Ikhshidid Emirate

Holding the Hijaz

Drafted from (ed.), The Cambridge History of Egypt, Volume 1: Islamic Egypt 640-1517 (1998)formation

Muhammad ibn Tughj was granted Egypt in 935 and took the title al-Ikhshid, an old Central Asian princely style from Farghana, where his family came from. The arrangement was the Tulunid one repeated: an autonomous province, an army of Turkish and Sudanese slave soldiers, the Abbasid name on the coin, and the revenue kept at home.

What distinguishes the Ikhshidids is what they were holding the line against. The Fatimids had been established in Ifriqiya since 909 and attempted Egypt three times; the Ikhshidids beat them off each time. They also held the Hijaz, which meant the Friday sermon at Mecca and Medina was preached in the Abbasid caliph's name and not the Fatimid one — the most valuable symbolic ground in the Islamic world, contested by two claimants to the same office.

The last effective ruler was not a member of the family at all but Kafur, an Abyssinian eunuch bought as a slave who had been regent for two of Ibn Tughj's sons and then ruled outright until 968. The Fatimids took Egypt the year after he died, against a divided court and a failed harvest, and the symbolic ground went with it.

The title from Ferghana

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

The man who took Egypt in 935 had been a prisoner in Damascus with his father, who died there. His route to power ran the length of the caliphate's collapse, and the name he ruled under came from a valley in Central Asia.

Three generations

Muhammad ibn Tughj came of a princely family in Ferghana, on the Jaxartes, whose rulers bore the title Ikhshid the way the sovereigns of Persia and Tabaristan were styled Kisra and Ispahbadh.

His grandfather Juff was among the Turkish officers al-Mu'tasim brought into Iraq — the same recruitment that built Samarra and that eventually swallowed the caliphate that made it. His father Tughj served with distinction in the armies of Khumarawayh, the Tulunid ruler of Egypt, fought the Byzantines as commandant of Tarsus, and was rewarded with the government of Syria. Then, Lane-Poole says, the pride of success brought its punishment, and he ended his life in the prison of Damascus.

Muhammad shared that captivity, and got himself released.

What followed was a career assembled out of the pieces of a disintegrating state: service under Takin, command of the disorderly Hawf district in Lower Egypt, a run of appointments in Syria where he earned the caliph's approval, and in 930 the governorship of Damascus.

Taking Egypt twice

He was nominated to Egypt in 933 and could not go, because Syria would not let him leave. He was recognised as governor in the Friday prayers at Fustat that year and sent a deputy to stand in for him while somebody else actually held the post.

He came in person in 935, on a second nomination, and had to fight his way in. The treasurer al-Madharani, who was the real power in Egypt, pushed the sitting governor into resisting the appointment. They were beaten at Farama; the Syrian fleet came up the Nile from Tinnis to Giza and commanded the capital until the army arrived and took possession.

The title came afterwards. Four years into his rule the caliph gave him special permission to use his ancestors' Ferghana style, and he became the Ikhshid — a Central Asian royal title, granted by an Abbasid caliph, to the ruler of Egypt. His coins were struck at Fustat, at Ramla in Palestine and at Damascus, which is a fair map of what he held.

What holding it looked like

The measure of the government is a negative one and Lane-Poole makes the point sharply: in the eleven years of the Ikhshid's rule there is not a single insurrection or disturbance on record, in a country that had spent the previous two decades in continuous anarchy.

The army recognised its master. His Syrian troops overawed whatever disaffection remained among Egyptians. He was cautious rather than brilliant — he would sign a treaty, give up territory, even pay tribute, rather than prolong a doubtful war. He is said to have gone in fear of assassination and taken extraordinary precautions. He was also said to be so strong that no other man could draw his bow, which is the kind of thing recorded about rulers people were relieved to have.

The size given for his army — four hundred thousand, with eight thousand in the bodyguard — is a chronicler's figure of the sort the period produces and is not a count. What is not in doubt is that it was large enough to stop the Fatimids, who had been driven back from Alexandria in his first year and did not seriously try again while he lived.

The world he was operating in

By this time the caliph's temporal power had simply gone. The Buyids held Persia, the Samanids the lands beyond the Oxus, the Hamdanids upper Mesopotamia, and a succession of Turkish emirs fought over Baghdad and the office of gaoler to the commander of the faithful.

In that setting the Ikhshid's achievement is exact and limited. He did not build anything new. He took the province his father had governed and the province his father's employer had ruled, held them both with an army raised on the same principle his grandfather had been recruited under, and kept them quiet for eleven years — which in the 940s was more than anyone else in the Islamic world was managing.

Three attempts, and the sermon at Mecca

Drafted from (ed.), The Cambridge History of Egypt, Volume 1: Islamic Egypt 640-1517 (1998)peak

The Ikhshidid state existed for thirty-four years and spent all of them doing one thing, which was stopping the Fatimids.

The Isma'ili caliphate had taken Ifriqiya in 909, and Egypt was the obvious next object: the richest province in the Islamic world, adjacent, and governed by a succession of weak Abbasid appointees. Fatimid armies came east in 914 and again in 919, before the Ikhshidids existed, and were beaten off with difficulty by the caliphate's own forces. Muhammad ibn Tughj was granted the province in 935 substantially because he was the officer who looked most likely to hold it, and a third Fatimid attempt came in 936 and failed against him.

What that bought was thirty years and the argument that went with them.

The Ikhshidids also held the Hijaz, and it is hard to overstate what that was worth. The Hafsid page has the sharif of Mecca briefly acknowledging a caliph in Tunis in 1259 and the whole page turning on it. The Fatimid page has holding the Hijaz as the thing that made Cairo's claim more than territorial. The Ottoman page has Selim acquiring the guardianship in 1517 and a largely Christian empire becoming the first power of the Muslim world.

For thirty years the Friday sermon at Mecca and Medina was pronounced in the name of the Abbasid caliph, because an Ikhshidid governor in Egypt kept the road open and paid for the grain that fed the holy cities — while a rival caliph in Ifriqiya, who regarded that caliph as a usurper, could not get to them.

That is a strange thing for a small provincial dynasty to have been doing. The Ikhshidids were not defending a doctrine; they were Sunni servants of a caliphate that was by this date a Buyid pensioner, and they were personally as autonomous as the Tulunids had been. What they were defending was an arrangement in which they were the useful party, and it held exactly as long as they could feed Mecca and beat an army in the delta.

Kafur

Drafted from (ed.), The Cambridge History of Egypt, Volume 1: Islamic Egypt 640-1517 (1998)peak

Abu al-Misk Kafur was bought as a slave, described in the sources as an Abyssinian eunuch, and given charge of Ibn Tughj's sons. He governed Egypt as regent for both of them and then, from 966, as ruler in his own name, with the khutba pronounced for him.

His court is where al-Mutanabbi went after leaving Sayf al-Dawla at Aleppo, and the poems he wrote about Kafur after failing to obtain the governorship he wanted are among the most savage invective in Arabic. They are also the reason Kafur's reputation reached later centuries in the shape it did, which is a caution worth carrying: the most quotable source on a ruler is frequently a disappointed client.

What Kafur actually did was hold Egypt, Syria and the Hijaz together for two decades against Fatimid pressure and internal factions, at a time when the Abbasid caliphate had been a Buyid possession for twenty years and could offer nothing.

He died in 968. The Fatimids took Egypt the following year against a divided court, a disputed succession and a failed Nile. What changed that year was not only who governed Egypt but which caliph the Friday prayer named, and those are different orders of change.

The master

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

Abu'l-Misk Kafur — "Musky Camphor" — was an Abyssinian slave bought from an oilman for a sum Lane-Poole converts as less than ten pounds. The Ikhshid, having noticed what he was, made him tutor and governor to his two sons, and the relation of tutor and ward lasted as long as they lived.

The princes were given an allowance of four hundred thousand dinars and told to enjoy themselves and stay out of government. They did, with scarcely a struggle, according to taste — the harem or the Qur'an — and died in luxurious obscurity. In 965 Kafur took the position openly, with the caliph's approval, as ustadh, master, of Egypt and its dependencies.

The detail on the coins

He struck no coins in his own name. His currency ran in the caliph's name alone.

That is the whole of his political method in one fact. The man was governing Egypt, Syria as far as Aleppo and Tarsus, and the holy cities; he had fought Sayf al-Dawla to a standstill and had the tribute of 945 cancelled; and he put nothing of himself on the money. An African slave running the richest province in Islam did not need the caliph's permission, and took care never to be found without it.

Egypt in his years had terrific earthquakes, a fire that destroyed seventeen hundred houses in Fustat, bad Niles and the scarcity that follows them, a Qarmatian raid into Syria, the capture of an Egyptian pilgrim caravan of twenty thousand camels, and a Nubian irruption that carried fire and famine through the Sa'id. It did not revolt once. The Ikhshid had got the country into order and Kafur knew how to keep it there.

The court

He collected poets and critics and had them argue in front of him in the evenings, or read him the history of the caliphs of old, and he paid enormously for it.

A poet who explained in choice verse that the frequent earthquakes were caused by Egypt dancing for joy at Kafur's virtues was thrown a thousand dinars. A sharif of the Prophet's family who picked up his riding whip found himself the owner of a baggage train. The daily provision for the kitchen ran to a hundred sheep, a hundred lambs, two hundred and fifty geese, five hundred fowls, a thousand pigeons and other birds, and a hundred jars of sweets; fifty skins of liquor were allowed to the servants alone. He drank quince cider, and the judge of Asyut sent fifty thousand quinces every season to make it.

Al-Mutanabbi, the greatest Arabic poet of the century, was among his intimates for two years, praised him extravagantly, left, and spent the rest of his life satirising him.

Reading the descriptions

Both of the surviving portraits are worthless as evidence and valuable as something else.

Al-Mutanabbi's praise was bought and his invective was revenge, and neither tells you what Kafur was like; what they tell you is what a great poet thought would wound a Black ruler in tenth-century Egypt, which turns out to be exactly what you would expect.

The nineteenth-century European account has the same problem from the other direction. Lane-Poole gives the facts carefully — the coins, the campaigns, the kitchen accounts — and then explains that when in power Kafur showed the love of luxury and ease that marks the Black in office, and that like all Blacks he delighted in music. The kitchen figures are checkable. The sentences around them are a British curator in 1901 telling you about 1901.

What is left when both filters are removed is a man bought for less than ten pounds who governed Egypt for twenty-two years, kept it quiet through earthquakes, fire and famine, held Syria against the most formidable warlord of the age, and was careful enough never to put his own name on a coin.

A negotiated surrender

Drafted from Brett, The Fatimid Empire (2017)end

Kafur died in 968 and the Ikhshidid position collapsed inside eighteen months, not because anyone beat it but because three things arrived at once.

The Nile came in low, twice. Egypt is entirely a function of the flood, as the Fatimid shidda a century later would demonstrate all over again, and a famine in 968 emptied the treasury and the granaries at the same time. The court divided between factions supporting an eleven-year-old Ikhshidid and various commanders. And the Fatimids, who had spent fifty-nine years and three failed invasions on this problem, had a general named Jawhar, an army of Kutama Berbers, and enough grain to feed Egypt through the crisis.

What happened in 969 is one of the rare conquests that was substantially negotiated. Jawhar came east; the Egyptian notables and the jurists of Fustat came out to meet him; and terms were agreed in writing before he entered — safety of persons and property, the maintenance of the Sunni legal schools and their judges, no forced conversion, the restoration of the water supply, and the endowments respected. There was a brief resistance and then there was not.

The Fatimids kept the terms in substance for two centuries. Egypt stayed largely Sunni and substantially Coptic throughout Isma'ili rule, and the regime made little sustained attempt to change that.

Two things this leaves.

The Hijaz went with Egypt, immediately. The sermon at Mecca and Medina was being pronounced for the Fatimid caliph within a year, and the argument the previous chapter describes the Ikhshidids winning for thirty years was lost in one season by a bad harvest.

And Egypt's autonomy, which the Tulunids had demonstrated and the Ikhshidids had confirmed, became permanent in a form neither had intended. Jawhar founded Cairo just north of Fustat that same year — a palace city, on the same instinct and roughly the same ground as the quarter the Abbasids had burnt in 905. What the Tulunids proved was that Egypt could pay for itself. What 969 established was that whoever held it did not have to pretend otherwise.

A wall in Jerusalem

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

A little over a year after Kafur died, the Fatimid army entered Fustat. With the fall of the last Ikhshid, Egypt stopped being counted among the provinces of the eastern caliphate, and stayed out of them for two hundred years.

What the dynasty left behind is very little. The physical record Lane-Poole could assemble comes to one inscription — Kafur's, on the east wall of the Haram at Jerusalem — and the coins, struck at Fustat, Ramla, Damascus, Homs and Tiberias, which are the map of what the dynasty held. Everything else about the Ikhshidids is in books written afterwards by people who worked for somebody else.

The verdict of 1901

Lane-Poole closes his account of the whole period from the conquest to 969 with a dismissal, and it is worth quoting because it is wrong in an instructive way.

Three hundred and thirty years after the Arabs entered the Nile valley, he writes, Egypt had produced no commanding men of its own. The few who counted — Ibn Tulun, the Ikhshid, Kafur — were foreigners, and even they were only a step above the ordinary official. They attempted no great expansion, they did not extinguish the Fatimids next door, and though they had fleets they never used them against Europe. Their public works were almost entirely in the capital and for their own pleasure. Egypt was still well behind Baghdad, Damascus and Cordoba; al-Azhar did not yet exist; no Egyptian Muslim had yet written poetry, history or criticism of the first rank.

Nearly every clause is factually defensible and the judgement built out of them is the wrong shape.

What was actually handed over

The complaint is that these rulers did not conquer anything and did not build outside their capital. It is worth asking what they did instead.

They kept a rich province quiet through a run of earthquakes, a fire that destroyed seventeen hundred houses, several bad Niles, a Qarmatian raid, the loss of a pilgrim caravan of twenty thousand camels, and a Nubian invasion of the Sa'id — without a revolt. They held Syria against the strongest warlord of the age. They fed the holy cities. They paid an army out of Egyptian revenue for a century, which was the thing Ibn Tulun had discovered was possible and which nobody in Egypt afterwards forgot.

The state the Fatimids walked into in 969 — an intact revenue system, an army habit, a governing class used to being governed from Fustat rather than from Iraq — is the state these men assembled. Within a generation of taking it over, the new dynasty founded al-Azhar and made Cairo the thing Lane-Poole complains Egypt had not yet become.

It is possible to be the necessary condition for somebody else's golden age and get no credit for it, and the surviving evidence makes that outcome more likely, because what a careful administration leaves is quiet years, and quiet years do not leave monuments. A dynasty that governed Egypt and Syria for thirty-four years is legible today in five mints and a line of writing on a wall in another country.