A History of the Muslim World to 1405

by Vernon O Egger

  In part, the revival of the Persian language was an expression of Iranian pride and resentment against Arab domination, causing a controversy as early as the eighth century that pitted proponents of Iranian culture against defenders of Arab preeminence. The poets and writers whose creativity resulted in the new Persian language, however, were not reluctant to borrow Arabic themes, styles, and vocabulary, as well as the Arabic alphabet itself. Except for the Qur’an itself, the texts of Islam now became available in a language other than Arabic for the first time. By the thirteenth century, some of the greatest Sufi literature would be written in Persian.

  Because Arabic continued to be the dominant language of religious scholarship even in Iran, it was in the secular arts that the Persian themes particularly flourished. Numerous lyric poets attained a high degree of proficiency, but perhaps the most famous of the medieval Persian works of literature was Ferdowsi’s Shah-nameh (1010). Sasanian values and styles were also revived in political writings, inscriptions and coins, court ceremonies, architecture, and painting. The glittering culture impressed Turkish newcomers, who, although proud of their own identity, readily accepted the Perso–Islamic elite culture for their own purposes. Ferdowsi’s dedication of his masterpiece to a Turkish ruler, consequently, was not merely in default of having a Persian-speaking regime to which to give it. Both the Ghaznavid and Saljuq regimes cultivated the Persian culture and adopted Persian as the language of administration (except for use in the Shari‘a courts). Their patronage of Persian culture laid the foundation for it to become the dominant culture of South Asia for several centuries.

  The City and the Countryside

  Throughout history, cities have served as the centers of government, commerce, and culture for most societies. They had higher death rates than did the villages, because disease was more likely to be spread from person to person in the crowded cities. Many rural folks might also view the cities as dens of vice or as enclaves for the rapacious classes that sought to enrich themselves at the expense of the peasants. Nevertheless, cities held out the allure of wealth, power, and entertainment for rural inhabitants, and other than during periods of catastrophe, the migration pattern tended to be from the village to the city.

  The City

  As in all premodern civilizations, only a minority of the population of the Dar alIslam lived in towns and cities. On the other hand, only China, among other regions of the world, could claim to have as many large towns and cities as the Muslim world did. The new patterns of trade and expansion that the Arab conquest helped to create had a powerful impact on the region’s urban life. Not all cities shared the same experience. The truncation of the Byzantine empire and the long-term, intermittent, naval warfare in the eastern Mediterranean had a negative impact for three centuries on cities such as Alexandria and Antioch; a few interior cities, such as Hira, lost their raison d’etre altogether and disappeared; others, such as the caravan cities of Rayy and Hamadan, experienced an economic boom because of the stimulus for overland trade; whereas numerous others, such as Kufa, Basra, and Sijilmasa, were created for the first time.

  Cities in the Muslim world had their own “personalities,” just as cities as different as Boston and San Francisco do today. They were located in a wide variety of settings. Access to water inevitably shaped the city’s contours: Some were on the coast, while others were on rivers, in oases, in the plains, or nestled in hills. Most were in arid to semiarid climates and could rely primarily upon mud-brick construction, but some were located in areas of moderate rainfall and needed to rely upon stone as the primary building material. Mud-brick construction tended to result in low skylines, but some stone towns and villages, particularly in Yemen and southern Morocco, contained buildings that rose ten or more floors. The legacies of Indian, Sasanian, Hellenistic, Byzantine, Roman, and Visigothic cultures, among others, influenced elements from architectural styles to the prevalence of bathhouses, churches, synagogues, gardens, and plazas. Some cities appeared from a distance as colorless as the earth that surrounded them, while others were highlighted with glittering tiles that covered the entirety of congregational mosques and other public buildings. As a result, travelers often remarked on the distinctive appearance of cities from one region of the Dar al-Islam to the other.

  The center of public life in Muslim cities was the mosque. Cities had numerous neighborhood mosques in which the pious would perform their daily devotions, but the officially designated congregational mosques were the preferred venue for the Friday noon prayer and sermon. They were also the setting for primary schools and higher education, they served as a forum for deliberations and the expression of public opinion, and they were restful havens when the crush of urban life created the need for repose and quiet. Their minarets might be thin or thick, round or square, but they served as a beacon to prayer and a reassurance of the Islamic character of the society in which the traveler found himself.

  The congregational mosque was necessarily surrounded by a large public space or square. Typically, the square connected the mosque with the central market. Muslim cities had one or more major markets, and most of the quarters of the city had smaller individual markets. The large market might be open air, or it might be covered with a roof. Some roofed markets in capital cities were huge, and over the centuries they might grow until they extended for a mile or more. The markets were usually organized according to the product being sold, so that the merchants of rugs and carpets would be consolidated in one area, while those who sold pots and pans of copper, brass, and other metals would be clustered together, and the sellers of glass objects would be found in yet another area. Often the shops in which the articles were sold also served as the workshop in which they had been produced. The butchers, tanners of leather, and blacksmiths, however, were almost always confined to the outskirts of the city for hygienic purposes or to reduce noise. Likewise, caravansaries tended to be located at the city’s edge. In some important caravan cities, thousands of camels, donkeys, and other beasts of burden might be constantly coming into the city’s environs, and the local inhabitants thought it best to keep both the animals and the foreign merchants at a distance.

  European visitors to thirteenth-century Andalus and fourteenth-century Muslim India commented on the attention to cleanliness characteristic of the cities in those regions. All across the Dar al-Islam, cities boasted numerous bathhouses. The public bath, of course, was not unique to the Muslim world. It was a legacy of Roman and Hellenistic societies. Islamic insistence on ritual purity before prayer, however, ensured that the institution would flourish in the Muslim world. Muslim cities from Andalus to India enthusiastically adopted the bath, modifying its layout and function according to their needs. Because of its primary purpose, the larger baths were usually adjacent to the congregational mosques. Muslims soon had to admit that, quite apart from its function in providing the required ablution, the bath was admirably suited for the objectives for which the Romans most valued it: relaxation and social interaction. Muslims devoted much energy and attention to the construction and maintenance of baths, washing facilities, drains, and latrines, even as these amenities declined in use in western Europe after the collapse of the western Roman empire.

  A bath in the Umayyad palace of Khirbat al-Mafjar. Note the mosaics in the floors.

  Cemeteries were usually situated outside the walls of the town. Their layout reflected the Muslim preference to be buried facing Mecca. They tended to be active social areas. Groups of Sufis might live adjacent to the tomb of the master who began their method of achieving spiritual insight, and the tomb might well attract pilgrims, who often lent a festive air to the vicinity. Townspeople themselves often visited graves and used the cemetery as picnic grounds and strolling areas. Also located outside the city walls might be a musalla, or place to perform the salat, at festivals or other occasions when a huge number of workshipers might assemble together and even the congregational mosque was not large enough to hold them.

  Residential n
eighborhoods in Muslim cities were nearly self-contained quarters. Pre-Islamic towns in the Arabian Peninsula had been organized by families and clans, so it was natural that garrison cities such as Kufa and Basra were organized along the same lines. Arab immigrants who settled in existing cities in Iraq, Syria, and Egypt followed a similar pattern. Even as more and more of the dhimmis converted to Islam in places as far apart as North Africa and Khorasan, most—but not all—cities in the Muslim world became organized into quarters that were based on kinship, ethnic group, religion, or occupation. They might contain a few hundred or a few thousand residents, and each would typically be served by a local mosque, market, public bath(s), and perhaps its own cemetery.

  Cities in the Dar al-Islam did not develop municipal institutions that assumed responsibility for the governance of a legally defined urban area. Thus, the inhabitants of each quarter assumed the responsibility for the provision of essential services such as the adjudication of conflicts, security, sanitation, and the delivery of tax revenues to the authorities. Facilities such as hospitals, neighborhood mosques, fountains, madrasas, khans, and public baths were usually funded by private bequests and particularly by the dedication of waqfs, as we saw in the previous chapter.

  Although some of the services that a quarter provided—most obviously the provision of water and sewerage facilities—required cooperation with other sections of the city, the quarters nevertheless became self-reliant and developed a sense of territoriality and identity. The head of the leading family in the quarter represented the neighborhood to the governor. In cooperation with the army or the police, he was responsible for maintaining order during normal times. Security was enhanced by a massive gate that marked the entry to a quarter, and it was closed at night. During periods when the central authority was weak, neighborhood security in cities from Anatolia through Iran was often assumed by groups of local youths. These were called futuwwa orders (sometimes also called ‘ayyar in the Arabic-speaking regions and ahi in the Turkish-speaking regions). Futuwwa in Arabic literally means “youth,” and the motivation for the earliest futuwwa orders was a moral one. Most of them had a code of behavior stressing altruism, generosity, patience, gravity, and justice. Many of their members were models of the best civic and moral behavior. As a result, Sufi orders often became linked with them, and Sufis as far away as Morocco would later adopt their regimen as part of their own code of behavior.

  Some of the futuwwa orders promoted sports activities, others were related to specific crafts, and others were mutual aid societies. The perceived obligation to help others contributed to the evolution of some futuwwa orders into militias when the power of the amir or sultan was weak and troops or police might not be reliable. Unfortunately, the young men could sometimes act more like youth gangs than disciplined militias, and they could be more of a threat to the local residents than they were a source of security. As a result, the term ‘ayyar is often used by the chroniclers to mean “brigands” or “troublemakers.”

  The futuwwa thus had an ambiguous status in society and an ambivalent relationship with the social and political authorities. They could be a force for cohesion or for disruption. On the whole, they tended to express the energies and causes of the disadvantaged and could applaud what they saw as “Robin Hood” behavior. The Abbasid caliph al-Nasir (1180–1225), who gained his autonomy from the Saljuqs, tried to institutionalize the futuwwa movement to further his own cause of social and political reform, but the destruction of the Abbasid caliphate soon thereafter ended whatever progress he may have made in that direction.

  Security for the neighborhood quarters was enhanced by the fact that they were not easily accessible by the wider public. The wide streets in the vicinity of the main mosque, which had to accommodate hundreds, if not thousands, of persons, branched off into smaller arteries that in turn branched off into still narrower lanes that twisted and turned and finally came to an end as culs-de-sac in front of the doors of a handful of residences in the residential quarter. The streets in most cities anywhere in the world at the time would seem labyrinthine to modern observers, but the layout of cities in the predominantly Muslim world had a special character. When thirteenth-century Aragonese (whose cities would seem claustrophobic and mazelike to us) began consolidating their hold on Valencia, they expressed their astonishment at the narrow, twisting streets and labyrinthine layout of the Muslim cities there.

  The corridor-like streets of a residential neighborhood in Fez.

  In part, this pattern can be explained by the fact that wide streets were not required in a society almost utterly devoid of wheeled vehicles. In addition, streets usually followed the contours of the elevation, in order to facilitate drainage after rains. In many cases, too, individuals tended to follow family members, members of the same craft or occupation, or fellow members of a religious sect or ethnic group into a particular neighborhood and to set it off deliberately from other neighborhoods. Modes of transportation, terrain, and affinity groups explain only part of the unique layout of Muslim cities, however. In the Iberian Peninsula, where one could expect continuity in the shape of cities over time, the Reconquista brought about a striking change: When the Portuguese, Castilians, and Aragonese built over preexisting Muslim cities, the new cities included twenty-five percent more public space than the Muslims had provided.

  Clearly other forces were at work, whether in the Iberian Peninsula or in India. Some are attributable to Islam and others are not. One is a concern with privacy and gender segregation, which has both pre-Islamic and Islamic roots. Pre-Islamic housing in North Africa, for example, was characterized by an absence of ground-floor windows and few windows on the upper floors. In part, this was a function of the heavy walls needed to insulate rooms and the need to reduce the amount of light entering the house. Courtyards allowed the occupants access to fresh air and sunshine without having to be in the public eye. This concern for privacy extends even to the tents of nomads, where it seems likely that male and female spaces were demarcated even before the advent of Islam.

  Instances of this pre-Islamic concern for privacy could no doubt be multiplied across the vast world of Islam. On the other hand, certain features of the Qur’an, Hadith, and Shari‘a also encouraged a consciousness of privacy that was given expression in the design of buildings and streets. In order to ensure family privacy and modesty, qadis frequently ruled on the height of buildings, the placement of windows, and the comportment of individuals. Not all Muslims lived in courtyard houses, but the Islamic concern for privacy and gender segregation reinforced any preexisting parallels, affecting the whole range of housing from one-room structures to vast palatial complexes. In addition, qadis tended to favor the individual’s property rights over concerns for the collective good except in the case of an overriding moral principle such as privacy. As a result, property owners had relatively free rein in their wish to build. Thus, buildings were allowed to infringe on public space, transforming streets into narrow, twisting defiles. The maze of streets created in effect an informal zoning system, which kept public activities and strangers away from most residential homes. A person traversing a city remained in public areas; a stranger who wandered into a residential area would be immediately noticed and monitored, if not accosted.

  By the thirteenth century, cities all across the Muslim world were slowly assuming a variation of the same pattern. There was no “blueprint” for such a Muslim city—as we have seen, Baghdad began as a meticulously planned, circular city. Esfahan, Herat, and Shiraz also began as circular cities, but their original plans were submerged under the pattern that became the dominant model throughout the Dar al-Islam by the thirteenth century. Hamadan’s original, square design was likewise lost to the characteristic model. Cities otherwise as culturally distinct as Herat in Afghanistan (founded by Alexander the Great), Baghdad in Iraq (carefully planned as the imperial capital of a Muslim empire), and Fez in Morocco (established by refugees from Arabia) all slowly adapted in their own way to the mod
el.

  The Countryside

  The vast majority of people in the Dar al-Islam lived in rural areas. Most lived in villages, and their livelihoods were tied to agriculture. In some areas, such as Yemen, Lebanon, and Morocco, villages could be built in remote mountainous areas and the peasants tilled fields that had been carved out of the sides of the mountains as terraces. Perched on precipices and constructed out of local stone or even lava, the villages were virtual fortresses and discouraged attacks from their neighbors. Aside from running feuds with neighboring villages, the lives of their inhabitants were relatively unmolested. Most peasants, however, lived in the fertile river valleys or plains, and were subject to outside intervention. The food and fiber that they produced were essential to the survival of the local town and city, and therefore the local governor exerted considerable efforts to ensure that they were under his control.