Al-Mu'ayyad

Al-Mu'ayyad was the son of Al-Mutawakkil and his concubine, Ishaq. She was an Andulasian, and was one of his favorites. She was the mother of his sons Ibrahim al-Mu'ayyad and Abu Ahmad (the future al-Muwaffaq).[1]

His father, caliph al-Mutawakkil had created a plan of succession that would allow his sons to inherit the caliphate after his death; he would be succeeded first by his eldest son, al-Muntasir, then by al-Mu'tazz and third by al-Mu'ayyad.[2]

In 849, al-Mutawakkil arranged for his succession, by appointing three of his sons as heirs and assigning them the governance and proceeds of the Empire's provinces: the eldest, al-Muntasir, was named first heir, and received governorship of Egypt, the Jazira, and the proceeds of the rents in the capital, Samarra; al-Mu'tazz was charged with supervising the domains of the governor in the Khorasan; and al-Mu'ayyad was placed in charge of Syria.[3]

Al-Mutawakkil had seemed to favour al-Muntasir. However, this appeared to change and al-Muntasir feared his father was going to move against him. With the implicit support of the Turkic faction of the army, he plotted the assassination of al-Mutawakkil which was carried out by a Turkic soldier on December 11, 861.

The Turkic regiments then prevailed on al-Muntasir to remove his brothers from the succession, fearing revenge for the murder of their father. In their place, he was to appoint his son as heir-apparent. On April 27, 862 both brothers, al-Mu'ayyad and al-Mu'tazz, wrote a statement of abdication. During al-Muntasir's short reign (r. 861–862), the Turks convinced him into removing al-Mu'tazz and al-Mu'ayyad from the succession. When al-Muntasir died of unknown causes, the Turkic officers gathered together and decided to install the dead caliph's cousin al-Musta'in (al-Mutawakkil's Nephew) on the throne.[4]

The new caliph was almost immediately faced with a large riot in Samarra in support of the disenfranchised al-Mu'tazz; the rioters were put down by the military but casualties on both sides were heavy. Al-Musta'in, worried that al-Mu'tazz or al-Mua'yyad could press their claims to the caliphate, first attempted to buy them off and then threw them in prison.[5]

In 866, al-Musta'in was deposed and al-Mu'tazz came into power. Immediately upon becoming the new Caliph, al-Mu'tazz had the former Caliph al-Musta'in executed. The Turkish soldiery, after a brawl with the Maghariba troops, now turned their support to al-Mu'ayyad. Enraged by this predicament, the jealous Caliph had his brother, al-Mu'ayyad, being next heir to the throne, imprisoned along with another brother, Abu Ahmad, who had bravely led the troops in the late struggle on his side.

The Turks attempted his release, but al-Mu'tazz, the more alarmed, resolved on his death. He was smothered in a downy robe (or, as others say, frozen in a bed of ice); and the body was then exposed before the Court, as if, being without mark of violence, he had died a natural death, (a transparent subterfuge).

This period saw the rise of a legend that an Abbasid prince had converted to Christianity under the influence of Theodore of Edessa, taken the name "John" and been killed for his apostasy; Alexander Vasiliev speculates that Muayyad may have been the convert. However, there is no Christian or Muslim record remotely associating Muayyad with Christianity or even, indeed, religious speculation. The motives for his murder seem to have been purely political; had he indeed converted, it would have given Mutazz an excuse to murder him for apostasy and been recorded.[6][7]

• Abdallah ibn al-Mu'tazz, nephew of al-Mu'ayyad.
• Al-Mufawwid, nephew of al-Mu'ayyad.

• Bosworth, C. E. (1993). "al-Muʿtazz Bi'llāh". In Bosworth, C. E.; van Donzel, E.; Heinrichs, W. P. & Pellat, Ch. (eds.). Encyclopaedia of Islam. Volume VII: Mif–Naz (2nd ed.). Leiden: E. J. Brill. pp. 793–794. ISBN 978-90-04-09419-2.
• Kennedy, Hugh (2004). The Prophet and the Age of the Caliphates: The Islamic Near East from the 6th to the 11th Century (Second ed.). Harlow: Longman. ISBN 978-0-582-40525-7.
• Ibn al-Sāʿī (2017). Consorts of the Caliphs: Women and the Court of Baghdad. Translated by Shawkat M. Toorawa and the Editors of the Library of Arabic Literature. Introduction by Julia Bray, Foreword by Marina Warner. New York: New York University Press. ISBN 978-1-4798-0477-1. {{cite book}}: |translator= has generic name (help)
• Saliba, George, ed. (1985). The History of al-Ṭabarī, Volume XXXV: The Crisis of the ʿAbbāsid Caliphate: The Caliphates of al-Mustaʿīn and al-Muʿtazz, A.D. 862–869/A.H. 248–255. SUNY Series in Near Eastern Studies. Albany, New York: State University of New York Press. ISBN 978-0-87395-883-7.
• This text is adapted from William Muir's public domain work, The Caliphate: Its Rise, Decline, and Fall.