Arabs

by Tim Mackintosh-Smith

  Abbasid adaptability was visible almost from the start of their rule. The Umayyads had secured their place in the Afro-Eurasian-Mediterranean world but had never detached themselves from Arabia and the long Arab past. Their chosen capital was a prolongation of that past: Damascus was the oasis of Arab dreams, a temperate earthly paradise set in a land of figs and olives. It was also a second-hand city, one of the many seats of government in a millennial game of musical chairs. The Abbasids made a new start. They began by systematically erasing their predecessors in the nastiest way, disinterring and desecrating their remains. The poetry-loving Hisham was subjected to particularly harsh post-mortem punishment in revenge for his crucifixion and burning of an Alid revolutionary, Zayd ibn Ali: Hisham’s own corpse, still reasonably whole, was given eighty lashes before itself being burnt. Fortunately for future lovers of Islamic art, this damnatio memoriae spared both the Umayyads’ great religious monuments and their more out-of-the-way rural palaces.

  The Abbasids turned their backs on Syria, and to begin with al-Saffah, figurehead of the Abbasid movement and first caliph of their dynasty, ruled from al-Kufah. But the city had remained the centre of Shi’ah activism, and if the Party of Ali were still fellow revolutionaries they would not remain so for long: they had been used, and soon they too would be erased. Al-Saffah therefore founded a new capital, at a comfortable distance – near al-Anbar, 200 kilometres up the Euphrates. The caliph had hardly moved there, however, when in 754 he died of smallpox. So it was that the real new Abbasid beginning took place under al-Saffah’s brother and successor, Abu Ja’far, who took the title al-Mansur, ‘the Victorious’.

  Al-Mansur is remembered above all for his foundation of Madinat al-Salam, ‘the City of Peace’ – and of dreams and nightmares – usually known by the name of a small earlier settlement on the site, Baghdad. It was yet another new town in the pivotal land between Arabia and Persia; but its site destined it to be different. Like the old Persian capital, nearby Ctesiphon, it was built on the Tigris, the easternmost of the two great rivers of Mesopotamia; unlike Ctesiphon, it straddled the river, with its eastern, left-bank suburb lying at the start of the road that led to Khurasan. Up to now, the major Arab cities – ancient al-Hirah, and recent al-Kufah and, far to the south, al-Basrah – had been built on the Arabian side of the western river, the Euphrates. Al-Mansur’s new capital re-orientated the empire geographically, politically and psychologically to the east as well as to the west. With their initial burst of conquest, Arabs had moved into the Eurasian mainstream; with the Umayyad move to Damascus, they had set their sights north and west, on the old Classical world, while keeping a southward eye on ancient Arabia. From Baghdad, however, Arabs looked east as well, and into the future.

  Baghdad was cosmopolitan, imperial and idiosyncratic: its global orientation was reflected in its design, which centred on the great Round City. Planned in concentric cirles like a target with the caliphal palace at the bull’s eye, 50,000 workmen laboured simultaneously to build it. In good Meccan mercantile tradition, al-Mansur soon commanded the merchants to come and set up shop; they formed a commercial suburb, called Karkh. Damascus had been an ancient Incense Road town; Baghdad rapidly became the new hub of multiple Silk and Spice Roads that crossed land and sea. The Round City was the caliphal capital, but it was no introverted Forbidden City: its gates at the cardinal points led to the four quarters of the empire, and over each one al-Mansur built an airy pavilion from which he could survey comings and goings. He was aware too of the wider world, and of the position in it of his own vast realm. Anglo-Saxon Mercia may not have featured except as part of a general ‘Frankish’ blur, but the other extreme did: ‘Here is the Tigris,’ he said one day, surveying the traffic on Baghdad’s river, ‘and nothing bars the way between it and China.’

  Baghdad, however, was not founded until 762, when al-Mansur had already been caliph for eight years. During that time, he had been busy levelling the political ground, removing all obstacles to autocracy. The first of these was the military commander of the Abbasid revolution, victor of the battle of the Greater Zab with his Bactrian camels and black banners, al-Mansur’s own paternal uncle Abd Allah ibn Ali. He made a bid for the caliphate, was besieged, captured and put under house arrest – and then, by the sort of coincidence that happens when potentates are in charge, was killed when the house collapsed on top of him (reliable people were summoned to bear witness that it was accidental). Having dealt with his uncle, al-Mansur then turned to the faithful lieutenant who had captured him, the revolutionary mastermind Abu Muslim. There were indications that the old story would repeat itself and that Abu Muslim would make a bid for independence in his native Khurasan, that rich, distant and troublesome province. Al-Mansur had him killed – then had to deal bloodily with a revolutionary splinter group that arose in this Abbasid Trotsky’s name. Next, just as al-Mansur was at last beginning work on his new capital, an Alid element of the Abbasid former revolutionary coalition itself rose in revolt. The leaders, two great-great-grandsons of Ali, were soon eliminated, one in Medina, the other near al-Kufah; in that place of falling heads, the latter was of course decapitated. By flogging dead Umayyads in revenge for their treatment of the descendants of Ali, the Abbasids had literally beaten the lessons of history into their predecessors. For all the lessons they themselves learned, they might as well have flogged dead horses.

  Built though it was on hypocrisy, wilful amnesia, treachery and avunculicide, Baghdad and the wider Abbasid empire would be stable for a time. The futuhat, the armed Arab ‘openings-up’, had reached their furthest limits in the two decades before the Abbasid coup. Now the borders of empire were consolidated, and a network of control and communication was built up. Those five far-flung Abbasid brothers of the first Islamic generation had ended up in locations as various as North Africa and Samarqand. Similarly, in early Abbasid times two brothers, Yazid ibn Hatim and Rawh ibn Hatim, could find themselves as governors respectively in North Africa and Sind; the difference was that when the first one died, the second was appointed to his post – a transfer from one end of empire to the other, and across half the width of the known world. The Round City was the hub of control and communication for a massive but mobile empire: al-Mansur’s grandson al-Rashid was overheard addressing a cloud, ‘Go and rain wherever you will, for your crop tax will come to me.’ There was nothing whimsical in the command. Revenues, reports and officials would come with increasing speed from increasing distances. It was possible, for example, to travel express, posting from the far end of Khurasan to Baghdad in as little as twelve days – a distance of more than 1,500 kilometres. Even the crops themselves could be sent by the equivalent of FedEx: myrobalans, a plumlike fruit, could be sent 2,500 kilometres from Kabul to Baghdad and arrive fresh.

  Given this carefully cultivated interconnectedness, and the fact that the Department of Posts also operated as the caliph’s most effective intelligence department, one had to go a long way to hide from the Abbasids. Surviving dissident descendants of Ali thus ended up scattered across a vast arc from the borders of India to the shores of the Atlantic. Many would remain in secluded obscurity: I once visited the ancestral Mauritanian stronghold of an Alid family, a mud fortress on the furthest edge of the Sahara from Baghdad, where members of the clan still held out against their persecutors of 3,500 kilometres away and 1,250 years ago. Some, however, were able to set up independent states, such as that of the Idrisids in Morocco, founded in 788. Most remarkably, an adventurous young survivor of the ousted Umayyads made it hot-foot to Spain and founded a western offshoot of the old dynasty even before the first brick was laid in Baghdad’s Round City.

  The ‘King of Kings’ in Baghdad may have ruled the biggest realm in the world, but he soon found out that the bigger the realm, the flakier the edges.

  MEASURING THE WORLD

  If it hadn’t been clear to their Umayyad predecessors, it was obvious to the Abbasids almost from the start that such an empire could not be held together by mil
itary force alone. It needed something more central, much more powerful – gravity, not pressure.

  Umayyad rule of their ever-broadening empire had been exclusive and aloof. As the base of the imperial pyramid had become ever more plural, so the apex had risen until it had lost touch with the ground. A new imperial architecture was needed – a structure in the round that would encompass plurality, which would centre on the caliph and celebrate him, but which would be built on the level; a structure not unlike the Round City. It was not – of course – that the Abbasid empire was in any political sense level; rather, the caliph was seen to share the same cultural ground with his subjects, whether they were descended from Persian noblemen, black slaves, migrant Indian peasants or bedouin Arabs. Under the Umayyads, the dominant culture had been Arabic, Arabian and elitist. Now it was Arabic, Islamic and increasingly accessible. Being a ‘true’ tribal Arab or a mawla, a tribal affiliate, was to matter less and less; as in the ancient, non-tribal South Arabian societies, it was submission to the unifying deity that made one a member.

  Long before, Arabic had given its speakers a sense of unity. With Muhammad, its rhetoric had given Arabs a sense of purpose and inspired the empire-building super-raids under his successors. Now, at long last, began the third conquest after those of language and arms – that of Islam. Up to the time of al-Saffah and al-Mansur, the rate of conversion remained very low: most Persians, for example, were still Zoroastrian. This changed under their successors: Islam would complete its transformation from cult to cultural hegemony. The part that subsequent caliphs played in it all was central, but usually closer to that of British monarchs as ex-officio heads of the Church of England than of medieval popes as de facto secular princes, or of more recent popes as infallible interpreters of divine will: caliphs were defenders of the faith, but not necessarily paragons of its practice. To take the case of alcohol, as with the Umayyads few of them would have passed a breathalyser test. The attitude was neatly expressed by al-Ma’mun, their greatest thinker:

  Drink, but always know that it’s a sin,

  and seek forgiveness from a kindly Lord.

  It was enough for their subjects that they were there, at the heart of things, and that they derived their name and their descent from Muhammad’s uncle.

  The subjects, meanwhile, covered the imperial gamut. Something of their diversity comes across in the list of people mimicked and satirized by the late ninth-century Baghdad comedian Ibn al-Maghazili: a’rabi bedouins, Turks, Meccans, Najdis from central Arabia, indigenous Nabati peasants from Mesopotamia, black Zanjis, Sindis from the valley of the Indus, Jat Indians, and ‘types’ such as camp homosexuals, judges, caliphal eunuchs and grammarians. Arabs accounted for only a few of these personas, and if they enjoyed any primacy it was mainly in their own eyes. To be an Arab in ninth-century Baghdad was not unlike being a WASP in twenty-first-century New York: important to oneself, perhaps, but increasingly irrelevant to the demography of ‘Baghdad on the Subway’ (as O. Henry aptly called his city).

  This diversity under the early Abbasids fuelled an intellectual ferment that bubbled with questions – not least questions about that belatedly cohesive force, Islam. Baghdad itself was not the major centre of learning: its inhabitants were dismissed by one scholar as ‘the camp-followers of the caliph’s army’. Rather, it was al-Kufah and al-Basrah that acted as the twin, often rival, intellectual capitals, a sort of Abbasid Oxbridge or Harvard and Yale. Debate was lively, thought free. According to a recent writer,

  The most important stage of Arab intellectual growth was in the Abbasid period. It was then that most of the questions were posed that are still posed today. Debate was marked by such extraordinary fearlessness that even heretics were able put forward their views. Today, we dare not pose the smallest fraction of the questions some of our forebears asked, and in this sense, we have regressed from those times.

  Among the questions were ones about the nature of God, about predestination and free will, sin and repentance. Foremost in debate in the earlier Abbasid period were the scholars known as the Mu’tazilah, who tended to stress the role of the individual, and in particular one’s ethical responsibilities and ability to make one’s own sense of scripture. They emphasized the importance of ijtihad – a cognate of jihad, ‘struggle’, with its various implications – but, for the Mu’tazilah, meaning the individual struggle to understand what Allah communicated to mankind through His messenger Muhammad. Their ideas were given a huge fillip when they were espoused by Caliph al-Ma’mun; at the same time they were fatally jeopardized for, in 833, only four months before his death, al-Ma’mun was to take a ‘papal’ turn and make them official dogma, thus turning what had been points of view into rights and wrongs. In particular, al-Ma’mun backed the view of the Mu’tazilah that the Qur’an was created by Allah, and not eternally co-existent with Him. At first glance, the point may look like a theological nicety. But when one considers the battles, theological and political, fought over the equivalent Christian questions in the early Byzantine period – about the exact relationship of God and His Logos, Jesus, and the nature of the Trinity – one will realize that the stage was set for bitter dispute, accusations and counter-accusations of heresy, even for inquisitions.

  It had taken two centuries for Islam to produce its first orthodoxy. In that time, however, Allah had come a long way from His beginnings as the tribal deity of Quraysh; but then, so too had Quraysh. The caliphs of its Umayyad clan, by depicting the great rulers of the world on the walls of their palaces, had signalled that they had staked their claim to territory on the world map of kings. For those of the Abbasid clan, that claim was now secure: they wanted a stake in learning as well as land, to found an empire of the mind as well as on the map. Rather as imperial Romans had looked across and back to Greece, and imperial Russians to France, so the rulers of the Arab empire looked to their neighbours present and past to build up their intellectual property portfolio. The theological debates of the time were thus part of a general intellectual opening-up, an opening that reached its widest during the earlier part of al-Ma’mun’s caliphate. An anecdote attempts to explain why this was. Under the heading, ‘The reason why books of philosophy and of the other ancient sciences have proliferated in this land’, the bookseller and bibliographer of Baghdad Ibn al-Nadim wrote,

  One night al-Ma’mun dreamed that a man . . . was sitting on his caliphal throne. ‘It was as if I were standing before him,’ he said, ‘and filled with awe by him. I asked him who he was, and he said, “I am Aristotle.” I was overjoyed, and said, “Great sage, may I ask you a question?” “Yes,” he said. So I asked him, “What is goodness?” He replied, “That which reason deems to be good.” And I said, “And then what?” He replied, “That which the law deems to be good.” And I said, “And then what?” He replied, “That which the mass of the people deem to be good.” And I said, “And then what?” And he replied, “And then there is no more ‘then’.”’

  At least in al-Ma’mun’s dreams, it seemed Baghdad might become that hypothetical city of the philosophers. In pursuit of the ideal, al-Ma’mun ‘wrote to the Byzantine emperor [Leo the Armenian] asking him to consent to sending a selection of such works on the ancient sciences as had been preserved and passed down in Byzantine lands. To this the emperor agreed, after some initial reluctance’.

  The dream may itself have been dreamed up to rationalize al-Ma’mun’s interests; but the interests were real, and there is nothing hypothetical in the way he put some of them into practice. ‘Al-Mamun was fascinated by the sciences of the ancients and wished to prove their theories’, says a biography of the three sons of Musa ibn Shakir, joint authors of a famous book on mechanical contrivances. In the course of his perusal of those ‘ancient’ sciences – that is, Greek and Hellenistic studies of the physical world – the caliph had read, for example, that the circumference of the terrestrial globe was 24,000 miles, and commisioned the Banu Musa brothers to put the figure to the test. They scouted around for the flatt
est and largest area possible and decided on the desert around Sinjar. There, they measured the elevation of the Pole Star, then travelled due north until they reached a point where the elevation had increased by one degree. Measuring with pegs and rope the distance travelled, they found it to be sixty-six and two-thirds of a mile. They then repeated the experiment by travelling due south until the elevation of the Pole had decreased by one degree, and found the distance to be the same. They then double-checked their figure in the desert around al-Kufah. Multiplied by 360 degrees, it gave a product of 24,000 miles – QED.

  The point is not in the originality of the experiment, ‘the ancient metrologists had themselves performed it’, but in the fact that the Banu Musa brothers, under al-Ma’mun’s patronage, ‘were the sole ones in the community of Islam to have applied themselves to it, and to have taken it out of the realm of theory and into that of practice’. The experiment had never been repeated in Islamic lands as far as the writer knew, and he was writing 450 years later. After his time, Mongol and Mughal Islamic rulers would become enthusiastic backers of the applied sciences, but among Arab rulers al-Ma’mun’s caliphate marks an apogee for practical research.

  Alongside the sciences of the non-Arabs (often called al-’ulum al-’aqliyyah, ‘the rational sciences’), the Arab sciences (al-’ulum al-naqliyyah, or ‘traditional sciences’) were also flourishing. The latter were really the Arabic sciences, as they revolved around texts – the written text of the Qur’an, and the vast body of sayings and doings of Muhammad and his companions, which existed as oral texts or jottings. In early Abbasid times, this second corpus began to be codified and committed to papyrus and increasingly, as we shall see, to paper. From it – at last – formal ethical and legal structures began to emerge for Islam. Of the four founders of the main ‘schools’ of Sunni jurisprudence – based, that is, on the sunnah or practice of Muhammad and his followers – three were ‘genetic’ Arabs; the fourth, Abu Hanifah, was a mawla and the grandson of a slave from Kabul. The next generation, however, those who elaborated and disseminated the founders’ ideas, tended to be as cosmopolitan as the empire. Not untypical is al-Qasim ibn Sallam: born in Herat, Afghanistan, to a Byzantine slave father, he eventually became a judge in Tarsus on the Mediterranean, and died in Mecca shortly after the time of al-Ma’mun. Similarly, Shi’ah ethics and jurisprudence were laid down by imams of the house of Ali, but built upon by their non-Arab followers. It was these ‘foreigners’ who took the kernel of the Qur’an and the amorphous raw material surrounding it, and pressed it into shape as a fully rounded religion.