by Will Durant
When the Arabs conquered Syria they were still half-barbarous tribes, recklessly brave, violent, sensual, passionate, superstitious, and skeptical. Islam softened some of these qualities, but most of them survived. Probably the cruelties recorded of the caliphs were no worse in total than those of contemporary Christian kings, Byzantine, Merovingian, or Norse; but they were a disgrace to any civilization. In 717 Suleiman, on pilgrimage to Mecca, invited his courtiers to try their swords on 400 Greeks recently captured in war; the invitation was accepted and the 400 men were beheaded in merry sport as the Caliph looked on.69 Al-Mutawakkil, enthroned, cast into prison a vizier who had, some years before, treated him with indignity; for weeks the prisoner was kept awake to the point of insanity; then he was allowed to sleep for twenty-four hours; so strengthened, he was placed between boards lined with spikes, which prevented his moving without self-laceration; so he lay in agony for days till he died.70 Such savagery, of course, was exceptional; normally the Moslem was the soul of courtesy, humanity, and tolerance. He was, if we may describe the mythical average, quick of apprehension and wit; excitable and lazy, easily amused and readily cheerful; finding content in simplicity, bearing misfortune calmly, accepting all events with patience, dignity, and pride. Starting on a long journey, the Moslem took his grave linen with him, prepared at any time to meet the Great Scavenger; overcome in the desert by exhaustion or disease, he would bid the others go on, would perform his final ablutions, hollow out a pit for his grave, wrap himself in his winding sheet, lie down in the trench, and wait for the coming of death, and a natural burial by the wind-blown sands.71
IV. THE GOVERNMENT
Theoretically, in the generation after Mohammed, Islam was a democratic republic in the ancient sense: all free adult males were to share in choosing the ruler and determining policy. Actually the Commander of the Faithful was chosen, and policy was decided, by a small group of notables in Medina. This was to be expected; men being by nature unequal in intelligence and scruple, democracy must at best be relative; and in communities with poor communication and limited schooling some form of oligarchy is inevitable. Since war and democracy are enemies, the expansion of Islam promoted one-man rule; unity of command and quickness of decision were required by a martial and imperialist policy. Under the Umayyads the government became frankly monarchical, and the caliphate was transmitted by succession or trial of arms.
Again theoretically, the caliphate was a religious rather than a political office; the caliph was first of all the head of a religious group, Islam; and his primary duty was to defend the faith; in theory the caliphate was a theocracy, a government by God through religion. The caliph, however, was not a pope or a priest, nor could he issuè new decrees of the faith. In practice he enjoyed nearly absolute power, limited by no parliament, no hereditary aristocracy, no priesthood, but only by the Koran—which his paid pundits could interpret at his will. Under this despotism there was some democracy of opportunity: any man might rise to high office unless both his parents were slaves.
The Arabs, recognizing that they had conquered decadent but well-organized societies, took over in Syria the Byzantine, in Persia the Sasanian, administrative system; essentially the old order of life in the Near East continued, and even the Hellenic-Oriental culture, overleaping the barrier of language, revived in Moslem science and philosophy. Under the Abbasids a complex system of central, provincial, and local government took form, operated by a bureaucracy that suffered little interruption from royal assassinations and palace revolutions. At the head of the administrative structure was the hajib or chamberlain, who in theory merely managed ceremony, but in practice accumulated power by controlling entry to the caliph. Next in rank, but (after Mansur) superior in power, was the vizier, who appointed and supervised the officials of the government, and guided the policy of the state. The leading bureaus were those of taxation, accounts, correspondence, police, post, and a department of grievances, which became a court of appeal from judicial or administrative decisions. Next to the army in the caliph’s affections was the bureau of revenue; here all the pervasive pertinacity of the Byzantine tax collectors was emulated, and great sums were sluiced from the nation’s economy to maintain the government and the governors. The annual revenue of the caliphate under Harun al-Rashid exceeded 530,000,000 dirhems ($42,400,000) in money, to which were added now incalculable taxes in kind.72 There was no national debt; on the contrary, the treasury in 786 had a balance of 900,000,000 dirhems.
The public post, as under the Persians and Romans, served only the government and very important persons; its chief use was to transmit intelligence and directives between the provinces and the capital, but it served also as a vehicle of espionage by the vizier upon local officers. The system issued itineraries, available to merchants and pilgrims, giving the names of the various stations, and the distances between them; these itineraries were the basis of Arabic geography. Pigeons were trained and used as letter carriers—the first such use known to history (837). Additional “intelligence” was provided by travelers and merchants, and in Baghdad 1700 “aged women” served as spies. No amount of surveillance, however, could check the Oriental-Occidental appetite for “squeeze” or “graft.” The provincial governors, as in Roman days, expected their tenure of office to reimburse them for the expenses of their climb and the tribulations of their descent. The caliphs occasionally forced them to disgorge their accumulations, or sold this right of squeezing to the newly appointed government; so Yusuf ibn Omar extracted 76,000,000 dirhems from his predecessors in the government of Iraq. Judges were well paid, yet they too could be influenced by the generous; and Mohammed (says a tradition) was convinced that out of three judges at least two would go to hell.73
The law by which the great realm was ruled claimed to deduce itself from the Koran. In Islam, as in Judaism, law and religion were one; every crime was a sin, every sin a crime; and jurisprudence was a branch of theology. As conquest extended the reach and responsibilities of Mohammed’s impromptu legislation, and puzzled it with cases unforeseen in the Koran, the Moslem jurists invented traditions that implicitly or explicitly met their need; hence the Hadith became a second source of Mohammedan law. By strange but repeated coincidence these useful traditions echoed the principles and judgments of Roman and Byzantine law, and still more of the Mishna or Gemara of the Jews.74 The growing mass and complexity of legal traditions gave sustenance and high status to the legal profession in Islam; the jurists (faqihs) who expounded or applied the law acquired by the tenth century almost the power and sanctity of a priestly class. As in twelfth-century France, they allied themselves with the monarchy, supported the absolutism of the Abbasids, and reaped rich rewards.
Four famous schools of law took form in orthodox Islam. Abu Hanifa ibn Thabit (d. 767) revolutionized Koranic law by his principle of analogical interpretation. A law originally enacted for a desert community, he argued, must be interpreted analogously, not literally, when applied to an industrial or urban society; on this basis he sanctioned mortgage loans and interest (forbidden in the Koran), much as Hillel had done in Palestine eight centuries before. “The legal rule,” said Hanifa, “is not the same as the rules of grammar and logic. It expresses a general custom, and changes with the circumstances that produced it.”75 Against this liberal philosophy of progressive law the conservatives of Medina put forth a strong defender in Malik ibn Anas (715–95). Basing his system on a study of 1700 juridical Hadith, Malik proposed that since most of these traditions had arisen in Medina, the consensus of opinion in Medina should be the criterion of interpretation of both the Hadith and the Koran. Muhammad al-Shafii (767–820), living in Baghdad and Cairo, thought that infallibility should have a wider base than Medina, and found in the general consensus of the whole Moslem community the final test of legality, orthodoxy, and truth. His pupil Ahmad ibn Hanbal (780–855) considered this criterion too wide and vague, and founded a fourth school on the principle that law should be determined exclusively by the Koran and
the traditions. He denounced the rationalism of the Mutazilites in philosophy, was jailed for orthodoxy by al-Mamun, but held so valiantly to his conservative position that when he died almost the entire population of Baghdad attended his funeral.
Despite this century-long debate, the four schools of law recognized by orthodox Islam agreed in detail as much as they differed in principle. They all assumed the divine origin of the Moslem law, and the necessity of divine origin for any law adequate to control a naturally lawless mankind. They all entered into such minute regulation of conduct and ritual as only Judaism could equal; they prescribed the correct use of toothpicks and matrimonial rights, the proper dress of the sexes, and the moral arrangement of the hair. One legist never ate watermelon because he could not find, in either the Koran or the Hadith, the canonical method for such an operation.76 The multiplicity of enactments would have stifled human development; but legal fictions and condoned evasions reconciled the rigor of the law with the flow and vigor of life. Even so, and despite the wide acceptance of the liberalizing Hanafite code, Mohammedan law tended to be too conservative, too inflexibly mortised in orthodoxy to allow a free evolution of economy, morals, and thought.
With these provisos we must concede that the early caliphs, from Abu Bekr to al-Mamun, gave successful organization to human life over a wide area, and may be counted among the ablest rulers in history. They might have devastated or confiscated everything, like the Mongols or the Magyars or the raiding Norse; instead they merely taxed. When Omar conquered Egypt he rejected the advice of Zobeir to divide the land among his followers, and the Caliph confirmed his judgment: “Leave it,” said Omar, “in the people’s hands to nurse and fructify.”77 Under the caliphal government lands were measured, records were systematically kept, roads and canals were multiplied or maintained, rivers were banked to prevent floods; Iraq, now half desert, was again a garden of Eden; Palestine, recently so rich in sand and stones, was fertile, wealthy, and populous.78 Doubtless the exploitation of simplicity and weakness by cleverness and strength went on under this system as under all governments; but the caliphs gave reasonable protection to life and labor, kept career open to talent, promoted for three to six centuries the prosperity of areas never so prosperous again, and stimulated and supported such a flourishing of education, literature, science, philosophy, and art as made western Asia, for five centuries, the most civilized region in the world.
V. THE CITIES
Before searching out the men and the works that gave meaning and distinction to this civilization we must try to visualize the environment in which they lived. Civilization is rural in base but urban in form; men must gather in cities to provide for one another audiences and stimuli.
Moslem towns were nearly all of modest size, with 10,000 souls or less, cramped into a small and usually walled area for protection against raid or siege, with unlit streets of dust or mud, and little stucco houses hugging their privacy behind a forbidding continuum of external wall; all the glory of the town was concentrated in the mosque. But here and there rose the cities in which Moslem civilization touched its summits of beauty, learning, and happiness.
In Moslem sentiment both Mecca and Medina were holy cities, one as the seat of the ancient Arab shrine and the birthplace of the Prophet, the other as his refuge and home. Walid II rebuilt in splendor the modest mosque at Medina; at Walid’s urging, and for 80,000 dinars, the Byzantine emperor sent forty loads of mosaic stones, and eighty craftsmen from Egypt and Greece; the Moslems complained that their Prophet’s mosque was being built by Christian infidels. Despite the Kaaba and this mosque, the two cities took on under the Umayyads an aspect of worldly pleasure and luxury that would have shocked the earlier caliphs, and must have gladdened the triumphant Quraish. The spoils of conquest had flowed into Medina, and had been distributed chiefly to its citizens; pilgrims were coming to Mecca in greater number, and with richer offerings than ever before, enormously stimulating trade. The holy cities became centers of wealth, leisure, gaiety, and song; palaces and suburban villas housed an aristocracy surfeited with servants and slaves; concubines accumulated, forbidden wine flowed, singers strummed pleasantly sad melodies, and poets multiplied rhymes of war and love. At Medina the beautiful Suqainah, daughter of the martyred Husein, presided over a salon of poets, jurists, and statesmen. Her wit, charm, and good taste set a standard for all Islam; she could not count her successive husbands on her jeweled fingers; and in some instances she made it a condition of marriage that she should retain full freedom of action.79 The Umayyad spirit of joie de vivre had conquered the abstemious puritanism of Abu Bekr and Omar in the most sacred centers of Islam.
Jerusalem was also a holy city to Islam. Already in the eighth century the Arabs predominated in its population. The Caliph Abd-al-Malik, envying the splendor with which the church of the Holy Sepulcher had been restored after its destruction by Khosru Parvez, lavished the revenues of Egypt to surpass that shrine with a group of structures known to the Moslem world as Al-Haram al-Sharif (the venerable sanctuary). At the south end was built (691–4) Al-Masjid al-Aqsa—“The Farther Mosque”—so named after a passage in the Koran (xvii, 1). It was ruined by earthquake in 746, restored in 785, and often modified; but the nave goes back to Abd-al-Malik, and most of the columns to Justinian’s basilica in Jerusalem. Muqaddasi considered it more beautiful than the Great Mosque at Damascus. Somewhere in the sacred enclosure, it was said, Mohammed had met Abraham, Moses, and Jesus, and had prayed with them; near by he had seen the rock (reckoned by Israel to be the center of the world) where Abraham had thought to sacrifice Isaac, and Moses had received the Ark of the Covenant, and Solomon and Herod had built their temples; from that rock Mohammed had ascended into heaven; if one but had faith he could see in the rock the footprints of the Prophet. In 684, when the rebel Abdallah ibn Zobeir held Mecca and received the revenues of its pilgrims, Abd-al-Malik, anxious to attract some of this sacred revenue, decreed that thereafter this rock should replace the Kaaba as the object of pious pilgrimage. Over that historic stone his artisans (691) raised in Syrian-Byzantine style the famous “Dome of the Rock,” which soon ranked as the third of the “four wonders of the Moslem world” (the others were the mosques of Mecca, Medina, and Damascus). It was not a mosque, but a shrine to house the rock; the Crusaders erred twice in calling it the “Mosque of Omar.” Upon an octagonal building of squared stones, 528 feet in circuit, rises a dome, 112 feet high, made of wood externally covered with gilded brass. Four elegant portals—their lintels faced by splendid repoussé bronze plates—lead into an interior divided into diminishing octagons by concentric colonnades of polished marbles; the magnificent columns were taken from Roman ruins, the capitals were Byzantine. The spandrels of the arches are distinguished by mosaics depicting trees with all the delicacy of a Courbet; even finer are the mosaics of the drum below the dome. Running around the cornice of the outer colonnade, in yellow letters on blue tiles, is an inscription in Kufic—the angular characters favored in Kufa; Saladin had it set up in 1187; it is a lovely example of this unique form of architectural decoration. Within the colonnade is the massive, shapeless rock, 200 feet around. “At dawn,” wrote Muqaddasi,
when the light of the sun first strikes on the cupola, and the drum reflects his rays, then is this edifice a marvelous sight to behold, and such that in all Islam I have never seen the equal; neither have I heard tell of aught built in pagan times that rivals in grace this Dome of the Rock.80
Abd-al-Malik’s plan to make this monument replace the Kaaba failed; had it succeeded, Jerusalem would have been the center of all the three faiths that competed for the soul of medieval man.
But Jerusalem was not even the capital of the province of Palestine; that honor went to al-Ramlah. Many places that are now poor villages were in Moslem days flourishing towns. “Aqqa” (Acre) “is a large city, spaciously laid out,” wrote Muqaddasi in 985; “Sidon is a large city, surrounded by gardens and trees,” wrote Idrisi in 1154. “Tyre is a beautiful place,” wrot
e Yaqubi in 891, built on a rock jutting out into the Mediterranean; “its inns are five or six stories high,” wrote Nasir-i-Khosru in 1047, “and great is the quantity of wealth exposed in its clean bazaars.”81 Tripoli, to the north, had “a fine harbor, capable of holding a thousand ships.” Tiberias was famous for its hot springs and its jasmines. Of Nazareth the Moslem traveler Yaqut wrote in 1224: “Here was born the Messiah Isa, the son of Mariam—peace be upon him! … But the people of this place cast dishonor upon her, saying that from all time no virgin has ever borne a child.”82 Baalbek, said Yaqubi, “is one of the finest towns in Syria”; “prosperous and pleasant,” added Muqaddasi. Antioch was second only to Damascus among the cities of Syria; the Moslems held it from 635 to 964, the Byzantines then till 1084; the Mohammedan geographers admired its many beautiful Christian churches, its rising terraces of pretty homes, its lush gardens and parks, the running water in every house. Tarsus was a major city; Ibn Hawqal (978) reckoned its male adults at 100,000; the Greek Emperor Nicephorus recaptured it in 965, destroyed all the mosques, and burned all the Korans. Aleppo was enriched by the junction there of two caravan routes: the city “is populous and built of stone,” wrote Muqaddasi; “shady streets, with rows of shops, lead to each of the gates of the mosque”; in that shrine was a mihrab famous for the beauty of its carved ivory and wood, and a minbar “most exquisite to behold”; near by were five colleges, a hospital, and six Christian churches. Homs (the ancient Emesa) “is one of the largest cities in Syria,” wrote Yaqubi in 891; “nearly all its streets and markets are paved with stones,” wrote Istakhri in 950; “the women here,” said Muqaddasi, “are beautiful, and famous for their fine skin.”83
The eastward sweep of the Arab empire favored for its capital a site more central than either Mecca or Jerusalem; and the Umayyads wisely chose Damascus—already heavy with centuries when the Arabs came. Five converging streams made its hinterland the “Garden of the Earth,” fed a hundred public fountains, a hundred public baths, and 120,000 gardens,84 and flowed out westward into a “Valley of Violets” twelve miles long and three miles wide. “Damascus,” said Idrisi, “is the most delightful of all God’s cities.”85 In the heart of the town, amid a population of some 140,000 souls, rose the palace of the caliphs, built by Muawiya I, gaudy with gold and marble, brilliant with mosaics in floors and walls, cool with ever-flowing fountains and cascades. On the north side stood the Great Mosque, one of 572 mosques in the city, and the sole surviving relic of Umayyad Damascus. In Roman days a temple of Jupiter had adorned the site; on its ruins Theodosius I had built (379) the cathedral of St. John the Baptist. Walid I, about 705, proposed to the Christians that the cathedral should be remodeled and form part of a new mosque, and promised to give them ground and materials for another cathedral anywhere else in the city. They protested, and warned him that “it is written in our books that he who destroys this church will choke to death”; but Walid began the destruction with his own hands. The whole land tax of the empire, we are told, was devoted for seven years to the construction of the mosque; in addition a large sum was given to the Christians to finance a new cathedral. Artists and artisans were brought in from India, Persia, Constantinople, Egypt, Libya, Tunis, and Algeria; all together 12,000 workmen were employed, and the task was completed in eight years. Moslem travelers unanimously describe it as the most magnificent structure in Islam; and the Abbasid caliphs al-Mahdi and al-Mamun—no lovers of the Umayyads or Damascus—ranked it above all other buildings on the earth. A great battlemented wall, with interior colonnades, enclosed a spacious marble-paved court. On the south side of this enclosure rose the mosque, built of squared stones and guarded by three minarets—one of which is the oldest in Islam. Ground plan and decoration were Byzantine, and were doubtless influenced by St. Sophia. The roof and dome—fifty feet in diameter—were covered with plates of lead. The interior, 429 feet long, was divided into nave and aisles by two tiers of white marble columns, from whose gold-plated Corinthian capitals sprang round or horseshoe arches, the first Moslem examples of this latter form.* The mosaic floor was covered with carpets; the walls were faced with colored marble mosaics and enameled tiles; six beautiful grilles of marble divided the interior; in one wall, facing Mecca, was a mihrab lined with gold, silver, and precious stones. Lighting was effected through seventy-four windows of colored glass, and 12,000 lamps. “If,” said a traveler, “a man were to sojourn here a hundred years, and pondered each day on what he saw, he would see something new every day.” A Greek ambassador, allowed to enter it, confessed to his associates: “I had told our Senate that the power of the Arabs would soon pass away; but now, seeing here how they have built, I know that of a surety their dominion will endure great length of days.”87†