Part 8

Year 298 (= A.D. 910). Abu ʿAbdullah had proved himself a loyal and efficient helper, and had done more than any other to establish the Mahdi in Africa. It seems that he was a sincere Shiʿite, and acted throughout in perfect good faith and in attachment to the Mahdi with whom he had corresponded, but probably had never seen before he entered the prison at Sijilmasa. In 298 these feelings changed. One account is that Abu ʿAbdullah and the chiefs of the Katama began to feel doubts about the Mahdi’s claim because he proved unable to work any miracles, and ability to perform miracles had always been assumed as one of the evidences of a Mahdi’s claims. Working miracles always has been and still is the primary essential of a _murabit_ (marabout) in North Africa, and there need be no reason to doubt that the non-fulfilment of the probably extravagant Berber expectations must have caused serious disappointment amongst the Katama. Then again, the Berbers, like the Arabs, are naturally fickle and insubordinate; in the ordinary course of things they would be sure to murmur before long against any ruler, especially against one near at hand. Did Abu ʿAbdullah share their feelings? or did he excite them for his own ends? Ibn Khallikan states that when the Mahdi was firmly established at Kairawan, Abu l-ʿAbbas reproached his brother that “You were master of the country and uncontrolled arbiter of its affairs, yet you have delivered it over to another and consent to remain in the position of an inferior,” and at this Abu ʿAbdullah began to regret that he had handed everything over to the Mahdi and commenced plotting against him (Ibn Khall. i. 465). But it must be remembered that Ibn Khallikan shows a very marked anti-Fatimid bias. It seems more likely that both Abu ʿAbdullah and the Berbers were really disappointed to find the Mahdi an ordinary mortal. The matter was debated in the presence of the chief sheikh of the Katama, and Abu ʿAbdullah expressed his doubts, saying: “His actions are not like those of the Mahdi to whom I used to try to win you: I am afraid I have been mistaken in him, and have suffered a delusion similar to that of Ibrahim al-Khalit when the night closed over him and he saw a star and said, ‘This is my lord’ (Qur. vi. 76). It is therefore incumbent on me and you to examine him, and to make him show those proofs which are known to the genealogists as those to be found in the Imam” (Arib b. Saʿid, _Nicholson_, pp. 120-121). As a result the Sheikh of the Katama waited upon ʿUbayd Allah and asked for the performance of a miracle as a proof of his claim to be the Mahdi. The reply was the immediate execution of the Sheikh. This gave serious alarm to Abu ʿAbdullah and his brothers, who held a meeting by night in the house of the youngest brother Abu Zakir. This night meeting may have been merely a conference to discuss changed conditions, or it may have been in the nature of a conspiracy. Such meetings continued for some time, and very probably treasonable plans were suggested, even if not seriously adopted: at any rate suspicion was aroused, the brothers were watched, and full information of their proceedings was carried to the Mahdi. One morning Abu ʿAbdullah appeared at court with his garment turned inside out, the Mahdi took no notice. Next day the same thing happened, and so on the third. On the last of these occasions the Mahdi asked him why he wore his garment so. He replied that it was an oversight; he had not noticed that it was turned the wrong way. The Mahdi continued, “Did you not pass the night at the house of Abu Zakir?”—he replied, “Yes,”—“Why did you do so?”—Abu ʿAbdullah answered that he did so because he was afraid. The Mahdi remarked that one only feared when there was cause to believe that there was an enemy. He then showed that he was fully aware of the meetings, that he knew the names of those present, and the subject of their conversation. As a punishment he declared that the three brothers should be expelled from Kairawan, and that Abu Zakir, who seems to have been the moving spirit, should be sent to Tripoli as governor. There had been a revolt of the Hawarite tribe in Tripoli, and so it seemed that Abu Zakir was to be sent on military service as a punishment, replacing the governor who was his uncle. At Kairawan this seemed a just and proper measure, for conspiracy could hardly be passed over, but the penalty involved no disgrace or apparent severity. So Abu Zakir set out for Tripoli bearing a letter to the governor. But unknown to him the letter contained orders for his instant execution. As soon as the governor read the letter he sent for Abu Zakir and showed it to him; the nephew admitted that it was the will of God and submitted to be beheaded. News of this was sent by carrier pigeon to the Mahdi, who perceived that it was now time to get rid of the other two brothers before they took the alarm. He invited them to a repast, but sends two officers, Garwaih al-Mulusi and Jaʿbar al-Mili, to conceal themselves behind the castle of as-Sachu and way-lay them as they passed. They did so and killed them with pikes. The bodies laid uncared for at the brink of a cistern until after the following noon, then the Mahdi orders them to be taken up and given a public funeral at which he himself officiated. In explanation of his action the Mahdi wrote a letter to the Shiʿites of Asia in which he said: “Ye know the position in which Abu ʿAbdullah and Abu ʿAbbas stood with regard to Islam; but Satan hath caused them to stumble, and they have been punished with the sword. Farewell” (Arib b. Saʿid, _Nicholson_, p. 128).

But the murder of Abu ʿAbdullah was not taken easily by all the Katama tribe, and a riot followed the funeral. At this the Mahdi showed the personal courage which, equally with a total absence of scruple or gratitude, became characteristic of his dynasty. Mounting his horse he rode out into the streets, and declared that now justice was satisfied, and that no further enquiry would be made or punishments inflicted. He was so far successful that the people dispersed quietly.

We may take the murder of Abu ʿAbdullah as marking the establishment of the Khalifate at Kairawan. Hitherto it had been more or less surrounded with a religious atmosphere; it had been essentially connected with a particular religious sect. Now, with the death of Abu ʿAbdullah it is established frankly as a secular power, although the religious claims are still maintained in the background. The Shiʿite position, however, now appears rather as political than sectarian. The orthodox Khalif was ruling at Baghdad, but the Mahdi’s followers regarded him simply as a usurper. The same view was taken by the Umayyad rulers in Spain, although at this time they had not yet ventured to assume the title of Khalif. Amongst the Shiʿites proper the Khalif exists only as the “concealed” Imam, and the visible ruler on earth is merely his viceroy: but the Mahdi claimed to be not only Mahdi, but the heir of the Imams, and thus assumed the Khalifate as the legitimate heir of ʿAli.

V

THE FATIMID KHALIFS OF KAIRAWAN

Led by religious enthusiasms, the Berber tribes had succeeded in sweeping away the Arab government of the province of Ifrikiya. To a very large extent, however, this was as much a racial and anti-Arab movement of the Berbers as a religious one: of course, very much the same has been true of every Mahdist movement in Africa. The history of Islam is full of similar revolts, for the most part either with a religious motive, or at least a religious pretext. Now the destructive work was finished and the Mahdi settled at Kairawan, having damped or perhaps quenched the religious fervour of his followers by the execution of Abu ʿAbdullah and the implied shelving of the miraculous powers which his earlier followers had associated with him, was faced with the task of constructing an orderly and stable principality out of what must be confessed to have been rather unpromising materials. More than once the Semitic and Berber tribes have shewn themselves quite capable of nation-building, and their work has not always been short-lived. The religious motive was effective in arousing the enthusiasm of fighting men, the task of framing political institutions demanded different qualities. At this time, no doubt, we must regard the Mahdi as primarily a political adventurer: that he had any serious regard for Shiʿite principles is incredible; that he was the missionary of an enlightened philosophy which would deliver men from the fetters of religion,—a position which may have been true of his ancestor ʿAbdullah,—is extremely improbable in his case. Unexpected circumstances had given him an exceptional opportunity as the founder of a dynasty, and we have now to see how he used this opportunity.

Towards religion the Mahdi’s attitude had been at first one of rabid Shiʿism, though he, as one of the fully initiated, could not have been sincere: no doubt he was acting up to what he expected to be the feelings of his subjects so far as he had observed the Katama and the immediate followers of Abu ʿAbdullah: closer acquaintance with the people of Kairawan showed him that he had been mistaken, the people generally were quite ready for a Mahdi, or anyone else, who could establish and maintain an orderly government, but as Muslims they were orthodox by a large majority, and by no means willing to accept the rather fantastic theories of incarnation and transmigration which appealed to the Persian mind. As soon as this was made clear the Mahdi formulated a definite policy in religion, enforcing strictly all the outward observances of Islam, rigidly punctilious in the prohibition of forbidden food and drink, and punishing severely those of the Ismaʿilian sect, who tried to practice the freedom of the higher grades of the initiated. It was no doubt possible for the initiate to disregard the rites of religion in their private life, but any external neglect, likely to cause scandal amongst the populace at large, was treated as a criminal offence: there was none of the open lawlessness of the Qarmatians tolerated in Ifrikiya: the inner grades of the sect were distinguished from other Muslims only by their reverence for the family of ʿAli, whom all revered to some extent, by their repudiation of the first three Khalifs, which was offensive to the orthodox but not intolerable, and by a few minor differences in the ritual of prayer, and in the treatment of the problems of the canon law.

The most difficult problem demanding the new ruler’s immediate attention lay in the lands to the west, for the Mahdi claimed to control all the territory to the Atlantic, over which the Aghlabid princes had pretended to rule. The first difficult task came in the revolt of Tiharet.

For long past the Berber lands of North Africa had afforded a refuge for every persecuted sect and dynasty of Islam. The earliest sect, the Kharijites, the wild men of the desert who adhered to the oldest form of purely Arab Islam, had entered Africa after they had been hunted down and slaughtered in Asia by the Umayyad Khalifs. In the days of the Mahdi they still held their own in the district of Tiharet in the mountainous country of Central Maghrab. They threw off all allegiance to the ruler at Kairawan and invited Muhammad b. Khazar to be their Emir. The Mahdi sent the Katami Aruba b. Yusuf against them: after three days siege the city was taken, plundered, and some 8,000 of the inhabitants slain.

The Umayyads who had put down the Kharijites in Asia had been compelled by the course of events to seek a refuge in Africa for themselves, and thence had passed over to Spain which was regarded as the remotest of the western parts. At this time they were ruling at Cordova (they did not assume the title of Khalif until A.H. 317), and held also some possessions in Africa about Oran. The same Karmati leader who had taken Tiharet was able to seize Oran.

The Idrisid dynasty, descendants of ʿAli by Hasan, expelled from Madina in 169, had founded a state in the remoter part of Morocco where they were still ruling. This state also was attacked by Aruba and reduced, so that all the western lands to the Atlantic coast was brought under the control of the Mahdi (Ibn Khald. i. 244-5, 267-8, etc.).

This course of consolidation of the most loosely held part of the Muslim world speaks well for the organising ability of the general Aruba, and established the Mahdi’s authority upon a sound foundation. It was, however, disturbed by domestic difficulties in the capital. Kairawan was an Arab colony, but under the Mahdi the Berbers were in the ascendant, and racial disputes were inevitable. One day a Katama tribesman treated a city merchant with insolence; a riot ensued, and some 1,000 of the Katama were slain. After this had been repressed the governor rode through the city and ordered the dead bodies of the Berbers to be removed. The workmen who carried out this order threw the bodies into the channel which served as the city sewer. At this the Katama tribesmen removed from the city in indignation, and declared that they would no longer submit to the Mahdi’s rule, and chose a youth named Kadu as their emir. Very soon this rebel was in possession of the whole province of Zab, and the Mahdi sent several generals against him without result. Some of these generals, indeed, deserted to the enemy, for the Berbers were the main fighting force in Africa, and there was a general indignation amongst them at the way in which the Katama rebels in Kairawan had been treated, and there were many followers of Abu ʿAbdullah still who threw in their lot with the revolted Berbers. At length ʿUbayd Allah sent his son Abu l-Qasim, and he, with some difficulty, managed to reduce the tribesmen.

In 300 the colony of Tripoli revolted. There, as in Kairawan, there had been riots between the Berbers and Arabs. When Abu l-Qasim returned from punishing the tribes he advanced to attack Tripoli, whilst the Mahdi at the same time sent a fleet against it, and after some delay it was reduced. Then Sicily revolted, and this proved to be a permanent loss to the Fatimid Khalifs. At first the Sicilians invited Ahmad, a son of Ziadat Allah, the former emir of Kairawan, to take charge. He refused, but after some time, as the invitation was repeated, he consented to be recognised as emir of Sicily. As soon as he was established he sent a letter to the Khalif of Baghdad professing loyalty and asking to be confirmed as emir by the Khalif. Thus Sicily broke away from the Fatimid dominions and became once more a part of the empire of the ʿAbbasid Khalif.

In 301 the Mahdi founded a new city on the coast near Kairawan, and gave to it the name of al-Mahadiya. The site was very badly chosen, and the place afterwards decayed completely, although it served as the Fatimid capital for some generations. At the same time he commenced building a fleet, by the help of which he hoped to make an attack upon Egypt in due course; no doubt he was by this time convinced that his kingdom in North Africa was not likely to be a stable one, just as it had been held precariously by the Arab rulers who preceded him: in fact it was an unsettled and savage country, which could be under control only so long as under actual military occupation. Probably, also, he hoped that the prospect of conquering Egypt would attach the Berbers to him more successfully. The weak point in these plans was that the building and manning of a fleet depended almost entirely on what Greek help he could hire. Soon afterwards he sent his general Khubasa eastwards and extended his authority, somewhat precariously, to Barqa. In the summer of 302 he made his first attempt against Egypt, sending forces by land under his son Abu l-Qasim, and Khubasa against Alexandria. The inhabitants of that city were obliged to take refuge in the ships in the harbour, whilst the invaders plundered their houses. The invading army then passed southwards to the Fayyum, but here they were met by an Egyptian army strongly reinforced from Baghdad, and compelled to retire. The effort, however, had brought the invasion of Egypt within the sphere of practical politics, and the plunder of Alexandria raised much enthusiasm amongst the Mahdi’s followers. At that time the ʿAbbasid Khalifate was in its decline: in Baghdad the government was in the hands of the military guard, the commander of that guard was the real ruler, the Khalif being no more than a figure head liable to be deposed and replaced at the will of the soldiery. The provinces were semi-independent, in most cases ruled by hereditary emirs who paid no more than a formal tribute of respect to the Khalif; indeed, in many cases it meant simply that his name was mentioned in the Friday prayer. Of all the provinces Egypt was, perhaps, the worst administered, and the ripest for falling away from the ʿAbbasid dominions. It was on the verge of disintegration by natural decay, whilst the Fatimid state which coveted it, though outwardly strong and efficient, had already showed that it had the seeds of internal weakness in the tribal jealousies of Berbers and Arabs.

In 307 the Mahdi’s armies made another attempt on Egypt, this time supported by a fleet of 85 ships, which passed along the coast from al-Mahadiya and anchored in the harbour of Alexandria. The Khalif’s officers at Baghdad could only get together 25 ships which were assembled at Tarsus and sailed over to Alexandria. But those twenty-five ships were manned by experienced Greek mariners, and inflicted a decisive defeat on the Mahdi’s fleet.

As Egypt now enters very directly into the affairs of the Fatimids, it will be necessary to consider its condition. For the last four years it had been governed by the Emir Dhuka ar-Rumi, _i.e._, Ducas the Roman (or Greek). Before the defeat of the Mahdi’s fleet Dhuka resolved to check the invaders who had followed their former route to the Fayyum, and were laying waste and plundering at will. He had great difficulty in inducing the Egyptian army to move at all, but at last marched out to Giza and encamped on the same side of the Nile as the Mahdi’s army. Soon afterwards he died, and the governorship was taken over by Tekin al-Khassa, who had been governor before from 298 to 303 and had been associated with the former victory over the Shiʿites. Immensely popular with the soldiery, his resumption of office made an immediate change, and he was able to take the offensive and inflict a serious check upon the invaders, about the same time as the naval victory at Alexandria. Although the Fayyum was cleared the Fatimid forces were still in control in Upper Egypt, whither their cavalry had pressed on whilst others stayed in the Fayyum. There the extreme narrowness of the Nile valley and the exposed condition of the Bahariya and the other oases always meant a minimum of defence, and the invaders were able to hold their own until the next year. That meant that the whole area was infested by bands of light cavalry, rapidly moving Bedwin, both Berber and Arab, always able to retreat at will into the neighbouring desert and very difficult to be restrained by any ordinary military force. In our own dealings with the Sanusi in 1916 we had experience of such difficulty. The only possible solution is a system of organised military patrol, which takes some little time to dispose efficiently. That Egypt was cleared after a few months’ interval shows that Tekin had considerable ability in handling the military task with which he was confronted.

These attacks of the Shiʿites revealed another weakness in Egypt. There was strong reason to suspect that they had many sympathisers there. There was an active branch of the Ismaʿilian propaganda at work in the country, and all who were initiated in the sect were of necessity spies and helpers of the invaders. Two at least of the leading officials, the Qadi and the Treasurer were in correspondence with the Mahdi and in his employ: this does not mean that they were converts to the Shiʿite sect, but simply that they were disloyal to their own service as the result of personal jealousies and rivalries, the perennial bane of all oriental governments. It was only the support of the army which maintained Tekin, and even so he was not in a position to attack his rivals in the government. When he had been successful in clearing the country of the Mahdi’s forces, he had his reward in dismissal from the governorship in which he was succeeded by Muhammad b. Hamal, but three days later he was restored, to be deposed again soon afterwards as the result of more palace intrigues. The two following governors, Hilal b. Badr and Ahmad b. Kayghalagh, held office, the first for two years, the other for one, and then in 312 Takin was restored and remained governor until his death in 321. Conditions indeed were such that only a military leader with the support of the army could exercise any effective control in the country. The reinforcements sent from Baghdad in 302 had done more harm than the Shiʿite invaders; they had totally demoralised the native soldiery, and the army was now no more than a large troop of brigands who lived on the plunder of the country. At his appointment in 312 Takin established the army in camps around his own palace as well as in quarters in the building itself, and, more by the force of his own personality than anything else, managed to keep them fairly in hand until his death. It was no small feat, for he was utterly unable to provide them with their pay, which was many years in arrear. At his death the governorship was assumed by his son Muhammad, but he had not his father’s power or popularity, and was soon mobbed and driven out by the discontented soldiers clamouring for their pay. The Treasurer Madaraʿi, who was in the Mahdi’s employ and largely responsible for the disorder in the finances, was obliged to hide himself. Several ambitious officers assumed the title of Governor and tried the expedient of raising funds by brigandage organised on a larger scale than usual, and the country had relief only in the fact that these were soon occupied in war against one another. It is not difficult to understand that the eyes of many Egyptians were turned longingly towards Kairawan, where the Mahdi, in an efficient though somewhat brutal manner, was administering a firm and well ordered state, maintaining civil law and peace. This is the easier to appreciate when we remember that Ismaʿilian missionaries were busy in Egypt, and the orderly government at Kairawan would naturally form one of their arguments.

At this juncture, when Egypt was plunged in anarchy, the Khalif at Baghdad intervened and appointed as governor Muhammad b. Tughj the Ikhshid, son of the Emir of Syria, who had himself been governor of Damascus since 318. As his name denotes, this new governor was of Turkish birth. For some time now the Khalifs, seriously alarmed at the growing independence of the various dynasties of hereditary governors, especially in Persia and the neighbouring lands, had been introducing Turkish mercenaries, reckless of the inevitable consequences.