House of Islam

Muslim jurists since the 9th century have referred to the Islamic world as being a ‘house’ or ‘abode’ of Islam (dar al-islam). Though the sources do not extend the metaphor, I am tempted to do so. Accordingly, the land on which the house was built was first ‘acquired’ by Arabs, who also provided the house’s architectural plans and foundations. Most of the house’s bricks and builders were Persian, and for much of Islamic history, from the 9th to the 19th centuries, its landlords were Turks (who also contributed to the menu and welcome-mat). Shiites, for their part, have long believed that the house was built on shaky foundations, and nowadays the building has been divided into individual apartments of varying sizes. Since the 18th century, the interior design has been dominated by Western styles which, in some flats, clashed with the traditional décor, creating spots of ugliness. Islamists might say that the apartments are little more than seedy motel rooms in need of urgent attention, for which they hope to raze the whole building and rebuild it as a house. What this extended metaphor attempts to demonstrate is how the various peoples of Islamic history have interacted and combined to build something in which they all have a signifi cant stake and to which they all contributed, albeit in different ways.

Mosques and Diversity of Islam

Not only is the mosque a symbol of Islam’s diversity, it also typifies how ‘organic’ Islamic culture is. Mosques in China look Chinese rather than Arabian, Syrian, Iraqi, or Greco-Roman. Mughal-era and Ottoman-era mosques are easily distinguishable, although both are, at least superfi cially, the products of the same. The ziggurat of Agar Quf (Dur Kuigalzu, Iraq). This ziggurat was built by the Kassites (r. 1531–1155 BCE) and was partially restored by the Iraqi government in the 1970s Turco-Islamic culture. In fact, Mughal mosques mix Islamic and Indian elements, while Ottoman mosques mix Islamic and Byzantine ones. Even when mosque-building was a way of asserting Islam’s victory over other religions, Islam and its monuments were defi ned in direct relation to those of local religious traditions. Whereas the Romans were bullish in stamping out other cultures’ architectural traditions, Muslims have always been conscious of local contexts and have integrated features of earlier societies into their own, often creating a unique blend between old and new styles. In a way, Islam is the fi rst ‘green’ civilization (though, it should be admitted, inadvertently so), with a long history of recycling older materials and using, for the most part, only local products and traditions.

The Turks

The Turks’ involvement with Islamic history is full of surprises, almost all of which are pleasant. The first surprise is that they ever came to be involved at all. In their pre-Islamic history, Turks had created a series of empires (c. 552–840, and in western regions of the Eurasian Steppe into the 10th century) and adopted a number of religions along the way, including Manichaeism, Buddhism, Nestorian Christianity, and Judaism, as well as retaining the traditional forms of shamanism. Moreover, unlike the Arabs and Persians, the Turks were not native to the Near East, their original homeland being in Mongolia. As nomads of the Eurasian Steppe, they lingered on the edge of settled civilizations, plying the routes from east to west and occasionally creating states of their own. The empire of the Uyghur Turks (744–840), for instance, had close relations with the Chinese, exchanging horses for silk (at rates favourable to the Turks), and entering into occasional marriage alliances with the Chinese ruling families. As the Huns in earlier centuries and the Mongols in later ones, their ultimate target was Chinese civilization; had they been given a choice in the matter, the Turks probably would have joined the sedentary world in China rather than the Near East. Thus, when they first entered the Islamic world it was against their will, as military slaves in the 820s.

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For over a millennium, most Muslims lived under the rule or protection of Turks. It is not surprising, then, that Turkish terminology and administrative practices have left their stamp on Islamic history, particularly in the classical and early modern periods. In fact, the word for ‘stamp’ in modern Arabic, damgha, is an ancient Turkish word (originally pronounced ‘tamgha’), having meant ‘tribal brand’ in pre-Islamic times and ‘commercial tax’ in the Mongol period. The fortuitous journey of this word, from ancient Mongolia to the modern Arab world, neatly illustrates the scope and range of the Turks’ activity in history.

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The Turks often chose to spread and develop Persian rather than Turkish literature. They did produce their own literary works: the earliest Turkish documents date from the 8th century and by the 11th century, Islamo-Turkish works were being composed, two of which – a mirror for princes from 1068 and an Arabic- Turkish lexicon from 1077 – are widely known. Despite this, the Turks relied on Persians in all things literary, a fact that is captured in a proverb recorded in the 11th-century lexicon, according to which, ‘There is no Turk without an Iranian, just as there is no hat without a head’. Beginning in the 14th century, and increasing in the following one, literature in both western (Ottoman) and eastern (Chaghatay) Turkish came to be composed at Turkish courts. Hence, Babur’s memoirs were composed in Chaghatay, though the high culture at the Mughal court was Persian. Still, it is ironic that one of the founders of Turkish literary culture, ‘Ali Shir Nava’i (d. 1501), wrote a polemical work on the superiority of Turkish over Persian, the vocabulary of which is nearly two-thirds Persian.

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The ‘crescent and star’ symbol with which Islam is often associated is of ancient Turkish (rather than Arab or Persian) provenance, and also that Turks have literally nourished Islamic (and other) civilizations through their culinary influence. Yoghurt, stuffed vine-leaves (dolma), kebabs, shawarma, and baklava, amongst many other well-known foods, all originate with the Turks (though Turkish coffee does not). And if the story is true that the croissant was created by Viennese bakers in celebration of the failed Ottoman siege of their city in 1683, then – at least indirectly – we owe them croissants too.

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A final surprise is that a people such as the Turks who have long been associated with military prowess have always been remarkably tolerant of, and open to, other cultures and religions. Perhaps because of their travels along the Eurasian Steppe Route, Turks have been exposed to numerous unrelated cultures in a way that some other nomads were not. (By contrast, during their own seasonal migrations, the Arabs came into contact with peoples to their north, south, and east – to their west was the Red Sea – who were basically sedentary versions of themselves.) For this reason, the Turks have a long history of willingly incorporating elements of other cultures into their own, as demonstrated by their adoption of others’ letters – not only in the figurative sense of the word, with Persian high culture, but also literally, going through various alphabets until they accepted the Arabic script, like other Muslim peoples. Signifi cantly, their capacity to adapt to changing circumstances has led them, unlike the Arabs or Persians, to adopt a Latin alphabet in the 20th century, a change undertaken not only by Turks in Turkey, but also those in Uzbekistan, Turkmenistan, and Azerbaijan. In a sense, the Turks have shown themselves to be both experts at identifying winning trends and flexible enough to align their own societies with them. This may be seen in their adoption of Islam, of Persian as a literary language, of gunpowder (against the grain of their indigenous traditions), and of modernity. Arabs and Persians may protest that they are too proud of their traditions to abandon them under pressure from outsiders, but the Turks can retort that in adopting and adapting to the prevailing culture – in this case, modernity – they too are remaining true to their traditions.

The Persians

The Arabs and, as we will see, Turks owe their prominence on the world stage to Islam. The Persians do not. Persians have a proud and long history of statehood that dates back to the Achaemenid period (559–330 BCE); when Arab conquerors defeated the Sasanid empire (224–651), they were putting an end to some 12 centuries of almost uninterrupted Persian self-rule and political autonomy. Thus, whereas the rise of Islam was an unmitigated success for the Arabs and Turks, it was something of a mixed blessing for the Persians, who gained monotheism and the True Religion, but lost their empire and independence. And although the early Muslims created their state in formerly Byzantine and Sasanid lands, the Sasanids paid the higher price of the two: conquered Byzantine subjects could fl ee to parts of the empire that had not been conquered and any Christian, Greek culture that had been uprooted by the conquests could be replanted in surviving Byzantine lands. The whole of the Sasanid empire, however, was conquered by Muslims, and although some Zoroastrians did flee to India (where they have been known as ‘Parsees’ ever since), Persian culture had nowhere to go but underground. All of this had shortterm, medium-term, and long-term consequences.

In the short term, the Persian people (and landscape) resisted the Arab armies fi ercely, which meant that in some provinces caliphal rule, conversion to Islam, Arab settlement, and Arabization were superficial. In most regions, Persian notables were allowed to retain a measure of power and Persian administrative traditions endured accordingly. Curiously, many Persians viewed the Muslim conquests as a temporary, reversible blip, and for the next two centuries an array of ‘redeemers’ appeared with the declared aim of restoring the pre-Islamic political, social, and religious status quo. Some modern historians and even some observers at the time have (wrongly) viewed various events in Islamic history as examples of Persian-redemption movements, including the Abbasid Revolution, the creation of Baghdad, the rise of the Buyids, Samanids, and Safavids, and the adoption by the Safavid rulers and their subjects of Shiism. Such an interpretation of events is incorrect in each case, but it is accurate in its general awareness of the traumatic impact that the rise of Islam had on many Persians.

In the medium term, rather than attempting to reverse the effects of Islam’s arrival, Persians and Persian culture were Islamicized. This happened most obviously under the Abbasids who, by moving to Iraq, constructed their power-base from the rubble of Sasanid institutions. Not only was political and governmental organization inherited from Persian traditions (as Byzantine ones had been inherited by the Umayyads in Syria), but much of Abbasid civilization – including literature, history, theology, religious sciences, Quranic studies, and even Arabic poetry and linguistics – was created and dominated by people who composed books in Arabic but told bedtime stories in Persian. Persians were very much aware of their cultural dominance and a literary movement arose promoting Persian culture and reminding the Arabs of their indebtedness to it. Even the great Ibn Khaldun (d. 1406), writing in the far west of the Islamic world, included in his Muqaddima (on which, see below p. 105) a section entitled ‘Most of the scholars of Islam have been Persians (‘ajam)’.

In the long term, Islamic culture itself was Persianized, even in the face of viable alternatives. This process began with the rise of semi-independent Persian dynasties in the Abbasid east, where rulers adopted Sasanid titles, traced for their dynasties Sasanid genealogies, and, most importantly, patronized literature in the Persian language. Perhaps the most famous literary work in Persian, the Shahnama (‘Book of Kings’), was composed in Samanid times and dedicated to a Ghaznavid ruler. It recounts in epic form all of Iranian history that is thought to have really mattered, beginning with the creation of the world and, tellingly, ending abruptly with the Muslim defeat of the Sasanid forces at the Battle of al-Qadisiyya (637).

Above all, the spread of Turks, Mongols, and Turco-Mongols to and within Islamic lands led to an effl orescence of Persian literature, even – or especially – outside of Iran. Persian-speaking missionaries played a pivotal role in the spread of Islam to the east, and it is no coincidence that the religious terminology used by Chinese Muslims prefers Persian words such as namaz (‘prayer’) over Arabic synonyms (in this case, salat). Before entering the Islamic world in the late 10th century, the Turkish tribes from whom the Saljuqs and Ottomans are descended were converted to Islam by Persians; religion was thus filtered to them through a Persian sieve. When the Saljuqs created a dynasty in Iran/Iraq, its administrative and literary forms were Persian, and when their relatives moved westwards to conquer Anatolia and create the Ottoman empire, here too Persian was adopted as the language of culture.

The Mongol and Timurid conquests, destructive though they were, also contributed to the success of the Persian language: on the one hand, having no attachment to Arabic as a religious language, the Mongols in Iran (who employed local, Iranian administrators) patronized Persian scholarship even in those fields that hitherto had been reserved for Arabic. On the other hand, the havoc wrought by the conquests forced leading Iranian scholars to seek safety (and patronage) elsewhere, mostly in Muslim India. Under the Delhi and, especially, the Mughal sultans Indo-Islamic literature, the arts (painting, in particular), and imperial administration were Persian in language and form, and some of the fi nest specimens of Persian culture were produced in Mughal lands. Thus, from the 11th to 19th centuries (even later, in some regions) Persian was the leading language of high culture throughout the Islamic world. Even when it was eventually eclipsed, by English and then Urdu and Hindi in India, and by Turkish and Arabic in the post-Ottoman provinces, its impact was still felt on many levels: Urdu literature still follows Persian models, while trendy Westerners read the mystical writings of Rumi (d. 1273), about whom it was said, ‘He has brought a [Holy] Book, though he is not a prophet’. Persian literature also found fans in Goethe (West-Eastern Divan) and Puccini (Turandot), amongst numerous other Western authors.

Arabs

Interestingly, from the vantage point of very early Islamic history, the conflation is not entirely unreasonable. It could be argued that Islam began as a chosen-people religion aimed exclusively at the Arabs; the Quran (12: 2, and 43: 3) states that it is in the Arabic language ‘so that you may understand [its message]’, a statement that assumes its audience to be Arabic-speakers. Moreover, under the Umayyad caliphs, the conversion of non-Arabs to Islam was normally discouraged and those who did convert were made ‘clients’ of Arab tribes. In other words, to be a Muslim one had to be an Arab – or at least an honorary one. And for centuries, Jews in Muslim lands (usually in Persia) argued that Muhammad was indeed a true Prophet sent by God to spread monotheism, but only amongst the pagan Arabs who needed it. (Persian Jews no longer subscribe to this theory.) Support for such an idea comes from the Quran itself (46: 12), which states: ‘And before this, was the Book of Moses as a guide and a mercy: And this Book confirms (it) in the Arabic tongue . . .’

Clearly, however, that is not the only way of looking at things and is certainly not how things turned out. Still, the Arabs and their culture have been central to all Muslims in a number of ways. The early association of Islam with Arabs, together with the long-standing objection (now obsolete) to translating the Quran, have meant that even non-Arab Muslims have had reason to learn at least the basics of Arabic. And it does no harm that Arabic is regarded – even amongst Persians – as the language of God (though most Muslim historians hold that Adam and Eve spoke Aramaic). Crucially, those who want to read the seminal works of Islamic law, theology, Quranic studies, hadith, history, and so forth must have a thorough grounding in Arabic. As Islam spread for the most part in regions and periods where literacy was very limited, a Muslim’s first experience of literacy often involved learning to read and write God’s language.

Consequently, even non-Arabic languages came to be written in a version of the Arabic script modifi ed to accommodate the particularities of the spoken languages. Persian, Urdu (Hindi in Arabic script), and – until relatively recently – Turkish, as well as a host of other languages, use the Arabic alphabet and contain numerous Arabic words. For these reasons, in the first few centuries of Islamic history all authors regardless of ethnicity would compose their works in Arabic. Arabic might thus be compared with Chinese, the stability of which over millennia allowed Chinese scholars to read about and build on their predecessors’ ideas, with the result that many world-changing inventions originated there – from paper, printing, the compass, and gunpowder, to magic tricks and kung-fu. As a scholarly language shared by non-native speakers, Arabic also brings to mind the use of Latin in pre- and early-modern Europe.

The spread of Arabic as a scholarly language allowed scholars, Muslim and non-Muslim alike, to communicate their ideas across boundaries and generations, with truly impressive results in many fields. In the 9th century, for instance, a considerable portion of the ancient Greek writings was translated into Arabic under caliphal auspices, at a time when most in the West had lost the ability to enjoy this heritage, and it is through translations into Latin of these Arabic versions of Greek texts that Europe rediscovered many of these works and their ideas. Thus, it has been argued (if not widely accepted) that the Renaissance as we know it would not have happened had the Arabs and their language remained in Arabia.

Shiism in Iran

Around the time that Osman was creating his state in Anatolia, a native of Azerbaijan named Safi al-Din (1252–1334) founded a Sufi brotherhood in Ardabil, whose followers came to be known as Safavids. By the late 15th century, this brotherhood had morphed into a militant Shiite–Sufi movement that held its leader to be either the hidden Imam or God Himself. At the turn of the 16th century, the leader of the Safavid order, a teenager named Isma‘il, came out of hiding and set about conquering Iran; by 1501, he was the region’s shah with a capital at Tabriz. In 1514, however, the Safavid forces were defeated by the Ottomans at Chaldiran, with three signifi cant consequences: first, the modern Turkish–Iranian border was set; second, having lost the battle (and their claim to divinity) to Ottoman gunpowder, the Safavid shahs acquired gunpowder too; and third, with Ottoman forces encroaching on their western provinces, subsequent shahs moved the capital eastwards, eventually settling on Isfahan under ‘Abbas I (r. 1587–1629).

In moving eastwards, the Safavids were distancing themselves from their original Turkmen power-base, and digging their heels into Iran’s heartland. The religious character of the state was purged of its radical ideas, which were replaced with orthodox, Twelver Shiism (while Turkish elites were replaced with Persian ones). This form of Shiism was forcibly imposed on a largely Sunni population, and Shiite scholars from Bahrain, Greater Syria, and Iraq were imported to Isfahan, where both religious and secular culture flourished. To his capital in Isfahan, ‘Abbas also shifted populations from provincial towns to create a cultural and economic hub. It was thus under the Safavids that Iran’s modern borders and religious and cultural identities were brought into clear focus – in sharp contrast to the tolerant heterogeneity of the Ottoman empire. Persian literature reached new heights and, to the extent that both the Ottomans and Mughals (or ‘Moghuls’, Persian for ‘Mongols’) had adopted Persian as the language of high culture (in pre-Ottoman Anatolia and pre-Mughal India), the Safavids were at the very centre of Islamic civilization. After the death of ‘Abbas II (r. 1642–66), however, decline set in: natural disasters (famines, earthquakes, and the spread of diseases) combined with ineffectual rulers to leave a political vacuum that was filled by Shiite ‘ulama’, or ‘mullahs’, who tightened Shiism’s hold on society. Imposing one’s religion by force is no way to win friends and influence people, and embittered Sunni tribesmen from Afghanistan overran the

Safavids in 1722, putting an end to their rule. Political unity – and Shiism – returned to Iran with the Qajars (1794–1925), who ushered Iran into modernity.

1100-1500

The first two periods are often referred to as the ‘formative’ and ‘classical’ periods of Islamic history; and for most Muslims (who, it should be noted, tend not to use these terms or chronological divisions), they are the centuries that count the most. But the overwhelming majority of the world’s Muslims would almost certainly still be infidels were it not for the events of the 1100–1500 period. And although modern Islamists (those for whom Islam is a political as well as a religious system) shine their spotlight on the age of the Prophet and Rashidun caliphs, it is in response to the events of this period that Islamist movements emerged. From a European perspective, this is the period without which Turkey would have no case for inclusion into the EU (and no case for being ‘Turkey’ at all), and without which Russia would have no ‘issues’ with Muslims to their south.

Golden Age: 800-1100

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.

Camels

What camels have going for them is their incredible ability to cope with short supplies over long periods; they are thus economically efficient and low-maintenance. What they have going against them is that their sensitive feet cannot cope with cold or uneven terrain. Muhammad may have gone to the mountain, but his immediate successors did no such thing, at least not to begin with, and throughout Islamic history mountain ranges have proven – by chance or by design – to be safe havens for those seeking to withstand pressure to convert, conform, or cooperate more generally. On account of their relative inaccessibility, mountains have helped locals as well as newcomers seeking refuge to retain their religious traditions (Christians in northern Spain, Anatolia, Armenia, Lebanon, and the Ethiopian highlands; and Zoroastrians and other dualists in northern Iran), and their cultural traditions (Persian in Iran, Berber in North Africa, Kurdish in northern Iraq), just as they were exploited by those escaping the reach of the central authorities more generally (Ismailis in Syria and northern Iran, Zaydis in Yemen, and the Taliban in Afghanistan). It is not for nothing that Moroccan political authorities referred to their mountainous regions as ‘siba’, [the lands of] rebellion. Soviet and latterly American troops in Afghanistan learned these facts the hard way; local Muslims have

known them all along.

Islamic History: A Very Short Introduction

Muhammad died in 632, having been the religious and political ruler of the Muslim state since it was created in 622, and clearly someone else had to take charge of affairs in his absence. But who would this be, and how would he be chosen? One solution proposed was that the communal elders should get together and choose the most suitable candidate from amongst Muhammad’s tribe (Quraysh). This is what Sunnis think, and such a consultation (shura) is the basis on which some of the earliest caliphs were selected. But what if Muhammad himself, with God’s inspiration, had actually nominated a suitable successor in his lifetime? Shiites believe that this is what happened and that ‘Ali was chosen; according to them the office passes through ‘Ali’s direct descendants from one generation to the next. As seen in Chapter 1, Shiites could not always agree on the precise line of the imam’s descent, which created further schisms. What if ‘Ali turned out to be a disappointing leader, as those who would become the Kharijites thought? For them, the caliph should simply be the most suitable candidate for the job, regardless of lineage (and when ‘Ali turned out not to be the one, they killed him). Others thought that a leader’s ability to take control of the state should be the decisive factor. After all, if God is guiding events, and He brings power into the hands of a particular person or family, who can argue? This was the Umayyad point of view. The list can be greatly extended, but the point should be clear: not only did the caliphate fail to unite the umma, it was the chief cause of divisions within it. And instead of unleashing the umma’s collective power, Muslims throughout the course of Islamic history have expended much of their intellectual and physical energies fi ghting amongst themselves about it.