That Islam
exists at all is due to events in the 600–800 period. That it looks the way it
does now is largely due to events in the 800–1100 one. And just as camels
represented the first period, caravans can be said to represent the second one.
A caravan consists of many camels (or other pack animals) led together by a group of
travellers, which reflects one of the major differences between the Umayyads
and the early Abbasids: the former created a somewhat exclusive, ‘Arab’ empire
whereas the latter were consciously cosmopolitan and inclusive, empowering non-
Arabs (mainly those who were culturally Persian – appropriately, ‘caravan’ is a
Persian word) and absorbing them into Islam. Caravans are also central to this
period for plying the routes that linked the Abbasids’ sprawling provinces,
transporting pilgrims, envoys, merchants, scholars, and soldiers across a road
network that encouraged a level of internationalism, multiculturalism, and
inter-connectivity that most Westerners would associate with modernity.
The
foundations of this achievement are strikingly similar to those that are
credited with the emergence of the modern West. But instead of a printing
revolution, the Islamic world in this period experienced a paper revolution,
whereby more expensive and elitist methods of writing (on papyrus and
parchment, for example)
were replaced by this more affordable medium. Literacy is thought to have
increased dramatically, creating new readerships that consumed (and, in a
circular way, generated) new genres of literature. Everything from pre-Islamic
poetry to works on theology, philosophy, medicine, science, belles-lettres, and
history was recorded in written form. A commensurate eruption in Islamic
culture and civilization resulted, producing a diverse civilian elite in the
Islamic world by the 9th century.
Travel and
trade also flourished in this period, feeding from and into this cultural efflorescence.
It is not just that travelogues (both real and imagined), maps, and geographies
were produced on the basis of new experiences in far-flung lands – though this
certainly happened – but also that Near Eastern merchants expanded their remit
and horizons well beyond Abbasid borders. One 9th-century writer tells us of
polyglot Iraqi Jews who criss-crossed Eurasia, travelling between France and
China (covering Muslim lands, southern Russia, and India along the way), and
the discovery of thousands of Abbasid coins in Scandinavia attests to the scope
of this commercial activity. Even the spread of papermaking from China to the
Near East is instructive in this context: our sources tell us that Muslims
defeated a Chinese army in 751, capturing papermakers in the process from whom
they learned the techniques themselves. What is interesting is that such
hostile circumstances – a bloody battle in Central Asia – did little to hinder
cross-cultural interaction and the spread of commodities, people, and ideas.
Muslims in this period had active frontiers in Spain, southern Europe, Central
Asia, India, and Africa, affording both rulers and individuals the opportunity
to derive kudos from waging jihad. The story about Chinese papermakers (and it
is almost certainly just a story) reminds us that such confrontations were seen
by the story’s authors to present further occasions for cultural
interaction as much as they stifled it.
