The Rise and Decline of the Muslim Civilization 43
In this desperate political, religious, and moral crisis, the salvag-
ing of what could be saved of Muslim civilization was to come
through human instruments as unpredictable as the salvaging of
what could be saved of the Graeco-Roman civilization at the end
of the third century A.D. through the rough Illyrian soldiers
Diocletian and Constantine. Like that earlier first-aid process, the
permanent loss of lifeblood from the wounded body-politic was
considerable, and the lesion was repaired only with coarser, and
less sensitive and flexible tissue.
The rise in the tenth century of the Fatimid and the lesser Shi'i
dynasties, Arab and Persian, had for the time deprived the Turks of
the political ascendancy they had been gaining in the Muslim
world; but it did not make them any the less indispensable as
garrison-troops and bodyguards. The Arab and Persian dynasts—
Fatimid., Buwayhid, Samanid—continued to employ Turks in
considerable numbers. Early in the eleventh century the Turkish
tribe which later became known as the Seljuks pressed down from
north of the Oxus into north-east Persia, becoming converted to
Sunni Islam as they did so. ! To these unlettered, unimaginative
soldiery the pedestrian rnatteif-of-factness of orthodox Sunni Islam
was more attractive and suitable than the spiritual exaltation or
over-elaborated subtleties of the Shi'i sects or the Sufis. By 1055 die
Seljuk Turks had entered Baghdad at the invitation of the effete
Abbasid caliph to rescue the caliphate from its Shi'i masters who
were intriguing with the rival and schismatic Fatimid caliphate.
To the Sunni majority of the Muslim world, whom a century of
Shi'i political supremacy and systematic religious propaganda had
failed to convert, the Turks were the more acceptable masters. In
1071 the Seljuks inflicted a crushing defeat on the Byzantine army,
which delivered into their hands the greater part of Asia Minor,
never conquered by the Arabs, as a region for Turkish settlement;
from this time onwards Asia Minor has continuously been pre-
dominantly Turkish in speech and Muslim in faith. The Seljuk4|
now ruled a vast empire extending from the Aegean to India.
While its first Sultans remained culturally uncouth, they were
fortunate in having as their wazir a gifted and intellectual Persian
who bore the title Nizam al-Mulk. This statesman founded at
Baghdad in 1066 the first real university of the Muslim world,
named after him the Nizamiya, a centre for propagating the Sunni
orthodoxy of al-Ash'ari as a counterblast to the Shi'i heresies