Caliph, Sultan and Emir are the Islamic world's names for religious leaders and national monarchs. In different historical periods, the meanings and powers of the three titles are also changing, and their origin and development process is a brief history of the Islamic world.
In 630 AD, Muhammad led an army to retake Mecca, and Islam established its dominance in the Arabian Peninsula. From the very beginning, Islam was fundamentally different from other religions. When Christianity and Buddhism were founded, there was already a mature political system in the local area, and religion was only used by rulers to transform and use to strengthen the regime. At the time of the founding of Islam, the Arab region was scattered, and it was the emergence of Islam that united the Arabian Peninsula into a country. Elsewhere it is a regime that needs a religion to rule steadily, and in the Arabian Peninsula a religion needs a regime to form a state. Therefore, the biggest feature of Islamic countries is the unity of church and state, and the caliph, which integrates religion and royal power, has entered the stage of history under such circumstances.
The rise of Islam
In 632 AD, Muhammad died, and since Muhammad had declared himself the last prophet sent by Allah, there would be no more messengers of Allah in the world. So the leaders of the Muslim world after Muhammad could only be Muhammad's agents, and the office of caliph (meaning agent of the Prophet) came from this. Abu Bakr (reigned 632~634), Umar (reigned 634~644), Osman (reigned 644~656), Ali (reigned 656~661), is the caliph elected by the Islamic world after Muhammad, known in history as the "Four Orthodox Caliphs".
Abu Bakr was Muhammad's father-in-law and was the prophet's right-hand man along with Umar. With Umar's support, Abu Bakr became the first caliph, and Umar became his deputy. The two worked together to balance the forces after the Prophet Muhammad and maintain the stable development of Islam.
After Abu Bakr, Umar succeeded as caliph. In order to divert internal contradictions and spread Islam, Umar launched the Great Conquest Movement. At that time, the Byzantine Empire and the Persian Empire were both defeated due to long-term hegemony, and the Arab army under the leadership of the famous generals Khalid and Amr included Iraq, Syria, Egypt, and Persia into the territory. But as Islam rushed out of the Arabian Peninsula, the caliphate struggled to control the situation. In the face of practical interests, the initial religious fervor has gradually been replaced by political battle.
The expansion of the Arab Empire
From Muhammad to Umar, early Islamic leaders lived frugally, immersed themselves in the study of classical faith, and organized an Arab nation through religion. But by the time of the third caliph, the Ottoman region under Islam had long since surpassed the backward and barren Arabian Peninsula, and the newly conquered regions, although religiously converted to Islam, were far more advanced in political structure than the Arabian Peninsula. The theocratic caliphate alone could not keep the empire running, and at a time when a crisis broke out within the upper echelons of the Arab empire.
The Ottoman life was extravagant and cronyistic, and the Umayyad family members of the family were placed in important positions, which attracted opposition from all forces. In June 656, Ottoman was hacked to death at his residence in Medina by rebel soldiers from Iraq and Egypt. Muhammad's cousin and son-in-law Ali succeeded him as caliph. The opposition accused Ali of being behind the assassination of Ottomans and refused to recognize Ali as caliphate. In October, Muhammad's widow Aisha (daughter of Abu Bakr) and opposition leaders Telha and Zubair led troops in a decisive battle with Ali near Basra, and the camel became the focus of the battle because Aisha rode in a camel sedan during the battle and constantly called on soldiers to fight Ali, which became the focus of the battle, which became known as the "Camel War".
The Battle of the Camel was the first large-scale civil war within Islam, with Ali victorious, Telha and Zubair killed, and Aisha captured. However, many of the Prophet's disciples were killed in this battle, which made Ali blamed by many forces. In 657, Osman's nephew Muawiyah, the governor of Syria, rebelled, and the two sides fought fiercely on the Suifen Plain on the Euphrates River on the Syrian border. At first, Ali's army gained the upper hand and almost won. At the moment of crisis, Amr proposed to Muawiyah that soldiers provoke the Qur'an with guns, shouting "Let Allah rule," and demanding that the fighting stop and peace talks be held. After the battle of camels, the soldiers were tired of fighting each other, and the Lord and the faction had the majority, and Ali had to accept the peace talks, giving Muawiya a chance to breathe.
Due to Ali's compromise, the main war faction in the army fled in anger and became known as the Hawalji faction. Ali's forces were greatly damaged by the split and were forced to accept the decision that both sides would give up their caliphate positions. Hawaliji sent out and chose a caliph to contend with Ali and Muawiyah. In 661, the Hawali faction sent two assassins to assassinate Ali and Muawiya respectively. As a result, Ali was assassinated, and Muawiya was only wounded. After Ali's death, Muawiyah was invincible and elected caliph.
When Muawiyah was elected, in order to stabilize the situation, he pretended to promise that Ali's son Hussein would succeed the caliphate after his death. However, as his power became secured, Muawiyah made no secret of nurturing his son Yezid as his heir. In 680, when Muawiya died and Yezid succeeded him as caliph, Hussein refused to recognize Yezid's legitimacy and went to Kufa to prepare to lead the struggle against Yezid. Yezid sent troops to kill Hussein in Karbala on the way. The move led to a radical break between Shiites and Sunnis and marked the replacement of the caliphate electoral system by hereditary systems.
During the Umayyad dynasty and later the Abbasid dynasty, the caliphate was hereditary, no different from the emperors of other regions. The caliph does not need to have extensive knowledge and religious practice, as long as it is the blood heir of the previous caliph. If Muhammad and the four orthodox caliphs worked part-time as religious leaders, then the subsequent caliph worked part-time as kings. The religious function of the caliphate gradually weakened and became a subsidiary name of royal power.
By the middle of the 9th century, the authority of the caliphate had changed again. As the Abbasid caliph began to use Turkic slaves as guards, the Turkic generals were in power. Local forces took the opportunity to stand on their own feet and fight each other endlessly. The puppet-reduced caliph is fought over by various forces like a mascot. In 1258, Genghis Khan's grandson Xu Lieyu led a western expedition to capture Baghdad, and the last Abbasid caliph Mustai Suim was wrapped in a blanket and trampled to death by the Mongols.
The division of the Arab Empire
After taking Baghdad, Xu Lie continued to lead his troops westward, only to be defeated by the Mamluks of Egypt at the Battle of Ain Jaru. At this time, the Mongol Khan Mengge was killed in the Fishing City of the Southern Song Dynasty, Xu Lieyu returned to the east, and the Mongol offensive to the west stopped. In order to give legitimacy to their rule, the Mamluk sultans installed several descendants of the Abbasid kings as caliphs. These caliphs merely served as an embellishment for the coronation of sultans and religious ceremonies, and the caliphate had long existed in name only.
In 1517, the Mamluks were destroyed by the Ottoman Empire, and the Ottoman sultans abolished the caliphate, considering its existence meaningless. It was not until the rise of European powers in the 18th century that the Ottoman Empire, in order to get rid of the sick man of West Asia, began to use the title of caliphate to unite the Islamic world against Europe. As a result, the way religions shaped the state a thousand years ago is too backward in the face of the modern nation-state. The Ottoman Empire inevitably disintegrated. In 1924, the nascent Republic of Turkey separated church and state and declared the abolition of the caliphate, ending the caliphate that had lasted for more than 1,300 years.
Ottoman Empire
Unlike the theocratic caliphate, the emir and the sultan assumed a secular role from the beginning. During the Umayyad dynasty, the emir was a provincial governor or governor assigned by the caliph. But later, some powerful emirs freed themselves from the control of the caliphate and divided one side, no different from the king. When the Umayyad dynasty collapsed, the Abbasids cut the grass and wiped out the Umayyad family, and only one prince, Abdul Rahman ibn Muawiyah, fled to Spain to establish the post-Umayyad dynasty. Abd Rahman proclaimed himself Emir and the later Umayyad dynasty became known as the Spanish Emir Principality.
During the Abbasid dynasty, the functions of the emir did not change much, and the post of Grand Emir was also established as the commander of the national army. As with the Umayyads, when the dynasty declined, the emirs everywhere established themselves and took the caliphate hostage to the vassals. In 999, when the Ghaznavids defeated the Samanid dynasty and entered Baghdad, Emir Mahmoud gave the caliph a new title, sultan. The word sultan is derived from Arabic and means "power", "rule", "rule", and is equivalent to the supreme commander and king. Beginning with Mahmud, monarchs in the Islamic world mostly referred to themselves as sultans, and some continued to adopt emirs. It is still used today in some Islamic countries in the Middle East and Southeast Asia, where the emir and the sultan still practice.
The history of the Islamic world is the history of secularization from the caliphate to the emir and the sultan to today's modern head of state. The theocratic nature gave the Islamic world a strong cohesion at the beginning of its birth, and for hundreds of years there was no struggle between kingship and clerical power as in medieval Europe. But the downside is also obvious: the tradition of theocracy has seriously hindered the secularization and modernization of Islamic countries. To this day, many countries in the Islamic world are still unable to escape the influence of religion, and the confrontation between religious factions has not only caused internal contradictions and international disputes, but also become a hotbed of extremist ideas and terrorism. On the road to secularization, Islamic countries and the entire world still have a long way to go.