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The fourth/tenth century saw a profound change in the political society of the Islamic world. The superficial characteristics of this are well documented and easy to recognize – the caliphate disintegrated into a bewildering variety of successor states. The Muslim sources present these states as being ruled by dynasties, the ‘Uqaylids of Mosul, the Marwanids of Mayyāfāriqīn and so on, each of which tended to last for about a century, and many of which seemed to go through a similar cycle of emergence, expansion under a strong ruler and decay under his weaker successors. Modern scholarship has tended to take over this traditional perspective, and it often seems to the casual enquirer that these states were sort of political mushrooms, pop-up states whose appearance is unexplained and whose collapse was the result of personal feebleness on the part of decadent rulers. In reality, however, the successor states varied greatly in their organization and outlook, and reflected closely the economic and social structures of the society which produced them; it is only by concentrating on at least some of them in detail that we can see how the changes of this time affected the Muslim world.
The breakup of the ‘Abbasid caliphate in the first half of the third/tenth century is generally seen as a sad, lamentable decline, with the loss of the political unity of the Muslim umma. But there are a number of sides to this story. Certainly, the dissolution of the ‘Abbasid caliphate was accompanied by economic decline and social disruption in some areas, notably in Baghdad and central Iraq, but also in agricultural areas bordering the Syrian and Jaziran deserts. The clearest examples of this can be seen in the archaeological record from the middle Euphrates valley and its tributaries, the Khabur and Balikh rivers. Recent surveys by Sophie Berthier, Karen Bartl and others have shown a common pattern, with expanding agricultural settlement in the late Umayyad period which reached a peak under the early ‘Abbasids as demand for food and supplies from the huge city of Baghdad made farming secure and prosperous. The same surveys show a steep decline and abandonment of these settlements through the tenth century as political chaos and economic uncertainty made people reluctant to invest in agricultural infrastructure. The inhabitants of these communities may simply have perished, but it is more likely that many of them adopted a pastoral lifestyle and attached themselves to the bedouin tribes whose growing power in the Fertile Crescent is one of the most conspicuous features of the late tenth and early eleventh centuries. In other areas, however, the arrival of political independence led to economic growth and social development. At the most basic level, it meant a new and vastly improved water supply for the citizens of Mayyāfāriqīn in the southeast of the Anatolian plateau; on a larger scale, it led to a sort of golden age in Fārs, a potentially rich area of Iran which had been exploited by outsiders since the Muslim conquests but which now became independent and prosperous under the Buyid dynasty; the picture of urban decline in Kūfa and Baṣra has to be balanced by the picture of growth in Shīrāz and Sīrāf.
On the cultural level as well, the period of the dissolution of the caliphate was one of great activities and achievements, what Adam Mez described in a famous book as the “Renaissance of Islam”. Some of this cultural activity was concerned with the collection and codification of the treasures of the classical Arabic past. Ibn al-Nadīm’s (d. 385/995) Fihrist was an index of all the works of Arabic literature then available, while Abū’l-Faraj al-Iṣfahānī (d. 356/967) sought to produce a comprehensive collection of the lives and works of the great Arabic poets in his Kitāb al-Aghānī, or Book of Songs. In this respect, these authors were perhaps analogous to those sixth-century figures in the West like Cassiodorus and Isidore of Seville, who attempted to keep alive classical learning in a hostile environment. But the culture of the age went far beyond the preservation of the past. In all fields, the fourth/tenth and early fifth/eleventh centuries were periods of great achievement. Al-Mutanabbī (d. 354/965) and Abū’l ‘Alā’ al-Ma‘arrī (d. 449/1058) in poetry, Ibn Sīnā (Avicenna) (d. 428/1037) in medicine and philosophy, al-Mas‘ūdī (d. 345/956) in historiography and al-Muqaddasī (d. after 375/985) in travel writing are only a few of the great figures of the time. This cultural efflorescence was in some ways a product of the political fragmentation of the time, which provided new sources of patronage for authors. The doctrinal disputes of the age, especially the growing division between Sunnī and Shī‘ī Islam, also gave rise to important theological writing and debate. While Baghdad remained important, it no longer played the dominant role as a cultural centre it had under the earlier ‘Abbasid caliphate, and the patronage of the caliphal court was replaced by support from many different sources, which allowed a great variety of writing to emerge and writers like al-Mutanabbī and Avicenna, for example, to move around freely from one area to another if they thought it would be advantageous.
Two major changes underlay these developments: the conversion of the majority of the population to Islam and the economic decline of Iraq. The question of conversion to Islam is very problematic, since, clearly, there were no census records or reliable statistics available. We know that there were no Muslims in the Near East before the time of the Prophet, and we can be reasonably certain that by the sixth/twelfth century, the non-Muslims formed a minority of the population in most areas: between these two poles, there is much room for speculation. The problem has been reexamined by R. Bulliet in his book Conversion to Islam in the Medieval Period, using Iranian genealogies to establish the dates when families became Muslim. His method was to look at the ancestors of men of learning as recorded in biographical dictionaries. He found that a significant proportion of these genealogies went back to a non-Muslim ancestor (in this, he was helped by the fact that non-Muslim names in Iran were totally different from Muslim ones). By calculating back from the date of the subject of the biography and reckoning each generation as twenty-five years, Bulliet could get some idea of the period at which the family had been converted. The method is obviously not foolproof and there are bound to be special circumstances in each family, but Bulliet worked from a sample of almost 500 genealogies, enough to give a representative picture. According to his research, Iran was only about 8 per cent Muslim at the time of the ‘Abbasid revolution in 132/750, but this changed rapidly in the years which followed; by the early third/ninth century, the proportion of Muslims was probably about 40 per cent, and this increased to between 70 and 80 per cent in the fourth/tenth century. It is more difficult to extrapolate from the Iranian data to other areas of the Muslim world, but we should probably be correct in assuming that the rate of conversion was faster in Iraq than in Iran but slower in Egypt, where the Muslims remained a small ruling group among a largely Coptic population until Fatimid times. Bulliet admits that his hypotheses are speculative and unprovable, but they do seem realistic and provide a useful basis for discussion.
The Islamization of the Near East had profound effects on political history. Under the Umayyads and early ‘Abbasids, the Muslims had been a fairly small ruling élite, whose links were with their fellow Muslims rather than with the non-Muslim populations of the areas in which they lived. There was a high degree of mobility among the ruling groups and, for example, a man of Syrian origin could govern Yemen for a period and then be transferred to Egypt or Armenia. Just as most of the British civil servants who administered India felt that their links were with their fellow Britons and with their British “home” rather than with the Indians who lived around them, the early Muslims preserved a sense of common identity, usually coupled with the common language of Arabic. Conversion, however, weakened this esprit de corps, and the élite lost its cohesion. As they became converted, people in the various provinces demanded to be admitted to the political process as full members of the Muslim community. In this way, the provinces came to be dominated by men whose roots and families were entirely local. They were good Muslims, but their loyalty to a caliph and centralized Muslim government hundreds, even thousands, of miles away in a land they had never seen was naturally limited. The progress of conversion meant that anti-Muslim revolts in the Near East almost completely died out even in areas like Egypt and Iran, where resistance had persisted in the Umayyad and early ‘Abbasid times. The only attempt in the fourth/tenth century to set up a non-Muslim state in the area, the move by Mardāvīj b. Ziyār (d. 323/935) to restore Zoroastrianism, was a conspicuous failure. The breakup of the caliphate was in no way a reaction against Muslim conquest, it was rather a natural product of its success and the evolution from a Muslim empire ruled by a small Muslim élite to a Muslim commonwealth where most of the population were Muslims was as natural, and in many cases as peaceful, as the emergence of the independent commonwealth countries of Australia, New Zealand and Canada from the British Empire.
The spread of Islam also led to the formalization of differences within the community. Of course, even in the days when the Muslims were a small minority of the population, there were vigorous debates and violent struggles to decide the nature of Muslim government. In the fourth/tenth century, however, these differences tended to become more rigid, and the sects tended to develop separate memberships and structures of leadership. There were many reasons for this process, but at least in part it was a product of the increasing numbers of Muslims from different geographical and social backgrounds. When Christianity became the dominant religion in the Roman Empire in the fourth century, heresy became a major political and social issue; when Islam became the dominant religion in the Near East in the fourth/tenth century, sectarian division came to the fore.
The second major cause of change, the economic collapse of Iraq must always be borne in mind as a fundamental, underlying factor in the collapse of the ‘Abbasids and the difficulties of the Buyids of Baghdad. It also meant that the Muslim world developed something of a hollow centre. The old heartlands became impoverished and suffered a constant haemorrhage of their more able and dynamic citizens to more recently converted areas like Iran and Egypt. The old ruling élite based in Mesopotamia was replaced by outsiders, men from such marginal groups as the Kurds of the Zagros Mountains, the Daylamites from the southern Caspian area and the Berbers of the hinterland of Ifrīqiya. The Muslim world no longer had a centre, a metropolis to look to, but rather a whole galaxy of regional centres, each developing its own political society and culture.
The successor states of the ‘Abbasid caliphate were, in political terms, entirely independent, but they were bound together by many ties of language and culture. The most obvious of these was the use, throughout the Muslim Near East, of Arabic as the main administrative language. As Latin was used by bureaucrats in medieval Europe in areas where the vernacular was quite different, Arabic was used in Islamic chanceries even in areas where the population spoke Kurdish, Persian, Armenian or Aramaic. The only important exceptions were in the courts of the Samanids and Ghaznevids in eastern Iran where New Persian emerged as a literary language but even there bureaucrats were expected to be literate in Arabic too. As in the medieval West as well, the common language led to the creation of bonds among bureaucrats in different states and a common bureaucratic culture. Administrative expertise acquired in one area could be used to carve out a career in another. The wazīr al-Ḥusayn b. al-Maghribī (d. 418/1027), for example, could begin his career with the Hamdanids of Aleppo, pursue it in Fatimid Egypt and ‘Uqaylid Mosul and end up a distinguished elder statesman in Marwanid Mayyāfāriqīn. This common Arabic-language bureaucratic culture was a major source of unity.
This unity was expressed at a formal level by the recognition of the theory of the caliphate. The ideal of the of the caliphate lived on after the demise of its political authority. One dynasty in the area, the Fatimids, set up a rival caliphate, but like the ‘Abbasids, they claimed the leadership of the entire Muslim world and inherited the pan-Islamic ideas of their ‘Abbasid rivals. Among the other dynasties, there were few who did not acknowledge the rights of a caliph in the khuṭba, the Friday sermon in which political allegiances were made public, although some rulers, like Qirwāsh b. al-Muqallad the ‘Uqaylid, might change their allegiances to suit their political needs. For some years after the Buyid takeover in Baghdad, the Samanids of eastern Iran continued to pledge allegiance to a now dead ‘Abbasid rather than the Buyid nominees. But whatever the practical reservations, no dynasty dispensed entirely with the idea of the caliphate or proclaimed an absolute independence. The grant of a title by the caliph remained a sign of political legitimacy and a sign that the recipient was now an accepted ruler. In the Fertile Crescent and much of Iran, the title of, for example, “Rukn al-Dawla” (Pillar of the [‘Abbasid] State) was sought after by all who tried to establish their rule, and it brought with it the assumption of caliphal authority, however powerless that might be in practice. Again, the medieval West provides an illuminating comparison: in eleventh- and early twelfth-century France, the actual power of the king in the more distant parts of his realm was nonexistent, but the barons of those areas, the dukes of Normandy and Aquitaine, the counts of Champagne and Toulouse acknowledged the monarchy and its role and did not call themselves kings even if they were independent in every practical way.
There were other signs of the nonpolitical unity of the commonwealth. As far as we know, no Muslim state erected trade barriers against any other. Travellers in this period like Ibn Ḥawqal, al-Muqaddasī and Nāṣir-i Khusrau seem to have been able to move about without government interference. Robbers and thirst may have posed problems for the travellers; visas and frontier posts did not. Politically, the Muslim world may have been divided; economically and socially, it remained a unity.
This contrast between the division of government and the unity of culture and society was a product of the changing nature of government. The ‘Abbasids and their rivals the ‘Alids attempted to create a truly Islamic state. It was a very ambitious programme of moral reform and rule by the Qur’ān and Sunna, a bold attempt to restructure society according to the vision of the Prophet, an ideal which has parallels in our own day. The dynasts of the Muslim commonwealth had no such aspirations. The functions of government were restricted to collecting taxes and providing a minimum of security to enable these dues to be gathered in peace. There were rulers who went further in developing their territories economically – ‘Aḍud al-Dawla, Badr b. Ḥasanūya and the Marwanids of Mayyāfāriqīn stand out in this respect. Others, like the Hamdanids and the ‘Uqaylids of Mosul, seem to have made no such effort, but none of them attempted to restructure society according to Islamic principles. For many people, the functions of government were marginal to their daily lives. In most cities, it was the urban élite of merchant and property-owning families who exercised everyday control over mosque and market. For the people of the villages, it was increasingly the iqṭa’ holder, claiming rights of ḥimāya, or protection, who represented government on a day-to-day basis. Even the Fatimid dynasty, with its Ismā‘īlī doctrine and its universal ambitions, made only intermittent attempts to spread its propaganda outside the governing class. It was as if Muslims had come to accept that government would not create a perfect Muslim society – at best, it could only provide the framework in which men could strive to become good Muslims.
Just as the functions of government became restricted, the profession of arms became confined to certain, mostly marginal, groups within the Muslim community. In early Islamic armies and, indeed, the armies of the ‘Abbasid revolution, the soldiers were simply the male Muslims prepared for battle, and the principle which lay behind the muqātila organization was that all Muslims should be able to do military service if called upon, and it was this which entitled them to their ‘aṭā’, or salary. Even the Khurāsāniyya of the early ‘Abbasid caliphate were in many ways part-time soldiers, owning property and conducting business in Baghdad, marrying, having families and eventually losing their military identity entirely. These armies were often very large: 40,000 soldiers from Baghdad followed ‘Alī b. ‘Īsā when he set out to march against Khurāsān in 195/811, and numbers of around 100,000 are quoted for the Caliph Hārūn al-Rashīd’s armies against the Byzantines. Almost always, these armies contained a majority of foot soldiers, often outnumbering the cavalry two to one, and on occasion even those who were mounted fought on foot. But ‘Alī b. ‘Īsā’s great army was defeated by Ṭāhir’s much smaller force, and this may have been the death knell of the huge armies of the early Islamic era. From the third/ninth century, and particularly after the military reforms of al-Mu‘taṣim, armies became smaller and more strictly professional. This seems to have accompanied a changeover to cavalry warfare, and particularly mounted archery, which required greater specialization and more equipment; the day of the part-time soldier was over. Increasingly, these specialist troops were Turks imported as slaves or otherwise recruited in eastern Iran or the areas to the north of the Caucasus Mountains. They were distinguished from the Muslim civilians not only by their function, notably their abilities in the highly specialized skill of mounted archery, but also by their race and language. In the third/ninth century, many of these Turks seem to have produced children who were fully Arabized Muslims like Mūsā b. Bughā and Aḥmad b. Ṭūlūn, ruler of Egypt (254–270/868–884), who began the integration of the families into Muslim society and the loss of their identity as a separate group.
The late fourth/tenth and early fifth/eleventh centuries saw the heyday of the ghulām system, which was so important in the history of the Muslim commonwealth. The ghilmān formed the core of the new army formed by al-Muwaffaq and al-Mu‘taḍid after the return of the caliphate to Baghdad. And after the breakup of the caliphate and the destruction of the old ‘Abbasid army on the orders of the amīr al-umarā’ Ibn Rā’iq in 325/936, their role became fundamental to many of the new emerging polities. There had been Turkish troops in the armies of the caliphs before, but what seems to have distinguished the ghilmān of this period was their social organization. They fought in bands, often only a few hundred strong, recruited by a leader. The leader, usually himself a Turk, was responsible for securing their pay and employment. The young ghilmān looked to their leader as a sort of father-figure and often took his name as a sign of gratitude; the great Anūshtakīn (d. 432/1041) was always known as al-Dizbarī after an obscure Daylamite commander called Dizbar who had favoured him in his youth.
It was to their leader, rather than to the sovereign who employed them, that they owed their loyalty. Their leaders became like the condottieri of fourteenth- and fifteenth-century Italy, powerful men, experienced professional soldiers, always seeking reliable paymasters to satisfy the needs of their followers. On the whole, they were efficient, expecting and needing to be highly paid for their services; if they were not, they could not maintain their horses and equipment. If one paymaster failed, then they were obliged to take service with another in order to survive as a fighting unit, and much of the apparent disloyalty and treachery can be explained in terms of financial necessity. Many of the lesser dynasts of the Near East could not afford to maintain ghilmān at all. Sayf al-Dawla, the Hamdanid ruler of Aleppo (d. 356/967), had recruited considerable numbers of ghilmān, but his son Sa‘d al-Dawla (d. 381/991), living in greatly reduced circumstances, could not afford to pay them, let alone recruit any more. Faced with this situation, they had two choices: some left to take service with the Fatimid rulers of Egypt, while others stayed in Aleppo and took over the government of the city for themselves, while continuing to acknowledge the exiled Hamdanid as a theoretical ruler. When, in 364/975, Alptakīn, the leader of the ghilmān in Baghdad, could no longer maintain himself against the Daylamite forces of ‘Aḍud al-Dawla, he led his followers, about 300 of them, to new pastures in Damascus, which they took over for a while, and then to the Fatimid court in Cairo, where some of them reached high positions. His first responsibility was to his followers rather than his paymasters.
The ghilmān seem to have lived celibate lives. We know little of how they were recruited in this period and only in the case of Anūshtakīn al-Dizbarī, whose early life was chronicled by the Damascus historian Ibn al-Qalānisī, do we know anything of their origins. Anūshtakīn came from eastern Iran and seems to have become a ghulām of his own volition, seeing it as a way of advancement in the world. He came west and ended up in Fatimid Cairo. By the early fifth/eleventh century, there seems to have been an established system of education for ghilmān at the Fatimid court, and Anūshtakīn distinguished himself in his class and made contacts which enabled him to further his career. Among the ghilmān of Baghdad, however, there is no trace of any such school and it is likely that senior ghilmān simply recruited likely looking lads for their service and trained them themselves. Anūshtakīn was also an exception in that he married and produced children. There is no evidence to suggest that most ghilmān were eunuchs, but it is clear that very few of them left heirs; neither of the two famous leaders of the Baghdad ghilmān, Sabuktakīn (d. 364/974) or his successor Alptakīn, left sons whom we know of, and they were succeeded by ghilmān who had been brought up in their service but were not, apparently, blood relations.
Instead, the ghilmān seem to have produced a strongly homosexual subculture. This has left literary traces, especially in Persian poetry, but it was disapproved of by outsiders, and chroniclers give us examples of the disastrous effects of such involvements; the ghulām Fātik, who briefly governed Aleppo for the Fatimids, was murdered by his ghulām lover while he slept, and the Buyid prince Bakhtiyār’s infatuation with a ghulām is given as one of the reasons he lost his throne and his life. The absence of family life and offspring was one of the reasons that ghilmān, despite their power, were never able to start dynasties or proclaim their independence (the only exception being the Ghaznavid dynasty of distant Afghanistan, which originated among the ghilmān of the Samanid dynasty), and even the most powerful of them, like Sabuktakīn of Baghdad and Anūshtakīn al-Dizbarī, never became rulers in their own right.
The ghulām system was characteristic of the century and a half of the Muslim commonwealth. It was employed by Buyids, Fatimids and many lesser dynasties. The system was not necessarily a bad one. In the main, ghilmān were loyal and effective troops and their small numbers meant that warfare between ghulām armies was not, on the whole, very destructive. The people of Damascus certainly seem to have preferred the rule of the ghulām Alptakīn to the lawless Berber troops of the Fatimid army. However, the payment of the ghilmān often imposed a crippling financial burden on governments, and bands of roaming ghilmān, seeking employment, could be a scourge.
While the ghilmān were the most distinctive feature of the military organization of the period, they were not the only soldiers. The other main military groups were marginal peoples from the fringes of Islamic society, the bedouin of the Syrian Desert, the transhumant Kurds of the Zagros Mountains, the Daylamites of the southwestern shores of the Caspian Sea and the Berbers of the mountains of Ifrīqiya. Some dynasties like the bedouin ‘Uqaylids and the Marwanid Kurds could rely on their tribal followings to the extent that they had no need to employ ghilmān, but they were the exceptions; even dynasties like the Buyids and the Fatimids, which had strong ethnic followings among the Daylamites and the Berbers, were obliged to employ ghilmān to supplement their other followers.
In short, the military were recruited not from the main bulk of the Muslim population but from certain specialized groups. Furthermore, there was an almost complete separation between military and civilian élites. Ghilmān did not become wazīrs, financial officials or religious dignitaries. Nor did they become merchants. Equally, members of the civilian élite did not become soldiers; one of the reasons the Barīdī tax farmers of southern Iraq failed in their bid to take over Baghdad in the confusion which preceded the coming of the Buyids was that they did not have the military experience to lead their armies. Members of the civilian élite, like the Fatimid wazīr Ya‘qūb b. Killis in Egypt, might recruit ghilmān as their private military following, but they did not themselves take up arms. There were, of course, some exceptions, notably among the wazīrs of the Buyids in Fārs and al-Jibāl, but on the whole, the gulf between civil and military leaders was a constant feature of the age.
It may seem that too much attention has been paid to the question of military organization, but in fact it is crucial to the understanding of the political structures of the time. The dynasties which emerged after the dissolution of ‘Abbasid power can be divided into those which were dependent on ghilmān for their military support and those which were dependent on tribal followings. Among those dependent, to a greater or lesser extent, on ghilmān were the Buyids of Baghdad, the Fatimids of Egypt and the Hamdanids of Aleppo and Mosul, while those which depended on tribal support were the Mazyadids of Ḥilla, the ‘Uqaylids of Mosul and the Mirdasids of Aleppo, all dependent on bedouin tribes, and the Hasanuyids, the ‘Annazids, the Rawwadids and the Marwanids, all dependent on Kurdish groups.
These different sorts of military support generated different sorts of political ecology. In polities which depended on ghilmān, the paying of the troops was the major preoccupation of government. This could be done in two ways, either by collecting taxes directly and paying salaries, usually monthly, to the troops or by giving out grants of iqṭā‘, which were essentially areas of land and villages from which the soldiers could collect the revenues directly. In either case, the object of the ruling dynasty was to acquire and keep settled lands which would yield cash revenues. Such a system could allow the individual ruler great power, since he controlled the revenues and a bureaucracy to collect them – and in the hands of a man like the Buyid ‘Aḍud al-Dawla (d. 372/983), the system was very effective. There were, however, many pitfalls; inefficient or corrupt revenue collecting and short-term liquidity crises meant that governments frequently relied on expedient grants of unsupervised iqṭā‘, and in some areas, like Baghdad and central Iraq, this led to prolonged periods of disturbance and anarchy.
In states based on a tribal following, however, the priorities of government were entirely different. The ruler’s most important obligation was to his followers, and their main concern was to secure adequate grazing for the animals on which they depended for their livelihood, and the policies of the ruling dynasty were dictated by pastoral considerations rather than the need to round off a compact state based on settled lands. Thus, the pastoral states tended to have uncertain boundaries and were often based on certain routes rather than on cities and villages. This is not to say that cash revenues were irrelevant. The leaders of the tribes needed revenues to reward their followers and to make up for the limitations of the pastoral economy and to this extent they needed to rule settled areas. The model of such rule was not, however, direct government, using paid agents and tax collectors, but rather indirect tribute gathering, in exchange for protection, an arrangement known as a ḥimāya. This meant that the leading citizens of the town agreed to pay certain sums to the ruler but were themselves responsible for the raising of the tax. In states where the government was dependent on the ghilmān, the ruler and his bureaucracy were usually based in the main city – Baghdad, Cairo, Shīrāz – whereas in tribal states, the ruler was more likely to spend his time away from the main cities, in the nomad camp or the mountain castle.
This pattern of indirect control was the main reason for the development at this time of an unprecedented degree of civic autonomy. In the towns we know most about, Aleppo under the Mirdasids and Āmid (now Diyarbakir) under the Marwanids, this took the form of local citizens exercising power through the office of ra’īs al-balad or of qāḍī, which came to mean more than simply “judge” and came to embrace administrative functions as well. In order to secure peace, the towns also produced their own militia, often known as the aḥdāth, who were part-time volunteers who usually fought on foot. Such signs of city self-government manifested themselves in areas controlled by tribal dynasties, not in cities like Fusṭāṭ, Baghdad, Baṣra or Shīrāz, which were ruled by settled dynasties dependent on ghilmān and other professional soldiers. The intermediary between the tribal leader and the citizens was often the wazīr, and in tribal states (and in the Buyid kingdom of al-Jibāl, which was structurally much more akin to the tribal states than the other Buyid kingdoms), the wazīrs acquired great importance as the essential intermediaries between the two lifestyles.
Another significant difference between the two types of state was in the structure of the ruling families. In tribal states, the ruling family tended to act as a kin group, dividing effective power among themselves. This could be a centrifugal force – we see in both the ‘Uqaylids of Mosul and the Hasanuyid Kurds how different members of the ruling house sought to acquire ḥimāyas over different areas and hence to establish a form of independence. In the Marwanid family of Mayyāfāriqīn, by contrast, the ruling kin were much more united, and it was this family solidarity which preserved their rule. In more bureaucratic states, the ruling kin played a smaller part. The clearest example of this comes from Fatimid Egypt, where only the ruler and his heir apparent seem to have had any political role at all. What happened to the brothers and cousins of the caliph we simply do not know. In the Buyid states, there was a constant tension between the necessity to establish a single dominant ruler and the traditional demands of kin solidarity, which decreed that each member of the ruling clan should enjoy a share of the power and wealth of the group.
These two different types of state were able to flourish together for a century and a half of the Muslim commonwealth. It was a system which, though apparently chaotic, in practice allowed the diverse groups which now formed the Muslim community to reach their own political solutions, the ones most appropriate to their needs. The combination of political diversity with cultural unity forms the background to the great intellectual and cultural achievements of the period. From the mid-fifth/eleventh century, the coming of the Ghuzz Turks and their Seljuk leaders suppressed much of this variety in favour of uniformity of government and religion, and with the coming of this order and uniformity much of the vitality of the previous era was lost forever. The Muslim commonwealth deserves more attention from historians than it usually receives.