The Inheritance of Rome: Illuminating the Dark Ages, 400-1000
Page 36
In a sense, this is quite true; but it is also the case that the Byzantines had become interested in representation and its rules for their own sake. It is already visible in the Parastaseis, in an almost entirely secular context: whom statues really represented mattered to people. It was, famously, also an issue important to the Muslim Arabs, who avoided all representations of people in their public art, seeing them as idolatrous (although the Qur’an conveys no such instruction, as we shall see in the next chapter). Caliph al-Walid I (705-15), who probably employed Byzantine mosaicists to erect the complicated foliage patterns on the walls of the Great Mosque of Damascus (see above, Chapter 10), would presumably have been entirely happy that they should take back to Constantinople accounts of his religious aesthetic. This aesthetic may indeed have impacted on Palestinian Christians, living under Arab rule, who after about 720 began to efface all representations of living beings, even animals and birds, from the floor mosaics of their churches; this obsession has no parallel in Byzantium, and may well show Muslim influence - though it goes beyond Muslim concerns, too. It must be stressed that there is absolutely no sign that the Byzantine Iconoclasts were influenced by the Arabs. But Arabs, Byzantines, Palestinian Christians, were all separately concerned with the issue of representation: which elements were holy, which were idolatrous, how and whom images represented and should represent. This was a break with a late Roman Christian tradition, in which images, even of saints, had relatively little special charge; in the East from now on they had, at least potentially, a numinous power, and people had to get them right, in one way or another. And the political system this mattered most in was Byzantium, for emperors were becoming more important foci of religious concern than were either Roman emperors or even, by now, caliphs. Iconoclasm did not begin with the emperors, but once it reached Constantine V and he took a decision on it, it immediately became an imperial initiative, and was tied to him, in a way ‘Arianism’ never was for Valens, nor Monophysitism for Anastasius I. Representation, and the importance of the visual, thus became tied in with imperial legitimacy. After 843 this became Orthodoxy; the religious centrality of images has been a feature of Orthodox Christianity ever since.
12
The Crystallization of Arab Political Power, 630-750
In June 656, ‘Uthman ibn ‘Affan, commander of the Believers (amr al-mu’minn), deputy of God (khalfat Allh - hence the English title ‘caliph’), was murdered in his house in his capital, Medina in western Arabia. The event convulsed the Arab world, and the First Civil War (fitna) followed, until peace was restored in 661. So much is certain (it was recorded shortly afterwards, although very sketchily, by the Armenian chronicler whom we call Sebeos); the rest is, and was, hotly contested. Was ‘Uthman’s successor ‘Ali (656-61) involved in the murder, as many in the ‘Uthmani party thought, hence the civil war? Was the murder carried out by disaffected pro-‘Ali bedouin extremists against ‘Ali’s will, as one of the earliest Arab historians, Sayf ibn ‘Umar (d. c. 796), claimed? Or was the murder the work of disaffected Egyptian soldiers, tired of ‘Uthman’s attempts to direct the Egyptian grain surplus to Medina and to replace the power of the early Arab conquerors of the provinces from Egypt to Iraq by more traditional tribal leaders - including members of ‘Uthman’s own immediate family, the Umayyads - as other early historians, Ibn Ishaq (d. 767) and especially al-Waqidi (d. 823), report? And, above all, was the murder a justified response to ‘Uthman’s illegitimate acts, which meant that he was no longer properly caliph, or was it illegal, and therefore had to be avenged?
‘Ali may have thought the first of these latter two alternatives. Certainly the later Shi‘ite tradition did - indeed, that tradition thought that ‘Uthman, and maybe his two predecessors, were usurpers, and that ‘Ali had been designated the Prophet’s successor by Muhammad himself at his death in 632. The ‘Uthmanis certainly thought the second, not least Mu‘awiya ibn Abi Sufyan, governor of Syria and ‘Uthman’s second cousin, thus also an Umayyad. Mu‘awiya demanded that ‘Uthman’s murder must be punished and led a Syrian army against ‘Ali’s Iraqi army to Siffin on the Euphrates in 657, where the two sides skirmished for some time. ‘Ali in the end agreed to arbitration on the issue, but lost part of his army - and his strategic advantage - as a result; the dissident group who left him, the Kharijites, were outraged at ‘Ali’s concession, for they thought that only God could judge the issue, not humans. One of them assassinated ‘Ali in 661, after which Mu‘awiya took over as sole caliph (661-80).
So who did kill ‘Uthman, and with what justification? The same question could be asked of many similar deaths in the early Middle Ages, as with Childeric II in Francia in 675, or Edward the Martyr in England in 978. The basic answer is that we do not fully know, and in these two latter cases historians are relatively relaxed about the fact that they do not know; it is enough for them to unpick the different interpretations in the sources so as to identify political alignments. But in the Islamic tradition it was, and is, not so easy. Religious disagreement between Muslim communities tends not to be over the nature of God, as inside early Christianity (a single monotheistic Allah gives less space for debate than the incomprehensible complexities of the Trinity), but rather, much more, over political legitimacy. The basic twenty-first-century division between Sunni and Shi‘a Islam goes straight back to 656, even if the two sides did not call themselves that yet. The Kharijites still exist too, in Sahara oases and Zanzibar, and have not yet forgiven ‘Ali for Siffin. It would even now be hard in the Muslim world to discuss neutrally the behaviour of ‘Uthman or his murderers without taking a position between Sunni and Shi‘a/Kharijite interpretations. And this was even more so around 800, when our first detailed accounts began to be written down, or around 900, when they were collected in the great historical compilations of writers like al-Baladhuri (d. 892) or al-Tabari (d. 923). Even a decision not to be sure who was right in 656 had a doctrinal implication from the eighth century onwards (it was associated with the Murji’ites, the ‘suspenders of judgement’). Indeed, in the ninth century this became common ground in much of what was becoming the majority Sunni tradition, for that tradition held that rulers should not be deposed, and that communal unity was more important than sectarian division (by then, Sunnis accepted both ‘Uthman and ‘Ali as legitimate caliphs; it was Mu‘awiya they had more trouble with). But the whole issue continued to matter, intensely, and all our sources are structured by partisan positions of this kind.
Writing early Arab history is in many ways a harder task than writing the history of other peoples or states in the same period. One reason is the religious importance of every event, as just discussed; this might seem less surprising, perhaps, when one is discussing Muhammad, who was a prophet above anything else, and maybe even his immediate successors, but Arab history right up to 750 has at least in part to be seen through salvationist perspectives. A second is the late date of most of our narrative sources. This ought not to matter too much to early medievalists - mid-seventh-century Byzantine history is mostly accessible only through early ninth-century writers, too, without Byzantinists being more than regretful about it - but the religious importance of the period, and the irreconcilable sectarian positions of our sources, have bothered Arabists much more and have resulted in the rejection by an influential strand of recent historians of all possibility of knowing anything reliable about Muslim Arab history before the 690s at the earliest. It is also the case that, after an absence of narrative sources for the Arabs in the seventh and early eighth centuries, in the ninth and tenth our source material explodes in quantity. There may be as much writing surviving in Arabic (mostly from Iraq) from those two centuries as from the whole of Europe in our whole period. The huge size of this source material, plus the radical nature of recent critiques of it, has led historians of the early caliphate into ever more enclosed discussions of the criteria for its authenticity, and there are remarkably few recent analyses of the details of the period before 750 (or even after it) in itself. The
sources themselves are opaque to the inexpert, too; they are frequently made up of quite bitty stories (akhbr), which are given truth-content by chains of informants, maybe going back a couple of centuries, but then often counterposed to other stories that say the exact opposite. One can feel oneself flung into an unfamiliar cultural world, which is further emphasized by the different way in which most historians currently write about it.
And yet the early Arab period is crucial for us to confront. The caliphate did not rule any part of Europe before the Arab-Berber invasion of Spain in 711, but it cannot be excluded from a history of the Continent. For a start, it was the Arabs who broke in half the surviving section of the Roman empire in the seventh century, ending for ever its dream of continued Mediterranean hegemony, and forcing it to reinvent itself as the state we call Byzantium, as we saw in the last chapter. Secondly, the caliphate was itself built on Roman foundations (as also Sassanian Persian foundations). Notwithstanding the difficulty and unfamiliarity of our narrative sources for it, it arguably preserved the parameters of imperial Roman society more completely than any other part of the post-Roman world, at least in the period up to 750; this is a paradox which it is essential to explore. Thirdly, the caliphate was simply richer and more powerful than any other post-Roman polity. By now it was the Arabs that dominated the Mediterranean. After 750, under the ‘Abbasids, the centre of the caliphate moved from Mu‘awiya’s Syria to Iraq, and further from Roman traditions; I shall discuss the ‘Abbasids in less detail as a result in Chapter 14. But the ‘Abbasids, even more than the pre-750 Umayyads, far surpassed their neighbours in their wealth and in the sophistication of their intellectual culture, and we must pay attention to that, both in Chapter 14 and in 15, when we look at the east Mediterranean economy as a whole. This chapter will discuss the Arab conquests and the Umayyad caliphate of Mu‘awiya and his successors. Here, we shall focus on the linked problems of the stabilization of the Arab (or Muslim) political system, and of the issue of social and cultural continuity and change, in the first of the many centuries of Arab dominance of the eastern and southern Mediterranean, and, indeed, of further afield.
Muhammad (c. 570-632) was a merchant in Mecca in western Arabia who around 610 began to get verbal revelations from God; he became a prophet and sought followers. The Arabs were polytheists, although there were substantial Christian and Jewish minorities among them. Muhammad was certainly closest to the Jewish tradition, and was, like the Jews, a very strict monotheist, but the most reliable early Muslim source (the Constitution of Medina, dating to the 620s) makes it clear that Muhammad saw the Believers (the commonest early word for his followers) as separate from Jews. Muhammad’s revelations were later collected as the Qur’an; Muslim tradition says that the basic recension of the text dates to ‘Uthman’s reign as caliph (644-56). Some recent western scholars have argued for a much later date, as late as 800 for John Wansbrough, the early eighth century for Patricia Crone, though Fred Donner makes a good defence for the traditional dating on grounds of content and style. However this may be, it is undeniable and important that elements of the Qur’an were already widely circulating in the late seventh century, as can be seen in the Qur’anic verses prominently displayed on the Dome of the Rock in Jerusalem, the first major piece of Islamic architecture, finished in 691-2, and that they clearly name Islam as a distinct and coherent religion, founded by Muhammad. The exact details of that religion in its first decades cannot be fully reconstructed, and will of course anyway have been understood differently by different people, but it was recognized as new and challenging right from the start. The Meccans were sufficiently threatened by it for Muhammad to have to flee to Medina, a more welcoming town, in 622; his ‘emigration’ there (hijra) marks the formal beginning of Islam, and Hijra dating for the years appears on an Egyptian papyrus as early as 643. Medina and Mecca fought for supremacy across the 620s, but Muhammad took his home town over in, probably, 630; it became the religious centre of Islam, although Medina remained the political centre. Muhammad also, remarkably quickly, extended his authority widely in Arabia, even before the fall of Mecca, and especially afterwards. By Muhammad’s death, the fragmented and warring Arab tribes for the most part recognized a single authority for the first time ever, and an authority of a new type, based on religious revelation.
The first caliphs, Abu Bakr (632-4), ‘Umar I (634-44), ‘Uthman and ‘Ali, were chosen from among Muhammad’s own close companions, and also, as all successive caliphs were too, from Muhammad’s own tribe, the Quraysh; the title khalfa may have existed from at least ‘Uthman’s time. They were both Muhammad’s successors as leaders of the Believers, and God’s representatives on earth. From the beginning, it was seen as essential to keep the Muslim community together, and Abu Bakr’s caliphate was taken up with subduing Arabia more fully; much of it, particularly in the east, had seceded after Muhammad’s death (partly under its own prophets - Muhammad was by no means the only one in the period) and had to be reconquered. This was doubtless easier because of the collapse of Sassanian hegemony along the east and south coasts of the peninsula after Heraclius’ victory over Persia in 628, for, of course, these Arabian events were happening just as the last great Rome-Persia war ended with the exhaustion of both sides and the prostration of the loser. ‘Umar sent Arab armies north in the 630s; after the defeat of the Romans on the River Yarmuk in 636, all Syria and Palestine was laid open to Arab conquest; after the defeat of the Persians at Qadisiyya in about 637, so was what later became called Iraq. By 640 the whole of the fertile crescent south of the Turkish mountains was under Arab control; Egypt was added in 639-42. Iraq and Egypt were thereafter always the economic powerhouses of the caliphate; except for the brief period of Sassanian rule in the 620s, they had not been part of the same political system since the death of Alexander nearly a thousand years before. In the 640s the Arabs took Iran as well; by the time the last shah, Yazdagird III, was killed in 651, Arab armies had reached the modern Iran-Afghanistan border. The conquests stopped here for a generation; but in fifteen years the whole of the Sassanian empire and half the eastern Roman empire had been conquered by the Arabs. Only Alexander, and the Mongols, have ever matched them for speed of conquest, and both Alexander’s empire and that of the Mongols soon broke up into their constituent pieces again. The Arabs, however, kept these territories together for three centuries, and their religion and culture have dominated there ever since.
The Arabs were able fighters, and both the Romans and Persians had long used them as mercenaries, the Ghassanid confederation by the Romans, the Lakhmids for the Persians. Given the exhaustion of the empires in the 630s, and the new-found religious unity of the Arabs, Arab victories and conquests are not in themselves extraordinary, and of course after the first great battles were won in 636-7 every Arab with a camel was likely to want to take part in the conquests and in the wealth they brought. What was less to be expected was that the conquests would hold together. There can never have been many Arabs; Yemen is the only substantial part of the Arabian peninsula that can sustain more than a scattered, largely pastoralist, bedouin population, and even the Arabs who had for long settled in Roman-ruled Syria and Palestine seem to have been on the desert fringes there too, and therefore not so very numerous. Arab settlers would have been hugely outnumbered everywhere, and might not have withstood sustained revolts or Roman counterattack if their unity faltered; alternatively, they were at risk of being absorbed into local populations and losing their cultural identity, as Germanic ruling groups were in every Romano-Germanic polity except England and Bavaria. The absence of early revolts was fortunate (they would have been most dangerous in Iran, where the Persian aristocracy was a military one and early Arab settlement was more or less confined to Khurasan in the north-east); as for the surviving Romans/ Byzantines, they were in no military shape to take advantage of Arab civil wars. But the core reason for the survival of Arab rule as not only a political but also a cultural hegemony was not luck. Rather, it was the result of
the decision (traditionally, and plausibly, ascribed to ‘Umar I in 640-42) to settle the Arab armies, not as a landowning aristocracy as in the Germanic West, but as paid garrisons in newly founded cities (amsr), Kufa and Basra in Iraq, Mosul on the edge of the Iraq-Syria borderlands known as the Jazira, Fustat (the future Cairo) in Egypt, and others. The tax revenues of the provinces went to these garrisons above all, who thus were well rewarded for their separation from the socio-political life of the conquered population; being on the local dwn, the register of those entitled to army pay, was a coveted privilege, defended against newcomers as much as possible. ‘Umar’s policy succeeded; relatively little Arab landowning is recorded for any of these core provinces before 750 (although it seems to have been greater in Khurasan, where indeed Arab settlers were eventually Persianized, and also in the later conquest territories of Africa and Spain). This set the template for a structural separation between a paid army and the rest of civil - civilian - society which was greater even than in the Roman empire, and which marked most Muslim political systems ever after.
This decision had several consequences. One was fiscal: the tax system of the Roman - and also Sassanian - empire never broke down, as it did in the West, for it always had an essential political purpose, the payment of a ruling army. Another was, as already implied, that the Arabs were preserved as a separate and superior social stratum. They intermarried with local families, but their children maintained an Arabic language, culture, religion, identity. And they were so separate that anyone from the conquered majority who sought political prominence would have to try to join them, both in culture and in religion. This was less true of the seventh century, when the Arabs discouraged conversion to Islam, and anyway maintained the provincial governments of the conquered provinces, both Roman and Persian, intact. It was possible for two generations after the conquests to be powerful in the civil administration without changing one’s culture or identity at all, as with the Mansur family, prominent Greek Christian administrators in the Umayyad capital, Damascus, into the early eighth century, one of whose members was the important Christian theologian John of Damascus (d. c. 750). But around 700 the basic language of administration was changed to Arabic; from then on bureaucrats would have to be Arabic-speaking and, increasingly, Muslim. The process of conversion, at least for local élites, was indeed seen as an Arabization process; one had to become the client (mawl, plural mawl) of the tribe of an Arab sponsor, and, usually, to change one’s name to an Arab one. Such people ‘became’ Arabs, with access to political power, and perpetuated Arabic language and culture as they did so. Peasant conversion (which existed from the start; Muslims paid lower taxes, at least in theory) did not ever bring political privilege, but very slowly the links of Muslim clientage extended outwards to the peasantry too, and Islamization/Arabization permeated the countryside as it did so. This process was not a large-scale one until the ninth century at the earliest, but it was steady from then on, and by 1000 the majority of the population from Egypt to Iraq probably spoke Arabic. Of the conquest lands, only Iran maintained its original Persian language, by now however written in Arabic script and full of Arab loanwords.