The term "Caliphate" refers to the political-religious state comprising the Muslim community and the
lands and peoples under its dominion in the
centuries following the death (AD 632) of the Prophet Muḥammad.
Ruled by a caliph
(Arabic
khalīfah,
“successor”),
who held temporal (and sometimes a degree of spiritual) authority, the
empire of the Caliphate grew rapidly through conquest during its
first two centuries to include most of Southwest Asia,
North Africa, and Spain. Dynastic struggles later brought about the
Caliphate’s decline, and it ceased to exist with the Mongol
destruction of Baghdad in 1258.
The urgent need for a
successor to Muḥammad as political leader of the Muslim community
was met by a group of Muslim elders in Medina who designated
Abū
Bakr,
the Prophet’s father-in-law, as caliph. Several precedents were set
in the selection of Abū Bakr, including that of choosing as caliph a
member of the Quraysh tribe. The first four caliphs—Abū Bakr,
ʿUmar I, ʿUthmān, and ʿAlī—whose reigns constituted what later
generations of Muslims would often remember as a golden age of pure
Islām, largely established the administrative and judicial
organization of the Muslim community and forwarded the policy begun
by Muḥammad of expanding the Islāmic religion into new
territories. During the 630s, Syria, Jordan, Palestine, and Iraq were
conquered; Egypt was taken from Byzantine control in 645; and
frequent raids were launched into North Africa, Armenia, and
Persia.
The assassination of ʿUthmān, and the ineffectual
caliphate of ʿAlī that followed, sparked the first sectarian split
in the Muslim community. By 661 ʿAlī’s rival Muʿāwiyah
I,
a fellow member of ʿUthmān’s Umayyad clan, had wrested away the
Caliphate, and his rule established the Umayyad caliphate that lasted
until 750. Despite the largely successful reign of Muʿāwiyah,
tribal and sectarian disputes erupted after his death. There were
three caliphs between 680 and 685, and only by nearly 20 years of
military campaigning did the next one, ʿAbd
al-Malik,
succeed in reestablishing the authority of the Umayyad capital of
Damascus. ʿAbd al-Malik is also remembered for building the Dome
of the Rock
in Jerusalem. Under his son al-Walīd
(705–715), Muslim forces took permanent possession of North Africa,
converted the native Berbers to Islām, and overran most of the
Iberian
Peninsula
as the Visigothic kingdom there collapsed. Progress was also made in
the east with settlement in the Indus
River
valley. Umayyad power had never been firmly seated, however, and the
Caliphate disintegrated rapidly after the
long
reign of Hishām (724–743). A serious rebellion broke out against
the Umayyads in 747, and in 750 the last Umayyad caliph, Marwān
II,
was defeated in the Battle of Great Zab by the followers of the
ʿAbbāsid
family.
The ʿAbbāsids, descendants of an uncle of Muḥammad,
owed the success of their revolt in large part to their appeal to
various pietistic, extremist, or merely disgruntled groups, and in
particular to the aid of the Shīʿites,
a major dissident party that held that the Caliphate belonged by
right to the descendants of ʿAlī. That the ʿAbbāsids disappointed
the expectations of the Shīʿites by taking the Caliphate for
themselves left the Shīʿites to evolve into a sect, permanently
hostile to the orthodox Sunnite majority, that would periodically
threaten the established government by revolt. The first ʿAbbāsid
caliph, as-Saffāḥ (749–754), ordered the elimination of the
entire Umayyad clan; the only Umayyad of note who escaped was ʿAbd
ar-Raḥman,
who made his way to Spain and established an Umayyad dynasty that
lasted until 1031.
The period 786–861, and especially the
caliphates of Hārūn (786–809) and al-Maʾmūn
(813–833), is regarded to have been the height of ʿAbbāsid rule. The eastward orientation of the dynasty was demonstrated by
al-Manṣūr’s removal of the capital to Baghdad in 762–763 and
by the later caliphs’ policy of marrying non-Arabs and recruiting
Turks, Slavs, and other non-Arabs as palace guards. Under al-Maʾmūn,
the intellectual and artistic heritage of Iran (Persia) was
cultivated, and Persian administrators assumed important posts in the
Caliphate’s administration. After 861, anarchy and rebellion shook
the empire. Tunisia and eastern Iran came under the control of
hereditary governors who made token acknowledgment of Baghdad’s
suzerainty. Other provinces became less reliable sources of revenue.
Shīʿite and similar groups, including the Qarmaṭians in Syria and
the Fāṭimids in North Africa, challenged ʿAbbāsid rule on
religious as well as political grounds.
ʿAbbāsid power ended
in 945, when the Būyids,
a family of rough tribesmen
from northwestern Iran,
took Baghdad under their rule. They retained the ʿAbbāsid caliphs
as figureheads. The Sāmānid dynasty that arose in Khorāsān and
Transoxania and the Ghaznavids in Central
Asia
and the Ganges
River
basin similarly acknowledged the ʿAbbāsid caliphs as spiritual
leaders of Sunnī Islām. On the other hand, the Fāṭimids
proclaimed a new caliphate in 920 in their capital of al-Mahdīyah in
Tunisia and castigated the ʿAbbāsids as usurpers; the Umayyad ruler
in Spain, ʿabd
ar-Raḥmān
III, adopted the title of caliph in 928 in opposition to both the
ʿAbbāsids and the Fāṭimids.
Nominal ʿAbbāsid authority was
restored to Egypt by Saladin in 1171. By that time, the ʿAbbāsids
had begun to regain some semblance of their former power, as the
Seljuq dynasty of sultans in Baghdad, which had replaced the Būyids
in 1055, itself began to decay. The caliph an-Nāṣir (1180–1225)
achieved a certain success in dealing diplomatically with various
threats from the East, but al-Mustaʿṣim (1242–58) had no such
success and was murdered in the Mongol sack of Baghdad that ended the
ʿAbbāsid line in that city. A scion of the family was invited a few
years later to establish a puppet caliphate in Cairo that lasted
until 1517, but it exercised no power whatever.
In modern times, many Islamist groups and their leaders seek to restore the Caliphate and, by extension, Islam's former glory. Among the organizations promoting this objective are the Muslim Brotherhood, Hizb-ut-Tahrir, Al Muhajiroun, As-Sabiqun, and al Qaeda.
Most of this introduction is from Britannica.com's entry for "Caliphate."
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