The Wiley Blackwell History of Islam

Armando Salvatore, Armando Salvatore

• Editorial: Wiley-Blackwell
• Año: 2018
• ISBN:
  9781118523568
• Edición: 1
• Categoría: Theology & Religion
• Categoría: Islamic Theology

A theoretically rich, nuanced history of Islam and Islamic civilization with a unique sociological component

This major new reference work offers a complete historical and theoretically informed view of Islam as both a religion and a sociocultural force. Uniquely comprehensive, it surveys and discusses the transformation of Muslim societies in different eras and various regions, providing a broad narrative of the historical development of Islamic civilization.

This text explores the complex and varied history of the religion and its traditions. It provides an in-depth study of the diverse ways through which the religious dimension at the core of Islamic traditions has led to a distinctive type of civilizational process in history. The book illuminates the ways in which various historical forces have converged and crystallized in institutional forms at a variety of levels, embracing social, religious, legal, political, cultural, and civic dimensions. Together, the team of internationally renowned scholars move from the genesis of a new social order in 7th-century Arabia, right up to the rise of revolutionary Islamist currents in the 20th century and the varied ways in which Islam has grown and continues to pervade daily life in the Middle East and beyond.

This book is essential reading for students and academics in a wide range of fields, including sociology, history, law, and political science. It will also appeal to general readers with an interest in the history of one of the world's great religions.

Part I
Late Antique Beginnings (to ca. 661)

1
Agrarian, Commercial, and Pastoralist Dynamics in the Pre‐Islamic Irano‐Semitic Civilizational Area

George Hatke

Introduction

As the early Islamic state achieved control of the Arabian Peninsula and expanded into the Fertile Crescent, North Africa, Iran, and Central Asia, it inherited an already interconnected world of agrarian, pastoral, and urban communities. The timeframe of circa 200–600 CE within which we will examine the socioeconomic history of these communities corresponds roughly with what has long been called Late Antiquity. At the political level Late Antiquity witnessed the polarization of the Fertile Crescent and the Caucasus between two rival superpowers, the Christian Eastern Roman Empire—popularly, if inaccurately, called Byzantium—and the Zoroastrian Sasanian Empire, which fought each other on and off throughout this period. The Irano‐Semitic civilizational area that encompassed the Sasanian Empire and much of the Eastern Roman Empire is essentially a linguistic construct: the Iranian side represented by those regions of Iran and Central Asia where related Indo‐Iranian languages were spoken, the Semitic side by the Fertile Crescent, the Arabian Peninsula, and the Northern Horn of Africa, where such cognate languages as Aramaic, Arabic, and, in the far South, the Ancient South Arabian and the Ethio‐Semitic languages were spoken. Aramaic‐ and Arabic‐speaking populations, it should be noted, were to be found on both sides of the Romano‐Sasanian frontier. The far South of the Semitic‐speaking world of Late Antiquity, located well beyond this frontier, witnessed important political, economic, and social developments of its own, the most significant being the achievement of political supremacy in South Arabia by the kingdom of Himyar and in Ethiopia by the kingdom of Aksum. Relations between these two states were often as volatile as those between the Roman and Sasanian empires. Aksum, in fact, intervened militarily in South Arabia as early as the 3rd century and would later, during the first half of the 6th, make its most significant show of force in the region by establishing a system of indirect rule through local puppet‐kings.

It must be stressed that, in linguistic and cultural terms, the Irano‐Semitic sphere of Late Antiquity was a spectrum rather than a region marked by a sharp divide. To begin with, the Semitic/non‐Semitic dichotomy which we now take for granted was of limited importance in the late antique context where religious and political divisions were often more significant than linguistic or ethnic cleavages. That a 4th‐century Persian‐speaking convert to Christianity like Aphrahat could become one of the greatest Syriac authors of Late Antiquity illustrates the porousness of the Irano–Semitic divide. In addition, there are a number of cultural and ideological commonalities between the two sides. Among these was the Christian religion which, beginning in the 4th century, gained a significant following throughout the Irano‐Semitic sphere, including Ethiopia and parts of Arabia. Another commonality was the experience of Hellenism, best understood as a cosmopolitan mode of expression inspired by Greek learning and Greek styles in art, architecture, and literature, which coexisted and interacted with non‐Greek cultures. In the centuries following the conquest by Alexander (356–323 BCE) of the Achaemenid Empire, Hellenism gained currency under the Ptolemaic, Seleucid, and Greco‐Bactrian dynasties in the form of Greek education, the popularity of Greek art, and the identification of local gods with Greek deities. Through trade, Hellenism was diffused throughout much of the Irano‐Semitic sphere and beyond, thus becoming by the turn of the Common Era a language of cultural symbols and attitudes shared by communities over an area extending from the central Mediterranean in the West to Northern India in the East and from the Black Sea in the North to the Horn of Africa in the South.

By virtue of the cosmopolitan character of Hellenism, the school of Greek philosophy at Nisibis once closed—or more properly, disenfranchised—by Justinian (r. 527–565) could still find a home in the Sasanian realm, while at the turn of the 7th century Alexandria could still attract students like Petros, a Nestorian Christian from Beth Qatraye in East Arabia. Even in the remote village of Nessana in the Negev, fragments of Virgil’s Aeneid are found together with biblical texts from the 6th century. Once the commonalities of the two sides of the Irano‐Semitic sphere are recognized, and the armed conflict between the Roman and Sasanian empires understood as only one component of transregional interactions within this sphere, it becomes possible to better appreciate the socioeconomic overlap between the two empires. In what follows we will examine late antique socioeconomic trends in the Roman Near East and the Sasanian Empire as well as in the Arabian Peninsula, this last being an all‐too‐often overlooked part of the late antique world deserving special attention here given its role as the birthplace of Islam. Our focus, following a brief and—given the fragmentary nature of the evidence—schematic treatment of demography, will be on the agrarian and pastoral economies of the Irano‐Semitic civilizational area, the relations between agrarian and pastoral communities, and commerce.

Demographic Trends in the Irano‐Semitic Civilizational Area

According to recent estimates, the eastern provinces of the Late Roman Empire had a combined population of approximately 19–20 million before they were hit by the plagues of the 540s (Haldon 2010: 39). Members of the urban elite in the Roman Near East often owned estates, as is clear from a collection of 6th‐century papyrus documents from Petra (Butcher 2003: 144; Morony 2004: 169). However, while cities depended heavily on their agricultural hinterlands, archaeological and textual data suggest that the dominant socioeconomic unit throughout most of the Roman Near East was the village, rather than the villa estates typical of much of the Roman West, and that most exchanges were conducted between villages independently of urban centers (Butcher 2003: 138–40, 149–50; Cameron 1993: 177, 180). During Late Antiquity some regions, such as the limestone massif of Northwestern Syria, witnessed demographic growth in village communities, the population of the Jabal Barisha area peaking at an estimated 21,000 during the 5th and 6th centuries (Butcher 2003: 146). Increasing density of settlement, and thus of population, has also been noted in parts of Southern Palestine, the Golan, and the Negev and seems to have reached its height in the late 5th and early 6th centuries. Even with the climate‐induced stresses sustained by agrarian communities in the Mediterranean in the early 540s, together with the plague which broke out almost simultaneously and affected the entire region, the rural communities of Syria‐Palestine seem, in most cases, to have flourished well into the 7th century. Those communities located in more southerly regions fared best. While cities like Apamea and others in the North of Syria‐Palestine fell into gradual decline from the mid‐6th century onward, other cities further south in Palestine and Transjordan, like Gerasa, Pella, and Bostra, flourished into the 7th century and continued to produce high‐quality pottery on a large scale (Haldon 2010: 25, 64). It is a testament to the resilience of village society in the Roman Near East that in regions like the Negev farming enclaves were occupied as late as the 8th or 9th century, while the more substantial settlements of Avdat, Nessana, and Shivta ceased in the 7th (Hirschfeld 2001: 264).

Estimating the population of the Sasanian Empire to the east is far more difficult given the many topographical and climatic variations within that polity. If an early 7th‐century Chinese text, the Chou‐shu (“The Book of Chou”), is to be believed, there were no fewer than 100,000 households in the city of Ctesiphon on the east bank of the Tigris, though obviously this figure—even if accurate—can in no way be used to extrapolate the overall population of the empire. Furthermore, given Ctesiphon’s role as the Sasanian capital, its demographic size is likely to have far exceeded that of other cities. Demographic growth was probably most significant not on the Iranian plateau, which was never a major center of urban or agricultural expansion in Late Antiquity, but in the fertile regions of Mesopotamia, the Diyala Basin, and Khuzistan, where the Sasanians promoted agrarian expansion on a large scale (Daryaee 2010: 401–2; Haldon 2010: 39–40).

As for the Arabian Peninsula, attempts to estimate its overall population during Late Antiquity are futile. Here too, population density varied widely from region to region depending on terrain and climate. In particular, the contrast between agrarian regions like South Arabia and the much drier regions of the North must have been significant. Only in the case of South Arabia can we speak of anything like an urban society in an Arabian context. Even in this case most settlements were small by the standards of the Roman and the Sasanian Near East, though the establishment of Himyarite supremacy in South Arabia between the late 3rd and early 4th centuries seems to have led to demographic concentration around such towns as Marib and Zafar. Elsewhere in South Arabia, many settlements which had flourished around the turn of the Common Era were abandoned. In East Arabia, archaeological evidence indicates a similar trend beginning in the 3rd century CE. Thus while a number of large and prosperous settlements flourished between the 3rd century BCE and the 2nd century CE at Thaj in present‐day Eastern Saudi Arabia, Failaka in Kuwait, Qal‘at al‐Bahrayn in Bahrain, and Mleiha and al‐Dur in the United Arab Emirates, occupation at these and other sites had either declined or ended altogether by the 3rd century CE (Kennet 2005: 114–15). At settlements in East Arabia where occupation continued into later periods, it was often restricted, as it was at Mleiha and al‐Dur, to the immediate vicinity of fortified residences—the strongholds, perhaps, of the leaders of Arab tribes like those which show up in increasing numbers in historical sources from South Arabia and the Roman world from the 3rd century onward. Judging from the limited quantity of coins and pottery from Mesopotamia, Iran, and South Asia found at Mleiha and al‐Dur, these tribal elites of East Arabia—if such they were—engaged in some foreign trade, and indeed at Mleiha there was an increase in imported pottery during the late Parthian–early Sasanian period. Yet between the 5th and 7th centuries, even Mleiha, al‐Dur, and Qal‘at al‐Bahrayn were deserted, while sites like Suhar in Oman and Kush and al‐Khatt in the United Arab Emirates remained occupied.

Agrarian Societies

As in all preindustrial societies, the main bulk of the population in the late antique Irano‐Semitic sphere was based in rural areas. In this section we will consider what this population produced, beginning with the Roman Near East. The several hundred villages, dating between the 4th and mid‐6th centuries, which have been identified in Northwestern Syria produced olives, grapes, wheat, beans, vegetables, sheep, cattle, and poultry. Together with Palestine, such regions of Syria as the Hawran and the Upper Euphrates valley also produced wine. Although wine was often exported abroad, the villages of the Roman Near East were for the most part sustained by the production of crops and livestock to meet local and regional demands. Thus while large‐scale specialized production of olive oil was the key to the success of village communities like those of Northern Syria, it appears that most of this oil was intended for Syrian rather than international markets (Butcher 2003: 148–9; Sartre 2005: 264). Even the olive oil alluded to on one Roman‐period ostracon from the port of Berenike on Egypt’s Red Sea coast might have been intended f...