Islam • 63came a folk hero. Championing the Mutazilites had done al-
Mamun no good; it had simply alienated the masses. At one
point, the caliph tried to reach out towards the Shiis by naming
Ali al-Rida, the Eighth Imam, as his heir, but the Shiis were,
like the Mutazilites, simply another spiritual and intellectual
elite and could not command the support of the ordinary peo-
ple. A few months later, al-Rida conveniently died- possibly
by foul play.
Later caliphs also tried to woo the Shiis and oscillated be-
tween one religious faction and another, to no avail. Caliph
al-Mutasim (83342) attempted to strengthen the monarchy
by making the army into his own personal corps. These
troops were Turkish slaves, who had been captured from be-
yond the River Oxus and converted to Islam. But this merely
separated him still further from the populace, and there was
tension between the Turkish soldiers and the people of Bagh-
dad. To alleviate this, the caliph moved his capital to Samarra,
some sixty miles to the south, but this simply isolated him
still more, while the Turks, who had no natural links with the
people, grew more powerful with every decade, until they
would eventually be able to wrest effective control of the em-
pire away from the caliphs. Increasingly, during the late ninth
and early tenth centuries, there were armed revolts by those
militant Shiis who were still committed to political activism
and had not retreated into mystical quietism, and the eco-
nomic crisis went from bad to worse.
But these years of political disintegration also saw the con-
solidation of what would become known as Sunni Islam.
Gradually, the various legists, the Mutazilites and the ahl al-
hadith pooled their differences and drew closer together. An
important figure in this process was Abu al-Hasan al-Ashari
(d. 935), who attempted to reconcile the theology of the Mu-
tazilites with that of the Hadith People. The Mutazilites had
been so fearful of anthropomorphic notions of God that they