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

by Vernon O Egger

  The Muslim world developed a remarkable cultural unity despite the overthrow of the “Arab empire” of the Umayyads and the rapid disintegration of Abbasid power. From the tenth through the thirteenth centuries, Shi‘ites, Sunnis, and shamanists held power in several different areas of the Muslim world; Iranians, Berbers, Turks, Kurds, and Mongols replaced Arabs as the ruling ethnic group in several polities; and utter devastation occurred in several areas. Nevertheless, the development of a distinctive Islamic culture continued without interruption. Just as the Shari‘a had developed independently of state patronage, so the economic, social, and cultural life of the Muslims continued to develop without reliance upon any given political order.

  Remarkably, the rise of numerous independent Muslim states did not result in a reassertion of the barriers that had hindered commerce and cultural exchanges between Byzantines and Sasanians. Although Muslim states feuded with each other, they did not erect obstacles to travel, trade, or the pilgrimage to Mecca. Scholars, missionaries, merchants, and pilgrims traveled widely throughout the Dar al-Islam and communicated developments in law, science, engineering, devotional material, etiquette, and numerous other facets of the various evolving Islamic societies over vast distances. The different regions of the Muslim world retained unique characteristics inherited from their pre-Islamic culture, but they were increasingly able to share a common Islamic culture, as well.

  Frontiers and Identities

  Today, after two centuries of experience with nationalism and the nation–state, we take for granted clearly demarcated boundaries, checkpoints, passports and visas, nationalist emotions, patriotism, and numerous other characteristics of the modern state. These paraphernalia of the modern nation–state are, in historical terms, recent phenomena. When studying the premodern history of any region of the world, it is important to understand that boundaries and personal identities functioned quite differently from the ways they do now.

  Frontiers Defining the Dar al-Islam

  When nation–states became defined in the modern period, physical features such as rivers, mountain ranges, and straits were convenient and easily recognized markers that could serve as fixed borders for the countries that shared them. In the pre-modern era, such phenomena were not viewed as dividing lines. The Strait of Gibraltar, for instance, which so “obviously” separates Africa and Europe to modern eyes, was not viewed as a border by the inhabitants of the peninsula or of North Africa until the twentieth century. The Umayyads of Andalus, the Almoravids, the Almohads, and later, Spain, considered the strait as a water highway.

  Rather than relying on borders, rulers had a sense of where their effective power lay and where it diminished. Cities were the seat of power for Muslim rulers, and in their vicinity the troops wielded effective control (as long as they were not rioting themselves), but the further away from the city, the less control was exercised. This was particularly the case when the territory at a distance from the capital was mountainous or arid, for such areas were too unproductive to justify the expense of administration, and they provided havens for rebels. Much as the illuminated areas of individual street lamps at night fade imperceptibly into the penumbra that lies between them, so there existed “penumbras of power” between rival polities where legitimate authority was ambiguous and where warlords, bandits, or adventurers of various types operated with considerable impunity. The best that the central government could hope to do was to play one group in these penumbras against another. This would effect at least temporary cooperation by means of bribes or punitive expeditions.

  The Seas

  Muslims were aware of several types of frontiers. One was the sea. The Indian Ocean during this period was viewed almost exclusively as a highway of commerce, whereas the Mediterranean offered both commerce and the threat of war. In the Indian Ocean, Muslims sailed almost unmolested, except for the need to coordinate voyages with the monsoons. As a result, Muslim settlements spread along the east African coast. Between the tenth and thirteenth centuries, over two dozen Muslim coastal communities sprouted on the African coast as far south as Kilwa, on the southern coast of modern Tanzania. The Muslim presence on the East African coast fostered the development of Swahili culture. Swahili itself derives from the Arabic word sahel, or coast, and it came to denote the speakers of a Bantu lingua franca along the coast from Kenya to Mozambique. Heavily influenced by Arabic, the Swahili language and material culture came to characterize the Islamized population of the East African coast after 1100.

  The much smaller Mediterranean Sea was ringed with numerous states. Their proximity to each other resulted in frequent contacts that could be either hostile or commercial. Frequently, they were engaged in war and commerce simultaneously. By the eleventh century, merchants from Venice, Amalfi, Genoa, and Pisa were becoming active at Alexandria and Antioch, even before the Crusades began. The Fatimids were pleased to trade with them and provided them with perfumes, cloth, gold, cotton, alum (a fixative used by cloth manufacturers), and, especially, pepper. By the era of the Crusades, Muslims were finding that the Europeans had goods they could use. The major commodities were timber, furs, and metals, especially copper, lead, iron, and tin. European silks became increasingly popular, and Italian-made arms were imported in large quantities, despite papal threats of excommunication to any Christian who sold arms to the enemy Muslims. Muslim fleets held the advantage in the Mediterranean until the era of the Crusades, but during the twelfth century the Italian city–states began to dominate both the eastern and western basins.

  The Land

  There were two types of land frontiers: the kind that separated the Dar al-Islam from the Dar al-Kufr, and the kind that separated the realm of one Muslim ruler from another. The former, of course, was usually the most dramatic, because the jurists agreed that Muslims were under an obligation to conduct jihad into lands unfortunate enough not to be under the guidance of the Shari‘a. Raids were not only permitted, but encouraged, into the Dar al-Kufr, and only there could one enslave people. Thousands of miles of such frontiers existed in North Africa and in the east. Muslims along those frontiers did not face major competing powers due to the huge expanse of desert or formidable mountain ranges that were characteristic of those areas. Longdistance trade flourished even in these areas over well-defined routes, and occasional raids might take place from the depths of the Sahara. In the east, invasions were not a threat from what is now Pakistan and Afghanistan, but, as we have seen, the frontier beyond Transoxiana was highly active and proved to be a conduit for numerous nomadic Turkish and Mongol groups. For almost a thousand years, the Central Asian frontier would prove to be a lucrative route to China, a source of manpower renewal and ethnic diversity for the Umma, and the origin for an occasionally catastrophic blow to lives and property.

  At both ends of the Mediterranean, a quite different frontier evolved from that in North Africa and on the eastern edges of the Iranian cultural zone. In Andalus and Anatolia, Muslim and Christian powers faced each other for centuries across frontiers that might vary from ten to one hundred miles wide. The frontier in either zone would shift from time to time and, due to almost constant raiding and skirmishing, some parts of it were depopulated. When an army from one side attacked the other, it departed from heavily populated areas defended by forts and passed through less densely populated areas. Eventually, the troups encountered only widely scattered, impoverished settlements, interspersed with gradually decreasing numbers of friendly fortified outposts. The army then began confronting enemy outposts, more and more enemy settlements, and then the enemy’s populated regions.

  For over two centuries, the Duero River valley in the Iberian Peninsula served as the center of the frontier between Muslim and Christian authority. This “no-man’s-land” was subject to sudden raids by murabitun from the Muslim side and their counterparts from the Christian side. Little is known of the nature of the Christian irregulars along the frontier during the early centuries of the history of Andalus, but the advent of the A
lmohads spurred the Christian kingdoms to approve the creation of three monastic orders of knights (Santiago, Alcantara, and Calatrava), which were modeled after the murabitun.

  Nevertheless, the dynamics of life along the frontier were not characterized by an unremitting hostility toward the other side. Despite the demands of distant popes to conquer all of the peninsula, Christian rulers operated within specific local restraints and opportunities, and the people who actually lived on the frontier often found that they had much in common with the “enemy” who lived in their vicinity. The Umayyads of Andalus were usually preoccupied with subduing recalcitrant petty Muslim rulers rather than trying to expand into Christian territory. As we have seen, Muslim rulers sometimes allied with Christian rulers against fellow Muslims, and Christians allied with Muslims against fellow Christians.

  Even some of the greatest “heroes of the faith” on either side, inspected closely, reveal a striking ambiguity of cultural and even religious loyalty. The most famous of these was probably El Cid, or Rodrigo Diaz de Vivar, one of the most celebrated figures of the Reconquista. A Christian nobleman from Castile, he lost favor in Castile and moved to Zaragoza, where he served the Muslim ruler there for a decade, fighting both Christian and Muslim rivals of his master. During the mid-1080s he refused to become involved in the critical campaigns against the invading Almoravids when they posed a genuine threat to the existence of an independent Christian presence in the peninsula. When he had the chance, he seized the Muslim city of Valencia in 1094 and ruled it until his death in 1099, defying rival Muslim and Christian rulers. Diaz’s ambivalent identity is apparent in the honorific by which he is known—“El Cid”—which derives from the term al-sayyid, an Arabic term of respect and honor. The legend that grew up around El Cid over subsequent centuries, portraying him as a champion of Christianity against Islam, was obviously the result of a highly selective approach to his career.

  A similar situation existed along the Anatolian frontier. The Taurus Mountains, as well defined as they are, did not suggest to either the Muslims or the Byzantines a natural border between the Dar al-Islam and the Byzantine territories. Although the Arab conquests did not push westward of them by much, Arab settlements did slowly extend onto the Anatolian plateau. The Arabs also swept to the northeast of the Taurus into Azerbaijan. As early as the reign of the Abbasid caliph al-Mansur (754–775), volunteers from Khorasan moved to this Byzantine frontier in order to engage in commerce and engage in jihad. Most of the Arab settlers lived in towns. By the middle of the ninth century, the largest of the towns were Malatya and Tarsus.

  Both Malatya and Tarsus served as bases for attacks on the Byzantines, but Tarsus presents a special case. For the first two centuries of the Abbasid era, the city’s economy was dependent on the institutionalization of jihad, or ghaza, as it was sometimes rendered. The latter term was an Arabic word used to refer to the bedouin raids or attacks on each other or on settlements. A raider in such an attack was a ghazi. Although jihad—usually understood as a war of conquest for the propagation of Islam or a war in defense of Islam against an outside threat—technically has a different connotation from ghaza; the chroniclers who reported on the activities of the Arab–Byzantine frontier used the two words interchangeably. This may reflect the changed reality of the time, when conquests did not come as easily as they had during the first century of Muslim history.

  By the tenth century, the concept of jihad had become central to Muslim identity and had endowed frontiers with cosmic significance. By this time, the Shari‘a had divided the world into two realms, the realm of Islam (Dar al-Islam) and the non-Muslim world, or realm of war (Dar al-Harb). A dweller in the realm of war was an enemy to whom the law offered no protection. Muslims had an obligation to attack him in his own realm, and if he entered the realm of Islam and was killed, no one was held culpable. Conflict with the inhabitants of the Dar al-Harb was assumed to last until the end of time. A permanent peace with the infidels was, therefore, an impossibility. A ruler could arrange a temporary truce if it served the interests of the Umma, but it was not legally binding. Jihad was understood to be a collective obligation: A group of Muslims had to be fighting at all times, or the community was guilty of a sin against God. Jihad became an individual obligation only when the ruler had mobilized an army in response to an enemy invasion.

  Jihad was a serious matter of shedding blood, and thus the jurists framed it with numerous qualifications. Jihad could not be declared without first calling upon the target population to accept Islam or pay the head tax as a mark of tributary status. It was permissible to kill infidel warriors, but not women, children, old men, the blind, or lunatics, unless they were unexpectedly engaged in warfare. A Muslim commander was given wide latitude in his choice of disposing of male prisoners. He could kill them, enslave them, or free them as tributary subjects, but he could not allow them to return to the realm of the infidel. Women and children could only be enslaved or freed as tributary subjects. The rationale for these options was that returning a nonMuslim to the Dar al-Harb would extend the length of time necessary to conquer it, and the Shari‘a did not provide for the possibility of an infidel’s permanent residence in the realm of Islam other than as a slave or tributary subject.

  The obligation of engaging in jihad was a requirement that God had enjoined upon the Umma as a whole—not one that the ruler could command. Individual participation was voluntary, and as long as a few were active, the collective requirement was fulfilled. Some of the mujahidun (“those who engage in jihad,” often transliterated as “mujahideen”) or ghazis were young men who engaged in raids for a short time before entering their intended careers as craftsmen, merchants, or scholars. They understood their service to be an act of worship as well as the fulfillment of an obligation, and they placed their perceived duty to God before their educational or career plans. Others were Sufis who saw jihad to be the outward expression of their inward quest. Still others made an occupation of raiding (some of them became quite wealthy from the spoils of war). The largest cities of the empire—particularly those of the Iranian plateau—financed the construction of ribats in Tarsus where their young men could stay while engaging in jihad/ghaza. They also supplied them with food and spending money until they acquired spoils from their raids. Muslims clearly viewed Tarsus as a permanent base for raiding Byzantine lands, and the expansion of territory was not the objective. This phase of ghaza ended in 965, when the Byzantines embarked upon their reconquest of the area and depopulated Tarsus.

  The Byzantine frontier again became the scene of institutionalized raiding under the Turks a century later. As we have seen, the first bands of Turkish herdsmen who entered the Buyid realms of the Dar al-Islam in the early eleventh century caused havoc in Iran, Iraq, and Azerbaijan. When the Saljuqs replaced the Buyids at mid-century, they tried to direct the Turkmen’s attention to Anatolia and away from Muslim territory. After Manzikert, in 1071, most of the Anatolian plateau lay open to the Turkmen. Christian villagers remained the majority population on the Anatolian plateau for two or three more centuries, but the constant threat from raiders increasingly concentrated the Christian population along the edges of the peninsula. During the twelfth and thirteenth centuries, Armenian Christians were concentrated in eastern Anatolia and in south-central Anatolia around the bend of the Mediterranean (Cilicia), while Orthodox Christians were concentrated in the extreme western littoral and along the Black Sea coast. As the Sultanate of Rum grew in power at Konya from 1116 until its defeat at the hands of the Golden Horde in 1243, Turkish raiders operated in the zones between the Sultanate of Rum and the Christian societies.

  The Turkish raiders of the no-man’s-land between the Muslim and Christian polities were known as gazis (the transliteration of “ghazis” when applied to the Turks). The Turks of Central Asia, like the bedouin of the Arabian Peninsula, regarded raiding as part of their pattern of subsistence, to supplement the meager return from their herds of animals. When they arrived in Anatolia, they typ
ically did not immediately settle down, but rather continued to herd and raid. They soon learned that raids on Muslim neighbors resulted in unpleasant punishment from the central authorities, but that those same authorities encouraged the raiding of nearby Christian territories.

  The Turks, like the Arabs before them, rationalized their raids as a religious act, and other Muslims came to understand them as such. The frontier society of the gazis offered an adrenalin rush to adventurers, a sense of freedom to those who felt oppressed under a centralized government, the possibility of wealth to the needy, and a ripe field of untutored souls to the missionary. Like most frontier areas, it was egalitarian in the sense that if a man could contribute to the goals of the group, he was accepted into it. Despite the fact that gaza was increasingly rationalized as a specifically Islamic religious act, identities and loyalties were as fluid as on the Iberian frontier. Occasionally Christians who had been victimized by gazas sought to join a gazi band, in a classic example of the attitude expressed by the phrase, “if you can’t beat them, join them.” Gazis not only accepted non-Muslims (and non-Turkish Muslims) as compatriots, but also shared the spoils equally with them. A Christian ruler (ostensibly defending his realm against the Muslim threat) who was fighting a fellow Christian would occasionally invite gazis to join him in a campaign, and gazis would occasionally seek alliances with Christian rulers against “wayward” fellow Muslims.