The Rightly Guided Ones 137sacring all the Umayya they could find. But the Shi‘ah ultimately
rejected Abassid claims of legitimacy and, as a result, were ruthlessly
persecuted by the new Caliphs.
While continuing to rule as secular kings, the Abassid Caliphs
embroiled themselves far more deeply in religious matters than had
their Umayyad predecessors. As we shall see, the seventh Abassid
Caliph, al-Ma’mun (d. 833), even attempted to impose a measure of
imperial orthodoxy upon the Muslims under his rule by launching a
short-lived, and ultimately unsuccessful, religious inquisition against
those Ulama who disagreed with his theological beliefs.
Although their dynasty lasted well into the eleventh century, the
later Abassid Caliphs were nothing more than figureheads who
wielded no direct authority over the Muslim lands. Even Baghdad,
their capital, was under the control of a Shi‘ite conglomerate of aristo-
cratic Iranian families called the Buyids, who from 932 to 1062 C.E.
ran all affairs of state but still allowed the Abassid Caliph to remain on
his powerless throne. Meanwhile, in Cairo, the Fatimids (909–1171)—
Shi‘ites who claimed descent from Ali’s wife and Muhammad’s daugh-
ter, Fatima—established themselves as Baghdad’s rivals, maintaining
political control over everything from Tunisia to Palestine. And in
Spain, a lone descendant of the Umayya, Abd al-Rahman, who had
managed to escape from the massacre that took place in Syria,
founded his own dynasty that not only lasted well into the fifteenth
century but became the paradigm of Muslim-Jewish-Christian relations.
The Persian Buyid chiefs were eventually replaced by the ethnic
Turks who founded both the Ghaznavid Dynasty (977–1186), which
claimed suzerainty over northeastern Iran, Afghanistan, and northern
India, and the Saljuq Dynasty (1038–1194), which ruled most of the
lands east of that. It was the Turks who, infiltrating the various sul-
tanates as hired militia, finally managed to reunite most of the Muslim
lands under the single Caliphate of the Ottomans: the Sunni dynasty
that ruled from their capital in Istanbul from 1453 until 1924, when
they were displaced by the victors of World War I.
There is no longer any such thing as a Caliph. With the rise of the
modern nation-state in the Middle East, Muslims have been strug-
gling to reconcile their dual identities as both citizens of independent