Sea of Faith

by Stephen O'Shea

  Elsewhere a period of adjustment necessarily took place. From the Taurus Mountains of southwestern Turkey clockwise through Syria and Palestine and all the way around the great sunny smile of the southern Mediterranean to the Pyrenees in the west, Islam was in control. The vast majority of its peoples were dhimmi, that is, Christians and Jews protected by Muslim authority in exchange for reduced rights and a higher rate of taxation. To spare the sensibilities of the Muslim minority, the ringers of church bells were everywhere enjoined to discretion; further, churches and synagogues might be repaired but not replaced with new ones; and no one from these communities of People of the Book might dare insult the Prophet or possess any slave who had embraced Islam. Aside from having to put up with these and other marks of social inferiority, the infidel could pursue his livelihood and worship his god with the blessing of the qadi, the chief religious magistrate of the Islamic city. Convivencia, imperfect and impermanent, was about to flourish. Paradoxically, the conditions for its first full flowering in the Mediterranean—in Córdoba,, the capital of al-Andalus—were fostered by acts that had nothing remotely to do with living together. Once again, Muslim turned on Muslim.

  In 750 in Damascus a mob broke into the tomb of Muawiya, the first of the Umayyad caliphs, and scattered his remains to the winds. He had been dead only seventy years. Muawiya's successors met similar posthumous indignities—the bodies of the men who had directed a century of conquest from Syria were unceremoniously disinterred and thrown out into the street. The rulers of an empire that stretched from the Indus to the Atlantic had become carrion. Their descendants barely had time to deplore the insult: following an initial massacre of the caliphal clan, a conciliatory truce was declared, for the sake of unity in the umma, and the remaining Umayyad princelings were invited to a banquet at Abu Futrus, in Palestine. Seventy dignitaries showed up; not one left the table alive.

  The perpetrators of this bloodbath were members of a Qurayshi clan descended from Abbas, one of Muhammad's uncles. What distinguished the Ab-basids, as the dynastic family is known, from other Quraysh disgruntled by the Umayyad monopoly on power was their ability to harness the resentments of converts to Islam. In Persia and Iraq the black flag of revolt had been raised repeatedly—among the shia and, most important, the sophisticated mawali of the old Sassanid empire, who could no longer stomach the precedence given the Arabian originators of Islam in the exercise of legitimacy and the division of wealth. There may also have been in their attitude more than a little age-old Mesopotamian disdain toward their desert neighbors. Although the Persians, in particular, did not immediately get what they were after—the Abbasids proved as jealous of Qurayshi prerogative as the Umayyads—their backing of the rival Arabian clan brought about one great change: imperial Islam moved east, to the Sawad, where the Tigris and Euphrates come close together.

  The Abbasid city of Baghdad or madinat al-salam (City of Peace), near the old Sassanid capital of Ctesiphon, was created in 762, the radiating spokes of its avenues nicely symbolizing its newfound location at the center of the universe. In a trice the cultural chameleon that was early Islam left the precincts of the Graeco-Roman world of Syria for the splendors of Persia. Damascus was a memory, though the shift in intellectual and artistic influence was not absolute. Far from it: in the next centuries Baghdadi scholars—Christian, Jew, and Muslim—would translate (as in both "move" and "render into Arabic") an enormous classical corpus of Greek and Roman thought. Al-Kindi, a ninth-century Baghdadi thinker, encapsulated the city's broad-mindedness when he wrote: "We should not be ashamed to acknowledge truth from whatever source it comes to us, even if it is brought to us by former generations and foreign peoples. For him who seeks the truth there is nothing of higher value than truth itself." At the same time as the wisdom of the west came flowing in, others brought to the city goods, techniques, and ideas direct from the wellsprings of India and China. Baghdad became both clearinghouse and producer of civilization.

  The city's influence spread into all fields of intellectual endeavor. As their Arabic names indicate, algebra, algorithm, even "Arabic" numerals (in fact an Indian import) would be among Baghdad's many contributions to mathematics. Its researchers scoured ancient texts for medical insights; its theologians wrestled with Aristotle and the siren song of reason centuries before scholastics in the West would do the same for Christian revelation; its engineers and agronomists perfected the waterwheel, improved irrigation, tried new crops; its geographers mapped the world, its astronomers the sky; its artists and artisans rivaled their contemporaries in glittering Constantinople. And its Abbasid caliphs, their world still alive to us through The Thousand and One Nights, grew wealthy to a degree that would have shocked the first successors to Muhammad's leadership in Madina. When, in 802, the caliph Harun al-Rashid heard of a remote monarch whose fledgling society might one day prove useful as an ally, he elected to send a gift as a token of his magnificence; the Baghdadi embassy bearing precious silks and leading an elephant named Abul Abbas to the court of Charlemagne in Aachen was no doubt greeted with the awe we today would reserve for a visit from extraterrestrials.

  For Mediterranean history, the genesis of Baghdad was an event on the same order of magnitude as the founding of Constantinople. The East, indeed the Far East, had drawn closer to the shores of the inland sea, now unimpeded in its access through the smooth continuum of Islam. If the ideas and innovations of Asia were the first to be felt, its peoples particularly the nomads of the steppes—would soon venture into the Fertile Crescent and beyond, with untold consequences for the region. Yet even as Baghdad's emergence as the metropole of Islam helped contract cultural distance, the stubborn realities of geography conspired to reduce the caliphate's political influence. Simply put, Baghdad was too far to the east to hold on to the west. Centered at Damascus, the Arab empire had begun showing signs of strain—ruled from Baghdad, it came apart, never again to be reunited. The radiating avenues of the great city turned out to be centrifugal.

  The most spectacular instance of flight from the center involved Abd al-Rahman ibn Muawiya al-Dakhil. A Syrian prince, grandson of an Umayyad caliph, Abd al-Rahman had remained in hiding during the Abbasid coup and shown enough sense to turn down the invitation to dine at Abu Futrus. He and his brother, preferring the safety of the upper reaches of Mesopotamia, were nonetheless discovered by agents of the Abbasid usurpers. Abd al-Rahman escaped capture by swimming across the Euphrates; his brother turned back in midstream, believing his pursuers' shouted promises of mercy. Safe on the western bank of the river, the fugitive Umayyad prince watched as his credulous sibling had his throat slit.

  It is not known how, exactly, Abd al-Rahman managed to elude Abbasid bounty hounters as he crossed Palestine, Egypt, Cyrenaica, Ifriqiya, and the Maghrib on his five-year journey to al-Andalus. He remained in the dar al Islam, the House of Islam, all the while putting as much distance as possible between himself and Baghdad. One tradition has him holing up with distaff kinsmen in Morocco—his mother had been a Berber slave brought to Syria—until conditions were ripe for him to cross the Strait of Gibraltar and rally his An-dalusi supporters. At the time north Africa and Iberia were experiencing revolts that mirrored the upheavals in the east—dissatisfied Berber converts and conquerors resented the privileges of the Arab minority and, like Munuza of the Pyrenees, set up principalities independent of the control of the emirs. Adding to the strife, the division between the two umbrella clan structures obtaining in the Arab world—the Yemen, or "south Arabs," and the Qays, or "north Arabs," to which the Quraysh belonged—was creating havoc in al-Andalus at this time. A factor in all the civil wars to afflict the umma in the seventh and eighth centuries, this distinction was neither innocuous nor folkloric: one unfortunate Qaysite emir of early al-Andalus fell into the hands of his Yemen enemies and ended his reign crucified between a pig and a dog.

  On August 14, 755, Abd al-Rahman bravely disembarked on the troubled shores of al-Andalus, earning his laqab—official sobriquet—as al-Da
khil (the immigrant). Alerted long before to his imminent arrival and impatient to put an end to the strife, a large force of Umayyad loyalists awaited him. He captured Córdoba,, made it his capital, and proclaimed himself emir, thus setting himself up for a life's work—he ruled for thirty-two years—unifying al-Andalus by mercilessly crushing restive Berbers and rival Arabs and safeguarding his hard-won possession from Abbasid and Frankish intrigue. Before finally submitting to the emir, the leaders of the important northern city of Zaragoza took care of the Franks for him, repulsing Charlemagne and hastening the disastrous retreat through Roncesvalles. (Charlemagne's hostility to the Umayyads explains why an Abbasid elephant arrived at his door as a gift.) As for his former persecutors, Abd al-Rahman proved searingly pitiless: early on in his reign, he had several truculent Abbasid sympathizers decapitated; an itinerant merchant, at the emir's behest, then set off with the severed heads salted away in his baggage and, in the middle of one night, placed them in the main market square of Kairouan, capital of Abbasid Ifriqiya. The cries of horror as the shops opened the following morning eventually reached the ears of the caliph in Baghdad, who was moved to say of the fearsome Umayyad survivor: "Praise be to God who has placed a sea between me and such a demon!"

  For all the grisly business attendant on its founding, the unitary state of Umayyad al-Andalus would eventually become a beacon of learning and the arts, its civilization bred of convivencia attaining refinements then available only in Baghdad and Constantinople. The immigrant, known to history as Abd al-Rahman I, laid the groundwork by stabilizing al-Andalus from within and fixing its borders without: after much skirmishing, Umayyad Spain came to occupy a good two-thirds of the peninsula, the no-man's-land (tierras despobladas) between the petty Christian kingdoms in the north and the grand emirate to the south stretching, roughly, along the valleys of the rivers Ebro and Duero. By contrast, along the Guadalquivir, Córdoba,'s river, emerged an everyman's land.

  The dhimmi—a majority of the populace of al-Andalus until about 950—played a major role in the life of the capital, participating in its institutions and culture. Mozarab Christians, although second-class citizens and often subject to punitive measures, took part in the government, as scribes, advisers, administrators, diplomats, and soldiers. Christian feasts, themselves adapted from pagan rites, enlivened the life of the capital: the midsummer night's festival of John the Baptist became a citywide celebration.* Other Christian proclivities were welcomed as well—the monastic vineyards in the suburbs became destinations of choice for thirsty but discreet Muslim grandees, and encounters between hedonists of different faiths were commonplace in the city's shaded groves of leisure. Out of this cultural promiscuity, however fleeting, greatness emerged.

  Few people could have been happier at this turn of events than the Jews of Iberia. After the Visigothic nightmare, they would know three uninterrupted centuries of peace under the Muslims. Al-Andalus was for them Sefarad, hence the term sephardic. Given time to develop, a vibrant literature emerged among the Jewish Andalusi commmunity, and its poets competed with their Christian and Muslim counterparts in technical virtuosity and still-haunting flights of feeling. By the tenth century the sacred and once-somnolent language of Hebrew had been dusted off, its use for the study of the Talmud complemented by its employment in profane artistry, prefiguring the synthesis of Kabbalism, a poetic approach to the divine that would characterize later medieval Jewish thought in the western Mediterranean. In more mundane matters, sephardic merchants exploited their ties of kinship with communities scattered throughout the dar al Islam, and Jewish scholars, traders, and doctors served as multilingual ambassadors for al-Andalus. In the tenth century one such physician, Hasday ibn Shaprut, became the de facto foreign minister for the Umayyad ruler, negotiating peace treaties with the non-Muslim kingdoms in northern Spain and, in an unparalleled moment of medical diplomacy, successfully treating a Christian Castilian royal, Sancho the Fat, for obesity within the walls of Islamic Córdoba,. Shaprut, ever the weaver of networks, once tried contacting the distant Jewish kingdom of the Khazars, north of the Black Sea. Even after the Córdoba, of the Umayyads fell (1031) and al-Andalus broke up into a passel of independent city-states, the age of tolerance continued: in the eleventh century, for example, Shmuel HaNagid, poet, scholar, soldier, and leader of the Jewish community, served as grand vizier, or first minister, to the emir of Granada.

  The development of such sophistication took generations. When Abd al-Rahman I first authorized the expropriation of the Visigothic church of Cordoba and began its transformation into the splendid Mezquita, no one could have predicted the near-miraculous burgeoning of civilization that would occur in the following centuries. Indeed, the emir's own writings (or those attributed to him) suggest a backward-looking ruler seized by nostalgia for Syria and sorrow for his slain kin. For Rusafa, his Cordoban country estate named after the Umayyad compound in Syria, the emir imported plants and cuttings from the Middle East, no doubt hoping to create there a garden of earthly regrets. It inspired him to write a lament for the displaced that transcends his own plight:

  In the midst of Rusafa a palm

  has appeared in a Western land,

  far from the home of palms.

  So I said: This is me—

  for I, too, am in exile,

  far from my family and friends.

  In exile you have grown tall,

  and alike we're far from home.

  However exquisite the melancholy derived from going back in search of lost time, its expression in al-Andalus was not accompanied by the hand-wringing about senescence and apocalypse common in Christian Europe. For one thing, the Muslims had won, and the Christians lost, a world—an inescapable fact that would have colored thinking about the changed circumstances. Also, the Muslim immigrants to the Iberian frontier—more than a million in the ninth and tenth centuries—brought with them the know-how of the old country. Damascus was a memory in al-Andalus too, but it hardly ceased to count as a font of traditions and techniques. Add to that the contributions of Baghdad, dynastic enemy but cultural cousin and trading partner (especially for Andalusi Jews), and it becomes easier to understand how al-Andalus made its predecessor, Visigothic Spain, seem like a benighted backwater. To cite just some of the crops the Arab immigrants brought to Spain is to realize how great was the transfer of knowledge from east to west: cotton, rice, hard wheat, sorghum, sugarcane, saffron, lemon, lime, orange, apricot, fig, pomegranate, banana, watermelon, spinach, artichoke, eggplant. One wonders what the Visigoths ate.

  Under the Umayyads, large portions of the peninsula's wilderness came under cultivation—the huerta of Valencia, still one of the most astonishing deltas of agriculture in all of Europe, was fully developed by the Arabs and Berbers. A tenth-century Iraqi visitor, Ibn Hawkal, gave an assessment of Andalusi prosperity:

  There are uncultivated lands, but the greater part of the country is cultivated and densely settled . . . Plenty and content govern every aspect of life. Possession of goods and the means of acquiring wealth are common to all classes of the population. These benefits even extend to artisans and workmen, thanks to the light taxes, the good state of the country and the wealth of its ruler—for he has no need to impose heavy levies and taxes.

  Another traveler in al-Andalus noted the abundance there of norias, the type of waterwheel used in irrigation for which the Syrian city of Hama is famous. By his reckoning, in the valley of the Guadalquivir alone, five thousand were in use.

  Stomachs full and peace prolonged, the peoples of al-Andalus lived a moment of grace, one that can be called an embarrassment of sophistication in light of its begrudging mention in most histories of Europe. In the ninth century, under Abd al-Rahman II (the immigrant's grandson), Córdoba, owed much of its cultural effervescence to the emir's patronage of one Ziryab, a singer, who, the story goes, was thrown out of the caliph's court in Baghdad by a teacher jealous of the younger man's voice. Welcomed in Córdoba,, handsomely paid, and housed by the Umayyads
for thirty-five years near the immigrant's old estate at Rusafa, Ziryab (Blackbird) became the cultural commissar of the city, dictating fashion and dispensing savoir faire as befits any self-respecting metropolitan dandy stuck out in an aspiring boomtown. Few aspects of social convention escaped his notice. Among his many injunctions, Ziryab instructed the Córdobans how to serve dinner (the composition and order of courses), how to recognize and cook wild asparagus, how to put away their dark clothes for summer whites (although white had been traditionally reserved for mourning), how to coif themselves presentably, how to make the most of their natural assets (he is believed to have founded a beauty institute), how to apply perfume, use toothpaste and deodorant, and generally live an urbane ninth-century life. More important was the effect of his principal talent—said to have committed a repertoire of ten thousand songs to memory, Ziryab influenced the development of Andalusi music, echoes of which can still be discerned in flamenco laments. The mix of love, loss, and longing, so prevalent in the songs performed for the upper classes of al-Andalus society, is suspected to have eventually crossed the Pyrenees and helped foster the troubadour ethic of courtly love. If so, it is a neat little oddity that the first great troubadour, William of Poitou, should have come from, of all places, Poitiers—and that his father attended the consecration of St. Hilaire le Grand, the church sacked by the pioneers of al-Andalus. An even nicer coincidence, given the memorial examined at Moussais-la-Bataille, is what is said to be another of Ziryab's gifts to western Europe: the game of chess.

  The famed norias, or waterwheels, on the Orontes River in Hama, Syria.

  Alongside a healthy respect for the senses came a commitment to the life of the mind. At its apogee of political and military power in the tenth century, Umayyad Córdoba, was also a city of scholars and books. The library of its ruler—by no means the only library in the city—was said to have contained 400,000 volumes, at a time when the greatest libraries in Christian Europe would have counted perhaps four hundred. One of its Umayyad princes, al-Hakam II, seems to have been a veritable bookworm, sending out agents throughout the dar al Islam to bid on the latest manuscripts and to recruit the best copyists. A papermaking workshop, the only one in Europe, was set up in the Andalusi town of Játiva, near Valencia. The omnivorous passions of Córdoba, were common knowledge in the Mediterranean: when, in 949, the basileus Constantine VII Porphyrogenitus sent a friendly embassy to the febrile city on the Guadalquivir, it arrived not only with mosaic tesserae to be used in the glittering mihrab of the Mezquita but also with a copy of the works of Dioscorides, the greatest medicinal botanist of antiquity, to the delight of the physician-vizier Has-day ibn Shaprut. Since no one at court could comfortably handle Dioscorides' Greek terminology, further help was solicited from Constantinople, and some two years later a monk named Nicholas arrived in Córdoba,. Along with a bilingual Sicilian Muslim, Nicholas worked with a committee of local notables (including Hasday) to make the the original Greek treasure trove, heretofore available in Córdoba, only through an incomplete Baghdadi translation, accessible to Arabic speakers in al-Andalus.