A History of Islamic Societies

With the centralization of state power came a new rhetoric of legitimacy. The early caliphate had been a series of individual reigns deeply dependent on the religious qualities of the caliphs, and their personal connection to the Prophet. After the first four caliphs, the various contenders for the position adopted different claims. ʿAli and his descendants claimed the right to the caliphate as a matter of family relation to the Prophet, the Kharijis on the basis of religious purity, and others on the basis of their Meccan tribal heritage. The Caliph Muʿawiya asserted the legitimacy of his reign in terms of Arabian tribal culture, but after the second civil war ʿAbd al-Malik based his claim to rule on his services to Islam.

At the same time, the caliphs adopted the ancient symbols of divinely granted rule expressed in poetry and literature, philosophy and science, and art and architecture. To define the authority of the regime and the legitimacy of the ruling classes, they propagated a cosmopolitan culture implicitly wider in scope than Islam. A literary and philosophical culture presented a vision of the universe as a whole, of the role of the state and the ruler in the divine plan, of the functioning of human society, and of the nature of human beings and their destiny in this world and the next. In Umayyad and ʿAbbasid times, this vision was expressed partly in Islamic religious terms and partly in literary and artistic terms inherited from Greco-Roman, Persian, and Indian cultures.