This was a golden age, a time when brilliant men like al-Kindī pushed the frontiers of philosophy and of science. Brilliant women stepped forward too, like the tenth-century poet best known as Rabīa Balkhī, in what is now Afghanistan, and after whom the maternity hospital in Kabul is today named; or Mahsatī Ganjavī who likewise wrote eloquently in perfectly formed – and rather racy – Persian.90
While the Muslim world took delight in innovation, progress and new ideas, much of Christian Europe withered in the gloom, crippled by a lack of resources and a dearth of curiosity. St Augustine had been positively hostile to the concept of investigation and research. ‘Men want to know for the sake of knowing,’ he wrote scornfully, ‘though the knowledge is of no value to them.’ Curiosity, in his words, was nothing more than a disease.91
This disdain for science and scholarship baffled Muslim commentators, who had great respect for Ptolemy and Euclid, for Homer and Aristotle. Some had little doubt what was to blame. Once, wrote the historian al-Masūdī, the ancient Greeks and the Romans had allowed the sciences to flourish; then they adopted Christianity. When they did so, they ‘effaced the signs of [learning], eliminated its traces and destroyed its paths’.92 Science was defeated by faith. It is almost the precise opposite of the world as we see it today: the fundamentalists were not the Muslims, but the Christians; those whose minds were open, curious and generous were based in the east – and certainly not in Europe. As one author put it, when it came to writing about non-Islamic lands, ‘we did not enter them [in our book] because we see no use whatsoever in describing them’. They were intellectual backwaters.93
The picture of enlightenment and cultural sophistication was also reflected in the way that minority religions and cultures were treated. In Muslim Spain, Visigothic influences were incorporated into an architectural style that could be read by the subject population as a continuation with the immediate past – and therefore neither aggressive nor triumphalist.94 We can also read the letters sent by Timothy, the Baghdad-based head of the church of the east in the late eighth and early ninth centuries, which describe a world where senior Christian clerics enjoyed responsive and positive personal relations with the Caliph, and where Christianity was able to maintain a base from which to dispatch evangelical missions into India, China and Tibet and on to the steppes – evidently meeting with considerable success.95 It was a pattern mirrored in North Africa, where Christian and Jewish communities survived and perhaps even flourished long after the Muslim conquests.96
But it is also easy to get carried away. For one thing, despite the apparent unity conferred by the cloak of religion, there was still bitter division within the Islamic world. Three major political centres had evolved by the start of the 900s: one was centred on Córdoba and Spain; one on Egypt and the Upper Nile; and the third on Mesopotamia and (most of) the Arabian peninsula, and they fought with each other over matters of theology as well as for influence and authority. Serious schism within Islam had emerged within a generation of Muammad’s death, with rival cases being set out to justify the correct succession from the Prophet. These quickly solidified into two competing arguments, championed by Sunnī and Shīa interpretations, with the latter arguing passionately that only the descendant of Ali, the Prophet’s cousin and son-in-law, should rule as caliph, and the former arguing for a broader understanding.
So despite the fact that there was a notional overarching religious unity that linked the Hindu Kush with the Pyrenees through Mesopotamia and North Africa, finding consensus was another matter. Similarly, relaxed attitudes to beliefs were neither uniform nor consistent. Although there were periods of acceptance of other faiths, there were also phases of persecution and brutal proselytisation. While the first hundred years after Muammad’s death saw limited efforts to convert local populations, soon more concerted attempts were made to encourage those living under Muslim overlordship to embrace Islam. These were not limited to religious teaching and evangelism: in the case of Bukhara in the eighth century, for example, the governor announced that all those who showed up to Friday prayer would receive the princely sum of two dirhams – an incentive that attracted the poor and persuaded them to accept the new faith, albeit on basic terms: they could not read the Qurān in Arabic and had to be told what do to while prayers were being said.97
The chain of events that began with the intense rivalry between the Roman Empire and Persia had extraordinary consequences. As the two great powers of late antiquity flexed their muscles and prepared for a final showdown, few could have predicted that it would be a faction from the far reaches of the Arabian peninsula that would rise up to supplant both. Those who had been inspired by Muammad truly inherited the earth, establishing perhaps the greatest empire that the world has seen, one that would introduce irrigation techniques and new crops from the Tigris and Euphrates to the Iberian peninsula, and spark nothing less than an agrarian revolution spanning thousands of miles.98
The Islamic conquests created a new world order, an economic giant, bolstered by self-confidence, broad-mindedness and a passionate zeal for progress. Immensely wealthy and with few natural political or even religious rivals, it was a place where order prevailed, where merchants could become rich, where intellectuals were respected and where disparate views could be discussed and debated. An unpromising start in a cave near Mecca had given birth to a cosmopolitan utopia of sorts.
It did not go unnoticed. Ambitious men born on the periphery of the Muslim umma, or even far beyond, were drawn like bees to honey. Prospects in the marshes of Italy, in central Europe and Scandinavia did not look too promising for young men looking to make a name (and some money) for themselves. In the nineteenth century, it was to the west and to the United States that such individuals looked for fame and fortune; a millennium earlier, they looked to the east. Better still, there was one commodity which was in plentiful supply and had a ready market for those willing to play hard and fast.
6
The Road of Furs
At its peak, Baghdad was a magnificent city to behold. With its parks, markets, mosques and bathhouses – as well as schools, hospitals and charitable foundations – it was home to mansions ‘lavishly gilded and decorated, and hung with beautiful tapestries and hangings of brocade and silk’, their reception rooms ‘lightly and tastefully furnished with luxurious divans, expensive tables, exceptional Chinese vases and innumerable gold and silver trinkets’. Down by the River Tigris were the palaces, kiosks and gardens which served the elite; ‘the scene on the river was animated by thousands of gondolas, decked with little flags, dancing like sunbeams on the water, and carrying the pleasure-seeking inhabitants of the city from one part of Baghdad to another’.1
The vibrancy of the markets and the spending power of the court, the wealthy and the general population were magnetic. The impact of the boom extended far beyond the frontiers of the Islamic world, where the Muslim conquests created new routes that snaked in all directions, bringing goods, ideas and peoples together. For some, the extension of these networks was a cause of some anxiety. In the 840s, the Caliph al-Wāthiq sent an expedition to investigate his dream that cannibals had breached a legendary wall that popular consent held had been established by the Almighty to hold back fierce savages. It took nearly a year and a half for a reconnaissance party, led by a trusted adviser named Sallām, to report back about the state of this wall. He explained how the fortification was maintained. Guarding it was a serious business, with one family entrusted with the responsibility of conducting an inspection on a routine basis. Twice a week a hammer was struck against the wall three times in order to check the wall. Each time, the inspectors would listen for any deviation from the norm: ‘if one applies one’s ear to the door, one hears a muted sound like a nest of wasps’, one account reports; ‘then everything falls silent again’. The purpose was to let the savages who might bring the apocalypse with them know that the wall was guarded and that they would not be allowed to pass.2
The account of checking th
e wall is so vivid, so convincing that some historians have argued that it refers to a real expedition and to a real wall – perhaps the Jade Gate, marking the entry to China to the west of Dunhuang.3 In fact, fear about destroyers of the world being contained behind the mountains of the east was a theme that linked the antique world with the Old and the New Testament as well as the Qurān.4 Regardless of whether Sallām’s journey actually did take place, terror of what lay beyond the frontiers was very real. The world was divided in two: a realm of Iran where order and civilisation prevailed; and one of Turan that was chaotic, anarchic and dangerous. As a plethora of reports from travellers and geographers who visited the steppe lands to the north make clear, those who lived outside the Muslim world were strange, and while in some respects weird and wonderful, mostly they were terrifying.
One of the most famous correspondents was Ibn Falān, who was sent into the steppes in the early tenth century in response to a request by the leader of the Volga Bulghārs for learned scholars to come and explain the teachings of Islam. As Ibn Falān’s account makes clear, the leadership of this tribe – whose lands straddled the Volga north of the Caspian Sea where the great river intersects with the Kama – had already become Muslims, but their knowledge of its articles of faith was rudimentary. Although the Volga Bulghār leader wanted assistance in building a mosque and learning more about the revelations of Muammad, it quickly emerged that what he really wanted was to garner support in countering the competition posed by other tribes on the steppe.
Ibn Falān was in turn bemused, amazed and horrified as he made his journey north. The life of the nomad, constantly on the move, stood in sharp contrast to the urbane, settled and sophisticated metropolitan culture of Baghdad and other cities. The uzz tribe were among the first peoples Ibn Falān encountered. ‘They live in felt tents,’ he wrote, ‘pitching them first in one place and then in another.’ ‘They live in poverty, like wandering asses. They do not worship God, nor do they have any recourse to reason.’ He went on: ‘They do not wash after polluting themselves with excrement or urine . . . [and in fact] have no contact with water, especially in winter.’ That women did not wear a veil was the least of it. One evening they sat down with a man whose wife was present. ‘As we were talking, she bared her private parts and scratched while we stared at her. We covered our faces with our hands and each said: “I seek forgiveness from God.”’ Her husband simply laughed at the prudishness of the visitors.5
The practices and beliefs of others on the steppe were no less surprising. There were tribes who worshipped snakes, others who worshipped fish and others still who prayed to birds after becoming convinced that they had triumphed in battle thanks to the intervention of a flock of cranes. Then there were those who wore a wooden phallus round their necks that they would kiss for good luck before setting out on a journey. These were members of the Bagird tribe – a people of legendary savagery, who would carry the heads of their enemies around with them as trophies. They had appalling habits, including eating lice and fleas: Ibn Falān saw one man find a flea in his clothes, ‘and having crushed it with his fingernail, he devoured it and on noticing me, said: Delicious!’6
Although life on the steppes was hard to fathom for visitors like Ibn Falān, there was considerable interaction between the nomads and the sedentary world to the south. One sign of this was the spread of Islam through the tribes – albeit somewhat erratically. The uzz, for instance, professed to be Muslims and would utter suitably devout phrases ‘to make a good impression on the Muslims who stay with them’, according to Ibn Falān. But there was little substance to their faith, he noted, for ‘if one of them suffers an injustice or something bad happens to him, he lifts his head up to heaven and says “bir tengri”’ – not invoking Allah, in other words, but Tengri, the supreme nomad celestial deity.7
In fact, religious beliefs on the steppes were complex and rarely uniform, with influences from Christianity, Islam, Judaism, Zoroastrianism and paganism jostling and blending to create composite worldviews that are difficult to disentangle.8 Part of the spread of these shifting, adaptive spiritual views was carried out by a new type of Muslim holy men acting as a form of missionary; these mystics, known as sufis, roamed the steppes, sometimes naked but for a set of animal horns, tending to sick animals and impressing onlookers with their eccentric behaviour and wittering about devotion and piety. They seemed to have played a crucial role in winning converts to Islam, fusing the shaman and animist beliefs that were widespread in Central Asia with the tenets of Islam.9
It was not just sufis who had an impact. Other visitors made interventions that were decisive in spreading ideas about religion. A later account of the conversion of the Volga Bulghārs records how a passing Muslim merchant cured the tribe’s ruler and his wife from serious illnesses after all other attempts to do so had failed. After making them promise to adopt his faith if he healed them, he gave them medicines, ‘and cured them, and they and all their people embraced Islam’.10 It was a classic conversion story: the acceptance of the leader or those close to him of a new faith was the decisive moment in large-scale adoption of a set of practices and beliefs.11
It is certainly true that expanding the faith into new regions became a badge of prestige for governors and local dynasties, helping them gain the attention of the Caliph as well as winning kudos within their own communities. The Sāmānids, based in Bukhara, for example, were passionate in championing Islam. One way they did so was by introducing a system of madrasas or schools, borrowing the concept from Buddhist monasteries, to teach the Qurān properly, while also patronising research into the adīth tradition – sayings and actions attributed to Muammad. Giving money out liberally to all comers also ensured that mosques were full to bursting.12
However, the steppes were much more than a Wild North, a frontier zone filled with savage people with strange customs, a void into which Islam could expand and where untouched populations could be civilised. For while accounts by visitors like Ibn Falān paint a picture of barbarianism, the nomadic lifestyle was in fact both regulated and ordered. Moving from place to place was not the result of aimless wandering, but rather a reflection of the realities of animal husbandry: with large herds and flocks of livestock to tend to, finding good pasture as a fact of life and doing so in a structured way was vital not just to a tribe’s success but to its very survival. What looked chaotic from the outside was anything but from within.
This is perfectly captured in a remarkable text compiled in Constantinople in the tenth century which sets out how one of the principal groups that lived to the north of the Black Sea was structured to give the optimum chances of success. The Pechenegs were subdivided into eight tribes that were in turn split into a total of forty smaller units, each with clearly demarcated zones that were theirs to exploit. Moving from place to place did not mean that life in tribal societies was disordered.13
Although contemporary commentators, travellers, geographers and historians who took an interest in the steppe world were fascinated by the lifestyles and habits they observed, their interest was also triggered by the economic contributions made by the nomads – especially with regard to agricultural produce. The steppes supplied sedentary societies with precious services and produce. There were members of the uzz tribe who in Ibn Falān’s reckoning owned 10,000 horses and ten times as many sheep. Even if we should not set too much store by specific numbers, the scale of operations was clearly substantial.14
Horses were a vital part of the economy, something that is clear from the references across a range of sources about the large number of cavalry that some of the major tribes of the steppes were able to put into the field. These were reared commercially, to judge from the account of the destruction of substantial stud farms by an Arab raiding force in the eighth century and from bones found by archaeologists north of the Black Sea.15 Farming also increasingly became an important part of the steppe economy, with crops being planted across the Lower Volga region, which included ‘many tilled
fields and orchards’.16 Archaeological evidence from the Crimea from this period attests to farming of wheat, millet and rye on a substantial scale.17 Hazelnuts, falcons and swords were some of the other products sold to the markets to the south.18 So too were wax and honey; the latter was thought to provide resistance to the cold.19 Amber was also brought to market in such quantities, not only through the steppes but from western Europe, that one leading historian has coined the term ‘the amber trail’ to describe the routes bringing the hardened resin to keen buyers in the east.20
Above all else, however, was the trade in animal pelts. Furs were highly prized for the warmth and status they bestowed on their wearers.21 One caliph in the eighth century went so far as to conduct a series of experiments to freeze a range of different furs to see which offered the best protection in extreme conditions. He filled a series of containers with water and left them overnight in ice-cold weather, according to one Arabic writer. ‘In the morning, he had the [flasks] brought to him. All were frozen except the one with black fox fur. He thus learned which fur was the warmest and the driest.’22
Muslim merchants distinguished between different animal pelts, setting prices accordingly. One writer in the tenth century mentions the import from the steppes of sable, grey squirrel, ermine, mink, fox, marten, beaver and spotted hare among the varieties that were then to be sold elsewhere by traders with an eye to making good money from marking these up.23 Indeed, in some parts of the steppe, pelts were used interchangeably with currency – with fixed exchange rates. Eighteen old squirrel skins were worth one silver coin, while a single skin was the price of ‘a great loaf of magnificent bread, large enough to sustain a big man’. This was incomprehensible to one observer: ‘in any other country, a thousand loads wouldn’t buy you a bean’.24 And yet there was an obvious logic to what was effectively a system of currency: having a means for exchange was important for societies that interacted with each other but lacked central treasuries that could oversee large-scale minting of coins. Skins, pelts and furs therefore served an obvious purpose in an unmonetised economy.
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