by Tamim Ansary
Yet the Abbasids also maximized everything that was good about Umayyad rule. The Umayyads had presided over a flowering of prosperity, art, thought, culture, and civilization. All this splendor and dynamism accelerated to a crescendo during the Abbasid dynasty, making the first two centuries or so of their rule the one that Western history (and many contemporary Muslims) remember as the Golden Age of Islam.
One of Mansur’s first moves, for example, was to build himself a brand new capital, a city called Baghdad, completed in 143 AH (765 CE). The city he built has survived into the present day, though it has been destroyed and rebuilt several times over the centuries, and is in the process of being destroyed again.
Mansur toured his territories for several years before he found the perfect site for his city: a place between the Tigris and Euphrates where the rivers came so close together that a city could be stretched from the banks of one to the banks of the other. Smack dab in the middle of this space, Mansur planted a perfectly circular ring of wall, one mile in circumference, 98 feet high, and 145 feet thick at the base. The “city” within this huge doughnut was really just a single enormous palace complex, the new nerve center for the world’s biggest empire.1
It took five years to build the Round City. Some one hundred thousand designers, craftspeople, and laborers worked on it. These workers lived all around the city they were building, so their homes formed another, less orderly ring of city around the splendid core. And of course shopkeepers and service workers flocked in to make a living selling goods and services to the people working on the Round City, which added yet another urban penumbra around the disorderly ring that surrounded that perfect circular core.
Within twenty years, Baghdad was the biggest city in the world and possibly the biggest city that had ever been: it was the first city whose population topped a million.2 Baghdad spread beyond the rivers, so that the Tigris and Euphrates actually flowed through Baghdad, rather than beside it. The waters were diverted through a network of canals that let boats serve as the city’s buses, making it a bit like Venice, except that bridges and lanes let people navigate the city on foot or on horseback too.
Baghdad might well have been the world’s busiest city as well as its biggest. Two great rivers opening onto the Indian Ocean gave it tremendous port facilities, plus it was easily accessible to land traffic from every side, so ships and caravans flowed in and out every day, bringing goods and traders from every part of the known world—China, India, Africa, Spain. . . .
Commerce was regulated by the state. Every nationality had its own neighborhood, and so did every kind of business. On one street you might find cloth merchants, on another soap dealers, on another the flower market, on yet another the fruit shops. The Street of Stationers featured over a hundred shops selling paper, a new invention recently acquired from China (whom the Abbasids met and defeated in 751 CE, in the area that is now Kazakhstan). Goldsmiths, tinsmiths, and blacksmiths; armorers and stables; money changers, straw merchants, bridge builders, and cobblers, all could be found hawking their wares in their designated quarters of mighty Baghdad. There was even a neighborhood for open-air stalls and shops selling miscellaneous goods. Ya’qubi, an Arab geographer of the time, claimed that this city had six thousand streets and alleys, thirty thousand mosques, and ten thousand bathhouses.
This was the city of turrets and tiles glamorized in the Arabian Nights, a collection of folk stories transformed into literature during the later days of the Abbasid dynasty. Stories such as the one about Aladdin and his magic lamp hark back to the reign of the fourth and most famous Abbasid khalifa, Haroun al-Rashid, portrayed as the apogee of splendor and justice. Legends about Haroun al-Rashid characterize him as a benevolent monarch so interested in the welfare of his people that he often went among them disguised as an ordinary man, so that he might learn first-hand of their troubles and take measures to help them. In reality, I’m guessing, it was the khalifa’s spies who went among the people disguised as ordinary beggars, not so much looking for troubles to right as malcontents to neutralize.
Even more than in Umayyad times, the khalifa became a near mythic figure, whom even the wealthiest and most important people had little chance of ever seeing, much less petitioning. The Abbasid khalifas ruled through intermediaries, and they insulated themselves from everyday reality with elaborate court rituals borrowed from Byzantine and Sassanid traditions. So, yes, Islam conquered all the territories ruled by the Sassanids and much that had once been ruled by the Byzantines, but in the end the ghosts of those supplanted empires infiltrated and altered Islam.
7
Scholars, Philosophers, and Sufis
10-505 AH
632-1111 CE
SO FAR I HAVE been recounting political events at the highest levels as Muslim civilization evolved into the civilization of the middle world. Big stories were unfolding, however, below that highest level, and none was bigger than the development of Muslim doctrine, and the social class it generated, along with the opposing and alternative ideas it engendered.
Looking back, it’s easy to suppose that Mohammed left his followers exact instructions for how to live and worship, complete in every detail. How complete they were, however, is difficult to gauge. What’s pretty certain is that, in his lifetime, Mohammed established the primacy of five broad duties, now called the five pillars of Islam:shahadah, to attest that there is only one God and Mohammed is his
messenger;
salaat (or namaz), to perform a certain prayer ritual five times every
day;
zakat, to give a certain percentage of one’s wealth to the poor each year;
sawm (or roza), to fast from dawn to dusk during the month of Ramadan
each year; and
hajj, to make a pilgrimage to Mecca at least once in a lifetime, if possible.
Notice both the simplicity and “externalness” of this program. Only one of the five pillars is a belief, a creed, and even that is given in terms of an action: “to attest.” The other four pillars are very specific things to do. Again, Islam is not merely a creed or a set of beliefs: it is a program every bit as concrete as a diet or an exercise regiment. Islam is something one does.
The five pillars were already part of life in the Muslim community by the time of Mohammed’s death, but so were other rituals and practices, and any of them may have been parsed somewhat differently back then. The fact is, when Mohammed was alive, there was no need to fix the details inflexibly because the living Messenger was right there to answer questions. Not only could people learn from him every day, but through him they might receive fresh instructions at any time.
Indeed, Mohammed did receive revelations continually, not just about general values and ideals but about practical measures to take in response to particular, immediate problems. If an army was approaching the city, God would let Mohammed know if the community should get ready to fight, and if so, how. If Muslims captured prisoners and after the battle was over wondered what to do with them: Kill them? Keep them as slaves? Treat them as members of the family? Set them free? God would tell Mohammed, and he would tell everyone else.
It’s well known that Muslims face Mecca when they pray, but this was not always the case. At first, in fact, Muslims performed their prayers facing Jerusalem. At a certain point in the maturation of the community, however, a revelation came down instructing them to shift direction, and it has been Mecca ever since.
And it will always be Mecca from now on, because Mohammed is gone and there will never be another Messenger, which means that no one will ever again have the authority to change the direction of prayer. In short, while Mohammed was alive, the Islamic project had an organic vitality. It was constantly in the process of unfolding and evolving. Any element of it might change at any time.
But the moment Mohammed died, Muslims had to ask themselves, “What exactly are we supposed to do? How are we supposed to do it? When we pray, should we hold our hands up here or down lower? In preparing for p
rayer, must we wash our feet all the way to the shins or would just to the ankles be enough?”
And, of course, there was a lot more to being a Muslim than the five pillars. Beyond individual duties such as fasting, alms, and the testament of faith, there was the social aspect of Islam, a person’s obligations to the community, the good-citizenship behaviors that fed into making the community an instrument of God’s will. For example, there was certainly a proscription against drinking. Certainly Muslims had some obligation to defend the community with their lives and fortunes when necessary in the obligation famously called jihad. In general, making sacrifices for the communal good devolved upon every Muslim because the community might not otherwise endure, and to many if not most Muslims, the community was the template of a new world, charged with an obligation to set a continuous example of how all people should live. Anyone, therefore, who contributed to the health of the community was doing God’s work, and anyone who fell short was misbehaving. But what contributed to the health of the community? And how much contribution was enough?
Once Mohammed died, Muslims had to bring their obligations into focus and get the details down in writing to secure their faith from drift, divergence, and the whims of the powerful. That’s why the first two khalifas collected every scrap of Qur’an in one place and why the third khalifa created that single authorized edition.
But the Qur’an did not explicitly address many questions that cropped up in real life. As a matter of fact, most of the Holy Book spoke in very general terms: Stop sinning; behave yourself; have a heart; you will be judged; hell is an awful place; heaven is wonderful; be grateful for all that God has given you; trust in God; obey God; yield to God—such is the gist of the message one gets from much of the Holy Book. Even where the Qur’an gets specific, it is often open to interpretation.
And “interpretation” portended trouble. If everyone were allowed to interpret the ambiguous passages for themselves, their conclusions might diverge wildly. People would move apart in as many different directions as there were people, the community would fragment, and the world might swallow up the pieces and who was to say the great revelation would not then vanish as if it had never been?
THE SCHOLARS
Clearly Muslims had to come to unified agreements about the ambiguous passages and do it fast, while the original excitement still burned in communal memory. No one in that early time wanted to offer a personal interpretation of the Truth backed only by his or her reason. If reason were enough, revelation would never have been needed. Certainly, none of the early khalifas laid claim to any such authority. They were devout people who refused to tamper with instructions from God. Their humble modesty was precisely what made them great. They wanted to get the instructions exactly right in letter and spirit—and by “right,” they meant, “exactly as God intended.”
From the start, therefore, Muslims tried to rely on their memories of the Prophet to fill in any gaps in the Qur’an’s guidelines. It was Omar who really set the course here. Whenever a question came up for which no explicit answer could be found in the Qur’an, he asked, “Did Mohammed ever have to deal with a situation like this one? What did he decide?”
Omar’s approach got people motivated to collect everything Mohammed had ever said and done, quotations and anecdotes known to Muslims as hadith. But many people had heard Mohammed say many things. Which ones were credible? Some quotations contradicted other quotations. Some people might have been making stuff up. Who could tell? And some, it turned out, hadn’t actually heard a quotation themselves, but had it only on good authority—or so they claimed, which of course raised the question, who was the original source? Was that person reliable? What about the other people who had transmitted it? Were they all reliable? What, finally, constituted a “good authority?”
Omar, as I mentioned, established a body of full-time scholars to examine such questions, thereby establishing a consequential precedent: before Islam had a standing army of professional soldiers, it had a standing army of professional scholars (called “people of the bench” or sometimes “people of the pen”).
Hadith, however, proliferated faster than any small group of scholars could control. New ones were constantly coming to light. By Umayyad times, thousands of remembered statements, quotations, and decisions of Mohammed’s were floating around. Combing through this jungle and determining which ones were authentic provided employment for an ever-greater number of scholars. The court funded this sort of work, but so did rich men eager to earn merit in God’s eyes. Independent scholars applied themselves to the great task on their own time, as well. If they gained enough fame, they attracted students and patrons. Informal groups of this type ripened into academies, sometimes as adjuncts to the waqfs mentioned earlier.
The word hadith is sometimes translated as “sayings,” but that term can be misleading. The sayings of Mohammed are not like the sayings of Shakespeare or Einstein or the local wit. They’re not remembered for their felicity of phrasing. No one would bother to record the sayings of the local wit, or even of Shakespeare, unless they were witty, pithy, or profound, but with hadith, what counts is the fact that Mohammed actually said them. It’s true that some hadith have an epigrammatic quality. One can admire the economy of the admonition: “Food for one is enough for two, food for two is enough for three. . . . ” But many hadith come off as ordinary, even casual, statements. They might have been remarks Mohammed tossed off in the course of daily life. One hadith reports the Prophet telling a fellow who had a sparse beard and had shaved those few scant hairs that he should not have shaved his beard. This comment from anyone else would have been forgettable and forgotten, but anything Mohammed said might offer one more clue about how to live a life pleasing to God.
Since the authenticity of a hadith was absolutely crucial, the authentication of hadith developed into an exacting discipline. At its core, it consisted of nailing down the chain of transmission and testing the veracity of every link. A hadith was only as good as the people who transmitted it. The chain of transmission had to extend to someone who knew the Prophet personally. Only then could a purported hadith be taken seriously. Ideally, it would trace to one of Mohammed’s close companions, and the closer the companion the more sound the hadith. In addition, every person who transmitted it after that had to enjoy an impeccable reputation for piety, honesty, and learning.
I heard that once the great scholar Bukhari was investigating the chain of transmission for a particular hadith. He found the first link credible; the second man passed muster too; but when Bukhari went to interview the third man in the chain of transmission, he found the fellow beating his horse. That did it. The word of a man who beat his horse could not be trusted. That hadith had to be discarded.
In short, to gauge the credibility of the people who transmitted a hadith, a scholar had to know a great deal about them and about their times. A scholar also had to know the circumstances in which a hadith was spoken so that its intention might be judged from context. The “science of hadith” thus generated an elaborate discipline of critical historiography.
Some seven or eight decades after Mohammed’s death, scholars across the Muslim world began compiling sifted collections of hadith grouped under specific topics, which functioned as organized statements of Islamic doctrine and as reference works on Islamic living. If you wondered, for example, what Prophet Mohammed had to say about diet, or clothing, or warfare, you could look it up in such a book. The enterprise began in late Umayyad times, but it matured in the Abassid era, and new collections kept emerging for centuries. (In fact, just last year, a distant Afghan acquaintance sent me a handwritten manuscript he was hoping I would translate into English. It constituted, he said, a new set of hadith he himself had collected—after fourteen centuries.)
Even though new hadith kept emerging, however, six collections achieved canonical status by the end of the third century AH. These complemented the Qur’an and came to constitute a second level of authority on the dos, do
n’ts, shoulds, and shouldn’ts of Muslim life.
Yet even the Qur’an and hadith together failed to give a definitive answer to every real-life question, as you can imagine. Sometimes, therefore, it was necessary for someone to make an original decision about a disputed situation. Given the legalistic spirit of Islam, Muslims conceded this right of original decision making only to scholars who had thoroughly absorbed Qur’an and hadith and had mastered the “science of hadith,” the discipline of authentication. Only such folks could be sure their rulings did not contradict some point set forth in the revelations.
Even qualified scholars were to make decisions based strictly on qiyas or analogical reasoning, the method Khalifa Omar used to discover the punishment for drinking (and to make many other rulings). That is, for each unprecedented contemporary situation, scholars had to find an analogous one in classical sources and derive a judgment parallel to the one already made. And if ambiguities arose about the way to apply qiyas, the matter was settled by ijma, the consensus of the community—which really meant the consensus of all the recognized scholars of the time. Such a consensus could guarantee the veracity of an interpretation because Prophet Mohammed had once said, “My community will never agree on an error.”
If a scholar had exhausted Qur’an, hadith, qiyas, and ijma, then and only then could he move on to the final stage of ethical and legislative thinking, ijtihad, which means “free independent thinking based on reason.” Scholars and judges could apply this type of thinking only in areas not derived directly from revelation or covered by established precedents.