Ahmad ibn Buya
Ahmad ibn Buya was the youngest of the three Daylamite brothers, mountaineers from the Caspian who had begun as soldiers of fortune in the wars of Iran, who entered Baghdad on 11 December 945 with his army, was received by the caliph al-Mustakfi, took the title Muizz al-Dawla, strengthener of the state, and within a month had the caliph seized at an audience, blinded and deposed. For the next hundred and ten years the Abbasid caliphs were the Buyids' pensioners in their own palace, and the Shia soldiers of the Buyids ruled the capital of Sunni Islam. He had lost a hand and some fingers in an early fight and was called the one-handed. His brother Ali held Fars and his brother Hasan the Jibal, and Ahmad had taken Kirman and then Khuzistan and Iraq from the caliph's Turkish commanders in the anarchy of the 940s, in which the Abbasid state had already ceased to govern anything outside Baghdad. The caliph, who had invited him in as a counterweight, had misjudged him. Ahmad put a new caliph, al-Muti, in the palace on an allowance, took the revenues of Iraq for his army, and paid the Daylamite infantry in land grants that became the iqta system Islamic states used for centuries. He was a Shia of the Zaydi or Twelver kind and in 963 ordered the first public mourning for Husayn on the day of Ashura in Baghdad, and the celebration of Ghadir Khumm, which produced riots between the sects every year after. But he kept the Sunni caliph as the source of his own legitimacy, since a Shia imam in the palace would have been a rival. He fought the Hamdanids of Mosul for northern Iraq for twenty years without a decision, took Basra and Oman, and lost the use of his soldiers' loyalty whenever the pay was late, which was often. He died in Baghdad in April 967, having made his son Bakhtiyar his heir and advised him, the story goes, to keep his elder cousin Adud al-Dawla as an ally, which the son failed to do and lost everything to him.
- Lived: 915 CE – 967 CE
- Nationality: Daylamite
- Roles: emir, ruler, general
