Forging Historical and Diplomatic Ties in the Islamic West: The Letter of a Berber Emir to the Umayyad Caliph, 317 ah (929 CE)

Summary

At the very end of the Hijri era's third century (297 ah/909 ce), the Islamic world was shaken by the proclamation of the Fatimid caliphate in Ifrīqiya. Claiming to be the rightful leaders of the Muslim community by tracing back their ancestry to Muḥammad through his daughter Fāṭima, the Fatimids were an Ismaili Shīʿite family who now also claimed sovereignty over the Islamic world, which made them the direct rival of the Baghdad-based Abbasid caliphate. Throughout the Islamic West, or Maghrib, that event had many repercussions, especially in al-Andalus. Here, power belonged to the Umayyad dynasty, which had taken root after 138/756, when the prince ʽAbd al-Raḥmān, fleeing to escape Abbasid persecution, settled in Córdoba and founded an emirate independent from Baghdad. Among his siblings, ʿAbd al-Raḥmān III, who was appointed emir of Cordoba in 300/912, eventually proclaimed himself caliph in a letter written and sent by the palatine chancery to every state agent, dated the day of 2 ḏū-l-ḥiǧǧa 316/January 16, 929.5

In the following years, ʿAbd al-Raḥmān developed a special relationship with the opposite shore of the Mediterranean (al-ʿidwa), known as the “Far Maghrib” (Maġrib al-Aqṣā). This region was conceptualized in a very specific way, being considered a buffer zone protecting al-Andalus from the Fatimid caliphate. But actually, although Umayyads and Fatimid rulers were both claiming to be the rightful caliphs, their rivalry was mostly considered by medieval Arabic authors as a later manifestation of the rivalry that opposed ʿAlī b. Abī Ṭālib and his kin to the Umayyad family, from the very beginning of the Islamic state. Accordingly, the Umayyad caliph pursued a very complex strategy in the Far Maghrib. On the one hand, with the support of local pro-Umayyad parties, he took control of several coastal cities, such as Ceuta (319/931), Asilah (320/932), and Melilla (324/936), as well as Tangier before the middle of the century. Meanwhile, on the other hand, he engaged in active diplomacy in order to encourage local actors to join his cause: especially the Berber emirs whose loyalty to the Fatimid caliphate was fickle. Among them was the lineage of the Banū Khazar, from the tribe of the Maghrāwa, who belonged to the great Zanāta confederacy and lived in the western plains of the Central Maghrib.