'IRAQ AND THE PERSIAN GULF' [‎176r] (356/862)

THE ARAB CALIPHATES 245
power, and Muqtadir (908-932) gave official power to the com
mander of the bodyguard with the title of Amir al Umara (com
mander of commanders). In 945 a new dynastic ruler of western
Persia, Ahmad ibn Buwayh, invaded Iraq with a horde of ‘Dilemite’
tribesmen from the mountains of Elburz, and was made Amir al
Umara, with additional titles of honour. For a century the Buway-
hids governed Iraq from their capital of Shiraz in Persia, and greatly
encouraged the extension of the Shia faith and the establishment of
its festivals. Adud ad Dawlah, the greatest of them (949—983),
reunited the eastern provinces ruled by Harun ar Rashid. He built
the shrine of Ali at Najaf and a famous hospital at Baghdad, while
his son’s Persian vizir, Sabur ibn Ardashir, built a great library of
10,000 books.
Seljuk and Khwarizm Turks, a.d. 1055-1220
This Shia predominance was overthrown by the advent of the
Seljuk Turks, who were strict Sunnis. This nomad people from the
Khirgiz steppes of Turkistan wrested Transoxiana and the Persian
provinces from the Ghaznawids and Buwayhids, and were welcomed
at Baghdad in 1055 by the Caliph Al Qaim. Their chief, Tughril
Beg, and his successors ruled the empire as As Sultan, ‘he with
authority’. Alp Arslan (1063—1072) succeeded by his victory over
the Byzantines at Manzikert in Armenia, where all the Mesopotamian
empires except the Achaemenid had failed, in achieving the per
manent conquest of Asia Minor. Under Malik Shah (1072—1092)
most of the lands held by Darius I were again ruled by a monarch
resident in Iraq.
The Seljuks maintained the existing forms of administration, and
their great vizir, the Persian Abu Ali ibn Ishak, called Nizam al Mulk or
‘the organizer of the kingdom’, was an expert on political government,
about which he wrote a treatise. He established a system of heredi
tary military fiefs which, like those of Parthia, tended to become
independent dynasties and so weaken the empire. The history of the
local dynasty of Mosul, which was one of these fiefs, illustrates the
geographical separation of northern and southern Iraq. Earlier, in
the tenth century, the Hamdanids of Mosul, whose power reached
through the Jazira, had succeeded in conquering northern Syria
including Aleppo and Homs, where from 944 to 1003 they defended
the Islamic world from the last onslaughts of the Byzantine Empire.
Now in the twelfth century another Mosul dynasty played a similar
part in Syrian history against the Crusaders. The decline of Seljuk