Download PDF | Adam J. Silverstein, Postal Systems In The Pre Modern Islamic World, Cambridge University Press ( 2007).
231 Pages
Postal Systems in the Pre-Modern Islamic World
Adam Silverstein’s book offers a fascinating account of the official methods of communication employed in the Near East from pre-Islamic times through to the Mamluk period. Postal systems were set up by rulers in order to maintain control over vast tracts of land. These systems, invented centuries before steam-engines or cars, enabled the swift and efficient circulation of different commodities — from people and horses to exotic fruits and ice — and, of course, news and letters. As the correspondence transported often included confidential reports from a ruler’s provinces, such postal systems doubled as espionage networks through which news reached the central authorities quickly enough to allow a timely reaction to events.
The book sheds light not only on the role of communications technology in Islamic history, but also on how nomadic culture contributed to empire-building in the Near East, and the ways in which the nascent Islamic state distinguished itself from the Byzantine and Sasanid empires that preceded it. This is a long-awaited contribution to the history of premodern communications systems in the Near Eastern world.
ADAM SILVERSTEIN is Lecturer in Islamic History at the Oriental Institute, University of Oxford.
Acknowledgements
This book could easily have been written without the help of the following people, but it would have been awful. It is a pleasure to thank Tarif Khalidi, who expertly supervised the doctoral thesis on which chapter 2 is based, and who instilled in me a deep appreciation of Islamic civilisation. Charles Melville and C. Edmund Bosworth examined the thesis and made several comments that improved it. I would not have found my way onto a doctoral programme of any sort, let alone one concerned with Islamic History, had it not been for the inspiring guidance of Patricia Crone, who introduced me to the subject when I was an undergraduate in Cambridge.
Ever since then, she has selflessly offered me her time, help, advice, and support at numerous junctures, for which | shall always be grateful. Geoffrey Khan and Petra Sijpesteijn have generously shared their expertise in Arabic papyrology with me on a number of occasions, and both have showed me that ‘humanity’ and the Humanities are indeed compatible — just when I was beginning to doubt it.
A number of scholars have been kind enough to read and comment on individual chapters of this book: Patricia Crone read chapters 3 and 4; Charles Melville read chapter 4; and Robert Irwin read chapter 5. Their advice has always seemed entirely sensible even if, in my stubbornness, I have not always taken it. Chase Robinson, an ideal colleague in every way, read a draft of the entire book and improved it considerably.
I would like to thank Marigold Acland and the editors of Cambridge Studies in Islamic Civilisation for encouraging me to write this book, Isabelle Dambricourt and Jodie Barnes for seeing it through the process of publication. I also wish to acknowledge the generous support of the British Academy, who awarded me a three-year post-doctoral fellowship, during which period much of the research for this book was carried out.
To the extent that taking up Islamic Studies (instead of Law) was meant to be an act of teenage rebellion, my parents took it disarmingly well and have lovingly encouraged me in every way from day one. And if there is even an ounce of scholar in me, it can easily be traced to their genes. To my wife Sophie, a true woman of valour, I owe my happiness. ‘Many women have excelled, but you surpass them all’ (Proverbs 31: 29).
Introduction
True to its title, this book is about postal systems in the pre-modern Islamic world. Although the terms ‘postal system’, ‘pre-modern’, and ‘Islamic world’ may seem self-explanatory, they deserve our attention here nonetheless, for they can be deceptively ambiguous.
Postal systems of the sort described in this book differ from modern ones in three ways. First, a modern postal system is defined by its role as an organisation that transports items for a fee. Pre-modern systems, by contrast, were defined by their method of transportation. The term ‘postal’ refers to the fact that people and riding-mounts were posted at convenient intervals along a route in order to allow couriers to rest periodically and obtain fresh mounts for the next leg of their journey.' Hence, whereas modern postal systems can deliver mail by aeroplane, ship, or road, pre-modern systems were — strictly speaking — exclusively road-based networks of mounted couriers.
Second, owing to the fact that pre-modern postal systems were not defined by their function, they served in a number of capacities that would not be expected of their modern counterparts. For instance, whereas in the pre-modern world privileged people such as envoys and ambassadors could be transported to their destination by post, in the modern world such practices would probably be considered a moderate form of torture rather than a privilege. Furthermore, the fact that pre-modern systems were almost always the speediest method of communication available meant that they were the most effective way of transmitting important information or intelligence reports from afar.
Indeed, any history of intelligence systems almost inevitably becomes a history of postal systems, and vice versa.’ Vestiges of the fact that news in Antiquity was closely associated with the method of its transmission are apparent in current newspaper titles, where the words ‘Post’, ‘Mail’, and ‘Courier’ are ubiquitous. Even in the Arab world, where postal systems from the seventh century until modern times have been labelled ‘al-Barid’ , newspapers have included the word Bard in their title.”
Third, the facilities of pre-modern postal systems were reserved for the ruling authorities in a way that modern systems are not. In fact, most pre-modern systems were governmental institutions whose services were officially inaccessible to even the wealthiest of private citizens. The pre-modern world was not characterised by the literacy rates of the modern West, and the tightly knit social structure of traditional societies did not encourage the dispersal of close acquaintances that is commonplace nowadays. For these reasons, most premodern people would have had no need to write and send letters to distant lands (assuming they could write at all).
When ordinary people — pilgrims and merchants, for instance — wanted to communicate with distant acquaintances, they would resort to relatively haphazard methods of communication such as entrusting letters to passing caravans or, in the case of wealthy individuals, to privately arranged couriers. On occasion, well-organised interest groups could even establish their own, independent postal systems, and numerous examples of such institutions are attested for medieval Europe, where universities, merchants, and even butchers developed private courier systems.* But the postal systems that interest us here were governmental organisations the likes of which existed in most periods and regions of the pre-modern Islamic world.
The definition of ‘pre-modern’ in this context is dictated by two factors. The first is the emergence of modern techniques of telecommunication, paticularly the telegraph, during the Ottoman period.° The telegraph was to pre-modern systems of communication what gunpowder was to ancient warfare: the beginning of a new chapter (or in this case, a new book) of history. The second is the privatisation of Near Eastern postal systems in the sixteenth century. Privatisation could entail either the devolution of control of the postal system to non-governmental bodies or the formal acceptance by the government that civilians might use the system’s services for a fee.
These factors contributed to the erosion of traditional, pre-modern postal systems and set the chronological limits adopted here accordingly. The phrase ‘Islamic world’ is slightly more problematic, and the regions and periods of Islamic history that are treated here are not merely those in which the general population or ruling authorities were Muslim. Rather, by necessity only those Muslim states that possessed complex postal systems (excluding e.g. Muslim Spain and Sicily) are covered, and by choice only those regions that were ‘Islamic’ throughout the formative and classical periods of Islamic history (excluding e.g. South-East Asia and Ottoman Europe) are considered.
The book is divided into three parts. Part I (chapter 1) deals with the postal systems employed in the pre-Islamic Near East, focusing on the East (the Persian empires from the Achaemenids to the Sasanids), the West (from the Romans to the Byzantines), and Arabia (until the Umayyad period). Part II covers the early caliphal phase of Islamic history, specifically the Umayyad (661-750) and early Abbasid period until 847 CE (chapter 2), and the Middle Abbasid period until 1258 (chapter 3), through which the postal systems of the Buyids, Seljuks, Fatimids, Samanids, Ghaznavids, international merchants, and Muslim philosophers are also encountered. Part III considers the postal systems employed in the Near East during the Mongol (chapter 4) and Mamluk (chapter 5) periods.’
Parts II and III are referred to as ‘Conquest and centralisation — the Arabs’ and ‘Conquest and centralisation — the Mongols’ respectively, as they represent pivotal moments in world history generally and in postal history particularly. When the Arabs and Mongols burst onto the international stage in the seventh and thirteenth centuries, they encountered settled and politically sophisticated states with deeply entrenched administrative traditions. It is well-known that both the Arabs and the Mongols came to draw heavily on the bureaucratic experience of their conquered populations. But what has hitherto eluded scholars is the fact that both conducted centralised campaigns of expansion that relied on express messengers who, moreover, employed techniques of communication that would be integrated into the caliphal and Mongol administrations within decades of their establishment.*
A comparison of the conquerors’ techniques of communication in the prestate phase and an analysis of the subsequent incorporation of indigenous traditions into the two empires’ bureaucracies may lead us to adjust our conquest-paradigms for Near Eastern history.
For a book on an aspect of Islamic civilisation, what may seem like an inordinate amount of attention is paid to pre-Islamic institutions, for which the following explanation is offered. To most students and scholars of Islamic history, the period begins in the seventh century CE. There is, for instance, no way of expressing ‘before the hijra’ in Islamic terms. But to rulers of the Islamic world, the Near East that they were inheriting was steeped in traditions and history.
In stressing the pre-Islamic heritage of a caliphal institution we are acknowledging that — as with other great civilisations in history — Islamic society did not simply emerge fully formed out of the sands and oases of seventh-century Arabia. However culturally sophisticated Arabia was at the time, one can be certain that it did not on its own equip subsequent Muslim rulers with all the necessary tools for ruling the Near East (as supporters of the shu‘ubiyya would point out centuries later). Thus, a detailed examination of the world into which the Arabians swept informs us of the conditions with which the conquerors had to contend and how their predecessors dealt with these conditions.
Accepting the pre-Islamic DNA of Islamic political institutions is not meant to belittle the Muslim achievement; on the contrary, it is the only way to appreciate those aspects of caliphal rule that were truly unprecedented. Whereas generations of Western scholars of Islam have pointed out the pre-Islamic provenance of various aspects of Islamic civilisation as a way of downplaying its originality and contribution to history, the approach here is to compare and contrast a caliphal institution with its antecedents as a way of highlighting those aspects of the Barid that made it unique. Would the Byzantine and Sasanid postal systems have been identical to the caliphal Barid had seventh-century Arabians stayed put? Or, put another way, what (if anything) makes an Islamic postal system ‘Islamic’?
These and related questions are of much greater concern to modern historians than they were to pre-modern Muslim authors, and our sources provide information of direct relevance to postal history only sparingly. The Barid was an administrative institution that, unlike most others, had a physical presence in all provinces of the caliphate. Postal stations, station-masters, couriers, guides, milestones, and riding-mounts were widely disseminated throughout a ruler’s realms, and even those authors who had little experience of administration in the capital would have been familiar with the postal system’s general infrastructure and activities.
This, for an historian of the Barid, is the good news. The bad news is that despite (or because of) this widespread familiarity with the system, contemporary authors almost never talked about it. Moreover, perhaps due to the clandestine nature of the Baria’s role in gathering and transmitting intelligence reports, our sources do not tend to describe this aspect of its activities in detail, if at all.” For these and other reasons, there are no classical Arabic or Persian treatises dedicated to the postal system’s history, functions, or administration;'° the closest one gets to a Barid-manual is the genre of caliphal itineraries (masalik wa mamalik) often written by and for postal employees.'' These itineraries provide a gazetteer of the various provinces of the known world and the routes that linked them, but otherwise serve our needs little more than a phonebook serves the needs of an historian of telecommunications.
The shortcomings of our sources are overcome by different means in each chapter, and our historiographic approach varies as a result.'” Our treatments of the Sasanid and ‘Arabian’ systems of communication are based on the many references to communications technology scattered amongst literary, documentary, and epigraphic sources in a number of languages that, despite their volume, yield only minimal evidence and tentative conclusions.
The Byzantine postal system, by contrast, is described in a range of primary and secondary sources that has no equivalent in Islamic letters until the Mamluk period (1250-1517). In this case, the challenge is to summarise and analyse a disparate amount of information, and relate it to the situation in the Near East on the eve of Islam. Our sources for the early caliphal period (until 847 CE) are relatively descriptive insofar as Arabic chronicles discussing the period make regular reference to the Barid in action.
But as most of these chronicles were only composed centuries after the events they purport to describe, it must be assumed that topoi and anachronisms taint literary accounts of this postal activity. A handful of Barid-related documents from the period act as a corrective to the literary record and illuminate the picture considerably. The Barid in the Middle Abbasid period (after 847) is repeatedly referred to ina large selection of contemporary literary and documentary sources that, taken together, allow us to arrive at a reasonably detailed understanding of the Barid’s function and structure during this period. The Mamluk Barid and the Mongol Yam are described in a wide range of contemporary accounts, many of which were written by administrators or travellers who had direct experience of the postal systems they describe.
Every effort has been made to tease pertinent information from the available evidence for each period, but it is recognised that, as we can only usefully ask questions to which our sources provide answers, we know more about the postal systems employed in some Islamic states than we do about others. Almost inevitably, some readers will deem my use and analysis of the sources to be unduly naive or sceptical, or otherwise misguided. My approach has been to quote the sources extensively, which should allow readers to make up their own minds on points of detail, and to take refuge in a statement of Yaqut al-Hamawt’s, according to whom: ‘As regards the Barid, there is disagreement concerning it.
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