This chapter provides a brief overview of the political history of the Islamic world, from the seventh-century Arabian conquests to the formation, during the fifteenth and sixteenth centuries, of the three great early modern Muslim empires: the Ottomans in Asia Minor, the Safavids in Iran and the Mughals in India. Its structure reflects the major political formations and transformations of this period: firstly, the Arabian ‘conquest polity’ which replaced the antique balance between Rome and Iran; then, after the demise of that empire in the mid-tenth century, the tumultuous era of ‘Berber’, Daylami and Turkic leaderships; finally, following the cataclysmic Mongol conquest of the eastern Islamic lands in 1258, the assimilation of these conquerors in the east and the political achievements of Turco-Mongol military strongmen and entrepreneurs in Syria, Egypt, Yemen and Anatolia. It looks at the elites and political structures that shaped and underlay this history and at their interaction with Islam. This had developed into a more fully articulated and stable ideological system, whose continued success lay in the new elites’ capacity to adopt and adapt it to their needs.

The early Islamic empire may have been the largest by land, but military reach should not be mistaken for highly centralised administrative structures: these only developed as the empire fragmented but were replicated in the tenth-century successor states, where the position of vizier gained increasing political influence. Nor should imperial success be mistaken for a stable elite, as newcomers – notably court scribes and religious scholars – challenged the military. The Abbasid caliphs’ fortunes varied with their military, fiscal and administrative structures, but they remained necessary legitimisers of other political structures, too sacred to depose. However, it was the ʿulamaʾ who established and elaborated ideological structures that long outlasted the first Muslim empires. After the mid-thirteenth-century upheavals, the ad hoc reach of Turco-Mongol and Arabo-Berber trans-regional leaderships formed an ‘archipelago’ in a ‘sea of semi-independent regions’ characterised by violent, volatile and complex power relationships. Eventual stabilisation ended centuries of political turbulence, centred around the great early modern empires of the Ottomans, Safavids and Mughals.

The early caliphate adopted the political organisation predominant in the late antique Middle East – imperial monarchy, sanctioned by divine power – but with a distinctively Islamic ideology of leadership involving kinship, piety, victory and justice. The prime location for the performance of royal power was the court, particularly for caliphal accessions or successions. The warrior rulers filling the caliphal vacuum after 945 adopted Islamic means of legitimisation, including oaths of loyalty, honorific titles, robes of honour, and being named on coinage and in Friday prayers; while the ʿulamaʾ increasingly claimed spiritual authority as ‘heirs of the Prophet’. The new Turco-Mongol elites from the thirteenth century on found a role for military strongmen, incorporating the nomadic virtues of strong leadership, good fortune and royal genealogy into a fluid mixture of ideologies. Performance of power encompassed the hajj, hunting parties, public sessions dispensing justice and rituals designed to bind the palaces of the court more closely to the towns wherever they were based.

The Chronicle (Ar. Taʾrīkh) of Khalīfa b. Khayyāṭ (d. AD 854) was composed in the early-to-mid ninth century and is the oldest Islamic chronicle still extant. Its compiler was a scholar of Qurʾān and ḥadīth – that is, a scholar of both of the Qurʾānic revelation and of the ‘reports’ or ‘traditions’ about the Prophet Muḥammad and the earliest Muslims. Khalīfa lived and worked in the large southern Iraqi port city of Basra – at the time one of the foremost centres of learning in the Islamic world. His Chronicle is arranged annalistically by years of the lunar Hijri calendar, beginning, after a short introduction, with year one – the year of the Prophet Muhammad's emigration (hijra) from Mecca to Medina (AD 622) – and ending with year AH 232/AD 847. It covers, in summary fashion, the political and administrative history of the Muslim polity, from its origins in Medina at the time of the Prophet and under the first caliphs through to the Umayyad and Abbasid caliphates.

Despite its early date, Khalīfa's Chronicle has received little attention in modern scholarship. Survey and textbook accounts tend to remark on its being the earliest surviving history in Arabic arranged chronologically, in contrast to earlier extant works which are structured thematically or arranged as biographical entries on individuals by generations. Modern historians have tended to dismiss it as telling us little or nothing that is not found in later, more famous works of the ninth century. It is, after all, much shorter than the surviving compendious histories produced in Iraq two or three generations later by al-Balādhurī (d. c. 892) and al-Ṭabarī (d. 923): al-Ṭabarī's History of Messengers and Kings (Taʾrīkh al-rusul wa-l-mulūk) is perhaps twenty times as long; al-Balādhurī's genealogically-arranged historical work, Genealogies of the Tribal Notables (Ansāb al-ashrāf), is perhaps about fifty times the length of Khalīfa's work.

But although Khalīfa's Chronicle may not provide many facts not known from later works, his framing of the material and the context of its compilation are markedly different from other early histories. In other words, the Chronicle itself is a hitherto-overlooked historical fact that raises important questions about the origins and development of Arabic chronicle-writing and the different ways in which the early Muslims went about finding their place in history and politics.

INTRODUCTION

Capital punishment can be understood as simultaneously an exercise of actual power – the ending of a human life – and an exertion of symbolic, or ritual, power. In this combination of symbolic transformation with real physical change, executions are unusual rituals. But the use of extreme violence against the human body certainly does have ritual characteristics, in that it has established rules (which may, of course, be deliberately challenged or broken) and in that these rules are used to make the drastic transformation in the status of the executed party seem legitimate and proper, to reassert more general ideas about the correct social order and to communicate threats and warnings to others who might seek to upset it. The victim of the execution is quite literally marked out as beyond reintegration into society. Their body becomes a kind of text, which can be read in a multitude of ways: the authorities carrying out the killing usually have one set of messages in mind, but the victim themselves, and those who witness or remember the act, may have very different ideas.

This ritual character of public executions poses interpretive problems. Philippe Buc has reminded medievalists that accounts of all rituals in narrative sources present particular challenges because of the polemical purposes to which they are put. This problem is acute for the Umayyad period of Islamic history (661–750 CE). Documentary sources for many aspects of Umayyad political culture, including capital punishment, are scarce. Furthermore, the literary accounts of events were composed after the Abbāsid Revolution, which brought the Abbāsid dynasty (r. 750–1258) to power in a violent rebellion against Umayyad rule. The Abbāsid period then witnessed the ongoing evolution of Islamic religious thought and practice, including the formation of some of the main features of classical Islam. Hence, the sources may manifest religious, legal and political ideas quite different from those that prevailed in Umayyad times.

Four unusual episodes from the end of the Umayyad period suggest that, although Buc's warning is well founded, sensitivity to the concerns of the sources means that they gain in their potential as sources.

The features that the rasāɔil of al-Walīd II and Yazīd III share with mid-eighth-century ‘religious epistles’ give some indication of their function: they are to be read out to large audiences at (in the extant cases) Iraqi and Khurasani mosques. They are also statements of religio-political dogma that begin with the general (even ‘banal’) and move to the particular (and highly contested) for sound rhetorical reasons. Just as the ‘religious epistles’ and sermons of the Kharijites were propaganda, the purpose of the late Marwanid texts is also persuasion – the communication of the caliph's claim to legitimate authority, to the exclusion of all other rival religio-political positions. Thus, the public documents from the late Marwanid bay0a are a partial record of caliphal articulations of their claims to authority (or, at least, the articulations of their scribes and advisers) and hence a partial record of an unequal dialogue between rulers and ruled.

As with the ‘religious epistles’ of their rivals, much of the language with which these texts seek to persuade echoes that of the Qurɔān. As with other Marwanid letters, lengthy quranic quotation is comparatively rare. Nonetheless, the Marwanid texts are replete with quranic allusion and quranic vocabulary. As with the still-growing corpus of seventh- and eighth-century quranic Arabic inscriptions, the content of later copies of documents from the dīwān al-rasāɔil leads to the conclusion that something closely resembling the canonical quranic text was already of great significance to Muslims of the Marwanid era.

During the late fourteenth or early fifteenth century CE, a senior administrator for the Egyptian Mamluks, Shihāb al-Dīn al-Qalqashandī (d. 1418), composed an authoritative, encyclopaedic manual for secretaries. The Ṣubḥ al-acshā fī ṣinācat al-inshāɔ(‘Daybreak for the Night-Blind regarding the Composition of Chancery Documents’) comprises a vast collection of copies of state documents (the early twentieth-century edition runs to fourteen large volumes), together with discourses on the theory and practice of the scribe and secretary. Long before al-Qalqashandī's time, the dīwān al-inshāɔ (‘chancery’) had taken on a central importance in the administration of most Islamic states, but the scribes of the dīwāns were fully aware that it had not always been so. Men like al-Qalqashandī continued to preserve traditions about the origins and development of every aspect of the scribe's profession, including the production of documents for the pledge of allegiance to the caliph.

The introductory lines on the composition of pledges of allegiance to caliphs in the Ṣubḥ al-a cshā explain that documents were not composed for the bay cas to the Companions of the Prophet who became caliphs in the first decades of Islam. In 694, when al-Ḥajjāj was appointed to govern Iraq, he established the formulaic oaths that became known as ‘the oaths of the bayca’; these oaths then remained in use under the Abbasids. This introduction is followed by a copy of an Abbasid formula for the oath of allegiance.

Throughout the Islamic tradition (that is, in texts composed in the eighth and ninth centuries and after) the verb bāyaca is used to describe the taking or giving of the pledge of allegiance to the leader of the Muslims (whence the noun, bayca, ‘pledge of allegiance’). This use of a quranic word is one instance of the numerous examples of Prophetic practice assuming the status of kerygma in the Islamic tradition. In this respect, the invention of the bayca as the means of recognising religio-political authority in the early Muslim community in some ways resembles the invention of the office of the caliphate itself, and the consultative process by which it was widely held that its incumbent should be chosen. Both the title ‘caliph’ (khalīfa) and the ‘consultation’ in choosing him (shūrā) appear to have been derived from quranic usages that suited, though did not anticipate, such institutions. Where bāyaca differs from khalīfa and shūrā is that it appears to have been not only, like khalifa and shura, something of a genuine continuation of Arabian custom but also a custom actually used by the Prophet Muḥammad, albeit subsequently modified and reimagined in response to new situations; Muḥammad does not seem to have anticipated caliphs, nor the method of selecting them, but he had taken pledges of loyalty from his followers, as the first caliphs did from theirs.

In the latter part of the Umayyad period, clandestine revolutionaries in the northeastern frontier province of Khurasan began to call for al-riḍā min āl Muḥammad (‘the Chosen One from the Family of the Prophet’) and al-kitāb wa'l-sunna (‘the Book and Custom’). The first slogan invoked the idea that the caliph should be drawn from the Prophet's clan of Hāshim (as opposed to merely from Quraysh, like the Umayyads) and that he should be chosen by the Muslims, not imposed upon them. The second appealed to Islamic piety as the basis for just rule: if God's word and the customs of His Prophet and His community were followed, then a truly just society would be the result. The collapse of Umayyad dynastic unity after 743–4 led to a series of rebellions across the caliphate. Then, in 747, sections of the army in Khurasan loyal to the ‘Hashimite’ cause rebelled. Many of the indigenous population of the province joined the revolt, pledging allegiance to a movement that held out the possibility of access to the benefits of membership of the Muslim military elite.

With their numbers swollen by the new converts, the revolutionary armies swept out of Khurasan and won a series of lightning victories. Syncretic, millenarian beliefs gave these armies a fervour that worked to their advantage on the battlefield. In the winter of 749–50, with success looking increasingly certain, a revolutionary cell in the Iraqi city of Kufa proclaimed cAbd Allāh b. Muḥammad Abū al-cAbbās as the new caliph (r. c. 750–4).

The thirty-two years between c. 628 and c. 660 witnessed the spectacular military and diplomatic success of the monotheist polity that had been founded after Muḥammad's emigration from Mecca to Yathrib (later Medina) in 622. In the last few years of his life (c. 628–32) Muḥammad consolidated his authority over Yathrib/Medina, brought most of the Ḥijāz into federation and began to extend his influence to other parts of the Arabian Peninsula. During the next three decades, those who succeeded him presided over the conquest of the rest of the Peninsula, the defeat of Sasanian Iran and the annexation of the Roman provinces of Egypt (Ar. Miṣr) and Oriens (Ar. Bilād al-Shām, often referred to as ‘Syria’). Then, with the slowing of military expansion in the 650s, consensus over the leadership of the Muslim polity began to break down, culminating in the civil war of 656–61, after which Damascus, in Syria, eclipsed Medina as the new capital of the empire.

During these three decades of spectacular expansion and conflict many of the religio-political institutions of the early Muslim empire came into being, among them the ‘caliphate’ (khilāfa) and the ‘pledge of allegiance’ (bayca, mubāyaca), by which the caliphate's incumbent was recognised as the ‘commander of the faithful’ (amīr al-muɔminīn) or ‘caliph’ (khalīfa, ‘successor’ or ‘deputy’). The quranic evidence, and other evidence for the milieu in which Muḥammad lived and preached, indicate that these pledges were a fusion of long-standing, pre-Islamic religio-political custom with late antique monotheist ideas about leadership and authority.

For all that the ‘Maronite Chronicle’ attests to some of the details of Mucāwiya's accession in Jerusalem in c. 660, there is no evidence for what was actually said at the Temple Mount, nor, beyond a hostility to the imposition of dynastic succession, does the later Arabic–Islamic tradition tell us with any verifiable accuracy what was pledged to Yazïd in c. 670 and reaffirmed in 680. From after the turn of the century, the evidential situation begins to improve. There is good evidence that some of the earliest extant versions of Islamic legal traditions (ḥadīth) took shape in the early eighth-century (although they are now extant only in ninth-and tenth-century compilations). When read alongside contemporaneous poetry from the early Marwanid court, and from the Marwanids' opponents, a consistent picture of the late-seventh and early eighth-century pledge of allegiance emerges. Nomads and former nomads, having made an emigration (hijra) to a garrison for jihad, were bound by pledges to obey their leader and not to ‘desert’, ‘revert to nomadism’ or ‘apostatize’ (tacarraba, irtadda, irfaḍḍa). Those who violated this pledge were ‘throwers-off’ of allegiance (khulacāɔ), outside ‘protection under covenant’ (jiwār, dhimma), without rights and potentially liable to execution. Both the legal traditions and the poetry also emphasise the monotheist and soteri-ological basis of the pledge: death without a bayca is a ‘pagan’, or jāhilī, death; indeed, for the Kharijite rebels against the caliphs the bayca is very explicitly a ‘sale’ of one's life in jihad.

This book is a history of the rituals by which the first Muslim monarchs were formally acknowledged. Like the Christian Roman emperor and the Iranian King of Kings, the caliph of the first Muslim empire was acclaimed by his followers and received oaths of allegiance from them. He appeared before them enthroned in both religious and royal settings, bearing the insignia of his office. That the caliph was a ‘monarch’, and in some senses a ‘king’, perhaps does not need to be restated. However, the emphasis in much of Islamic political thought on the notion of ‘kingship’ (mulk) as mere earthly, or temporal power, in contrast to the legitimate authority of the ‘caliphate’ (khilāfa), which is derived from God, can obscure the important continuities between caliphal authority and that of ancient Near Eastern monarchy. Because of this distinction in the Islamic tradition, ‘monarchy’ is probably a better description of the caliphate than ‘kingship’; it encompasses the shared cultural heritage with ancient Near Eastern rulership, while acknowledging the distinctive semantic and conceptual transformations of that heritage that took place in Islam.

The monarchs of Rome, Iran and Islam each represented temporal and sacral authority in an imperial context – they were both ‘king’ and ‘priest’ of a preeminent, divinely sanctioned world power. In Islam, a division of roles between the caliph and his Muslim subjects eventually led to ‘classical’ Sunni orthodoxy (that is, the four main schools of medieval Sunni Islam), in which the right to interpret God's law (sharica) came to reside not exclusively in the person of the caliph, but rather in God's community as a whole.