Islam. 85perils which, they felt, put the moral, cultural and religious
well-being of the ummah in jeopardy, and even threatened its
very survival.
It was the Seljuk Turks who, more by accident than de-
sign, gave fullest expression to the new order in the Fertile
Crescent, where this decentralization was more advanced.
The Seljuks were Sunnis, with a strong tendency towards
Sufism. Their empire was ruled from 1063 to 1092 by the
brilliant Persian vizier Nizamulmulk, who wanted to use the
Turks to restore unity to the empire and rebuild the old
Abbasid bureaucracy. But it was too late to revive Baghdad,
since the agricultural region of the Sawad, the basis of its
economy, was in irreversible decline. Nor was Nizamulmulk
able to control the Seljuk army, a cavalry force of nomadic
tribesmen who were still a law unto themselves and moved
with their herds wherever they wished. But, with the aid of
a new slave corps, Nizamulmulk did build an empire which
reached as far as Yemen in the south, to the Syr-Oxus basin
in the east and into Syria in the west. This new Seljuk Em-
pire had very few formal political institutions, and order was
imposed at the local level by the amirs and the ulama, who set
up an ad hoc partnership. The amirs who commanded the
various districts pre-empted Nizamulmulk's centralizing
plans by becoming virtually independent, administering
their own regions and taking the land revenues directly
from the inhabitants instead of from Baghdad. This was not
a feudal system, since, whatever the vizier may have in-
tended, the amirs were not the vassals of the caliph nor of
the Seljuk Sultan Malikshah. The amirs were nomads who
had no interest in farming their territory, so they did not
form a feudal aristocracy, tied to the land. They were sol-
diers, and not much interested in the civil life of their sub-
jects, which became in effect the province of the ulama.
The ulama held these scattered military regimes together.