A HISTORY OF THE MUSLIM WORLD TO 1405
THE MAKING OF A CIVILIZATION
VERNON O. EGGER
Georgia Southern University
First published 2004 by Pearson Education, Inc.
Published 2016 by Routledge
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Library of Congress Cataloging in Publication Data
Egger, Vernon
A history of the Muslim world, to 1405 / Vernon Egger
p. cm.
Includes bibliographical references and index.
ISBN-13: 978-0-13-098389-3 (pbk)
1. Civilization, Islamic. 2. Islam—History. I. Title
DS36.85.E34 2004
909′.097671—dc21
2003052833
Contents
PREFACE
ACKNOWLEDGEMENTS
NOTE ON TRANSLITERATION AND DATING
PART ONE
The Formative Period, 610–950
1.
ORIGINS
Southwestern Asia in the Seventh Century
The Byzantine Empire
The Sasanian Empire
The Arabian Peninsula
The Rise of Islam
The Meccan Environment
Muhammad
A Framework for a New Community
Conclusion
NOTES
FURTHER READING
2.
ARAB IMPERIALISM
Arab Conquests
Arabia and the Fertile Crescent
Iran
North Africa and the Iberian Peninsula
Central Asia and the Indus River Valley
Umayyad Administration
The Caliphate
The Administration of Non-Muslims
The Administration of Muslims
Arab Warriors
Non-Arab Converts
Regulating Women’s Roles
The Rationalization of Society
Dissolution of the Arab Empire
Conclusion
NOTES
FURTHER READING
3.
THE DEVELOPMENT OF SECTARIANISM
‘Ali and the Politics of Division
Political Dissension
‘Ali’s Caliphate: Shi‘ites and Kharijites
Karbala
The Abbasid Revolution
Shi’ite Identities
The Ghulat and the Zaydis
The Husayni Alids
The Centrality of Muhammad al-Baqir and Ja‘far al-Sadiq
The Imamis
The Isma‘ilis
The Shi‘ite Movement
The Sunni Consensus
Conclusion
FURTHER READING
4.
THE CENTER CANNOT HOLD: THREE CALIPHATES
The Abbasid Caliphate
The Early Period
Military and Economic Problems
The Assertion of Regional Autonomy
The Fatimid Caliphate
Isma‘ili Activism
A Second Caliphate in the Umma
The Umayyad Caliphate of Cordoba
The Consolidation of Umayyad Power
A Third Caliphate in the Umma
Economic Networks
A Single Economy
Overland Trade
Maritime Commerce
Conclusion
NOTES
FURTHER READING
5.
SYNTHESIS AND CREATIVITY
The Origins of Islamic Law
Assimilation and Adaptation
Groping Toward an Islamic Jurisprudence
The Development of the Shari‘a
The Synthesis of al-Shafi‘i
Consolidation of the Madhhabs
The Impact of the Shari‘a
Early Sufism
The Contemplative Life
Testing the Limits of Transcendence
The Accommodation of Sufism
The Reception of Science and Philosophy
Science (“Natural Philosophy”)
Philosophy
The Development of an Islamic Theology
The Reception of Rationalism
The Critique of Rationalism
Conclusion
NOTES
FURTHER READING
PART TWO
A Civilization Under Siege, 950–1260
6.
FILLING THE VACUUM OF POWER, 950–1100
The Buyid Sultanate
The Advent of the Turks
Origins
The Saljuq Invasion
The Great Saljuqs and the Saljuqs of Rum
The Fatimid Empire
The Conquest of Egypt and Palestine
Religious Policies
The New Egyptian Economy
Ominous Developments
The Nizaris (“Assassins”)
The Muslim West
Norman Invasions of Muslim Territory
The “Hilali Invasion” of Ifriqiya
A Berber Empire
The Collapse of the Umayyad Caliphate of Andalus
The Incorporation of Andalus into the Maghrib
Conclusion
FURTHER READING
7.
BARBARIANS AT THE GATES, 1100–1260
The Period of the Crusades
The First Crusade
The Franks on the Defensive
The Loss of Andalus
Provisional Solutions: The Great Berber Empires
The Disintegration of the Almohads and of Andalus
Realignment in the East
The Collapse of the Great Saljuqs
Sunni–Nizari Rapprochement
The Mongol Campaigns
Conclusion
FURTHER READING
8.
THE CONSOLIDATION OF TRADITIONS
Science and Philosophy
Mathematics and the Natural Sciences
Philosophy
The Sunni Resolution to the Tension between Reason and Revelation
Consolidating Institutions: Sufism
The Emergence of Lodges and Tariqas
Speculative Mysticism
Consolidating Institutions: Shi‘ism
Twelver Shi‘ites
The Isma‘ilis
The Impact of “The Foreign Sciences” and Jurisprudence
The Transmission of Knowledge
Schools
The Legacy to Europe
ENGLISH WORDS DERIVED FROM ARABIC
Conclusion
NOTES
FURTHER READING
9.
THE MUSLIM COMMONWEALTH
Frontiers and Identities
Frontiers Defining the Dar al-Islam
Frontiers within the Dar al-Islam
Identities
The City and the Countryside
The City
The Countryside
Conversion to Islam
A Muslim Minority
The Pace of Conversion Quickens
The Issue of Authority in the Muslim World
Conclusion
NOTES
FURTHER READING
PART THREE
Mongol Hegemony, 1260–1405
10.
THE GREAT TRANSFORMATION
The Mongol Khan
The Qipchaq Khanate
The Il-khanate
The Chaghatay Khanate
New Centers of Islamic Culture
The Mamluke Empire
The Delhi Sultanate
The Ottoman Sultanate
Scourges
Plague
Timur Lang
Conclusion
FURTHER READING
11.
UNITY AND DIVERSITY IN ISLAMIC TRADITIONS
Intellectual Life in the Fourteenth Century
The End of the “Golden Age”?
Against All Odds
Ibn Taymiya
Ibn al-Shatir
Ibn Khaldun
Hafez
Ibn Battuta
Law
The Queen of the Sciences
The “Closing of the Gate of Ijtihad”?
The Varieties of Religious Expression
“Orthodoxy” and “Heterodoxy”
The Proliferation of Sufi Groups
Sufism Triumphant
Sufism as Social Critique
Sufism, Syncretism, and Shi‘ism
Conclusion
FURTHER READING
GLOSSARY
INDEX
DOCUMENTS
Chapter 1
Confronting the Death of the Prophet
Chapter 2
The Arrival of al-Hajjaj in Kufa (694–695)
Chapter 3
The Rightful Caliph: The Shi‘ite Version
Chapter 4
A Commercial City in the Mediterranean
Chapter 5
Hadith: Guides to Living
Chapter 6
The Birth of Rostam
Chapter 7
Franks through Muslim Eyes
Chapter 8
A Handbook for Sufi Novices
Chapter 9
Jihad in the Shari‘a
Chapter 10
In the Presence of Timur
Chapter 11
The People’s Poet
MAPS
Map 1-1
Western Asia and the Mediterranean on the Eve of Islam
Map 2-1
Arab Conquests, 632–750
Map 3-1
The Age of Sectarian Development, 650–950
Map 4-1
Political Fragmentation of the Umma, to 950
Map 4-2
The Tenth-century Muslim Trading Zone
Map 6-1
The Eastern Muslim World, 950–1030
Map 6-2
The Muslim World, Late Eleventh Century
Map 7-1
The Western Muslim World, 1100–1260
Map 7-2
The Muslim East, 1200–1260
Map 10-1
The Mongol Empire, ca. 1300
Map 10-2
The Eastern Muslim World, Late Fourteenth Century
TABLES
Chapter 3
The Early Alids and Abbasids
Chapter 8
The Isma‘ili (Sevener) and Imami (Twelver) Shi‘a
Preface
This book is an introduction to the history of the Muslim world for readers with little or no knowledge of the subject. I use the term Muslim rather than Islamic because this is a study of the history made by the Muslim peoples rather than a history of the religion of Islam. It is important to make a distinction between Muslim and Islamic—properly speaking, Islamic should refer to elements of the religion, while Muslim relates to the adherents of the religion. Thus, not all customs followed by Muslims are Islamic, and although a mosque is an example of Islamic architecture, a palace is not. A generation ago, the great scholar Marshall Hodgson wrestled with this problem and coined the term Islamicate to describe the cultural features of Muslim societies that were not strictly religious, such as secular architecture. The term has not gained widespread acceptance, and this book will avoid it.
If the distinction between Islamic and Muslim seems strained, suppose that someone said that the White House is an example of Christian architecture because a Christian designed it, or that Bastille Day is a Christian holiday, since it is celebrated in a country with a Christian majority. No one is tempted to make such assertions, and yet they are equivalent to speaking of Islamic palaces or Islamic medicine, as many historians do. Much of the history related in this book is not directly related to Islam, and so it is more appropriately called Muslim history.
The phrase Muslim world, as used in this book, refers to regions ruled by Muslimdominated governments, as well as areas in which the Muslim population is a majority or an influential minority. For several decades in the seventh century, the Muslim world was coterminous with the region often referred to today as the Middle East, but it soon expanded far beyond that heartland. By the tenth century, many of the most important cultural developments in the Muslim world were taking place outside the Middle East. The size of the Muslim world has alternately expanded and contracted over time, and we will be concerned to see how and why that has happened.
The themes of the book are tradition and adaptation. The history of any society is one of the preservation of core values and practices, but also one of adaptation to changing conditions. Muslims follow a religion that is strongly anchored in both scripture and authoritative codes of behavior and are conditioned to adhere closely to the canon of their religious tradition. On the other hand, from the very beginning of their history, Muslims have found ways to adapt elements of their faith to their culture, as well as to adapt their cultural values and practices to the core of their faith. Islam is no more of a homogeneous world religion than is Christianity or Judaism.
The themes of tradition and adaptation allow us to make sense of some important issues in Muslim history. By being aware of the premium placed on faithfulness to the scriptures, we can understand more clearly how Muslims were able to maintain a common sense of identity throughout the wide expanse of the world in which they settled. Further, we can more readily appreciate why Muslims have accepted certain features of alien cultures and rejected others. From the first century of the Islamic calendar, when Muslims were having to decide how to administer a huge majority of non-Muslims in the former Byzantine and Sasanian empires, until today, when many Muslims are concerned about the impact of a secular, global economy on their heritage, the tension between adherence to tradition on the one hand and adaptation to changing conditions on the other has been at the center of Muslim concerns.
This book treats economic, political, intellectual, and social developments over a wide area and across many centuries. Of these topics, the intellectual and political developments receive more attention than social and economic history. The study of the social history of the Muslim world is in its infancy. Therefore, it is not possible at this point to write the history of the daily lives of ordinary men and women in large areas of the Muslim world. Economic history tends to stress connections among areas of the world, which is why it is a popular theme in the field of world history. The motif of connections and of global integration that economic history can convey runs throughout this book as a powerful undercurrent. In the first decade of the twenty-first century, however, I am convinced that our awareness of connections in Muslim history needs to be balanced by an awareness of diversity and discontinuities. Troubling stereotypes of Islam and of Muslims loom large in our culture and can be modified only by our becoming aware of the diversity of religious and political expressions within the Muslim world.
A widely held assumption in our society is that Islam is a crystallized a
rtifact from the seventh century—or, at best, from the tenth or eleventh century, when Islamic law is often said to have stopped developing. It is important to be aware of the important stages in the historical development of Islam and to realize that critical periods in history have encouraged Muslims to be either flexible or inflexible in their reception of new ideas. It is also important to be aware of the varieties of expression of Islam. Many generalizations about Islam are actually applicable only to Sunni Islam, and even then, to the Sunni Islam practiced in certain countries, not to regions in other parts of the world. The history of Shi‘ite Islam is usually ignored—or recognized only in passing. Shi‘ites have played a major role in history and should be recognized for having done so.
Another widely held stereotype is that Muslims form a monolithic, homogeneous mass that acts in concert on given issues. In recent years, this assumption has given rise to the notion that “Islam” and “the West” are on the eve of a “clash of civilizations.” According to this theory, when Muslims in one area have a grievance against “the West,” other Muslim groups will come to their aid on the basis of their civilizational “kin.” The impression of a monolithic Muslim world is reinforced by the fact that many world history books discuss the Abbasid caliphate (750–1258) as though it were an empire that united the great majority of the world’s Muslims of that age, leaving the impression that Muslims have a history of political unity. Even the textbook discussions of the sixteenth- and seventeenth-century empires of the Ottomans, Safavids, and Mughals rarely note their great differences. The fact is that Muslim political unity was shattered in the third decade after the Prophet’s death. There have been numerous Muslim political entities ever since then. Not only have conflicting interests divided them, but Muslim states have also frequently allied with Christian, Hindu, or other states against fellow Muslims.
Just as intellectuals prior to the seventeenth century thought that the universe possessed different physical properties from those on earth, so have historians and political theorists often treated Muslim history as different in kind from the history of the rest of the world. This book attempts to show through an examination of their history that Muslims are an integral part of the world community and have functioned as other human beings have under similar conditions.
Acknowledgments
This project has taken much longer than I anticipated when I began it with a naive expectation that it would require a couple of years to fill in the gaps in my lecture notes. Gaps, indeed. The book relies almost entirely on the work of other scholars. I have listed the sources that I have found most valuable—and that I recommend to other readers—at the end of the relevant chapters. I wish to express my appreciation to the members of the staff of the Interlibrary Loan office of the Henderson Library at Georgia Southern University for their consistently excellent help, and to the Faculty Research Committee and the Faculty Development Committee for making it possible for me to devote several months to full-time research and writing on this project.
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