Eventually the hostility to Mohammad from the ruling families of Mecca made his position there untenable. He fled Mecca, and in 622 was accepted into Medina by a group of prominent citizens. Life in Medina had been marred by feuding between rival clans, and it seems that Mohammad’s welcome in part reflected their need for an arbitrator to prevent further strife. As it turned out, the arrival of Mohammad in Medina signified the acceptance of a new principle of spiritual leadership, to supersede the previous structure based on patriarchal kinship relations. The move to Medina is remembered by Muslims as the Hijra, which means ‘migration’, and has central importance in the early history of Islam. The migration from Mecca and the establishment of the Muslim community in Medina provides the date at which the Muslim calendar begins.
Initially the group around Mohammad was open to Jews and Christians, but it gradually became clear that the revelation was dictating a new religion in its own right, distinct from either Judaism or Christianity (though building on and surpassing the teaching of the prophets of both). Put simply, Mohammad rejected the Trinity and the divinity of Jesus, and the Jews rejected Mohammad’s presentation of himself as a Prophet after the pattern of the Jewish prophets of the Old Testament. This was important in Medina, because there were three important Jewish tribes there. Early on, Mohammad had given Jerusalem as the direction of prayer and had made other provisions that apparently conciliated Judaism. The earliest, most essential elements of Islam are strikingly congruent with Judaism in content and significance. But the Jews rejected Mohammad’s revelation and relations between them and the Muslims deteriorated. The Jewish tribes were accused of treacherous contacts with the Meccans, and in succession they were ejected from Medina; their property was confiscated and the males of the last tribe were massacred after they attempted to betray the Medinans at the Battle of the Trench.2 As the remaining inhabitants were converted, Medina became the model of a unified Muslim community—the umma.
Islam now took something like its final form, as expressed through the Qor’an. The faith was based on five pillars—the shahada—the obligation to acknowledge the existence of one God, and Mohammad as his Prophet, prayer (salat), almsgiving (zakat), pilgrimage (hajj), and the Ramadan fast. These five pillars were supplemented by social rulings, regularising and imposing a rational morality on the previous chaos of clan customs and establishing an overarching ethic of commonality and brotherhood, while reinforcing some traditions of patriarchy and clan loyalty. The institution of the blood feud was discouraged and regulated, as was divorce. Incest was outlawed, and honesty and fairness in business dealings were encouraged.
The importance of women in the story of Mohammad’s life, first Khadija, then his later wives, Aisha and others, and his daughter Fatima,3 is echoed in the provisions he made for them, which in every case limited the power of men over women, while leaving male supremacy intact. The Qor’an urged respect for women within marriage, and respect for their modesty and privacy (though it made no specific rules for women’s dress or veiling, and some have suggested that the veil originated as an elite practice, copied from the Christian Byzantine court—comparable perhaps with the custom among aristocratic Englishwomen in Victorian times). The Qor’an gave women the right to own property in their own name. It also discouraged the pre-Islamic practice of killing unwanted girl infants (in Sura 81, speaking of the Day of Judgement):
‘… when the infant girl, buried alive, is asked for what crime she was slain; when the records of men’s deeds are laid open, and heaven is stripped bare; when Hell burns fiercely and Paradise is brought near: then each soul shall know what it has done’).
Many have judged that the Qoranic ideal and Mohammad’s example were more favourable to women than later Arab and Muslim practice.4
The decade after the Hijra was marked by continuing hostility and eventually war with the ruling families of Mecca; and by missionary effort toward the tribes of Arabia as a whole. Gradually Mohammad and his followers made headway, and finally in 630 the Meccans accepted Islam and Mohammad’s supremacy. The Ka’ba of Mecca was made the central, holy shrine of Islam. Islam’s victory over the Meccans’ resistance won over most of the remaining Arab tribes. By the time of the Prophet’s death in 632 most of Arabia was unified under the new religion; vigorous, idealistic and determined to spread its dominance more widely. Islam had created a powerful religious, political and military force that was to change the face of the region, and the world.
The Arab Conquest
When Mohammad died the Muslim umma threatened to fall apart as different factions had different ideas about the succession, and some tribes sought to regain their independence. Mohammad’s friend Abu Bakr was elected as the Prophet’s successor and became the first caliph (Khalifa means successor), promising to follow Mohammad’s example (sunna). It was natural that this should include further efforts to spread the message of Islam, as Mohammad had done, both by negotiation, and by armed force, including raiding into hostile territory. Initially this meant consolidation in the southern and eastern parts of the Arabian peninsula, and then expansion northwards, into what is now Iraq and Syria. The dynamic of expansion helped to stabilise the rule of the first four caliphs (known by Sunni Muslims as the Rashidun, the righteous caliphs) but their rule was nonetheless turbulent and three of them died violently.
The crucial point at which raiding turned into more deliberate wars of conquest was the battle of Ajnadayn, near Gaza, in 634, where the Muslim Arabs defeated a Byzantine army sent to restore order in Palestine. The burst of confidence inspired by this success prompted further victories: Damascus was taken in 636 and a Byzantine relief force was decisively beaten at the battle of Yarmuk in the same year, confirming the Muslims in possession of Syria. Their enemies discovered that Islam had given the Arabs an almost invincible cohesion and confidence in bat-tle—an attribute later described by the great Arab historian Ibn Khaldun as asabiyah—which roughly translates as ‘group feeling’. In the following year the Muslim armies moved east, against the Sassanid empire.
Persia, like the Byzantine Empire, was weakened by the wars that had raged through the reign of Khosraw II. The Sassanids had repulsed initial moves by Arab raiding parties into Mesopotamia (notably at the battle of the Bridge in 634) but the royal army under King Yazdegerd III was defeated at Qadesiyya (near Hilla in modern Iraq) in 637, after which the Arabs took Ctesiphon and the whole of Mesopotamia. Arab generals persuaded the Caliph to continue the offensive against the Persians rather than allow Yazdegerd to counter-attack, and they defeated him a second time at Nahavand near Hamadan in 641. After this Sassanid resistance effectively collapsed and Yazdegerd fled east, begging local rulers to help him against the Arabs (he was killed at Merv in 651—not by the invaders but by one of his own subjects, like Darius III). The Arabs established their dominion over the Iranian plateau (though towns like Qom and Kashan fought hard before surrendering,5 and resistance in the Caspian provinces of Tabarestan continued for many years). Khorasan was conquered by 654 and despite resistance in the outlying territories along the southern coast of the Caspian and in the north-east these were all taken and Balkh captured by 707.
The conquest was not followed, for the most part, by mass murder, forced conversion or what today we would call ethnic cleansing. Instead the new Arab masters were content, as a matter of policy, simply to replace the ruling elites of the territories they had conquered. The Arab troops set up armed camps in the new lands, on the fringe of existing cities or in the form of new settlements, often on the margin between cultivated land and uncultivated territory that could be used to graze animals. The Arabs generally allowed existing proprietors, peasants and merchants to go about their business as normal, expropriating only state land, the estates of the Zoroastrian temples, and those of members of the old elites who had fled or had died in the fighting.
Religious policy was marked by the same tolerance and restraint, once the conquest was over. Mohammad had specified tolerance for Christians
and Jews (‘people of the Book’) on condition that they paid tribute, which became a special tax for non-Muslims (the jizya). But this left Iranian Zoroastrians in a grey area,6 and many fire temples were destroyed and priests killed before it became normal for Zoroastrians to be treated with similar tolerance, subject to the jizya. The example of the new rulers, and the settlement of Arab soldiers into the new territories began a slow process of Islamisation, made the easier by the similarity of many of the precepts of Islam to the familiar features of Mazdaism—righteous thought and action, judgement, heaven and hell, and so on. There was a religious ferment through this period, within which many concepts and formulae might be held in common across different sects. Consider the following:
… at whatever moment he dies eighty maiden angels will come to meet him with flowers… and a golden bedstead, and they will speak to him thus: do not fear etc.… And his fruitful work, in the form of a wondrous divine princess, a virgin, will come before him, immortal,… and she herself will guide him to heaven.7
This remarkable passage links the idea of the houris of paradise, familiar from the Qoranic context, with the idea of the Mazdaean daena leading the soul to heaven, which we encountered in Chapter 1. But this text is a Manichaean one, in the Iranian Sogdian language, from Central Asia. Bausani has given a series of significant parallels between passages in the Zoroastrian scriptures and passages in the Qor’an.8 Despite the firm, clear, guiding principle of the Mohammadan revelation, other earlier ideas continued to bubble away, sometimes to appear again later in some of the more diverse and eclectic Islamic sects.
The propertied and élite classes of Iran had an interest in converting to Islam, in order to avoid the jizya. They and more modest folk converted, and often attached themselves to Arab clans or families as mawali (clients), sometimes taking Arabic names. But most inhabitants of Iran remained non-Muslim for several centuries. The restraint of the conquerors is probably another important explanation for the success of the conquest: many of the subjects of the new empire may have been less heavily taxed than previously, and ordinary Iranians probably benefited from the replacement of a strongly hierarchical aristocratic and priestly system by the more egalitarian Islamic arrangements, with their emphasis on the duty of ordinary Muslims to the poor. But as in other epochs, the victors wrote the history; if more contemporary material from the peoples of the conquered lands had survived, the picture of tolerance might be more shaded. There were massacres at Ray and Istakhr, both Mazdaean religious centres that resisted more stubbornly than elsewhere.9
Umayyads and Abbasids
Within twenty years of Mohammad’s death, his Arab successors had conquered most of the territory we now call the Middle East. After 100 years, they controlled an area that extended from the Atlantic to the Indian Ocean. From this point onwards, Iran zamin was ruled for the most part by foreign rulers for nearly a millennium. But conquest and the problems of wealth and power it brought also created new tensions among the victorious Arabs.
The fourth caliph, Ali, was Mohammad’s cousin, and had married his daughter Fatima. But despite these close ties to the Prophet and his own pious reputation, Ali’s caliphate was marred by civil war with the followers of the previous caliph, Uthman. When Ali was assassinated in 661 a close relative of Uthman, Mu’awiya, declared himself caliph. This date marks the beginning of the Umayyad dynasty, named after the family from which the dynasty were descended—one of the leading families of Mecca that Mohammad had fought before Mecca’s submission to Islam. Soon the new empire adopted forms of government resembling those of its predecessors, the Romans and the Sassanid Persians. The capital moved to Damascus (at that time, of course, a city formed by centuries of Christian, Roman and Byzantine rule) and henceforth the caliphate passed mainly from father to son. The Umayyads discriminated strongly in favour of Arabs in the running of the empire, but were criticised among the Arabs for becoming too worldly and making too many compromises. They distanced themselves from their origins, became lax personally in their religious observances, and depended on paid soldiers rather than kinsmen and clan followers. As the empire and their responsibilities expanded, these changes were probably inevitable, as was the response: part of the eternal tension in Islam between piety and political authority.
Throughout this period there was dissent over the right of the Umayyads to rule. One group, the Kharijites, said that the caliph should be chosen by popular assent from among righteous Muslims, and deposed if he acted wrongly. Another group was to prove more important in the long run, and their dissent from orthodox Sunni Islam eventually created a permanent schism. These Muslims identified with Ali and the family of the Prophet descended through him. They believed that Ali should have been the first caliph, and that the Caliphate should have descended in his line, which (through Ali’s wife Fatima) was also the line of the Prophet himself. Ali’s second son Hossein attempted a revolt in 680, but was overwhelmed at Karbala by Umayyad troops and killed. This was a crucial event, the full significance of which will be explored in a later chapter. Eventually the attachment to the family of the Prophet, to Ali and his descendants, evolved a theology of its own and a firm belief that the descendants of Ali were the only legitimate authority in Islam—becoming what we now call Shi‘ism.
Tension and dissent reached a crescendo in the middle years of the eighth century. In the 740s there was a revolt against the Umayyads in Kufa, and they suffered external defeats by the Turks in Transoxiana and by the Byzantines in Anatolia. Then in the late 740s a Persian convert, Abu Muslim, began a revolt against Umayyad rule in Khorasan, where the creative dynamic between survivors of the old Persian landowning gentry (the dehqans) and the new Arab settlers had been particularly powerful, and where much intermarrying and conversion had occurred (there appears to have been a fusion of cultures, with Arab settlers adopting the Persian language, Persian dress and even some pre-Islamic Persian festivals).
Abu Muslim led his revolt in the name of the Prophet’s family, thereby concealing his final purpose and ensuring a wide appeal. Drawing support from Arab settlers in Khorasan, who resented their taxes and felt betrayed by the Umayyads, Abu Muslim and his followers defeated local opposition and, starting from Merv, led their armies westward under a black banner. They defeated the forces sent against them by the Umayyad caliph in a series of battles in 749-750 and in the latter year proclaimed a new caliph in Kufa—Abu’l Abbas, who was not a descendant of Ali, but of another of Mohammad’s cousins. But before long the new caliph, uneasy at the continuing strength of Abu Muslim’s support in Khorasan, had him executed (in 755).10 The effect of this was to endorse orthodox Sunnism and to marginalise once again the followers of Ali, the Kharijites and other disparate groups that had supported the revolt originally. But the revolt of Abu Muslim was another important religious revolution in Iran, and he was remembered long afterwards by Iranians, and still later by Iranian Shi‘ites, as a righteous, brave and successful revolutionary betrayed by those he put in power.
Instead of Damascus, the new capital of the Abbasid dynasty was established in Baghdad, hard by the old Sassanid capital of Ctesiphon (though the seat of Abbasid government later moved north to Samarra). The centre of gravity of the empire had moved east in a deeper sense too. As time went on Persian influence at the court of the new dynasty became more and more marked (especially through the Persian Barmakid family of officials), and some historians have represented the Abbasid supremacy as a cultural reconquest of the Arab conquerors by the Persians. The strengthening of Persian influence had begun already under the Umayyads. But texts recording Sassanid court practice were translated into Arabic and applied by the new bureaucrats, creating a more hierarchical pattern of government, in which the caliph was screened by officials from contact with petitioners (a departure from earlier Umayyad practice, according to which the caliph had still taken counsel from tribal leaders in assembly, and manipulated their loyalties and allegiances in age-old patriarchal fashion). New offices appeared in the
government of the Abbasids, including that of vizier, or chief adviser or minister; and the administration was divided into separate departments or ministries, called diwans. These institutions were taken directly from Sassanid court practice, and were to endure in Islamic rulership for over a thousand years.
The influence was also apparent in the buildings constructed by the Abbasids, and many of the buildings of Baghdad were built by Persian architects. Even the circular ground-plan of the new city may have been copied from the Sassanian royal city of Ferozabad in Fars. Where the Umayyads had tended to follow Byzantine architectural models, Abbasid styles were based on Sassanid ones. This is apparent in the open spaces enclosed by arcaded walls, the use of stucco decoration, the way domes were constructed above straight-walled buildings below, and above all (the classic motif of Sassanian architecture), the iwans: large open arches, often in the middle of one side of a court, often with arcades stretching away on each side, often used as audience-halls. As with other cultural inheritances from Sassanid Iran, these architectural motifs survived for centuries in the Islamic world11.
Particularly under the Abbasid caliph Al-Mansur and later, many Persian administrators and scholars came to the court (though they still worked there in Arabic, and many had Arabic names), mainly from Khorasan and Transoxiana. These Persians encountered opposition from some Arabs, who called them Ajam, which means the mute ones, or the mumblers; a disparaging reference to their poor Arabic (not so different from the origin of the term ‘barbarian’ as used by the Greeks of the Persians a thousand years before). The Persians defended themselves and their cultural identity from Arab chauvinism through the so-called shu’ubiyya movement, the title of which refers to a verse from the forty-ninth Sura of the Qor’an, where Allah demands mutual respect between different peoples (shu’ub). It was primarily a movement among Persian scribes and officials; their opponents (including some Persians) tended to be the scholars and philologians. But the shu’ubiyya sometimes went beyond asserting equality or parity, in favour of the superiority of Persian culture, and especially literature. Given the religious history of Persia and the lingering attachment of many Persians to Mazdaean or sub-Mazdaean beliefs, shu’ubiyya also implied a challenge to Islam, or at least to the form of Islam practised by the Arabs. A satirical contemporary recorded the attitude of a typical young scribe, steeped in the texts that recorded the history and the procedures of the Sassanid monarchy:
Iran: Empire of the Mind Page 10