Pledge to the caliph. Reflexions about a letter to Umayyad caliph ʽAbd al-Raḥmān III (317/929)

In 317/929, ʽAbd al-Raḥmān III, who was the Umayyad emir of al-Andalus, proclaimed himself caliph. During his reign, he managed to build a very specific political relation between the Iberian peninsula (al-Andalus) and the opposite shore of the Mediterranean (al-ʽidwa), ie. the Far Maghrib. Indeed, while he ordered the conquest of several coastal places to be conquered, he also secured many pledges of allegiance from local Berber emirs. Much of these allegiances were publicly pledged by those emirs, who had to choose between the Umayyad caliphate of al-Andalus and the Fatimid caliphate of al-Qayrawān. Fortunately, many of the letters addressed by the Maghrāwa emir Muḥammad b. Ḫazar (fl. 920-950) to the Andalusian court were copied and preserved in the Muqtabis fī aḫbār ahl al-Andalus of Ibn Ḥayyān (987-1076), including the one in which he recognized ʽAbd al-Raḥmān III as the rightful imām. Those documents give us an invaluable insight regarding the entreating strategies that were deployed by to justify an allegiance to the Umayyad caliphate of Cordoba. Indeed, some of the arguments brought by Muḥammad b. Ḫazar were common in the medieval Islamic world, while other were more specific to his own identity, agency, strategy, location, history and culture.