In the words of Ibn
Khaldun:
In the Muslim
community, the jihad is a religious duty because of the universalism of the
Islamic mission and the obligation [to convert] everybody to Islam either by
persuasion or by force ... [By contrast] the other religions had no such
universal mission and the holy war was [therefore] not a religious duty to them
apart from self-defense. (Abdel Rahman ibn Muhammad ibn Khaldun, Kitab al-Ibar wa-Diwan al-Mubtada wa-I-Khabar, Beirut, Dar
al-Kitab al-Lubnani, 1961, Vol. 1, p. 408.)
For modern-day
discussion of the doctrine of jihad see: Majid Khadduri,
War and Peace in the Law of Islam John's Hopkins University Press, 1955;
Rudolph Peters, Jihad in Classical and Modern Islam, Princeton, 1996; Bernard
Lewis, "Politics and War;' in Joseph Schacht and C. E. Bosworth (eds.),
The Legacy of Islam, Oxford, 1974, pp. 156-209; Andrew G. Bostom,
The Legacy of Jihad: Islamic Holy War and The Pate of Non-Muslims, 2005; Jacob Lassner, The Shaping of Abbasid Rule, Princeton University
Press, 1980, pp. 8-16, 89-102,177.)
This dogmatic
worldview has been matched by a good measure of tactical pragmatism. Although
Muhammad and his successors relinquished neither their dichotomist view of
international affairs nor their ultimate goal of world domination, the Prophet
was not deterred from crossing the religious divide and aligning himself with
non-Muslims whenever this suited his needs. (W. Montgomery Watt, Islam and the Integration
of Society, 1961, p. 89.) This practice was widely developed by his successors
who, as we have seen, were far less interested in the mass conversion of the
conquered populations than in enjoying the material fruits of their
subjugation. For them the triumph of Islam was not so much a cultural and
civilizational issue as it was a territorial and political matter. The lands
they occupied and ruled became an integral part of the House of Islam whether
or not most of their inhabitants became Muslims. No matter how hard the caliphs
professed their commitment to the pursuit of a holy war against the
unbelievers, theirs was a straightforward act of empire-building rather than a
"clash of civilizations." They were, of course, extremely proud of
their religion and convinced of its superiority over all other faiths. Yet this
did not prevent them from appropriating the intellectual property of other
cultures and religions, and for good reason. At the time of the conquests the
Arabs were a marginal group, lacking substantial material resources, with a
dearth of bureaucratic and administrative experience and a limited literary and
cultural tradition. It was only natural for them to take whatever they could
from the great cultural and intellectual centers that had come under their rule
in order to strengthen their own imperial prowess. The Byzantine (and Iranian)
bureaucratic and administrative systems thus remained in operation, especially
in the fiscal and monetary fields, and were manned by former imperial officials.
Roman and provincial legal norms and practices influenced the nascent Islamic
law, and the Umayyad caliphs had a distinct penchant for emulating their
Byzantine counterparts, so much so that a prominent student of Islam described
the Umayyad caliphate as a NeoByzantine Empire.
(Gaston Wiet, "L’Empire
neo-byzantin des Omeyyades
et l'empire neo-sasanide
des Abbasides;' Journal of World History, Vol.
1,1953-54, pp. 63-71.)
This was illustrated
inter alia by the adoption of the title "Allah's Caliph;' which evoked the
universal claim to power made by the Byzantine emperors (and the Iranian
shahs). It was also manifested by the designation of a royal heir by the caliph
himself, by the policy of glorification through monumental architecture, by the
remarkable attention paid to the maintenance of the roads, to the extent of
imitating the Roman milestones, and by the modeling of the earliest dinar on
Byzantine coinage until it was withdrawn and replaced by a more
"Islamic" design. Even the most extraordinary Umayyad acts of
religious piety-the building of the Dome of the Rock and the mosques of
Damascus and Medina-were inspired by the grand Byzantine monuments and were
constructed with Byzantine help and building materials, notably gold and mosaic
cubes, sent by the emperor at the caliph's request. When criticized for his
shameless imitation of the Byzantine emperors, the first Umayyad caliph Mu'awiya (661-80) retorted that "Damascus was full of
Greeks and that none would believe in his power if he did not behave and look
like an emperor." (Hamilton A. R. Gibb, Studies on the Civilization of
Islam, 1962, pp. 5I-57; Oleg Graber, "Islamic Art and Byzantium,"
Dumbarton Oaks Papers, 18,1964, p. 88.)
The absorption of the
conquered civilizations was thorough and comprehensive. Indian medicine,
mathematics, and astronomy were eagerly studied, while Iranian administrative
techniques, social and economic traditions, literary and artistic methods, and
important elements of political thinking were adopted and acted upon. Yet the
largest source of borrowing by a wide margin came precisely from that part of
the world with which the House of Islam was supposedly locked in a deadly
civilizational confrontation-the Vlest. Countless
Hellenistic sciences and fields of learning were incorporated en masse into the nascent Islamic civilization: medicine
and pharmaceutics, botany and zoology, mineralogy and meteorology, mathematics,
mechanics, and astronomy, and, above all, philosophy. In all these spheres the
Hellenistic heritage fused with local traditions and with foreign influences,
especially from Iran and other Eastern countries. Even Arabic literature
adopted many Hellenistic motifs and themes, as well as less readily discernible
elements such as its stylistic and presentational patterns and emotional
conventions. (Gustave E. von Grunebaum, Medieval Islam,University of Chicago Press, 1962, p. 294; S. D. Goitein, Studies in Islamic History, 1968, pp. 54-70;
Richard Frye, The Golden Age of Persia: The Arabs in the East, 1975, pp. 150-85
; Goodman, "The Translation of Greek Materials into Arabic;' in M. J. 1.
Young et al (eds.), Religion, Learning, and Science in the Abbasid Period,
Cambridge University Press, 1990, pp. 477-97.)
It is arguable, of
course, that cultural and intellectual appropriation implies no affinity with
those from whom you take and that the pretense to originality and uniqueness
often results in the disparagement of one's intellectual and conceptual roots.
Just as the early Christian church sought to consolidate its position by
denigrating its Jewish origins, so Islam accused the "People of the
Book," Jews and Christians, from whom it derived most of its ideas, of
straying from the "right path" or even of tampering with the Holy
Scriptures. Islam's wholesale incorporation of Hellenistic culture and science
did not therefore mean acquiescence to Western civilization but rather an
augmentation and refinement of its own edifice so as to maintain its supremacy.
As far as Muslims were concerned there was no fundamental difference between
the material and the intellectual properties of the vanquished peoples. Both
were legitimate spoils of war that could readily be appropriated by the
conquerors without attribution and regarded as an indigenous part of the House
of Islam. Muhammad, for example, is said to have commended to his followers a
prayer that is virtually identical to the Christian Paternoster, or Lord's
Prayer. (W. Montgomery Watt, The Influence of Islam on Medieval Europe, 1972,
p. 11.)
A similarly pragmatic
approach characterized Islam's economic relations with Christendom. Born in a
mercantile milieu, Islam had always been amenable to trade and commerce.
Muhammad himself was a successful merchant, as were several of his early
companions, and their favorable attitude to trade permeated the new religion
from the start. Numerous sayings attributed to the Prophet sang the praises of
commerce, while Islamic law and political practice took great care to protect
the interests of Muslim merchants. Thus, for example, while foreign nationals
were subjected to a 10 percent custom on the value of their merchandise and
Dhimmis had to pay a 5 percent tax, Muslim merchants were liable to only a 2.5
percent tax. (Goitein, Studies, p. 232.)
A clear line was thus
drawn between the religious duty to fight unbelievers wherever they were, and
the maintenance of economic relations with the non
Muslim world. In the words of the historian Daniel Dennett: "Neither in
the Qur'an, nor in the sayings of the Prophet, nor in the acts of the first
caliphs, nor in the opinions of Muslim jurists is there any prohibition against
trading with the Christians or unbelievers." (Daniel C. Dennett, "Pirenne and Muhammad;' Speculum, Vol. 23, No. 2, April
1948, p.168.) This approach generated in short order a thriving international
trade as the Islamic empire happily interacted with "infidels" of all
hues, from the Far East to the Atlantic. Pagan Mrica
was probably the most lucrative branch of this foreign trade for centuries, as
Muslim merchants exchanged very cheap products against gold (as late as the
eleventh century black African tribes were reportedly trading gold for an equal
weight of salt). Yet there was also extensive trade between Muslims and their
immediate European neighbors: Byzantium and the pagan peoples to its north. The
magnitude of this trade is evidenced by the huge quantities of Islamic coins
(dating from the end of the seventh to the beginning of the eleventh century)
discovered in different parts of Russia, Finland, Sweden, and Norway, and it
comprised a wide range of commodities including furs, skins, amber, timber,
cattle, and weapons. The primary commodity by far was slaves, mainly from the
pagan Slav peoples; the pervasiveness of this phenomenon is borne out by the
fact that in a number of European languages, and also in Arabic, the word for
slave is a derivative of ‘Slav.’ (E. Ashtor, A Social
and Economic History of the Near East in the Middle Ages, 1976, pp. 100--06; C.
E. Bosworth, "The City of Tarsus and the Arab- Byzantine Frontiers in
Early and Middle Abbasid Times;' in his The Arabs, Byzantium, and Iran, 1996,
p. XlV.)
Muslim trade with
Western Europe was more limited, but this had less to do with the creation of
two implacably hostile civilizations on the opposite sides of the
Mediterranean, than with the economic inferiority of Western Europe, which had
not yet reached the level of manufacturing and production that would allow it
to compete on an equal footing with the Islamic empire. As a result, the trade
relations between the two systems bore some resemblance to the "colonial
trade" of the nineteenth and twentieth centuries, except that in this case
Europe held the status of colony, exporting raw materials and slaves in return
for consumer goods. I already have extensively covered related subjects here.
The Jews played a
central role in the latter trade, on the European side. Owing to their
exclusion from agriculture, the main occupation of the Christian majority, they
became a largely commercial people. Their high level of literacy and knowledge
of foreign languages, and their ability to communicate with coreligionists in
the Islamic lands, made them uniquely suited to serve as a bridge between the
two world powers, though their position was extremely tenuous and exposed to
the rapacity of greedy potentates and fanatic mobs. During the Abbasid
era, but continuing well after the caliphs had lost their prowess: the
gem-studded golden dishes on the caliph's table, the thousands of gilded
curtains at the royal palace, and the golden tree and the ruby- eyed golden
elephant in the caliph's courtyard are only some of the more .1 ostentatious
possessions that bear witness to this extravagance. This opulence extended well
beyond the confines of the caliph's palace. The shifting of the imperial center
of gravity to Iraq and the establishment of Baghdad as the new capital linked
the empire with the farthest corners of the globe. Abbasid extravagance was in
stark contrast to the daily existence of most of the caliph's subjects. The
empire might have been fabulously rich, but these riches were concentrated in
the hands of the few at the expense of the many: at a time when the caliph
could bestow dozens of thousands of dirhams on a favorite poet for reciting a
few lines, ordinary Iraqi laborers were carrying home between one and two
dirhams a month. (Ahmad ibn Yahya al-Baladhuri, Futuh al-Buldan, Cairo, 1957,
Vol. 2, p. 149.)
Wastefulness and
corruption permeated all walks of imperial life, from the caliph and military
commanders to local officials and administrators. Since the caliphal court
required vast amounts of money to finance its extravagant lifestyle,
confiscation of funds and properties, both private and public, became a ubiquitous
feature of royal life. The caliph Mu'tamid (870-92)
even created a special ministry for the confiscation and distribution of the
properties of those who had died without an heir. Although the ministry was
eventually abolished, the practice remained widespread throughout the empire
as government officials invariably exploited their positions for
self-enrichment. Bribery was institutionalized and ingenious illegitimate
techniques for tax evasion were devised at the expense of small businessmen and
landowners.
The growing burden of
taxation and the decline in availability of cultivable land, owing to the
deterioration of the irrigation system in southern Iraq, drove large numbers of
peasants to the cities. The authorities did their utmost to force them back to
their communities, so as to prevent a decrease in payments of land tax, the
main source of government income, but even so a restless proletariat developed
in the cities, providing an audience for preachers and agitators of all hues.
Violent clashes among local groups, and between these groups and the
government, became commonplace. Growing lawlessness on the part of the troops
led to the formation of citizen organizations for defense and reprisals, which
were often transformed into robber gangs. Notable among these were the Ayyarun, thugs drawn from the lower reaches of society who
made their living through extortion, racketeering, and robbery. Ready to sell
their services to the highest bidder, groups of Ayyarun
competed against each other to serve the rival Shiite and Sunni camps in their
incessant squabbles in Baghdad and other Iraqi cities. At times the Ayyarun were recruited to the local security services as a
means of controlling their bubbling aggressiveness; on other occasions they
were hired by the upper classes to resist government policies. (Muhammad Muhi aI-Din Abdel Hamid al-Mas'udi, Muruj al-Dhahb wa-Maadin al-Jawhar, University of Beirut, 1970, Vol. 3, pp. 126-27.)
To make things worse,
the imperial metropolis shamelessly plundered the natural resources of the
provinces for its own use while disregarding these territories' interests and
needs. This practice had already started at the time of the Prophet, when
Medina thrived on the tribute of the rapidly expanding umma. It continued after
the conquests and reached its apogee under the Abbasids: rice, grains, and
fabrics arrived from Egypt, silver, copper, and iron from Iran, Aghanistan, and Central Asia, brocade, pearls, and weapons
from Arabia. A special effort was made to obtain the largest possible
quantities of gold. Aside from a steady stream of this precious metal from
Sudan, bought from the unwitting locals for insubstantial amounts of bartered
goods, the Abbasids removed huge quantities of gold from the palaces of the
Iranian kings and nobility. In Egypt they went so far as to systematically
plunder the pharaonic tombs, where they apparently found more gold. (Ahmad ibn
Yahya al-Baladhuri, Ansab
al-Ashraf, Beirut, 1996, Vol. 10, pp. 361-62. )
This economic
exploitation, combined with the government's weakening control of the
periphery, triggered rebellions throughout the empire. These often had a
religious coloring. As early as 750 a peasant uprising took place in Upper
Egypt, followed the next year by an insurrection in northern Iraq. Even in
Khurasan, the foremost bastion of support for the Abbasid dynasty and the
primary source of manpower and materiel for the imperial administration, there
was a tremendous amount of opposition to the central government. After the
conquests the Arabs used the imperial monetary systems of the vanquished
peoples. In 696 they minted their own gold coin, the dinar, followed two years
later by a silver coin, the dirham. Under the Umayyads the exchange rate was
ten dirhams for one dinar, rising during the Abbasid era to twelve dirhams per
dinar. E. Ashtor, A Social and Economic History of
the Near East in the Middle Ages (London: Collins, 1976), pp. 81-84.
One of the most
serious revolts in the province, which threatened to sever Central Asia from the
empire, was headed by a non-Muslim Iranian nobleman by the name of Babak who
sought to break free from Abbasid colonial subjugation and establish his own
kingdom. "Perhaps I shall not live long from this day;' he reportedly
wrote to his son, "[but] it is better to live one day as a leader than
forty years as an abject slave." In late 816 or early 817 Babak rose in
revolt, capitalizing on widespread resentment at Abbasid colonization of
Armenia and Azerbaijan on the one hand, and the deteriorating economic
conditions in the region on the other. Several expeditionary forces sent by the
caliph were comprehensively routed and legions of peasants flocked to Babak's
camp, enthused by his populist policy of breaking up large estates and
distributing their lands among the needy. For twenty years the ambitious rebel
managed to hold out against the imperial government, steadily expanding his
domain and making alliances with local potentates. It was only in 837 that the
caliph Mu'tasim, who four years earlier had succeeded
his brother Ma'mun, finally managed to put down the
revolt. To magnify the effect of his victory, the caliph paraded the captured
rebel around his newly established capital of Samarra on the back of an
elephant before ordering the executioner to dismember his body, rip open his
stomach, and decapitate him. Babak is said to have endured these atrocities
with such dignity that Mu'tasim might have pardoned
him had he not endangered the empire's integrity to such an extent. (Muhammad
ibn Saad, al-Tabaqat al-Kubra, Cairo, 1968, Vol. 3,
pp. 77, 157-58; Mas'udi, Muruj,
Vol. 3, pp. 50, 76-77; Ibn Abdel Hakam, Futuh Misr, p. 82; Ahmad ibn Abi Ya'qub
al-Ya'qubi, Tarikh al-Ya'qubi
,Beirut, 1960), Vol. 2, p. 154.)
No sooner had the
dust settled on Babak's revolt than the imperial center was rocked by a
similarly formidable social rising, this time by the empire's most despised
class: the Zanj. Herded by the hundreds and thousands into labor camps in the
salt flats near Basra, without their families or hope, and given meager rations
of food, these black East African slaves had revolted previously during Umayyad
times, and in the autumn of 869 they again rose in strength. Led by a
charismatic Iranian Kharijite who claimed Alid
descent and styled himself as the Mahdi, they managed to rout the local
governors and to establish their own independent entity. Within a year the
rebels were in control of much of southern Iraq and the western Iranian
province of Khuzistan. In September 871 they occupied
Basra, slaughtering most of its residents and carrying the rest off as slaves. For the next twelve years they continually
terrorized the government and in 879 they nearly reached Baghdad. This was,
however, the limit of their success. For all their efforts, the Zanj failed to win
over other sectors of imperial society. A number of Bedouin tribes aside,
neither the peasants nor the urban proletariat threw in their lot with the
rebels. Religious resentment of the heretic Zanj, together with deep contempt
among the indigenous population toward black Mricans
(nearly five hundred years later the great Muslim historian Ibn Khaldun would
describe them as "close in their character to dumb animals"), left
the rebels isolated. By the summer of 883 they had been crushed by the imperial
armies. Their leader was killed and his head was sent on a pole to Baghdad.( Ya'qub ibn Ibrahim al-Kufi (Abu Yusuf), Kitab al-Kharaj, Cairo, 1933, pp. 23-24; Michael G. Morony, "Landholding in Seventh-Century Iraq: Late
Sasanian and Early Islamic Patterns; in A. 1. Udovitch
,ed., The Islamic Middle East, 700-1900: Studies in Economic and Social
History, Princeton, 1981, pp. 135-75.)
This violent record
underscores yet another striking similarity between the Abbasids and their
Umayyad predecessors: reliance on armed force as the primary means of dynastic
survival. This was ominously foreshadowed by Abul Abbas's regnal title of Saffah ("bloodshedder"), which he invoked as
early as his inaugural speech. "Oh people of Kufa;'
he said, "you have become the happiest of people through us and the most
honored by us. We have raised your [annual] stipends by one hundred dirhams.
Hold yourselves ready, for I am the ultimate bloodshedder and the destroying
avenger." (G. E. von Grunebaum, Classical Islam:
A History 600-1258, 1970, p. 57.)
Abul Abbas was to
earn his title. In an attempt to prevent any backlash from supporters of the
fallen dynasty, the Abbasids embarked on a murderous spree. In Mecca and Medina
scores of Umayyads were rounded up. Some were executed on the spot; the rest
were arrested and murdered in detention. In the Iraqi garrison town of Was it
the governor laid down his weapons in return for a personal guarantee of safe
conduct by the caliph, only to be treacherously murdered. In Palestine, the
newly appointed governor of Syria invited a group of eighty prominent Umayyads
to a banquet, slaughtered them all, then sat calmly among the corpses to finish
his meal. Even the dead were not spared, as the remains of the Umayyad caliphs
were exhumed and desecrated. Particularly gruesome treatment was meted out to
Hisham (724-43). His corpse was discovered virtually intact; after being
crucified and given 120 lashes, it was burned to ashes. Only the pious Umar II
escaped desecration. Small wonder, then, that upon Mansur's death on October 7,
775, his body was interred in a secret location to prevent its future
desecration. There are differing views about the origin of the Diwan. According
to the ninth-century historian Ahmad ibn Yahya Baladhuri
(d. 892), Umar probably borrowed the idea from the "kings of Syria;'
presumably the Byzantine emperors (Futuh, Vol. 3, p.
549). Muhammad ibn Abdus Jashiyari (d. 942) points to
Sasanid origin, as does the modern scholar Michael G.
Morony. See: Jashiyari,
Kitab al- Wuzara wa-l-Kutab, Cairo, 1938, p. 17; Morony,
Iraq after the Muslim Conquest, Princeton University Press, 1984, p. 56.)
In fairness to the
Abbasids, it should be said that they were only following in the footsteps of
their fallen predecessors and that they murdered "only" those deemed
most dangerous to their rule. It had been a common Umayyad practice to kill
rebels and mutilate their bodies as a means to deter future insurrections. The
renegades were habitually decapitated and their corpses crucified. The heads of
the chief rebels were then displayed throughout the province before being sent
to the caliph, where they were kept in a special storehouse in the royal
palace, each in a separate basket. (Baladhuri, Futuh, Vol. 1, pp. 33-41, 76-83. A Jewish community
nevertheless managed to survive in Yemen until the 1940s.)
Having rid themselves
of their enemies, the Abbasids turned on their allies and champions with
similar savagery. First to fall was the Hashemiyya
leader Abu Salama Khallal, who was instrumental in
laying the ground for the revolt that carried the Abbasids to power. Appointed
Wazir Al Muhammad (Vizier of the House of Muhammad) after the fall of Kufa, he antagonized the Abbasids by failing to act with
sufficient swiftness and conviction to have Abul Abbas proclaimed as caliph. By
some accounts, he even had serious doubts regarding Abul Abbas's suitability
for this lofty position. Abu Salama paid dearly for his behavior: in March 750
he was assassinated while on his way home after an audience with the caliph. His
death was conveniently attributed to the Kharijites. (Hava
Lazarus-Yafeh, Some Religious Aspects of Islam: A
Collection of Articles, 1981, p. 14; Patricia Crone, Slaves on Horses: The
Evolution of the Islamic Polity, 1980, p. 30.)
Next in line was Abu
Muslim, to whom, more than anyone else, the Abbasids owed their throne. The
dashing Mawla had established himself during the revolution as the undisputed
master of most of Iran and the eastern provinces, and while he remained loyal
to his suzerain, his autonomy was deeply resented by some members of the ruling
family. "Commander of the Faithful, just give me an order and I will kill
Abu Muslim;' Mansur pleaded with Abul Abbas, "for his head is full of
treachery." The caliph was reluctant to undertake such a gratuitous act.
"My brother, you know the trials and tribulations he has gone through and
what has been achieved because of him," he protested. Mansur remained
unmoved. "That was only because of our revolution;' he said. "Had
you sent a cat, it would have taken his place and done what he had done for the
revolution." "But how could we kill him?" "When he comes to
see you, and you will be engaging him in conversation. I could sneak in
unnoticed and deal him a blow from behind that would take his life." As Abu
Abbas remained unconvinced, it was left to Mansur to implement his plan after
ascending the throne in June 654, but not before using Abu Muslim's military
skills to crush a bid for the caliphate by an Abbasid rival. In February 655,
after much hesitation and against the counsels of his advisers, Abu Muslim
decided to accept Mansur's invitation for an audience. Upon arriving at the
caliph's camp, he was warmly received by Mansur. "Go, Abdel Rahman, and
make yourself comfortable;' the caliph said. "Take a hot bath, for travel
is a messy business. Then come back to me." When the hardened Abu Muslim,
who had reputedly put hundreds of thousands of people to death during the
revolution, arrived for his meeting with Mansur the next morning he was
confronted with a barrage of charges over trivial matters, As he was busy
explaining himself, the caliph signaled to the guards, who promptly entered the
room and killed Mansur's political savior. The caliph then summoned Abu
Muslim's friends and associates on a false promise of remuneration and
contemptuously threw the decapitated head of their fallen leader in front of
them. (Baladhuri, Futuh,
Vol. 1, pp. 216-18; Abu Yusuf, Kitab al-Kharaj, pp.
120-21; Wilfred Madelung, The Succession to Muhammad: A Study of the Early Caliphate,
Cambridge University Press, 1997, p. 74.)
A similar fate befell
the Barmakids, an aristocratic Iranian family and the
first vizierial dynasty in medieval Islam. As Mansur's vizier, Khaled Barmaki played a key role in the development of the Abbasid
administrative system, and over the next four decades he and his descendants
ran the imperial administration very much on their own since the caliphs who
succeeded the austere and tough-minded Mansur preferred to indulge in the
pleasures of royal life rather than shoulder its burdens. "I delegate to
you the responsibility for my subjects;' Harun told Khaled's son Yahya.
"You may pass judgment as you like, appoint whom you like, for I shall
not occupy myself with these matters together with you:' Harun's lack of
interest in public affairs ran so deep that he allowed Yahya and two of his
sons-Fadl and Ja'far-to act
as judges in his place, a hitherto unprecedented renunciation of the caliph's
most sacred right that even the "godless" Umayyads had resisted.
Yahya was also entrusted with the royal seal and was the first vizier to be
given the title of Emir: an important innovation that effectively made the
vizier the caliph's deputy.( Abu Yusuf, Kitab al-Kharaj,
pp. 120-28, 138-49; Bertold Spuler,
The Muslim World: A Historical Survey. Part I-The Age of the Caliphs, 1960, pp.
25-27. C. E. Bosworth, The Concept of Dhimma in
Early Islam;' in his The Arabs, Byzantium, and Iran, 1996, pp. 37-51.See also
Yohanan Friedmann, Tolerance and Coercion in Islam: Interfaith Relations in the
Muslim Tradition, Cambridge University Press, 2003.)
Yet all this was of
no help to the Barmakids once Harun decided to
dispose of his faithful servants. The family's property was confiscated and
Yahya and three of his sons were thrown into prison, where the aged vizier and
his illustrious son Fadl died some
time later. Ja'far, a refined man of letters
and culture, who had a particularly close relationship with Harun, was singled
out for special treatment. He was executed in Kufa
and his body was sent to Baghdad at the caliph's specific orders, where it was
beheaded and dismembered. Ja'far's head was impaled
in the city center and the two halves of his body were hung on either side of
Baghdad's main bridge. The mutilated body remained on display for many months,
while Ja'far's magnificent palace was subsequently
expropriated by Ma'mun. (Samuel S. Haas, "The
Contributions of Slaves to and Their Influence upon the Culture of Early
Islam" Princeton: PhD Thesis, 1942; Ira M. Lapidus, "Arab Settlement
and Economic Development of Iraq and Iran in the Age of the Umayyad and Early
Abbasid Caliphs;' in Udovitch (ed.), TheIslamic Middle East, pp. 177-207.)
The potential threat
posed by Abu Muslim or the Barmakids was wholly
personal and could readily be removed through their physical elimination,
though Abu Muslim's murder triggered a string of uprisings in Khurasan that had
to be summarily suppressed. Not so the Shiite danger. The Abbasids had come to
power on the back of a demand to restore the caliph ate to the House of
Muhammad. Hypothetically, their claim to occupy this prestigious post might
have appeared as good as that of any family branch, but in important respects
it was far inferior to that of the House of Ali. It was Abu Talib, Ali's father,
who had tended to the orphaned Muhammad and who had subsequently protected him
as a prophet against Meccan enmity. Ali himself spent much of his childhood in
Muhammad's household, was among the first converts to Islam, and married the
Prophet's beloved daughter Fatima before becoming the last of the four
"rightly guided" caliphs. By contrast, Abbas had apparently never
converted to Islam and his relations with Muhammad were correct but not
particularly warm. Patricia Crone argues that while pre-Islamic Arabia provided
the general context for the wala (clientage) it did
not provide the institution itself, which derived its crucial features from
Roman and provincial law. (Crone, Roman, Provincial, and Islamic Law: The
Origins of the Islamic Patronage, Cambridge University Press, 1987, pp. 40-88.)
By way of
circumventing this problem, Abbasid propaganda deliberately avoided allusions
to the particular identity of the would-be caliph, and instead concentrated
more broadly on the need to restore the caliphate to "the chosen one from
the House of the Prophet." But knowing full well that for most the House
of Muhammad was largely synonymous with Alid lineage,
the Abbasids did their utmost to give their efforts a Shiite coloring. Hence
their claim to be the rightful successors to Muhammad ibn Hanafiyya's
imamate, and hence the portrayal of the revolt as an act of revenge for the
martyrdom of Ali's son Hussein and the widely revered Yahya ibn Zaid, a
descendant of Ali killed in the course of an anti-Umayyad revolt in 743.
(Daniel C. Dennett, Conversion and the Poll Tax in Early Islam, Harvard
University Press, 1950; Ignaz Goldziher, Muslim
Studies, 1967, Vol. 1, pp. 101-36; Crone, "Were the Qays
and Yemen of the Umayyad Period Political Parties?" Der Islam, Vol. 71,
No. 1,1994, p. 24; J. J. Saunders, A History of Medieval Islam, 1965, pp.
95-97.)
Such pretenses could
not have been further from the truth. Though they exploited the Shiites'
machinery, ideological zeal, and above all widespread appeal to Khurasan's disenfranchised
communities, the Abbasids had no intention of sharing power with their Alid cousins. Quite the contrary: because of the relative
weakness of their claim to the caliphate they went out of their way, after
seizing power, to garnish their own credentials and to deride those of the Alids. Gone was the claim to legitimacy by virtue of
association with the Hashemiyya, to be replaced by
inflated accounts of Abbas's importance in Islamic history and his close
relations with the Prophet, who had allegedly promised him that "the rule
will pass unto your descendants." (C. H. Becker, "The Expansion of
the Saracens;' The Cambridge Medieval History, 1911-36, pp. 335-36; Elias Shoufany, Al- Rida and the Muslim Conquest of Arabia,
Toronto University Press, 1973.)
Abbas was portrayed
as Muhammad's guide and counselor, a caring uncle, whereas Ali was said never
to have been recognized as a lawful candidate for the caliphate, which is why
he had been passed over in favor of the Umayyad Uthman in the succession of
Umar. "Which is more closely related to the Prophet of God, his uncle or
his nephew?" ran a typical piece of pro-Abbasid propaganda:
The [Prophet's]
daughter's children desire the rights of the caliphate but theirs is not even
that which can be put under a nail; The daughter's husband [i.e., Ali] is not
heir, and the daughter does not inherit the Imamate; And those who claim your
inheritance will inherit only repentance. (Muhammad ibn Jarir
al-Tabari, Tarikh al-Rusul wa-l-Muluk,Cairo, 1966, Vol. 3, pp. 287-301.)
Such claims did
little to endear the Abbasids to the Shiites, who believed that their forfner partners had deceitfully robbed them of the fruits
of the revolution. In the autumn of 762, after years of covert agitation, two
great -grandsons of Ali-Muhammad ibn Abdallah, known as "The Pure Soul;'
and his brother Ibrahim-rose in open revolt against the Abbasids. Although
Mansur had sought for some time to lure the brothers into a direct
confrontation, the uprising caught him totally off guard. With only one
thousand soldiers at his immediate disposal (the rest were deployed throughout
the empire), the caliph found himself in such desperate straits that for seven
weeks he never changed clothes except to attend public prayers. So deep was
Mansur's anxiety that he had a close relative of the brothers decapitated, then
had his head paraded throughout Khurasan as that of the Pure Soul. Fortunately
for the caliph, the brothers showed a fatal lack of political and military
experience and failed to coordinate their operations. Muhammad was the first to
fall: the Abbasid force sent to the Hijaz cut off his supply routes before
killing him in a quick and decisive battle. Ibrahim, who launched his revolt
from Basra, was far more successful. At one point he managed to raise as many
as 100,000 fighters and to occupy the garrison town of Was it and the former
Iranian province of Fars, in the process inflicting a crushing military defeat
on the imperial armies. But he, too, was eventually defeated, having failed to
sustain the cohesion and motivation of his troops. Other Shiite contenders were
more fortunate. Twenty-four years after the suppression of the Pure Soul's
revolt, a younger brother by the name of Idris participated in yet another
abortive insurrection in Medina before escaping to Morocco. In 789 he
established his own dynasty, the Idrisids, founding a
capital at Fez two years later. He was poisoned at Harun's behest, but his
dynasty survived for another 130 years and prepared the way for a string of
local dynasties that rule Morocco to the present day and claim descent from the
Prophet. The success of the various Shiite sects, offshoots, and dynasties in
establishing themselves at the empire's periphery from where they challenged
the regime's legitimacy gave the Abbasids their worst recurring headache. One
such sect was the Zaidiya, which viewed Zaid ibn Ali,
a great-grandson of Ali killed in the course of an abortive rising in 740, as
the rightful imam. In the ninth century they established an independent imamate
in Daylam, the mountainous ridge at the southwestern
tip of the Caspian Sea, and in 892 one of their leaders was invited by the
local tribes to Yemen, where he established his own dynasty.
As for Saladin,
certainly one of the major empire builders, his elaborate holy-war propaganda
rather was a fig leaf for an unabashed quest for self-aggrandizement. To the Zangids Saladin was a thankless usurper who exploited the
power he had acquired in their service to disinherit them from their rightful
possessions. To other local potentates he was a dangerous imperial contender
who wanted to deprive them of their independence and who had therefore to be
resisted by all means. Had Saladin been truly alarmed by infidel presence in
the midst of the House of Islam he would have supported Nur al-Din's operations
in Transjordan, an important stepping stone for an assault on the Latin
Kingdom. He could also have established an anti-crusading alliance with the Zangid princes and other warlords after Nur al-Din's death.
That he instead chose to unify the region under his exclusive control, putting
his family in the driver's seat and disparaging other Muslim contenders as
enemies of Islam, indicated the supremacy of his imperial ambitions over his
religious piety: nearly a decade before his death on March 4, 1193, and a few
years before the capture of Jerusalem, he took the trouble to ensure the
survival of his nascent empire by publicizing his last will and testament,
which partitioned his territories among his three young sons. While he was busy
fighting fellow Muslims for regional mastery, a fact that is deliberately
omitted by his two official biographers, Saladin maintained a generally
peaceful relationship with the crusader states, based on friendly
correspondence and truce agreements. The intermittent clashes between them were
largely sparked by Frankish violations of these agreements. At the same time he
continued the profitable trade with the Italian city-states that had existed
since Fatimid times, and cultivated the Byzantine Empire as a strategic
counterweight to both Muslim and Christian potential rivals .(David Abulafia,
"Trade and Crusade, 1050-1250;' in Michael Goodich,
et al ,eds., Cross-Cultural Convergences in the Crusader Period, 1999, pp.
1-20; David Jacoby, "The Supply of War Materials to Egypt in the Crusader
Period," Jerusalem Studies in Arabic and Islam, Vol. 25, 2001, pp.
102-29.)
Neither did Saladin
attempt to undo the existing arrangements with the Franks in the territories
that had come under his rule, such as the 1108 agreement between Damascus and
the Latin Kingdom on the partition of the Golan Heights revenues. He was
likewise intent on ensuring the smooth operation of the Levant trade, and it
was the endangering of this trade by the prince of Karak,
Reynald of Chatillon, that triggered the attack on
the Karak castle in the summer of 1187, which set in
train the process that led within a few months to the recapture of Jerusalem
and the collapse of the Latin Kingdom. But even Saladin's soldiers and
commanders seemed to have lost their appetite for frghting
shortly after the capture of Jerusalem on October 2, 1187. This was illustrated
by the failure to capture Tyre in the winter of
1187-88, and the lackluster performance and increasing desertions in the war
against the Third Crusade (1189-92), sparked by the fall of Jerusalem. When, on
September 2, 1192, Saladin reached a truce agreement with King Richard the
Lion-Heart of England, his troops were ecstatic. "The day when peace came
was an auspicious day;' wrote Maqrizi, "both
sides showing universal joy and happiness after what had afflicted them for so
long a war. The Frankish soldiers mixed with those of the Muslims, and a group
of Muslims left for [Christian-held] Jaffa for trade. A great number of Franks
entered Jerusalem to make the pilgrimage, and the Sultan received them with
regard, giving them food and liberal hospitality.”( Ibn Athir,
al-Kami, Vol.11, pp. 553-57. ) Reflecting neither a burning spirit of
jihad nor an unwavering antiChristian enmity, this
behavior epitomized Saladin's career. For all his extensive holy-war
propaganda, an essential component in a socio-political order based on the
principle of religion, Saladin's attitude to the Frankish states was above all
derived from his lifelong effort at empire-building. As long as they did not
stand in the way of this endeavor he was amenable to leaving them in peace or
even to maintaining a mutually beneficial economic and political relationship
with them. But when a unique opportunity to land a shattering blow presented
itself, he had no qualms about seizing the moment, just as he unhesitatingly
ended hostilities when such action had outlived its usefulness. There was
nothing personal about this behavior. It was strictly business. "Now that
we are done with the Franks and have nothing else to do in this country, in
which direction shall we turn?" Ibn Athir has
Saladin asking his brother Adel and his son Afdal
prior to his death, before suggesting a possible course of action: "You
[Adel] take some of my sons and a part of the army and advance to Akhlat [in present -day eastern Turkey]. When I have
finished with Byzantium, I will join you and we will proceed into Azerbaijan,
from where we will gain access to Iran. There is nobody there who can stop
us." (Ibn Athir, al-Kami, Vol. 12, pp. 95-96.)
It is arguable that,
for all his prodigious historiographical skills, Ibn Athir
was a champion of the House of Zangi and therefore
had a vested interest in presenting Saladin as a quintessential imperialist
rather than a genuine holy warrior. Yet no such ulterior motives can be
attributed to Saladin himself. In a letter to the caliph Nasser, after the
death of Nur al-Din's son in 1181, he claimed to be the true heir to the Zangid legacy and espoused a grandiose imperialist design
extending well beyond the liberation of Jerusalem and the destruction of the
crusader states. Were he to be given possession of Mosul, Saladin hinted in an
attempt to attract the interest of his suzerain, this would lead to the capture
of Jerusalem, Constantinople, Georgia, and North Africa, "until the word
of God is supreme and the Abbasid caliphate has wiped the world clean, turning
the churches into mosques." (Lyons and Jackson, Saladin, pp. 193-94.) In a
conversation with his aide and biographer, Ibn Shaddad,
eight years later, Saladin reiterated his imperial dream. "When God Almighty
has enabled me to conquer the rest of the coast;' he said, "I shall divide
up the land [among my sons], make my testament, then cross this sea to their
islands to pursue them until there remains no one on the face of the earth who
does not acknowledge Allah-or I die [in the attempt]." (Ibn Shaddad, al-Nawadir al-Sultaniya, pp. 24-25.)
Saladin did not live
to see his imperialist dream realized. In his last years he was forced to
concede some of his gains to the Third Crusade and to acquiesce in the
reconstitution of the Latin Kingdom, albeit on a more limited scale. After his
death in 1193 the empire he had built was divided between members of his
family, the Ayyubis, who maintained their rule in
Egypt until 1250 and in Syria for a further decade. Lacking their great
ancestor's expansionist drive and torn by fratricidal feuds, they spent most of
their reign engaged in a rearguard action to secure their shrinking dominions.
Their relations with the crusader states were largely peaceful, and they continued
the thriving trade with the Italian city-states, in which the Frankish ports
along the Mediterranean played an important role. In 1229, only forty-two years
after Saladin's occupation of Jerusalem, his nephew surrendered the city to the
Franks. For general surveys of the Ayyubis see: A
History of the Ayyubid Sultans of Egypt, trans. from the Arabic of al-Maqrizi, with an introduction and notes by R. J. c.
Broadhurst, 1980; Stephen R. Humphreys, From Saladin to the Mongols: the Ayyubis of Damascus 1193-1260, University of New York,
1977.)
It was left to the Ayyubis' formidable slave-soldiers, the Mamluks, who in
1250 ousted their masters in a military putsch, to deliver the coup de grace to
the independent Christian presence in the Middle East. In a series of brilliant
campaigns, the general-turned-sultan Baybars I
(1260-77) undermined the crusading infrastructure in the Galilee and the
coastal plain. The process was completed in 1291 with the destruction of the
last crusader strongholds and the displacement of their inhabitants.
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