Studies on the rituals of royalty have a long tradition in both ethnological and historical research. Whilst Fatimid rituals have already been analysed very thoroughly (P. Sanders, Ritual, Politics and the City in Fatimid Cairo, Albany 1994 and recently J. Oesterle, Kalifat und Königtum, Darmstadt 2009), the Umayyad and Abbasid caliphate have received less attention. This may be partly due to the success of 11th and 12th Sunnite theological and legal discourse that described the caliphate as a unique Muslim institution opposed to worldly kingship (mulk). However, Aziz al-Azmeh in his seminal study on Muslim Kingship (London 1997, 2001) has established the caliphate as an example of late antique and medieval monarchies by not confusing specific concepts of the historical sources (like mulk and khilāfa) with categories of modern historical analysis (like kingship and monarchy). The work of Andrew Marsham is another important contribution to a historical, not normative, understanding of the early Muslim caliphate that arose in the context of late antique Roman and Sasanian universal monarchy. With this topic, Marsham is faced with the well-known problem of written sources that become extant only from the mid-eighth century onwards conveying and modelling earlier documents in a different context. Throughout his study, Marsham pays particular attention to a critical reading of the sources by a careful and detailed assessment of the degree to which alleged texts of former periods might have been adapted or invented at the time they have been quoted by later compilers.
The Umayyads expressed their claims for universal monarchy by inscribing themselves into the tradition of late antique imperial power. The fresco at the palace of Quṣayr ʿAmra, showing the Umayyad caliph as a world ruler (recalling the Christian pantokrátōr) to whom the kings of Rome and Iran and other monarchs pay homage, is a highly pertinent example among other royal media such as coins, clothing and imperial architecture. But the Umayyads also continued a tradition that was shaped on the Arabian Peninsula at the time of the first four caliphs: the pledge of allegiance (bayʿa) by which the members of the umma acknowledged the new leader of their community. This was a new use of the bayʿa. The quranic bayʿa had been a religio-political covenant contracted before God, a pledge of loyalty or obedience to the Prophet as God's representative as well as a pledge for obedience in war. As a ritual confirmed by handshake, it was a continuation of pre-islamic practices of tribal alliances described by different concepts (ḥilf, ḥabl, ʿaqd) often implying one or several deities and the monotheist notions of covenant between God and humankind. In the conflicts during and after the reign of the third caliph ʿUthmān (d. 35/656), different factions had taken sides by giving or withholding the bayʿa. In relying on the bayʿa-ritual, therefore, the Umayyads applied the established model of nomad military agreements intrinsically linked to the covenant with God and His earthly representative, the caliph. The bayʿa thus became the main ritual of caliphal accession. In so doing, the Umayyads played down the consensual character (shūra) of the tribal bayʿa and shaped it as an instrument of monarchical power by introducing another element: the reigning caliph appointed one or two successors who took the bayʿa as the nominated wali al-ʿahd (being in succession to/in possession of the covenant). Umayyad court panegyrics and documents depicted the caliph as the legitimate representative of God's covenant, equating obedience to God with obedience to the Commander of the Faithful who acted as the righteous imām according to the archetypes of David and Salomon. In the later Umayyad period, the bayʿa and wilāyat al-ʿahd were written down in documents that were read publicly in the mosques, like the khutbas and other religious epistles. In the mid-eighth century, the written bayʿa became more elaborate, following a formal scheme in the framework of the emerging legal text genres. These formulas remained unchanged from the mid-ninth century onwards, but they were embedded in later Sunnite reasoning about the caliphate, when theological and legal scholars claimed an uninterrupted continuity to the time of the prophet. At the time of the decline of Abbasid imperial power, these canonical texts conflated Arab, post-Roman and post-Sasanian cultural practice into a coherent Islamic sacralized tradition and vision of the past with the Prophet at its centre.
Although Marsham considers other ritual and material elements of caliphal accession, he focuses on the bayʿa and wilāyat al-ʿahd (the latter not being practised after the ninth century) as the main threads of his analysis. The title of his book, however, evokes the expectation of an exploration of the whole inauguration ritual where the central element of the bayʿa is treated as one of its parts and systematically, not occasionally, analysed in relation to other ritual elements such as space, time, movement, emblems, actors, the body of the deceased predecessor and so on. This study, therefore, is less a work referring to methodological outlines and problems of ritual research, and more a meticulous – and much-needed – analysis of textual evidence for the bayʿa. This focus allows the author to analyse the bayʿa in the context of the changing political, societal, administrative, religious and scholarly conditions. The book impresses particularly because of the author's critical treatment of the sources and resulting historical approach. Andrew Marsham has not only filled an important gap by presenting a comprehensive study of the caliphal bayʿa up to the tenth century, his study is also an example of how to deconstruct a normative view of Islamic history that uncritically takes classical sacralizing Sunnite interpretations of the Muslim past for granted.
