A History of the Muslim World to 1405

by Vernon O Egger

  Jihad in the Shari‘a

  This selection regarding the rules pertaining to jihad comes from a legal treatise by the Egyptian Shafi‘i scholar Ahmad ibn al-Naqib (d. 1368). Jurists from the other schools of law differed over details (some would reject the permissibility of destroying property of the enemy, for example), but this text reflects a widespread conception of jihad: The Dar al-Islam is in a constant state of potential or actual war with the Dar al-Harb; actual conflict should be taking place somewhere at all times; the engagement in jihad by a few Muslims relieves the obligation on the Umma as a whole; jihad is viewed as both a defensive reaction against hostile non-Muslims and as an aggressive act that follows a rejected ultimatum from a Muslim ruler to non-Muslims in the Dar al-Harb to accept Islam or pay the poll tax.

  Jihad is a communal obligation. When enough people perform it to successfully accomplish it, it is no longer obligatory upon others. Jihad is personally obligatory upon all those present in the battle lines. Jihad is also obligatory for everyone when the enemy has surrounded the Muslims. Those called upon are every able-bodied man who has reached puberty and is sane…

  It is offensive to conduct a military expedition against hostile non-Muslims without the caliph’s permission.

  Muslims may not seek help from non-Muslim allies unless the Muslims are considerably outnumbered and the allies are of goodwill towards the Muslims.

  The caliph makes war upon Jews, Christians, and Zoroastrians until they become Muslim or else pay the non-Muslim poll tax [and thereby become dhimmis]. The caliph fights all other peoples [idolaters] until they become Muslim.

  It is not permissible to kill women or children unless they are fighting against the Muslims. Nor is it permissible to kill animals, unless they are being ridden into battle against the Muslims, or if killing them will help defeat the enemy. It is permissible to kill old men and monks [who fight Muslims]. It is unlawful to kill a non-Muslim to whom a Muslim has given his guarantee of protection provided the protecting Muslim has reached puberty, is sane, and does so voluntarily.

  Whoever enters Islam before being captured may not be killed or his property confiscated, or his young children taken captive. When a child or a woman is taken captive, they become slaves by the fact of capture, and the woman’s previous marriage is immediately annulled. When an adult male is taken captive, the caliph considers the interests [of the community] and decides between the prisoner’s death, slavery, release without paying anything, or ransoming himself in exchange for money or for a Muslim captive held by the enemy. If the prisoner becomes a Muslim then he may not be killed, and one of the other three alternatives is chosen.

  It is permissible in jihad to cut down the enemy’s trees and destroy their dwellings.

  A free male Muslim who has reached puberty and is sane is entitled to the spoils of battle when he has participated in a battle to the end of it. After personal booty, the collective spoils of the battle are divided into five parts. The first fifth is set aside, and the remaining four are distributed, one share to each infantryman and three shares to each cavalryman. From these latter four fifths also, a token payment is given at the leader’s discretion to women, children, and non-Muslim participants on the Muslim side. A combatant only takes possession of his share of the spoils at the official division.

  As for personal booty, anyone who, despite resistance, kills one of the enemy or effectively incapacitates him, risking his own life thereby, is entitled to whatever he can take from the enemy, meaning as much as he can take away with him in the battle, such as a mount, clothes, weaponry, money, or other….

  SOURCE: Ibn al-Naqib, Ahmad ibn Lu’lu’. Reliance of the Traveller: A Classic Manual of Islamic Sacred Law. Edited and translated by Nuh Ha Mim Keller. Revised edition. Beltsville, Maryland: Amana Publications, 1999, pp. 600–606

  Since gazis accepted non-Muslims into their raiding societies, it is not surprising to learn that they were more tolerant of religious differences than most urban Muslims were. On the one hand, they became much more active as missionaries than the ulama in any time or place have been; on the other hand, they commonly venerated the shrines of local Christian saints, just as Christians of the rural areas visited Muslim spiritual teachers and venerated the shrines of Muslim saints. Gazi society was characterized by folk religion rather than by the intellectualized and formal Islam of the cities. As such, its version of Islam was often scorned by the ulama. Illiteracy was high in rural peasant areas anywhere; the uncertainties and fluidity of the frontier could only exacerbate the situation. Inevitably, religion on the frontier was different from its urban cousin and it was syncretistic, whether among Christians or Muslims. The Turkish nomads and semi-nomads themselves were originally shamanists. As they passed through Iran and into Anatolia, they picked up their knowledge of Islam from popular preachers, Sufi adepts, and members of persecuted sects who sought the safety of remote regions out of fear of persecution. In the process, they combined elements of their original spiritual practices with Shi‘ism, Sunnism, popular Christianity, and other local religious legacies.

  Frontiers within the Dar al-Islam

  If hostile empires failed to demarcate exact boundaries between each other, the separation of Muslim polities from each other was even more imprecise. Like the frontiers that surrounded the Dar al-Islam, internal frontiers were a function of the diminishing power that cities exerted over their hinterland. Deserts, mountains, and sheer distance ultimately reduced the power of a Muslim ruler until he had to cooperate with regional strongmen, who in turn had to negotiate with rulers on their other frontiers. Thus travel among the various Muslim polities required flexibility and adaptation to changing circumstances, but it was rarely complicated by legal obstacles.

  In order to understand the achievements of the peoples of the Muslim world prior to the formation of nation–states, it is important to realize that they were able to travel remarkably freely, regardless of their religious affiliation. When traveling from one part of the Muslim world to another, they would be recognized as different from the indigenous inhabitants, but they were not regarded as alien. Christians and Jews were allowed to travel great distances without harassment, provided they could demonstrate that they had paid their taxes. Even Christians from Europe were allowed access to important commercial cities, although their movements were often restricted. Linguistic barriers were not a major concern, either, since traveling scholars and merchants of any of the three main religions knew at least some Arabic, which played the role of an international language throughout the Dar al-Islam just as Latin did in western Europe. Due to the patronage of Persian literature by the Samanids and Ghaznavids, the Persian language increasingly became the lingua franca from Iran to South Asia.

  The major challenge that travelers faced was not presented by powerful Muslim rulers, but rather by the absence of such power in the frontier regions. It was there that scholars, merchants, pilgrims, and others who were traveling overland were most likely to be attacked by bandits. If they survived the hazards of the less secure areas, they would not know when they had passed definitively from one “country” to another until they approached towns and cities dominated by a different amir. Upon entering the gates to the town, they would encounter customs booths and other signs of official monitoring. Local authorities would check the travelers’ papers. While passports would not be required, the officials would make sure that foreigners from the Dar al-Kufr paid for the protection that they would enjoy and that Christians and Jews from other regions in the Dar al-Islam were carrying documentation that they had paid their taxes in their home regions.

  The contrast between the modern focus on state boundaries and the monitoring of “aliens,” on the one hand, and the indifference toward such elements in Muslim societies of the tenth to thirteenth centuries, on the other, is best explained in terms of the different types of law obtaining within each. Modern states enforce a code of laws that is territorial and applies to all who are within the national bo
undaries, with the exception of those who hold diplomatic immunity. By contrast, even in the pre-Islamic era, the governments in the area that became the Dar al-Islam had considered their primary functions to be the provision of security and the collection of taxes, rather than the creation and enforcement of a code of laws that defined a territorial state. For Byzantines, Sasanians, and then Muslims, law was personal, rather than territorial. As we have seen, the Shari‘a was not developed by the state, but by groups of scholars working independently of the state. “Foreigners,” whether Muslim or not, continued to be subject to the laws of their own religious communities when they left their homes. The Muslim state did not have a set of laws to which it considered them subject.

  Identities

  Prior to the spread of the nationalist idea in the nineteenth century, the concept of “nationality” or “citizenship” was extremely rare, with the Roman Empire being one of the few exceptions. Otherwise, people conceived of their personal identity in terms of family lineage, residence in a particular village or city, participation in the rituals of a given religion, and the language they spoke. Within the Dar al-Islam, the most important identities were those defined and addressed by the Shari‘a. Among these were religious affiliation, gender, and slavery. The issues of religious identity and the status of women are discussed in other sections of this book, but, at this point, a few observations on slavery are in order. In addition, the issue of ethnicity bears some exploration. Although it was not an issue of concern to jurists, it played an important role in the perceptions of others, in self-perception, and in the development of cultural expressions.

  Slavery

  Until the modern period, slavery was almost universally considered to be an unfortunate, but common, experience. The scriptures of Islam, like those of Judaism and Christianity, did not condemn the institution of slavery. On the contrary, the scriptures and their commentaries addressed slaves and slave owners alike, counseling them in how to relate to each other. Despite condoning slavery, the Shari‘a discouraged, and eventually prohibited, the enslavement of both Muslims and dhimmis. Unlike the Christian world, the Umma also forbade the imposition of slavery as a punishment for debt or crime. Thus, to be a slave in the Muslim world one was born to slave parents, captured in campaigns of conquest, or purchased from abroad. Like the Roman and Greek worlds, but unlike the plantation slavery of the early modern period, slaves in the Muslim world were not used primarily for agriculture or mining, but rather for domestic purposes or in the military. Slaves were not unknown in large-scale agriculture and mining: The late ninth-century Zanj revolt in southern Iraq was the best-known case of the agricultural use of slavery, although they were also used on a few large estates in Andalus and North Africa. Large crews of slaves were also doomed to the brutal and hopeless conditions of salt mines in the Sahara and gold mines of Nubia. Nevertheless, nothing in the records available to us now suggests that agriculture and mining were reliant to a large degree on slave labor. Slaves were used primarily in homes, in shops, in the military, and as tutors and entertainers in the palace. Most of the earliest slaves owned by Muslims were captured in warfare, but by the Abbasid period, that source dried up considerably. The raids of Mahmud of Ghazna once again brought in a vast quantity of slaves, this time from India—contemporary accounts report a figure of over 50,000 Indian captives as part of the pillaging in the raid of 1018 alone—but conquest ceased being a primary source of slaves. Most slaves were purchased from abroad. Many came from Africa, both east and west, but even more came from Europe. The European slaves are usually referred to as Greeks or Slavs. Andalus became a thriving entrepot of the European slave traffic, and it was serviced primarily by Catalan and Italian merchants. Egypt, too, had a famous slave market, which offered for sale slaves from Africa and Europe alike. With the increasing demand for Turks in the many Muslim armies of the Dar al-Islam, Transoxiana became a major area in the long-distance slave trade. From the Samanid regime until the end of the fifteenth century, the trade in Turkish slaves became an important pillar of the economy of the region.

  Muslims viewed slavery with ambivalence. On the one hand, the jurists ensured the legal existence of the institution by formulating a myriad of regulations that became enshrined in the Shari‘a. Slaves were legally property and could not own or inherit property themselves. Courts of law usually did not accept their testimony. A slave owner had unlimited sexual access to his female slaves. According to Sunni legal schools, slaves were not to hold jurisdiction over freemen and were not to exercise religious functions.

  On the other hand, the Shari‘a admonished slave owners to treat their slaves humanely, and families commonly adopted their slaves. The Qur’an and Hadith made clear that the manumission of slaves was a commendable act, and the Shari‘a provided various ways for manumission to happen. A master who stated in the presence of a witness, even in jest, that his slave was free would have to give him his freedom. Slaves whose masters were willing could pay for their freedom. A concubine who gave birth to the children of her master could not be sold thereafter; on his death, she and her children were free, and her children had a legal right to his property on the same basis as the children of his wife or wives. The concubines of caliphs were in a particularly ambiguous position. Technically slaves, their sons could become caliphs. The last two Umayyad caliphs were the sons of slave mothers, and all but the first Abbasid caliph were the sons of concubines.

  Like concubines, eunuchs held an ambiguous social position. The Qur’an forbade the mutilation of slaves, and the Shari‘a reinforced the stricture. As a result, it was illegal to castrate individuals within the Dar al-Islam, but a thriving trade developed for individuals who were emasculated on the frontiers. Most eunuchs were either Slavs or Africans, and although they are most famous for their role in the harems of powerful men, they also served as custodians of the Ka‘ba and of the tombs of famous individuals. Moreover, within the Fatimid empire some eunuchs managed to gain a certain revenge for their mutilation as they became powerful military or political figures who wielded enormous authority over free Muslims. Jawhar not only served as commander of the Fatimid armies, but also exercised absolute power in the process of consolidating Fatimid power over Egypt in preparation for the arrival of al-Mu‘izz. Several other eunuchs were Fatimid military leaders, governors of towns and provinces, chiefs of police, and muhtasibs.

  The most distinctive feature of slavery in the Muslim world, however, was the widespread use of slave armies. Between the early ninth century, when al-Mu‘tasim began building his slave units, to the thirteenth century, most armies between Egypt and Central Asia became organized around a nucleus of slaves. The Abbasids were seeking to escape dependence first upon the bedouin, who had provided the support for the Umayyad regime, and then upon the Khorasanis, who began to expect extra consideration for their role in the destruction of the Umayyads. The Buyids needed Turks to supplement their own Daylami infantry, and the Fatimids needed units of various types in order to be able to compete as a great power. Slave armies were, indeed, dependent on their patron and usually fanatically loyal. On the other hand, they perceived how vulnerable they were in the event of a cutoff of support, and they could turn on their master in a moment. For them to seize power themselves was hardly a possibility that al-Mu‘tasim or any other of the early rulers could have entertained, but it was a logical step for the Ghaznavids and Mamlukes.

  Ethnicity

  The lack of a precise territorial concept among most peoples of the period in question, in any region of the world, accounts for the lack of specificity in their use of place-names. As we have seen, inhabitants of the eastern Mediterranean often referred to North Africa and Andalus alike as the Maghrib, or “West.” Before the Crusades forced them to make some conceptual distinctions, they referred to the Byzantine Empire, the Italian Peninsula, and western Europe alike as Rum. Khorasan might mean the regions served by Merv and Nishapur and a large area to the south, or it might include Transoxiana. On the o
ther hand, it was the Muslims themselves who first conceptualized “India” as a separate civilization. The Sasanians had used the term “Hind” for the area around the Indus River valley, but the Arabs applied the term to the collective civilization that was shaped by Sanskritic literature. This came to include not only the Indian subcontinent, but later included parts of Southeast Asia and Indonesia as well (hence our term Indies).

  The strength of ethnic identities varied with period and place. During the Umayyad period, non-Arab Muslims discovered that their ethnic identity automatically classified them as inferior to the Arabs, and it is clear that during the Abbasid period, ethnic tensions within the armies were a major cause of strife. Because of their dependence on the ruler, slave soldiers were sensitive to any signal that another group was gaining an advantage over them, for such a development could be life threatening. Within the larger society ethnic identity remained important, if not as divisive as during the first century of Islam. In Andalus, Berbers felt that the Arabs never fully accepted them, right down to the end of the Reconquista. Like the Arabs, the Turks who invaded southwestern Asia in the eleventh century considered themselves superior to the peoples whom they conquered. The Saljuqs, in particular, made it clear that they were proud of their Turkish heritage, even while they were adapting to the mores and customs of their Iranian and Arab subjects.

  Perhaps the most impressive instance of ethnic assertion, however, was the revival of certain aspects of Persian culture in the ninth and tenth centuries. The Arabic language had been the medium of religious scholarship for Muslims from the beginning, had become the language of administration in the late Umayyad and early Abbasid regimes, and had rapidly become a lingua franca for commerce and poetry throughout the Dar al-Islam by the ninth century. However, Persian remained the spoken language east of Iraq, and it soon became a major literary vehicle. The Tahirid regime, which served as governors for the Abbasid caliphate (821–873), began patronizing Persian literature, the Saffarid state (867–963) continued the tradition, and the Samanid state (892–1005) developed a special interest in the cultivation of Persian literature at their court in Bukhara. Dialects of Persian had long been the language of commerce for the overland trade in central Asia, and with the aid of court patronage, the Dari dialect of Persian now became a language of high culture.