Similarly, Christian and Jewish communities were permitted to continue operating according to their own legal systems, leaving them largely autonomous within the caliphate. For this reason, the Umayyad Caliphate may be regarded as a secular state: that is, government was separated from religious authority. In other words, Sharia Law – derived from the Quran and Hadith (sayings of Muhammad) – was not applied throughout the civil sphere.
Such freedom inevitably resulted in certain anomalies. For instance, as the caliphate expanded beyond the borders of Syria into Anatolia, it found itself fighting the Byzantine Christians. Meanwhile, the many Christians within the borders of Syria were not regarded as the enemy, and were permitted to go about their business as before. Even more astonishing is the fact that Muawiya, the first caliph of the Umayyad dynasty, was even married to a Christian. Despite such apparent contradictions, in practice this policy only served to strengthen and consolidate Umayyad rule in the new territories. Here we can see that they were in accord with the twentieth-century historian Paul Kriwaczek’s insight that empires which allow a certain freedom to their subject peoples tend to be more easy to control and last longer.
The conquest of the Iberian peninsula, along with expansion east as far as the Aral Sea and modern-day Pakistan, left the Umayyad Caliphate ruling over a vast region covering around 4,300,000 square miles, and 62 million people. (At the time a third of the world’s population.) This was the largest empire the world had yet seen – around twice the size of the Roman Empire at its zenith.12
By 711, the Umayyad conquest of the Iberian peninsula was complete, and Arab forces now pushed across the Pyrenees, spreading east along the coast of southern France, and north into the heartland of France itself. The Umayyads continued to sweep all before them until in October 732 they reached as far north as Tours, less than 150 miles south-west of Paris. It seemed as if all western Europe lay at their mercy.
However, they now found themselves opposed by the combined forces of Charles Martel, ruler of the Franks, and Odo the Great of Aquitaine.13 The appearance of Martel and the Franks in such numbers caught the Umayyad general Abd-al-Rahman by surprise, and Martel formed a square, taking advantage of the hills and woods as cover. Opinions differ as to which side had the largest army, but there is no doubt that Martel had been preparing for this battle for some years. The fearsome Umayyad cavalry was forced to charge uphill through trees; meanwhile their infantry was ill-dressed for the cold French autumn. Martel’s eventual victory sent the Umayyad army into retreat back across the Pyrenees.
In the words of the great nineteenth-century German historian, von Ranke, this battle ‘was the turning point of one of the greatest epochs of European history.’ Instead of western Europe becoming an Arab continent, it now meant that Frankish power was established. Within less than forty years, Charlemagne (‘Charles the Great’) would be crowned king of the Franks, and set about establishing an empire that unified much of western Europe for the first time since the Fall of Rome.
The Umayyad Caliphate would continue to rule until it came into conflict with the Abbasid revolution in 750. The Umayyad forces under their White Flag were soon overcome by the Black Flag of the Abbasids and a new caliphate was established.14 The Abbasid family was descended from Muhammad’s uncle Abbas ibn Abd al-Muttallib, after whom they were named. So once again, this was a Sunni dynasty, as their caliphs were not directly descended from the Prophet. The Abbasid power base was Persia, and soon after they assumed power, the capital would be transferred to Baghdad. This was to be the beginning of the Golden Age of Islam, when the originally Arab world of the caliphates would take on a distinctly Persian hue.
Most famous of its early caliphs was undoubtedly Harun al-Rashid (‘Harun the Rightly Guided’), who features as the sultan in the One Thousand and One Nights of Scheherazade. From the outset, the Abbasid caliphs saw it as their duty to promote learning, founding the House of Wisdom. This probably began as the large private library of Harun al-Rashid, which he made available to scholars. It soon evolved into an intellectual centre of learning, attracting scholars of the highest quality.
The most significant of its early functions was the sponsoring of the Translation Movement, which would have a major influence on Arabic thought over the coming six centuries of the caliphate. This movement was responsible for translating works of the Ancient Greek mathematicians, physicians, astronomers and philosophers (especially Aristotle). Many of these works had been lost in the West after the Fall of the Roman Empire, and the effect of this new knowledge upon Arabic thought cannot be overestimated. It certainly influenced some of the finest minds of the caliphate period. But more than this, it inspired them to original thinking, which was in advance of anything hitherto found in human knowledge.
Two incidents serve to illustrate the significance of this to the outside world. In 802 Charlemagne sent a mission of friendship to the court of Harun al-Rashid. This returned with a gift for the King of the Franks, in the form of a gilded bronze clock – at a time when no such thing existed throughout Europe. According to the modern French historian André Clot, this clock was ‘a clepsydra, which on the hour sounded a chime and dropped small coloured balls into a pool; at midday twelve horsemen galloped out of twelve windows in the case.’ Charlemagne and his courtiers gazed in awe at this wondrous instrument, convinced that it worked by conjuring up magical spirits.
The second incident took place some 300 years later, when an English philosopher and traveller named Adelard of Bath returned from a voyage to the Levant, where he had scarcely been able to believe what he had seen and learned. The Arabs had translated hitherto unknown works of Aristotle and the Ancient Greeks, thus immeasurably increasing their learning – especially in the field of natural philosophy (what we would now call science).
They had gone on to achieve amazing feats, such as measuring the circumference of the earth (a feat achieved by the ancient Greeks, but subsequently forgotten). Muslim scholars had also invented algebra, and drawn diagrams of how the human body worked. They had discovered new curative ointments and medicines, and had created an astrolabe that could measure the movements of the stars. This latter had enabled the Arabs to make new discoveries in astronomy, and vastly improved their ability to navigate when travelling by sea or across deserts.
Other Western visitors would confirm Adelard’s fabulous stories, even adding to them. One told of a battle in the far north-east of the caliphate, where the Muslims had taken a number of prisoners-of-war, who had subsequently passed on a secret of their oriental culture: how to make paper out of rags, which could then be written on. (This is now reckoned to refer to the Battle of Talas, which took place in Kazakhstan in 751, the only known conflict between Abbasid and Chinese armies.)
So who were these great Arab thinkers? What exactly was the import of their discoveries? And how did they manage to accomplish such feats? The general answer to the last question much resembles the explanation for the sudden explosion of learning in Ancient Greece. That is, the separation of religious and scientific thought. The scientists declared that all learnings both spiritual and secular, was ‘understanding the mind of God’. Anyone who sought to curtail their researches was thus committing blasphemy. Fortunately, it was several centuries before the religious authorities saw a way around this sophistry, which usurped their all-embracing powers.
The treatment of the sick in the courtyards of mosques dated back as far as Muhammad himself and his mosque in Medina. Such places gradually became separate institutions, known as bimaristan, a Persian word for ‘home of the sick’. The first great bimaristan was founded in 805 by Harun al-Rashid in Baghdad. Within the first decades of the Abbasid Caliphate, other hospitals had been established in Cairo, Damascus and Cordoba. The religious influence remained in the fact that all – regardless of sex, race or religion – could be treated at such institutions, and free of charge.
On the other hand, the knowledge and practices employed in such hospitals was purely secular.
Arab medical scholars made use of the translated works of Aristotle, and in particular Galen. Another religious aspect of such places was the belief that ‘God sends down no malady without also sending down with it a cure’. Such a belief might not be scientific, but it was certainly an inspiration to those studying medicine, who immediately set about seeking cures for the ailments with which they were confronted. As we shall see, one of the reasons for this golden age was that although religion and science were separate, they actually supported one another. Science was a religious quest, inspired by religious belief.
The first great scholar to embody this tradition was Al-Razi (often known as Rhazes in the West), who was born in 854 in Ray, south of the Caspian Sea in Persia. He travelled to Baghdad as a young man, where such was the depth and breadth of his intellect that he was asked by the Abbasid caliph al-Mutadid to found a new great hospital, intended to be the finest and greatest in all the caliphate. An indication of Al-Razi’s scientific thought can be seen in the method he used to choose the hospital’s location. He selected the district where the fresh meat displayed on the hooks outside the butchers’ stalls took the longest to rot.
Al-Razi would complete over two hundred manuscripts during the course of his sixty-five-year lifetime. In common with other scholars of the day, he did not limit himself to one field. His greatest advances may have been in medicine, where he wrote pioneering work on contagious diseases and anatomy, but he also made original contributions to fields from logic to astronomy, grammar and philosophy.
The Baghdad of this era was one of the wonders of the world. Sailing ships from as far afield as Cathay (China) and Zanzibar tied up at the palm-fringed quays along the Euphrates river. At the heart of Baghdad lay the famed two-mile-wide Round City, with its three rings of defensive walls, within which stood the Golden Palace of the caliphs and the Grand Mosque. From here four axial roads ran out to the four corners of the Arabic Empire. In suburbs beyond the walls were villas with shaded gardens and tinkling fountains. Beyond lay the teeming bazaars whose stalls displayed cinnamon from Sumatra, cloves from Zanzibar and a plethora of goods in between. On the streets, entertainments ranged from fire-eaters and sword-swallowers to turbanned storytellers, recounting many of the same tales that appear in One Thousand and One Nights.
But these magical narratives were far from being the only great literature produced during this golden era. Perhaps best known in the West is The Rubaiyat of Omar Khayyam, which would cause a sensation when it was translated some 700 years later by the Victorian English poet, Edward Fitzgerald. Omar Khayyam himself remains a somewhat mysterious figure, who achieved renown in his lifetime as an astronomer and a mathematician. His Rubaiyat (poems in quatrains) first appeared in a biography written about him over forty years after his death.
Since then as many as two thousand quatrains have been attributed to him. Though some of these are certainly not his work, there is no doubting the quality of the poetry itself:
Here with a Loaf of Bread beneath the Bough,
A Flask of Wine, a Book of Verse – and Thou
Beside me singing in the Wilderness –
And Wilderness is Paradise enow.
This was hardly the orthodox way to Paradise, and Omar Khayyam soon found himself facing a charge of impiety, whereupon he took the precaution of leaving town on a pilgrimage.
One of the great scholars of the Abbasid Caliphate was Muhammad al-Khwarizmi, who in 820 was appointed head librarian at the House of Wisdom in Baghdad. Al-Khwarizmi would produce works on astronomy, geography, and also mathematics. The last field would see his most permanent contributions. It was he who popularised the Hindu-Arabic numerals, which introduced a decimal counting system that freed mathematics from previous cumbersome methods of calculation.
His name, al-Khwarizmi, has come down to us in the word algorithm (a process or set of general rules for solving specific problems). But most important of all was his work The Book on Calculation, whose Arabic title contains the words al-jabr meaning ‘the reunion of broken parts’. This is a penetrating metaphorical description of how we solve an equation with unknown quantities, and is the Arabic from which we derive the word ‘algebra’.
In the Hadith, Muhammad explicitly forbad figurative representation, in case this led to idol worship. Consequently, Arabic art became sublimated into highly abstract forms such as patterned tiles and calligraphy. The walls of mosques – both great and small – contained superb examples of these Islamic forms of artistry. Here, in calligraphy, language and prayer took on a combined beauty of their own, whilst tiles exhibited complex geometric patterns and ingenious intricate symmetries that still intrigue mathematicians to this day.
Muhammad even taught his daughter Fatima calligraphy, and this practice was taken up by many women within the confines of the harem. Cut off from normal socialising, some of these women studied and became scholars in their own right. These scholars became renowned as teachers of women students. Little mention is made of such educated women, owing to the oppressive patriarchy of the society. However, we catch a tantalising glimpse in one of the tales related by Scheherazade.
Briefly, the story tells of how an Arab slave girl called Tawaddud was offered to the caliph, but her owner wanted him to pay an extortionate sum on account of her exceptional learning. To test this, the caliph summoned to his palace all the most learned men in the land, so that they could question her. First a scholar of the Quran began questioning her, and she gave correct answers to all his questions. Then she asked him a question, which he could not answer. The caliph ordered that the scholar be stripped of his robes and cast out in disgrace. Next a physician questioned her on details of anatomy and medicine. Tawaddud correctly answered all his questions, even apparently citing works of Galen as her authority. The physician was forced to concede to the caliph: ‘This damsel is more learned than I in medicine.’
Finally, a philosopher questioned her on the nature of time, admitting defeat when she solved a mathematical riddle he posed. The caliph then offered to pay 100,000 gold pieces for Tawaddud, at the same time offering to grant her any request she chose. She replied that she wanted to return to her master, whereupon the caliph rewarded them both with a place at his court.
In 1095, the Eastern Mediterranean coast of the Abbasid Caliphate began coming under attack from the western armies of the Crusaders. These had been ordered by Pope Urban II to go to the assistance of the Byzantine Emperor, who was under threat from the Seljuk Turks (Sunni allies of the Abbasids). The Frankish warriors of the First Crusade then invaded the Holy Land of their Christian heritage. By 1099 they had conquered Jerusalem and soon set up permanent Christian kingdoms along the hinterland of the eastern Mediterranean. Only when Salah ad-Din (Saladin), a Sunni Muslim of Kurdish descent, led the Islamic armies would the Crusaders meet their match, with Jerusalem being retaken in 1187.
By now the Abbasid Caliphate was beginning to fall apart, with various regions becoming virtually autonomous. Then, without warning, in 1257 a vast army of Mongols suddenly poured into Abbasid territory from the north-east, sweeping all before them. By January 1258, Baghdad itself was under siege. The following month the city was overrun, sacked and burnt to the ground.
From this time on, the centre of power in the Islamic Levant would move east to Cairo, where an Abbasid Caliphate would soon be re-established. But the golden era of the Baghdad Caliphate was over. The caliphs now only held religious power, with the resident Mamlukes holding the political and military power.
Despite this blow, one part of the old Islamic Empire continued to flourish. For years, Al-Andalus (the Iberian peninsula) had been a virtually autonomous province of the empire, ruled over by the Emir of Cordoba. Indeed, such was the independence of the Emirate of Cordoba that it retained its allegiance to the old Umayyad Caliphate. And soon its cultural magnificence had even begun to rival that of Abbasid Baghdad. By as early as the tenth century, the city of Cordoba had grown to an estimated population of 500,000, making it
the largest city in Europe. (In the Empire, only Baghdad, and possibly Cairo, were larger, the former having a population of around 800,000.) With a mix of Islamic, Christian and Jewish people living in comparative harmony, Cordoba had become a great financial, political and cultural centre.
Even the second city of this independent emirate became a wonder of Islamic Europe. Granada, located almost 2,500 feet up in the cool Sierra Nevada, with its fabled Alhambra palace and gardens, would in time become independent of Cordoba. In this way, Granada was able to provide trade links between the Arabic world and the Christian provinces that were gradually making inroads into Al-Andalus in the north. This trade link reached south across the Mediterranean to the Berber territories of North Africa, and thence across the Sahara. (Sahara is simply the Arabic word for desert.)
These trade links carried caravans of gold from the mines of Mali, as well as salt, ivory and slaves north from Timbuktu. In the opposite direction, this trade route was also responsible for the spread of the Islamic religion to West Africa. Later, Granada would become a great centre of Jewish civic influence and culture, until the delicate balance of multi-religious tolerance was upset, resulting in the 1066 massacre of the Jews.
Al-Andalus would produce one of the greatest philosophers of the Arabic Golden age. This was Ibn Rushd, who was born in Cordoba in 1126. Like so many of the other great Arabic scholars of this era he was a polymath, writing works on everything from physics to jurisprudence. He travelled to Marrakesh, in the Islamic province of Morocco, where he made astronomical observations attempting unsuccessfully to discover physical laws that might explain the movement of the stars in the heavens. In later life he was appointed as a qadi (judge of the Sharia court) in Cordoba, but fell out of favour and was banished by the emir.
He is best remembered for his voluminous commentaries on the works of Aristotle. Many of these would be translated into Latin and began circulating amongst scholars in Europe. Here Ibn Rushd’s name became Westernised to Averroes. Such was his influence on Medieval Christian thought that it led to a philosophy known as Averroism. This included a mystical strain, which claimed that all humanity shared the same eternal consciousness.
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