Senior Thesis Excerpt

Over the next couple of months I plan to post various excerpts from my recent Senior Honors Thesis, which I wrote for Professor Chamberlain at the UW last year. This particular writing sample is important to me because it was enabled me to travel to Egypt for the first time, and I thought I'd share it with you. Plus by posting them it allows me to post bits of my own writing without having to come up with something new! Read it you'll learn something about Egyptian history!

My paper's title was 'The Question of Change and Continuity in High Medieval Egypt: Did Regimes Matter?' I looked at three regimes in Medieval Egypt: the Fatimids, the Ayyubids, and the Mamluks and assessed how they impacted Egyptian history. Here is the section subtitled 'Background':


Early Egyptian society has long been considered resilient to assimilation under various foreign conquerors, and several historians have long argued for the high degree of continuity within Egypt throughout this period. An agrarian ancient society highly dependent on the flooding of the Nile for its agriculture, Egypt had long served as a sort of imperial granary for whoever claimed dominion over the land. Historian Robert Ritner points out that under the Libyans, Nubians, Assyrians, Persians, Macedonians, and all the way up to the Roman conquest, Egyptian society remained relatively unchanged. And even the dominion of the Romans, he asserts, went largely unnoticed by the majority of Egypt’s inhabitants and there was no more apparent change to the daily life of Egyptian peasants after the arrival of the Romans. This agrarian nature continued into early medieval period and the conquest of Egypt by Arabs.

The Fatimids
The Fatimid empire was named for Fatima, the daughter of the prophet Muhammad and wife of ‘Ali. Its rulers were unique in their practice of Isma’ili Shi’a Islam, which was simultaneously a political, social, philosophical, and religious movement. They challenged both the religious and political authority of the Sunni ‘Abbasid caliphs in Baghdad. Isma’ilism held that the caliph was the supreme Imam with a supernatural purpose--he held divine powers and claimed to be supremely infallible and divinely guided. He was thus ruler of both religion and state. The imam was the servant and friend of Allah, possessor of divine light and the proof of Allah on earth. He was indeed held in Shi’a belief to be essential for the continuation of humanity’s very existence. This was in sharp contrast to the role of the caliph in Baghdad, whose power was merely nominal as the source of religious legitimization for the many Islamic rulers. However, Isma’ilism never truly spread to be more than a sort of state religion in Egypt; the vast majority of the population remained Sunni Muslims.

One of the most important aspects of Fatimid rule was their so-called mission, or Da’wa, which was propaganda designed to spread their religious message on behalf of the imam. This was an important movement organized to spread Isma’ili Islam, although most of their conversion efforts were focused outside of Egypt as to not incite revolt by the predominantly Sunni population. Considering the small number of Isma’ilis that actually held power in Egypt, the Fatimids never really sought to fully convert the population of Egypt and they instead accepted secular recognition as the ruling authority.

The Fatimid state was founded in Tunisia in 910, but relocated to Egypt upon its capture in 969. In this same year the conquering general Jawhar founded the new capital city of Cairo (al-Qahira). It built as an explicitly Isma’ili city for it contained mosques that invoked Shi’ism and a large palace in the center of the city to emphasize the central role of the Isma’ili caliph/imam. They did not bring about a large alteration of Egyptian society, and in fact relied instead upon the administration of the previous regime. The first Fatimid caliph to rule in this new empire was al-Mu’izz, who ruled from 972-975, although the dynasty reached its apex under al-‘Aziz. Written primary sources on the Fatimids are unfortunately rare, and the sources that do survive were often written by Sunni outsiders who were explicitly hostile to the Isma’ili doctrine. Many Isma’ili sources have been destroyed by their rivals, and the few that do survive are often laced with hidden and secretive meanings, making a complete understanding of Fatimid history and doctrine elusive until more recent scholarship.

Paul Walker, in his work on the history of the Fatimids, organized the 200 year history of the Fatimids into two periods: 1) one hundred years of empire and expansion from 969 until the emergence of a civil war under the caliph al-Mustansir in the late eleventh century, resulting in 2) a century of dictatorships where military wazirs retained the majority of control in the country from 1073 to 1171. The wazirs, who began in the employ and patronage of the caliph imam as civilian administrators, shifted to take on a military role under Badr al-Jamali in 1073 during the caliphate-imamate of al-Mustanir and assumed the position ‘amir al-juyush’ with an independent power base. Cairo was plagued by looting and factional in-fighting between black slave soldiers and Turkish troops, and Badr al-Jamali resolved this by crushing the Turkish soldiers. Al-Jamali and his son al-Afdal initiated a period of complete wazir control, independent of the caliph’s patronage. Fatimid Egypt thus became an arena in the struggle for power between these two forces. And during the majority of their regime Egypt remained politically and militarily weak.

The Ayyubids
The Ayyubid dynasty was founded by Salah al-Din Yusuf ibn-Ayyub--known to the west as Saladin and best known for his recapture of Jerusalem from the Crusaders in 1187, and the dynasty gets its name from his father, Ayyub. Saladin had been sent into Egypt along with his uncle Shirkuh by Nur al-Din, the Zengid king of Syria. Saladin, after the death of his uncle and subsequent appointment as wazir in 1169, began to rather subtly replace important administrators and palace guard with his own troops. He then opportunistically placed the Fatimid royal family under house arrest, an act which was followed shortly by the death of the Fatimid caliph, possibly by natural causes. In September 1171 the name of the Abbasid caliph al-Mustadi, instead of the Isma’ili Fatimid caliph al-Adil, was read during the kutba Friday prayers in the congregational mosques of Cairo for the first time in over 200 years. Fatimid rule in Egypt had come to end, replaced by the Ayyubid dynasty. At risk of overgeneralization, the Ayyubid regime can organized into three periods: 1) the apex under Saladin and his son al-Aziz, 2) holding and consolidation under al-Malik al-Adil (the brother of Saladin) and al-Kamil, and finally 3) decline under al-Malik al-Salih.

The Ayyubids’ state included Egypt, Syria, portions of the Arabian Peninsula, Northern Africa, and sections of Mesopotamia. Saladin had in effect united the Fatimid and Zengid territories in a combined Muslim force in order to combat the Crusaders. However, the Ayyubids often faced succession disputes and the fragmentation of political power. They ruled in a sort of ‘family confederation’ with a complicated system of client lineage where political power stemmed from the household and not their religious claims. Upon the death of the ruler various sons and other relations would vie for control. Power originated from the household or 'bayt', although each member of the Ayyubid family would often hold the loyalty of different amirs and soldiers and opportunistic alliances. Sultans would often have to rely upon external or internal threats and “opportunistic alliances among its ruling households” in order to maintain stability and promote unity, such as how Saladin had utilized the Third Crusade and his son al-‘Adil used the Fifth Crusade.

One of the last Ayyubid Sultans, al-Salih Ayyub, began to purchase and recruit an extremely large amount of mamluks, or military slaves, who were mostly Qipchak Turks from the southern Russian steppes. Al-Salih’s mamluks made up a force known as the Bahriyya. Soon, these Bahri Mamluks became the most important element of Egypt’s army and state. Al-Salih was in fact sowing the seeds of the destruction of the Ayyubid house. The arrival of the Mongols in Syria and St. Lous IX of France in Egypt led to the eventual murder of the last Ayyubid sultan, Turanshah, and the advancement of a new regime in Egypt: the Mamluks.

The Bahri Mamluks
Whereas the Fatimids were an aristocratic social class and the Ayyubids dynastic military lords, the Mamluks were military slave rulers. The first ten years of the Mamluk dynasty in Egypt was characterized by political chaos, and power changed hands rather rapidly. Their future looked bleak, as they needed to contend with the Mongols, Franks, and Armenians. Egypt was facing starvation and even plague. Although the country tended to be rich and prosperous its recent chaotic government was rendering it weak. However, with the ascent of the Bahri Mamluk named Baybars to the sultanate in 1250, the regime was to be the pinnacle of military power in Egypt’s recent history and saw maximized resistance to the Latin occupation in the Holy Land.

Baybars returned internal structure and centralized administration to Egypt. He fortified Alexandria and built a watchtower in Rosetta to protect against future invasions and crusades from Europe, and was then able to erect a large domain of control over Egypt, Syria, and Palestine to avoid the fragmental tendencies of his Ayyubid predecessors. He was even able to dramatically reduce the power of the Assassins nearly to nothing, eliminating the Isma’ili threat once and for all and largely becoming the undisputed ruler in Muslim lands in the Middle East. Through all this time Baybars ushered in a dramatic militarization of society.

The Mamluk regime was known as the dawlat al-atrak, or dynasty of the turks, by contemporary Arabic sources, and indeed the Mamluk rulers were ethnically Turkish. Under these slave-kings, Egypt became “increasingly militarized and mamlukized” Mamluks not only assumed the position of sultan but also came to dominate the composition of the military and even political institutions. They found legitimization through claiming to be the saviors of Islam, which was not far-fetched as they not only completely removed the Crusaders from Palestine but also successfully defended the region from the Ilkhanids and the Mongol invasions.

Historian Linda Northrup has divided the Mamluk regime into four periods: 1) 1250-60 the ascent of the Bahriyya, 2)1260-93 the consolidation of power under Baybars, Qalaqun, and Khalil, 3) 1293-1310 factional struggle and political instability, and 4) 1310-41 the prosperous third reign of al-Nasir Muhammad ibn Qalawun. This fourth period was perhaps the apex of Mamluk rule, although al-Nasir Muhammad himself was the son of a mamluk, and thus strictly not a mamluk himself. Nonetheless, the Bahri Mamluk sultanate came to an end in 1390, when power was taken over by the Circassian Mamluks.

Cheers,
Andrew