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

by Vernon O Egger

  The early Buyids wore their Zaydi convictions lightly, but later generations made no secret of their Twelver Shi‘ite sympathies. On the one hand, they did not force their sectarian identity upon their subjects and they never threatened the Sunni caliph. On the other hand, they did protect and encourage the practice of Shi‘ism, which had been crystallizing in Iraq even before the Buyids assumed power there. Hasan al-‘Askari, the eleventh Imam of Twelver Shi‘ism, was in Samarra when he died in 874, and the scholars who began developing the idea of the Hidden Imam in the 940s were centered in Baghdad. During the 960s, the Buyid regime in Baghdad inaugurated two ceremonies that became central to the ritual life of subsequent Twelver Shi‘ism. One was ‘ashura’, which memorializes the death of Husayn at Karbala. ‘Ashura’ literally means “tenth,” referring to the tenth day of the month of Muharram, when Husayn was killed. Over the next several centuries, the observance of the martyrdom eventually developed into an elaborate ten-day observance involving prayer, Qur’anic recitations, reenactments of the battle at Karbala, and, in some localities, self-flagellation by the pious as a way to share in Husayn’s suffering.

  The other festival that Shi‘ites began to observe at this time was ghadir khumm, the celebration of Muhammad’s designation of ‘Ali to be his rightful successor. The basic assertion of pro-Alids all along had been that ‘Ali and his family were the most qualified to rule. The early Shi‘ites had claimed that the Prophet had designated ‘Ali to be his successor at the pool (ghadir) of Khumm. Now, under a Shi‘ite regime, that tradition could be publicly celebrated. When the celebrations were held, however, clashes between Sunnis and Shi‘ites were common.

  Throughout the period of Buyid rule, Baghdad lagged behind both Rayy and Shiraz economically and politically. Shiraz was the wealthiest city of the Buyid confederation, and Rayy became a thriving commercial center on the east–west caravan route. Baghdad did house the caliph, its physical size was still impressive, and scholarly life continued, but it was in the grip of perpetual economic and political crises. Daylami and Turkish soldiers frequently fought pitched battles in the streets, and the countryside was plagued with banditry.

  In addition, the tenth and eleventh centuries witnessed a reassertion of nomads throughout the Fertile Crescent and western Iran. The Umayyads and early Abbasids had controlled the movements of nomads by means of a policy that combined the incentives of subsidies and the threat of force. The bedouin lost their subsidies by the ninth century and were displaced from the Abbasid army by the tenth century. They soon began raiding settlements in Syria and Iraq, and discovered that the decline of central authority and of economic stability enabled them to engage in attacks almost with impunity. Several local Arab and Kurdish families seized control of cities during this period, and created short-lived dynasties. By the end of the tenth century, competing Arab and Kurdish families ruled northern Iraq, northern Syria, the middle Euphrates valley, and eastern Anatolia. The most famous of the new ruling groups was the Shi‘ite Hamdanid confederation, which controlled Mosul and Aleppo for most of the tenth century. The Hamdanids actually controlled a larger area than did the caliph or his Buyid “Commander of Commanders.” They demonstrated their wealth and sophistication by patronizing famous artists and scholars. The Hamdanid ruler of Aleppo, for example, became the primary patron of the philosopher al-Farabi.

  Compounding the disorder caused by the “bedouinization” of Syria and Iraq during this period was a century-long revival of Byzantine military power. The Byzantines began capturing Arab settlements in eastern Anatolia in the 930s, driving out the population. In the 960s, they retook Crete, captured Antioch and Tarsus, and sacked Aleppo. Aleppo was subjected to nine days of pillaging, and 10,000 Muslim children were said to have been dragged into captivity. Although the Hamdanids subsequently regained their position as rulers of Aleppo, they served thereafter at the sufferance of the Byzantines and had to pay tribute to them.

  Under pressure from the street preachers and ulama, the Buyid regime in Baghdad attempted to mobilize against the Byzantine threat in the early 970s. Factions within the Turkish units of the Buyid army seized this chance to rebel against their masters, however, leading to a civil war that lasted from 972 to 975 and devastated Baghdad. Northern Syria remained vulnerable to Byzantine incursions, and over the next few decades vast expanses of Muslim settlement in the frontier zone along the Taurus Mountains were wiped out. Refugees flooded into Syria and northern Iraq, causing the Buyids and the caliphate to lose considerable prestige for their failure to stem the tide of the Christian enemy’s incursions.

  A resurgent Byzantine empire was ominous for the Buyids, but the security problem was intensified by the rise of yet another threat, this time from the east. After 1030, isolated groups of Turkish sheep herders and war bands began to filter into Azerbaijan and northern Iraq from Transoxiana. Themselves the victims of warfare in the east, they were desperately poor, seeking green grass for their sheep and plunder for themselves. Their arrival touched off chronic warfare between them and the local inhabitants. One group of these herdsmen temporarily captured Mosul in 1044. Challenged from the east and from the west, the authority of the Buyids by the middle of the eleventh century extended little farther than the environs of their three main cities. Even in the cities the sight was not pretty. Travelers reported that Baghdad had degenerated into a congeries of fortified hamlets, separated from each other by the desolate ruins of what once had been the greatest city in the world west of China.

  The Advent of the Turks

  By the middle of the eleventh century, the Buyids were suffering from a series of escalating challenges from the Byzantines, bedouin, and Turks. A clear-headed military analyst in Baghdad in the early eleventh century would have emphasized the need to concentrate Buyid military resources against the Byzantines and bedouin: They were, after all, formidable local threats. The Turks, fearsome as they might be, were based a thousand miles away in Transoxiana. Such a clear-headed analysis would have been wrong, as even rational calculation sometimes can be in the face of the unexpected. As it turned out, the Turks dispensed with the Buyids, Byzantines, and bedouin as though they were leaves before the wind. The coming of the Turks into southwestern Asia in the mid-eleventh century heralded a profound transformation in the relations of power in the Dar al-Islam.

  The Turks were a new addition to the linguistic quilt of the Umma. Whereas Arabic is part of the Semitic language family and Persian is one of the Indo– European languages, Turkish is a member of the Ural–Altaic language group, which includes the languages of the Mongols and Koreans. Like the Arabs before them, the Turks quickly conquered a vast, sedentarized and urban-based society. Unlike the Arabs, whose language and religion transformed the civilization of the conquered areas, the Turks were quick to appropriate the languages and religion of the societies into which they moved. But even though they recognized that the culture of the new areas was superior to theirs, they had a sense that they were destined to be rulers over wide areas of the earth. Politically and militarily, they would prove to be the dominant ethnic group within the Umma for most of the next nine centuries.

  Origins

  Between the seventh and eleventh centuries, most Turks lived in the area north of the Syr Darya River and the Aral Sea and were divided into some two dozen competing confederations. A few Turkish groups—among them the Bulgars, Khazars, Cumans (the western Qipchaqs) and Pechenegs—made their way westward early in this period and played an important role in the early medieval history of eastern Europe. Others, notably the Qarluqs, Oghuz and eastern Qipchaqs, remained in the area north of Transoxiana.

  From the early ninth century, Turks had interacted with Muslims in different ways. Individual Turks entered the Dar al-Islam as adventurers or as slaves, some served as mercenary soldiers of established states, and many others found the urban-based Islamic culture to be irresistibly attractive because of its dynamic culture. The Samanid state, with its capital in Bukhara, was the Muslim principali
ty that had the most contact with the Turkish peoples. Even though it was a self-consciously Persian regime, its military force was composed largely of Turkish mamluks. Furthermore, although the economic base of the Samanid regime was the irrigated agriculture of Transoxiana, a large part of its wealth derived from the commerce of the slave trade, for the states of southwestern Asia had by the tenth century developed an insatiable appetite for slave soldiers.

  In 961, one of the Samanid ruler’s Turkish mamluks seized from his master the city of Ghazna (modern Ghazni) in what is now Afghanistan, where he proceeded to build a power base. In 994, his successor cooperated with the Samanid ruler of the time to repel an invading force of Turks from the Qarluq confederation, and as a reward he received control of Khorasan. Thus, by the end of the tenth century, the Ghaznavids had virtually independent control of the territories south of the Amu Darya. This empire was inherited by Mahmud of Ghazna (998–1030), who became famous for his wide-ranging military campaigns. He made at least seventeen major raids into India for treasure, striking as far south as Gujarat, plundering and destroying Hindu temples. The most successful, and infamous, of his conquests was the plundering of the immense temple complex of Somnath in 1025–1026, which resulted in the massacre of thousands of Hindus and the extraction of incalculable wealth. Mahmud boasted of how his troops smashed to pieces the golden idols there; he did not emphasize that the gold was then carried back to the treasury at Ghazna for him to enjoy.

  The Ghaznavid state had long-lasting repercussions. As an aggressive Muslim regime based in what is modern Afghanistan, it was poised to be a base for the future expansion of Islam into South Asia, as we shall see in subsequent chapters. Culturally, it was equally influential. Mahmud’s capital at Ghazna is obscure to most of us today, but prior to the thirteenth century it ranked among the three or four most culturally advanced cities in the entire Dar al-Islam. It attracted not only Turkish warriors, but also many learned authorities of Persian and Arabic culture—poets, historians, linguists, and mathematicians.

  The Ghaznavids were Persianized Turks. Although the ruling elite were ethnic Turks, they continued the patronage of Persian art and literature that the Samanids had begun in Transoxiana decades earlier. The greatest literary work of the era was the Shah-nameh, or Book of Kings. This monumental epic of some 60,000 verses is an intriguing example of the Persian revival of the period. While it is not anti-Islamic, it is a celebration of pre-Islamic Iran, and can be read as an implicit criticism of the Arab conquest of Iran. Its author, Ferdowsi, is said to have worked on the poem for thirty years. For most of that period he lived under Samanid rule, but he presented the manuscript to Mahmud in 1010.

  Mahmud also commissioned several outstanding architectural works which had a long-lasting influence. Iranian mosques were already beginning to incorporate into their design a Sasanian feature, the eyvan, or large vaulted hall closed on three sides and open to a court on the fourth. Several large mosques of this type were constructed in Ghazna. Over the course of the next century, the motif of a court surrounded by four eyvans came to dominate Saljuq mosque architecture and was used frequently in Iran and Central Asia for centuries to come.

  Mahmud’s large army, augmented by armor-plated war elephants, struck terror into the hearts of all his opponents. Although his raids may appear to the observer to have been largely in quest of loot, Mahmud insisted that he was championing the cause of Sunnism against both paganism and Shi‘ism. He gained a reputation in the Muslim heartland as a champion of Sunni Islam, and although he was a brutal and exploitative ruler, he was praised by scholars for his patronage of the arts and sciences. Sunnis who chafed under Buyid rule looked to him as their deliverer, and to their delight he turned his armies westward late in his career. He captured Rayy from the Buyids in 1029 and harassed Buyid holdings in Kirman and Fars. At his death in 1030, he controlled an empire that extended from the border of Azerbaijan to the upper Ganges, and from the Amu Darya to the Indian Ocean.

  The Birth of Rostam

  Speakers of Persian still revere Ferdowsi’s Shah-nameh, and many of them know by heart large numbers of its verses. The figure from the poem who remains the most popular with Iranians is Rostam, a great hero who fought continually for the defense of Iran. The selection that follows relates details from the circumstances surrounding his birth and provides a flavor of the tone and style of the poem, even though the translation is in prose.

  The incident requires some background: The great ruler Sam had abandoned his infant son Zal at birth because the baby’s hair was entirely white. The child was placed on the top of a remote mountain to die, but a great bird, the Simorgh, brought Zal to her nest and raised him as her own. Eventually, Sam learned that Zal had survived to become a towering figure himself and came for him. As Zal was leaving the mountain with his father, the Simorgh gave him one of her feathers and told him that, should he ever encounter trouble, he should burn the feather, and she would come to his aid. Zal soon met the beautiful princess Rudaba, and, as the poem relates, their love grew, and wisdom fled: She was soon pregnant with their son, Rostam. The pregnancy, however, was difficult, and Zal was afraid that Rudaba would die. Remembering the feather, he burned it, and the Simorgh instantly appeared.

  The Simorgh inquired, “What means this grief? Why these tears in the lion’s eyes? From this silver-bosomed cypress, whose face is as the moon for loveliness, a child will issue for you who will be eager for fame. Lions will kiss the dust of his footsteps and above his head even the clouds will find no passage. Merely at the sound of his voice the hide of the fighting leopard will burst and it will seize its claws in its teeth for panic. For judgment and sagacity he will be another Sam in all his gravity, but when stirred to anger he will be an aggressive lion. He will have the slender grace of a cypress but the strength of an elephant; with one of his fingers he will be able to cast a brick two leagues.

  “Yet, by command of the Lawgiver, Provider of all good, the child will not come into existence by the ordinary way of birth. Bring me a poniard of tempered steel and a man of percipient heart versed in incantation. Let the girl be given a drug to stupefy her and to dull any fear or anxiety in her mind; then keep guard while the clairvoyant recites his incantations and so watch until the lion–boy leaves the vessel which contains him. The wizard will pierce the frame of the young woman without her awareness of any pain and will draw the lion–child out of her, covering her flank with blood, and will sew together the part he has cut. Therefore banish all fear, care and anxiety from your heart. There is a herb which I will describe to you. Pound it together with milk and musk and place it in a dry shady place. Afterwards spread it over the wound and you will perceive at once how she has been delivered from peril. Over it all then pass one of my feathers and the shadow of my royal potency will have achieved a happy result.”

  Speaking thus she plucked a feather from her wing, cast it down and flew aloft. (Zal took the feather and obeyed his instructions. When his son was born, he named him Rostam.)

  Ten foster-mothers gave Rostam the milk, which provides men with strength and then, when after being weaned from milk he came to eating substantial food, they gave him an abundance of bread and flesh. Five men’s portions were his provision and it was a wearisome task to prepare it for him. He grew to the height of eight men so that his stature was that of a noble cypress; so high did he grow that it was as though he might become a shining star at which all the world would gaze. As he stood you might have believed him to be the hero Sam for handsomeness and wisdom, for grace and judgment.

  SOURCE: The Epic of the Kings: Shah-Nama the national epic of Persia. Translated by Reuben Levy. (1967) pp. 47–48.

  While the Ghaznavids were securing their power in Afghanistan in the second half of the tenth century, clans from two of the Turkish confederations—the Qarluq and Oghuz—began crossing the Syr Darya into Transoxiana. The Qarluq group, led by the Qara-khanid dynasty, converted en masse to Islam about 960. In 992 the Qarakhanids seized Bukh
ara from the Samanids, and seven years later they took Samarqand. The Amu Darya now served as the boundary between the Qara-khanids and their rivals, the Ghaznavids.

  Qara-khanid unity fractured within a decade, and rival Qara-khanid rulers assumed control of Bukhara and Samarqand. Like the Ghaznavids, the Qara-khanids ruled over a largely Iranian populace at first, but Transoxiana experienced a continual in-migration of Turks. The Qara-khanid rulers professed to accept the authority of the Abbasid caliph, at that time under the control of the Buyids, and they became a force for the propagation of Islam within Transoxiana and in surrounding territories. Again like the Ghaznavids, they patronized literature, but in this case, it was a new Turkish literature based on Arabic and Persian models, with the result that Turkish speakers had access to a wide range of Islamic literature. The dynasty further signaled its transition from a nomadic lifestyle to an urban environment with its financial support for hospitals, mosques, schools, and caravanserais in Transoxiana.

  The Saljuq Invasion

  The most famous of the Oghuz clans is that of the Saljuqs. They left the region north of the Aral Sea and entered Transoxiana in the 980s when the Samanids requested their assistance against other Turkish invaders. Still more migrated into the area in the early eleventh century when various branches of the Qara-khanids sought outside aid in their own civil war. Thus, the Saljuqs came into Transoxiana by invitation. It is not known if they had converted to Islam before they entered Transoxiana or after, but, like the Qarluqs, they converted collectively—the religion of the leader became the religion of the tribe.