Caliph, << KAY lihf >>, was the title used by the men who succeeded the Prophet Muhammad as rulers of Islamic states. The office these men held was called the caliphate. Islamic empires emerged in the A.D. 600’s and flourished for several centuries. Early Islamic empires covered a vast area stretching from Central Asia to Morocco and Spain.
According to Islamic tradition, in about 610, Muhammad began to receive revelations from God and began to preach the religion of Islam in the Arabian city of Mecca. Those who accepted his message were later called Muslims. In 622, Muhammad moved to the Arabian city of Medina, where he became the political and military leader of a rapidly growing Islamic state.
After Muhammad’s death in 632, the first four caliphs were Abū Bakr, who ruled from 632 to 634; Umar ibn al-Khattāb, who ruled from 634 to 644; Uthmān ibn Affān, who ruled from 644 to 656; and Alī ibn Abī Tālib, who ruled from 656 to 661. Most Muslims know the first four caliphs as the Rāshidūn, or rightly guided. They were not prophets. They governed an Islamic state from its capital at Medina and continued to extend the borders of that state in an effort to create an empire. Most historians believe that during this period, powerful Muslims elected the caliphs and then swore allegiance to them.
In 661, members of the Umayyad family, led by Mu`āwiyah ibn Abī Sufyān, established a caliphate. Mu`āwiyah, who had opposed the caliphate of Alī, moved the Islamic capital to Damascus in Syria.
The Umayyad caliphs presented themselves as men whom God had chosen for the office. They were succeeded by their sons or other male relatives. Many Muslims opposed hereditary succession, preferring a process of election or appointment. Some maintained that the best Muslim should be caliph, even if that were an enslaved person. Other Muslims claimed that the caliph should be descended from the Prophet Muhammad through Alī, who was Muhammad’s cousin and son-in-law. The Umayyads extended the empire into Afghanistan and Central Asia in the east and across North Africa and into Spain in the west.
Members of the Abbāsid family overthrew the Umayyads in 750 and established a new hereditary caliphate in what is now Iraq. They began building a new capital, Baghdad, in 762. The Abbāsids descended from Muhammad’s uncle al-Abbās ibn Abd al-Muttalib, which they claimed justified their position of authority. Like the Umayyads, Abbāsid caliphs associated their reign with the grace of God. The caliph Abū Ja`far al-Mansūr, who ruled from 754 to 775, was known as “the power of God on earth.”
By the mid-900’s, the empire under the Abbāsids was breaking up. Local leaders governed lands that had once been centrally controlled from Baghdad. At the same time, in the western part of the empire, new caliphates emerged and broke away from Baghdad. Thus, for much of the period from the mid-900’s to the mid-1200’s, the Abbāsids ruled the Muslim world in name only. Most of the caliphs were puppet rulers, serving at the whim of military dictators.
The Mongols conquered Baghdad in 1258 and killed the ruling Abbāsid caliph. Two years later, the Mamluks defeated the Mongols in a decisive battle in Palestine. They then took a surviving member of the Abbāsid family to Cairo, Egypt. There, he served as caliph to legitimize the Mamluk sultanate in Egypt.
Centuries later, many sultans (rulers) of the Ottoman Empire, based in what is now Turkey, claimed to rule the Muslim world as caliphs. The Ottoman Empire ended in 1922, and two years later, Turkish president Mustafa Kemal (later called Kemal Atatürk) abolished the caliphate.
