Egypt under the caliphate

For more than 200 years—that is, throughout the Umayyad caliphate and well into the Abbasid—Egypt was ruled by governors appointed by the caliphs. As a province in an empire, Egypt’s status was much the same as it had been for centuries under foreign rulers whose main interest was to supply the central government with Egyptian taxes and grain. In spite of evidence that the Arab governors tried in general to collect the taxes equitably, taking into account the capacities of individual landowners to pay and the annual variations in agricultural yield, resistance to paying the taxes increased in the 8th century and sometimes erupted into rebellion in times of economic distress. Periodically, religious unrest was manifested in the form of political insurrections, especially in those exceptional times when a governor openly discriminated against the Copts by forcing them to wear distinctive clothing or, worse, by destroying their icons. Still, the official policy, especially in Umayyad times, was tolerance, partly for fiscal reasons. In order to maintain the higher tax revenues collected from non-Muslims, the Arab governors discouraged conversion to Islam and even required those who did convert to continue paying the non-Muslim tax. New Christian churches were sometimes built, and the government took an interest in the selection of patriarchs.

More than just a source of grain and taxes, Egypt also became a base for Arab-Muslim expansion by both land and sea. The former Byzantine shipyards in Alexandria provided the nucleus of an Egyptian navy, which between 649 and 669 joined in expeditions with Muslim fleets from Syria against the islands of Rhodes, Cyprus, and Sicily and defeated the Byzantine navy in a major battle at Phoenix (present-day Finike, Tur.) in 655. By land, the Arab armies advanced both to the south and to the west. As early as 651–652 the governor of Egypt invaded Nubia and imposed a treaty that required the Nubians to pay an annual tribute and to permit the unmolested practice of Islam in the province. Raids against North Africa by Arab armies based in Egypt began in 647; by 670 the Arabs had succeeded in establishing a garrison city in Ifrīqiyyah (now Tunisia), called Kairouan (Al-Qayrawān), which thenceforth displaced Egypt as the base for further expansion.

While some Arabs were passing through Egypt on their way to campaign in North Africa, others were being sent to the Nile valley on a permanent basis. In addition to tribal contingents that at times escorted newly appointed governors to Egypt (some of which settled in towns), tribesmen were sometimes imported and settled in an effort to increase the Arab-Muslim concentration in the vicinity of Al-Fusṭāṭ. The settlement of large numbers of anarchic tribesmen in Egypt, with tribal ties and allegiances elsewhere in the empire, meant that Egypt often became embroiled in political difficulties with the central government. Civil strife centring on the assassination of the caliph ʿUthmān ibn ʿAffān (656) began in Egypt, where the tribesmen resented the favouritism shown by the caliph to members of his own family. Uprisings led by the dissident Khārijite sect were frequent in the mid-8th century. In the 9th century the Abbasid caliph al-Maʾmun (reigned 813–833) himself led an army from Iraq to put down a rebellion raised both by tribesmen and by Copts; repression of the Copts accompanying their defeat in 829–830 is usually cited as an important factor in accelerating conversion to Islam.

The difficulty inherent in ruling Egypt from Baghdad, which was itself undergoing stress and turbulence, is evident from the rapid turnover in governors assigned to Egypt; al-Maʾmūn’s father, the caliph Hārūn al-Rashīd (ruled 786–809), for example, appointed 24 governors in a reign of 23 years. In order to strengthen their armies, the Abbasid caliphs had begun early in the 9th century to form contingents of Turkish slaves known as Mamluks (“owned men”). To finance these new military formations and, in particular, to pay the Turkish commanders who headed them, the caliphs began to give them administrative grants (iqṭāʿ in Arabic, usually translated, albeit inaccurately, “fief”) consisting of tax revenues from certain territories.

Possibly as a means of both removing the governorship from the level of tribal strife and paying the central government’s Turkish Mamluks, the caliphs began assigning the administration of Egypt to Turks rather than to Arabs. But this policy resulted in no tangible improvement in the administration of Egyptian affairs until 868, when Egypt was granted as a fief to the Turkish general Babak, who chose to remain in Iraq but appointed his stepson, a young Mamluk named Aḥmad ibn Ṭūlūn, as his agent in Egypt. Ibn Ṭūlūn’s great achievement was that he quickly established his own authority in Egypt and backed it up with an army of his own creation, powerful enough to defy the central government of Baghdad and to embark upon foreign expansion.

Though short-lived, the Ṭūlūnid dynasty succeeded in restoring a measure of Egypt’s ancient glory and inaugurated a new phase of Egyptian history. For the first time since the pharaohs, Egypt became virtually autonomous and the bulk of its revenues remained within its borders. What is more, Egypt became the centre of a small empire when Aḥmad conquered Syria and Palestine in 878–879. These developments were paralleled in other provinces of the Abbasid empire and were the direct result of the decline of the caliph’s power.