The State and its Problems

In English, the word ‘sultan’ means ‘a prince or king's son, a high officer’. According to Arabic dictionaries, the word derives from a root meaning to possess or exercise power through the use of ‘coercion’. The title ‘sulṭān’ was in fact one that many medieval governors began to adopt from the eleventh century (fifth ah) onwards to distinguish their temporal power from the exclusively religious authority exercised by the caliphs in the Near East, albeit increasingly in name only. Around that time, Islamic political theory had assimilated the idea that the caliphate was not the only possible form of government and that other sovereigns, using titles such as that of ‘sulṭān’, were also capable of protecting the interests of the Islamic community.

However, prior to the eleventh century, Arabic authors in general, and Andalusi ones in particular, were already using the term sulṭān on a frequent basis. During the caliphal era reference is made, for example, to the sulṭān's army (‘askar al-sulṭān), the appointment of a governor of the sulṭān (‘āmil al-sulṭān), or someone serving as the sulṭān's emissary (rasūl al-sulṭān). In all these cases, sulṭān was not a title, as the word was still not used in that sense, but it referred to the power incarnated in the caliph, and that flowed from him. So, for example, when al-Ḥakam II fell mortally ill in 976 (366 ah), we are told that the vizier Ja‘far b. ‘Uthmān al-Muṣḥafī took care of his sulṭān (yudabbiru sulṭāna-hu). Many other examples confirm this: at the end of the ninth century (third ah) during the era of the fitna of the emirate, one group of rebels wanted to restore obedience to the centralised power of Córdoba and claimed they did so ‘to uphold the old bonds that they and their ancestors had had with the sulṭān in times of rectitude’; at one of the receptions held at Madīnat al-Zahrāʼ, the road to this city palace was filled with people from the suburbs of Córdoba, to whom the sulṭān had granted arms; and finally, the Idrīsids, who ruled over enclaves in North Africa, were concerned about the extension of Andalusi power (sulṭān al-Andalus).