Arab and Seljuq Conquests

Another undergraduate class writing assignment...I'm embarrassed by this stuff but might as well...

Parallels in the Arab and Seljuq Conquests

            Both the Arab conquerors and Seljuq Turks were nomadic peoples who established states controlling agrarian populations in the Middle East. Since both groups originated among populations without centralized states, which includes bureaucracies, standing armies, and large urban centers, the process chosen by Arabs and Turks to build states reveals how pastoralist nomads played an essential role in new forms of state formation. For both conquering peoples, adoption of local customs, the incorporation of religion for moral legitimacy, and alliances with urban elites and the landed aristocracy were necessary to establish enduring states, as well as dependency to a certain degree on slave soldiers, or mamluks. However, the states established by the Arabs and Seljuqs were often short-lived, especially the Seljuq Sultanate, but the institutions of the state were upheld by successor states throughout the Middle East for centuries.

            The Seljuqs, Turkic-speaking nomads from Central Asia, left the steppes in the early 11^th century as war bands. Around 1025, the Seljuqs acted as military guardians of Khurasan for the Ghaznavids, a state established by mamluks in Afghanistan. From their humble beginnings as steppe warriors for the Ghaznavids, they defeated them after a 15 year guerrilla war to establish their own state. With their own territory, Khurasan, the Seljuqs used their religious identity as Sunnis who would save the powerless Abbasid caliphs in Baghdad to rally support from Central Asian pastoralists and local peoples of Iraq, Iran, and Khurasan. After taking Baghdad in 1055, they struck a deal with the Abbasid caliph, who still had some legitimacy to the Sunnis opposed to the Fatimid Shia in Egypt. This agreement included the caliph recognizing the Seljuq leadership as legitimate politically while relinquishing all political power himself, thereby creating a special title of sultan for the Seljuqs and keeping only nominal power.

This aforementioned deal, mutually beneficial to the Abbasid caliphs and Seljuqs eager for political legitimacy in the region, only came about through active Seljuq courting of the ulama in the cities. Without instituting state policies that supported Islamic learning through the establishment of madrasas, places of learning, and waqfs, or charitable foundations from Seljuq elites for the ulama or other needs, the ulama would not have given the additional support for religious and political legitimacy. Indeed, by the 11^th century, the ulama and specifically, the qadi, had attained enough influence and power that their support must have been sought by any state wanting legitimacy. The state support of the ulama led to an enduring political system through which religion and the state were irreparably tied in urban areas, as well as in terms of land distribution through the iqta, or redistribution of land to military commanders. These aspects of the Seljuq sultanate would live on in later dynasties and successor states, such as the Mamluk sultanate in Egypt, a state founded by military slaves themselves.

Unfortunately for the Seljuq dynasty, the pastoralist traditions of leadership, such as the primus inter pares ideal and decentralized leadership, led to no stable system of succession. By the third generation, feuds within the ruling house of the dynasty caused political fragmentation as the empire was carved into successor states. These newer states maintained the same institutions, however, regarding slave soldiers, waqfs, the iqta, and courting the favor of the ulama. The pastoralist, decentralized lifestyle and system of inheritance prevented the ruling house from maintaining a centralized empire, but the institutions fostered under this dynasty persisted under small Seljuq states that were expanding across Anatolia after the battle of Manzikert in 1071 and other regions of the Islamic world.

The Arab pastoralists who conquered the Middle East after the death of the prophet Muhammad in the 7^th century also developed new institutions to maintain a centralized political system. While the Seljuqs worked through the ulama, the Arab conquerors relied on their status as Muslims to unify warring Arab factions and differentiate themselves from the conquered dhimmis, or non-Muslims. Arab rulers did not encourage conversion to Islam, which provided them a constant source of revenue through the jizya tax. The diwan and the military garrisons also established ways to transcend tribal divisions by distributing wealth to Arab soldiers and, for some time under the Umayyad dynasty, separated the Arab elite from the conquered peoples.

This gradual assimilation of Arabs into the society of the conquered peoples went both ways, with fusion of pre-existing philosophy, architecture, art, and music from both the Arab tribes and the conquered peoples of North Africa and the Middle East. Indeed, this vast cultural complex developed into something one can only call Islamic because of its cosmopolitan nature and high degree of cultural miscegenation. While adopting cultural practices of the conquered peoples, the Ummayad rulers maintained their separate Arab identity through patronage of poetry that romanticized desert life and their nomadic past. Subsequent Arab dynasties would also maintain a separate Arab identity rooted in Islam and common ancestry, such as the Abbasid caliphate in Baghdad’s claim to legitimate rule from their descent from al-Abbas, an uncle of the prophet Muhammad.

Moreover, the Umayyad and Abbasid caliphates also adopted political ideology of the conquered peoples. The Abbasids, for instance, appropriated Persian imperial symbolism and ideology after the conquest of Iran and the collapse of the Sassanians during the initial Arab conquest. The first Arabs to adopt Persian imperial ceremonies were actually Arab governors in Kufa and Basra, who likely adopted these practices to stabilize Arab military rule over the conquered peoples of Iran and Iraq. The caliph also came to resemble more and more an emperor because of the custom of isolating him, thereby elevating the position and inculcating a sense of awe. Furthermore, the Abbasids built their capital Baghdad near Ctesiphon, the former imperial capital of the Sassanian state, clearly to assert their imperial legacy and tradition to legitimize their rule. Baghdad was also planned as a circle, another political symbol asserting imperial perfection for their subjects. In addition, the construction of monumental architecture such as excessively extravagant palaces, mosques, or the Abbasid imperial capital in Samarra all indicate clear political symbols of the power of the caliphate. Instead of deriving their power solely from moral claims, the Abbasid caliphate increasingly became just another empire in a region with a long history of imperial ideology and symbolism embedded in court rituals, architecture, and displays of power.

Another way pastoralist-descended Arabs built enduring states was tolerance and incorporation of non-Muslims into the political system and the creation of a core bureaucracy. Christians and Jews, for example, were taxed through the jizya, but their religious leaders became their mediators between the Arab state and themselves. For instance, Arab ruling elites worked through Jewish community leaders in Fatimid Cairo such as the Gaon to keep the political machine functioning. Christian and Jews were also allowed to participate in the state itself, as bureaucrats, advisors, and agents of the state, which ensured that Arab Muslim dynasties were not solely unjust despots imposing their rule on servile populations. The Fatimids, as a Shia dynasty in a sea of Sunni Islam, best exemplify this tolerance and willingness to employ non-Arabs in service to a centralized state apparatus. The ulama naturally played a significant role in Arab dynasties as well, but, in the case of the Abbasids, usually outside of the caliph’s court because of its decadent and immoral entertainment. The importance of religious identity among people cannot be neglected, since Muslims began to see themselves as a pious community, or ummah, led by the ulama, during this period.

A contrasting case to both the Seljuqs and Arabs, the Mongols, illustrate one extreme direction pastoralist nomads took in administering conquered agrarian peoples. Their rise in the 13^th century under Temujin depended on extreme violence in the form of massacres, uniting all Mongols under his army, and adopting military innovations to conquer most of Eurasia. Temujin’s success in uniting Mongol tribes under one army, however, did not lead to a permanent, centralized state spanning across Eurasia from northern China to the Middle East, however. Their pastoralist ways, internal divisions, and political fragmentation was inevitable as the empire broke into separate khanates across Eurasia that assimilated into the conquered societies. Thus, unlike the Seljuqs and Arab pastoralists, the extreme violence but assimilationist policies of Mongol conquerors led to a multitude of short-lived states across a vast territory impossible to centralize. The Seljuqs and Arab nomads had pre-existing, centuries-old traditions of political centralization and religious institutions to manipulate that allowed their states in the Middle East to last longer and leave new political innovations, such as mamluks.

Therefore, state formation among pastoral nomads in the Middle East reveals how these decentralized peoples constructed states using religion, cooperation and cooptation of local peoples, embracing pluralistic societies, and adopting cultural and political systems already present among conquered peoples. With the aforementioned approaches, the Arab and Seljuq elite were able to establish a political framework for future states, even if their own collapsed within a few generations. The Seljuqs perhaps best exemplify this, since the decentralized nature of the steppe continued to hinder full centralization under the ruling sultan. The Mongol empire, which on the other hand also adopted local practices of conquered peoples, could not survive since their empire was too expansive and because of an absence of political legitimacy beyond fear instilled in subject peoples due to their massacres. The Mongols lacked a clear religious or political claim to legitimacy that would unite all under a single banner, and they left little new developments in state formation.