Download PDF | The Great Caliphs The Golden Age Of The ' Abbasid Empire,By:Amira K. Bennison (Author) Yale University, Press 2010.
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Acknowledgements
a tangible and intangible nature. In this case, I am grateful to all those who taught me not only to examine the fine detail of Arabic texts but also to question and consider the history of the Islamic Middle East as a grand panorama. ‘This includes not only lecturers and professors but also the undergraduates who have sat through my survey courses for over a decade and asked me many a stimulating and provocative question about the hows and whys of Islamic history.
My thanks also to Alex Wright of I.B‘Tauris who thought that I might be just the person to write this book and has patiently waited for it to be completed. While writing, I have had occasion to consult many friends and colleagues on all manner of points and I am grateful to them all, but special thanks are due to James E. Montgomery, who has offered consistent encouragement and invaluable references as well as making incisive comments on draft chapters, and to Maria Angeles Gallego, Christine van Ruymbeke and Jan Bennison, who also took the time to read and comment on various chapters.
I also owe a debt of thanks to Theodore and Tshiami who have kept me sane and reminded me that there are other things to life than book-writing. Finally, in the words of the tenth-century geographer al-Muqaddasi, whom I have had frequent occasion to quote in the course of writing, N o book is ever written without incurring numerous debts of both Of course I do not acquit myself of error, nor my book of defect; neither do I submit it to be free of redundancy and deficiency, nor that it is above criticism in every respect.
ntroduction
For most of us the word ‘Mediterranean’ conjures up images of pictur-esque villages of whitewashed houses whose blue-painted shutters pick up the intense blue of sea and sky, or cream and ochre pillars topped with Corinthian capitals from Graeco-Roman times set against a backdrop of silvery green olive groves. Moreover the history of the Mediterranean from the Greeks and Romans to modern times is assumed to belong to “Western civilization’, a vague notion if ever there was one.
In contrast the word ‘Islam’ triggers a very different set of associations: in recent times violent and confrontational, but previously an Orientalist pastiche of deserts, camels, turbanned warriors with swords, and women enveloped in black, casting coy and seductive glances from behind their veils. This seems to be a history which belongs to Arabia and the Middle East, the crossroads between Africa and Asia, the home of very different civilizations to those of the purported West — those of the mysterious Orient.
However, when viewed through the lens of the /ongue durée of history, preconceptions about what is East and what is West, familiar and alien, seem to have less secure foundations than before. For centuries, the Mediterranean was a Muslim-dominated sea and many of its shores are still inhabited by Muslims and, although it may come as a surprise, many of those Muslims in earlier centuries perceived themselves as heirs to the Mediterranean civilizations of Antiquity as well as the civilizations of Mesopotamia and Persia.
Arabia, the homeland of the Arabs, had long historic connections with Greece, Rome and Persia before the conversion of the Arabs to Islam and their establishment of their own regional empire, and this book’s main contention, which will be familiar enough to professional historians of Islam, is that Islamic civilization, as it came to flourish during the ‘Abbasid era from the mid-eighth to the mid-thirteenth centuries cE, can legitimately be viewed as one in a succession of empires and civilizations which flowered in the Mediterranean. Some, like Rome, pushed further north and west into what became Europe, while others, like Islam, pushed into Asia and Africa, but to consider them as belonging to either East or West is a quite false dichotomy.
The Fertile Crescent was one of the cradles of human civilization which soon began to flower also in Egypt, Asia Minor and Greece, not to mention the Indus valley and China. However, European and Western scholarship until fairly recently insisted on dividing these civilizations into “Western’ and ‘Eastern’ categories which reflected whom the scholars in question perceived as the founders of Western civilization rather than any geographical reality. While Greece and Rome were indisputably of the West, Persia and Egypt stood for the East, and other peoples and civilizations needed to be assimilated to one or the other. To give but one small example: the Phoenicians, generally seen as ‘Eastern’, originated in the Levant and then set up a trading empire which stretched to Essawira, a small port on Morocco’s Atlantic coast, which is further west than any part of Europe. On the other hand, the Seleucids, the descendants of the Macedonian Alexander’s general, Seleucas Nicator, who established a series of city-states across the Middle East, are frequently popped on to the ‘Western’ list. These kind of attributions have little to do with geography and everything to do with cultural identity.
The Romans proved more able than any of their predecessors to bring the entire Mediterranean basin into a single empire which also incorporated northwestern Europe as well as parts of Asia and Africa. Rome’s spectacular achievements — its apparently democratic form of government in the form of the Senate, its technical virtuosity symbolized by roads, aqueducts and amphitheatres, and its art and culture preserved in statues, mosaics and literature — have made it the supreme model for emulation by Western empire builders from the Holy Roman emperors to Napoleon and Mussolini. However, as it becomes more common to understand the Roman Empire from Augustus onwards as a monarchy with a court, so the earlier tendency to contrast Roman republicanism with the oriental despotism of Persia becomes less convincing; not to mention the fact that Rome also inspired the Muslim Ottomans, whose empire actually formed the closest match with the Roman Empire in terms of its geographical extent, its administrative complexity and its use of slaves.
The Muslim view of Rome as an eastern Mediterranean rather than ‘Western’ empire becomes even clearer with the transformation of the eastern Roman Empire into the Christian Byzantine Empire. This was a mostly Greek-speaking empire but the Byzantines called themselves ‘Romans’ and were so called by their Muslim neighbours, for whom ‘Rome’ was thus Constantinople and the Roman Empire a Middle Eastern rather than a European power, its heartlands Syria and Turkey while Italy, Gaul and Britain were distant lands lost to all manner of Gothic, Vandal and Gaelic barbarians.
The same absence of East-West dichotomies is apparent when we turn to the history and civilization of classical Islam, which existed at a time when today’s pre-eminence of the West was undreamed of and there was no need for either side to think in terms of today’s polarities. Although the formation of Islam posed a serious challenge to Christianity, as to other religions in the Middle East, this did not gain any East-West connotations until the Crusades. Naturally, Latin Christendom during the Dark Ages was of little concern or interest to Muslims in the early Islamic era, except where they actually shared a frontier in northern Spain and the Pyrenees. Muslims were keenly aware of the myriad Christian sects in their own region and indeed conceptualized their faith as the final and best revelation in the series of such messages God had sent to the prophets of different peoples. Allah was the god of Abraham, Moses and Jesus as well as Muhammad, and Judaism and Christianity were therefore religions based upon Truth even if their practitioners had each in turn corrupted the message they had been sent, necessitating God’s dispatch of a new revelation. In religious terms, therefore, Islam was no more ‘oriental’ than its Jewish and Christian predecessors, and all three communities shared the same territory alongside Zoroastrianism and even Buddhism further east.
In the realm of culture as in religion, Muslims entered into a discursive relationship with the past and their civilization came to draw on the Graeco-Roman, Byzantine and Sasanian heritages in various ways whilst also exhibiting its own separate and sparkling Islamic character. This is a particularly important point. It is fairly well known that some Greek science reached medieval Europe by way of the Arabs; however, it is less commonly recognized that Muslims actively engaged with the materials they had translated from Greek, Persian and Sanskrit into Arabic, and that they added a great deal of new material to the information they received. The Europeans of the Middle Ages therefore acquired not only Greek science but also the numerous important additions, improvements and criticisms of it made by generations of Muslim scholars from Baghdad to Toledo. This knowledge combined with many other developments within Western society itself to enable Europeans to embark upon the intellectual and physical voyages of discovery that formed the modern world.
It would be foolish to exaggerate the continuity between the different phases of Mediterranean history, but the link between Antiquity and Islam is usually neglected, if not actively denied, in favour of a concept of Orientalist and Enlightenment ancestry that Western Europe, and by extensionEuropean power, its heartlands Syria and Turkey while Italy, Gaul and Britain were distant lands lost to all manner of Gothic, Vandal and Gaelic barbarians.
The same absence of East-West dichotomies is apparent when we turn to the history and civilization of classical Islam, which existed at a time when today’s pre-eminence of the West was undreamed of and there was no need for either side to think in terms of today’s polarities. Although the formation of Islam posed a serious challenge to Christianity, as to other religions in the Middle East, this did not gain any East-West connotations until the Crusades. Naturally, Latin Christendom during the Dark Ages was of little concern or interest to Muslims in the early Islamic era, except where they actually shared a frontier in northern Spain and the Pyrenees. Muslims were keenly aware of the myriad Christian sects in their own region and indeed conceptualized their faith as the final and best revelation in the series of such messages God had sent to the prophets of different peoples. Allah was the god of Abraham, Moses and Jesus as well as Muhammad, and Judaism and Christianity were therefore religions based upon Truth even if their practitioners had each in turn corrupted the message they had been sent, necessitating God’s dispatch of a new revelation. In religious terms, therefore, Islam was no more ‘oriental’ than its Jewish and Christian predecessors, and all three communities shared the same territory alongside Zoroastrianism and even Buddhism further east.
In the realm of culture as in religion, Muslims entered into a discursive relationship with the past and their civilization came to draw on the Graeco-Roman, Byzantine and Sasanian heritages in various ways whilst also exhibiting its own separate and sparkling Islamic character. This is a particularly important point. It is fairly well known that some Greek science reached medieval Europe by way of the Arabs; however, it is less commonly recognized that Muslims actively engaged with the materials they had translated from Greek, Persian and Sanskrit into Arabic, and that they added a great deal of new material to the information they received. The Europeans of the Middle Ages therefore acquired not only Greek science but also the numerous important additions, improvements and criticisms of it made by generations of Muslim scholars from Baghdad to Toledo. This knowledge combined with many other developments within Western society itself to enable Europeans to embark upon the intellectual and physical voyages of discovery that formed the modern world.
It would be foolish to exaggerate the continuity between the different phases of Mediterranean history, but the link between Antiquity and Islam is usually neglected, if not actively denied, in favour of a concept of Orientalist and Enlightenment ancestry that Western Europe, and by extension the Western world, is the child of Greece and Rome, whilst Islam proceeds from an alien and exotic Eastern source. I have always found it striking the number of people who do not realize that Judaism, Christianity and Islam purport to come from the same Abrahamic source and that the founding fathers of our respective civilizations, ‘the prophets of Israel and the philosophers of Greece’, as the American scholar of religion Carl Ernst puts it, are shared."
Civilizations are not, however, static, and this book cannot do justice to the entire sweep of Islamic history across three continents and 1,500 years. Instead I shall focus on the ‘Abbasid era, which is generally considered the classical age of Islamic civilization and the formative century which preceded the ‘Abbasid revolution in 750, during which the seeds of many of the achievements of the ‘Abbasid age were actually planted. I shall end in 1258 when the Mongols marched into Baghdad and killed the last caliph. This marked the end of the classical era and the start of a new phase in Islamic history, often characterized as ‘medieval’ for want of a better word, during which the Muslim world was ruled by military men in alliance with coteries of religious scholars rather than by a caliph or his representatives. Some ruled no more than a city, others ruled vast territories but none claimed the universal mantle of the caliph until the rise of a new triad of empires — the Ottomans, Safavids and Mughals — the Muslim equivalents of the Habsburgs at the dawn of the early modern era in the sixteenth century.
Our story begins in the 630s cE when the Arabs, inspired by the new Abrahamic monotheism which came to be known as Islam, poured out of their harsh and rugged homeland in the Arabian peninsula and established a vast empire ruled by the Rightly Guided Caliphs (634-61) and the Umayyads (661-750) in turn. By 750 Muslims ruled most of the southern Mediterranean world and the ancient Persian lands to the east, and had extended their influence deep into the Sahara desert, the Central Asian steppe and India. Despite the scorn with which these often poorly clad wiry Arab tribesmen were originally viewed by their imperial Byzantine and Sasanian Persian opponents, they proved to be both militarily capable and politically adept. Within a short time, Christian contemporaries came to share the Muslims’ own conviction that God was indeed on their side. A certain lethargy on the part of the subjects of both the Byzantines and the Sasanians, who were frequently over-burdened with taxes and at religious odds with their imperial masters, was also a contributory factor in the Arabs’ success. Stories, almost certainly fictional, of Byzantine soldiers chained together to prevent their desertion convey the atmosphere of the times.
As the conquest proceeded the Arabs shifted their capital from the Prophet’s city of Medina in the oases of western Arabia to Damascus, a city with an ancient pedigree stretching far back into Antiquity. Here the first caliphal dynasty, that of the Umayyads (661-750), presided over and fostered the birth of a new civilization, that of Islam, which imbibed the heady aromas of Greece, Rome and Byzantium whilst also retaining its own unique character. In fact, it is one of the most remarkable aspects of the Islamic conquests that this was so, and that the Arabs were not simply absorbed by the cultures they had politically subjugated, as was later the case with the Mongols in both China and the Middle East.
Instead they went from strength to strength despite the political and military turmoil created by the very process of empire-building itself. In 750 the ‘Abbasid caliphs replaced their Umayyad predecessors and moved the imperial capital eastwards to the old Sasanian heartlands, where they constructed a new city which came to be known as Baghdad. ‘This turned out to be a master stroke: Iraq, already the site of the thriving Muslim garrison towns of Kufa and Basra, quickly emerged as the centre not only of an empire but more importantly of a civilization which drew heavily on the foundations laid by Greece, Byzantium and Persia. The ‘Abbasid caliphs themselves played an invaluable role in this process, welcoming at their court not only Muslim scholars, poets and artists but also Nestorian Christian and Jewish physicians, astrologers of all faiths, and pagan philosophers.
However, the importance of the ‘Abbasid era for the flowering of Islamic civilization does not lie exclusively in the luxurious halls of the palaces of Baghdad or Samarra, the ‘Abbasids’ ninth-century capital, but in the society which developed outside the gilded corridors of power. From the outset, Muslims conceived of themselves as members of a single community, the umma. During the conquest period, the wmma was a thin, predominantly Arab layer at the top of society, an elite held together by its Arab ancestry and differentiation from the masses of Christians, Jews and Zoroastrians over which it ruled. Although it would be naive to deny that Arab-Muslim ranks were, at times, deeply divided by tribal feuds and jostling for influence, some sense of common identity and origin persisted and was reinforced by the presence of Qur’an reciters, storytellers and poets who repeated the tales of Muhammad’s life and doings and sang of the feats of the Arabs in the new /ingua franca of Arabic in mosques, marketplaces and military camps from Cordoba in Spain to Merv in Central Asia.
Along with the new vivacious language of Arabic, the rituals of Islam also played a vital integrative role, especially as non-Arab populations began to convert to the new faith. The annual pilgrimage to Mecca, the hajj, which took place in the Muslim lunar month of Dhu’l-Hijja, was particularly important in this respect. The Ka‘ba, a square building housing the famous black stone, was actually a pagan Arabian shrine where Arabs had congregated to pay their respects to the god Hubal and his consort al-‘Uzza and other pagan deities such as the goddess Allat, worshipped at nearby Ta’if. Muhammad had transformed such pagan habits of pilgrimage into the Muslim az by asserting that the Ka'ba had actually been built by Abraham before it was defiled by the worship of pagan idols and was therefore the ultimate symbol of Semitic monotheism at which all Muslims should pay their respects at least once in their lifetime.
With the elaboration of Islam and the conversion of peoples who had no experience of Arabia, the pilgrimage served as a means of assimilation and created a sense of physical connectivity with the Muslim past for those who managed to make the often perilous and always time-consuming journey to Mecca and nearby Medina, the burial place of Muhammad. Many of those who undertook the pilgrimage were of an intellectual bent and dedicated many years to it, stopping in each city on their route to sit at the feet of its scholars who commented on the Qur’an and other texts in the shady arcades of the mosques. Such pilgrims all contributed to the emergence of a much larger umma, deeply rooted in local societies but also self-consciously part of a larger whole, the capacious dar al-islam or house of Islam.
The other crucial factor in the development of Islamic civilization in ‘Abbasid times was commerce. Although the most usual stereotype is of the Arab as a desert nomad, in reality many Arabs came from the villages and towns of the Yemen (known as Arabia Felix by the Romans for its green steeply terraced valleys), the settled coasts of eastern Arabia and the Syrian towns on the northern fringe of the desert. The kingdoms of old Arabia supplied and received goods to and from Greece, Rome, Persia, Ethiopia and India. Even in the vast desert interior, sacred enclaves (Aarams), where tribesmen were obliged to enter unarmed, dotted the landscape and hosted important commercial fairs such as the gathering held at ‘Ukaz near Mecca. Islam therefore developed in a semi-commercial environment and Muhammad worked as a commercial agent in his youth. This meant that despite the initially military character of the Islamic conquests, the Muslims were not slow to exploit the commercial opportunities opened up to them. The creation of a vast empire also enabled non-Muslims, Jews especially, to strengthen and extend their trade networks across the length and breadth of the Islamic world and develop new partnerships with Muslims to the mutual benefit of all those involved.
In the following pages, I shall draw a picture of the politics, society and culture of classical Islam with the two-fold aim of revealing its dynamic character and the nature of its relationship with the past and, to a lesser extent, the present. Chapter 1 provides a political overview of the ‘Abbasid caliphate and its many ups and downs between its establishment in 750 and its destruction at the hands of the Mongols in 1258. At the outset, the caliphs controlled an impressive empire reaching from Tunisia to Afghanistan, but political problems in Iraq, where their capital, Baghdad, was situated, gradually allowed independent princes, provincial governors and finally rival caliphal lineages to take over much of the Islamic world.
Warrior lineages masquerading as the caliphate’s protectors took over in Baghdad, and then the Crusaders carved out their own principalities in the Levant. The history of the ‘Abbasid caliphate is thus not simply the history of the caliphs themselves but also all those who sought to usurp their power and authority, control them or emulate them. This is why I have included references to the Fatimids of Egypt and Umayyads of Spain, who were rivals of the ‘Abbasids from a political perspective but culturally connected to them in many ways.
Much of what we know about ‘Abbasid times across the Islamic world relates to cities, and Chapter 2 therefore takes a look at classical Islamic cities as a development of earlier Middle Eastern urban traditions. ‘The ‘Islamic city’ was one of the favourite themes of Orientalist scholarship, which tended to view such places as utter contrasts to the grand Graeco-Roman and Persian cities of more ancient times, and also defective in comparison with medieval European cities, which kept classical civic virtues alive in an attenuated form, and modern Western cities which had revived all the positive qualities of ancient cities.
The cities of the early Islamic and ‘Abbasid eras, however, did not really fit this negative stereotype and nor were they so wildly different from those of the Byzantine and Sasanian eras which preceded them. This chapter looks at how such cities were actually planned and built to serve the needs of rulers and the ruled, and the ebb and flow from previous eras.
Chapter 3 explores what life was really like for men and women, Muslims and non-Muslims, rich and poor, in this period. It is easy to assume that contemporary perceptions of what Muslim societies are like — which are themselves generally unrepresentative stereotypes — can be projected backwards in time, but this is often not the case. Like all pre-modern societies, Islamic society in ‘Abbasid times was one in which upward social mobility was limited and a person’s station in life was determined by his or her father’s position. It was, however, a pluralistic society, which recognized ethnic and religious differences.
Christians, Jews and Zoroastrians were allowed to practise their faiths as religious minorities, and Arabs, Persians, Turks and others competed for power and influence at the highest levels. Just as Roman citizenship was not based on ethnicity, neither was participation in the ‘Abbasid elite. Service and merit were much more important. Public life was male dominated and women did not hold much formal power, although their rights to inheritance were rather better than in Christian societies of the time. However, the glimpses we have of their lives suggest a reality rather different from contemporary assumptions about the position of Muslim women in society.
In Chapter 4 I look at trade and industry, the lifeblood of the Islamic world, and the intimate relationship between these sectors and pilgrimage. Commerce kept the numerous cities, towns and ports of the Middle East and North Africa alive and also enabled the spread of commodities, ideas and people which created an ‘Abbasid-influenced world much bigger than the area controlled by the caliphs themselves in a form of premodern globalization.
The dynamism of the commercial sector reflected the Prophet’s own commercial background, enshrined in his biography, and the early development of long-distance pilgrim routes from all over the Islamic world to Mecca in Arabia which doubled up as trade routes. As we shall see, pilgrimage and trade were often entwined and facilities provided for pilgrims could be used by merchants and vice-versa. Moreover many pilgrims supported their long journeys by buying and selling along the way, stimulating the market even more.
Chapter 5 explores the cultural production of the ‘Abbasid era, what knowledge Muslims and scholars of other faiths considered important and which sciences they nurtured and developed in the eighth to thirteenth centuries, including their translation of a substantial number of ancient Greek works into Arabic. There is a strong tendency to divide Muslim knowledge into religious and rational categories and imply a sharp division between the two, an attitude rooted more in Enlightenment secularism than in Muslim definitions of the categories of knowledge.
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This chapter tries to present Muslim knowledge as a more integrated cultural package in which Islamic branches of study overlapped with areas of knowledge favoured by other civilizations, most notably Greek philosophy and medicine, but also mathematics, astronomy and astrology of Greek, Persian and Indian origin.
Chapter 6 concludes the story by looking at the processes of transmission which conveyed Arabo-Islamic knowledge and its Greek base into Latin Christendom, and justifies placing classical Islamic civilization on a continuum between the civilizations of Antiquity and modern Western civilization. Various facts, theories and concepts, not to mention literary styles, made their way slowly but surely from Muslim centres of learning to the frontiers of the Islamic world in the hands of scholars, traders and even warriors, where they were acquired by other peoples who took them in new directions.
The avidity of scholars like Robert Ketton, a twelfth-century Englishman who spent his life in the Ebro valley south of the Pyrenees, translating scientific materials from Arabic, was as remarkable as that of the Arabs in Baghdad 400 years earlier, and equally significant in terms of creating a link between the empires and civilizations which preceded the ‘Abbasids and those that succeeded them in the Middle East and in Europe.
It is probably obvious by now that this is a story of continuity and change, a pair of concepts which historians love to juxtapose as they study the transition from one era to another. In fact, it is simply a matter of common sense: how could a new regime, however revolutionary or apparently different, not owe some debt to the past? However, such common sense is sometimes lacking when it comes to viewing the transition from late Antiquity to the Islamic era, when a comfortable Christian world rooted in the GraecoRoman heritage was suddenly and dramatically replaced by the apparently alien era of Islam, an interloper in both religious and cultural terms.
Many scholars have explored both the continuities and changes that occurred at this seminal moment in history, and I can only write this book because of their work. However, it seems to me important at this juncture, when the mere mention of the word ‘Islam’ conjures up a whole array of negative stereotypes, to try to capture the very different atmosphere of the classical Islamic era.
It is not my intention to suggest that any single people or civilization is better than any other but simply to depict Islamic civilization at a moment when it was self-confident, tolerant by the standards of the time and open to influences from outside, and to point to the importance of this phase within the longer story of Mediterranean civilization.
The Middle East has always been the physical bridge between Europe and Asia, but it has also functioned as an important link between past and present. As inheritors of at least a portion of the cultural wealth of Antiquity, Muslims presided over a new period of synthesis and creativity, the fruits of which Western Europeans came to share through various Mediterranean meeting points and frontiers before embarking upon their own age of discovery and creativity.
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