Monarchy

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MONARCHY

Neither the Qur?an nor Muhammad made any specific provisions for the organization of government for the Islamic community. Muhammad's successors, who ruled Arabia and a vast empire conquered by the Muslims during the quarter of century after the Prophet's death, were called caliph (khalifa) and assumed the title of "Commander of the Faithful": (amir al-mu? minin). After a civil war that ended the period of the four "rightly-guided" caliphs in 661, the caliphate became hereditary in the Umayyad Dynasty until 750, and in the Abbasid Dynasty from 750 until 1258. The administrative and fiscal systems of the Byzantine (Roman) and Sassanian (Persian) empires were taken over by the caliphate. The bureaucratic class that carried out the fiscal and administrative tasks for the caliphs were eventually ordered to use Arabic instead of Persian and Greek in the closing decade of the seventh century, and some decades thereafter also began to translate Persian works on statecraft into Arabic. Through these translations, the idea of monarchy was absorbed into the public law and Arabic literature on statecraft, as can be seen in the Book of Sovereignty (Kitab al-sultan) by the famous ninth-century author, Ibn Qutayba.

This term first occurs as a substantive, meaning "authority" in the Qur?an, and came into usage with reference to the palaces housing the caliph's central administration. In the latter part of the ninth century, independent royal dynasties were established in Iran and in Egypt and chose to remain under the suzerainty of the caliphs. In this period, we find the term sultan first used to refer to a specific person: the caliph's brother, who was the commander of a special army. This haphazard use of the term to refer to a person became systematic when the Buyids (Buwayhids), Shi?ite mercenaries from the Caspian region, captured Baghdad in the mid-tenth century, without, however, overthrowing the Abbasid caliphate. The Buyids became the first of a series of secular independent rulers to assume the title of sultan. The bifurcation of sovereignty into caliphate and sultanate became permanent, however, and underscored the new autonomy of monarchy from the caliphate.

In Iran, where the Buyids ruled independently of the caliph, they assumed the pre-Islamic Persian titles of shah (king), and even the imperial shahanshah (king of kings). The Turkish Seljuks, who replaced the Buyids in Baghdad in 1055 and proceeded to defeat the Byzantine emperor and create a vast empire from the Oxus to the Mediterranean, assumed the titles of both sultan and shahanshah. The subsequent Turkish dynasties, including the Ottomans, attached the title of sultan to their names, also using additional Persian terms such shah and its variant, padshah. Local rulers in Iran used the title of shah, and those in the Arab countries, the equivalent term malik (king). Turkish dynasties established a Muslim monarchy in northern Indian in the thirteenth century, with Delhi as its capital. The Dehli Sultanate lasted for some three centuries, until the Mogul conquest in 1526, which established a larger Muslim empire in India. The sultanate spread eastward into Asia, and survives to this day in the federal states of Malaysia and in Brunei. With the spread of Islam into sub-Saharan Africa, some of the Muslim local rulers assumed the title of sultan, and in 1841, the sultan of Oman transferred his court to Zanzibar across the Indian Ocean.

Monarchy (saltana[t], padshahi, mulk) was legitimated independently of the caliphate, and primarily on the basis of justice. The function of monarchy was the maintenance of order and ruling with justice. As such, monarchy was compared to prophecy, the function of which was the salvation of humankind. Kings were thus required by the divine constitution of cosmic order, just as were the prophets. As stated in a tradition (hadith) attributed to Muhammad, "the ruler (sultan) is the shadow of God on earth." A distinct literary genre on political ethic and statecraft grew, grounding the legitimacy of monarchy in its justice. This literature absorbed a philosophical strand that idealized monarchy on the Platonic model of the philosopher-king. A major synthesis of the Persian and the philosophical traditions, written in the thirteenth century by Nasir al-Din Tusi, Akhlaq-e Naseri, had many imitators and became the standard work on political ethic and statecraft in the great modern empires of the early modern period: the Ottoman, the Safavid, and the Mogul.

After the overthrow of the Abbasid caliphate by the Mongols in 1258, the rulers of Muslim lands typically added caliph to sultan as their titles, except in Mamluk Egypt (1260–1517), when a shadow Abbasid caliph was maintained by the Mamluk sultans. The Ottomans claimed the last Abbasid (shadow) caliph gave them the mantle of the Prophet and transferred the caliphate to them when they conquered Cairo in 1517.

The idea of constitutional monarchy was introduced into the Islamic world in the process of political modernization, with the Ottoman constitution of 1876 and the Iranian constitution of 1906. With the creation of the modern state of Turkey, the Ottoman sultanate was abolished in 1922, and the caliphate in 1924. In Iran, the monarchy was overthrown with the Islamic revolution of 1979. A number of Muslim monarchies have survived to the present, notably in Morocco, Saudi Arabia, and Jordan.