by Hugh Kennedy
Anyone who knows about astronomy will see that this is true. It is well known that the number of degrees in the heavens is 360 and that the heavens are divided into twelve constellations and that each constellation is thirty degrees. This makes 360 degrees in all. They then multiplied the number of degrees in the heavens by 66⅔, that is the length of each degree, and the total was twenty-four thousand miles. This is certain and there is no doubt about it.
Then the Banū Mūsā returned to Ma’mūn and told him what they had done, and that this agreed with what he had seen in the ancient books. He wished to confirm this in another location so he sent them to the Kufa area where they repeated the experiment they had conducted in Sinjar. They found the two calculations agreed and Ma’mūn acknowledged the truth of what the ancients had written on the subject.6
The account reveals the respect that intellectuals in the caliph’s circle had for the ancients, whose works they could now read in the new translations. But their respect was not uncritical, and they needed to test what they had read rather than being overawed by the ancients’ authority. We can also see their commitment to practical scientific method, the statement of a hypothesis and the use of experimental evidence to prove it and, perhaps most impressive, the care taken to make sure that the experiment could be replicated, in the same area and then in an entirely different one. All this demonstrates a truly scientific approach that has few parallels in the post-classical, pre-modern age.
THE RELIGIOUS SCIENCES AND HISTORY WRITING
The prolific literary culture of the Abbasid caliphate expressed itself in many different ways. For a lot of people in ninth-century Baghdad, both intellectuals and commoners, the most important of these were probably the collections of Traditions of the Prophet, which were being gathered and discussed in numerous assemblies in the city. People came from all over the Muslim world to the great city to listen to the masters expound and to garner new and unusual material. At the same time leaders of the emerging law schools, such as Ahmad b. Hanbal, lectured and wrote. At one level this activity was a result of the caliphal system of government. Without the financial impetus and the development of this huge city, the circles and gatherings would never have appeared. At another level, however, the Abbasid court in the ninth century was not where these Islamic sciences developed, and indeed the court and the scholars were in many ways at odds. Poetry and science could thrive in the Abbasid palaces and the homes of their rich and powerful courtiers, but the collection of Traditions did not. These religious studies were taught in mosques and private houses, not at court.
Abbasid court culture also encouraged the development of historical writing, though here again much of it took place in studies and libraries far removed from the palace. The greatest master of the age was Abū Jafar al-Tabarī (d. 923). Tabarī was a Persian by origin from the area of Tabaristan (hence the name) on the southern shores of the Caspian Sea. He came to study in Baghdad when still a young man and lived there for most of the rest of his adult life. He seems to have led an austere bachelor life—there is no mention of any close family—and he lived off the rents of the family estates in his native Tabaristan, which were brought to him every year by pilgrims passing through the capital on their way to the Holy Cities. Despite his Persian origins, he wrote exclusively in Arabic. His History of the Prophets and Kings is a huge collection of material relating to the pre-Islamic and Islamic past, virtually a one-man library. In the English translation it appears in thirty-eight volumes, each of them more than 250 pages long. Nor was this all: Tabarī also wrote a Commentary on the Qur’ān which was almost as long.
Tabarī’s economic independence meant that he was not a court historian and there seems to be no record that he ever met any of the caliphs of his time or attended their courts. He did not actively criticize their regime, but he records with vivid honesty such discreditable episodes as Caliph Mansūr’s execution of Abū Muslim or the avoidable disasters of the civil wars which followed the death of Hārūn al-Rashīd in 809. He also incorporates the biography of the Shiite Muhammad the Pure Soul, who led an uprising against Abbasid rule in 762, which is deeply sympathetic to the rebel. There is no evidence, either, that he denigrated the Umayyad caliphs whom the Abbasids had overthrown. In short, there is no evidence that he wrote to please the court or that he was subject to any sort of censorship. He had his prejudices—a dislike of popular rebellions and uprisings and extreme religious views—but they were essentially those of the pious Baghdad bourgeoisie of his era.
In the later parts of his chronicle, he does incorporate what might be called official history. This reflects the policies of Abbasid caliphs anxious to publicize their roles as military champions of Islam. The warrior caliph Mutasim appears to have commissioned long and detailed accounts of his campaigns against the Byzantines, notably the sack of Amorion in 833 and the campaigns of his generals against non-Muslim rebels in northern Iran. Later on Caliph Mutadid asked for his campaigns against the Zanj rebels in southern Iraq to be recorded with the same care. We also know that in the later ninth century letters from generals and provincial governors describing the defeats of rebels were read out in the mosque at Friday prayers and some of these were included by Tabarī in his great work. In general, though, Tabarī’s multifaceted history reflects the pluralist society in which it was written, a society in which the caliphal government made no effort to control or dictate what intellectuals wrote.
The history writing of this period was deeply humanist, that is to say that it portrayed events as being caused primarily by human agency, and it attached enormous importance to human character, describing the main actors with all their faults and strengths. Direct divine intervention in the course of human affairs was rarely invoked. Of course, it was acknowledged that God protected some virtuous people and equally that he punished some wicked ones, but it was human beings who made the decisions about whether to act well or badly. The measure of good or bad behaviour among rulers was rarely that of strict piety, only the Umayyad caliph Umar II was credited with being motivated by religious goals and his reign was too short to come to any conclusions. The qualities expected of a good ruler were a concern to defend Islam and Muslims, wisdom and foresight, behaving in moderation in all things and dealing justly with all men. Caliphs and other rulers failed because of their stupidity, vanity and arrogance. It was a scale of values that Shakespeare, among others, would have recognized.
THE INCLUSIVENESS OF CALIPHAL CULTURE
One important aspect of this cultural activity was its inclusiveness. The Abbasid caliphate was a deeply Muslim polity; it was ruled by Muslims and the caliph was, as we have seen, God’s representative on earth. At the same time, it was broadly tolerant of religious difference and there is very little evidence for the ill-treatment of non-Muslim populations. The city of Baghdad itself had been founded as the capital for a Muslim dynasty and its official name, Madinat al-Salam, the City of Peace, suggested an Islamic identity. Yet within this new city a Christian community had developed. They built churches and monasteries and no one seems to have stood in their way. The hierarchies of the various Christian churches in the caliphate were recognized by the caliphs. One patriarch of the Church of the East, Timothy, was a regular visitor to the court of Caliph Mahdī. Christian administrators continued to work in the higher echelons of the bureaucracy, though vastly outnumbered by Muslims, and, as we have seen, Christians played an important part in translating Greek into Arabic.
By and large, churches and synagogues were respected and there are few reports of deliberate attacks on these places of worship. The cathedral in Damascus was demolished by the Umayyad caliph Walīd, but that was because he wanted to build a (still surviving) mosque on the site and the Christians were amply compensated in cash and by the restoration of some churches which they had lost at the time of the original Muslim conquest of the city seventy years before. The great cathedral at Edessa (now Urfa in southern Turkey) was damaged when some of the marble columns were taken for
building mosques. In Baghdad we hear of churches being attacked by mobs, but this was part of a general civil disturbance rather than a product of caliphal policy.
Just as there was no attempt to take over or destroy churches in general, so Zoroastrian fire temples continued to exist in areas like Fars, in southern Iran, where large numbers of them were still functioning in the tenth century. Indeed they were valued by at least some Muslims because the old soot from the eternal flames in the fire temples made the blackest and most permanent ink. Most were abandoned from the eleventh century onwards because increasing conversion to Islam meant that they no longer attracted worshippers, but there was no official move to close them.
The disused temples and other monuments of classical antiquity were often admired and, while they might also be used as quarries for building materials, there was no attempt to destroy them for ideological reasons. On this subject, Tabarī records an interesting discussion which is said to have occurred between Caliph Mansūr and his Persian adviser Khālid b. Barmak, who was one of the men in charge of the building operations in Baghdad. Mansūr suggested demolishing the huge brick palace of the Sasanian Persian kings in the old capital of Ctesiphon nearby and using the rubble in his new city. Khālid replied, ‘I do not think that is a good idea, O Commander of the Faithful,’ and when the caliph asked him why, he said, ‘It is one of the proofs of Islam by which the observer is convinced that people like its lords were not swept away by the power of this world but only by the power of God.’ The caliph said he was wrong and that he only said that because of his Persian connections.
Mansūr ordered that the palace be demolished and a section of it was, but it was soon apparent that the demolition and transport of the materials was more expensive than making them new on site. When he consulted Khālid again about what should be done, the reply was that he should complete the demolition or people would say he had given up. Once again, the caliph rejected his advice and the great Ctesiphon arch still stands to this day.
It would be misleading to say that this was an equal society where people of different faiths lived together as fellow citizens. Christians, Jews and other non-Muslim religious minorities were second-class citizens in a number of ways, not being allowed, at least in theory, to bear arms or ride horses, both public indications of status. At the same time, they participated in the economic and intellectual life of the society and their cultural contributions were accepted and admired as an important part of the vibrant mix which characterized the life of the Abbasid caliphate.
ABBASID CULTURE REMEMBERED
The memory of the glories of Abbasid court culture lingered on in less expansive days. The personalities of the period, their characters, deeds and sayings remained part of the intellectual hinterland of Arab writers and thinkers for centuries. An interesting example of this is Ibn al-Sāī’s Consorts of the Caliphs. Ibn al-Sāī (d. 1276) lived in Baghdad and he was actually in the city at the time when it was sacked by the Mongols and the Abbasid caliph was put to death, in 1258. He himself survived this trauma and lived to a ripe old age. The book was probably written before that date. It consists of thirty-eight brief lives, some of them only a few lines long, of the female partners of the caliphs, celebrating their wit, their wealth and their piety. The author takes the story down to his own days, trying to show that the great women of the contemporary (thirteenth-century) Abbasid court were worthy inheritors of a great tradition, but the women of his own time lived virtuous and sober lives and talked only in prose. It was the women of the early Abbasid period who had panache and wit and the ability to make poetry come alive.
There are many memorable figures in the collection, but, to give a flavour, let us hear some of the story of Mahbūba, beloved of Caliph Mutawakkil. She was one of a group of 400 slave girls given to the caliph by one of his courtiers, but ‘in his eyes she surpassed them all’. She was famous for her ready wit and clever ripostes. One of the courtiers tells the following story:
I was once in the presence of Mutawakkil when he was drinking. He handed Mahbūba an apple perfumed with a scented musk blend. She kissed it and took her leave. Then one of her own slaves appeared with a piece of paper which she handed to Mutawakkil. He read it, laughed, and tossed the paper to me to read. This is what it said:
‘You-fragrance of an apple I had to myself
You ignite in me the fire of ecstasy
I weep and complain of my malady
And of my grief’s intensity.
If an apple could weep, then the one I hold
Would shed such tears of pity
If you do not know what my soul has suffered,
Look, the proof is in my body.
If you gaze upon it you will see
One unable to suffer patiently.’
The poem was set to music and became a popular song.
The same courtier remembered another occasion:
The caliph said, ‘I paid Qabīha7 the Poetess a visit and found she had written my name on her cheek using scented musk blend. I swear, Alī [the court poet who was sitting with him], I have never seen anything more beautiful than that streak of black against her white cheek. Go ahead and compose a poem about that!’
Mahbūba was sitting behind the curtain, listening to us talk and in the time it took for an inkstand and a scroll of paper to be brought and for Alī to formulate his thoughts, she had already improvised the following verses:
‘She wrote “Jafar”8 in musk on her cheek
How lovely that streak where the musk left its mark!
On her face she wrote just one line,
But she etched many more on my heart.
Who can help a master in thrall to his slave,
Subservient in his heart, but plain to see,
Or one whose secret desire is Jafar
May he drink his fill from your lips.’
Alī was dumbfounded by being upstaged like this.
In another story from the same courtier we hear:
Mutawwakil had a falling-out with Mahbūba and found it very hard to be apart from her. In the end the pair made up. Meanwhile I went to see him. He told me he’d had a dream that they had been reconciled, so he called a servant and said to him, ‘Go and find out how she is and what she is doing.’
The servant returned and told him that she was just singing.
‘Can that woman really be singing when I am so angry with her?’ he said to me. ‘Come on, let’s find out what she is crooning about.’
We headed to her room and this is what she was singing:
‘I wander the palace, but I see no one,
No one will answer my plaint it would seem.
I feel as though I’ve committed a sin,
One I can repent of but never redeem.
Will someone plead my case to a king
Who ended a quarrel when he came in a dream?
Yet when the dawn broke and the sun shone,
He forsook me again and left me alone.’
Mutawakkil was visibly moved. Realizing he was there, she came out of her room, and I made myself scarce. She told him she’d had a dream in which he’d come to her and they’d made up.
That is why she had composed the poem, put it to music and sung it. Mutawakkil was so touched that he decided to stay and drink with her. She made sure I was well rewarded.
But the days of musk and wine were brought to a brutal end with the caliph’s assassination in 861. For all her beauty, intelligence and wealth, Mahbūba was still a slave. When Mutawakkil was killed his slaves were divided up and Mahbūba went to a Turkish soldier, Wasīf, one of the conspirators who had plotted the caliph’s death.
The courtier’s account continues:
One day, as he was having his morning drink of wine, Wasīf ordered that Mutawakkil’s slaves should be brought before him. They arrived in all their splendour, adorned, perfumed and dressed in brightly coloured clothes, bedecked with jewels, except for Mahbūba who came dressed in pure mourning white and not wearing a
ny make-up.
The slaves sang, drank and made merry, as did Wasīf. Carried away by it all, he commanded Mahbūba to sing. She picked up her lute and sobbed as she sang:
‘What sweetness does life hold for me
When I cannot see Jafar?
A king I saw with my own eyes
Murdered, rolled in the dust.
The sick and the sorrowful
They can all heal;
But not Mahbūba—
If she saw death for sale
She would give everything she has to buy it
And join him in the grave.
For the bereaved
Death is sweeter than life.’
The song struck home. Enraged, Wasīf was on the point of having her killed when Bughā [another Turkish soldier], who happened to be present, said, ‘Give her to me!’
Bughā took her, gave her her freedom and allowed her to live wherever she pleased. She left Samarra for Baghdad where she lived in obscurity and died of grief.
May God have mercy on her and reward her for her devotion to the memory of her beloved master.9