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

by Vernon O Egger

  There is a quarter known by the name of the mosque of Ibn Saqlab. It is also big but has no streams, and its inhabitants drink from wells. By its edge flows the river called Wadi ‘Abbas, a broad and swift stream on which they have many mills, but their gardens and orchards do not make use of it.

  The New Quarter is large and adjoins the quarter of the mosque. There is no division or demarcation between them, and both are unwalled, as is also the Quarter of the Slavs. Most of the markets are between the mosque of Ibn Saqlab and the New Quarter. They are as follows: the olive oil sellers in their entirety; the millers, the money changers, the apothecaries, the smiths, the sword cutlers [polishers?], the flour markets, the brocade makers, the fishmongers, the spice merchants, … the greengrocers, the fruiterers, the sellers of aromatic plants, the jar merchants, the bakers, the rope makers, a group of perfumers, the butchers, the shoemakers, the tanners, the carpenters, and the potters. The wood merchants are outside the city. In Palermo proper there are groups of butchers, jar merchants, and shoemakers. The butchers have nearly 200 shops for the sale of meat, and there are a few of them inside the city at the beginning of the main road. Near them are the cotton merchants, the ginners, and the cobblers. There also is another useful market in the city.

  SOURCE: Islam from the Prophet Muhammad to the Capture of Constantinople. II: Religion and Society. Edited and translated by Bernard Lewis. New York: Oxford University Press, 1974, 23–24.

  The upper two images are the obverse and reverse of a Sasanian-style coin that the Umayyads continued to strike for several decades. After the Arabization and Islamization policies of ‘Abd al-Malik, coins of any Muslim state resembled the coin shown in the lower two images. It contains no human representation, and its Arabic inscriptions are from the Qur’an.

  In the east, the famous Silk Road through Central Asia was an important link between Iran and China. Actually, there was no single Silk Road, but several roughly parallel routes that had been conduits of commerce and ideas since 500 B.C.E. or earlier. Under the Han dynasty (206 B.C.E.–220 C.E.), the links between Iran and China became a matter of Chinese state policy, and trade became regular and important. Transoxiana became the central link in a great network of roads that connected the Mediterranean with Ch’ang-an, the capital of several Chinese dynasties, including those of the Han and T’ang (618–907). Merchants from the Syrian coast followed a path through Rayy to Bukhara and Samarqand; merchants from the Aegean Sea would cross Anatolia and then arrive at the Transoxiana oases either by crossing the Caspian Sea by ship or by following a road to Rayy.

  MAP 4.2 The Tenth-century Muslim Trading Zone

  From Samarqand, the routes to China were all daunting. The road due east scaled formidable mountain ranges so high they caused altitude sickness; the more indirect route to the north was across steppe land, and thus less exhausting, but was often contested by competing tribes or states, making the journey risky at best. Thus, the Silk Roads encouraged a thriving trade in luxury goods and provided a route for the introduction of Chinese technologies and techniques into the Muslim world that craftsmen readily adopted.

  Maritime Commerce

  Overland trade, however, was a long and dangerous undertaking, even with camels. The bulk of the trade between the Muslim world on the one hand, and India and China on the other, took place by sea, utilizing the Indian Ocean. Until the beginning of the tenth century, the center of Muslim commerce in the Indian Ocean was the Persian Gulf. The metropolis of Baghdad served as an enormous siphon that attracted staples and luxuries of every kind. Even as it imported timber and metals overland from the north and west, it served as a magnet for luxuries coming by sea. Large ships bearing goods from China and South Asia tied up at the wharves of Ubulla, the port for Basra, where stevedores transferred their cargoes to river boats bound for Baghdad. There the boats unloaded their cargoes from all around the Indian Ocean basin: porcelain, silk, spices, precious stones, perfumes, incense and scented wood, and slaves.

  Other ports in the Gulf—Siraf on the Iranian coast, and Sohar and Muscat in Oman—also became flourishing entrepots of world trade during this time. Goods from China were highly valued, and even in the pre-Islamic era Arabs had established a colony in Canton (Guangzhou) in order to have direct access to Chinese silks, porcelain, lacquerware, and other goods. The Muslim community in Canton was expelled in 879 by the T’ang dynasty, and many of the merchants resettled in Southeast Asia, where they reestablished trading connections with the Gulf.

  Direct trade with China, however, was rare. The long distances and the need to synchronize one’s schedule with the monsoons meant that a round trip to China required a year and a half. As a result, the Muslim carrying trade was focused on the western half of the Indian Ocean basin. Merchants who wished to trade with the residents of East Africa could send vessels on winter’s northerly monsoon to reach most of the east coast of Africa, and the southeasterly monsoon brought them back in summer. As a result of this trade, Muslim communities began to appear along the Ethiopian coast of the Red Sea in the eighth and ninth centuries. By the tenth century, several communities containing Muslim Arab traders were established along the Somali coast, and a few could be found as far south as Zanzibar.

  East of the Gulf, Sind was an important stop. Although the region had long been famous for its agricultural potential, pre-Islamic Arabs valued it largely as a conduit for trade from India. Conquered by the Muslims in 711, Sind gradually became autonomous in the second half of the ninth century. Daybul was a flourishing port of call for merchants crossing the Indian Ocean, and it was open to influences from many regions. Four hundred miles up the Indus River, Multan became the major Muslim city in the Punjab (the region that is defined by the five large tributaries of the Indus). Sind was predominantly Buddhist at the time of the Arab conquest, although Hindus were in the process of persecuting them and forcing them out of the region. Hinduism itself, only just beginning to be established, did not weather the invasion well, and Islam gradually replaced it along the length of the Indus. Multan became notorious in the Sunni imagination when it fell to Fatimid-supported Isma‘ilis in 977. Despite the efforts of certain Sunni rulers to crush the Isma‘ilis, they maintained a significant presence in Sind for over two centuries and expanded into Gujarat.

  Muslims also established trading communities on India’s Malabar Coast, south of Gujarat. Jews and Nestorian Christians, along with Arabs from Yemen, had established settlements there in pre-Islamic times, and the Arabs in the area rapidly Islamized after 650. Malabar had traditionally supplied spices and luxury goods to the Mediterranean region, and its merchant community served as middlemen for the commerce of the Indian Ocean. The coastal plain is separated from the rest of India by the Western Ghats, a steep escarpment that extends parallel to the Arabian Sea for over seven hundred miles, insulating the coast from political and cultural developments inland. As a result, Malabar’s contacts with the rest of the world were by sea, and hence with Southeast Asia, Arabia, and East Africa even more than with the rest of India. This orientation allowed the Muslims of the region to develop a quite different identity from those who subsequently settled the interior.

  In contrast to the thriving trade of the Indian Ocean basin, the maritime commerce of the Mediterranean was in a depressed state for several centuries until the end of the ninth century. Although merchants from Muslim territories (both Muslims and Jews) and from the Byzantine Empire continued to trade throughout the intermittent warfare that erupted between the two sides, most of their commerce was conducted overland with the Black Sea entrepot of Trebizon rather than through Mediterranean seaports. Maritime commerce in the eastern Mediterranean was jeopardized by the fact that the Byzantine navy conducted naval attacks on Muslim ports, and even great ports such as Alexandria and Antioch gradually lost population to interior cities located on caravan routes. In the western Mediterranean, the collapse of the Roman economy and administration in western Europe after the fourth century had resulted in an imp
overished society that could not afford to import many goods. Trade thus declined in that area. Contacts even between Andalus and western Europe were few. The merchants of Andalus were much more interested in trade with the wealthier Byzantines and with Muslims to the east.

  The late ninth century witnessed an important shift in the movement of Indian Ocean trade into southwestern Asia, with important consequences for Mediterranean trade. The mamluk revolt in Samarra, coupled with the Zanj revolt, contributed to political disruption and economic instability in the central lands of the Muslim world. As Baghdad declined, the Red Sea began to supplant the Gulf as the main trade route from India to the Mediterranean. In the tenth century, Egypt began to enjoy a prosperity that it had not experienced for hundreds of years, making it all the more attractive to the Fatimids of Ifriqiya. Merchants from several European cities, primarily Italian, began establishing regular contacts with Muslim ports in the eastern Mediterranean. The new European demand for Asian goods stimulated the economies of ports such as Alexandria and Antioch, setting the stage for a vibrant international trade in the eleventh and twelfth centuries.

  Conclusion

  The first half of the tenth century witnessed a development that must have distressed many Muslims. In 910, the Fatimids announced the establishment of a second caliphate in the Muslim world. They claimed that theirs was not merely a second caliphate, but the only legitimate one. Less than two decades later, however, in 929, the Umayyad dynasty in Andalus also claimed the caliphate. Sixteen years after that, the Buyids became the real power behind the Abbasid caliphate, raising the question of what function the caliph played in society. Prior to the tenth century, the caliphate had been a symbol of Muslim unity, but now it represented differences within the Umma. More important, the competing claims of three caliphs had to have raised religious anxieties for at least some believers. While more cynical or detached individuals could dismiss the fact of three caliphs as political posturing, at least some Muslims, who had been taught that the caliph represented God’s authority on earth, had to wonder if they were recognizing God’s actual representative. The situation was not unlike the schism that developed within the papacy in the fourteenth and fifteenth centuries, when two, and then three, popes challenged each other, causing great anxiety among the Christians of western Europe.

  But the growing religious and regional identities within the Umma were transcended by a sophisticated and remarkably efficient economic network that tied all the regions together. Caravans and ships brought goods from locations half a world away. Not only were manufactured goods exchanged in this manner, but crops as well, resulting in a foreshadowing of the so-called Columbian exchange six hundred years later. Just as the voyages of Columbus opened up an era in which the flora and fauna of the western and eastern hemispheres would be exchanged, so was the ecology of the Mediterranean transformed by Muslim commerce.

  In addition, as more and more Arab and Iranian merchants converted to Islam, the port cities and desert oases to which they moved or in which they established agencies became outposts of Islamic civilization. A Muslim diaspora began to extend around the Indian Ocean basin and in China. A similar development took place across the “sea” of the Sahara, as the “ships” of caravans brought Muslims into the oases of the desert and the cities of the sub-Saharan savannah, introducing the religion to those areas for the first time. These communities became centers of Islamic culture, and would eventually radiate monotheism and Islamic law into their hinterlands.

  NOTES

  1.

  Population estimates for Baghdad vary widely, with some estimates ranging up to one million. The most carefully reasoned seems to be Jacob Lassner’s study, The Topography of Baghdad in the Early Middle Ages. Detroit: Wayne State University Press, 1970, p. 160. For the land area comparison with Constantinople, see the same source, p. 158.

  2.

  Tenth-century Cordoba is frequently said to have had a population of half a million people, but Thomas Glick makes a good case for a considerably smaller population of 100,000. The city would still have dwarfed any urban center in contemporary western Europe, and its wealth and hygiene would have stood in even sharper contrast. See Thomas F. Glick, Islamic and Christian Spain in the Early Middle Ages (Princeton, New Jersey: Princeton University Press, 1979), p. 113. By contrast, Andrew M. Watson, a specialist in medieval agriculture, says that the city attained a population of one million. [See “A Medieval Green Revolution: New Crops and Farming Techniques in the Early Islamic World,” in The Islamic Middle East, 700–1900: Studies in Economic and Social History, A. L. Udovitch, ed. (Princeton, New Jersey: The Darwin Press, Inc., 1981), p. 57, n. 45.]

  3.

  See Glick, Islamic and Christian Spain, pp. 33–35, and Roger Collins, The Arab Conquest of Spain, 710–797 (Oxford, U.K.: Basil Blackwell, 1989), p. 217, for contrasting evaluations.

  FURTHER READING

  General

  Kennedy, Hugh. The Prophet and the Age of the Caliphates. London and New York: Longman, 1986.

  The Abbasid Caliphate

  al-Hibri, Tayeb. Reinterpreting Islamic Historiography: Harun al-Rashid and the Narrative of the ‘Abbasid Caliphate. Cambridge, U.K.: Cambridge University Press, 1999.

  Lassner, Jacob. The Shaping of Abbasid Rule. Princeton, New Jersey: Princeton University Press, 1980.

  Lassner, Jacob. The Topography of Baghdad in the Early Middle Ages. Detroit: Wayne State University Press, 1970.

  Sourdel, Dominique. “The Abbasid Caliphate.” In P. M. Holt, Ann K. S. Lambton, and Bernard Lewis, eds., Cambridge History of Islam, vol. I. Cambridge, U.K.: Cambridge University Press, 1970.

  The Fatimid Caliphate

  Brett, Michael. The Rise of the Fatimids: the World of the Mediterranean and the Middle East in the Fourth Century of the Hijrah, Tenth Century C.E. Leiden, Boston: Brill, 2001.

  Daftary, Farhad. The Ismailis: Their History and Doctrines. Cambridge, U.K.: Cambridge University Press, 1990.

  Halm, Heinz. Empire of the Mahdi: The Rise of the Fatimids. Leiden: E. J. Brill, 1997.

  Madelung, Wilferd and Paul Walker. Advent of the Fatimids: A Contemporary Witness. London and New York: I. B. Taurus, 2000.

  The Umayyad Caliphate of Cordoba

  Collins, Roger. The Arab Conquest of Spain, 710–797. Oxford: Basil Blackwell, 1989.

  Glick, Thomas F. Islamic and Christian Spain in the Early Middle Ages. Princeton, New Jersey: Princeton University Press, 1979.

  Jayyusi, Salma Khadra, ed. The Legacy of Muslim Spain. Leiden, New York, Koln: E. J. Brill, 1992.

  Economic Networks

  Ashtor, E. A Social and Economic History of the Near East in the Middle Ages. Berkeley, California: University of California Press, 1976.

  Bulliet, Richard. The Camel and the Wheel. Cambridge, Massachussetts: Harvard U Press, 1975.

  Goitein, S.D. A Mediterranean Society, 5 vols. Berkeley, California: University of California Press, 1967–88.

  Hourani, George F. Arab Seafaring in the Indian Ocean in Ancient and Early Medieval Times. Revised and expanded by John Carswell. Princeton, New Jersey: Princeton University Press, 1995.

  McNeill, William H. “The Eccentricity of Wheels, or Eurasian Transportation in Historical Perspective,” in American Historical Review, 92, 5, December, 1987, 1111–1126.

  Risso, Patricia. Merchants & Faith: Muslim Commerce and Culture in the Indian Ocean. Boulder, Colorado: Westview Press, 1995.

  Watson, Andrew. Agricultural Innovation in the Early Islamic World: The Diffusion of Crops and Farming Techniques, 700–1100. Cambridge, U.K.: Cambridge University Press, 1983.

  CHAPTER 5

  Synthesis and Creativity

  When the Arabs began their conquests in the 630s, their practice of Islam was rudimentary and simple. They possessed a body of scriptures, a few simple rituals, and the memory of specific teachings and acts of the Prophet that served as guides for behavior. In the seventh century, however, there had yet to emerge a class of Muslim religiou
s specialists whose careers were devoted to the elaboration of the deeper meaning of the principles of the faith and to the production of devotional literature, guidelines for ethical living, and theology. The vast majority of Arab Muslims, in fact, were a handful of years—or even months—removed from polytheism.

  The development of Islam as a major institutional religion began during the eighth century. After decades of expansion into new territories, it was becoming clear to some pious believers that guidelines for doctrine and correct behavior needed to be drawn up in order to stop the proliferation of quarreling sects and to obtain a consensus regarding doctrine, ritual, and ethics. Simultaneously, the Arabs now found themselves in the midst of millions of adherents of other major religions, whose institutions, doctrines, and rituals they found to be commendable or repugnant in varying degrees. They encountered bureaucratic organizations, civil and religious laws, social structures, cuisine, and types of entertainment that were entirely new to them. Which of these were compatible with the faith that the Prophet had brought to his people? What distinguished his community from those of Christians, Jews, and Zoroastrians, many of whose adherents were engaging in a polemical attack on the doctrines and rituals of Islam? Just as the internal dynamics of the community began the process of articulating the implications of the faith, so was there a need to mark off the boundaries between it and the other monotheistic religions. By the middle of the tenth century, the foundations had been laid for Islamic law and devotional life, and subsequent discussions would refer back to this period as the touchstone for debate.