munity after the death of mUhammad in 632 and
was claimed by many pretenders to that leader- ship. Another title given the caliph was “com- mander of the faithful” (amir al-muminin).
As a prophet, Muhammad had been a unique leader exercising absolute religious and political
aUthority. The caliphs were not prophets and
therefore could not exercise this dual authority in the same way, and yet the community was accustomed to leadership that was both political and religious. The first four caliphs, known as the Rashidun, or rightly guided, exercised some religious authority as companionsoFthe prophet,
but over time, the position came increasingly to be a political one.
The majority Sunni view among Muslims is that Muhammad did not appoint a successor, and so his companions and leaders within the community agreed upon abU bakr (r. 632–634).
There was no consensus, however, on whether
a caliph should be appointed or elected and by whom, on what basis the selection should be made, nor on the precise duties and responsi- bilities of the caliph. These questions would con- tinue to plague Islamic government throughout
the period of the caliphate. Abu Bakr appointed
Umaribnal-khattab (r. 634—644) as his succes-
sor, and it was during his caliphate that many of the early Arab Muslim conquests took place. Due in part to the legacy of the conquests, but even more to Umar’s ability to combine egalitarian leadership and religious piety, he came to symbol- ize the ideal caliph. His status was heightened by the fact that the reigns of Uthmanibn al-aFFan
(r. 644–656) and ali ibn abi talib (r. 656–661)
that followed him were marked by internal strife and civil war. These events led to the permanent division of the Muslim community into Shii and Sunni Islam and brought about the end of the Rashidun caliphate. Subsequently, few caliphs could be held up as ideal Islamic rulers. Rather, they inherited and exercised their power in a way similar to that of the kings and emperors in neighboring non-Islamic lands.
After the 10th century, the caliph’s power was overshadowed in the political realm by the
sUltans, and in the area of religion by the Ulama.
The caliph’s strength and significance was based primarily on his role as the symbolic head of the Islamic community. It was for this reason that the Ottoman sultan Selim (r. 1512–1520), upon con- quering the Islamic heartlands in the early 16th century, adopted the title of caliph in order to strengthen his religious legitimacy and authority.
As Ottoman power waned in relation to that of European rulers from the 18th century onward, Ottoman sultans sought to retain some authority by claiming to be the spiritual leaders of the Mus- lims and defenders of Islam. The Ottoman defeat in World War I, which led to the rise of the new Turkish Republic, meant the end of the caliphate. The founder of the new secular state of tUrkey,
mUstaFa kemal atatUrk, formally abolished it in
1924.
See also Fatimid dynasty; imam; government,
islamic; ottoman dynasty; sUnnism; Umayyad
caliphate.
Heather N. Keaney Further reading: Patricia Crone and Martin Hinds,
God’s Caliph (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press,
1986); Hugh Kennedy, The Prophet and the Age of the
Caliphates: The Islamic Near East from the Sixth to the Eleventh Century (London: Longman Press, 1986);
Wilfred Madelung, The Succession to Muhammad (Cam- bridge: Cambridge University Press, 1997).
caliphate
The caliphate is the office of religious and political ruler in Islamdom. It went through several stages of historical development. The first four caliphs
make up what is regarded by Muslims as the Rashidun, or the caliphate of the rightly guided (r. 632–661). These caliphs were all early converts to islam and close companions oF the prophet
Muhammad. For the most part, they continued to model the ideals of Islamic government: uphold- ing proper religious practice and social justice. It was during this period that Islam experienced its most rapid expansion into syria, iraq, persia, and
North Africa
The period of the rightly guided caliphate ended in civil war, and the capital of the Islamic empire and the caliphate moved from Medina to damascUs. There the Umayyad caliphate (r.
661–750) became increasingly secular, exercis- ing authority based on the power of the military rather than moral or religious aUthority. The
tension between religious legitimacy and secular authority eventually led to the overthrow of the Umayyads in the eighth century by the Abbasids, who moved the capital to baghdad, Iraq. The
early abbasid caliphate (750–1258) is regarded as
the golden age of Islamicate civilization.
In addition to its wealth and power, the caliphate symbolized the united Muslim com-
munity (umma), living proof that despite blood-
shed and civil war, God had not abandoned his community. When the caliphate’s political power began to decline, the Muslim community held even more tightly to the symbolic significance of the caliphate. Starting in the 10th century, a series of military commanders seized control of the military and political workings of the empire. Eventually, authority was divided up among these commanders, who were known as amirs or sUltans. Due to the symbolic and
religious significance of the caliphate, however, sultans claimed to rule on its behalf. Throughout the medieval period, the caliphate and sultan- ate complemented each other, with the former lending religious legitimacy to the latter, while the sultanate provided the political and military power to defend Islamdom.
The sultans proved incapable, however, of defending Islam and the caliphate from the Mon- gols, who destroyed Baghdad and the Abbasid Caliphate in 1258. Even though the mamlUk
sultans of egypt attempted to continue the caliph-
ate in cairo through an Abbasid survivor, the
caliphate no longer carried the same religious significance. When the Ottoman Turks defeated the Mamluks in 1517, they absorbed the caliphate into their sultanate.
When the Turkish nationalist mUstaFa kemal
atatUrk (d. 1938) dismantled the Ottoman Empire
and established tUrkey as a modern, secular
nation-state, he formally abolished the caliphate in 1924. This marked the symbolic end of an era and made official what had in many ways been a longstanding reality. Today there are still reform- ers who call for a restoration of the caliphate, believing that it is necessary for enforcing sharia
and establishing God’s government on Earth. See also imam; Fatimiddynasty; khilaFat move- ment; ottomandynasty.
Heather N. Keaney Further reading: Halil Inalcik, The Ottoman Empire:
The Classical Age 1300–1600 (London: Phoenix Press,
2000); Hugh Kennedy, The Armies of the Caliphs: Mili-
tary Society in the Early Islamic State (New York: Rout-
ledge, 2001); Donald Quataert, The Ottoman Empire,
1700–1922 (New York: Cambridge University Press,
2000); David Wasserstein, The Caliphate in the West:
An Islamic Institution in the Iberian Peninsula (Oxford:
Clarendon Press, 1993).
calligraphy
The term calligraphy comes from Greek kalli- graphia, meaning beautiful writing, or the visual elaboration of written scripts known in Arabic as khatt (line).
Within the field of Islamic art, calligraphy
refers to stylized scripts in languages that use (or used) the Arabic alphabet, among them Arabic,
Persian, Urdu, and Ottoman Turkish. The word that designates the practice and the forms of styl- ized writing is khatt, whose basic meaning as line associates it with both architectural planning and geometry. As calligraphy, khatt means penman- ship or an individual hand, and khattat applies to a master practitioner of khatt as a visual art form (but also to sign painters).
The status of Arabic as the shared language of Islamic scriptures led Orientalist historians to associate stylized scripts exclusively with reli- gious values and, at the same time, to consider this writing a subset of (meaningless) arabesqUe
ornamentation. The practice of stylized writing, in fact, has a number of internal histories that governed forms, aesthetic criteria, and contextual meanings. These histories show that changes in the forms of letters indicate historical disruptions rather than continuities; the adoption or rejection of particular scripts was a conscious means of expressing desired meanings through form.
The rationalization of scripts in 10th- and 11th-century iraq produced a new canon of
writing in which clarity, legibility, and harmony defined aesthetic quality in khatt. But this writ- ing reform also allowed its Abbasid sponsors to order and control the output of scribes and to
create a visual system that immediately expressed loyalty to them as opposed to rivals such as the Fatimids, who continued the use of angular forms. This example demonstrates that the much romanticized art of Islamic calligraphy neither follows an evolutionary line in which angular letters naturally mutated into rounded ones, nor reflects identical and unchanging Islamic ideals, but rather highlights distinctions among them. Qazi Ahmad’s 17th-century Persian treatise on calligraphy similarly illustrates views governed by a different time, place, and group ideology and ascribes the invention of beautiful writing to Imam Ali (d. 661), patron saint of Iranian callig- raphers of the time.
Finally, the United States postal stamp designed by khattat Muhammad Zakariya (whose training comprises a spiritual content) illustrates the use of calligraphy to symbolize the presence of Muslims in the country. In this instance, an official document again embraces khatt as a sign of a particular community but deploys it as an item of identity politics in a new cultural and historical setting that reinterprets it to fit this context.
See also arabic langUage and literatUre;
Fatimid dynasty; ibn al-baWWab, abU al-hasan
aliibn hilal; ibn mUqla, abU ali mUhammad.
Nuha N. N. Khoury Further reading: Oleg Grabar, The Mediation of Orna-
ment (Princeton, N.J.: Princeton University Press, 1992);
Qazi Ahmad bin Mir Munshi al-Husayni, Gulistan-i
Hunar, trans. V. Minorsky, Calligraphers and Painters: A Treatise by Qadi Ahmad, Son of Mir Munshi (circa A.H. 1015/A.D. 1606) (Washington, D.C.: Smithsonian
Institution, 1959); Yasin Safadi, Islamic Calligraphy (Boulder, Colo.: Shambhala Publications, 1978); Yasser Tabbaa, The Transformation of Islamic Art During The
Sunni Revival (Seattle: University of Washington Press,
2001).