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Decline of Center 

Decline of caliphal authority meant neither the dissolution of empire nor the diminution 

of the high level of culture and civilization. Instead, competing centers of power 

emerged, some of which maintained an alliance cemented by tribute to the Abbasids and 

some of which challenged Abbasid authority and Sunni orthodoxy. In Egypt under the 

Tulunids (r. 868-905), power fell into the hands of Turkish officers who established their 

own dynasties. The Saffirids led a popular rebellions, and they ended up controlling most 

of eastern Iran from 861-900. There was even a slave revolt in the salt extraction marshes 

in southern Iraq whereby rebels created a small state (868-883) in which private property 

was forbidden and possessions distributed communally. The caliphate did contrive to 

restore order by 905, but a total collapse of the imperial system was only postponed. 

Corruption of the central administration, the division of the bureaus into factions 

exploiting the government in their own interests, loss of control over taxable rural lands, 

and loss of revenue meant that military victories could no longer be followed up by 

routine government. Independent principalities and warlords burgeoned. In the early 10

th 

century the Samanids controlled Khurasan and Transoxiana; the Buwayhids, Western 

Iran; the Hamdanids, Upper Mesopotamia, and the Ikhshidids, Egypt. Ultimately the 

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Buwayhids seized Baghdad in 945, and full governmental powers, both military and civil, 

were vested in them. The caliphate, deprived of all effective power, remained for 

centuries the legitimate fount of all authority and the symbol of religious unity, but the 

empire as a single Middle Eastern political entity was lost. Nevertheless, despite the lack 

of political unity, there existed the notion of 

dar al-Islam

, i.e. the abode of Islam, 

meaning a unity of among those states whose people profess Islam.