The Caliph's Splendor

Islam and the West in the Golden Age of Baghdad

Benson Bobrick

• Publisher: Simon & Schuster
• Year: 2012
• Print ISBN: 9781416567639
• eBook ISBN: 9781416568063
• Topic: History
• Subtopic: European History
• Index: History

The Caliph’s Splendor is a revelation: a history of a civilization we barely know that had a profound effect on our own culture.

While the West declined following the collapse of the Roman Empire, a new Arab civilization arose to the east, reaching an early peak in Baghdad under the caliph Harun al-Rashid. Harun is the legendary caliph of The Thousand and One Nights, but his actual court was nearly as magnificent as the fictional one. In The Caliph’s Splendor, Benson Bobrick eloquently tells the little-known and remarkable story of Harun’s rise to power and his rivalries with the neighboring Byzantines and the new Frankish kingdom under the leadership of Charlemagne.

When Harun came to power, Islam stretched from the Atlantic to India. The Islamic empire was the mightiest on earth and the largest ever seen. Although Islam spread largely through war, its cultural achievements were immense. Harun’s court at Baghdad outshone the independent Islamic emirate in Spain and all the courts of Europe, for that matter. In Baghdad, great works from Greece and Rome were preserved and studied, and new learning enhanced civilization. Over the following centuries Arab and Persian civilizations made a lasting impact on the West in astronomy, geometry, algebra (an Arabic word), medicine, and chemistry, among other fields of science. The alchemy (another Arabic word) of the Middle Ages originated with the Arabs. From engineering to jewelry to fashion to weaponry, Arab influences would shape life in the West, as they did in the fields of law, music, and literature.

But for centuries Arabs and Byzantines contended fiercely on land and sea. Bobrick tells how Harun defeated attempts by the Byzantines to advance into Asia at his expense. He contemplated an alliance with the much weaker Charlemagne in order to contain the Byzantines, and in time Arabs and Byzantines reached an accommodation that permitted both to prosper. Harun’s caliphate would weaken from within as his two sons quarreled and formed factions; eventually Arabs would give way to Turks in the Islamic empire.

Empires rise, weaken, and fall, but during its golden age, the caliphate of Baghdad made a permanent contribution to civilization, as Benson Bobrick so splendidly reminds us.

PART ONE

chapter one

MINARET AND TOWER

On the twenty-first of March 630, the Byzantine Emperor Heraclius entered Jerusalem by its Golden Gate at the head of his legions to set up the True Cross of Christ, which he had just recaptured from the Persians in one of his great Persian wars. Dressed in humble garb, he dismounted not far from the Church of the Holy Sepulchre, and went the rest of the way on foot. Thousands of weeping Christians, overcome with elation, parted before him and carpets scented with aromatic herbs were strewn across his path. “An indescribable joy,” wrote one Byzantine court poet, “seized the entire Universe.”¹ It was “a triumphant event for all Christendom,” and is still marked today in the Church calendar as the “Feast of the Elevation of the Cross.”² Yet even as it was taking place, in one of the strangest coincidences of history, word came that an imperial outpost beyond the Jordan River had just been assailed by a small Arab band. The emperor paid little heed. Within a few years, however, Palestine and many other provinces would be torn forever from Roman rule, the Persian Empire shattered, and a new faith and people would arise to control the world’s stage. In 636, just six years after Heraclius shrugged off this first Arab attack, his own vast legions would be crushed by the forces of Omar, second caliph from the Prophet, on the banks of the Yarmuk River in Syria.

Ever since that day, the forces of the Near and Middle East have had “a deep, silent disdain” for the thunderings of Christian power.³

THE RISE OF ISLAM IS OFTEN DEPICTED AS HAVING TAKEN place in a primitive community of desert Arabs, who tended their flocks when not raiding caravans or engaged in tribal feuds. After their conversion to Islam, these tribes banded together and, upon the death of their Prophet (so the story goes), folded up their tents and swarmed out of the desert to spread his new doctrine to the world. Almost overnight they began to demonstrate a marked degree of culture and became an invincible military machine.

That strange picture, still popular in the West, is at once both too pathetic and high-flown. Islam had its cradle in an area where advanced civilizations—Egyptian, Babylonian, Persian, and Byzantine—had thrived since ancient times. Arabia lay on their outskirts, but in succession or combination all had irrigated its psychic soil. Cuneiform tablets record large Arab armies complete with infantry, cavalry, and chariots as early as 853 B.C. And the oral tradition of Arabic poetry is resplendent with heroic lays that tell of mighty battles, the dreams of love, and the oases of paradise. Empires rose and fell, and by the seventh century A.D., those large Arab armies and the kingdoms they served had long since dispersed. But the region remained in dynamic transition, where the vibrant streams of faith and culture converged.

The Prophet Muhammad sprang from its soil.

Born ca. A.D. 570 at Mecca in Arabia on the shores of the Red Sea, Muhammad was the son of a merchant and belonged to the elite Arab tribe of the Koraish. Orphaned early, he was raised by in-laws, married a wealthy merchant’s widow (much older than himself), had four daughters and two sons, and embarked, in the footsteps of his father, on a business career.

Despite his worldly interests, he was a religious man, spent whole nights in contemplation on Mount Hira near Mecca, and there one day in 620, it is said, the angel Gabriel appeared to him and urged him to preach among the Arabs on behalf of the one true God. Like other Arab prophets, he spoke in rhythmic prose, but his revelation was distinctly monotheistic, which set him apart.

Most Arabs worshipped the forces of nature and at Mecca the central pagan cult revolved around a meteorite. This was the famed Black Stone, built into a cube-shaped sanctuary called the Kaaba. Muhammad fulminated against polytheistic idolatry (the Kaaba contained at least 150 idols) and such barbarous practices as burying female children alive. Though he had no direct knowledge of the Hebrew or Christian scriptures, which had not yet been translated into Arabic (the only language he knew), he had many probing encounters with Jews and Christians, both on his caravan journeys and in Mecca; and his religious understanding was deeply swayed by the ideas he had acquired of these faiths. His grasp of their doctrine and tradition, however unclear, was earnest and he cast himself as a religious reformer entrusted by God to restore the ancient cult of Abraham, which he believed the Jews and Christians had betrayed.

Muhammad, in fact, never claimed to be the founder of a new religion, but merely one whose unsought if sacred calling it was to warn his fellow man of the coming Judgment Day. He saw himself as the last of the prophets, the seal and keystone of those who had gone before. But the Meccan elite resented his attack on their beliefs and the implied threat it posed to the profits they derived from the annual pilgrimage (or Hajj) that Arabs made to the Kaaba. His teaching at first also aroused hostility and derision, from the community at large, which forced him to flee Mecca in 622 for the town of Medina to the north. This became known as the year of the Hegira, or Flight. In the Muslim calendar, it marks the year One. Everything in the Muslim calendar dates from that time just as Christians date their calendar (backward and forward) from the presumed birth of Christ. In Mecca, Muhammad had been the despised preacher of a small congregation; in Medina, he became the leader of a powerful party, which formed the basis of his rise. He began to act as lawgiver for his small community of refugees, won new converts, expelled or killed those who reviled him, and established a theocratic city-state. Between 622 and 628 various clashes occurred between his followers and Meccans, but by 630 he gained the upper hand. Mecca was taken, and Arabs from as far away as Bahrain, Oman, and southern Arabia joined his ranks. Though Arab tribes had long been a volatile force in the region, Muhammad managed to forge them into a single confederation and persuade them to put aside their jealousies and feuds.

Their bond of union was not only Muhammad’s charisma, but Islam, their newfound faith. “Islam” means “surrender” or “resignation to the will of God.” One who professes Islam is therefore a “Muslim,” meaning “one who surrenders oneself.” Islam’s simple creed is “There is no God but God, and Muhammad is His Prophet.” The essence of its teaching is a belief in God (“Allah” in Arabic) and His Angels; in the Scripture or Koran (meaning “recitation”) as revealed through Muhammad to mankind; and in a final Resurrection and Judgment of man according to his works on earth. Equally plain and direct are the obligations placed upon believers. They consist of almsgiving; prayer five times a day—at dawn, noon, midafternoon, sunset, and dusk—facing Mecca; the observance of the fast during the month of Ramadan, the ninth month of the Muslim year; and the Hajj, or pilgrimage to Mecca, which Islam appropriated from the pagan past. Muslims abstain from eating pork and drinking wine; regard marriage as a civil ceremony; and bury their dead. Orthodox Muslims do not tolerate images of anything divine, and in the forms of their worship no priest or cleric stands between the soul and God. The mosque, where the faithful assemble for public devotions every Friday, is an open courtyard surrounded by colonnades and unadorned save for Koranic texts. It features a mihrab or niche showing the direction of Mecca, a pulpit, and a minaret where the muezzin (as he is called) utters the call to prayer.

Although Muhammad, like Christ, never wrote anything, over time scattered transcriptions of his teachings were posthumously collated and compared with oral recollections. By a lengthy editorial process (not unlike that which attended the making of the New Testament), a canonical version of the Koran emerged. In time the sacred text was supplemented by a voluminous compendium of Muhammad’s reported pronouncements and deeds, known as the Traditions or Hadith. Hadiths, real or spurious, served as the Muslim Talmud and “furnished the community with apostolic precepts and examples covering the minutest detail of man’s proper conduct in life.”⁴ They also provided an encyclopedic fund of anecdotes, parables, and sayings by which Muslims were edified.

Muhammad died in 632 while returning from a pilgrimage to Mecca and leadership at first passed by election to a series of caliphs, or “successors”—Abu Bakr, Omar, Othman, and Ali—who inherited his temporal but not theocratic crown. These first four caliphs, who ruled without founding dynasties, are sometimes known as the Orthodox caliphs, and it was under their aegis—and that of their invincible general Khalid ibn al-Walid (“the sword of Islam”)—that the early conquests were made.

Yet Islam had been a “church militant” from the start. Even under Muhammad (if not at his direction), Muslim bands had carried out raids along the borders of the Byzantine Empire. Within two years of his death, victories brought the Muslims into Chaldea (southern Iraq), gave them the city of Hira, and with the Battle of Yarmuk in 634, opened Syria to their arms. Damascus fell in 635; Antioch and Jerusalem in 636; and Caesarea in 638. Seleucia-Ctesiphon, the capital of Chaldea, was taken in 637; Mesopotamia subdued; the cities of Basra and Kufa founded; and part of Persia annexed in 638–40. Egypt, then mostly Christian, was conquered in 641. The decisive Battle of Nahavand in 642 put an end to the Sassanid dynasty of Persia and placed all of Persia in Muslim hands.

Circumstance favored their advance. The Byzantine and Persian empires were both exhausted by fighting (having fought each other to a standstill in their own “Thirty Years’ War”), while the Semitic inhabitants of Syria, Palestine, and Mesopotamia were more nearly akin to the Arabs than to their Byzantine and Persian lords. The latter had also overtaxed their subjects, and among Egyptian Christians there was a religious schism between Eastern Orthodox believers and the Copts. Some resistance came from centers of Greek civilization—Alexandria in Egypt, for example, and Jerusalem in Palestine; but by 660, barely thirty years after Muhammad’s death, Islam had swept over an area the size of the former Roman Empire.

Still the conquest went on. Muslim troops swept through Persia to the river Oxus and began to annex Bukhara, Khujand, Farghana, Samarkand, and other lands beyond. As the eighth century dawned, they reached the borders of China, at Kashgar, where a treaty was concluded with the Chinese. All this took place in concert with Muslim gains in the West. The Barbary Coast and its wild Berber population was occupied (if not quite subdued) up to the gates of Carthage by 647; Kairawan founded in 670; and Carthage taken in 693, as Arabs reached the Atlantic coast. From Tangier they crossed into Spain in 710; took the whole Gothic kingdom, including Toledo, by 712; and in 725 advanced into southern France. At length, they were checked by Charles Martel, then king of the Franks, at the Battle of Poitiers in 732 in the foothills of the Pyrenees, but the Muslims held on to Narbonne; raided Provence; ravaged Corsica and Sardinia; invaded Armenia; annexed Cyprus (649); and from 670 onward kept Constantinople under intermittent siege. They also continued to press eastward to Afghanistan and the westernmost part of India known as Sind.

India was not unknown. Even before the Arab conquests, Arab coastal traders found that a coasting voyage eastward from the Persian Gulf would bring them to the mouth of the Indus, and that if they ventured farther out, or were carried out at certain seasons of the year, the monsoons would drive them across to India’s southwest coast. Seafaring traders on the coast were therefore familiar with India’s western ports, and a number of Arab merchants had sailed to there from Shiraz and Hormuz or crossed from harbors in Oman. Upon their return, they had described “a land of wealth and luxury, of gold and diamonds, jeweled idols, and gorgeous religious rites.”⁵

One expedition, during the Caliphate of Omar, had made a failed attempt to seize territory near Bombay. Another in 644 wandered off course into the Thar desert and came to naught. Sixty years later, however, eight boats carrying Muslim women from the King of Ceylon to Al-Hajjaj ibn Yusuf, the Arab governor of Iraq, were attacked and plundered off the western coast. The caliph demanded reparations, but the local ruler refused on the ground that the pirates were not under his control.

That led to the dispatch in 711 of a third expedition, this time under Muhammad ibn Kasim, a prince of royal blood. A handsome young man of nobility and dash, he started at the head of a cavalry force 12,000 strong (6,000 on camels, 6,000 on Syrian horse) and a large baggage train. He also had the best contemporary artillery, including one huge catapult or ballista—designed for hurling great stones over battlements—that was shipped to him by sea. Reinforcements also came to him in a steady stream, until at length he had an army of 50,000 men. As one Muslim chronicler put it, he had “all he could require, including needles and thread.”⁶

Kasim besieged the Hindu port of Debal and carried the town by assault. The main Hindu army retreated up the Indus River with Kasim in pursuit. On the west bank of the Indus Kasim beheld for the first time an imposing force of Hindu chiefs, mounted on armored war elephants, led by their king, Dahir. The battle at a place called Rawar was fierce. Dahir fought bravely but was killed. From Rawar, Kasim proceeded further up the Indus. In subsequent years, two separate Muslim kingdoms in India were established—one in Mansurah or Sind proper (up to Aror on the Indus), the other at Multan. But that was the end of it for three hundred years. The Muslims settled in, made no attempt to push farther east, and on the whole remained on friendly terms with their Hindu subjects and neighboring Hindu states. In the northern Punjab the limits of Arab rule were set by the powerful Hindu kingdom of Kashmir; in the east, by a military caste known afterward as the Rajputs, who were prepared to contest every inch of ground.

By then, Islam spanned three continents in a broad swathe of conquest that stretched from the Atlantic to the Indus and from the Aral Sea to the cataracts of the Nile. Many of their great battles—Yarmuk, Yamanah, Alexandria, Nahavand, Makkah, Kadisiya, and so on—ring through Islamic history with the same power and aura as do Agincourt, Yorktown, Waterloo, and Gettysburg in the West. Wherever the Arabs went, “their intrepidity and vigor,” as one writer put it, “strengthened by their proud feeling of a common nationality and their zeal for the faith,” helped them to prevail.⁷ Under Islam, the Arabs had become a world-conquering nation, and within a century of Muhammad’s death, the banks of the Jaxartes and the shores of the Atlantic alike resounded with the call of “Allahu Akbar,” “God Is Great.”

The West at the time was sunk in the Dark Ages. Who could say for sure that the muezzin’s cry, as was suggested, might not one day sound over Paris, London, or Rome?

Although it is sometimes said that the Arabs lacked any military tradition beyond that pertaining to tribal raids (with no experience, for example, in besieging fortified towns), their formidable early tactics were based on “desert power”—in effect a kind of sea power, for Arabia was “a sea of sand.”⁸ Adopting the same principles of attack later used by modern maritime nations (and by tank divisions in North Africa during World War II), the Arabs seemed to strike out of nowhere—east into Persia, west into Egypt, north into Syria and Iraq—with sudden force, only to disappear into the sandy wastes from which they came.

As their conquests advanced, however, their soldiers adapted, and in outfit and armor most later Muslim armies were not unlike the Persian an...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Dedication
• Chronology
• Part One
• Part Two
• Epilogue
• Acknowledgments
• Appendix
• Photographs
• About Benson Bobrick
• Notes
• Bibliography
• Index
• Copyright