Abbasid Caliphate of Cairo

A caliph for Cairo

Drafted from Banister, Edinburgh Studies in Classical Islamic History and Culture (2021)formation

Hulegu had the last Baghdad caliph rolled in a carpet and trampled in February 1258. In June 1261 an Abbasid prince who had escaped the sack and spent three years among the desert tribes of Iraq arrived in Cairo, and Baybars invested him as caliph.

The transaction is legible from both sides. Baybars was a Kipchak slave soldier who had murdered his way to the sultanate a few months earlier, in a state founded by a coup, with no lineage, no election and no claim except the army. The caliph gave him an investiture — a formal delegation of authority from the office that had been the only non-conquest source of legitimacy in Sunni Islam for six hundred years. The caliph, for his part, got a household, a stipend, and the survival of a line that had been extinguished three years earlier.

Al-Mustansir did not last. Baybars sent him east with a force to retake Baghdad and he was destroyed by a Mongol army on the Euphrates within months of his investiture. The line that ran for the next two and a half centuries was not his but al-Hakim's — a rival Abbasid whom the amir of Aleppo had already proclaimed, and who had submitted to al-Mustansir and marched east with him. Sixteen more caliphs followed.

What was created in 1261 is a strange object and it is worth being blunt about it. This caliphate had no territory, no army and no revenue. There is nothing to measure about it, and the absence is not a failure of the sources: there was nothing there. What it had was a claim, and the claim turned out to be worth having for two and a half centuries, which is longer than most states with armies manage.

A million dinars, and six months

Drafted from al-Suyuti, History of the Caliphs (Tarikh al-Khulafa') (1881)expansion

The Cairo caliphate tried to be a state exactly once, in the first year of its existence, and the attempt killed the caliph who made it.

Proving who he was

Al-Mustansir had been a prisoner in Baghdad. When the Mongols took the city he was released in the confusion, got away, and lived among the tribes west of Iraq until Baybars became sultan and he came to Cairo with ten men of the Banu Muharish.

The first thing that happened to him was an examination. Baybars came out to meet him with the judges and the officers of state, he rode through Cairo — and then, al-Suyuti records, his descent was certified through the chief qadi before he could be acknowledged caliph. An Abbasid arriving from the desert three years after the line had been publicly extinguished was not simply believed. His genealogy was checked by the senior judicial officer of Egypt, and only after that did the oath of allegiance begin, the sultan swearing first, then the chief qadi, then the great shaykh Izz al-Din ibn Abd al-Salam, then the nobles by rank.

Then the two ceremonies that were the whole point. The caliph rode in the black mantle to the mosque in the citadel, mounted the pulpit and preached. And in a pavilion built outside the walls, before the judges and the nobles, he invested Baybars with his own hands — a black gold-embroidered turban, a violet mantle, a gold chain for the neck, golden buckles for the feet — while the secretary of state read the diploma of investiture aloud from a second pulpit. Baybars then rode back in through the Gate of Succour, the city decorated, the high marshal carrying the diploma before him and the nobles walking.

Baybars settled a revenue on him and gave him a household: an atabek, comptrollers, a steward, a treasurer, a chamberlain, a secretary, slaves, a hundred horses, thirty mules and ten camels.

Baghdad

Then al-Mustansir asked to go and take Baghdad back, and Baybars financed it.

The sultan escorted him as far as Damascus and furnished the expedition with a million gold dinars and sixty-six thousand dirhams. The eastern princes came in — the lord of Mosul, the lord of Syria, the lord of Jazirat ibn Umar. So did a rival: the amir of Aleppo had set up an Abbasid of his own with the title al-Hakim, whose name was already on coins and in the Friday prayer, and this second caliph submitted to al-Mustansir and joined the march.

They took Hadithah. They took Hit. Then the Mongol army met them, a great number of Muslims were killed, and the caliph was missing. Al-Suyuti reports both versions and states his own view without softening it: some say he was slain, which was apparently the case; others that he escaped and lay concealed in the provinces.

November 1261. His caliphate had lasted less than six months.

What was learned

The line that ran for the next two and a half centuries was not his. It was al-Hakim's — the rival from Aleppo, who had submitted on the road to Baghdad and outlived the man he submitted to.

And the lesson was absorbed permanently. No Cairo caliph ever again led an army, asked for one, or attempted to recover anything. The office spent the following two hundred and fifty years doing what it had done on that one afternoon in the pavilion outside the walls: conferring on other people the authority it could not exercise itself.

What an empty office was for

Drafted from Banister, Edinburgh Studies in Classical Islamic History and Culture (2021)peak

The standard verdict is that the Cairo caliphs were figureheads and puppets, and the standard verdict is where Banister starts rather than where he ends. The dismissal is inherited: chroniclers close to the sultanate had little reason to dwell on them, later Ottoman writing had reason to minimise the line it had displaced, and modern accounts have generally passed the brevity along.

Three things the office actually did. It invested sultans, and the investiture was not decorative in a state where sultans were made by faction and murder at a rate the Mamluk succession made necessary: a new sultan wanted the ceremony, and the ceremony required the caliph to be there and to consent. It delegated authority outward, to rulers who had no other way of obtaining it. In 1496 Askia Muhammad of Songhai obtained recognition as caliph of the Sudan from the Cairo Abbasid — a West African ruler buying a title from a man with no soldiers, and getting his money's worth. And it was a resource in a crisis: when the sultanate broke down, the caliph was a piece on the board because he was the one figure no faction had made.

That last point produced the exception, in 1412, when the amirs could not agree on a sultan and made the caliph one. It is the only occasion in two and a half centuries when the office held power rather than conferring it, and it happened for exactly the reason above: the caliph was the one figure in Cairo who was not a faction. It is told in full further on.

And it ended the way it began: in the possession of whoever held Egypt.

The caliph who was made sultan

Drafted from al-Suyuti, History of the Caliphs (Tarikh al-Khulafa') (1881)peak

In May 1412 the sultan Faraj marched against a rebel governor, was beaten, and fled. The amirs could not agree on a replacement, and did the one thing that had never been done in Cairo: they made the caliph sultan.

He did not want it

Al-Musta'in had been caliph since 1405 under his father's covenant. Al-Suyuti is careful about what happened next, and the care is the interesting part: the caliph did not assent to this save after opposition and continuous protest, and he made the amirs swear an oath first.

What he made them swear was specific. If he were ever deposed from the sultanate, they would keep him as caliph.

A man being handed supreme power in Egypt negotiated, before accepting it, for the right to go back to being powerless. He had judged the situation correctly and he was still overruled by it.

Then he returned to Cairo, appointed and dismissed ministers, and had the coinage struck in his name — though his title, al-Suyuti notes, stayed as it was.

The poem

The most revealing document of the episode is a celebration, and it was written by the greatest scholar of the age.

Ibn Hajar al-Asqalani — the hadith master whose commentary on Bukhari is still the standard one — composed an ode for the occasion. The lines al-Suyuti quotes begin:

The kingdom is on a sure foundation among us, through al-Musta'in the Just the Abbaside. The dignity of the descendants of the uncle of Muhammad hath returned to its place after a long oblivion.

After a long oblivion. A hundred and fifty years of investing Mamluk sultans had not, to the scholars of Cairo, counted as the Abbasids holding anything. The moment one of them actually governed, the learned class produced the language of restoration immediately, which means the language had been sitting there unused the whole time.

Six months

The reality arrived within weeks, and al-Suyuti describes it as an office geography.

Al-Musta'in lived in the fort. Shaykh al-Mahmudi — the victorious rebel — set himself up in the stables, and was given the administration of Egypt with the title Nizam al-Mulk. And the nobles, when released from duty at the palace, went down to the stables to pay their respects there, and the business of government was transacted in the shaykh's presence. Afterwards his chancellor would go up to the fort, where the caliph attached his signature.

Then even that was taken. It was represented that the caliph could not sign a document until it had first been shown to the shaykh. Al-Suyuti's phrase for what followed is a physical one: the caliph was now in trepidation and his heart was straitened.

In November the shaykh required him to resign the sultanate. Al-Musta'in agreed on one condition — that he be allowed to come down from the citadel to his own house. The shaykh refused even that, took the sultanate as al-Mu'ayyad, and in 1414 publicly deposed him from the caliphate as well and proclaimed his brother Da'ud. Al-Musta'in was moved into a house inside the citadel with guards to keep people away from him.

The judgement

And here the office showed what it still was.

Nawruz, governor of Syria, assembled the judges and the doctors of law and asked for a ruling on what al-Mu'ayyad had done in deposing and imprisoning the caliph. They gave sentence that it was unlawful, and it was agreed to make war on him for it.

A titular caliph with no soldiers had been set aside by the man who held Egypt, and the response was a formal legal finding and a civil war. The oath the amirs had sworn in May turned out to be worth exactly what al-Musta'in had feared and rather more than anyone else expected.

He was sent to Alexandria and imprisoned there, released some years later and allowed to return to Cairo — and chose to stay in Alexandria, which suited him, where the merchants gave him considerable sums. He died there of the plague in 1415.

What an investiture actually was

Drafted from Banister, Edinburgh Studies in Classical Islamic History and Culture (2021)aside?What aside means

The transaction this whole polity existed to perform is usually described in three words — the caliph invested the sultan — and it is worth setting out what those words covered, because the specificity is the argument for taking the office seriously.

A new sultan came to the caliph, or the caliph was brought to him. There was a formal audience with the senior officers, the four chief judges of the legal schools and the religious establishment present as witnesses. The caliph delegated authority in a spoken formula and a written diploma, naming the territories and the powers conferred. The sultan was robed — a specific set of garments, the caliph's own black in some periods — and received a sword and, often, a banner. The sultan then swore to uphold the sharia, protect the frontiers and the pilgrimage, and rule justly. The diploma was read publicly. Afterwards the sultan's name was pronounced in the Friday sermon and struck on the coinage, with the caliph's name above it.

Almost none of that involved the caliph doing anything a soldier could not have compelled. That is the point. The value of the ceremony was that it could not be performed by anybody else: there was exactly one man in the world who could confer it, he was in Cairo, and he was in the sultan's keeping.

Two things follow. The first is that the caliph's consent was a real if narrow lever, because a refusal was expensive and visible — and in a sultanate where rulers were made by faction and murder, an accession that looked irregular needed the ceremony more, not less. The second is that the ceremony was portable. A ruler who could not come to Cairo could be sent a diploma, which is how a ruler in the Niger valley could be recognised as caliph of the Sudan in 1496 by a man with no soldiers, and treat the recognition as worth the journey.

The office had no territory, no army and no revenue. What it had was a monopoly on a document, and for two and a half centuries the document was worth travelling for.

The deed my father drafted

Drafted from al-Suyuti, History of the Caliphs (Tarikh al-Khulafa') (1881)aside?What aside means

There is one history of the caliphate written from inside the Cairo Abbasid household. Jalal al-Din al-Suyuti, the most prolific scholar of fifteenth-century Egypt, finished his History of the Caliphs in Cairo in the 1490s. His father was imam to one of these caliphs and drafted their documents. Suyuti himself, as he says in a single unemphatic clause, was brought up in the caliph's house and on his bounty.

So the last section of his book is not research. It is family.

The document

He quotes the deed by which al-Mu'tadid named his full brother Sulayman as his successor, in 845 of the Hijra — 1441 — because his father wrote it.

It is worth reading for its own sake. The heir is "the sublime seat of dignity, the learned doctor, the noble, the princely, high in rank and birth, of royal descent"; the appointment is made "for the sublime Caliphate", "as an Imam over the Muslims", "for the fulfilment of what is obligatory upon him for the due government of the affairs of those who believe in one God", and "to follow the traditions of the orthodox Caliphs and rightly-guided Imams".

The reasoning is careful and entirely internal. The caliph has tested his brother's condition and become acquainted with his heart and knows of nothing emanating from him that impairs his claim. If he left the office unsettled he would burden the men who have authority to loose and bind with the trouble of choosing, so he has acted out of compassion, to free them from the charge. And a clause worth its weight: this covenant does not require the approval of everyone concerned in it, but binds whoever hears it, who must make it known and call people to submit to it when the time comes.

Every phrase in it belongs to an office that had once governed from the Atlantic to the Indus. It is being used to hand an empty title from one brother to another, in a city where a Turkish sultan decided everything, by a man whose son would grow up in that household and copy the text into a book.

What he says about them

Suyuti's judgement on these caliphs is not what a reader expecting embarrassment would predict, and it is not embarrassed at all.

Sulayman — al-Mustakfi — he calls one of the most virtuous of the caliphs: pious, devout, constant in prayer and in reading the Qur'an, given to silence, shunning the society of men, of excellent disposition. His brother said he had never known a serious fault in him since he grew up. The sultan trusted him and knew his worth. Suyuti's father was his imam and stood high with him.

Then Suyuti says the thing he must have meant, because it costs him something: that the family of this caliph are excellent in faith, devotion and virtue, and he does not believe there is on the face of the earth a caliph more virtuous than these, after the descendants of Umar ibn Abd al-Aziz.

That is a claim about the last four hundred years of the office, made by a man comparing it to the one Umayyad caliph the pious tradition had ever approved of.

The funeral

Al-Mustakfi died at the end of Dhu al-Hijja 854, aged sixty-three. Suyuti's father outlived him by forty days.

The detail he keeps for the end is that the sultan came to the funeral and carried the bier himself.

A ruler who held the entire military and fiscal power of Egypt walking under the coffin of a man who had none — that is what the arrangement looked like from the inside, to the people it was for. Not a fiction anybody was maintaining cynically. An office with nothing in it, taken seriously by the man who had emptied it.

Taken to Constantinople

Drafted from Banister, Edinburgh Studies in Classical Islamic History and Culture (2021)end

In January 1517 Selim I destroyed the Mamluk army outside Cairo, and among the assets that passed to the Ottomans was the caliph. Al-Mutawakkil III was taken to Constantinople, held, and eventually allowed home to Cairo, where he died a private person on a pension. The office simply stopped being filled.

What happened to the claim is a longer story and needs care. The Ottoman position from the eighteenth century onwards was that the caliphate had been formally transferred at Cairo in 1517 — that al-Mutawakkil had ceded the office and its insignia to Selim in a ceremony, and that the Ottoman sultans had been caliphs by right ever since. The account appears in Ottoman writing of the 1770s, when the empire was negotiating with Russia over its authority as a religious protector of Muslims outside its borders and had a concrete use for the argument.

Modern scholarship does not accept the ceremony. The near-contemporary sources for 1517 do not describe a transfer, Selim did not use the caliphal title in the way the later account requires, and the story's first appearance is two hundred and fifty years after the event in a context that explains it.

The office has three endings, and they are all real. It ended at Baghdad in 1258 when Hulegu killed al-Musta'sim. It ended here in 1517, quietly, when the man who could perform the ceremony was moved to another city and nobody appointed a successor. And it ended in 1924 when a parliament in Ankara voted. Of the three, this is the only one where nobody appears to have decided anything: the office was not abolished and was not transferred. It was carried off with the furniture and not set up again.

The bequest

Drafted from Lane-Poole, A History of Egypt in the Middle Ages (1901)afterlife

On 22 January 1517 the Ottomans beat the Egyptian army outside Cairo. The next day Selim was prayed for in every mosque in the city. On the 26th he entered Cairo in state, and Lane-Poole's sentence about that entry is the one to keep: he came in accompanied by the captive caliph.

The last Mamluk sultan was betrayed and hanged at the Zuwayla gate in April. Al-Mutawakkil was carried off to Constantinople and imprisoned. When Selim died in September 1520 his son released him and let him go home to Cairo, where he lived out his life and died — Lane-Poole says 1538; other accounts say 1543 — and where, on the version Lane-Poole gives, he bequeathed his title and his rights to the Ottoman sultan.

A story doing its work

That bequest almost certainly did not happen, and the interest of finding it here is that this is a standard English history of Egypt published in 1901, by the curator who had catalogued the Egyptian coins in the British Museum, stating it as plain fact in a single subordinate clause.

By 1901 the transfer had been the official Ottoman position for over a century. It had been useful in 1774, when the empire was negotiating with Russia over its standing as protector of Muslims it no longer governed, and it was useful again under Abdulhamid II, who was making the caliphal title do real diplomatic work from India to central Asia at exactly the time Lane-Poole was writing. A claim that begins as a negotiating position ends as a line in a reference book, which is how such claims usually end.

The objection everybody knew

Lane-Poole records the objection in the same breath, and it is worth having, because it shows the argument was live rather than settled.

The legality of the inheritance, he writes, is repudiated not only by the Shi'a but by the majority of learned Sunnis, who are aware that a caliph must belong to the Prophet's tribe of Quraysh. The Ottomans were not Qurayshi and could not be made so. What he then concedes is the part that mattered in practice: whatever they were by right, the sultans of Turkey had been caliphs in fact over most of Sunni Islam ever since al-Mutawakkil died.

That is the whole afterlife of the Cairo caliphate in two sentences. The office could not be inherited, and it was inherited anyway, because the thing that made it real was never the descent — it was being the ruler with Mecca and Medina in hand, which is what the Cairo Abbasids' own patrons had been for two and a half centuries and what the Ottomans now were.

And Egypt

The other consequence Lane-Poole notes has nothing to do with the caliphate and is the more concrete of the two.

After the conquest, Egypt sank into the position of a mere province of the Turkish empire, and was administered separately from Syria and Arabia beside it. The country that had housed a caliph in order to have a caliph — that had gone to the trouble of finding an Abbasid in 1261 and installing sixteen more of them — stopped needing one on the day it stopped being the seat of anybody's government.

The office and the state that invented the use for it went out together.