The hundred and twenty-five years between the Seljuk entry into Baghdad in December 1055 and the accession of al-Nasir to the caliphate in 1180 are the period during which the central Islamic lands were under the substantial military and political authority of the Sunni Turkish Seljuk dynasty, with the Abbasid caliph at Baghdad serving as the formal religious-constitutional sovereign in a dyarchy that the Seljuk grand viziers — most notably Nizam al-Mulk under Alp Arslan and Malik-Shah — substantially codified into a working institutional model. The period also saw: the principal external shock to the medieval Islamic political system, the First Crusade and the establishment of the Crusader states in the Levant; the substantial intellectual development of Sunni orthodoxy through the Nizamiyya madrasa system; the substantial codification of Sufi mysticism under al-Ghazali; and the substantial gradual transition of the Abbasid caliph from ceremonial figurehead toward the modest restoration of actual authority that al-Nasir's reign would complete.
The Seljuk arrival
The Seljuks were a clan of the Oghuz Turks — a Turkic-language confederation of the Central Asian steppe — who had converted to Sunni Islam under their eponymous founder Seljuk (died c. 1009) and had served as mercenaries and frontier garrisons in the late Samanid and Ghaznavid states of Khurasan. The substantial Seljuk political expansion began with their victory over the Ghaznavid army at Dandanqan on the 23rd of May 1040, after which they progressively occupied Khurasan, then moved west through Iran during the 1040s and early 1050s. By 1055 they controlled all of Iran east of the Buyid territories and had achieved substantial military superiority over the declining Buyid amirate.
Tughril Beg's entry into Baghdad on the 18th of December 1055 was substantially uncontested. The reception by the caliph al-Qa'im on the 17th of January 1058 conferred on Tughril the formal title of "sultan" (a word meaning "authority" in Arabic but coined as a formal title by the Seljuks) and substantially regularised the political position of the new regime within the Abbasid constitutional framework. The Seljuks took on substantially the same constitutional role that the Buyids had occupied — the chief executive authority within the caliphate — but with the substantial doctrinal advantage of being Sunni rather than Shia and therefore substantially more theologically congenial to the caliph and the religious establishment.
Alp Arslan and Malik-Shah
The principal Seljuk political achievements occurred under the second and third sultans — Alp Arslan (1063–1072) and Malik-Shah (1072–1092) — and substantially under the administrative direction of the vizier Nizam al-Mulk (1018–1092), who served both sultans through a thirty-year tenure that constituted the principal continuous administrative authority of the period. Nizam al-Mulk's Siyasat-nama ("Book of Government"), composed in the late 1080s, is the principal medieval Islamic treatise on practical political administration and has remained one of the principal source texts for the medieval Islamic political tradition.
The territorial expansion under Alp Arslan and Malik-Shah was substantial. Alp Arslan's defeat of the Byzantine field army at Manzikert on the 26th of August 1071 substantially opened the central Anatolian plateau to Turkmen settlement and to the establishment of the Seljuk Sultanate of Rum (centred at Konya from the late eleventh century), a substantially separate but allied dynasty that would substantially persist as the principal political authority in Anatolia until the Mongol invasions of the thirteenth century. Malik-Shah's reign saw the substantial extension of Seljuk authority into Syria, Palestine, the Hejaz, and parts of Yemen. By Malik-Shah's death in 1092 the Seljuk realm extended from the Bosphorus to the Hindu Kush, with substantial subordinate dynasties of Seljuk relatives in Anatolia (the Rum Sultanate), Syria, Kerman and other regions.
The Nizamiya madrasas
The most consequential institutional innovation of the Seljuk period was the substantial development of the madrasa system — formal religious schools, endowed with permanent waqf (charitable endowment) revenues, with full-time stipendiary faculty and resident students. The Nizamiya madrasas — founded by Nizam al-Mulk in approximately 1067 at Baghdad and subsequently in Nishapur, Isfahan, Basra, Mosul, Herat and other principal cities — were the substantial institutional embodiment of the system and produced the substantial model for all subsequent Sunni religious-educational institutions.
The madrasas served three principal political functions. First, they trained the religious-administrative cadre that the Seljuk state required, providing a substantial supply of qualified scholars for judicial, administrative and educational positions. Second, they were the principal institutional vehicle for the substantial doctrinal consolidation of Sunni orthodoxy — particularly the Shafi'i and Hanafi legal traditions favoured by Nizam al-Mulk — against both the Shia tradition that had been institutionally privileged under the Buyids and the various heterodox movements (Isma'ili, Qarmatian, philosophical-rationalist) that the period had produced. Third, they were the substantial vehicle for the propagation of Sunni religious-political theology, particularly the doctrine of the religious legitimacy of the caliph-sultan dyarchy that the Seljuk-Abbasid arrangement required.
Al-Ghazali
The principal intellectual figure of the period was Abu Hamid al-Ghazali (1058–1111), the Persian-born theologian, jurist and Sufi mystic who held the principal chair at the Baghdad Nizamiya from 1091 until his substantial personal crisis and abandonment of academic position in 1095. Al-Ghazali's principal works — the Tahafut al-Falasifa ("Incoherence of the Philosophers", a substantial critique of the Aristotelian rationalist tradition of al-Farabi and Ibn Sina), the Ihya' Ulum al-Din ("Revival of the Religious Sciences", a substantial encyclopaedic synthesis of Sunni orthodoxy and Sufi mysticism), and the autobiographical al-Munqidh min al-Dalal ("Deliverance from Error") — substantially defined the institutional shape of Sunni Islamic religious culture for the subsequent eight centuries.
The substantial achievement of al-Ghazali's synthesis was the integration of the Sufi mystical tradition (which had previously existed somewhat outside the legal-theological mainstream of Sunni Islam) into the substantial orthodox institutional structure, with the substantial result that the subsequent Sunni tradition was substantially more accommodating of personal religious experience than the pre-Ghazalian tradition had been. The substantial consequence for the philosophical tradition was substantially less favourable: the Incoherence of the Philosophers substantially weakened the institutional position of the Aristotelian rationalist school within the Sunni religious establishment, and Sunni philosophical activity progressively diminished after the twelfth century while Shia and Iranian philosophical activity continued.
The First Crusade
The substantial external shock to the Seljuk system was the First Crusade of 1095–1099. The Crusader armies, which crossed Anatolia in 1097–98 and reached Antioch in October 1097, took Antioch on the 3rd of June 1098 and Jerusalem on the 15th of July 1099 — exploiting substantially the political fragmentation of the Seljuk realm after the substantial deaths of Nizam al-Mulk and Malik-Shah within weeks of each other in 1092, and the subsequent succession crises among the Seljuk family. The substantial failure of the Seljuk and Fatimid authorities to combine an effective response permitted the establishment of the Crusader states (the Kingdom of Jerusalem, the County of Edessa, the Principality of Antioch, the County of Tripoli) that constitute Volume XII of this library.
The Crusader presence in the Levant did not produce a substantial alteration of the overall Islamic political situation — the substantial proportion of the Islamic population and the substantial proportion of the empire's resources were not in the Crusader territories — but it produced a sustained ideological and military focus that would condition Islamic political-religious thought for the subsequent two centuries. The substantial Muslim military response was developed during the second half of the twelfth century by the Zengid dynasty of Mosul and substantially completed by Saladin (Salah al-Din) and his Ayyubid successors, who took Jerusalem in 1187 and substantially eliminated the Crusader states except for a residual coastal strip by the early thirteenth century.
The end of the Seljuk dominance
The substantial Seljuk political authority declined through the twelfth century as a consequence of the substantial succession crises within the family, the substantial growth of independent provincial dynasties (the Zengids of Mosul, the Ayyubids of Egypt and Syria, the Khwarazmian dynasty of Khwarazm), and the substantial recovery of the Abbasid caliphate's own political position under the caliphs al-Muqtafi (1136–1160), al-Mustanjid (1160–1170) and al-Mustadi (1170–1180). By 1180 the substantial Seljuk grand sultanate had become a relatively minor regional power in Khurasan; the principal political authorities in the central Islamic lands were the Ayyubids of Egypt-and-Syria, the Khwarazmians of central Asia, and the substantially restored Abbasid caliph at Baghdad. The substantial restoration under al-Nasir (1180–1225) is the subject of chapter VIII.
End of Chapter VII