A History of the Muslim World to 1405: The Making of a Civilization

by Vernon O Egger

  The Fatimids did not try to convert the Sunnis of Ifriqiya by force, but they did gain a reputation for harshly suppressing some of the Sunni leaders. They may have been provoked: The Sunni leaders had quite often deliberately antagonized the Aghlabids, as well. The Fatimids did force all the mosques to institute the slightly different Shi‘ite version of the call to prayer and to proclaim the Friday sermon in the name of the Fatimid caliph-Imam.

  Ifriqiya turned out to be a fortuitous location for the Fatimid Empire to begin, because most of North Africa had fragmented into numerous ministates after the Berber Revolt of 740. No major power threatened the Fatimids in their early days, but these small states would be vulnerable when the Fatimids were ready to attack. Almost all of the neighboring states were led by Berbers, and many of them had adopted Khar-ijism. Kharijism was popular among Berbers because of its sanctioning of the overthrow of an unjust ruler, its egalitarianism, and its insistence that even a non-Arab could become caliph. Several of the Kharijite Berber states that were founded in the mid-eighth century became important in the trans-Saharan trade. Tlemcen and Sijilmasa (modern Rissani, Morocco) were among the first of these. Tahart (modern Tagdemt, Algeria) was founded by Rustam, a Kharijite of Iranian origin. It deserves special notice. It became the seat of the Rustamid dynasty, which had a remarkable history. Despite the Kharijites’ preference for political decentralization and their antidynastic bias, the sanctity and dignity of the Rustamid dynasty enabled it not only to hold power from generation to generation, but also to hold the respect of other Kharijite oases all across the northern fringe of the Sahara. Its reputation as a center of learning attracted Kharijite scholars from as far as Iran.

  Most of the Kharijite settlements from Tahart to Tripoli adhered to the Ibadi variant of Kharijism, and their inhabitants tolerated the sins of fellow Muslims much more generously than the original Kharijites did. The original Kharijites typically insisted that the commission of a sin automatically made a Muslim an apostate, thus deserving the penalty of death. By contrast, Tahart became famous for its religious toleration, and it welcomed Christians, Jews, non-Kharijite Muslims, and adherents of different subsects of Kharijism. Ibadism even at this early date was hardly distinguishable from Sunnism. Nevertheless, it was attractive to many Muslims—usually dwelling in small towns in remote areas—to whom it was important as a badge of dignity, piety, and spiritual egalitarianism.

  Berbers were also the overwhelming majority west of Tlemcen and the Atlas Mountains, but Kharijism was not as prominent there. The most dynamic development in Morocco during the pre-Fatimid period was the arrival in the 780s of an Alid named Idris ibn ‘Abdullah. He was from Mecca, but it is not clear whether he was a refugee from Abbasid persecution or a missionary. Apparently a Zaydi Shi‘ite, he quickly won a following among some local Berbers, and in 790 he captured Tlem-cen. Before his death the following year he subdued most of the interior of northern Morocco. His son Idris II was born a few months after his death and was recognized as Imam at the age of eleven. Idris II reigned for more than two decades, establishing his dominance in the region from the Sous River in southern Morocco to some one hundred miles east of Tlemcen. He welcomed into his new capital city of Fez an influx of Shi‘ite Arabs from Iberia and from Qayrawan after unsuccessful rebellions in those Sunni-dominated regions. By the time of his death in 828, the area around the city was largely Arabized, and Fez had become the dominant city in the region. With the establishment of two large mosques at mid-century, the city began challenging Qayrawan as a center of Islamic learning in North Africa.

  Politically, however, there was no chance that Fez would soon become the capital of a major power. The first two Idrisids seem never to have ruled over a defined territory, and upon the death of Idris II the towns acknowledging his authority were divided among several of his sons. Morocco remained splintered into many feuding principalities. It remained largely Berber for many centuries, although considerable numbers of Arab adventurers and entrepreneurs came into the area over the next two hundred years. Because of the Atlas mountain ranges, these immigrants tended to be funneled along the Mediterranean coastal plain to the Atlantic plain and then south, or into the oases on the eastern slope of the Atlas, and thence to the Sous River. Both of these areas had access to trade (maritime commerce for the former and the trans-Saharan trade in gold and slaves for the latter), whereas the interior of Morocco did not offer many economic opportunities. As a result of this pattern of settlement, the Arabization and Islamization of Morocco took place on the periphery of the country. By the tenth century, the Umayyad dynasty in the Iberian Peninsula was attempting to secure its influence among these commercial settlements.

  The Fatimid task, then, was to subdue as many of the small principalities as possible before the Umayyads of Iberia gained a strong foothold in the Maghrib. The Fatimid targets were weak, but numerous, which entailed many battles and sieges. At the core of al-Mahdi’s army was the cavalry of the Kutama Berbers of western Ifriqiya. They were rivals of the largely Zanata Berbers of the southern oases, and control of those commercial oases was critical for Fatimid prosperity. The political and economic rivalry of the Kutama and Zanata Berber groups was overlain by religious differences. The Fatimids and the Kharijites hated each other. The Kharijites placed a premium on piety and strict observance of ritual, and their egalitarian ideals included the conviction that truth was accessible to all. The Fatimids, by contrast, viewed ritual as the outer truth that was not as important as the inner, spiritual truth; their organizational hierarchy of religious officials was the absolute opposite of religious egalitarianism; and they taught that individuals have access to different levels of truth.

  Al-Mahdi had spent four years (905–909) of his life as a fugitive in the Kharijite stronghold of Sijilmasa, but he did so inconspicuously. When his identity was discovered, he had been placed under house arrest. Once his supporters began their campaign to place him in power in Qayrawan, they turned on the Kharijites with a fury. One of the Fatimid army’s earliest conquests in 909 was Tahart, where the Rustamids were massacred. Other Kharijite oases from Tripoli to Tlemcen fell and were also treated with brutality. By 917, al-Mahdi’s army had captured Fez, and the Fatimids were well on their way to domination of the entire Maghrib.

  Al-Mahdi’s most important goal, however, was to conquer Egypt. The fertile Nile valley would be an ideal location from which to coordinate the plan to dominate the Muslim world. The Abbasid grip on Egypt had weakened since the late ninth century, when the Tulunid governors became increasingly autonomous. Al-Mahdi launched campaigns against Egypt as early as 913–915, and again in 919–921, but was thwarted when the Abbasid army intervened both times. Al-Mahdi died in 934, and his son launched a third campaign against Egypt, once again without success. The Fatimid regime planned a fourth campaign, but it was aborted when a rebellion broke out among the Berbers of the Maghrib in 943. The Fatimids lost the entire Maghrib temporarily, and the capital city of Mahdiya was even besieged. For the next two decades, the Fatimid government was forced to concentrate its efforts on consolidating its power in the Maghrib. It relied increasingly upon the Kutama Berbers and the empire’s urban population, who feared the unruly mountain and desert tribes. Not until the last third of the century would the Muslim world know how powerful this new Fatimid state could be.

  The Umayyad Caliphate of Cordoba

  The Iberian Peninsula witnessed the rise of yet a third caliphate within the Umma during the first half of the tenth century. Its emergence was not inspired by a challenge to Baghdad, for the Abbasids never controlled the peninsula. The area’s links even with the Umayyad central government in Damascus had been tenuous from the first, due to the great distance of the province from the capital and the preoccupation of Damascus with the northern and eastern frontiers of the empire. Commercial and cultural links with the Arab east remained close, but the Muslims of the Iberian Peninsula developed a distinctive identity that facilitated the declaration of a separate calipha
te.

  Map 4.1 Political Fragmentation of the Umma, to 950

  The Consolidation of Umayyad Power

  Muslim raiders rapidly and easily subdued the Iberian Peninsula between 711 and 720, except for the north, where prolonged, vicious fighting took place. Historically, the mountain people of the north had always resisted domination by the government of the south, whether Roman or Visigothic, and that pattern continued under the Muslims. The peoples of the north were, themselves, separated from each other by high mountain ridges. Although they spoke mutually intelligible dialects, they formed distinct communities. The Muslims were primarily interested in the northern section simply to protect their own lines of communication, for they quickly realized that the area had little wealth to offer. Indeed, when the small principality of Asturias revolted about 720, the Muslims made little effort to quell the rebellion, preferring instead to begin a series of raids north of the Pyrenees into southern Aquitaine and Provence that lasted for several decades. The Muslims would eventually regret not having stamped out the revolt in Asturias. For the moment, however, Asturias was merely an arid and stony hill country, offering little for the effort that securing it would require. The wealth of the cities, monasteries, and churches in southern France, on the other hand, proved to be irresistible.

  Despite the ease of the Muslim conquest of the Iberian Peninsula, the area was not politically stable under the Umayyads of Damascus. The primary threat to the dynasty was not that of the native population, but rather factional rivalry among Arab tribes. As a result, governors found that they were often opposed simply because of their tribal identity, and their authority was constantly challenged. The rivalry among the Arabs made the society vulnerable to the Great Berber Revolt of the 740s, which spread into the peninsula from North Africa. Several thousand Syrian troops, arriving from Damascus, suppressed the rebellion in Iberia. The uprising, however, had so shattered the administrative structure in North Africa that Damascus could not reestablish control over the Iberian peninsula, and it became autonomous. Moreover, in 750 a famine spawned by a sustained drought forced thousands of Berbers who had settled in the northwestern and north central parts of the peninsula to migrate to the south, allowing Asturias to annex much of the vacated territory. For the next three centuries, the valley of the Duero River formed a permeable and elastic frontier between Christian and Muslim regions. Increasingly, Arab writers referred to the Muslim-held territories—as opposed to the Christian-dominated areas of the peninsula—as al-Andalus (hereafter, Andalus). The original meaning of the term is an object of speculation.

  The Abbasid revolution was an epochal event for most Muslims, but its impact on Andalus was unexpected. The Abbasids attempted to eradicate the Umayyad family, but one of the princes, ‘Abd al-Rahman, escaped into Egypt and then into North Africa. There his heritage served him well, for he was able to find refuge among the Berber tribe from which his mother had come. From the Maghrib he made contact with Umayyad partisans who had sought refuge in Andalus, and he learned that his family had support among powerful units of the Syrian troops there. With their help, he resurrected the Umayyad dynasty, establishing a power base in Cordoba. The family would rule from there for almost three centuries, until 1031. ‘Abd al-Rahman, not surprisingly, refused to recognize the Abbasid caliph, and he assumed the title of amir, which suggests “commander” or “leader.” The Muslims of Andalus thereafter maintained close cultural contacts with the eastern regions of the Muslim world, but acknowledged no religious or political authority outside the peninsula.

  The Umayyad name held no mystique for the bulk of the Arab and Berber tribes in the peninsula, however, and ‘Abd al-Rahman had to lead military campaigns almost until his death in 788 in order to gain the submission of the Muslim warlords. One episode in ‘Abd al-Rahman’s campaigns made its way into the literature of the Franks. In 777, Arab and Berber chieftains in the foothills of the Pyrenees asked Charlemagne for help in resisting the encroachments of the Umayyad ruler. The Frankish king, who was in the early stages of his own conquests, recognized an unexpected opportunity to limit the power of a rival and simultaneously to secure territory on his southwestern frontier. When his army arrived at Zaragoza (Saragossa) in 778, however, the city’s ruler changed his mind and closed its gates to him. After an unsuccessful siege, Charlemagne was forced to withdraw through the western Pyrenees. At Roncesvalles, his rear guard, commanded by Roland, was attacked and massacred, inspiring the Frankish epic The Song of Roland. The actual identity of the attackers, whether Basques or Muslim Arabs or Berbers, has not been conclusively determined, but Muslims received the blame in the poem. ‘Abd al-Rahman captured Zaragoza and Pamplona the following year.

  The Umayyads reigned over Andalus from their capital of Cordoba, but they never managed to rule the region as a centralized state. Even after ‘Abd al-Rahman II (822–852) introduced Abbasid-style administrative offices and practices in an effort to centralize control, Berber and Arab tribes remained powerful down to the end of the dynasty in 1031. The central government was dominant, but the tribes tested its strength through frequent revolts. The native Hispano–Romans, both Christians and new converts to Islam, also engaged in periodic revolts against the government. The new converts seem to have been rankled by the same irritant that had bothered new converts in Umayyad Damascus: the privileges of the Arab elite.

  Andalus was ethnically and religiously the most diverse polity in western Europe during the period from the ninth to the thirteenth centuries. It embraced the majority Hispano–Roman Christian population, a large Jewish minority, and the Muslims, among whom were the Arabs, Berbers, and a growing number of Hispano–Romans. The Arabs and Berbers, as conquering and garrisoned soldiers, served in the army all over the country, but a difference emerged in the pattern of settlement of the “civilians” of the two groups. The Berbers scattered all over Andalus, but in the mountains that form the perimeter of the central plateau (the Meseta), they greatly outnumbered the Arabs and became identified as a troublesome mountain people. The Arabs, on the other hand, tended to settle in the fertile lowlands, prominent among which were the Ebro and Guadalquivir valleys and the Valencian coast. The Jews, as in Christian Europe, were found primarily in urban areas.

  The Muslims had conquered a land whose agriculture was typical of the Mediterranean region: sheep herding in the mountains and winter crops of wheat and barley, olives, and grapes in the valleys. Vegetables were grown on small irrigated fields in the Ebro valley and in Valencia. The Muslim settlement had a profound effect on the agriculture of Andalus and, subsequently, of Europe. The Arabs found that the old Roman irrigation systems, which were used to pump water from rivers into fields, had fallen into disuse. They repaired them and introduced into Andalus the noria, or water wheel, and irrigation from wells. The result was both an increase in the area of cultivable land and the ability to grow crops during the hot, dry summer.

  The impact of the Muslim invasion on the variety of crops grown in Andalus was even greater. Due to the enormous extent of the conquests by the Arab armies in the seventh and eighth centuries, a remarkable diffusion took place in edible plants. Arabs in Andalus brought in plants from Syria, Berbers introduced crops from North Africa, and both groups experimented with new crops from as far away as Iran and the Indian Ocean basin. As a result, Andalus was soon home to the date palm, sugar cane, oranges (the Valencian orange and the tangerine—named after Tangier, across the Strait of Gibraltar—attest to the popularity of the oranges grown in the western Mediterranean), lemons, grapefruit, apricots, almonds, artichokes, rice, saffron, sugar, eggplant, parsnip, and lemons. Cotton, the mulberry tree, and the silkworm also made their first appearance in the Iberian Peninsula at this time. Elaborate gardens patterned after the Persian style became commonplace, and in the literature of the day Andalus—particularly the rich agricultural province of Valencia—became a model for paradise. Because of the new crops and the improved irrigation systems, as many as four harvests per year were no
w possible, greatly increasing the productivity of the land and the density of the population.

  The newly productive agriculture stimulated the economy of Andalus. Little commerce took place with the underdeveloped Christian areas to the north of the Pyrenees, but a lively trade developed between Andalus and the eastern Mediterranean, with both Byzantines and Abbasids overlooking political differences in order to benefit economically. The most important goods exported from the west were silk cloth, timber, agricultural products, and gold from west Africa. Toledan steel had been famous since Roman times; in the form of cutlery and swords, it was in high demand, as were Andalusi copper utensils. The Andalusian breed of horses became one of the most prized in European history. Although its origin is disputed, most equine specialists think that it was the result of local mares having been bred with the North African Barb horse, which was brought in during the eighth-century invasion.

  As had been the case in southwestern Asia, the international economy stimulated urbanization. The cities of Andalus blossomed, in startling contrast to the absolute dearth of urban life in western Europe before the eleventh century. Toledo, the old Visigothic capital, continued to flourish, but was supplanted in importance by cities to the south and east. The heart of Andalus was the Guadalquivir valley, and Cordoba was the center of Umayyad power. ‘Abd al-Rahman I had revived the city when he made it his capital, and he is responsible for having begun construction of the Great Mosque, now famous throughout the world for its architectural splendor. ‘Abd al-Rahman II enhanced the cultural life of the city with his patronage of music, poetry, and religious works, and he authorized a major expansion of the mosque. ‘Abd al-Rahman III (912–961) founded a new complex of palace and official buildings at Madinat al-Zahra, some four miles outside the city walls. A veritable palace city, its size can be gauged by the 4100 marble columns that lined it. During the tenth century the grandeur of Cordoba, with its libraries and creature comforts, awed Europeans and Muslims alike. It may well have had a population approaching 100,000, at a time when Paris and London were muddy villages. Seville, the second city in size and influence, may have been home to over 80,000 inhabitants by the eleventh century.2