Community, Empire, and Commonwealth: Imperial Identity Under the Caliphate

This paper deals with the caliphal imperial identity from the eighth through the tenth centuries. While the rise of the Caliphate as a world-wide political entity was a rapid process, the self perception of the ruling and learned elite as belonging to and representing an imperial power was not. The enunciation of imperial identity in court ceremonial and literature began systematically only after the political and sectarian debate in public life about the nature of religious community produced a legal and theological discourse that governed the rules for membership in the community. It was only after the currency of such a discourse that the ruling and learned elite began to imagine past and contemporary imperial experiences as models for or competitors to the caliphate. However, shortly after the appearance of universal histories shoring up this narrative, the newly emerging regional powers on Abbasid territories from the tenth century onward began not only to undermine the power of the Caliphate but also provoke alternative narratives that acknowledged coexisting sultanates/caliphates and rationalized how regional powers shared, or competed on, the wider commonwealth of believers.