State and religion in Islamic societies

Past & Present, May, 1996 by Ira M. Lapidus

IV

THE POST-IMPERIAL, SALJUQ STATES AND COMMUNITIES

The separation of state and religious institutions was confirmed by the historical t ends of the next two centuries. The territorial empire of the caliphate collapsed in 945 and the domain of Islam was parcelled out among independent local regimes. Beginning in the eleventh century, the region was also subject to repeated waves of nomadic invaders from Central Asia whose chieftains established a succession of short-lived empires. The Saljuqs, who reigned from c.1040 to c.1200, defined the political institutions of the new era. While the state was in the hands of nomadic chieftains and war-lords of slave origin, Saljuq-led governments cultivated an Islamic identity. In principle, they recognized the legitimacy of the caliphate. They portrayed themselves as the defenders of Islam. They enforced islamic law, patronized the pilgrimage, endowed colleges of learning and religious activity, and sometimes waged jihad against non-Muslim populations in Anatolia and Central Asia.

None the less, these states were not considered inherently Islamic. Turkish regimes looked back to their tribal ancestry and their conquests as the basis of dynastic legitimacy. By the cultivation of local languages, poetic traditions, architectural motifs, musical themes and cultic practices, or through universalistic, rationalistic, cosmological, philosophical and scientific pursuits, Middle Eastern states asserted a legitimacy independent of religion, and identified themselves as cosmopolitan, imperial and patrimonial regimes based on non-Muslim civilizations.

In the same period, Middle Eastern societies, disrupted by political turmoil and nomadic invasions, reacted to the upheavals by converting to Islam and by organizing themselves into communities based on religion, including Shii communities, Sunni schools of law and, later, Sufi brotherhoods. In the late tenth and eleventh centuries, the schools of law, already well established, acquired madrasas or colleges, buildings with endowed support serving as residences for both scholars and students and providing stipends for religious study.

Furthermore, in the course of the eleventh century the common people came to be identified with the schools of law. The leading scholars had close ties to merchant, bureaucratic and official families. They had a popular following among the people who sought their advice and protection. The schools of law came to serve important administrative, as well as religious and educational, purposes. The scholars took charge of judicial administration, local police, irrigation, public works and taxation. They organized education and charities. They officiated at births, marriages and deaths. They gave healing and spiritual consolation. Thus the ordinary daily relationships that constitute a civil society -- marriage, family, inheritance, business dealings, friendships, education, arbitration and litigation of disputes -- all came under the purview of Islam.

Another type of religious-based community organization was built around Sufism. Sufism began as the purely individual quest for spiritual enlightenment and closeness to God among holy men and ascetics, but it gradually evolved into a social movement. Sufi masters acquired disciples. On the military frontiers of the Islamic world, and subsequently in the towns of the interior, the Sufis acquired residences for teaching, missionary activity and charitable work.