Succession

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SUCCESSION

The issue of succession—the assumption by a person of political or other institutional authority previously possessed by another—entered Islam with the death of the prophet Muhammad and has been a subject of continuous debate ever since. Simply put, Sunni Muslims believe that the Prophet's religious authority died with him, that his political authority passed to a succession of caliphs initially selected on the basis of consensus and merit, and that the institution of the caliphate rapidly declined into hereditary monarchy and ultimately military usurpation. Shi?ites believe that both the Prophet's religious and political authority remained united in a hereditary line of imams, that his dying wishes were subverted and suppressed by Sunnis, and that the caliphal succession has never been legitimate. Recently, scholars have increasingly questioned the traditional Muslim view of both the theory and the practice of caliphal succession. Some have argued that the historical record is obscure on even the most crucial points, and that in any case what can be gleaned from it suggests that divine absolutism, primogeniture, and forcible seizure of power were present from the beginning. Others have stressed the contributions of pre-Islamic Middle Eastern political traditions—particularly that of Persian/Zoroastrian divine absolutism—to the development of Islamic political theory. Whatever the exact course of events, it is clear that "the classical theory of the caliphate" as formulated by al-Mawardi (d. 1058) was the culmination of an ongoing process of interaction between the Islamic religious and political establishments. Subsequently, Muslim thinkers who strove to preserve an Islamic component in political succession were forced into increasingly distressing compromises by such cataclysms as the Mongol destruction of the Baghdad caliphate, the advent of secular dynastic rule in most Muslim lands, and the increasing intervention in Middle Eastern politics by European imperialism. After the dismantling of the Ottoman Empire following the First World War, most governments in Muslim lands adopted modern secular principles of political legitimacy, although by the end of the twentieth century, popular support for the reinstatement of Islamic principles and practices of political succession was increasing.

Etymology of Khalifa

The original significance of the Arabic verb for "to succeed," kh-l-f—from which is derived the word for caliph (khalifa)—is irretrievably buried beneath ancient and impenetrable layers of usage. It occurs in Akkadian meaning "to slip into or put on [especially clothes]" and in Hebrew meaning "to succeed, replace or pass away." Dictionaries of early South Arabic give one occurrence of the word khalifa with the quasi-political meaning of "viceroy" in a fourth-century South Arabic inscription, but also give meanings as diverse as "suit of clothes," "gate of a city," and—happily confirming a popular conception about Arabic etymology—"pregnant camel." It is a sign of the ambiguity of the meaning of the word that, although in both Arabic and Hebrew the first form of the root commonly denotes succession in time, place, or function, it has come in the former to be applied to the thing succeeding and in the latter to the thing succeeded. Lane's Arabic-English Lexicon gives the primary meaning of the verb khalafa as "he came after, followed, succeeded, or remained after, another, or another that had perished and died." Of the 127 instances of the root kh-l-f in the Qur?an, most have specialized meanings related only distantly to the first form meaning of "to come behind or after." As demonstrated by al-Qadi, the array of meanings encompassed by kh-l-f and its derivatives is closely paralleled by the array of meanings encompassed by b-d-l, which can mean both "to exchange" and "to be exchanged" and is used by the Qur?an in contexts closely analogous to those in which it uses kh-l-f. The near identity of these two roots is echoed today in the use by modern Arabic and Hebrew of badla and khalifah, respectively, to denote "suit"—that is, change of clothes.

The Term "Khalifa" in the Qur?an

The etymological significance of the word khalifa in the Qur?an is less obscure than its pre-Qur?anic usage because the Qur?an has been an object of philological exegesis since very early after its appearance. The two plural forms khulafa? and khala?if occur seven times between them in the Qur?an, and in all cases are said by commentators to denote tribes or peoples who, despite the warnings of their apostles, disobeyed God's will and were consequently wiped off the face of the earth by Him. Most commentators similarly treat the two occurrences of the singular khalifa as referring to the classic Qur?anic theme of a succession of peoples governing the earth, rather than the succession of individual rulers governing peoples. However, a handful of interpretations of Qur?an 2:30—"When your Lord said to the angels: I am about to put a successor (khalifa) on the earth, they said: Will You place on it one who will do harm on it and will shed blood ..."—interpret the word khalifa as a reference to Adam as an individual rather than the Children of Adam as a collective. The scarcity and lateness of commentators who ascribe to the word khalifa the connotation of an individual person with a political office have suggested to some scholars that the connection between the Qur?an's term khalifa and the office of caliphate was not made "before the end of the Umayyad period or the early decades of Abbasid rule" (al-Qadi, "The Term Khalifa"). To others it implied that the idea of a connection was in the air but played down by early commentators "anxious to avoid approving the Umayyad caliphs' use of the verse about Adam to enhance their own dignity" (Watt 1971, p. 567).

Umayyad Succession

The role of religion in the Umayyads' justification of their succession to the caliphate has itself undergone substantial revision by scholars—a revision that parallels revisionist views of the progress of both empire and theocracy in the early Islamic state generally. The Umayyads' use of the title khalifat Allah—"Caliph of God" (denoting a direct connection to the Divine) as opposed to "Caliph of the Apostle of God" (denoting succession to Muhammad as political leader of the umma)—belies the conventional picture of the entire Umayyad period as an interval of secular kingship between the perfect theocracy of the Rashidun and the less perfect theocracy of the Abbasids. ?Umar II's reprise of Abu Bakr's humble declaration that "I am not khalifat Allah" was the exception rather than the rule. The sources abound in evidence of a concerted effort by Umayyad court poets and scribes to augment the initial Umayyad claim to the caliphate as avengers of the blood of ?Uthman with the claim that they had been installed in their position by God. Crone and Hinds rely heavily on this court poetry to reverse the traditional view of the emergence of divine absolutism in Islam. They argue that the theocratic Shi?ite-type conception of the imamate was the original one and that from the very first, caliphs aspired to as much, if not more, religious authority than the Prophet. It can be plausibly argued either that the interpretation of the title khalifat Allah by the Umayyads constituted "the first formulated 'theory' of the caliphate in Islamic history" (al-Qadi, "The Religious Foundation of Late Umayyad Ideology and Practice") or that the Umayyads "had still not decided to transfer the concept of 'Caliph of God' from the sphere of court flattery and rhetorical salutation into the sphere of law" (Barthold).

Early Islamic Sectarianism and Caliphal Succession

If the precise etymology of the caliphal title and the exact nature of the ideological basis on which the Umayyads justified their succession are matters of speculation, the fact that the air was thick with theological ferment surrounding the issue of political succession in the umma throughout the Umayyad period is not. Sectarianism in any religion often has thinly disguised political roots, but because of Islam's status as a state religion from its inception, the political roots of early Islamic sectarianism are not disguised at all. The three broad non-Shi?ite sectarian subdivisions of the earliest period—Kharijite, Qadarite, and Murji?ite—all contained parallel theological and political components—that is to say, doctrinal positions on sin that very closely allied with conceptions of legitimate political succession. The Kharijite doctrine that any sin renders the sinner an apostate had its political reflection in their position that any injustice on the part of the caliph renders his succession invalid. The Qadarite doctrine that humans possess control over (qadar) and therefore responsibility for their actions had its political reflection in their position that the legitimacy of the caliph's succession depended on his dispensing equitable justice to the ruled. The Murji?ite doctrine that judgment of any sinner must be deferred to God had its political reflection in their view that the legitimacy of caliphal succession was the concern of God rather than men. While Kharijite anarchism and Qadarite activism were persecuted under the Umayyads, Murji?ite quietism seems to have been the political ideology of choice for the silent majority during the Umayyad caliphate. In contrast to the supposed period of Rashidun harmony during which no fewer than three of the first four caliphs were felled by assassins, not one of the Umayyad caliphs–with the sole exception of the battlefield death of Sulayman b ?Abd al-Malik—ended his term of office for any reason other than death by natural causes until al-Walid II was edged out by Yazid III in 744 after the Abbasid revolution had already begun.

Hadiths About Caliphal Succession

It is against this background of political and theological ferment that hadith statements about caliphal succession attributed to the Prophet must be evaluated. In contrast to the dearth of explicit statements in the Qur?an about legitimate political succession, hadith literature has many explicit references to the caliphate as a political office. Many of these hadiths use the terms imam or emir rather than khalifa in some or all variants, leaving open the possibility that they might have been initially uttered by the Prophet in reference to following the leader of the communal prayer and obeying the commanders of early military expedition, and were later reinterpreted—willfully or not, and with or without substitution of the word khalifa—as allusions to a political institution that did not exist prior to the Prophet's death. Those hadiths which refer unambiguously to the caliphate reflect debates about the political succession in Islam going on among early Muslim intellectuals who wrote down the record of the Prophet's utterances and the history of the early exemplary Rashidun (rightly guided) caliphate centuries after the fact. A vast majority of approved hadiths about caliphal succession fall into the quietist Muji?ite rather than the radical Kharijite or activist Qadarite category.

The question of whether the caliph's full title was properly khalifat Rasul Allah, ("the successor of the Apostle of God"), with the connotation of succeeding the Prophet in his temporal function as defender of the faith, or khalifat Allah ("the successor of God"), with the connotation of being appointed by and having a direct connection with God Himself, was also a much-vexed and obscure issue of early Islamic political discourse. The uneasiness of Sunni orthodoxy with the latter title and its accompanying conception of the caliph as possessor of the type of divine charisma claimed for the Shi?ite imams is reflected by the widely circulated stories about the first caliph Abu Bakr's insistence on being called khalifat Rasul Allah rather than khalifat Allah. The second caliph ?Umar rejected both khalifat Allah as applying only to King David and khalifat Rasul Allah as applying only to Abu Bakr and decided that the correct title was "Caliph of the Caliph of the Apostle of God." In view of the potential of this title for cumbersome recursiveness, ?Umar opted for amir al-mu?minin ("Commander of the Faithful"), a title that continued to have a rarified status even after the title khalifa became debased in the late Middle Ages through widespread usage by many different rulers of widely varying power and piety.

Caliphal Succession Under the Abbasids

As is attested to by the survival of hadith expressing some of their views in the standard Sunni collections, aspects of the Khariji, Qadari, and Murji?ite approaches all fell within the boundaries of what later became the Sunni discourse on the legitimacy of caliphal succession. But it was slogans borrowed from ?Alid groups later consigned by the heresiologists to the moderate but nonetheless heretical fringes of Shi?ism that swept the Abbasids into office. The Abbasids borrowed three planks from the ?Alid platform. First of all, they claimed the right to caliphal succession as members of the house of Muhammad (ahl al-bayt) by virtue of their eponymous ancestor's having been the uncle of the Prophet. Secondly, they claimed to be the beneficiaries of nass—designation by virtue of the father of the first Abbasid caliph's having had the imami charisma transferred to him by the son of Muhammad b. al-Hanafiyya, the reluctant figurehead of the revolt of al-Mukhtar which had first put both the mawali constituency and their ?Alid ideology on the Islamic political map. Thirdly, they claimed to be rightful caliphs by virtue of being the members of the family of Muhammad (Al Muhammad) most capable of achieving power. The first two of these claims were shaky to say the least. While it is true that in terms of genealogy al-?Abbas was on the right side of the ?Abd Manaf family tree relative to Umayya, he had not even converted to Islam during Muhammad's lifetime, and was certainly not the relative of the Prophet whom the ?Alids had in mind when they chanted the slogan "most pleasing of the house of Muhammad." The alleged transfer of imami charisma to the father of al-Saffah by the son of Ibn al-Hanafiyya had all the plausibility of the Donation of Constantine employed a half century later to justify papal dominion in Western Europe. The third justification of the Abbasid succession—that the Abbasids were the members of the family of the Prophet most capable of achieving power—was rendered unassailable by the successful result of the Abbasid revolution.

The early Abbasid era, in addition to being the golden age of the Baghdad caliphate, was also the period during which the embryonic Sunni Islam defined its approach to legitimate caliphal succession—frequently in opposition to the vision of the reigning caliph. The view favored by the caliphs is represented by the Risala fi al-Sahaba of Ibn al-Muqaffa? (d. 756), which advises the caliph al-Mansur (r. 754–775) to aspire to be something like the high priest of Islam and act as the final arbiter on points of Islamic law. The view favored by the "proto-Sunni" ulema was represented by the qadi (judge) Abu Yusuf, who in his Kitab al-Kharaj advises the caliph Harun al-Rashid (r. 786–809) to subordinate his will to the stricture of the book and the sunna like any other Muslim. The issue was decided by the outcome of the mihna, or "Islamic Inquisition" (833–847), during which Ahmad b. Hanbal's (d. 855) heroic opposition to the caliphal government's efforts to enforce adherence to the Mu?tazilite doctrine of the createdness of the Qur?an upheld the ascendance of the book and the sunna over the will of the caliph of the day. This triumph of the emerging Sunni approach to caliphal legitimacy resulted in the dispersal of religious authority away from a central governing body and toward multiple schools of law and a decentralized clerical authority. In retrospect, this separation between Islam and the state insured that Islam would avoid the fate of Zoroastrianism, the official religion of Iraq-based, Middle East-wide, divine-absolutist Sassanian Empire to which the Abbasid caliph was successor, and develop into a supranational world religion that was able to survive the demise of the first Islamic state.

The Classical Theory of the Caliphate

It is one of the oft-noted paradoxes of Islamic intellectual history that the theory of caliphal succession was explicitly formulated just at the time when the institution of the caliphate was declining into political insignificance. But it is precisely in weakness that political institutions are in need of theoretical bolstering. The fullest expression of the classical theory of the caliphate was articulated by al-Mawardi (d. 1058), whose Ahkam al-sultaniyya (Rules of sovereign power) defines the relationship between the caliph's spiritual and temporal duties, noting that the "imamate is established for the succession of prophecy in the preservation of the religion (din) and the administration of the world (dunya)."

The necessity of the caliphate as a collective religious duty (fard kifaya) upon the Islamic community is demonstrated through such shari?a evidence as hadiths enjoining obedience to the imams, the ijma? (consensus) of the community about establishing an imam. Traces of the polemic against Shi?ism that conditioned the formulation of the embryonic theories of caliphal succession of al-Mawardi's predecessors—for example, the Ash?arite theologians al-Baqillani (d. 1013) and al-Baghdadi (d. 1037)—surface only rarely in al-Mawardi's exposition. The awkward position into which Sunni theorists of the caliphate were squeezed by the need to defend the historical record of the caliphate, on the one hand, and the need to oppose Shi?ite theocratic conceptions of political succession, on the other is illustrated by al-Mawardi's insistence that, while the caliph should be selected by election, rather than appointment, and this election can be accomplished by a single elector—this last provision justifying what became the most common mode of succession, appointment by a caliph of his son as heir. Al-Mawardi is careful to refer to this mode of succession as ?ahd ("investiture") rather than with the Shi?ite term nass ("designation"). Similarly, the principle of imamat al-mafdul ("the imamate of the less qualified") does double duty for al-Mawardi. It serves as a rejection of the Kharijite stance that as soon as a better qualified candidate appeared he must replace a less qualified sitting caliph no matter how much civil disturbance this might cause; it also counters Shi?ite claims that the successions of the first three caliphs were illegitimate because ?Ali—who even by most Sunni accounts was a more qualified candidate than ?Uthman—was passed over. For all his will-ingness to compromise on the person of the caliph, al-Mawardi strives at every point to uphold the sanctity of the caliphal succession itself. Despite the many principles of caliphal succession that he draws by analogy with shari?a contracts, al-Mawardi stresses that the caliphal bay?a is "a public interest whose consequences go beyond that of private contracts" (al-Mawardi, al-Akham al-sultaniyya, p. 9).

As the caliphate progressively declined into powerlessness and caliphal succession eventually became the plaything of the sultan of the moment, al-Mawardi's successors were forced into a progressively more realistic accommodation with historical actuality. Al-Ghazali (d. 1111), for example, adds to election and investiture by the preceding caliph a third mode of succession: investiture by a man of power (rajul dhu shawka). As he reluctantly concedes: "Government in these days is a consequence solely of military power, and whosoever he may be to whom the possessor of military power gives his allegiance, that person is the caliph. " (Al-Ghazali, Ihya? ?ulum al-din)

Succession after the Caliphate

After the Mongol conquests obliterated the Baghdad caliphate, the terms in which men of religion evaluated the legitimacy of political succession diverged still further from al-Mawardi's "classical" theory. Two different approaches to a world without a caliph are represented by Ibn Taymiyya (d. 1328) and al-Taftazani (d. 1389). Ibn Taymiyya's theory of the caliphate can best be characterized as a revival of Kharijite positions. He abandons the Quraysh lineage requirement, the imamate of the less qualified, and even the necessity of the caliphate itself. Ibn Taymiyya seems to regard excessive stress on the importance of even the Sunni imamate as a Shi?ite-like heresy and is as antipathetic to Sunni consensus as to imami charisma as a religious principle of legitimate political succession. For Ibn Taymiyya, good Islamic government is any state in which emirs and ulema collaborate in the interests of Islam.

Al-Taftazani is far less sanguine about the removal of the caliphate from the political legitimacy equation, and is far less ready than Ibn Taymiyya to accept the political fragmentation of the Middle Period (c. 1000–1500) as a permanent feature of the Islamic world. Al-Taftazani's views on the caliphate were referred to frequently by proponents of the revival of the caliphate in the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries. His Sharh was used as a textbook at al-Azhar, and both his Maturidi rationalism and his frequent references to the salaf al-salih ("upright predecessors") appealed to the reformist Salafi movement of the nineteenth century that touted original Islam as the true religion of reason and enlightenment. By contrast, the favoritism toward Hanafism and eventual revival of caliphal universalism by the Ottoman sultans banished Ibn Taymiyya's Hanbali puritanism to the margins, where it became associated with groups on the religious fringe, such as the Wahhabis. However, after the failure of the caliphal revival efforts of the 1920s, Ibn Taymiyya's tactical retreat to "Islamism-in-one-country" got a second look from groups like the Muslim Brotherhood (Ikhwan al-Muslimin) that worked for Islamic renewal from the ground up instead of from the top down.

In the meantime, in addition to eradicating the Baghdad caliphate, the Mongols also brought to the Islamic world a theory of dynastic succession in which God chose the ruler of the world directly, without the agency of the umma, and demonstrated His choice not through the consensus of scholars but through the outcome of military struggles. This made the subject of legitimate political succession less a matter for prescription by men of religion and more a matter for description by historians. The most prominent of these was Ibn Khaldun, "the world's first sociologist," who viewed the succession of political sovereignty as driven by ?asabiyya—or the ruling dynasty's group cohesion. Indeed, he interprets the restriction by previous theorists of the caliphate to the house of Quraysh not as deriving from hadith text but rather as from the fact that Quraysh was in possession of the ?asabiyya of the moment during the period of Islamic origins. Although Ibn Khaldun is more of a historian than a religious scholar, his views on the relationship of religion to political succession were often quoted by later ulema because of his general prestige. In particular, his portrayal of the Quraysh lineage requirement as a practical rather than doctrinal consideration was much cited by proponents of non-Quraysh candidates for the caliphate.

Dynastic succession displaced caliphal legitimacy as a political principle in the Islamic world from the Mongols through the period of the early modern Timurid, Safavid, and Ottoman empires. Toward the end of the nineteenth century the Ottoman sultan ?Abd al-Hamid II tried to counter national separatism among Muslim ethnic minorities in the empire by pushing the idea that the Ottoman sultans were legitimate successors to the caliphate on the basis of a dubious claim that the last descendant of the Abbasid caliphs in Mamluk Cairo had transferred the caliphate to Selim III upon his conquest of Egypt in 1517. Immediately following the defeat of the Ottoman Empire in 1918, several efforts to revive the caliphate as a governing body of the world Muslim community garnered support among Islamic liberals and pan-Islamists. By then it was too late, however, European hegemony having imposed on the Middle East principles of political succession that had neither religious roots nor cultural resonance in the Islamic world. By the end of the twentieth century this had provoked an Islamist reaction whose vision of political legitimacy has far more in common with historically marginal fringe Islamic political movements than with traditional mainstream views of caliphal succession.

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Mark Wegner

Encyclopedia of Islam and the Muslim World