How the caliphs protected Muslims

The caliphs were expected to keep Muslims safe and to answer to Allah for it. They, and sultans who took on the duty, fed Medina in a famine, built water stations on the pilgrim road, guarded the Hajj caravans, sent soldiers and craftsmen to Aceh and endowed kitchens and hospitals. They also fought each other, and Baghdad fell in 1258.

A shield that answers for itself

Muslims understood the office through a hadith. Abu Hurayrah heard the Prophet ﷺ say:

Muslim’s version reads “if he commands otherwise” in the last line. In both, the duty to protect and the ruler’s reckoning before Allah sit side by side.

Al-Nawawi, writing in Damascus in the 13th century, reads the shield as a cover: the imam keeps the enemy from harming Muslims, and keeps people from harming one another (Sharh Sahih Muslim). Another hadith says that each of you is a shepherd, answerable for his flock, and names the ruler first, then the man of the house, the woman in her husband’s home and the servant (Bukhari 893, sahih (al-Bukhari); Muslim 1829, sahih (Muslim)).

Umar and the Year of Ashes, 639

Ibn Sa’d reports that after the Hajj of 18 AH (the 18th year after the Hijrah), drought killed the herds of the Hejaz and people ate ground bones. The land turned black like ash, which gave the year its name, and in his account the famine lasted nine months. Al-Tabari dates it to 18 AH (639).

Letters to the provinces

Umar wrote to his commanders for food: Amr ibn al-As, whom Ibn Sa’d places in Egypt, Mu’awiya in Syria and Sa’d ibn Abi Waqqas in Iraq, as Ibn Sa’d reports through al-Waqidi. Ibn Kathir gives the plea as “Help, for the ummah of Muhammad ﷺ!”

Umar’s men met the supply camels at the edges of Syria and Iraq, slaughtered them, and handed out flour and cloaks. Al-Waqidi’s figures, as Ibn Sa’d gives them: 20 ships and 1,000 camels from Amr, 3,000 camels from Mu’awiya, and 2,000 from Kufa.

Ibn Kathir, writing in Damascus in the 14th century, flags one problem. By his reckoning, Egypt had not yet been conquered in 18 AH.

The caliph’s own table

Al-Tabari reports that Umar swore off ghee, milk and meat until the rains came, and gives his question: how could he care for his people if he did not suffer what they suffered? Ibn Sa’d adds that he lived on bread and oil until his skin darkened.

At night, Ibn Sa’d continues, Umar prayed and walked the paths into Medina, saying: “O Allah, do not let the ummah of Muhammad ﷺ perish at my hands” (our translation). If supplies failed, he said, he would lodge a hungry household with every household that had food. People, he said, do not perish on half a stomach.

Umar’s night rounds

One night at Sirar, near Medina, Umar and his freedman Aslam found a woman at a pot, her children crying from hunger. Al-Tabari, reporting from Aslam, says the pot held only water, to quiet them until they slept, and that she blamed Umar.

Umar carried flour and fat from the store himself, asking Aslam whether he would carry his burden on the Day of Resurrection. Then he cooked and fed the children. Later retellings fill the pot with stones; al-Tabari has water, and does not place the story in the famine year.

Ibn Sa’d reports that Umar kept flour, dates, raisins and sawiq, a toasted grain meal, for stranded travellers, and placed supplies on the road from Mecca to Medina to carry them “from water to water”. Through al-Waqidi, he gives Umar’s fear that Allah would ask him about “a camel that died lost on the bank of the Euphrates”. We did not find the popular version, a mule stumbling in Iraq, in Ibn Sa’d or al-Tabari.

Zubaydah’s road to Mecca

The pilgrim route from Kufa to Mecca was old: TDV records Kufic inscriptions on it dated 40 and 56 AH (660-661 and 675-676). The early Abbasid caliphs al-Saffah, al-Mahdi and Harun al-Rashid built rest stations, wells, cisterns, markers and signal towers along it (TDV, entry by the Saudi archaeologist Saad al-Rashid).

The largest effort came from Zubaydah bint Ja’far, Harun’s wife, who died in Baghdad on 11 July 831, and the road took her name. TDV counts 99 stations and about 90 cisterns, the largest 50 metres across. It records that she spent 3 million dinars on the road, and in 213 AH (828) brought spring water to Arafat and on by channels to Mecca, the work known as Ayn Zubaydah.

Ibn Jubayr, a traveller from al-Andalus, left Mecca with the Iraqi caravan in April 1184 and crossed the road in Muharram 580 (April to May 1184). He wrote that its cisterns, pools, wells and stations were Zubaydah’s works, still serving pilgrims, and that without them the road could not be travelled. At al-Tha’labiyyah he records seven men crushed or drowned in the scramble for water.

Amorium, 838

In 223 AH, which fell in 837 and 838, the Byzantine emperor Theophilus attacked the frontier town of Zibatra. Al-Tabari reports that his troops killed the men, enslaved the women and children, and burned the town.

Refugees reached the caliph al-Mu’tasim at Samarra, and al-Tabari says he called his men to arms from his palace. TDV dates his march to 1 April 838.

Al-Tabari adds that as the caliph set out, he sent commanders to help Zibatra; they found the emperor gone and stayed until its people had returned to their villages. Theophilus was defeated in July, and Amorium, near today’s Afyon, fell on 12 August 838 (TDV).

The cry that came later

The woman appears in later works. Ibn al-Jawzi, writing in Baghdad before his death in 1201, gives it as something that “reached us”: a Muslim woman taken captive cried “Wa Mu’tasimah!”, and the caliph answered, “Labbayk, labbayk!” Ibn al-Athir, writing in Mosul around 1230, makes her a Hashimite captive.

Ibn al-Tiqtaqa’s al-Fakhri, written about 1302, tells it too and opens with “it is said”. Abu Tammam’s ode on the victory, composed at the time, has the caliph answering “a voice from Zibatra”. The later versions give that voice a woman and her words.

Guarding the Hajj, 1517-1915

The office of amir al-hajj, commander of the pilgrimage, began after the conquest of Mecca in 8 AH (630), TDV records. The Ottomans took on the duty by war with another Muslim dynasty: Selim I defeated the Mamluks at Marj Dabiq on 24 August 1516 and outside Cairo on 22 January 1517 (TDV).

Two caravans, two commanders

From 1517 the Ottomans ran two great caravans, from Damascus and Cairo, each with its own amir al-hajj. Garrisons stayed all year at the stations on the Damascus road to guard stored food, and the Cairo caravan travelled with 500 to 2,000 soldiers and its own judge (TDV). Two years after a Bedouin attack in 1558, Süleyman ordered forts on the route, among them Tabuk, with a mosque, a well and two pools (TDV).

Tents and hot meals for the poor

At the end of the 16th century the Damascus caravan set aside 60 camels for poor pilgrims, some for food such as hardtack, the rest to carry the weak. At every halt tents went up for the poor and hot meals were served in the sultan’s name, and pilgrims who died were shrouded and buried (TDV, section by Abdülkadir Özcan).

Waqfs, endowments for good causes, paid for this. One left by the Mamluk sultan Qansuh al-Ghawri was still working in the 1580s (TDV).

Paying the tribes

Safety was also bought. TDV records that from 1596 to 1615 the budget of the Ottoman province of Egypt paid Bedouin tribes 5,100 to 5,800 gold coins a year, and that of Damascus 9,057 to 11,678. Late payments could bring attacks, and commanders sometimes held hostages from Bedouin families.

It did not always hold. TDV records heavy attacks in the 1630s, 1670s and 1750s, and the last of them, on the returning Damascus caravan in 1757, cost many pilgrims their lives.

The surre

Each year a procession called the surre carried money and goods to the people of Mecca and Medina. TDV says the custom is usually traced to the Abbasid caliph al-Mahdi (775-785). The Ottomans sent it every year from 1517 to 1915, except in years of the early 1800s when the Hejaz was outside their control.

In 1837 it went overland from Istanbul by way of Damascus: 54 halts on the way out, and 90 days on the road there and back. After bandits seized it near Payas in 1863, it went by sea (TDV). The Hejaz Railway later changed the route again.

Help for Aceh, 1560s

Aceh, a sultanate in northern Sumatra, faced Portuguese fleets in the Indian Ocean. Selim II’s letter of 1568 records Aceh’s complaint: the Portuguese had captured merchant and pilgrim ships bound for Mecca, and fired on and sunk the rest.

TDV records that in 1565 Sultan Ala’uddin Ri’ayat Shah of Aceh asked Süleyman for help. After Süleyman died on campaign at Szigetvár, the envoys offered their allegiance to Selim II and agreed a defensive pact in 1567.

What was promised, and what arrived

Selim ordered cannon, muskets and craftsmen, and 17 warships were assigned, but a revolt in Yemen kept the fleet in the Red Sea and put the expedition off by a year (TDV, entry by Numan Kurtulmuş). The ships and soldiers Selim did send carried a decree and a khutbah text, and most of the party settled in Aceh (TDV).

Al-Raniri’s Bustan al-Salatin, a chronicle written in Aceh around 1644, says the “Sultan of Rum” sent the craftsmen who cast Aceh’s great cannon. The Ottoman scholar Katib Çelebi wrote in his geography, the Cihannüma, that the Acehnese learned cannon-casting from the Ottomans (TDV).

Free kitchens and free hospitals

Much of this care ran on waqfs, which our page on awqaf covers in full. Three examples show who was fed or treated, and who paid.

The Haseki Sultan kitchen, Jerusalem

Hürrem Sultan, Süleyman’s wife, built a complex in Jerusalem in 1551 with a mosque, a madrasa, a lodging house and a public kitchen that fed hundreds of guests, Sufis, students and poor people (TDV). Villages around Ramla funded its waqf, and after her death in 1558 Süleyman added four more near Sidon.

Nur al-Din’s hospital, Damascus

Nur al-Din founded a hospital in Damascus in 1154. TDV says a captured Frankish king’s ransom paid for it, without naming him, and that it taught medicine; Ibn al-Nafis studied there (entry by Arslan Terzioğlu).

In 1184 Ibn Jubayr described the city’s newer hospital, which TDV identifies as this one. It cost about 15 dinars a day and kept registers of patients and spending, and doctors examined the sick every morning. The mentally ill were treated too, though kept in chains.

Qalawun’s hospital, Cairo

Al-Maqrizi, quoted by the historian Ahmad Isa, says Qalawun, then a Mamluk amir and later sultan, was cured in Damascus in 1276 by medicines from Nur al-Din’s hospital, and vowed to build one. His Mansuri hospital was finished in Cairo in 1285, funded by shops, baths, inns and estates.

Qalawun endowed it, he said, “for my equals and those beneath me”. The deed names the sick of the Muslims, rich and poor, residents and visitors, with nothing to pay, in wards for fevers, eye disease, wounds, women and the mentally ill.

Waqfs could fail too. Al-Maqrizi tells of a 14th-century supervisor who could not read the accounts and neglected the patients until he was removed.

The honest record

The office that fed Medina in 639 also failed Muslims, sometimes badly.

Muslims fighting Muslims

The caliph Uthman was killed in Medina on 17 June 656. The Battle of the Camel followed near Basra in late 656, and at Siffin, on the Euphrates, the main battle began on 19 July 657, after weeks of skirmishes and a truce (TDV). TDV notes that sources give about 70,000 dead at Siffin, a figure it calls exaggerated.

In 68 AH (688), during the next civil war, every claimant to the caliphate named his own amir al-hajj, and four of them stood at Arafat (TDV). TDV adds that they did their duties without fighting one another.

Mecca, 930

In 317 AH (January 930), with the caliph al-Muqtadir weakened by a palace coup early in 929, the Qarmatian leader Abu Tahir attacked the pilgrims in Mecca. Ibn Kathir records pilgrims killed at the Ka’bah, bodies thrown into Zamzam, and the Black Stone carried off for 22 years.

Baghdad, 1258

The Mongols entered Baghdad at the end of Muharram 656, Ibn Kathir writes, and the killing went on for 40 days. He dates the death of the caliph al-Musta’sim to 14 Safar 656 (about 20 February 1258), is unsure how he died, and gives the dead only as reports: 800,000, 1.8 million or 2 million. The Iraqi historian Abd al-Aziz al-Duri, writing in TDV, notes that the later sources give the higher figures, and that the true toll, though hard to fix, passed 100,000.

The Abbasid caliphate in Baghdad ended there. In 1261 the Mamluk sultan Baybars installed an Abbasid as caliph in Cairo.

Protection that served the protector

TDV is frank that protection also built power. TDV records that the Mamluks used the Hajj and aid to the Hejaz to make their rule legitimate. They competed with Yemen’s Rasulid rulers over who sent the surre and the Ka’bah’s cover, until Baybars went on Hajj in 1269 and settled it in the Mamluks’ favour (TDV).

TDV says the same of the Ottomans: a safe Hajj made the sultan’s rule legitimate, and the surre reminded everyone of his influence over the Hejaz.

Read next: The railway the ummah helped pay for, on how the Damascus pilgrim route changed in 1908.

Sources

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18. Casim Avcı, “Mu’tasım-Billâh”, TDV İslâm Ansiklopedisi: the dates of the Amorium campaign (Turkish). https://islamansiklopedisi.org.tr/mutasim-billah
19. Ş. Tufan Buzpınar, “Surre”, TDV İslâm Ansiklopedisi: the custom, the Mamluk-Rasulid rivalry and Baybars’ Hajj of 1269, the 1837 route, 1863-1864, the registers, the surre as a reminder of influence (Turkish). https://islamansiklopedisi.org.tr/surre
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26. Feridun Emecen, “Selim I”, TDV İslâm Ansiklopedisi: Marj Dabiq (24 August 1516) and al-Raydaniyya (22 January 1517) (Turkish). https://islamansiklopedisi.org.tr/selim-i
27. Anthony Reid, Southeast Asia in the Age of Commerce, 1450-1680, vol. 2 (New Haven: Yale University Press, 1993), pp. 146-147 and 221-222, where Selim II’s letter of 1568 (as published by Saffet Bey, Tarih-i Osmani Encümeni Mecmuası, 1912) and al-Raniri’s Bustan al-Salatin (about 1644) are quoted. https://archive.org/details/southeastasiaina0002reid
28. UNESCO World Heritage Centre, Tentative Lists: the Darb Zubaydah entries of Saudi Arabia (ref. 6577) and Iraq (ref. 6576), submitted in January 2022. https://whc.unesco.org/en/tentativelists/6577/ and https://whc.unesco.org/en/tentativelists/6576/. Confirmed by EAMENA (Endangered Archaeology in the Middle East and North Africa), “Surveying Darb Zubaydah, Iraq”. https://eamena.org/article/surveying-darb-zubaydah-iraq

Hadith on this page

• Bukhari 893, sahih (al-Bukhari)
• Bukhari 2957, sahih (al-Bukhari)
• Muslim 1829, sahih (Muslim)
• Muslim 1841, sahih (Muslim)