by Hugh Kennedy
There was another innovation at this time, again generated by the demand for easier and quicker production of reading materials, and that was the development of new forms of writing. We have a number of manuscripts, mostly but not entirely Qur’anic, which show Arabic hands of the seventh and early eighth century in a style of writing known as Kufic. It is formal, careful and often very elegant, but at the same time it was slow to write, each letter being carefully formed individually. In the early tenth century, if not before, a new hand emerged. It is said to have been first developed by Ibn Muqla, vizier to the caliph Muqtadir, but it is probable that his achievement was the culmination of some decades of experimentation. The new script, known as naskhi, or copyists’ hand, was much faster and easier to write, almost a sort of shorthand, and while grand Qur’āns may still have been produced in Kufic, this new script was widely used for most other literary publications.
The use of paper and the new Arabic hand in turn made writing accessible to those without private means. It could be argued that Baghdad under the Abbasid caliphate was the first society in the history of the world in which a man or a woman could make a living as an author. Of course, people had written books before, thousands of them, but they had always been wealthy in their own right, employed or subsidized by rich patrons, or attached to institutions, like Christian monasteries, which gave them the space and security to write. In the ninth century Baghdad could boast a Grub Street culture where a would-be author could write a work, have it copied and sell it in the hundred or more shops in the Book Suq (Sūq al-warrāqīn), and make enough money to stay alive. It was not easy to live off one’s writing, any more than it is in Britain today, but it was at least possible. And if your own books were not selling well, you could always fall back on copying other people’s work to tide you over in the lean periods.
The technologies were in place, the demand was there, so what did the writers, poets and artists of the Abbasid caliphate produce? In the second half of the tenth century a Baghdadi writer called Ibn al-Nadīm (d. 995) compiled a book called Fihrist, which can best be translated as ‘The Catalogue’. We do not know whether this is a library or a bookseller’s catalogue, but in it the author lists some 3,500 authors with the names of the books they wrote and some information about their contents. Many of these books must have been very short, little more than pamphlets, but equally many were more substantial works. The variety of subjects they covered was truly astonishing. He divides his list into ten chapters:
Languages and scripts: the scriptures of the Muslims and other people of the book (37 pages)
Grammar and lexicography (51 pages)
History, belles-lettres, biography and genealogy (73 pages)
Poetry (22 pages)
Scholastic theology (47 pages)
Law and Tradition (38 pages)
Philosophy and the ‘ancient sciences’ (62 pages)
Stories, legends, romances, magic and conjuring (32 pages)
Doctrines of the non-monotheistic religions (32 pages)
Alchemy (9 pages)
We might expect to find Islamic religious sciences and Arabic poetry in such a list, but what is more surprising is the amount of material relating to other religions, to non-Arabic scripts and to science and philosophy. It seems that all human knowledge, as it existed at the time, is there somewhere and there is no hint that any subject was banned, censored or felt to be forbidden.
THE ABBASID POETS
Poetry was the queen of the arts of the time. Since the great pre-Islamic poets of the Jābiliyya, with their images of the lone warrior and his camel, riding, fighting and loving in the harsh environment of the Arabian desert, poetry had conveyed the aspirations of men who lived more prosaic lives. It had also intrigued grammarians and literary critics who sought in it the origins of the Arabic language and more obscure points of grammar and lexicography. But of course most readers and listeners in the Abbasid caliphate did not live in the wild desert and their knowledge of, and enthusiasm for, camels was probably almost as limited as ours, so the poets of the Abbasid age moved on from the ancient and revered paradigms to reflect the largely urban and courtly world in which they participated.
Panegyric poetry was still the best way to make money: it is also the most difficult form of verse for us to appreciate. The extravagant and complex metaphors seem simply contrived and insincere, clearly designed to encourage rewards from the caliph or other patron. People at the time, however, had a different opinion. Just as we today can admire the flattering portraits of the powerful and wealthy painted by Velázquez or Goya because we can say that they are superb examples of the painter’s art, so contemporaries valued praise poetry in the same way, for the startling new image or the subtle variations of common tropes.
Hunting poetry can also leave many of us cold, and poetry in praise of wine we can no longer taste is not much better, but the poetry of love can still resonate through the centuries, even in translation. Perhaps the best known of Abbasid love poets was Abū Nuwās, the ‘father of locks (of hair)’. He flourished in the reign of Hārūn al-Rashīd, and especially in the circle of the young prince Amīn, where his innovative and unconventional poetic talents could develop. He writes of wine and love, openly glorifying both. The tavern, and the groups of young men drinking there, are celebrated with uninhibited enthusiasm. It may come as something of a surprise to find that drinking poetry was so popular in the Muslim society of the time, but it was one of the measures of the confidence and diversity of this society that it could accept such challenging images if they were presented elegantly and wittily. Abū Nuwās presents a world of common taverns, but the enjoyment of wine was also a central part of Abbasid court culture. Some caliphs, such as Mahdī, did not drink out of religious scruples, but many others did as part of princely display and performance.
Abū Nuwās wrote love poetry about women, but more often about young men and boys. Nor are the poems abstract and chaste fantasies. He celebrates gay sex with unconcealed enthusiasm which can sometimes catch modern readers by surprise: poems by middle-aged men praising the sexual attractiveness of schoolboys would, after all, be regarded as dangerously transgressive even, or perhaps particularly, in the early twenty-first century, but the celebration of same-sex love was a widely accepted literary form in both Arabic and later Persian poetry in the Islamic Middle East.
It is easy to seize on Abū Nuwās because his poetry was clever, eloquent, original and very popular, but it would be wrong to assume that he was typical of all the poets and writers of his time. Some, like his contemporary and sometime rival Abū’l-Atāhiya, became deeply pious and devoted themselves to religious themes, while others, like Abū Tammām in the ninth century, found new and interesting ways of praising their patrons, in his case the warrior caliph Mutasim, and celebrating their victories over the Byzantines. Perhaps the most striking feature of this poetry to the modern reader is its sheer variety: all male human life is there, and there was no attempt, either official or unofficial, to censor it. Pious people certainly disapproved of some of the sentiments expressed, but, in general, books were not burned, nor were poets imprisoned and punished.
The majority of poets in this era were male, but women played an important role in the performance of the culture. The singing girl ( jāriya) is a characteristic presence in descriptions of gatherings, whether domestic or public, in which poetry was discussed. Most poems were sung and the singers were mostly young women. It is easy to forget this because there was at the time no form of musical notation; so while we have the lyrics of hundreds of songs, the tunes are completely lost to us. The singing girls learned and passed on the musical tradition. They appear in countless stories. They are clever and sassy and, needless to say, beautiful. They are also learned not only in music but sometimes in the Traditions of the Prophet and the religious sciences. They were usually slaves, trained up by masters in the Holy City of Medina and sold on in Baghdad, but before we consider the implications of their servile stat
us we should remember the anecdote of one of Zubayda’s (Hārūn’s wife) conversations with one of the girls in her entourage. ‘Are you a slave or free?’ the queen asks, to which the girl replies, ‘I don’t know,’ and Zubayda responds, ‘No, nor do I.’ In their knowledge and personalities the singing girls were major figures in the artistic environment. They were an integral part of the court culture of the caliphate, and when the caliphate collapsed in the middle of the tenth century, the singing girls disappeared from the cultural landscape at the same time.
The richness and variety of this literary and musical culture is evoked in one of those great compilations which the new technologies of writing had made possible, the great Book of Songs (Kitāb al-aghāni). Abū’l-Faraj al-Isfahānī (d. 967) began his great work by selecting the hundred best songs he could find and used this list as a framework to attach numerous other poems and, just as important, prose anecdotes about the lives and deeds of many of the poets and singers. The result is fascinating. The stories about the artists are unusual in their detailing of non-elite lives. An abiding theme of the collection is the way in which people from low and even outcast social backgrounds can rise to fame and fortune through their artistic talents, and this means that tales of the struggling poor form a central part of the work. Isfahānī was writing after the collapse of the Abbasid caliphate in the tenth century and his collection is, in some aspects, a memorial to a culture which was vanishing, but the riches it preserves gives us a wonderful panorama of this world.
THE ABBASID SCIENTISTS
If poetry and song were the only literary products of this caliphal culture, it would be interesting but limited. In fact, cultural activity spread in many different directions. One of the most famous achievements of the period is the translation of ancient Greek works into Arabic and the intellectual ideas that emerged as a result. The Greek-speaking and -writing Byzantines, the Rūm of the Arabic sources, were of course arch-enemies of the early Muslims and warfare against them was maintained as a regular and pious exercise. This did not prove an obstacle, however, to the acquisition and appropriation of Greek learning. Muslims wanted Greek learning because they believed it to be useful and they translated and read those parts of the Greek canon which are almost completely ignored by modern western readers. They wanted Euclid’s geometry, Ptolemy’s astronomy, Galen’s medicine and Dioscorides’s knowledge of the usefulness of herbs and plants. Above all, they wanted to acquire and use the philosophy of Aristotle, both as a way of viewing the world, and as a tool box of logical techniques for constructing arguments.
On the other hand, they had no interest in ancient Greek poetry: after all they had plenty of ancient poetry of their own, so the Iliad and the Odyssey and all later poetry were completely ignored. Greek drama was an unopened book to them and they had no interest either in historical works. The Histories of Herodotus, which would have told them so much about the ancient Persians who built the ruins they saw at Persepolis and the ancient Egyptians who built the pyramids, were unknown to them.
Caliphs and others had commissioned translations from the Greek from the Umayyad period onwards and, as we have seen, Mansūr was credited with initiating this practice, but it was the personal enthusiasm of Caliph Ma’mūn that really gave impetus to the translation movement. He was perhaps the most genuinely intellectual of the caliphs we encounter in this book and the fashion he set encouraged his courtiers to patronize translators and other intellectuals, paying them for their work and employing them in their great households as tutors for their children.
There are mentions in our sources from this period of an institution called the House of Wisdom (Bayt al-hikma). Enthusiastic modern historians have taken this to be a sort of proto-university, a college where distinguished scholars could work and debate in peace and a measure of prosperity. In reality, the House of Wisdom was simply a library where books were stored. To find scholars at work you had to go to the great houses where patrons would maintain resident intellectuals. In this sense Abbasid Baghdad was a bit like London and Paris during the Enlightenment: it was in the salons and the studies of government officials, including, of course, caliphs and private individuals, that learning flourished.
Many of the works which were translated into Arabic had previously been translated from Greek into Syriac, another Semitic language. Syriac was the literary version of Aramaic, the Semitic lingua franca of the Middle East before the Muslim conquests, and the translations had mostly been made in Christian monasteries, which were centres of Syrian intellectual activity. In this way they had already been through a filter. The monks were mainly interested in the same sort of practical texts as the Muslim scholars were. They did not, on the whole, translate theological or devotional writings, as one might imagine, because they held the Byzantines to be heretics whose works were useless and corrupting.
The people who knew Greek and Syriac were mostly Christians and almost all the translations were carried out by members of the religious minorities. Let us take the example of Hunayn b. Ishāq (d. 873). Hunayn was a Christian from the city of Hira, near Kufa, in central Iraq. It had been a centre of Iraqi Christianity before the coming of Islam and the traditions of learning were clearly still alive. Hunayn was a skilled stylist in Greek, Syriac and Arabic and made a good living as a translator. A later biographer gives us a glimpse of his agreeable lifestyle:
He went to the bath every day after his ride and had water poured on him. He would then come out wrapped in a dressing gown and, after taking a cup of wine with a biscuit, lie down until he had stopped perspiring. Sometimes he would fall asleep. Then he would get up, burn perfumes to fumigate his body and have dinner brought in. This consisted of a large fattened pullet stewed in gravy with a half kilo loaf of bread. After drinking some of the gravy and eating the chicken and the bread he would fall asleep. On waking up he drank four ratls [perhaps two litres] of old wine. If he felt like fresh fruit, he would have some Syrian apples and quinces. This was his habit until the end of his life.5
Despite his relaxed approach, he was a prodigious worker. His output was enormous and his standards high.
The translation of Greek texts was much more than a passive reception of works from another culture. These writings stimulated a wave of new research and discussion in the Muslim world. Greek philosophy inspired Yaqūb b. Ishāq al-Kindī, known as ‘Philosopher of the Arabs’. Unlike many of the scholars who worked in Abbasid court circles, Kindī was an Arab from an ancient and aristocratic Bedouin lineage, but he spent his life in Baghdad and was a familiar figure at the courts of the caliphs Ma’mūn, Mutasim and Wāthiq. He also had a very extensive private library, which was a source of pleasure and pride until it was confiscated at the instigation of his intellectual rivals, the Banū Mūsā, though it was eventually returned to him. He was not himself a translator, but he was the first to use Aristotle’s work to create an Islamic philosophical discourse in Arabic. He was also the first to grapple with the problem of reconciling faith with logical investigation.
This approach to Muslim doctrine aroused the suspicion and hostility of more conservative elements in society and there were continuous disputes between the philosophers and the Traditionists, who held that one should accept the teachings of the Qur’ān and sunna without further question. The issues were very similar to the discussions in twelfth-century France between the radical and flamboyant philosopher Peter Abelard and his opponent, the austere and dogmatic St Bernard, Abbot of Clairvaux. In both cases this was not a dispute about the truth of religion, between believers and atheists, but about ways of understanding and investigating religious ideas. For philosophers in both Baghdad in the ninth century and Paris in the twelfth, the ideals were fides quaerens intellectum, faith seeking understanding, and in both cases they came up against those who believed that investigating the divine mysteries could lead to heresy and unbelief. As long as caliphs like Ma’mūn and Wāthiq reigned, Kindī and those who thought like him were protected by the patronage of the court.
But when in 847 Mutawakkil came to the throne, he reverted to strict orthodoxy, seeking the favour of the Traditionists, and the influence of philosophers was eclipsed.
Despite this hostility, the Arab philosophical tradition survived for centuries. In Andalus, at the time of the Almohad caliphs, the great Ibn Rushd (d. 1198) initiated the last original discussions in the canon. Arabic philosophy would ultimately survive the loss of caliphal patronage, but, without the initial protection and support of the court of the caliphs in the ninth century, it is unlikely that it would have developed and matured in the way it did. This openness to, and delight in, new ideas was fundamental.
The caliph Ma’mūn certainly showed a real interest in natural and experimental science. This can be seen in the story of his project to measure the circumference of the earth. There was no question that the earth was round: every educated person in ninth-century Baghdad knew that. But no one knew how big it was, and the caliph was determined to find out. He knew that the ancient Greeks had calculated it at 24,000 miles and he wanted to determine whether this was accurate. He asked the Banū Mūsā, who were his main scientific advisers, to investigate. As Ibn Khallikan recorded:
They enquired where a level plain could be found and were told that the desert of Sinjar [in north-west Iraq] was completely flat as was the country around Kufa. They took with them a number of people whose opinion Ma’mūn trusted and whose knowledge of this area could be relied on. They set out for Sinjar and came to the desert. They halted at a spot where they took the altitude of the Pole Star with certain instruments. They drove a peg into the ground and attached a long cord to it. They walked due north, avoiding as much as possible going off to left or right. When the cord ran out, they stuck another peg into the ground and fastened a cord to it and carried on walking to the north as they had done before until they reached a spot where the elevation of the Pole Star had risen one degree. Then they measured the distance they had travelled on the ground by means of the cord. The distance was 66⅔ miles. Then they knew that every degree of the heaven was 66⅔ miles on earth. Then they returned to the place where they had stuck in the first peg and continued to the south, just as they had previously done to the north, sticking in pegs and fastening cords. When they had finished all the cord they had used when going north, they took the elevation of the Pole Star and found it was one degree lower than the first observation. This proved that their calculations were correct and that they had achieved what they had set out to do.
