Islamic Civilization in Thirty Lives

Chase F. Robinson

• Publisher: University of California Press
• Year: 2017
• ISBN:
  9780520966277
• Edition: 1

Religious thinkers, political leaders, lawmakers, writers, and philosophers have shaped the 1, 400-year-long development of the world's second-largest religion. But who were these people? What do we know of their lives and the ways in which they influenced their societies? In Islamic Civilization in Thirty Lives, the distinguished historian of Islam Chase F. Robinson draws on the long tradition in Muslim scholarship of commemorating in writing the biographies of notable figures, but he weaves these ambitious lives together to create a rich narrative of Islamic civilization, from the Prophet Muhammad in the seventh century to the era of the world conquerer Timur and the Ottoman Sultan Mehmed II in the fifteenth. Beginning in Islam's heartland, Mecca, and ranging from North Africa and Iberia in the west to Central and East Asia, Robinson not only traces the rise and fall of Islamic states through the biographies of political and military leaders who worked to secure peace or expand their power, but also discusses those who developed Islamic law, scientific thought, and literature. What emerges is a fascinating portrait of rich and diverse Islamic societies. Alongside the famous characters who colored this landscape—including Muhammad's cousin 'Ali; the Crusader-era hero Saladin; and the poet Rumi—are less well-known figures, such as Ibn Fadlan, whose travels in Eurasia brought fascinating first-hand accounts of the Volga Vikings to the Abbasid Caliph; the eleventh-century Karima al-Marwaziyya, a woman scholar of Prophetic traditions; and Abu al-Qasim Ramisht, a twelfth-century merchant millionaire. An illuminating read for anyone interested in learning more about this often-misunderstood civilization, this book creates a vivid picture of life in all arenas of the pre-modern Muslim world.

Part 1

Islam & Empire

600–850

Islam was born in seventh-century west Arabia when a handful of men and women committed themselves to the proposition that Muhammad b. ‘Abd Allah was a prophet sent by God. It prospers in the twenty-first century: there are now about 1.6 billion Muslims, the large majority living outside the Middle East, especially in South and Southeast Asia. Measured by population, Islam is now second only to Christianity as a global religion, and given the growth that occurred in the twentieth century, and the forecasts for the twenty-first century, it is arguably the most successful of the world’s religions. Nearly 45 million Muslims now live in Europe, and about 3.3 million in the US.

Much of this population growth took place over the last few centuries, whereas the civilization that I shall be describing took root mainly in what is now known as North Africa, the Middle East and Central Asia. Through conquest, conversion and demographic growth, Muslims ruled lands that stretched from the Atlantic to Central Asia, knit together loosely or tightly, depending on constantly changing dynamics of economic exchange, and political expansion and contraction. As we shall see, conquests in the seventh and eighth centuries created empires that brought together most of these lands into a single political community, but this unity disintegrated during the ninth and especially tenth centuries. A world-bestriding empire was eclipsed by a commonwealth of Islamic states, which shared a commitment to Islam as the single (if variegated) religion of rule, the use of Islamic languages in government (especially Arabic, Persian and Turkish), high culture, ritual life and a common history of rule by caliphs – those who ruled the great Islamic empires of the earlier period.

Put another way, Islamic states rose and fell, and the societies that they ruled were in constant transformation, but throughout the pre-industrial period, Muslims participated in a common project of transmitting and elaborating a culture inherited from empire. We may usefully begin by understanding how that empire came to be.

Damascus as a model of change

In 600 CE Damascus was an ancient and prosperous town. Fortuitously located on the edge of the Syrian desert, about fifty miles from the Mediterranean, it had long served as a crossroads of trade that linked Middle Eastern markets with the northern and western Mediterranean. The armies of Alexander the Great had once conquered it, but over the previous 250 years, Damascus had been caught up in radical change: it had become progressively monotheist, a multiplicity of Middle Eastern and Roman gods having been eclipsed by Christianity’s insistence upon belief in a single god made incarnate in Christ. Christianity had been born in Palestine and Syria, and Christian emperors now ruled from the Bosphorus. The first of those emperors, Constantine (d. 337), called the city that would bear his name ‘New Rome’. Nowadays historians call it Constantinople, and the late Roman state, Byzantium; we know it now as Istanbul.

Damascus was thus a provincial capital of what had become an emphatically Christian empire, which legitimized its rule not merely through its descent from Rome, but also by its mission to convert. In some parts of the Byzantine empire, conversion to Christianity remained ongoing, and Constantinople was frequently at war with the Sasanian empire, based in Iraq and Iran, itself closely aligned with a Zoroastrian clergy. In 622, the Byzantine emperor Heraclius (d. 641) launched what would be the last of a long string of campaigns against the Sasanians, who had been occupying much of the Middle East (including Damascus and Jerusalem) for nearly a decade. His war was nothing less than a crusade, intended to drive out the Sasanians and restore Christian rule to the Holy Land.

At about the same time that Heraclius was taking power in Constantinople, a figure named Muhammad was beginning to preach an alternative, more radical monotheism in west Arabia: Islam, literally ‘submission’ to God’s will. His preaching would inspire belief and action that would reshape the familiar world of late antiquity. Rumours of faraway events may have reached Damascus by the early 620s; they must have circulated there in the mid- to late 620s, when armies fighting for Muhammad had reached southern Syria; in 636, the inhabitants witnessed the entrance of Arabian armies into the city. Muslim tribesmen-soldiers had surrounded it, and Byzantine armies put up surprisingly little resistance. Arab raiders were not uncommon, and it’s likely that the Byzantines underestimated these Muslim Arabians’ resolve and ambitions.

As much as the Damascenes would have wished Muslim rule to be temporary – there was good reason to think that Heraclius’s defeated armies would return from Constantinople to restore the old order – Islamic rule was consolidated and concentrated in Syria. In 661, the Muslim governor of Syria became the caliph (the supreme ruler), and he made Damascus, until then a moderately important provincial town on the eastern edge of the Byzantine empire, the capital of an Islamic empire. By this time, Muslim armies had routed Sasanian armies in Iraq and Iran, putting an end to 400 years of Sasanian rule; they had also defeated Byzantine armies elsewhere in the Middle East and much of North Africa, reducing Byzantium to about one third of its previous size. A political order dating from the early third century and lasting until the early seventh – some sixteen generations of Damascenes – had come crashing down in the space of two.

Damascus was as close as the caliphs came to having a capital until the middle of the eighth century, and early in that century there appeared the most poignant symbol of its changing fortunes: in about 706, the bulk of the city's cathedral, originally built on the site of a temple for Jupiter, the Roman god, was demolished and replaced by a congregational mosque. It would be called the Umayyad Mosque, after the ruling dynasty of the Umayyads (r. 661–750); the figure conventionally given credit for this building was a caliph named al-Walid, the son of ‘Abd al-Malik. As we shall see, it is to ‘Abd al-Malik that the Umayyad state owes much of its success; indeed, that state was in many respects the political shell for a family enterprise driven by ‘Abd al-Malik’s sons and descendants. It came to an end in 749–50 with a revolution that installed the Abbasid dynasty in power and showed the limits of the patrimonial, Arabian-style politics of the Umayyads. Islam had unleashed powerful forces of integration, creativity and cosmopolitanism, as the case of Ibn al-Muqaffa‘ illustrates. Al-Ma’mun, the seventh Abbasid caliph, allows us a glimpse at a systematic attempt to embed rationalism at the heart of the ruling institution.

Umayyad Mosque, Damascus, Syria, built by ‘Abd al-Malik's son al-Walid (r. 705–15).

Still standing in the middle of old Damascus, the Umayyad Mosque is as good a symbol as any for the transformational character of the new order: mosque had eclipsed cathedral, much as cathedral had once eclipsed pagan temple. In fact, the history of the Damascus mosque exemplifies a broader pattern: in general, early Islamic history charts a set of continuities. Earliest Muslims drew from deep springs of religious and political thought, some of which ran back to the ancient Middle Eastern and Hellenistic periods, others from shallower, sixth- and seventh-century currents. The Prophet Muhammad is a case in point: he saw himself as the most recent (and possibly the last) in a succession of prophets that stretched all the way to Creation, when God created Adam, the first prophet. Even so, Muhammad was very much the product of his own time, a figure who accelerated the conversion of Arabia to monotheism, especially the kind of militant monotheism that Heraclius himself had exemplified. The Shi‘ites, partisans of the cause of Muhammad’s cousin and son-in-law ‘Ali agreed, but differed from other Muslims in holding that ‘Ali was uniquely qualified to succeed him. This was not merely a polite difference of opinion; it generated political violence and sectarian identity. ‘A’isha, one of Muhammad’s wives, had an important role in these developments.

Perhaps the most striking illustration of this pattern – how early Muslims appropriated and transformed the political and religious traditions that they had inherited – comes in their political thought. There were several models available, none especially attractive. In Rabbinic Judaism, exile from the Holy Land had severed religious authority from political claims; and in Iran, the collapse of the Sasanian state had discredited Zoroastrian absolutism. Heraclius’s militant Christianity was a potent alternative, but one weakened by centuries-long infighting about the nature of Christ. Coming from the sparsely settled environment of west Arabia, where the political order was tribal and the prestige form of religiosity was polytheism, earliest Muslims offered a radical re-invention of a wheel long thought obsolete: they re-ignited prophecy and fused kingship and priesthood. In so doing, they completed the task inaugurated by Constantine three centuries earlier, building a religio-political order that would bring the world under the authority of the One God. Rabi‘a al-‘Adawiyya, a pious exemplar of pure love of God, is a salutary reminder that one response to this extraordinary political change was abandoning the attachments of the world.

In sum, an empire, which claimed and effected political dominion, and a religious tradition, which would generate rituals, a theology and a law, were the twin siblings of seventh-century prophecy. There is probably nothing in recorded history that parallels the explosion of political action and religious innovation that took place in the Middle East in the seventh and eighth centuries. In complementary ways, the figures who appear in Part 1 were all participants in the project of fusing prophecy and politics – and so in creating the caliphate itself: they inspired it, designed it, lived it and rationalized it.

1 Muhammad, the Prophet

(632)

Inspiring religious leader, paragon of piety and virtue, brilliant political strategist, doting father and grandfather, misguided megalomaniac or instrument of the devil – Muhammad was and remains many things to many people. To the historian, he is above all an enigma. We know that Muhammad founded a religio-political movement in early seventh-century Arabia, which, by the end of that century, can properly be called an Islamic empire. But saying much more than that requires facing two paradoxes.

The first concerns evidence. Pre-industrial history is filled with individuals who founded religious or political movements. It is the enduringly successful ones that especially deserve our attention, however; and since successful endurance always means creative transformation, a given movement’s origins are usually obscured by a fogbank of myth and legend. We have surer evidence for Muhammad than we do for the Buddha, Zoroaster, Jesus or Mani, but far less than we would like (and far less than we do for earlier figures in history, such as Augustine). It may not be going too far to say that while Islam owes its foundation to Muhammad, it owes its success to the creative transformations of his memory and legacy that were carried out by Muslims who never knew him. Since most of what we know about Muhammad comes from accounts that date from no earlier than two or three generations’ remove (and many accounts come from much later), reconstructing his life requires peeling away the accreted layers of legend, myth and model. Research has shown that there is less left than was once thought – and certainly much less than any historian would like. There has recently been some progress in recovering material that is both early and reliable, but we still have too little of it to draw a portrait that is as authoritative as it is detailed.

The second paradox concerns western Arabia. It was a remarkably unpromising place to found a world religion. Lacking water and so extensive agriculture, it was very much the economic, cultural and political backwater of the seventh-century Middle East. Sparsely settled and cohering uneasily through bonds of kinship and tribalism, the Hijaz (as western Arabia is called in A...