The Foundation of Muslim Rule in India: A History of the Establishment and Progress of the Turkish Sultanate of Delhi, 1206–1290 A.D. c14.5

c14.5

As the supreme ruler of Islam, the Caliph had long been reduced to a mere shadow. With the ascendency of the Turks, early in the 9th century, commenced the rapid process of his decline; the Buwide rulers of Hamadan were the first of a series of dynasties, who, by occupying Baghdad and tolerating the Caliph as a puppet, demonstrated the emergence in the bosom of Islam, of what may perhaps be described as nation-states. The Abbaside family retained its moral leadership and even sovereignty over portions of Iraq, but only by the courtesy of the Ghaznawide, Seljuq and the Khwarizmi emperors. Besides the rival Caliphate of the Fatimides in Egypt, new principalities arose whose rulers wielded unquestioned sovereignty, thus converting the *Darul Islam* into a multiple state-system. Yet constitutional law was chary to recognise the passing of the Caliph, for it knew of only one temporal sovereign for the indivisible world of Islam. Juristic ingenuity therefore, found a solution by according to the new rulers the status of a viceroy to whom, either formally or by implicit acquiescence, power was supposed to have been delegated by the Caliph. Religious belief accorded well with this arrangement and the Caliph's exclusive sovereignty over the Islamic world was thus continued by a legal fiction. What was originally a matter of courtesy, however, became, in course of time, a legal obligation and a formal appointment by the Caliph was considered as conferring extra dignity; even where no direct delegation of power took place, legal scruple demanded an invocation of the Caliph's name in the *khutbah* and coin. From the tenth century the Abbaside Caliphate thus lived on merely as a symbol of Islam's original unity to whom almost every Muslim ruler owed at least a token allegiance.