A History of the Muslim World to 1405

by Vernon O Egger

  Villages throughout the Dar al-Islam had traditionally been autonomous in the sense that they were self-governing. Christian and Jewish villages were allowed to practice their own preferred system of law. The lives of villagers in Iraq and Iran were the first to feel the effects of the iqta‘ in the tenth century, and, like peasants thereafter, their lot seems to have declined. As we have seen, the Buyids introduced the iqta‘ into Iraq. Later, the Saljuqs, Ayyubids, and Mamluks adopted the practice. An iqta‘ was originally a specified tract of land (usually agricultural land and the villages that supplied the manpower for it) temporarily assigned to a military officer in return for equipping, paying, and supplying a number of soldiers to the service of the sultan. The holders of the early iqta‘s knew that their possession of the land was temporary, and their sole interest was to exploit it. Maintenance of the irrigation systems would typically be neglected, and exorbitant taxes would be charged to the unlucky peasants. The consequences for agriculture were catastrophic in some areas. Because of the debts that cultivators amassed under such conditions, they could be as fixed on the land as securely as the serfs in western Europe. When the Saljuqs made iqta‘s inheritable, peasants reaped the benefits, as managers began to take an interest in long-term investments.

  In addition to the exploitation that they usually experienced at the hands of local elites, many of the peasants from North Africa to Transoxiana were subject to the depredations of nomads. Most of the time, peasants and nomads lived in a symbiotic relationship with each other. The pure nomads required the grains, fruits, and tools that peasants could provide, while the peasants purchased draft animals, wool, and hides from the nomads. Many of the bedouin were not pure nomads, but semi-nomads who cultivated fields for part of the year and spent the rest of the year in pastures. Because of their wanderings, they often encroached on the fields of peasants. In the ensuing quarrels, the nomads had the upper hand in mobility and martial training, and the peasants usually lost. The temptation for bedouin to raid the storage sheds of the cultivators was always great, and because of the nomads’ ability to subsist in harsh environments, it was difficult if not impossible for central authorities to punish them.

  With the widespread breakdown in central authority during the tenth and eleventh centuries, the bedouin increased their depredations in the area from Iraq to Morocco, with the result that large tracts of cultivated land were abandoned. The twelfth century witnessed the violence caused by several Crusades, the Almoravids and the Almohads, and the endemic warfare of the late Saljuq period, and was followed by the two invasions of the Mongols. The suffering that the voiceless people of the countryside endured is limited only by our imagination.

  Nomads and peasants had little access to education or formal religious instruction. The bedouin, in particular, were scorned by urban populations for their irreligion. Groups such as the Almoravids and the Almohads, who conquered under the banner of Islam, were regarded with jaundiced eye by many merchants and artisans, who regarded their version of Islam with suspicion and condescension. These Berber peoples at least had been instructed in the faith; most nomads were quite ignorant of the basics of Islam. Muslim peasants almost always had access to a village mosque, but their imam was unlikely to be well educated. Many of the parents in the village would be satisfied if he could teach their children the Arabic alphabet and drill them until they had memorized the Qur’an. Because villagers and nomads had an uncertain grasp of the doctrines of Islam, they were even more likely than their low-income cousins in the city to have recourse to practices that were residues of pre-Islamic religions and that were condemned by the ulama. They, however, turned to whatever could help them find meaning in an otherwise crushing existence.

  Conversion to Islam

  A major development in world history was the achievement of a Muslim majority in the region from North Africa to Iran by 1300. This outcome is not surprising, but it was also not inevitable. Muslim military conquests outside the Arabian Peninsula were never followed by widespread conversion. The mere imposition of Muslim political rule was sufficient to change the status of a country from the Dar al-Kufr to the Dar al-Islam. The Shari‘a recognized the existence of non-Muslim populations within the Muslim state, and granted them a wide degree of autonomy in the application of their law and customs, as long as they paid their taxes (the payment of which was a major reason they were often not encouraged to convert).

  A Muslim Minority

  Conversion rates were slow during the Umayyad caliphate of Damascus and for some time afterward in most parts of the Umma. The Umayyads themselves were in part responsible for this. They assumed that Islam was for Arabs and that it was better for non-Muslims to pay taxes rather than to convert and not pay taxes. Other factors were at work, as well. Until the last decade of the seventh century, Muslim authorities continued to employ Greek and Persian as the languages of administration. Even after Arabic became the official language, for centuries to come, many Christians and Jews continued to hold important government offices in various parts of the Islamic world. As long as lucrative and prestigious employment was possible and conversion was optional, it was natural to continue with one’s traditional religion. Christians dominated the financial bureaucracy of the Egyptian bureaucracy until the late nineteenth century, and more than one Christian served as wazir in the Fatimid state. Jews, especially, served as personal physicians to Muslim rulers. Personal physicians to rulers had unusually open access to the center of power, and their broad education often made them the most qualified officials in the palace. Some of them were granted awesome state power (and a corresponding vulnerability when things went wrong).

  One’s place in the social structure also played a role in rates of conversion. Peasants in most areas of the empire had little contact with the culture of the conquerors except with the hated and feared tax collector. As a result, they were even slower to convert than urban dwellers. Terrain also played a factor. The formidable mountains of the Taurus, Zagros, Elburz, Lebanon and anti-Lebanon ranges in the east, and the Atlas and other ranges in North Africa, were home to many peoples who were there precisely because they wished to avoid central authority. Shielded by the rugged terrain, they were more trouble to subdue than they were worth to any imperial government until the late twentieth century. As a result, they remained unconverted for centuries. If and when these groups did convert, it was often to a minority version of Islam, such as Shi‘ism or Kharijism, and the mountainous areas in southwestern Asia and North Africa have remained refuges of minority groups to the present day.

  The presence of dhimmis rarely presented a major problem for Muslims, although they were a reminder that not everyone had recognized Muhammad as the Prophet, even when presented with the opportunity. Occasional discrimination against Christians and Jews did occur, most notably under the Fatimid Imam al-Hakim, during the Zirid regime in Granada, and under the late thirteenth-century Mamlukes. It is significant, however, that the Muslim community did not develop an attitude to either Christians or Jews even remotely resembling the anti-Semitism that medieval European Christians directed towards the Jews in their midst.

  Dhimmis were, to be sure, distinct from the Muslim population. In many cities, they tended to be concentrated in certain quarters of the city (although rarely were they the exclusive residents of a given quarter). They paid the poll tax, and the Shari‘a developed sumptuary laws to regulate their behavior. These were irregularly enforced: The Umayyad caliph of Damascus ‘Umar II and the Fatimid caliph al-Hakim were exceptional precisely because they enforced such laws. Nevertheless, they were on the books and were a constant reminder to Jews and Christians that they were subject, if protected, peoples. Examples of such regulations were the requirement to wear distinctive dress and to avoid wearing colors—particularly green—associated with the Prophet; a prohibition against carrying arms and riding horses; and a prohibition against building new places of worship and repairing old ones without permission.

  Although som
e of the later Shi‘ites believed that eating with, or perhaps even touching, dhimmis would obligate a Shi‘ite to perform full ablutions before he could pray, most Muslims enjoyed unrestricted interaction with Christians and Jews and often celebrated their holidays with them. The Sunni schools of law agreed that the meats prepared by Jews according to kosher practices satisfied the ritual prescriptions of the Shari‘a. On the other hand, apostasy from Islam to Judaism or Christianity was punished severely and often resulted in death. Muslim men could marry non-Muslim women (many marriages in the ruling class were of this type), but a Muslim woman could not marry a non-Muslim man. Implicit in this custom, of course, was the assumption that the male was the head of the family and that his religion would influence the rest of the family’s members.

  The Pace of Conversion Quickens

  Forces were at work that did encourage conversion, however. Some were what may be termed negative factors. Some sought to escape paying the dhimmi tax, to gain legal equality with Muslims, or to improve their social status. The weakening of central authority seems to have played a role in mass conversion. In Iraq, for example, the Nestorian community had maintained excellent relations with both the Umayyad and Abbasid administrations and had avoided subjection to the more onerous features of the sumptuary laws. That changed with the caliphate of al-Mutawakkil (847–861), who was confronted with his fractious army, the expensive new capital at Samarra, and the explosive debate between the Mu‘tazilites and Hanbalis over the relative merits of reason and revelation. The caliph, desperately seeking allies in his struggles, yielded to the demands of the antirationalist Hanbalis and enforced the harsher regulations. After the middle of the ninth century, the quality of life for Nestorians deteriorated markedly, and conversion rates rose.

  The “bedouinization” of large parts of Iraq and eastern Syria during the tenth and eleventh centuries also accelerated the conversion process. The reassertion of bedouin autonomy in Syria and Iraq occurred simultaneously with the Hilali invasion of North Africa and bedouin predations in Egypt. The result was the raiding of villages and towns and the disruption of agriculture. The poor, as always, suffered, but in the long run it was the ruin of the landowning and merchant elite and of the monasteries that broke down the institutional structures of the Christian and Jewish communities in these areas, and led to their replacement by Islamic institutions.

  On the other hand, it is highly unlikely that most converts to Islam left their original religious affiliation for “negative” reasons. Some did so primarily because they had been impressed by the piety and spirituality of individual Muslims, or because they found the simple, yet profound monotheism of Islam a more convincing model of the meaning of the universe than any other religion with which they were familiar. Many converts, no doubt, changed their religious affiliation for reasons they would have had difficulty articulating, because the change simply seemed like the natural thing to do. A variety of factors, positive and negative, would accumulate in their experience, and the impulse to convert was less explicit and conscious than tacit.

  Today, many of us find it difficult to understand how individuals could change religions without coercion. Religious identity in premodern societies, however, was typically not a matter of an individual commitment to a set of doctrines. Rather, it was the product of one’s community and involved ritual and the body of laws that guided one’s life. When one’s social situation changed, it was appropriate to change one’s religion. In some cases, individuals made the switch, but we see many incidents in which whole families or communities converted en masse.

  The military garrison cities played a major role in this process of gradual conversion. Founded in order to isolate the Arabs from the surrounding population, they quickly became centers for the dissemination of the Arabic–Islamic culture instead. Whether in Egypt, Iraq, or Khorasan, the large cantonments served as magnets for local craftsmen, traders, household servants, entertainers, and scholars. The policy of cultural insulation collapsed as economic symbiosis became a fact of life. Some non-Muslims became acculturated to the norms of the dominant cultural group by having learned the Arabic language and having adopted new habits of dress and manners. The adoption of the Arabs’ religion was a next, natural step. For others, the process was reversed: Adoption of Islam led to cultural assimilation.

  The process of assimilation was never a one-way process, however, as we saw when the Arabs adapted many Byzantine and Sasanian governmental practices to their own purposes. On the individual level, as well, one adapted to one’s environment. In Khorasan, where tens of thousands of Arab warriors settled during the last third of the seventh century, Arabs assimilated to the local culture more dramatically than elsewhere. Not only were Arab soldiers placed in the garrison city of Merv, but they also settled in numerous small Iranian communities. Ordinary villagers and townsmen mixed frequently with Arabs, and the two cultures assimilated. The two groups engaged in a high degree of intermarriage, Arabs adopted Iranian dialects, and many Khorasanis converted to Islam during the early eighth century. Arab and Khorasani Muslims were already making common cause when Abbasid propaganda began to appeal to them, and ethnic distinctions became less and less apparent.

  Later, the rise and increasing independence of the Tahirid, Saffarid, and Samanid dynasties from about 820 on seems to have accelerated the conversion process not only within Khorasan, but also throughout the Persian cultural area. These Iranian dynasties were explicitly Muslim, and yet they encouraged the development of a new Persian literature. It used the Arabic alphabet and borrowed motifs from Arabic poetry, but it glorified themes from pre-Islamic Iranian history and myth. By reasserting an Iranian cultural identity within an explicitly Islamic context, this new literary and cultural movement seems to have been particularly effective in making the transition from Zoroastrianism to Islam seem less of a betrayal of one’s tradition and identity.

  The actual rate at which conversion took place is not known. The process of conversion was not noted by the chroniclers of the day. Richard Bulliet’s statistical analysis1 of the history of the adoption of Muslim names in Iran concludes that, by the mid-ninth century, half the population of Iran had converted to Islam and that, by 882, half the population of Iraq was Muslim. He concludes that, by the beginning of the eleventh century, perhaps eighty percent of the population of Iran was Muslim. This method of calculating the rate of conversion is suggestive, but while the evidence for certain cities has to be taken seriously, generalizations can mask local variations. The cities in the regions of Fars, Jibal, and Kirman in Iran, for example, remained strongholds of Sasanian and Zoroastrian loyalties until at least the middle of the eleventh century. The populations of the major mountain ranges do not appear to have become Muslim before the twelfth century.

  No agreement exists on when the population of other areas of the Dar alIslam became a Muslim majority. Many scholars would agree that Syria and Egypt became majority Muslim societies sometime between the twelfth and fourteenth centuries, but cannot be any more specific than that. Regions as distant as Andalus, as we have seen, present special problems. The proclamation of the caliphate suggests a self-confident and dominant Muslim community, and yet scholars cannot agree on whether Islam was ever the majority religion there. Christianity seems to have disappeared from North Africa by the end of the eleventh century—the century of great disorder in Ifriqiya—but Judaism continued to maintain a viable presence there.

  As the proportion of the Muslims in the population increased and the influence of the ulama over the people and the rulers was consequently enhanced, the position of dhimmis deteriorated. The ulama tended to insist that rulers enforce sumptuary laws as a matter of obedience to the will of God. Mobs could put pressure on the political authorities to remove non-Muslim officials, and the safety of other members of the non-Muslim communities would be threatened by association. During periods of distress, large numbers converted to escape the humiliating conditions and the physical dangers they entailed.<
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  The Issue of Authority in the Muslim World

  The process of conversion to Islam seems to have contributed not only to social tension, but also to the breakdown of political unity in the Dar al-Islam. As long as the Muslims were a minority ruling elite, they had a vested interest in maintaining ties of affinity with each other across great distances. Whenever the percentage of Muslims in a given society approached half the population, the Muslims found themselves pulled by a variety of identities—familial, social, and ethnic—that often competed with their sense of being a part of the Umma. Just as social clashes among the Muslims within each polity increased, so did the likelihood of breaking from a caliph’s political authority.

  The office of the caliphate was a unifying factor in the early history of Islam, for it was the locus of political and religious authority for most Muslims. It proved to be a remarkable combination of fragility and durability over the first six centuries of Islam. It emerged as an ad hoc measure to carry on the work of the Umma in the absence of the Prophet. It was not a constitutional office—it was explicitly provided for neither by the Qur’an nor by the Prophet’s instructions—and two issues remained controversial: the responsibilities and powers of the office, and the provision for succession to the office in the event of a vacancy.

  A significant minority within the Umma rejected the Umayyad and Abbasid caliphs as illegitimate on the grounds that they were not lineally associated with ‘Ali, whom they believed to have been the Prophet’s choice to have been his successor. The numerous factions that adhered to this conviction at one time or another were collectively known as Shi‘ites, and they followed their own candidates as the true Imam/caliph. Increasingly, as it became clear that their Imams (with the exception of the Fatimids) would have little or no chance to wield political power, the figure of the Imam became one of a heightened spirituality, a figure to whom God had granted spiritual insight available to no other mortal.