods, when in the name of Islam a richly creative culture spread across the whole Eastern Hemisphere?

I

The Formation of the International Political Order, 945–1118

The Earlier Middle Period faced problems of totally reconstructing political life in Islamdom. The time saw great political inventiveness, making use, in state building, of a variety of elements of Muslim idealism. The results proved sound in some cases, but provided no common political pattern for the Islamicate society as a whole; but that society nonetheless retained its unity. This was provided rather by the working out of political patterns on relatively local levels, both military and social, which tied the world of Islamdom together regardless of particular states. The Jamâ‘î-Sunnî caliphate assumed a new role as a symbolic rallying point for all the local units. The resulting political order turned out to have remarkable toughness and resiliency and expansive power.

Development of political and cultural multiplicity

From the point of view of what had preceded, the political developments of the tenth century can be looked at as the disintegration of the caliphal empire. Where opposition Shî‘î movements did not gain a province outright, the provincial governors became autonomous and founded hereditary dynasties, or local herdsmen-soldiers seized power and gave the caliph only a nominal allegiance. In any case, this one generally acknowledged authority was rendered impotent and, after 945, the government he headed, already internally disrupted by its mercenary soldiers, lost control even of its home provinces. The caliph became a mere cipher in an empire parcelled out among usurpers.

What broke down, of course, was the political idea that had supported the caliphal power. It is what may be called a ‘political idea’ which gives individuals and groups a historical basis for expecting that the state will endure as a power to be reckoned with despite any given current crisis. This implies not merely the subjective prestige of legitimacy (important though that is) but also concrete geographical, economic, military, and socio-cultural components which gather together standing group interests effectively enough to give most groups concerned a practical reason for hoping the state will survive, or at least for expecting others will so hope. On this basis they will, willingly or by way of precaution, forgo short-term interests if they conflict with the long-term interests of the state power.

It was a conception of the advantages of the unity of the Muslims that had held the caliphal state together through a series of major crises—the first fitnah at the time of ‘Alî, the second at that of ‘Abd-al-Malik, then the revolution which overthrew Marwânî power, and finally the division of the empire between al-Ma’mûn and al-Amîn. All parts of the arid region from Nile to Oxus had relatively close ties with the rest; men in any part of the region were likely to travel to other parts or at least have connections there, and were concerned to see a common political stability. Sustained by the concentrated resources of the Sawâd, the central bureaucracy was able, on the whole, to command peace within the region as a whole and to suppress local inequities, and to assure the free flow of trade and the existence of large concentrated markets. Throughout the empire, the idea prevailed among the politically active that not only the greatest moral prestige but also the greatest material advantage was to be had through unity—in practice, that is, through accepting whichever claimant to central power could command strongest support. In the last resort, if secondary interests proved inconsistent with unity there were usually enough who chose to bet on the side of unity to ensure its victory. Consequently in any crisis, when some section of the body politic defected, the central power was able to command the support of other sections in sufficient strength to break up the points of resistance.

But by the time of al-Mutawakkil, the central civil authority was becoming discredited. However much ideally the notion of Muslim unity was still cherished, in practice the idea had ceased to work. The court was financially mismanaged and unable to give effective leadership; under these circumstances, the soldiery, which as a body of mercenaries did not identify itself with the Muslim community at large so much as with their individual commanders, ceased to respect the court; their commanders were therefore in a position to override the civil authority; and—the crucial point—there was no other section of the population which identified its interests with the central caliphal power and possessed enough solidarity to counterbalance the soldiery if the soldiers ever united on anything. With the central power thus paralyzed at home, respect for it failed in the provinces; those who counted there politically found it profitable and feasible in the immediate circumstances to support a governor who retained the revenues at home rather than send them to Baghdad. As the court’s revenues diminished, its power of attraction dwindled and defection snowballed.

In the tenth century it was still locally established powers, or the armies they had originally raised, that took up the leadership that the Baghdad court no longer provided. But the separate governors and generals stood, in themselves, for no serious political ideas; they presented mere fragments of the old caliphal state. By the eleventh century political disintegration had proceeded so far that alien wandering Turkic nomads, possessed of the single unpurchasable virtue of military loyalty to their tribe, had solidarity sufficiently greater than that of any other body, to enable them to seize power in the heart of Iran and to lord it over the caliphs.

Looked at from the point of view of the caliphal state, this was a process of almost unrelieved political disintegration. But the same process can be looked at from the point of view of the international society which followed. From this viewpoint we can see it as the beginnings of an articulation of the society of Islamdom on a new and more flexible basis. As the great political idea of the caliphate proved unworkable, there were gradually worked out new political ideas. This was usually by accident; some of those who created them intended simply to renew the Muslim unity on a different basis, for instance, and their success in creating an actual state meant a failure in their wider intentions. Whatever the conscious motives, in fact a series of new state structures, based on new political ideas, ensued. And one of the greatest of these was the work of those wandering Turkic tribesmen.

The Fâṭimîs: a Shî’î state based on the Nile and a navy

Before those tribes came on the scene, the most grandiose of the efforts to restore Muslim unity had been worked through. The ideal of the Fâṭimid rulers of Egypt, and of the Ismâ'îlî Shî’î sect which supported them in all the lands of Islam, was to reunite the Muslims under a new ‘Alid caliphate and to bring it to final victory in the whole world. In this they failed. They did succeed, however, in making of Egypt, and of their new capital Cairo, a centre of commerce and of the arts and sciences, which rivalled Baghdad in the eleventh century. The Fâṭimî state was one of the most successful in overcoming the threat of reduction to despotism and anarchy. This state was based on a threefold political idea. A primary component in the political synthesis was the agrarian wealth of Egypt. The Fâṭimîs maintained in full the bureaucracy of the Nile valley. A second, and more distinctive, foundation of the Fâṭimî Egyptian prosperity was sea commerce. On the basis of this commerce (combined with the natural productivity of Nile-fertilized Egypt), wealth flowed into Cairo, to be distributed again from there. The government at Cairo was thereby enabled to hold the sort of loyalties that Baghdad had forfeited, and to set the fashions within its sphere. Finally, a third component in the political idea, of more ambivalent effect, was the standing appeal of the Cairo régime to the Ismâ’îlî subjects of its rivals throughout Islamdom.

Egypt has commonly been two societies in one: that of the land and that of maritime commerce. Flooded yearly with silt-rich Nile water, Egypt has for millennia been a fabulously productive agricultural land, apparently not subject to the natural vicissitudes of the Iraq. Though sometimes agriculture was more extensive than at other times, Egypt’s rulers have never wanted for agrarian wealth. But the peasants and their gentry have tended to form a closed society, set apart from the constantly changing society of the cosmopolitan commercial classes, which in turn have often had alien origins and sympathies. (This may partially account for the relative sterility of Egypt in bringing forth figures great beyond its own confines.) These commercial classes have sometimes been more dominant and sometimes less, for the use made of Egypt’s geographical position for commerce has been less unvarying than its agriculture, and has largely determined its relative prosperity from time to time. It is perhaps especially in Ptolemaic, Fâṭimî, and latterly in Levantine Egypt that the ‘alien’ commercial classes set the tone of the Egyptian state.

The Egyptian rulers and merchants of Hellenistic and Roman times had much increased their wealth from the trade between India (and all the Southern Seas) and the Mediterranean lands, one of the two best routes for which was the nearly all-water route across the Arabian Sea, up the Red Sea, and across a brief portage (sometimes made into a canal) to the Nile and thence the Mediterranean. India and the Indies produced a variety of luxury goods—spices, perfumes, fine cloths, steel goods, etc.—which found a ready market in Syria, Anatolia, the Ukraine, Greece, and the other Mediterranean lands; they were paid for with fine glassware, cloths, and other works of handicraft or else with unworked products of the northern and southern hinterlands such as furs and gold. Much of this trade passed through Alexandria, and the Egyptian middlemen reaped great profit. But always other routes were at least as advantageous, and especially since about the third century, when the Sâsânian empire had come into being, the Egyptian trade route had been less prominent; for a still larger share of the trade than usual went along the chief rival route (the best route by nature): passing up the Persian Gulf and the Tigris-Euphrates rivers, in Sâsânian territory, and thence overland through Syria to the Mediterranean. With the breakdown of ‘Abbâsî authority and the reduction of purchasing power at Baghdad itself, and the advent of a number of petty states in the Fertile Crescent, often at war with each other, the Euphrates trade route apparently became less profitable as compared with the route via the ever-opulent Nile delta.

The Egyptians, under a series of essentially independent governors, took advantage of the situation to lure a larger share of the trade back to the Red Sea and the Egyptian ports. This policy came to full fruition under the Fâṭimid dynasty, which was able to maintain in dependency many distant provinces important for the trade, to the advantage of the Egyptian privileged classes. The Ismâ’îlî Shî’îs who had come forth in rebellion in 909 in North Africa and established their imâm in place of the Aghlabid ruler in what is now Tunisia, had enlarged on the strong Aghlabî position in the west Mediterranean, extending their sway even to Morocco. In 969, after numerous tries, they annexed Egypt with the aid of a few local Shî’î supporters, of many other Egyptian malcontents, and of Berber tribal troops from the Maghrib. In Egypt they continued to be naval-minded. There they built a new city, next to the old capital, Fusṭâṭ; this was Cairo, designed to rival Baghdad; and they ruled as caliphs. But Cairo was not only a strategic centre but also an inland port with busy ship traffic up the Nile; it quickly became a major transshipment point between the Mediterranean and the Southern Seas. The first caliph at Cairo, al-Mu‘izz, was glad to foster the prosperity of his new seat of power.¹

In accordance with the Ismâ’îlî ideal of making Islam triumphant in all the world, it was hoped the strong Fâṭimî navy could be used in the conquest of Constantinople and the Christian empire. In the meantime, it was useful in ensuring Egyptian prosperity. Already Ibn-Killis (d. 991), the vizier of al-Mu’izz, took pains toward the end of the tenth century to foster trade. The Fâṭimids had strong religious reasons for controlling Mecca and Medina, where their caliphate could be proclaimed to all the Muslim world. This coincided with a need to maintain political oversight of the coasts of the Red Sea as far south as the Yemen, so that there could be no excessive interference with trade by local middlemen there. The Fâṭimî navy controlled both the Red Sea and the eastern Mediterranean seaways; Fâṭimî power was respected from Sicily, which owned Fâṭimî overlordship, to Sind, where an Ismâ’îlî dâ’î was established. Though the Ismâ’îlî party was very strong in the inland areas of the Iraq and Iran, the Fâṭimîs had little fortune there; to the end, it was the reach of the Fâṭimî navy that determined the extent of the dynasty’s control outside Egypt.

Nevertheless, Ismâ’îlî loyalties helped mould both the internal and the foreign policy of the state. By the time the Fâṭimîs took over Egypt, they had little of the revolutionary left in their practical programme. But they intensified their radical theoretical appeals to the underground Ismâ’îlî movement that still was proving popular with malcontents in the central Muslim lands. The Qarmaṭians of Baḥrayn, independent in east Arabia, were not disposed to recognize the enthroned imâm. But the ordinary Ismâ’îlî dâ’îs in the Iraq and Iran mostly decided to recognize the new power, which was quick to honour them and their ideas; with fresh vigour, they renewed their efforts and hopes for completing the goals of the Ismâ’îlî movement throughout Islamdom.

These Ismâ’îlîs living outside the Fâṭimî state supplied both a ready-made foreign policy and a source of internal leadership. Unless it disowned them altogether, the Egyptian government had to serve as an eccentric focus for revolutionary forces from Nile to Oxus, and necessarily stood opposed to the entire series of Iranian régimes that were occupying the former ’Abbâsî territories, whatever their relations among themselves. But these foreigners also contributed a certain number of disciplined and intelligent administrative leaders to Egypt itself. Parallel to the regular state organization was a religious hierarchy, charged with teaching the Ismâ’îlî doctrine to those who chose to be initiated, and also with organizing and disciplining the movement both beyond the Fâṭimî frontiers and within them. This Ismâ’îlî hierarchy had almost as much prestige as the governmental hierarchy; the chief dâ'î at its head ranked alongside the vizier; indeed, the same man sometimes served in both posts at once.

The consequences of this Ismâ’îlî presence may have been felt chiefly in the continuity and dependability of the Fâṭimî policies, which gave the dynasty a prestige and longevity unparalleled in Islamdom in that period. Indeed, the social structure within Egypt continued little changed—unless, perhaps, so far as it was marked by a systematic concern for the needs of the commercial and tradesman classes. But the intellectual atmosphere was one of notable ferment (though much of its more distinctive activity, being restricted to an Ismâ’îlî context, had little overt effect on later periods in Islamdom). The old Ismâ’îlî interest in Falsafah was now given free rein among the intellectuals; it was, in effect, just another sort of luxury indulged in by those who could afford it. Ismâ’îlî thinkers had only their hierarchical superiors to answer to for their inner beliefs, and delighted in a wide range of speculation. Much of this was a matter of strictly Ismâ’îlî allegorism and symbolism: beautiful systems were built up in which the figures mentioned in the Qur'ân and in Shî‘î lore shadowed forth the spiritual structure of the universe. But an interest was also taken in every aspect of natural and philosophic inquiry. The Ismâ’îlîs made Cairo a centre of learning. The Azhar mosque, the chief mosque of the city, was (as it is even now, under Jamâ’î-Sunnî auspices) above all a centre of study, endowed for this purpose by several Fâṭimid caliphs, notably al-’Azîz (976–996) and al-Ḥâkim (996–1021), the successors of al-Mu’izz. It had a library, and stipends for teachers and students.

The brilliance of Fâṭimî high society shows most readily in its fine arts. Egyptian commercial prosperity was not based only on the transit trade. Egyptian handicraft industry was itself an important element in the trade. Among other things, fine fabrics were made, especially in certain towns near the coastline or actually on it, where the air was conducively humid. These industrial arts were inherited from the pre-Islamic Coptic times. They were controlled by the government, which absorbed a large part of the product. The rest went to the luxury markets everywhere between Nile and Oxus, and far beyond.

These luxury crafts were significant both from an economic and from an artistic point of view. By way of productive activity they contributed to the opulence of the Egyptian ruling classes both directly and by providing articles of trade. Thereby they assured several flourishing town populations of a share in Egypt’s agricultural produce. At the same time the craft work had aesthetic merit. This appeared in the colour designs in the cloth, and in the form and decoration of pottery and of crystal ware as well as of bronze pieces, of all kinds of jewellery, and generally of all articles of use which were susceptible of being made beautiful. The lovely treasures of our museums labelled ‘Fâṭimîd’ allow us to share remotely in the luxury those craftsmen made possible.

The Fâṭimî period is famous for solidly beautiful pieces of glaze or crystal ware. Some older Coptic traditions were used in its design; Iranian themes are more evident; but all were reworked for Fâṭimî taste. The growing independence of Egypt as an artistic centre is especially clear in architecture. Under the Fâṭimids, forms continued to be borrowed from Iran—for instance, the domed tomb—but in the course of this there was established the distinctive tradition that was to culminate in the Mamlûk mosques: for instance, the early experimentation with ‘stalactite’ forms at the corners where a square base meets a domed roof, and the grooved treatment of the miḥrâb, the niche indicating the qiblah toward Mecca, which at times could produce an effect of wonderful concentration. In such ways, the Fâṭimî aesthetic life was endowed with a notable continuity of style which set off this side of the state, complementing its political and social life.

The decline of Fâṭimî power

Once it had been well established, the independent cultural and economic prosperity of Egypt long outlasted the specifically Ismâ’îlî forms with which it was tied up in early Fâṭimî times. So long as the Red Sea trade route flourished, the main lines of the Egyptian state remained sound. On the other hand, Ismâ’îlism began to weaken even before the end of the Fâṭimid dynasty. Ismâ’îlism, however, had been a key element in the Fâṭimî élan within the limits imposed by naval possibilities. It had brought with it special cultural and political opportunities and also special paradoxes and weaknesses. With the slowing down of the Ismâ’îlî impulse, the Egyptian power became more localized, never bearing quite so wide a sway; and the peculiar Ismâ’îlî intellectual and political experiments did not outlast it.

The decline of the Fâṭimid dynasty was tied in with the special paradoxes of Ismâ’îlism itself. It had begun already before the end of the tenth century, when the Fâṭimids’ lieutenant on the North African mainland, Ibn-Zîrî, relying on his Berber tribal connections, refused to acknowledge the imâm any further but set up an independent dynasty. Nevertheless Fâṭimî authority completely disappeared in the Maghrib and Sicily only gradually in the first half of the eleventh century. More serious from an Ismâ’îlî point of view—and hence from the point of view of the stability of the dynastic appeal—were internal schisms.

The first of these occurred under the eccentric al-Ḥâkim (996–1021). Al-Ḥâkim seems to have been an effective ruler. Defying dynastic precedent, he appointed a Sunnî chief qâḍî on the ground that he was both the justest and the shrewdest man available (on points of law the qâḍî was guided by Ismâ’îlî muftîs). In his time, the Ismâ’îlî power reached its greatest extent in Syria and remained generally at the summit of its prestige. But al-Ḥâkim was personally subject to bizarre moods and fits of cruelty. Thus he insisted at one time that the shops of Cairo be lit all night, as he preferred to be active then; men had to take their sleep in a prolonged daytime siesta. He is said to have offered a sort of lottery, in which some prizes were unexpected fabulous rewards, but others provided for sudden death—so emulating the hand of Providence. Tales are told of his gross personal brutality.

But even the most bizarre of his whims seems to have been touched with a serious religious purpose. Thus it would seem that his decree about night-time business was partly designed to demonstrate that his police were so efficient and his justice so rigorous that night was as safe as day; and indeed he seems to have been vindicated. Al-Ḥâkim took an intense personal interest in religion, which as imâm he had a right to do; but he did not always remain within the scope laid down by general Ismâ’îlî principles, which his position as imâm presupposed. Some of his actions expressed chiefly a puritan rigour. He wished, above all, to be the perfect ruler; widely generous, enforcing strict good order, and absolutely just to all the people. Personally, he avoided all luxury and mounted a simple donkey for his excursions. He was merciless to any of the great who, he thought, took advantage of their position. (It was on such that he commonly vented his cruelty.) His puritanism led him to decree the destruction of Egypt’s vineyards so as to eliminate wine at its source, to impose heavy disabilities on dhimmîs, and to forbid the women of Cairo to stir from their homes.

But increasingly his measures expressed an interest in religious doctrine. Greatly interested in learning, he early set up a well-equipped library and school for Ismâ’îlîs in a mosque of his erection, where not only Ismâ’îlî dogmatics but various sciences were studied. But then he turned gradually to favour the Jamâ’î-Sunnism of the masses of his subjects and even made difficulties for the Ismâ’îlî hierarchy. Finally, however, he came to favour the idea of a new revelation altogether. He allowed violence to flare up between his troops and the Cairo bourgeoisie (through all the disorder he, personally, wandered unguarded and untouched) and encouraged enthusiasts who looked for a millennial culmination of the troubles. Then one night he rode out quite unattended onto the desert, and no unquestionable trace of him was ever found.

After his disappearance, the status quo ante was restored; the wealthy returned to their luxury and gaiety, and such property as he had confiscated and given out was restored to the legitimate owners. But the spectacle of the royal experimenter had given an unusual impetus and consistency to that side of the Ismâ’îlî vision which concerned rather equal social justice for common people than the universal establishment of a conventional Sharî'ah which still allowed gross inequalities. The remarkable personality of al-Ḥâkim persuaded certain Ismâ’îlî enthusiasts to look on the shifting phases of his life as an allegory of all human history, and to regard al-Ḥâkim himself as a manifestation of Deity. Making use of the allegorical tendencies of Ismâ’îlî doctrine, they worked out a new ‘inward’ truth to supersede the conventional Ismâ’îlîsm. Though they won a certain hearing among Ismâ’îlîs everywhere, they could not persuade the official Ismâ’îlî hierarchy, who reacted by defining orthodoxy all the more closely. But they did win the allegiance of a peasant revolt which then broke out in Syria, and which became unusually widespread and persistent under sophisticated Ismâ’îlî leaders. The remnants of the rebels were eventually gathered in independent mountainous refuges, where they became the enduring sect of the Druzes, ever looking to the return of al-Ḥâkim to bring justice to the whole world.²

In the long reign of al-Ḥâkim’s grandson al-Mustanṣir (1036–1094), the weakening of the Ismâ’îlî impetus took a decisive turn. In the first part of the reign the state, which had easily survived the antics and even the divisive incitements of al-Ḥâkim, seemed to be still sound. In 1058 Baghdad and part of the Iraq were temporarily brought to Fâṭimîd allegiance—not, however, so much through the strength of either Egyptian or Iraqi Ismâ’îlî forces, as through the policy of a single powerful general who wanted Egyptian help against his enemies. But by 1062 the Egyptian government itself was engulfed in an internal crisis. The mercenary soldiery—as in the days of ‘Abbâsî decline—got out of hand, and for about a decade there was mounting chaos in Cairo as different factions of troops disputed for the spoils of the upper classes. When Badr al-Jamâlî, a competent general from the Syrian province, was called in to clean up the mess, in 1074, he reconstituted the Fâṭimî state on a less ambitious basis.

In 1071 Sicily had been lost to the Franks while the Fâṭimîs were helpless, and a few years later, while Badr was in Egypt much of Syria was taken by the Saljuks, then ruling in Iran in the name of the ‘Abbâsid caliphs. Though the Ismâ’îlî dâ’îs still held parts of the Yemen, concern with other outlying areas was abandoned. Badr and his son, who succeeded him as vizier, made little effort to control more than Egypt itself and southern Syria. On al-Mustanṣir’s death (1094), most of the non-Egyptian Ismâ’îlîs, especially those in Iran, repudiated the leadership of the Fâṭimid dynasty (they became the Nizâri Ismâ’îlîs, most of whom now adhere to the Âghâ Khân, leader of the Khojas of India). On the death of the last strong Fâṭimid caliph, al-Âmir (1101–1130), the Ismâ’îlîs of Arabia and the Indian Ocean coasts repudiated them likewise (they became the Ṭayyibîs, now chiefly represented by the Indian merchant community of the Bohras). The fractional Ismâ’îlî sect that remained loyal to the Egyptian dynasty ceased to play much of a role in the state, and disappeared some time after the dynasty was extinguished by the Sunnî Saladin in 1171. The state was then reconstituted on a Jamâ’î-Sunnî foundation, but continued, when strong, to control Syria and the Ḥijâz with its navy and to foster Indian Ocean–Mediterranean trade through its ports, down to the end of the fifteenth century.

Party kingdoms in Spain: the collapse of Spanish independence

Egypt could develop an independent state and cultural autonomy on the basis of a peculiar commercial position. Spain, perhaps, developed its autonomy on the basis of sheer geographical isolation. For a long time, Islamicate high culture was relatively weak in Spain (which had had a Latin high-cultural life rather different from the Irano-Semitic, and distinctly less active); Spain remained dependent upon impulses from more central areas. In the ninth century one Ziryâb, coming from Baghdad, set the tone of musical and courtly fashion, and a disciple of the legist Mâlik b. Anas loyally introduced the latest fiqh from its homelands. But already in the tenth century, Spanish Muslims began to show their independence when, in 929 at the end of al-Muqtadir’s reign, the Spanish Umayyad amîr took the title of caliph and Spanish power spread over much of the Maghrib. The title represented a real access of central power in the Muslim state there. He established his control both in the Muslim cities of the south, often almost autonomous, and in the Muslim marches north of Toledo. This was the more feasible because, by the tenth century, the Muslim population had grown in Spain as it had from Nile to Oxus, and the inherited feuding of Arab and Berber tribes was politically less decisive than the common needs of an increasingly flourishing society.

‘Abd-al-Raḥmân III (912–961), the new caliph, was successful in fighting for more than a nominal rule; he set up a Spanish version of the ‘Abbâsî absolutism. His court fostered the same sorts of learning, literary and philosophical, that had graced the High Caliphal court. His absolutism was even completed likewise with alien troops; Berbers from the south, and western and eastern European slaves from the north (the latter being called ‘Slavs’) who eventually, in turn, quarrelled and asserted their power. ‘Abdal-Raḥmân’s authority was resumed by Ibn-abi-’Âmir al-Manṣûr, a potent minister (under an Umayyad figurehead) who became, in effect, sovereign (976–1002). He abandoned anything but titular power in the Maghrib, where the Fâṭimîs, even when they moved to Egypt, retained more power, and Berber tribal blocs proved most powerful of all. But he concerted all Muslim resources in campaigns to subdue the independent Spanish Christians of the northern fringes of the peninsula. His greatest achievement was to destroy the great shrine of St. James (Santiago) at the furthest northwest extreme of Spain, a shrine dear to all the Occident.

But this interim of Spanish political power was short-lived. After 1010, when the power of al-Manṣûr’s sons was broken amidst quarrels among the alien soldiery, no one military party inherited Spain as a whole. Rather, independent courts sprang up in almost every Spanish city. Their rulers were called mulûk al-ṭawâ’if, ‘party kings’ (in Spanish, reyes de taifas); for, depending as they did on the support of local partisans, they were generally not absolute rulers but more or less heads of factions. Within a decade or so, Spain was covered with such courts and the Umayyad caliphate had disappeared. Some of these courts represented a Slav factional power and some a Berber, but some represented local civic loyalties, and carried on a vigorous political life within the limits of local resources. In particular, in Seville a family of qâḍîs (the ‘Abbâdids) led the local notables so effectively that gradually Seville gained control over much of southwest Spain. But whereas the Spanish Umayyad caliphate had been able to maintain internal peace, the lack of political integration that had forced (and allowed) the strongest Umayyads to depend on alien troops showed up even more directly in constant warfare among the party kings, which Spanish Muslims had to put up with. Like Muslims elsewhere, the Muslims of Spain never succeeded in creating a national political structure rooted in the land; nor did they discover a political idea that would make up for this by way of special combinations of interests.

Nevertheless, it was in these petty states that the high culture introduced by the Spanish caliphs had its fruition. These courts are particularly famous for the distinctive poetry cultivated at them. Even within the standard verse forms, a fresh love of nature appeared; eventually, new verse patterns were developed—stanza forms, till then alien to Arabic poetry; and even a controlled interspersing of vernacular speech, popular Arabic and Romance. Whereas in the central regions, the Pahlavî and Aramaic heritages, to the extent that they survived, were incorporated into the new Arabic literature in the course of its very formation, the Romance heritage of Spain was introduced late into an Arabic literary tradition already well formed. It gave it a special provincial flavour, attractive for its relative freedom from established restraints; the Spanish experiments even influenced Arabic literature further east.

The poet-theologian Ibn-Ḥazm (994–1064) typifies the peculiar Spanish setting. As a poet, he illustrated with his own poems in his ‘Dove’s Neck Ring’ (translated into most Western languages), the various phases and moments of the sort of chivalric love subsequently elaborated by the Provençal troubadours. This love posture, inherited in part from earlier Arabic writers, was highly cultivated in Spain then; Ibn-Ḥazm endowed it with rigorous, if not profound, system.

As a thinker, he found himself in opposition to the rigid Mâlikî faqîhs, as was the case with nearly every independent Spanish mind. He adopted a theological position assumed by some other Spaniards also: that of the Baghdad jurist Dâ’ûd al-Ẓâhirî, the ‘externalist’. This position, developed at a late period when the number of available ḥadîth reports had greatly multiplied, insisted on restricting legal speculation to the minimum by depending exclusively on ḥadîth, even relatively poorly attested ones; it had the advantage of by-passing the mass of learnèd doctrine of the Mâlikîs in favour of a body of reports in principle more available to everyone equally. It has been suggested that part of the appeal of the Ẓâhirî position for Ibn-Ḥazm lay in its allowing wide scope to individual choice, placing actions on which no sound ḥadîth report could be found into the neutral ‘permissible’ category; thus its late development would coincide with a relative freedom from Marwânî Arab tradition and a deep involvement in the requirement of urban culture for maximum flexibility consistent with essential discipline.³

Ibn-Ḥazm also developed an elaborate critique of Muslim and non-Muslim theological positions from an essentially common-sense standpoint which rejected all spiritual or metaphysical subtleties in favour of monotheistic propriety and morality. He rejected kalâm disputation as such, though he argued closely in rejecting it. He always cut through to an incisive point, even when he was overly schematic in describing sects of less interest to him. (Thus in discussing the Shî’îs, rare in Spain, he systematically made every group regard its imâm as prophet or as god, in a standardized formula remote from the actual sect’s human position; yet he did bring out, in his thirst for system, unlike most writers, the most decisive difference between the Zaydî Shî’îs and those more radical—their attitude toward a naṣṣ imâmate.) He even took the trouble to analyze the Bible text itself when pointing out the self-contradictions of Jews and Christians.

Full of vigorous life, Ibn-Ḥazm survived in sorrow the last of the Spanish Umayyad caliphs, whom he had served as vizier as a young man, to retire from politics into a varied and always polemical scholarly life. The poets and scholars of Spain were, like him, by turns lyrical and polemical—and often rather prosaic or even rigid in matters of ultimate allegiance.

The Spanish courts for almost a century carried on a brilliant cultural life without fear of the equally disunited Christians to the north or of the Berber tribes that ruled loosely in the Moroccan cities across the straits. Their Mediterranean seaports grew rich with the reviving west Mediterranean trade, as Italy, Gaul, and Germany went into a rapid economic development at this time. In the 1050s, the ‘Abbâdid dynasty of Seville, having displaced a number of the lesser city dynasties, became peculiarly famous for the same gay life of poetry and music; a life for which this age in Spain was long remembered. These little courts were not able to maintain themselves, however. The Christians of northern Spain eventually concentrated their forces and threatened the Muslims with conquest. Toledo fell in 1085.

The Muslim Spaniards had to call in a newly arisen Berber power—the Murâbiṭs (Almoravids), whom we shall discuss in more detail subsequently; on the basis of the enthusiasm aroused in Islamizing frontier populations, certain Berber tribes were able to support a stronger government than usual, which had taken over in Morocco. The Murâbiṭs now crossed into Spain to defend it against the Christians. The Murâbiṭs beat back the Christians, but imposed their own rule, in which the most puritanical faqîhs had their way. The cultivated Spanish life continued, but in the sombre atmosphere imposed by Berber military masters. Ultimately, the Berbers could not maintain themselves in an unsympathetic Spain; the long-run effect of the failure of the party kingdoms was to abandon Spain to the less luxurious northern Christians, who proved able to maintain themselves without dependence on foreign intervention.⁴

The Persian provincial successor states

In the central areas, the Fertile Crescent and the Iranian plateau—and in the Oxus basin—the tradition of the caliphal state was not readily replaced by an essentially local continuity, as in Egypt, or overthrown by locally successful alternative political ideas as in remoter areas like the Maghrib, Arabia, and Sind. At first the new powers merely continued, more or less skilfully, the administrative and social patterns bequeathed them by the caliphal government.

The Sâmânid governors in the east, who had inherited the position of the Tâhirids, had been well established in their autonomy since before the caliphal collapse. They maintained at Bukhârâ an efficient bureaucratic administration in the Oxus basin and Khurâsân throughout the tenth century; they remained loyal to the caliphs so far as such loyalty had any meaning, and the disappearance of an independent power at Baghdad made little difference in their status or activity.

Nevertheless, after the reign of Naṣr II (913–942), the Sâmâni power was weakened. Territorially, it had to yield its western Iranian lands