Download PDF | A History of the Muslim World to 1405: The Making of a Civilization 1st Edition by Vernon Egger (Author), 2004.
484 Pages
Preface
This book is an introduction to the history of the Muslim world for readers with little or no knowledge of the subject. I use the term Muslim rather than Islamic because this is a study of the history made by the Muslim peoples rather than a history of the religion of Islam. It is important to make a distinction between Muslim and Islamic—properly speaking, Islamic should refer to elements of the religion, while Muslim relates to the adherents of the religion.
Thus, not all customs followed by Muslims are Islamic, and although a mosque is an example of Islamic architecture, a palace is not. A generation ago, the great scholar Marshall Hodgson wrestled with this problem and coined the term Islamicate to describe the cultural features of Muslim societies that were not strictly religious, such as secular architecture. The term has not gained widespread acceptance, and this book will avoid it.
If the distinction between Islamic and Muslim seems strained, suppose that someone said that the White House is an example of Christian architecture because a Christian designed it, or that Bastille Day is a Christian holiday, since it is celebrated in a country with a Christian majority. No one is tempted to make such assertions, and yet they are equivalent to speaking of Islamic palaces or Islamic medicine, as many historians do. Much of the history related in this book is not directly related to Islam, and so it is more appropriately called Muslim history.
The phrase Muslim world, as used in this book, refers to regions ruled by Muslimdominated governments, as well as areas in which the Muslim population is a majority or an influential minority. For several decades in the seventh century, the Muslim world was coterminous with the region often referred to today as the Middle East, but it soon expanded far beyond that heartland. By the tenth century, many of the most important cultural developments in the Muslim world were taking place outside the Middle East.
The size of the Muslim world has alternately expanded and contracted over time, and we will be concerned to see how and why that has happened. The themes of the book are tradition and adaptation. The history of any society is one of the preservation of core values and practices, but also one of adaptation to changing conditions. Muslims follow a religion that is strongly anchored in both scripture and authoritative codes of behavior and are conditioned to adhere closely to the canon of their religious tradition. On the other hand, from the very beginning of their history, Muslims have found ways to adapt elements of their faith to their culture, as well as to adapt their cultural values and practices to the core of their faith.
Islam is no more of a homogeneous world religion than is Christianity or Judaism. The themes of tradition and adaptation allow us to make sense of some important issues in Muslim history. By being aware of the premium placed on faithfulness to the scriptures, we can understand more clearly how Muslims were able to maintain a common sense of identity throughout the wide expanse of the world in which they settled. Further, we can more readily appreciate why Muslims have accepted certain features of alien cultures and rejected others.
From the first century of the Islamic calendar, when Muslims were having to decide how to administer a huge majority of non-Muslims in the former Byzantine and Sasanian empires, until today, when many Muslims are concerned about the impact of a secular, global economy on their heritage, the tension between adherence to tradition on the one hand and adaptation to changing conditions on the other has been at the center of Muslim concerns. This book treats economic, political, intellectual, and social developments over a wide area and across many centuries. Of these topics, the intellectual and political developments receive more attention than social and economic history.
The study of the social history of the Muslim world is in its infancy. Therefore, it is not possible at this point to write the history of the daily lives of ordinary men and women in large areas of the Muslim world. Economic history tends to stress connections among areas of the world, which is why it is a popular theme in the field of world history. The motif of connections and of global integration that economic history can convey runs throughout this book as a powerful undercurrent. In the first decade of the twenty-first century, however, I am convinced that our awareness of connections in Muslim history needs to be balanced by an awareness of diversity and discontinuities. Troubling stereotypes of Islam and of Muslims loom large in our culture and can be modified only by our becoming aware of the diversity of religious and political expressions within the Muslim world.
A widely held assumption in our society is that Islam is a crystallized artifact from the seventh century—or, at best, from the tenth or eleventh century, when Islamic law is often said to have stopped developing. It is important to be aware of the important stages in the historical development of Islam and to realize that critical periods in history have encouraged Muslims to be either flexible or inflexible in their reception of new ideas. It is also important to be aware of the varieties of expression of Islam. Many generalizations about Islam are actually applicable only to Sunni Islam, and even then, to the Sunni Islam practiced in certain countries, not to regions in other parts of the world. The history of Shi‘ite Islam is usually ignored—or recognized only in passing. Shi‘ites have played a major role in history and should be recognized for having done so. Another widely held stereotype is that Muslims form a monolithic, homogeneous mass that acts in concert on given issues.
In recent years, this assumption has given rise to the notion that “Islam” and “the West” are on the eve of a “clash of civilizations.” According to this theory, when Muslims in one area have a grievance against “the West,” other Muslim groups will come to their aid on the basis of their civilizational “kin.” The impression of a monolithic Muslim world is reinforced by the fact that many world history books discuss the Abbasid caliphate (750–1258) as though it were an empire that united the great majority of the world’s Muslims of that age, leaving the impression that Muslims have a history of political unity. Even the textbook discussions of the sixteenth- and seventeenth-century empires of the Ottomans, Safavids, and Mughals rarely note their great differences. The fact is that Muslim political unity was shattered in the third decade after the Prophet’s death.
There have been numerous Muslim political entities ever since then. Not only have conflicting interests divided them, but Muslim states have also frequently allied with Christian, Hindu, or other states against fellow Muslims. Just as intellectuals prior to the seventeenth century thought that the universe possessed different physical properties from those on earth, so have historians and political theorists often treated Muslim history as different in kind from the history of the rest of the world. This book attempts to show through an examination of their history that Muslims are an integral part of the world community and have functioned as other human beings have under similar conditions.
Acknowledgments
This project has taken much longer than I anticipated when I began it with a naive expectation that it would require a couple of years to fill in the gaps in my lecture notes. Gaps, indeed.
The book relies almost entirely on the work of other scholars. I have listed the sources that I have found most valuable—and that I recommend to other readers—at the end of the relevant chapters. I wish to express my appreciation to the members of the staff of the Interlibrary Loan office of the Henderson Library at Georgia Southern University for their consistently excellent help, and to the Faculty Research Committee and the Faculty Development Committee for making it possible for me to devote several months to full-time research and writing on this project. I am also grateful for the comments, insights, and corrections that I received on the manuscript from Herbert Bodman, Donald Reid, David Commins, Gladys Frantz-Murphy, Erik Gilbert, John Parcels, Kenneth Perkins, and two reviewers who wished to be anonymous.
They saved me from several egregious errors, although I obstinately persisted in certain interpretations despite their best efforts (but never when they agreed on a criticism). I invite readers to send me their own suggestions on how to improve this book—I have been known to yield in the face of overwhelming odds. Finally, anyone who works on a major project within the context of a family knows that an author’s acknowledgment of a family’s support and patience is not a perfunctory gesture: The writing of a book inevitably disrupts family life. I welcome the opportunity to thank Mary, Krista, and Rachel for their good-humored patience and encouragement throughout this endeavor. Vernon O. Egger
Note on Transliteration and Dating
Any work that deals with the Muslim world faces the challenge of the transliteration of words from one alphabet to another. Scholars need a comprehensive system that represents in the Latin alphabet all the vowels and consonants of other alphabets, but nonspecialists can find such a system more confusing and alien than useful. The problem is a serious one when transliterating only one language; in this book, we have to deal with several. I have tried to compromise between accuracy and ease of use. Geographic place names are spelled in this book as they appear on modern English-language atlas maps (Khorasan, Baghdad, Cairo). In some cases, no consensus exists among cartographers on the spelling of place names, and so this book occasionally provides alternate spellings (Zaragoza/Saragossa, Qayrawan/Kairouan).
In a few cases, this book uses names that are more easily understood by English-speakers than some that are more culturally authentic. An example is the Greek-based “Transoxiana” for the Arabic phrase ma wara’ alnahr. In the interest of trying to make transliterated words less of an obstacle to the task of understanding the material, I have also used the more popular spellings for some words, even when doing so seems inconsistent with the practice of the book as a whole. Thus, I discuss “Sunnis and Shi‘ites” rather than “Sunnis and Shi‘is” or “Sunnites and Shi‘ites.” For personal names and technical words in the Arabic, Persian, and Turkish languages, a simplified version of the Library of Congress system is used. No distinction is indicated in this book between long and short vowels, nor are diacritical marks provided for the vowels of words from any language.
For the Arabic language, no attempt is made to indicate the so-called velarized consonants, and no distinction is made between the forms of the letter h, which should be sounded or aspirated. The combination dh represents the sound of the th in the English word then; kh is similar to the ch in the Scottish loch; gh is best described as the sound made when gargling. The q is pronounced farther back in the throat than the k. The symbol ’ represents a glottal stop, the sound that begins each syllable of the English expression uh-oh. The symbol ‘ represents an Arabic consonant with no English equivalent, but it is important in words such as ‘Ali or Shi‘ite. Phonetically, it is a “voiced guttural stop” produced in the very back of the throat, by constricting the larynx to stop the flow of air. An approximation may be achieved by making a glottal stop as far back in the throat as possible.
The prefix al- is the definite article in Arabic, meaning the. Before most letters in the alphabet, the prefix sounds the way it is spelled, but it assumes the sound of certain letters when it precedes them (t, th, d, dh, r, z, s, sh, n). Thus, al-Rahman is pronounced ar-Rahman. Notes regarding the significance of names containing ‘Abd, Abu, and Ibn may be found in the glossary. Understanding these terms makes the learning of Arabic-based names easier and more meaningful. This book uses the abbreviations B.C.E. (Before the Common Era) and C.E. (Common Era). The abbreviations refer to the same dates that are designated as B.C. (Before Christ) and A.D. (anno Domini), respectively, on the Gregorian calendar, but they are an attempt to use religiously neutral nomenclature.
They have almost totally replaced the B.C./A.D. designations in books on world history because of the latter’s Christian-specific nature. In a book on Muslim history, the most logical (and considerate) way of dating would be to use the A.H. (anno hejirae) system, which is based on the Islamic calendar. The first year of this system began in July 622 on the Gregorian calendar. Most readers of this book, however, are non-Muslim citizens of the United States, who, in my experience, are usually confused rather than helped by the use of the A.H. dating system. It is explained in the glossary.
PART ONE
The Formative Period, 610–950
Islam arose in the early seventh century as a religio-social reform movement in the small, hot, and dusty town of Mecca in the western Arabian peninsula. During its first decade, the movement appeared to be highly vulnerable, attracting only a few dozen followers. Many observers expected it to fail miserably. If those same skeptics could have used a time machine to travel one century into the future, they would have found Muslims ruling an empire from the Atlantic to the Indus River valley in modern Pakistan—a region that stretched across 5000 miles. Other groups before and after this period also conquered huge territories in a very short time, but their rule proved ephemeral. The Muslims, by contrast, created a new civilization in this vast area.
Their achievement may well be the closest approximation to the cosmological theory of the “Big Bang” that human history has to offer. The period of Muslim conquests was necessarily followed by an extended period of consolidation. Muslims shared a common set of beliefs and practices, but they lived in dramatically different cultures, had access to a wide range of resources, and were confronted with challenges specific to their region. As they worked out the implications of their faith, they found that their solutions differed from those of their fellow Muslims in other parts of the world. One of the most fascinating features of Muslim history is the continuity of Islamic identity in the absence of a central religious authority such as a pope, patriarch, or synod.
The important developments in religious doctrine and practice were the products of pious individuals who communicated with each other across vast distances. As a result, differences arose among those who called themselves Muslims. In a few cases, such differences were irreconcilable and even deadly. In general, however, the story of Muslim history is that devotion to the Qur’an and the example of the Prophet have enabled Muslims across a wide spectrum of societies to recognize that they belong to the same community of faith. Chapter 1 provides a broad overview of the areas in which Muslim societies first developed: the regions of what had been the eastern Byzantine Empire, the former Sasanian Empire, and the Arabian Peninsula.
Muhammad’s career was confined almost exclusively to the peninsula, but his immediate successors as leaders of the Muslim community were preoccupied with the areas they were conquering in the Byzantine and Sasanian empires. It was here that Islam in the post-prophetic period largely developed, and it is important to understand the pre-Islamic history of these territories. Chapter 2 discusses the conquests of the first century of Muslim history and the development of administrative structures in the newly conquered areas. It shows that this first Muslim state created after the death of the Prophet was an “Arab empire” that failed to live up to the ideals of Islamic equality and justice.
Chapter 3 examines the first major divisions within the Muslim community. It traces the rise of a movement known as Kharijism and explores the early history of Shi‘ism. It shows how the history of Shi‘ism was linked to the revolutionary Abbasid movement that overthrew the Arab empire. Chapter 4 examines the political fragmentation of Muslim society after the eighth century and its organization into three caliphates.
The apparent disunity of these political systems was balanced by the development of a highly integrated and sophisticated economic system that linked all of the regions under Muslim control. Chapter 5 surveys the religious and intellectual developments of the era. It is here that we can see more clearly the correlation between the cessation of the conquests on the one hand and the establishment of the foundations of religious institutions on the other. The period from 600 to 950 is called “formative” not because Islam assumed its permanent form during this time, but because its possibilities for future development were narrowed into specific directions.
For nearly three centuries after the conquest of the Pyrenees Mountains and the Indus valley, the frontiers of Muslim-ruled territory remained essentially stable. During this time, the methodology for determining Islamic law was developed, Islamic mysticism and theology developed their frameworks, science and philosophy were introduced as fields of study, and the distinctions between the terms Sunni and Shi‘ite became well defined. As we shall see in Part Two, the subsequent three centuries saw further elaborations on Islamic traditions, but they were channeled by the developments of the period to 950.
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