Download PDF | Bertold Spuler_ Robert Hoyland (ed.) - Iran in the Early Islamic Period_ Politics, Culture, Administration and Public Life Between the Arab and the Seljuk Conquests, 633–1055-Brill (2014).
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Editor’s Preface and Acknowledgements
Bertold Spuler was one of the leading German Orientalists of the middle decades of the twentieth century. He was a specialist of Iran and Central Asia and composed numerous books on this subject, attaining high international standing, as is indicated by the fact that many of his writings were translated into a variety of European languages.! One that did not receive this treatment (though it was translated into Persian) was his monumental work on early Islamic Iran: Iran in friih-islamischer Zeit, which provides a fundamental basis for the study of Iran from the first Arab conquests in the 630s until the arrival of the Seljuk Turks in 1055.
This is a very difficult period to write about, especially the first half of it, which has been labelled ‘The Two Centuries of Silence’ by the prominent Iranian historian Abdulhossein Zarrinkub.2 Documentary evidence is very scarce and the Arabic and Persian literary accounts, though voluminous, are court-orientated, intended principally for edification and entertainment. It takes a lot of effort to use this material for historical ends and Spuler expended much labour sifting through it so that he could piece together a picture of numerous aspects of Iranian society. These included:
religion (Zoroastrians, Muslims, Christians, Jews and Buddhists), ethnic groups (Arabs, Turks, Persians etc.), intellectual and cultural life, administration, law, economy (agriculture, manufacture, trade, etc.), social stratification, landownership, taxes, the military and daily life.
The volume Spuler produced is doubly difficult to access. Possibly because of the situation in Europe after the Second World War, it did not enjoy a wide distribution and many university libraries — even some very good ones — do not possess a copy. Secondly, being in German, it has not reached the worldwide audience that it deserved. And yet, more than half a century on, no textbook for this period of Iranian history has been produced that might serve in its stead, which greatly impedes the teaching of this subject to new students. It seems worthwhile, then, to make Spuler’s work on this period accessible to a global audience.
Now is a particularly opportune time, for Iranian history is enjoying something of a renaissance, in part because of current events, which see Iran featuring prominently in the world news and which have made scholars understand how important Iran is and was in geopolitical terms, as a crucial bridge between the Fertile Crescent and Central Asia, and in part because of the expanding horizons of late antique studies. Already in 1971, Peter Brown, in his by now cult book The World of Late Antiquity, argued that early Islamic Iran should be included within the purview of the scholar of late antiquity, for in the course of its encounters with the Late Roman Empire it had been exposed to some of the key phenomena of late antiquity, such as the tightening bond between religion and politics, the emergence of self-governing religious communities and the spread of Greek logic and science.
The Sasanian period (224-652) has benefited from this attention, now well served by Touraj Daryaee’s Sasanian Persia: The Rise and Fall of an Empire (London, 2009), and the medieval period is also quite well catered for, notably by David Morgan’s Medieval Persia 1040-1797 (London, 1988). It is to be hoped that the translation of Spuler’s Iran in friih-islamischer Zeit will stimulate interest in and aid research on the time between these two eras.
Of course, the fact that no textbook for early Islamic Iran has been produced since Spuler wrote does not mean that scholarship in this field has stood still — indeed, it has become an increasingly popular area of study of late. Since no recent advances in our knowledge will be represented in Spuler’s text, it would perhaps be helpful if 1 comment here on a few of the most important publications. As regards reference works the most significant development has been the launch of the Encyclopaedia Iranica, which made its début in 1982. Under the careful guidance of Ehsan Yarshater, it has become an essential tool for consultation and research on all aspects of Iranian history and culture, comprising high-quality entries on an enormous range of topics. Its usefulness has been greatly enhanced by the fact that it is available free online, which also means that it can be easily and swiftly updated. In addition, I should mention the voluminous output of C.E. Bosworth, who, over the last five decades, has produced foundational works on numerous aspects of Iranian history, including monographs (in particular the ones on the Ghaznavid dynasty and the province of Sistan), translations (especially of al-Tabart), articles and encyclopaedia entries (300 or so in the Encylopaedia of Islam and Encyclopaedia Tranica).
Academic articles on early Islamic Iran published since 1952 are too numerous to consider here, but monographs are still relatively few, and it is worth mentioning those that have changed the way we think about and approach the subject. Particularly important are three highly original works by Richard Bulliet. His Patricians of Nishapur (1972) makes good use of biographical dictionaries to give a fascinating picture of a number of leading wealthy families in this east Iranian city in the aftermath of the breakup of the Abbasid Empire. He illustrates the crucial role of religious learning in their achievement of status, the rivalry that existed between the law-schools of the Shafi’is and Hanafis, and the part played by the recently introduced institution of the madrasa.
In his Conversion to Islam in the Medieval Period (1979) Bulliet turns once again to biographical dictionaries in order to try to answer the question of when Iran became a majority Muslim country. Because Muslim and non-Muslim names were very often markedly different in Iran, it is reasonably easy to spot converts: thus someone called ‘Ali ibn Rustam is very likely either a convert himself or the son of a convert. Examining a sample of 469 of such cases Bulliet is able to show that conversion to Islam occurred mostly during the period AH 150-300 (AD 767-912), with the process substantially complete by the end of the third Islamic century. His latest book, Cotton, Climate and Camels in Early Islamic Iran (2009), is perhaps his most innovative, tracing the rise of cotton cultivation in Iran in response to a demand for a simple and distinctive form of attire by newly-converted Muslims and its subsequent demise as demand fell and a long period of cold weather led to the migration into the Islamic world of large numbers of Turkic nomads from the Central Asian steppe.
In the field of religion the contribution of Wilferd Madelung has been significant, in particular his Religious Trends of Early Islamic Iran (1988), which grew out of his 1983 Columbia Lectures on Iranian Studies. It is full of rich insights into the religious diversity of this land, illustrating the intersection between theology, law and ethnicity. For example, it considers the links between Maturidi theology and the Turks, the role played by the Murjiite sect in the spread of Hanafism in east Iran, the theological dimension to the rivalry between the Hanafi and Shafi‘ law schools in Iranian cities, the nature of Persian Kharijism and the varieties of Persian Shi‘ism, and the links between Sufi mystical orders, Shafi‘i law and Ash‘ari theology. What shines through clearly in this volume is the complexity of relationships between religious movements and their ideological motivations, geographical distribution, internal dynamics and external events.
The other giant in the field is Patricia Crone. Many of her writings offer insights into Iranian history and culture in the late antique and early Islamic periods; for example, her Medieval Islamic Political Thought (2004) deals with Shi‘ism and Isma‘ilism in Iran and has a long section on the Persian tradition of kingship. But her greatest contribution to our understanding of this region lies in her recent work The Nativist Prophets of Early Islamic Iran (2012). Here she examines a number of insurrections that took place in the mountainous regions of western and eastern Iran in the eighth and ninth centuries. A close analysis of the doctrines of the rebel leaders leads her to conclude that they rest upon regional forms of Zoroastrianism, but with local colouring; in east Iran/Transoxania, for example, some insurgents drew upon Buddhist ideas. She then relates these events to the bigger picture of the socio-economic changes wrought by the Arab conquests and Abbasid revolution and the ways in which the pre-Islamic Persian religious worldview found its expression within the new Islamic milieu.
Besides the output of these three prominent scholars the study of early Islamic Iran has been enriched in the last decade or so by a series of stimulating monographs. Saleh Agha’s The Revolution which toppled the Umayyads: neither Arab nor Abbasid (2003) is an insightful investigation into the incubation of the revolution of AD 750 that led to the rise of the Abbasid Empire and demonstrates convincingly that the role played by Iranians was much more substantial than had previously been recognised. Deborah Tor’s Violent Order: Religious Warfare, Chivalry and the Ayyar Phenomenon in the Medieval Islamic World (2007) shows that ‘ayyaris, who have often been portrayed negatively as brigands, originally began as ascetic defenders of a newly emerging Sunni Orthodoxy, and she illustrates their close links to the Saffarid state, which ruled east Iran in the ninth and tenth centuries.
Parvaneh Pourshariati’s Decline and Fall of the Sasanian Empire (2008) offers a new interpretation of the collapse of the Persian Empire in the wake of the Arab conquests, namely that the alliance between the Sasanian and Parthian families (whose heartlands lay in the southwest and the northeast of Iran respectively) that had endured since the 220s began to unravel in the late sixth century, and particularly in the aftermath of the disastrous defeat inflicted by the Byzantines upon Emperor Khusrau 11 in 628. Turning to literary culture, we have Mohsen Zakeri’s Persian Wisdom in Arabic Garb: Ali b. Ubayda al-Rayhani (2007), a presentation of the works of this key figure in the transmission of pre-Islamic Persian lore into Arabic, and Andrew Peacock’s Mediaeval Islamic Historiography and Political Legitimacy: Bal‘ami’s Tarikhnamah (2007), which looks at the composition and reception of this very early witness to Persian prose writing. We might fittingly conclude with mention of the innovative work by Sarah Savant, The New Muslims of PostConquest Iran (2013), which considers the ways in which Iranian converts to Islam used the pre-Islamic past to construct their new identity, social status and cultural outlook in a rapidly Islamicising world. The quality of these and other publications bodes well for the future of scholarship on early Islamic Tran.
A Note on Editing
The truism that every creative work is a product of its own time is worth emphasizing here and leads to two particular caveats. In the first place, Spuler envisages such notions as ethnicity and identity in quite essentialist terms, not as social constructs subject to variation and change, as has became more usual in recent years. In particular, he views the Middle East as dominated by three overarching groups: Arabs, Persians/Iranians and Turks, and attributes to them a clearly defined and enduring linguistic, cultural and ethnic character. This view has survived largely intact into twenty-first century scholarship and there has as yet been little appreciation of the degree to which these three labels have meant very different things to different peoples at different times. The dominance of the languages of Arabic, Persian and Turkish has helped to mask the fact that identities and allegiances were, and still are, quite fluid and multifaceted in this region.
In the second place, Spuler has a very positive attitude towards the ‘Aryan’ people, which reflects his upbringing in Germany in the first half of the twentieth century. As an expert in the Middle East and Central Asia with a talent for languages, he was drafted into the military in the Second World War, where he served as a translator, interpreter and advisor on Turkish issues. The Communist government of the Soviet Union was at best lukewarm and sometimes overtly hostile to Islam and religious authorities in its Caucasian and Central Asian colonies, and the German Reich strove to win over the local populations of these regions by demonstrating support for Islam. Spuler had alluded in many of his writings to the positive aspects of Islam and its centrality to the Middle Eastern and Turkic world, and so it is not surprising that he was selected by the German army to run a mullah training school at the University of Géttingen, which was intended to produce loyal leaders for military units composed of Pows and deserters from the Soviet army and staff for German-sponsored mosques in Soviet territories.? Although these features of Spuler’s writing could be excised without too much detriment to the work as a whole, it seems to me preferable to leave them in as a testament to the times during which he lived and wrote.
In the third place, Spuler was writing this book during the difficult days of the Second World War, and that can be discerned in his comments about the problems of getting hold of certain academic materials. It would also seem that his work was frequently disrupted, for he uses different ways of referring to the same source, often neglects to include items in the bibliographies, and so on (though it is not evident why he did not revise the whole book before publishing it). I felt it was therefore necessary to reorganise and simplify the overly complex system of references, abbreviations and bibliographies. Now all items (rather than, as before, a selected number) are in the bibliographies, arranged alphabetically (rather than, as before, by subject), except those that are very tangential to the study of Iran or those that Spuler says were inaccessible to him (then, in both cases, cited in full in the footnote in which they are mentioned). I have also simplified the rendering of place names where their modern equivalent is reasonably well known. Finally, I have included the corrections of Albert Dietrich (indicated by the letters aD) from his review of Spuler’s Iran in friih-islamischer Zeit (Oriens 6, 1953, 378-86), in which he went to the trouble of checking many of the references, which highlighted both the strengths and the weaknesses of the work as a whole.
Acknowledgements
I am very grateful to the Volkswagen Foundation for funding the translation of this book. The work was begun by Berenike Walburg, a promising young doctoral student in the field of Iranian history at St Andrews University who very sadly did not live to see its completion. The bulk of the translation was accomplished by Gwendolin Goldbloom, and I am very thankful to her for her dedication and her competent handling of Spuler’s often difficult prose. I was greatly helped in the final revision and editing by Sarah Waidler, with contributions on particular points from Tora Olsson, Anna Chrysostomides, Leyla Najafzada and Charles Mercer.
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