Religion and secular power in the Almoravid dynasty

I just came across a set of notes I made back in 2007 that I thought I would turn into a blog post. They have to do with the Almoravid ascendancy in what is now Spain.

The Umayyad dynasty endured in the Islamic Caliphate from 657 to 750. In Islamic Spain, however, the Umayyads ruled for another two and half centuries until 1031, more or less factually independent of the Caliphate, which they nevertheless formally recognized. They were eventually succeeded by the Almoravid dynasty.

12th century Almoravid gold coin

The Almoravids were a reform movement that originated among the Berber tribes of North Africa, in the Sahara. It advocated a return to the basics of Islam, interpreted as always with its own particular emphasis. Yūsuf ibn Tāshufīn (died 1106) founded the dynasty based on the Sanhaja group of Berber tribes. Ibn Tāshufīn established Marrakesh as his capital, around 1062. At that time, the Almoravids controlled the Berber parts of Morocco and western Algeria.

By this time, Islamic Spain was ruled by local kings in several different small states, making them vulnerable to the Christian Reconquista. King Alfonso VI of Castille and Leon (1040—1109) took Toledo and pressed for further conquests of Muslim-held areas.

Carlos Fuentes writes in El Espejo Enterrado (1992), "But if the Reconquista was indeed a war against Islam, it was also a war of the Christian kings among themselves." Yet "this combat was also an embrace" because of the complex and shifting alliances involved. In Alfonso VI's drive on the southern Muslim kingdom of Grenada, his most famous warrior Rodrigo Díaz de Vivar (1043-1099), better known to history as El Cid, allied with the Muslim king of Zaragoza. El Cid had earned his reputation as a great Christian warrior against the Muslims ("Moors"); ironically, his name comes from Arabic, meaning "my lord." But his main subordinate commander made a competing alliance with the king of Grenada. In feudal times, loyalty could be a complex and shifting quality, founded on a much different basis than that to which we are now accustomed.

El Cid (Rodrigo Díaz de Vivar; 1043-1099)

But the Muslim kings didn't have to pick only from Christian allies. Several of the remaining Spanish Muslim petty monarchs called on Ibn Tāshufīn for assistance. After defeating Alonso VI i the Battle of Zallāqah in 1086, the Christian advance was halted. Ibn Tāshufīn and his Almoravids were eventually left in control of the remaining Muslim areas of Spain.

The Berber reformer Ibn Tūmart was born around 1080, in the era when Ibn Tāshufīn had become the most powerful leader in western Islam. After study in the great centers of Islamic earning, Córdoba, Alexandria, Baghdad and Mecca, Ibn Tūmart became the founder of yet another back-to-basics Berber reform movement, the Almohads (al-Muwaḥḥidūn) movement, their name meaning "those who recognize the unity of God." styled himself as the mahdī, an eschatological savior in Islamic thought. The mahdī is more often associated with Shi'a Islam but has also been part of the Sunni tradition.

By 1147, Ibn Tūmart and his successor ʿAbd al-Muʾmin (1145-63), who was also a close disciple of Ibn Tūmart Islamic renewal beliefs, had taken Marrakesh and were in control of the former Almoravid kingdom in northern Africa.

Once again, Islamic Spain splintered politically, and it was Alfonso VII (c. 1104—1157) this time who attempted to exploit their military weakness. And, again the Spanish Muslim kings invited the rulers in Marrakesh, this time ʿAbd al-Muʾmin and the Almohads, to help. ʿAbd al-Muʾmin reversed the territorial gains of Alfonso VII and expanded Almohad rule into the whole Maghreb. Eventually the Almohads rule Islamic Spain and what is now Tunisia, Algeria and Morocco.

But the Almohads' impressive moment of historical prominence lasted only a century or so. As Fred Donner writes in "Muhammad and the Caliphate" (The Oxford History of Islam [1999]):

During the last decades of the twelfth century the Almohads had to overcome the stubborn resistance mounted by the last Almoravid holdouts from the Balearic Islands (near the eastern coast of Spain), who had seized much of Ifriqiya. In Spain the Almohads were engaged in a continuing struggle against the Christian kingdoms, particularly those of Castile and Portugal. Despite promising offensives into Castilian territory in the 1190s, the Almohads were crushingly defeated in 1 212 by a Christian coalition at Las Navas de Tolosa (in southern Spain), the battle that really sealed the fate of Islamic Spain. Almoravid control in Spain unraveled over the next two decades, and Christian forces seized in rapid succession the major cities of Andalusia: Merida (1231), Córdoba (1236), Valencia (1238), Seville (1248), Murcia (1261), and Cádiz (1262). Virtually all that remained of Muslim Spain thereafter was the small, brilliant kingdom of Granada, which hung on until 1492, partly because of the skill of its rulers, the Nasrids, and partly because in r 244 one of the rulers had signed a treaty recognizing the vague overlordship of the kingdom of Castile.

W. Montgomery Watt, the great Western scholar of Islam, took up the question of "The Decline of the Almohads" in the Summer 1964 issue of History of Religions. His article focuses on ways in which the religious reform movement aspect of the leadership of Ibn Tūmart and ʿAbd al-Muʾmin may have facilitated their political and military success. And, conversely, how the decline of the worldly power of the Almohads was related to changes in their religious orientation. But 1230, the Almohads embraced a more Orthodox Sunni Islam and the Mālikite variety of sharia (Islamic law).

Watt looks at why the back-to-basics Almohad religious movement faded so quickly. He uses the Prophet Muhammad's original founding of Islam as a reference point.

Watt suggests that part of the answer lies in the following areas. Ibn Tūmart emphasized peripheral ritual issues such as forbidding the use of musical instruments, which Watt sees as in large part a protest by rural tribesmen "against the soft life of the city-dwellers, not an attempt to reform themselves." The Prophet's original movement was an urban-based one, addressing issue which made broader demands for reform necessary and which called for real self-examination. "For one thing," Watt writes, "Muhammad is more concerned with basic social injustice, as, for example, in the perversion of traditional custom for the advantage of individuals."

Ibn Tūmart asserted doctrinal points against his Almohovid opponents. He argued for an abstract, non-anthropomorphic concept of God, stressed the role of reason and criticized the Almorovids' approach to the Mālikite school of sharia. But, Watt writes:

If Ibn-Tūmart's moral and social preaching was peripheral and sectional, his doctrinal emphases are a hotchpotch; that is to say, they consist of a number of unrelated and apparently incompatible points, which have been adopted because of some immediate practical relevance. The root of the difficulty is that Ibn-Tūmart has no radically new conception of the state or a way of life. Basically he accepts the Sunnite conception of the Islamic polity and way of life.

Ibn Tūmart was a charismatic leader, a role which had a strong tradition among the Berbers. But Watt suggests that their religious doctrines lacked a corresponding appeal. Watt credits the emphasis on reason in Almohadism as being what "made possible the flourishing of philosophy in Spain in Ibn-Ţufayl and Averroes (Ibn-Rushd). Yet the section of the population which experienced the need for a rational religion must have been small; and the problem of how a rational theology was to be related to the religion of the masses was never adequately solved in Spain."

Watt's comments on the Prophet's original movement by way of contrast to Ibn Tūmart's are intriguing:

There will always be something of a mystery about the growth and development of Islam, as indeed there is about all the great religions. When one reflects on the facts, it is truly astounding that the message of the Qur'an, originally addressed to the relatively uncultured citizens of Mecca, should have been capable of becoming the basis of a great civilization whose leading exponents stood for centuries in the highest ranks of human culture. It might be suggested that military success contributed to the development, together with the existence of a situation in which military success on the scale of the Arab conquests was possible. Yet the military success itself owed something to the religion and, at the same time, was never more than one facet of the whole. ...

The conclusion that the failure of Almohadism was essentially a failure to make converts from all sections of the community and converts of sufficiently high quality is supported when we turn back to look at the prophet Muhammad. As already noticed, in the moral and social field he was constantly aiming at the reform of his own community; though he accepted current morality in certain respects (e.g., the blood-feud or corporate responsibility for crime), most of the points he emphasized were central and concerned with basic social injustice. From a doctrinal and general point of view he was putting forward a radically new conception of the community and way of life. ... Thus the Islamic community came to be regarded as a community actually constituted by its possession of a divinely revealed way of life-the way or sunna of Muhammad, given to him by God and practiced by him. It was above all this conception of the charismatic or divinely founded and guided community that inspired countless men to labor at the solution of the practical and intellectual problems confronting the Islamic body politic in its early centuries. They were not merely converted but made to respond from the depths of their being.

Muhammad's statecraft

The Prophet in Medina

When Abū Bakr became the first caliph after the death of Muhammad, he inherited an Islamic state that had developed some strong distinctive features during the rule of the Prophet. In Der Islam (2004), Hans Küng describes the governmental form under the Prophet as a federation of tribes and clans with the Islamic umma (community) of Medina as its core. During his lifetime, it expanded first to Mecca and then over large parts of the Arabian peninsula.

Muhammad's state was unquestionably based on the Prophet's new religion. "Without Islam as an ideological basis," writes Küng, "this political integration would have been completely unthinkable." It was a large part of Muhammad's achievement to build on the foundation of the traditional tribes and clans but also to provide the leadership and ideology - Islam - that enabled a state to function as a higher power than the tribal relationships.

Küng argues that Muhammad's state had three distinct characteristics that heavily influenced future developments: exclusivity, theocracy and militancy.

Though during Muhammad's time we see religious persecution, e.g., of Jewish tribes in Medina, in other parts of Arabia the Muslim state tolerated Jews and Christians. But under ‛Umar, the second caliph (ruled 634-644), they were driven out, making Arabia exclusively Muslim. Thus, the exclusivity of which Küng speaks.

On the issue of theocracy, Küng makes an important observation about the stat and religion in Europe. Although the European rulers in Abū Bakr's time certainly used religion and were willing to force it on their subjects, the Church was a separate institution from the state (i.e., the royal houses). And the separate institutions of Church and state were to come into conflict and opposition many times. "The Islamic polity [of the early Muslim period] is both at the same time: religious community and political government, a 'divine state'," he writes.

As for militancy, Küng observes that, starting with Muhammad, Islamic society was a "fighting community." He says, "War as an instrument of politics is not only affirmed in a basic sense [in the early Muslim community] but nevertheless, when it is necessary, practiced with great restraint." Küng pointedly distances himself from the modern-day notion among many in Western countries that Islam is inherently warlike. "The readiness to fight stands side by side with a Muslim openness for peace," he says with reference to the early Muslim times.

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Timelines for early Islām

The Prophet Muhammad teaching

Hans Küng's Der Islam (2004) suggests that Islām has gone through six historical/religious "paradigms" in its development. He calls the period of the Prophet's life and the time just after the "original Islāmic community" paradigm, the "golden age" of Islām (622-661). This period is especially important because Muslims look to events and interpretations of the Prophet's thought from this period to derive Islāmic positions on theological and social issues, as seen in the paper I referenced earlier on Islām and war.

I know that a list of dates is inherently boring. But I want to sketch out a framework of dates for Islam to which I can refer back.

Ira Lapidus in A History of Islamic Societies (2002 edition) provides the following table of "Islam in World History":

• Early village farming communities (c. 7000 BC)

• Cities (c. 3000 BC)

• Empires (c. 2400 BC)

• Axial-age and monotheistic religions (c. 800 BC)

• Muhammad (c. 570-632 [CE])

• Middle Eastern Islamic societies (622-c. 1200)

• Worldwide diffusion of Islam (c. 650 to present)

• Rise of European world empires (1200-1900)

• Modern transformation of Islamic societies (1800 to present)

And here are some more specific dates for the early Islamic periods, the first three paradigms in Küng's schema.

Muhammad's lifetime: ca. 570 CE - 632

The four Rightly Guided Caliphs (Rashidun Caliphs): 632-661

These four are particularly important. With the time of their rule, there are Abū Bakr (632-634), ‛Umar ibn al-Khaţţāb (634-644), ‛Uthmān ibn Άffān (644-656), and Άlī ibn abī Tālib (656-661).

The 14 Umayyad caliphs: 661-750

The most important Umayyad caliphs historically were Mu'āwiya ibn abī Sufyān or Mu'āwiya I (ruled 661-80), Άbd al-Malik (685-705) and ‛Umar II. ibn Abd al-Άzīz or ‛Umar II (717-20).

Umayyad dynasty in al-Andalus: 756-1009

The Umayyad dynasty continued, however, in al-Andalus (Spain). During its early years under Muslim rule, al-Andalus was ruled by a governor responsible to the caliph. Άbd-ar-Rahmān was proclaimed as the first emir in 756, founding the Umayyad dynasty in al-Andalus. The Umayyad dynasty exercised effective power there until 1009. After that time, political authority in al-Andalus seriously fragmented (though the Umayyads continued to hold some power). The period of 1009-1091 (or sometimes 1031-1091) is known as the time of the "party kings" - party as in the sense of "partisan."

The 21 Άbbāsid caliphs: 750-945

The most significant ‛Abbāsid caliphs were al-Ma'mūn (ruled 813-833), al-Mu‛tasim (833-42) and al-Wātiq (842-847).

The Άbbāsid dynasty founded Baghdad as their center of power as soon as they took control of the caliphate.

There were 16 additional Άbbāsid caliphs after al-Muttaqī (940-944). But they ruled largely as figureheads. The Buwayhids or Iran seized control of Baghdad in 945. As Ira Lapidus says, "The Caliphs were allowed to continue in nominal authority - indeed, the Άbbāsid dynasty lasted until 1258 - but they no longer ruled; the Άbbasid empire had ceased to exist." The real power was now held by local rulers of the various parts of the formerly unified empire.

There were also three Muslim civil wars during this period:

First civil war: 656-61
Second civil war: 680-92
Third civil war: 744-50

The paradigm periods

In Küng's model of Islāmic paradigms, as noted above, the "original Islamic community" paradigm corresponded to the time of Muhammad and the four "right guided" caliphs. Küng gives particular attention to the confrontation of Islām and Christianity, which in this period was largely with the Eastern Orthodox Christian Byzantine Empire.

The period of the Umayyad caliphate (661-750) produced what Küng calls the "Arabian empire" paradigm. The most important clash with Christendom in this period was in al-Andalus (Spain).

Küng sees the period of the Άbbāsid caliphate up to the Mongols conquered and sacked Baghdad in 1258 as embodying the "classical Islāmic world-religion" paradigm. The main confrontation with Christians during this period was the Crusades.

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Muhammad's accomplishments and vision

The Prophet and the Archangel Gabriel

Hans Küng in Der Islam (2004) summarizes the major achievements of Muhammad in four categories:

(1) Unifying the Arabs. This was both a political and religious accomplishment. But at this stage Islam was understood as God's revelation to the Arabs. This concept was to influence later Muslim policy on tolerating other religions in lands rule by Muslims.

(2) Consolidating the Muslim community. The five pillars of Islam provided a common reference point for all Muslims everywhere: the profession that God is one God and Muhammad is his Prophet; ritual prayer; charity; fasting; and, the hajj to Mecca.

(3) Conflicts with Christian and Jews. Despite the tolerant attitude toward Jews and Christians as "people of the book" recommended in the Qur'ān, Mushammad during his lifetime came into conflict with both Christian and Jewish groups. So a definite element of hostility was there, as well.

(4) Expansion of the Islamic confederation. Muhammad created an unprecedented level of cooperation among the tribes of the Arabian Peninsula, one that would soon enable them to challenge the mighty Byzantine and Sassanian (Persian) empires. And in the context of these expansions, Christian and Jewish groups were made subordinate to the political power of Muslims, though they remained as distinct communities with their own religion.

And Küng makes a further summary of the results of the foregoing:

• The religious/political one-man rule of Muhammad is later used to legitimize the absolutist centralism of the Arab-Muslim Islamic empire.

• In such an Arab-Islamic empire, Jews and Christians are certainly tolerated, but only with starkly reduced rights, as "protected minorities."

Reformist Islamic scholar Mohammed Arkoun wrote in his 1994 book Rethinking Islam: Common Questions, Uncommon Answers, reflecting on the Prophet's life achievements:

People sometimes ask: "What did Muhammad want?" We have to ponder the pertinence of the question. Volition presupposes reflection, deliberation, strategy, and tactics aimed at reaching the targeted objective. Having assumed a position of responsibility for the community of believers, the Prophet had to think about means of protecting it so that the Message could reach the hearts of actual and potential believers and he could create the political and social conditions for a durable expansion of the new religion. But Muhammad exercised this volition in the psychological context of waīy - inspiration, eruption, revelation - all the while maintaining the place of the "I" in the communication space of Qur'anic discourse (I/We -- you -- they/you).

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Muhammad the Prophet

The Prophet Muhammad receiving the Qu'ran from the Archangel Gabriel

Continuing (finally!) with comments related to Hans Küng's Der Islam (2004), I'll pick it back up with Muhammad.

The beginning of Islam

Muhammad ibn Abdallah (ca. 570-632) was the Prophet and founder of the Islamic religion. He was part of the Quraysh tribe in the Arabian city of Mecca. Although the Quraysh were the dominant group in Mecca, Muhammad's particular clan of Banu Hāšim was not one of the most influential. When he was 40 years old, he began receiving the revelations that eventually were collected into the Qur'ān. His following in Mecca was small, but it grew enough that he began to have conflicts with the business elite and the more powerful clans in Mecca. His first followers included his trusted wife Hadiğa and two men who were later to become caliphs, Abū Bakr and ٬Ali.

Muhammad's message challenged the existing Meccan society with "an alternative form of life," says Küng. In particular, he challenged the selfishness and greed of the wealthy, and spoke in soldidarity with slaves and orphans and the poor. (My translation appears below the German quotation; I've retained Küng's somewhat unusual alternation of past and present tense in his description.)

Kein Wunder, dass Muhammads Botschaft unter den Qurais nicht nur auf Neugierde, sondern vor allem auf Unverständnis stösst. Glauben findet sie nur bei ganz wenigen: bei Mitgliedern von Muhammads Familie und Clan sowie bei Freunden (einer Reihe vor allem jüngerer Manner auch aus einflussreichen Clans) und bei einigen Angehorigen der untersten Schicht (Sklaven, Fremde). Muhammad nimmt sie unterschiedslos in seine Gemeinschaft auf. Gewiss, alles keine Sozialrevolutionäre, aber ernsthafte Fromme, die mit dem sich verandernden sozialen und moralischen Klima in Mekka unzufrieden sind (darunter Abū Bakr und ٬Ali, die spateren Kalifen). Jedenfalls bildet sich jetzt die erste kleine muslimische Gemeinde, deren Basis nicht ein bestimmter sozialer Status, sondern der gemeinsame Glaube, das Ritualgebet, die eschatologische Frömmigkeit sowie ein Ethos der Gerechtigkeit sind. Auch dies unterstreicht nur die Tatsache, welch geistiger Energie es bedurfte, damit der Prophet jetzt als Führer einer hochst marginalisierten Gemeinde seinen von vielen Seiten in Frage gestellten Weg weitergehen kann. Schwierigkeiten, Widerstände, Ablehnungen von aussen gibtes denn auch genug, innere Anfechtungen und Zweifel sind oft die Folge. Warum?...

Muhammads Eintreten fur ein Ethos der Gerechtigkeit angesichts des kommenden Gerichtes, seine mit scharfen Worten, Strafandrohungen und feierlichen Schwiiren erfolgte Aufforderung zur Umkehr und zur sozialen Solidarität bedroht die egoistische und materialistische Einstel-lung der reichen Kaufleute und Händler.

[No wonder that Muhammad's message ran up against not only curiosity among the Quraysh, but above all against a lack of understanding. It found belief among only very few: among members of Muhammad's family and clan as well as among friends (especially a number of younger men also from influential clans) and by some supporters from the lowest stratum (slaves, foreigners). Muhammad took them into his fellowship without discrimination. Certainly they were all not social revolutionaries, but serious, pious people who were discontented with the changing social and moral climate in Mecca (among them Abū Bakr and ٬Ali, the future caliphs. In any case, the first small Muslim community developed, whose basis is not a particular social status, but rather the common faith, the ritual prayer, the eschatological devoutness as well as an ethos of justice. And this underlines only the reality of what spiritualenergy it required with which the Prophet now, as the leader of a highly marginalized community, to be able to continue on his path, which is being called into question from many sides. There are also quite enough difficulties, resistance, rejection from outside, and inner disputes and doubt are often the result. Why?]

[Muhammad's stand for an ethos of justice in the face of the coming [divine] judgment, his demand to change one's ways and to social solidarity, delivered with sharp words, threats of punishment and solemn oaths, threatened the egotistic and materialistic attitude of the wealthy salespeople and traders.]

Historian Ira Lapidus wrote of the first Meccan period in A History of Islamic Societies (2002):

Significantly, the first converts were rootless migrants, poor men, member of weak clans, and younger sons of strong clans - those people most dissatisfied with the changing moral and social climate of Mecca, for whom the Prophet's message proved a vital alternative. ...

[The] opposition [to Muhammad] was couched in religious terms, but Muhammad's preaching was in fact an implicit challenge to all the existing instituitons of the society - worship of gods and the economic life attached to their shrines, the values of tribal tradition, the authority of the chiefs and the solidarity of the clans from which Muhammad wished to draw his followers. Religion, moral belief, social structure, and economic life formed a system of ideas and isntituions inextricably bound up with one another. To attack them at any major point was to attack the whole society root and branch.

The hiğra and the Medina period

In 622, he emigrated to the city of Medina with most of his relatively small number of followers. This move to Medina is known as the hijrah (hiğra). The Islamic calendar begins counting time from July 16, 622, (day 1 of year 1) to commemorate the hiğra. Muhammad found a much larger following in Medina and eventually became their temporal as well as spiritual leader, enabling the Medinans to get beyond the tribal and clan rivalries that had bitterly divided their city. Islam became a formal community, an "umma," which is still the word used to refer to the community of Muslims.

In this community whose rule was now grounded in the new religion, revealed by God to Muhammad through the angel Gabriel, Muhammad was faced with several groups of opposition, Küng writes: polytheists among some of the smaller Mednan clans; Muslim dissenters (those appeared early!); Beduin tribes in the area; and, many of the Jews in Medina. The Jews of Medina did not recognize Muhammad as the Prophet of God. So his previously favorable attitude the Jews there, "changed into a negative one," as Küng says. And, of course, Muhammad blamed it on them.

Küng gives close attention to the conflict between Muhammad and the Jews of Medina,not least because the influence of Jewish ideas, and very specifically Jewish Christian ideas, were very important in Muhammad's religious outlook. Muhammad's conflict was with three local Jewishtribes (not to be confused with the Biblical 12 tribes!): the Qaynuqah, the Nadir and the Qurayzah. As Küng puts it, it came "to (ethnic) cleansing and massacres" by Muhammd's forces against the Jews. The Qaynuqah and the Nadir were driven out of Medina. The Qurayzah men were largely massacred and the women and children taken as slaves.

Küng doesn't try to hide the grim nature of these conflicts and the problems they raise for us today. He does point out that such conduct was standard in the practice of that place and time in tribal/clan conflicts. Muhammad did not thereby adopt a blanket anti-Jewish policy, and both the Qur'ān and later Muslim practice tolerated Judaism and Christianity within Muslim realms outside of Arabia. Forced conversions were not Muhammad's goal.

Return to Mecca

Gaining control over Mecca was. The Prophet and his Medinans had a long war with Mecca (624-630). The final entry of Muhcammad's victorious army into Meccas on January 11, 630 was peaceful. Muhammad had been accepted as the leader of Mecca and of his native Quraysh tribe. The combined forces of Mecca and Medina were now the most formidalbe force on the Arabian peninsula. The religious pilgrimage site in Mecca, the Ka٬ba, was already an important site for the various tribal religions in Arabia. The Prophet adopted it to his new religion. And the pilgrimage to Mecca and the Ka٬ba, the pilgrimage being known as the hajj (hāğğ), also became an exclusively Muslim event.

Muhammad lived only two years after the taking of Mecca. But in those two years, the influence of Islam became dominant in the Arabian peninsula. The Prophet's expansion of his political control brought him into further conflict with Jews and Christians. Although we can distinguish Muhammad's religion from his political power, religion and politics were combined on all sides in a way that is very different from modern conceptions.

This sketch of the Prophet's life says little about his religious ideas. I've just tried to give the general historical background. Many of the details of Muhammad's life were to become important in interpreting the Qur'ān and other traditions stemming from Muhammad. And descent from Muhammad would play an important part in the Sunni/Shi'a split in Islam.

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