AL-HAKIM
But only half of the work was done. Islam stood as firmly as ever and the conspiracy had only produced a schism in the faith and had not destroyed it. Ubayd Allah was in the awkward position, on the one hand, of ruling a people who were in great bulk fanatical Muslims and did not understand any jesting with their religion, and, on the other hand, of being head of a conspiracy to destroy that very religion. The Syrians and Arabs had apparently taken more degrees than the Egyptians and North Africans, and Ubayd Allah found himself between the devil and the deep sea. The Qarmatians in Arabia plundered the pilgrim caravans, stormed the holy city Mecca, and, most terrible of all, carried off the sacred black stone. When an enormous ransom was offered for the stone, they declined—they had orders not to send it back. Everyone understood that the orders were from Africa. So Ubayd Allah found it advisable to address them in a public letter, exhorting them to be better Muslims. The writing and reading of this letter must have been accompanied by mirth, at any rate no attention was paid to it by the Qarmatians. It was not till the time of the third Fatimid Khalifa that they were permitted to do business with that stone. Then they sent it back with the explanatory or apologetic remark that they had carried it off under orders and now sent it back under orders. Meanwhile the Fatimid dynasty was running its course in Egypt but without turning the people of Egypt from Islam. Yet it produced one strange personality and two sects, stranger even than the sect to which it itself owed its origin. The personality is that of al-Hakim Bi’amrillah, who still remains one of the greatest mysteries that are to be met with in history. In many ways he reminds us curiously of the madness of the Julian house; and, in truth, such a secret movement as that of which he was a part, carried on through generations from father to son, could not but leave a trace on the brain. We must remember that the Khalifa of the time was not always of necessity the head of the conspiracy, or even fully initiated into it. In the latter part of the Fatimid rule we find distinct traces of such a power behind the throne, consisting, as we may imagine, of descendants and pupils of those who had been fully initiated from the first and had passed through all the grades. In the case of al-Hakim, it is possible, even, to trace, to a certain extent, the development of his initiation. During the first part of his reign he was fanatically Muslim and Shi‘ite. He persecuted alternately the Christians and the Jews, and then the orthodox and the Shi‘ites. In the latter part, there was a change. He had, apparently, reached a point of philosophical indifference, for the persecutions of Christians and Jews ceased, and those who had been forced to embrace Islam were permitted to relapse. This last was without parallel, till in 1844 Lord Stratford de Redcliffe wrung from the Porte the concession that a Muslim who apostatized to Christianity should not be put to death. But, mingled with this indifference, there appeared a strange but regular development of Shi‘ite doctrine. Some of his followers began to proclaim openly that the deity was incarnate in him, and it was evident that he himself accepted and believed this. But the Egyptian populace would have none of it, and the too rash innovators had to flee. Some went to the Lebanon and there preached to the native mountain tribes. The results of their labors are the Druses of to-day, who worship al-Hakim still and expect his return to introduce the end of all things. Finally, al-Hakim vanished on the night of February 12, A.D. 1021, and left a mystery unread to this day. Whether he was murdered, and if so why, or vanished of free-will, and if so again why, we have no means of telling. Our guess will depend upon our reading of his character. So much is certain, that he was a ruler of the autocratic type, who introduced many reforms, most of which the people of his time could not in the least understand and therefore misrepresented as the mere whims of a tyrant, and many of which, from our ignorance, are still obscure to us. If we can imagine such a man of strong personality and desire for the good of his people but with a touch of madness in the brain, cast thus in the midst between his orthodox subjects and a wholly unbelieving inner government, we shall perhaps have the clew to the strange stories told of him.
THE ASSASSINS
Another product of this conspiracy, and the last to which we shall refer, is the sect known as the Assassins, whose Grand Master was a name of terror to the Crusaders as the Old Man of the Mountain. It, too, was founded, and apparently for a purpose of personal vengeance, by a Persian who began as a Shi‘ite and ended as nothing. He came to Egypt, studied under the Fatimids—they had established at Cairo a great school of science—and returned to Persia as their agent to carry on their propaganda. His methods were the same as theirs, with a difference. That was the reduction of assassination to a fine art. From his eagle’s nest of Alamut—such is the meaning of the name—and later from Masyaf in the Lebanon and other mountain fortresses, he and his successors spread terror through Persia and Syria and were only finally stamped out by the Mongol flood under Hulagu in the middle of the seventh century of the Hijra (the 13th A.D.). Of the sect there are still scattered remnants in Syria and India, and as late as 1866 an English judge at Bombay had to decide a case of disputed succession according to the law of the Assassins. Finally, the Fatimid dynasty itself fell before the Kurd, Salah ad-Din, the Saladin of our annals, and Egypt was again orthodox.
CHAPTER III
The problem of the Abbasids; the House of Barmak; the crumbling of the empire; the Prætorians of Baghdad; the Buwayhids; the situation of the Khalifa under them; the Saljuqs; the possibilities of development under them; the Mongols and the Abbasid end; the Egyptian Abbasids; the Ottoman Sultans, their heirs; theory of the Khalifate; the modern situation; the signs of sovereignty for Muslims; five grounds of the claim of the Ottoman Sultan; the consequences for the Sultan; other Muslim constitutions; the Shi‘ites; the Ibadites; the Wahhabites; the Brotherhood of as-Sanusi.
CRUMBLING OF THE EMPIRE
We must now return to the Abbasids, whose empire we left crumbling away. It was a shrewd stroke of policy on the part of its founder to put the new capital, Baghdad, on the Tigris, right between Persia, Syria and Arabia. For the only hope of permanence to the empire lay in welding these into a unity. For a short time, in the hands of the first vigorous rulers, and, especially, during fifty years of guidance by the House of Barmak—Persians who flung in their lot with the Abbasids and were their stay till the madness of Harun ar-Rashid cast them down—this seemed to be succeeding; but, just as the empire of Charlemagne melted under his sons, so did the empire of al-Mansur and al-Ma’mun. The Bedawi tribes fell back into the desert and to the free chaos of the old pre-Islamic life. As the great philosophical historian, Ibn Khaldun, has remarked, the Arabs by their nature are incapable of founding an empire except when united by religious enthusiasm, and are of all peoples least capable of governing an empire when founded. After the first Abbasids, it is a fatal error to view the Muslim dynasties as Arab or to speak of the Muslim civilization as Arabian. The conquered peoples overcame their conquerors. Persian nationalism reasserted itself and in native independent dynasties flung off the Arab yoke. These dynasties were mostly Shi‘ite; Shi‘ism, in great part, is the revolt of the Aryan against Semitic monotheism. The process in all this was gradual but certain. Governors of provinces revolted and became semi-independent. Sometimes they acknowledged a shadowy sovereignty of the Khalifa, by having his name on their coins and in the Friday prayers; sometimes they did not. At other times they were, or claimed to be, Alids, and when Alids revolted, they revolted absolutely. With them, it was a question of conscience. At last, not even in his own City of Peace or in his own palace was the Khalifa master. As in Rome, so in Baghdad, a body-guard of mercenaries assumed control and their leader was de facto ruler. Later, from A.H. 320 to 447 (A.D. 932-1055), the Sunnite Khalifa found himself the ward and puppet of the Shi‘ite Buwayhids. Baghdad itself they held from 334. But still, a curious spiritual value—we cannot call it authority—was left to the shadowy successors of Muhammad. Muslim princes even in far-off India did not feel quite safe upon their thrones unless they had been solemnly invested by the Khalifa and given their fitting title. Those very rulers in whose power the Khalifa’s life lay sought sanction from him for their rule. At one time there seemed to be some hope that the fatal unity of theocratical Islam would be broken and that a dualism with promise of development through conflict—such as the rivalry between Pope and Emperor which kept Europe alive and prevented both State and Church from falling into decrepit decay—might grow up; that the Khalifa might become a purely spiritual ruler with functions of his own, ruling with mutual subordination and co-ordinate jurisdiction beside a temporal Sultan. The Buwayhids were Shi‘ites and merely tolerated, for state reasons, the impieties of the Sunnite Khalifas. But in 447 (A.D. 1055), Tughril Beg, the Saljuq, entered Baghdad, was proclaimed Sultan of the Muslims and freed the Khalifa from the Shi‘ite yoke. By 470, all western Asia, from the borders of Afghanistan to those of Egypt and the Greek Empire, were Saljuq. With the Saljuq Sultan as Emperor and the Khalifa as Pope, there was a chance that the Muslim State might enter on a stage of healthy growth through conflict. But that was not to be. Neither State nor Church rose to the great opportunity and the experiment was finally and forever cut off by the Mongol flood. When the next great Sultanate—that of the Ottoman Turks—arose, it gathered into its hands the reins of the Khalifate as well. This is what might have been in Islam, built on actual history in Europe. The situation that did arise in Islam may become more clear to us if we can imagine that in Europe the vast plans of Gregory VII. had been carried out and the Pope had become the temporal as well as the spiritual head of the Christian world. Such a situation would have been similar to that in the world of Islam at its earliest time during some few years under the dynasty of the Umayyads, when the one temporal and spiritual sovereign ruled from Samarqand to Spain. Then we can imagine how the vast fabric of such an imperial system broke down by its own weight. Under conflicting claims of legitimacy, an anti-Pope arose and the great schism began. Thereafter the process of disintegration was still more rapid. Provinces rose in insurrection and dropped away from each rival Pope. Kingdoms grew up and the sovereigns over them professed themselves to be the lieutenants of the supreme Pontiff and sought investiture from him. Last, the States of the Church itself—all that was left to it—came under the rule of some one of these princes and the Pope was, to all intents, a prisoner in his own palace. Yet the sovereignty of the Khalifa was not simply a legal fiction, any more than that of the Pope would have been in the parallel just sketched. The Muslim princes thought it well to seek spiritual recognition from him, just as Napoleon I. found it prudent to have himself crowned by Pius VII.