The crucial point at which raiding turned into more deliberate wars of conquest was the Battle of Ajnadayn, near Gaza, in 634, where the Muslim Arabs defeated a Byzantine army sent to restore order in Palestine. The burst of confidence inspired by this success prompted further victories—Damascus was taken in 636 and a Byzantine relief force was decisively beaten at the Battle of Yarmuk in the same year, confirming the Muslims in possession of Syria. Their enemies discovered that Islam had given the Arabs an almost invincible cohesion and confidence in battle. This attribute was later described by the great Arab historian Ibn Khaldun as asabiyah, roughly translating as “group feeling.” In the following year the Muslim armies moved east against the Sassanid Empire.
Persia, like the Byzantine Empire, was weakened by the wars that had raged through the reign of Khosraw II. The Sassanids had repulsed initial moves by Arab raiding parties into Mesopotamia, but the royal army under King Yazdegerd III was defeated at Qadesiyya (near Hilla in modern Iraq) in 637, after which the Arabs took Ctesiphon and the whole of Mesopotamia. Arab generals persuaded the caliph to continue the offensive against the Persians rather than allow Yazdegerd to counterattack, and they defeated him a second time at Nahavand, near Hamadan, in 641. After this, Sassanid resistance effectively collapsed and Yazdegerd fled east, begging local rulers to help him against the Arabs (he was killed at Merv in 651—not by the invaders but by one of his own subjects, like Darius III). The Arabs increasingly established their dominion over the Iranian plateau, though towns like Qom and Kashan fought hard before surrendering, and resistance in the Caspian provinces of Tabarestan continued for many years.5 Khorasan was conquered by 654, and despite resistance in the outlying territories along the southern coast of the Caspian and in the northeast, these were all taken and Balkh captured by 707.
The conquest was not, for the most part, followed by mass murder, forced conversion, or what today we would call ethnic cleansing. Instead the new Arab masters were content, as a matter of policy, simply to replace the ruling elites of the territories they had conquered. The Arab troops set up armed camps in the new lands, on the fringe of existing cities or in the form of new settlements, often on the margin between cultivated land and uncultivated territory that could be used to graze animals. The Arabs generally allowed existing proprietors, peasants, and merchants to go about their business as normal, expropriating only state land, the estates of the Zoroastrian temples, and those of members of the old elites who had fled or had died in the fighting.
Religious policy was marked by the same tolerance and restraint once the conquest was over. Mohammad had specified tolerance for Christians and Jews (“people of the Book”) on condition that they paid tribute, which became a special tax for non-Muslims (the jizya). But this left Iranian Zoroastrians in a gray area, and many fire temples were destroyed and priests killed before it became normal for Zoroastrians to be treated with similar tolerance, subject to the jizya.6 The example of the new rulers, and the settlement of Arab soldiers into the new territories, began a slow process of Islamization, made easier by the similarity of many of the precepts of Islam to the familiar features of Mazdaism—righteous thought and action, judgment, heaven and hell, and so on. There was a religious ferment through this period, within which many concepts and formulae might be held in common across different sects. Consider the following:
. . . at whatever moment he dies eighty maiden angels will come to meet him with flowers . . . and a golden bedstead, and they will speak to him thus: do not fear etc. . . . And his fruitful work, in the form of a wondrous divine princess, a virgin, will come before him, immortal . . . and she herself will guide him to heaven.7
This remarkable passage links the idea of the houris of paradise, familiar from the Qoranic context, with the Mazdaean idea of the daena leading the soul to heaven. But this text is a Manichaean one, in the Iranian Sogdian language, from Central Asia. Bausani has given a series of significant parallels between passages in the Zoroastrian scriptures and passages in the Qor’an.8 Despite the firm, clear, guiding principle of the Mohammadan revelation, other earlier ideas continued to bubble, sometimes to appear again later in some of the more diverse and eclectic Islamic sects.
The propertied and elite classes of Iran had an interest in converting to Islam, in order to avoid the jizya. They and more modest folk converted and often attached themselves to Arab clans or families as mawali (clients), sometimes taking Arabic names. But most inhabitants of Iran remained non-Muslim for several centuries. The restraint of the conquerors is probably another important explanation for the success of the conquest—many of the subjects of the new empire may have been less heavily taxed than previously, and ordinary Iranians probably benefited from the replacement of a strongly hierarchical aristocratic and priestly system by the more egalitarian Islamic arrangements, with their emphasis on the duty of ordinary Muslims to the poor. But as in other epochs, the victors wrote the history; if more contemporary material from the peoples of the conquered lands had survived, the picture of tolerance might be more shaded. There were massacres at Ray and Istakhr, both Mazdaean religious centers that resisted more stubbornly than elsewhere.9
UMAYYADS AND ABBASIDS
Within twenty years of Mohammad’s death, his Arab successors had conquered most of the territory we now call the Middle East. After one hundred years, they controlled an area that extended from the Atlantic to the Indian Ocean. From this point on, Iran zamin (the land of Iran) was ruled for the most part by foreign monarchs for nearly a millennium. But conquest and the problems of wealth and power it brought also created new tensions among the victorious Arabs.
The fourth caliph, Ali, was Mohammad’s cousin, and had married his daughter Fatima. But despite these close ties to the Prophet and his own pious reputation, Ali’s caliphate was marred by civil war with the followers of the previous caliph, Uthman. When Ali was assassinated, a close relative of Uthman, Mu‘awiya, declared himself caliph. This was in 661, a date that marks the beginning of the Umayyad dynasty, named after the family from which the dynasty was descended—one of the leading families of Mecca that Mohammad had fought before Mecca’s submission to Islam.
Soon the new empire adopted forms of government resembling those of its predecessors, the Romans and the Sassanid Persians. The capital moved to Damascus (at that time, of course, a city formed by centuries of Christian, Roman, and Byzantine rule) and henceforth the caliphate passed mainly from father to son. The Umayyads discriminated strongly in favor of Arabs in the running of the empire, but were criticized among the Arabs for becoming too worldly and making too many compromises. They distanced themselves from their origins, became lax personally in their religious observances, and depended on paid soldiers rather than kinsmen and clan followers. As the empire and their responsibilities expanded, these changes were probably inevitable, as was the response—part of the eternal tension in Islam between piety and political authority.
Throughout this period there was dissent over the right of the Umayyads to rule. One group, the Kharijites, said that the caliph should be chosen by popular assent from among righteous Muslims, and deposed if he acted wrongly. Another group was to prove more important in the long run, and their dissent from orthodox Sunni Islam (named after the sunna—the example of the Prophet) eventually created a permanent schism. These Muslims identified with Ali, and the family of the Prophet descended through him. They believed that Ali should have been the first caliph, and that the caliphate should have descended in his line, which (through Ali’s wife Fatima) was also the line of the Prophet himself. Ali’s second son Hosein attempted a revolt in 680 but was overwhelmed at Karbala by Umayyad troops and killed. This was a crucial event, the full significance of which will be explored in a later chapter. Eventually the attachment to the family of the Prophet—to Ali and his descendants—evolved a theology of its own and a firm belief that the descendants of Ali were the only legitimate authority in Islam, becoming what we now call Shi‘ism.
Tensio
n and dissent reached a crescendo in the middle years of the eighth century. In the 740s there was a revolt against the Umayyads in Kufa, and they suffered external defeats by the Turks in Transoxiana and by the Byzantines in Anatolia. Then in the late 740s a Persian convert, Abu Muslim, began a revolt against Umayyad rule in Khorasan, where the creative dynamic between survivors of the old Persian land owning gentry (the dehqans) and the new Arab settlers had been particularly powerful, and where much intermarrying and conversion had occurred. There appears to have been a real fusion of cultures, with Arab settlers adopting the Persian language, Persian dress, and even some pre-Islamic Persian festivals.
Abu Muslim led his revolt in the name of the Prophet’s family, thereby concealing the movement’s final purpose and ensuring a wide appeal. Drawing support from Arab settlers in Khorasan, who resented their taxes and felt betrayed by the Umayyads, Abu Muslim and his followers defeated local opposition and, starting from Merv, led their armies westward under a black banner. They defeated the forces sent against them by the Umayyad caliph in a series of battles in 749–750, and in the latter year proclaimed a new caliph in Kufa—Abu’l Abbas (for whom the Abbasid dynasty was named). Abbas was a descendant not of Ali but of another of Mohammad’s cousins. Before long the new caliph, uneasy at the continuing strength of Abu Muslim’s support in Khorasan, had him executed (in 755),10 the effect of which was to endorse orthodox Sunnism and to marginalize once again the followers of Ali, the Kharijites and other disparate groups that had supported the revolt originally. But the revolt of Abu Muslim was another important religious revolution in Iran. He was remembered long afterward by Iranians, and still later by Iranian Shi‘ites, as a righteous, brave, and successful revolutionary betrayed by those he put in power.
Instead of Damascus, the new capital of the Abbasid dynasty was established in Baghdad, hard by the old Sassanid capital of Ctesiphon (though the seat of Abbasid government later moved north to Samarra). The center of gravity of the empire had moved east in a deeper sense, too. As time went on, Persian influence at the court of the new dynasty became more and more marked (especially through the Persian Barmakid family of officials), and some historians have represented the Abbasid supremacy as a cultural reconquest of the Arab conquerors by the Persians. The strengthening of Persian influence had begun already under the Umayyads. But now texts recording Sassanid court practice were translated into Arabic and applied by the new bureaucrats. This created a more hierarchical pattern of government. The caliph was screened by officials from contact with petitioners, a departure from earlier Umayyad practice in which the caliph had still taken counsel from tribal leaders in assembly and manipulated their loyalties and allegiances in age-old patriarchal fashion. Now new offices appeared in the government of the Abbasids, including that of vizier, or chief adviser or minister, and the administration was divided into separate departments or ministries called diwans. These institutions were taken directly from Sassanid court practice, and were to endure in Islamic rulership for more than a thousand years.
The influence was also apparent in the buildings constructed by the Abbasids, and Persian architects built many of the buildings of Baghdad. Even the circular ground plan of the new city may have been copied from the Sassanian royal city of Ferozabad in Fars. Where the Umayyads had tended to follow Byzantine architectural models, Abbasid styles were based on Sassanid ones. This is apparent in the open spaces enclosed by arcaded walls, in the use of stucco decoration, in the way domes were constructed above straight-walled buildings below, and, above all, in the classic motif of Sassanian architecture, the iwans. These were large open arches, often in the middle of one side of a court, often with arcades stretching away on each side, often used as audience halls. As with other cultural inheritances from Sassanid Iran, these architectural motifs survived for centuries in the Islamic world.11
Particularly under the Abbasid caliph Al-Mansur many Persian administrators and scholars came to the court, mainly from Khorasan and Transoxiana (though they still worked there in Arabic, and many had Arabic names). These Persians encountered opposition from some Arabs, who called them Ajam, which means the mute ones, or the mumblers—a disparaging reference to their poor Arabic. The Persians defended themselves and their cultural identity from Arab chauvinism through the so-called shu‘ubiyya movement, the title of which refers to a verse from the forty-ninth Sura of the Qor’an, in which Allah demands mutual respect between different peoples (shu‘ub). It was primarily a movement among Persian scribes and officials; their opponents (including some Persians) tended to be the scholars and philologians. But the shu‘ubiyya sometimes went beyond asserting equality or parity in favor of the superiority of Persian culture, especially literature. Given the religious history of Persia and the lingering attachment of many Persians to Mazdaean or sub-Mazdaean beliefs, shu‘ubiyya also implied a challenge to Islam, or at least to the form of Islam practiced by the Arabs. A satirical contemporary recorded the attitude of a typical young scribe, steeped in the texts that recorded the history and the procedures of the Sassanid monarchy:
. . . His first task is to attack the composition of the Qor’an and denounce its inconsistencies. . . . If anyone in his presence acknowledges the pre-eminence of the Companions of the Prophet he pulls a grimace, and turns his back when their merits are extolled. . . . And then he straight away interrupts the conversation to speak of the policies of Ardashir Papagan, the administration of Anushirvan, and the admirable way the country was run under the Sasanians . . . 12
In time, the solution to such conflicts proved to be assimilation and synthesis, but the shu‘ubiyya gave the Persians in Baghdad a collective self-confidence and helped to ensure the survival of a strong element of pre-Islamic Persian culture as part of that synthesis.13 Like the religious controversies about free will and the nature of the Qor’an that were going on at the same time, the shu‘ubiyya was a sign of conflict, change, and creative energy.
Boosted by the creativity of the Persians the Abbasid regime set a standard and was looked back on later as a golden age. Baghdad grew to be the largest city in the world outside China—by the ninth century it had a population of around four hundred thousand. The Abbasids endeavored to evade the tensions between piety and government and to cement their support among all Muslims by abandoning the Umayyad principle of Arab supremacy and by establishing the principle of equality between all Muslims. This same inclusive spirit extended even to taking Christians, Jews, and descendants of Ali into the government—provided they proved loyal to the regime.
The integration of the huge area of the Arab conquests under the peaceful and orderly rule of the Abbasid caliphate brought new and dynamic patterns of trade, as well as a great release of economic energy. The caliphs encouraged improvements in agriculture, particularly through irrigation, which created new prosperity especially in Mesopotamia, as well as on the Iranian plateau. There the following centuries saw the widespread introduction of rice cultivation, groves of citrus fruits, and other novelties.14 The region of Khorasan and Transoxiana profited hugely from revitalized trade along the ancient Silk Route to China, from the agricultural improvements, and from the mixing of old and new, Arab and Iranian. Because of these changes, the area entered an economic and intellectual golden age of its own.
The Abbasid system relied first on the local networks of control set up by provincial governors across the vast territories of the empire, and second on the bureaucracy that tied those governors to the center in Baghdad. The governors collected tax locally, deducted for their expenses (including military outlays), and remitted the remainder to the Abbasid court. The hand of central government was relatively light, but these arrangements put considerable power in the hands of the governors, which in the long run was to erode the authority of the caliphate.
The Abbasid court became rich, but it also became very learned. The caliphs, especially caliph al-Ma‘mun (813–833, himself the son of a Persian concubine), encouraged and supported scholars who translate
d ancient texts into Arabic. These were initially translated from Persian, but later also from Syriac and Greek, drawing on writings discovered across the conquered territories. Al-Ma’mun’s predecessor al-Mansur (754–775) had founded a new library, the Beyt al-Hikma (House of Wisdom), which attempted to assimilate all knowledge in one place and translate it into Arabic. An idea taken directly from the model of the Sassanid royal libraries, the House of Wisdom drew extensively on writings and scholars from Gondeshapur in Khuzestan, the most famous of the Sassanid academies.15 Gondeshapur had survived up to that point, but it seems thereafter to have been eclipsed by Baghdad. At the same time, the diffusion of scholarship also profited from the introduction of paper manufacturing from China, which replaced the more expensive and awkward papyrus and parchment.
Al-Ma’mun seems to have encouraged a shift in emphasis toward astrology, mathematics, and the translation of Greek texts, under the eye of his chief translator, Hunayn ibn Ishaq. These developments led to what has been called the ninth-century renaissance, as Persian scholars writing in Arabic discovered and applied the lessons especially of Greek philosophy, mathematics, science, medicine, history, and literature. The new scholarship was not merely passive, but creative. It produced new scientific writings, literature, histories, and poetry of great and lasting quality, forming the basis of much later intellectual endeavor—including in Europe—in the centuries that followed.
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