Al-Ma’mun was also the beneficiary of the traditional Arab sciences, for he had been schooled in the nascent study of Hanafi jurisprudence as a youth. With this background, his Aristotelian dreams and his measurement of the globe, he was clearly equipped to be a broad-minded thinker, even if he would come late in life to pontifical conclusions. Nothing, however, prepared the empire for another experiment of his – one which seems not to have been repeated anywhere, in any form, until the twentieth century. It was a political experiment, and it sought to bridge the great rift in Arab and Islamic unity: that between the Shi’ah, the Party of Ali, and the rest. It was a rift that had begun as a simple if perilous crack in the Arab power-base, but one that had already swallowed so many lives and loyalties from the battle of Siffin onward. It had also been gaining new dimensions – as a division in the very nature of authority, between caliphate and imamate; between an authority subsisting in texts and their interpretation by scholarly consensus, and another more esoteric, apostolic kind of authority inherited with the blood of the martyred Ali and al-Husayn.
Al-Ma’mun’s recent forebears, the first Abbasid caliphs, had hardly promoted love between the two blocs by coming to power on a Shi’i ticket and then proceeding to rip that ticket to pieces by arrogating power to themselves. But in 816 al-Ma’mun apparently decided to renounce the Abbasid monopoly on rule: he designated Ali al-Rida, the eighth imam of the Shi’is, as heir to the caliphate, and gave him his daughter in marriage. Dazed by the decision but dutiful, those closest to the caliph went along with it; some Shi’is scented success, at last, for their cause, while others smelt a rat; Abbasid dynastic hardliners were appalled. As it happened, Ali al-Rida died two years later, and the business was quietly forgotten – except by the Shi’is, who put his death down to a plot and a poisoned pomegranate. They may be right. Whatever the truth of the matter, the caliph buried Ali al-Rida beside his father, the late caliph al-Rashid, where the latter had died on an expedition to Khurasan. The place became known to Iranian Shi’ism as al-Mashhad, the Sanctuary, and is still the holiest site in Iran.
Conspiracy theories abounded and still do. There was even a niggling rumour that al-Ma’mun secretly exhumed and swapped the two bodies. If it is true, when Shi’i pilgrims stand by the tomb of their eighth imam and pray for his soul, then cross over and curse, triply, al-Rashid’s grave, their prayers and curses are at cross-purposes. God is the one who knows.
The next official attempt at Sunni–Shi’i reconciliation would not take place until the 1940s, with the foundation of an ecumenical body, the Jama’at al-Taqrib; within two decades, that too would fizzle out and die. But for a brief season in the early ninth century, it seemed that the great hemiglobal organism that had gestated in Arabia and been born in the time of Muhammad might, at last, have grown to maturity and left the squabbles of its Arab infancy behind. But once more, the community of Islam stood, as it had done in years immediately after the Prophet,
at a fork in the path of pilgrimage.
Now, two centuries on, the choice was between intellectual routes: on the one hand that of tradition with its textual, rhetorical truths, on the other that of reason, with its empirical truths; and between political paths – the authority of the Sunni Abbasid caliphate, or of the Shi’i Alid imamate . . . Or, as the mercurial al-Ma’mun had shown by making the imam heir to the caliphate, there might have been middle ways to pioneer, ways of compromise but also ways to unity. But, as always, it was easier to agree to differ than to compromise, and to let the future suffer the consequences.
FOUND IN TRANSLATION
Despite divergences intellectual and political, one bond above all still gave the vast and complex organism unity and identity: it still wrote, even if it rarely spoke, in the old high Arabic language. Spoken Arabic might have been splitting up into new dialects, but as Islam expanded to become a world religion and a world culture, Arabic provided the words for that world. In the Qur’anic version of a biblical story, Allah taught Adam the Arabic names of all things in creation; now, with Islam recreating the world in its own image, Arabic was again supplying the vocabulary. It could provide much of it by spontaneous generation: Arabic had always been supple, subtle and versatile, its root-system spontaneously producing offshoots. But just as marriage with the women of the conquered lands had given birth to new hybrid Arabs and new hybrid Arabics, so the language was also enriched from other tongues. Arabic’s own word-world expanded.
In this expansion, formal translation played as important a part as day-to-day communication. The translation movement had begun slowly in Umayyad times, with Arabic versions of texts on chemistry done in Alexandria from Greek and Coptic for an enthusiastic Umayyad prince. Now the programme accelerated, and with the new Abbasid eastward orientation it took in new source-languages: to the first three languages to be mined – Greek, Coptic, and the Syriac of Fertile Crescent scholarship – were added the Persian language, Pahlavi, and Sanskrit. The range of sciences expanded too, with works translated on medicine, botany, pharmacology, astronomy, astrology, geography, geometry, engineering, music, mathematics and more. And the enrichment was not just of the Arabic language and Arabic-thinking minds, but of world knowledge as a whole. If nothing else, the Arab adoption of sifr, the ‘cipher’ – the figure zero, hitherto confined to India – and their communication of it to the rest of the Old World via ‘Arabic’ numerals, would have done much to take that world into the modern age.
Arabic civilization, however, was no cipher itself, no mere hyphen between east and west, ancient and modern. Arabic-speaking scientists were to add much of their own to ancient knowledge, particularly in the spheres of medicine, trigonometry, mathematics and astronomy – as witness the giveaway al- words like ‘alcohol’, ‘algebra’, ‘algorithm’, and star names like ‘Altair’ (al-tayr, ‘the bird’). Others are less obvious: when Hollywood borrowed the name of a star, Betelgeuse, for that of a movie, Beetlejuice, did the movie men realize it was the Arabic ibt al-jawza’, ‘Orion’s armpit’?
As al-Ma’mun’s dream shows, philosophy was eagerly consumed, particularly Aristotle’s, but also that of Plato and the Neoplatonists. Al-Ma’mun was the greatest sponsor of translation and scientific endeavour, and gave the lie to the jibe about Baghdad being nothing but an overblown garrison town by founding a sort of Royal Institution in the city, the Bayt al-Hikmah or House of Wisdom. The Abbasid institute focused on translation but also on the heavens, with astronomical observatories in Baghdad itself and in Damascus. Sponsorship also went on at less exalted levels, even if few could match the sum paid by the three Banu Musa brothers to their own in-house translators – 500 gold dinars a month, at a time when the pay of a foot soldier was twenty dirhams a month, or about two dinars. Eventually, as Dimitri Gutas has written, ‘the majority of pagan Greek books on science and philosophy . . . that were available in Late Antiquity throughout the eastern Byzantine empire and the Near East had been translated into Arabic’. The translation movement had not run out of energy; it had run out of texts.
Even then, however, the literary drive did not end. It changed gear, for the translations had begun to inspire a broad range of original thinking in Arabic, and the thinking was now being set down in what for Arabic was a completely novel way – plain prose, with neither rhythm nor rhyme, composed directly in writing: prose like that which I am writing now. A whole new medium of expression unfurled. At last, users of Arabic could think in ink as well as in sound: the language could serve intellectuals as well as poets, orators and imperial book-keepers. Admittedly, few of the intellectuals were Arabs ‘proper’; they covered the genetic spectrum of the empire. But in philosophy, the first and one of the greatest was the ninth-century ‘Philosopher of the Arabs’, al-Kindi, a prolific author in and defender of science in all its forms. He belonged to that immensely talented clan of princes, poets and pioneers, the ancient ruling house of the tribe of Kindah who had produced the fourth-century king Imru’ al-Qays, author of one of the earliest known
Arabic texts, his namesake the sixth-century wanderer and greatest of the pre-Islamic poets, and that seventh-century rebel reconciled to Islam, the far-travelled warrior al-Ash’ath.
It has often been said that if had not been for Arabs, Europeans would have had no Renaissance. It might be better said that the Abbasids, and especially al-Ma’mun – an unstinting patron greater than Maecenas or the Medici, and mid-way between them in time – were themselves princes of the Renaissance, of which the later European episode was a continuation after a long hiatus.
A REVOLUTION ON PAPER
The Abbasid Renaissance, and the birth of written scholarship in Arabic that came with it, were both powered by paper. This was the third stage in a writing revolution that had begun with the recording of the Qur’an, and had then spread with the need to run the empire in the language of its rulers.
The change from writing little, and slowly, on expensive parchment and papyrus to writing a lot, quickly, on much cheaper paper was a leap in information technology no less important than the leap from paper to screens in our own age: it, too, generated words, not all of them worth generating, but all adding volume to the literary buzz of the times. The traditional account tells how paper came west with Chinese papermakers captured by Arabs at the battle of Talas or Taraz, east of the Syr Darya River, in 751 – the clash which marked the furthest penetration of Arab forces into Asia. The story is almost certainly a simplification of a longer and woollier process; the bibliographer Ibn al-Nadim, for example, says that ‘Khurasani paper’ made from flax was known in the west in Umayyad times. What is not in doubt is the sudden spread of paper under the Abbasids. Al-Ma’mun’s father, al-Rashid, is said to have ordered the use of the material in government offices to prevent the ‘cooking of the books’: writing on paper is difficult to erase, unlike that on parchment and papyrus, which can be scraped off comparatively easily. From al-Rashid’s time comes the oldest known surviving paper from the Arab empire, a Greek manuscript written in Damascus in about 800. It is not known where the leaves for it were made, but by that date a papermaking industry had begun in Iraq and was about to spread westward.
The smoothness of paper compared to other writing surfaces further helped the growth of more rounded and cursive Arabic scripts, originally developed by Umayyad imperial scribes to help them speed through their increasing piles of copying. And, just as it had done in its native China, paper also enhanced a whole calligraphic aesthetic, one that would unify the world of Islam and keep it rooted in its Arabic origins: a lot of ‘Islamic’ art is really Arabic calligraphic art. As sculpture was to ancient Greece and the movie is to the modern United States, so calligraphy has been to Arabs through the second half of their long story. Even when they ‘disappear’ from that half, when their role changes from active to passive, the script inscribes itself on and on – saying nothing new, perhaps, but providing a line of continuity, a lifeline for Arab identity that would lead Arabs to their nineteenth-century reappearance in world history.
The calligraphic aesthetic is all-embracing: it literally describes and inscribes both the divine, in the revelation of the Qur’an, and the human – the kiss-curl of the beloved is the letter waw:
and the lovers entwined are a lam-alif of the elaborate ‘Kufic’ sort:
and, to complete the aesthetic circle, letters in their wider sense are described in terms of human beauty:
Perfume the literature you write with only the finest ink,
for literary works are luscious girls, and ink their precious scent.
As yet, in the Abbasid stage of the writing revolution, most writers had no time for such whimsicalities. Written scholarship had a lot to catch up with, and now it began to do so in industrial quantities. A scholar of Nishapur in Iran, for example, would hold open lectures on hadith in which 500 inkwells would be set out for those attending to take down his words. There was a seemingly unstoppable flow of ink: by the early tenth century the wazir Ibn al-Furat could return to his office from sick-leave to find a thousand letters waiting for him to deal with, and another thousand chits to be signed – the equivalent of the bursting email inbox. Sometimes red tape spooled out of control, as in a story of an official with loose bowels who had to submit a written application to use the only available lavatory. By the time it came back, approved, and the illiterate janitor had sent for a clerk to read it out, it was almost too late: a case of logorrhoea and diarrhoea at odds with each other.
At the other literary extreme of this writing society, libraries abounded and played their own part in ensuring cultural cohesion. The ninth-century poet Abu Tammam, for example, marooned by snow in the Iranian city of Hamadhan, shut himself away in the library of one of the local notables, poring over pre-Islamic verse. The scene is a miniature of the cultural empire: an Arabic poet of ambiguous but probably Greek origin, travelling through Persia, reading the works of his ancient Arab predecessors. Libraries grew apace with the outpouring of words. The great statesman of the tenth century, al-Sahib ibn Abbad, was offered a tempting career change, but declined it partly on the grounds that his library alone would need 400 camels to transport it. This was also the age when weighty individual works were appearing, themselves an attempt to contain and control the never-ending flood of ink – books like the tenth-century histories of al-Tabari and al-Mas’udi, both running to many volumes. Al-Mas’udi’s is lost, but its surviving four-volume abridgement – Muruj al-dhahab, The Meadows of Gold – is compendious in itself. It is one of my main sources: it gives an Abbasid world-view of history, in which the Arab empire is both part of a continuum beginning with Adam, and central (as the Tang emperor observed) to a human geography that includes Copts and Persians, Franks and Chinese.
Al-Mas’udi had himself observed a fair portion of that geography, and was thus eminently qualified to present the Abbasid perspective. An Arab descendant of Muhammad’s learned companion Abd Allah ibn Mas’ud, he grew up in Baghdad but would visit many lands – Egypt, Persia, Sind, India, Sarandib (Sri Lanka), and possibly Indo-China, China, the East Indies, and then Madagascar and East Africa on his way back home via the Arabian Peninsula. Later he toured what are now the north and west of Iran, and the lands of the Levant. As the personification of an increasingly bookish and mobile age, he has been compared to Herodotus. But he also embodies a restlessness that had always been endemic in Arabia, had been released after Muhammad when Arabs set out to pioneer a political empire, and was now finding its outlet in travels in search of knowledge. Dual empires of territory and information, such as Edward Said describes in his Orientalism, were not confined to later Western conquerors.
Few if any individuals could have rivalled al-Mas’udi’s explorations, either on the ground or on paper. But the Arabic language and culture he and others used and exported travelled even further. Well before al-Mas’udi’s time, as we have seen, the salon of the poet Ibn al-A’rabi – ‘the Son of the Bedouin’, who was actually of Sindi origin – brought together visitors from Andalus and Turkestan, the extremes of empire. The encounter was not the only one of its kind. ‘I was reciting in the entrance hall of my house one day,’ the later Baghdad poet Ibn Nubatah remembered,
when there was a knock on the door. ‘Who is it?’ I said.
‘A visitor from the Mashriq [the east of the empire],’ came the reply.
‘How can I help you?’ I asked.
He said, ‘This verse is yours, is it not:
“A man who dies not by the sword, still to him death will come:
the causes may be many but the malady is one.”’
‘Yes,’ I said, ‘it is mine.’
‘May I then recite it on your authority?’ he asked.
‘Certainly,’ I replied. He went on his way. At the end of the day there was another knock on the door.
‘Who is it?’ I said.
‘A visitor from Tahart, in the Maghrib [in Algeria],’ came the reply.
‘How can I help you?’ I asked.
He said, ‘This verse
is yours, is it not:
“A man who dies not by the sword, still to him death will come:
the causes may be many but the malady is one.”’
‘Yes,’ I said, ‘it is mine.’
‘May I then recite it on your authority?’ he asked.
‘Certainly,’ I replied. And I was amazed that this verse should have reached both East and West.
Another poet, al-Buhturi, caught the world-spanning mood of the times:
The caravan of my widely travelling verse will surely always
follow you . . .
The Abbasid age was mobile, physically, artistically, intellectually. Al-Kindi, descendant of that most talented of Arab families since long before Islam, vigorously opposed intellectual stick-in-the-muds, obscurantists who would attack philosophy in the name of religion. ‘It is right and proper for us,’ he wrote,
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