The Islamic Golden Age (original) (raw)
The Great Caliphs The Golden Age of the 'Abbasid Empire
Peasants and country folk • The people of the city • Women and children • The religious minorities • Beggars and tricksters 94 4. The Lifeblood of Empire: Trade and Traders in the 'Abbasid Age Routes and commodities • Merchants and pilgrims • Trade facilities 37 5. Baghdad's 'Golden Age': Islam's Scientific Renaissance The foundations of Islamic learning • The flowering of knowledge under the ' Abbasids • The ' Abbasid translation movement • Translations, translators and scientists • Knowledge and science after the translation movement 58 6. The 'Abbasid Legacy 203 Notes 26 Bibliography 225 Index 235 vii Illustrations Maps and diagrams . The Middle East and North Africa before the Islamic conquest 2 2. The 'Abbasid empire, 750-900 CE 3 3. The Islamic World c. 00 CE 4. The Round City: Plan of Baghdad. (After Lassner, The Shaping of ' Abbasid Rule, pp 86, 90) 7 5. A Simplified Family Tree of the Prophet and the Caliphal Dynasties 25 2. 'Abbasid-style Mosque of Ibn Tulun in Cairo. (Author's photograph) 73 3. Great Mosque of Qayrawan which achieved its current form under the Aghlabids who ruled Tunisia in the name of the 'Abbasids. (Author's photograph) 73 4. Umayyad royal city of Madinat al-Zahra' outside Cordoba. (Author's photograph) 75 5. Portal of the Fatimid Great Mosque of Mahdiyya which evokes the Roman arches dotted across the Tunisian landscape. (Author's photograph) 76 6. Roman arch at Sbeitla in Tunisia. (Author's photograph) 77 7. Fatimid Mosque of al-Hakim in Cairo. (Author's photograph) 78 8. Fatimid al-Aqmar Mosque in Cairo. (Author's photograph) 78 9. The Fatimid Gate of Victory and minaret of the Mosque of al-Hakim, Cairo. From David Roberts, Egypt and Nubia (London, 846-49), vol. 3, plate 3, tab.b.9. (Reproduced by kind permission of the Syndics of Cambridge University Library) 78 20. Minaret of the Almohad Great Mosque of Seville. (Author's photograph) 8 2. Courtyard of the Almohad Great Mosque of Seville planted with orange trees. (Author's photograph) 83 22. Portal of the hospital of Nur al-Din in Damascus showing its reused Byzantine lintel. (Author's photograph) 90 23. A caravan of pilgrims or merchants at rest near Asyut, Upper Egypt. From David Roberts, Egypt and Nubia (London, 846-49), vol. , plate 37, tab.b.9. (Reproduced by kind permission of the Syndics of Cambridge University Library) 39 24. Fragment of a Kufic Qur'an, probably dating to the eighth-ninth century CE. (Manuscript Add 24, p 48 verso. Reproduced by kind permission of the Syndics of Cambridge University Library) 64 25. A page from a thirteenth-century copy of the version of Euclid composed by the 'Abbasid mathematician Thabit b. Qurra. (Manuscript Add 075, p 43. Reproduced by kind permission of the Syndics of Cambridge University Library) 88 26. The entry for Cinque Foil in a Botanicum antiquum illustrating Dioscorides' botanical dictionary with captions in Hebrew, Greek, Arabic and Turkish. (Manuscript Ee.5.7, p 269. Reproduced by kind permission of the Syndics of Cambridge University Library) 99 ix x Note on Transliteration and Arabic Conventions T ransliteration of Arabic into English poses a number of problems and it is impossible to be consistent. I have used the standard transliteration system employed by the International Journal of Middle Eastern Studies, but in order to avoid cluttering what is supposed to be an accessible text, I have chosen not to mark Arabic long vowels or emphatic letters. I have assumed that specialists know which letters are soft and which are emphatic and where long vowels fall, while the general reader does not need to be confused by a series of unintelligible lines and dots above and below letters. I have indicated the Arabic letter ayn and the glottal stop hamza with opening and closing quotation marks respectively. With respect to place names, wherever possible I have used contemporary English forms for clarity, although this does lead to some anachronisms. For instance, for the Iberian peninsula I have used 'Spain', which really only applies to the Christian kingdom established in the fifteenth century, rather than more correct but less readily comprehensible terms. The same applies to 'Tunisia', 'Morocco' and other country names which were not regularly used in pre-modern times but direct the reader to the correct geographical area. Pre-modern Arabic names consisted of several components in the form: father of (abu) someone, personal name, son of (ibn) someone, to which was often added an adjective indicating a tribe, place or profession and, for rulers, an honorific title. For example, the Prophet's full name was Abu'l-Qasim Muhammad ibn 'Abd Allah, to which one could add 'al-Hashimi', meaning 'of the clan of Hashim'. In keeping with usual academic conventions, I have abbreviated ibn to b. throughout the text except when it appears at the start of a shortened name, e.g. Ibn Khaldun. It is also conventional to describe caliphs and rulers using their honorifics, e.g. al-Ma'mun, with the exception of the Umayyads of Spain, who are generally known by their personal names. 'Western' empire becomes even clearer with the transformation of the eastern Roman Empire into the Christian Byzantine Empire. This was a mostly Greek-speaking empire but the Byzantines called themselves 'Romans' and were so called by their Muslim neighbours, for whom 'Rome' was thus Constantinople and the Roman Empire a Middle Eastern rather than a 'Abbasid times was commerce. Although the most usual stereotype is of the Arab as a desert nomad, in reality many Arabs came from the villages and towns of the Yemen (known as Arabia Felix by the Romans for its green steeply terraced valleys), the settled coasts of eastern Arabia and the Syrian towns on the northern fringe of the desert. The kingdoms of old Arabia supplied and received goods to and from Greece, Rome, Persia, Ethiopia and India. Even in the vast desert interior, sacred enclaves (harams), where tribesmen were obliged to enter unarmed, dotted the landscape and hosted important commercial fairs such as the gathering held at 'Ukaz near Mecca. Islam therefore developed in a semi-commercial environment and Muhammad worked as a commercial agent in his youth. This meant that despite the initially military character of the Islamic conquests, the Muslims were not slow to exploit the commercial opportunities opened up to them. The creation of a vast empire also enabled non-Muslims, Jews especially, to strengthen and extend their trade networks across the length and breadth of the Islamic world and develop new partnerships with Muslims to the mutual benefit of all those involved. In the following pages, I shall draw a picture of the politics, society and culture of classical Islam with the twofold aim of revealing its dynamic The Great Caliphs 4 Caliph, some allowing it on the grounds that he oversees what is owed God by his creation, in accordance with His words, glorified and exalted be His name. … The majority of scholars, however, object to this view, regarding it as sinful to hold. 7 'Uthman was succeeded by 'Ali, the most tragic of the Rightly Guided Caliphs and, in many ways, the most influential in terms of later political and religious developments. 'Ali was the Prophet's cousin and son-in-law as a result of his marriage to Muhammad's eldest daughter, Fatima, who died six months after her father. Since Muhammad had no surviving sons, 'Ali, Fatima and their two sons, Hasan and Husayn, were his closest relatives, and some Muslims felt that 'Ali should have succeeded the Prophet immediately after his death and that his rights had been usurped by Abu Bakr, 'Umar and 'Uthman in turn. They were known as the 'Party of 'Ali' The Great Caliphs 6 (shi'at ' Ali), which eventually developed into the Shi'i Muslim minority, and they strongly championed his elevation to the caliphate when 'Uthman was assassinated. However, others, including 'Aysha, the daughter of Abu Bakr and one of the Prophet's wives, popularly known as the 'Mother of the Believers', opposed 'Ali's choice as caliph. While no love was lost between 'Ali and 'Aysha, her vehement disapproval probably lay in, firstly, 'Ali's consistent criticism of economic, social and religious developments which he believed were against the spirit of Islam and, secondly, her fear that if he became caliph he would upset the emerging but still fragile social and political order of early Islam. In order to secure his caliphate, 'Ali had to fight a coalition led by Talha and Zubayr, two eminent and early converts who shared 'Aysha's views. He managed to defeat his opponents at the Battle of the Camel, so called because of 'Aysha's attendance in a camel litter, only to be faced by a much greater threat to his power from the governor of Syria, Mu'awiya, a kinsman of 'Uthman, who insisted that the new caliph had not avenged his predecessor's murder as he should have. The armies of 'Ali and Mu'awiya met in 657 at Siffin in northern Syria. Although 'Ali might have won on military grounds, Mu'awiya was a consummate politician and reputedly halted the battle and called for a negotiated settlement by ordering his men to wave sections of the Qur'an on their spears. This proved to be disastrous for 'Ali: the arbitration process which took place the following year was inconclusive and 'Ali had to settle for control of Iraq while Mu'awiya ruled supreme in Syria and Egypt. The Islamic empire was temporarily divided into two and 'Ali's credibility among his own supporters was severely dented. Some of them felt that as caliph he should never have negotiated with a rebel such as Mu'awiya and that his decision to do so was such a gross misjudgement that it disqualified him from the caliphate. They left his camp and formed Islam's first sect, the Kharijites, who held the view that the caliphate belonged to the Muslim best qualified for the post, even if he was a black slave, according to a very...
The Abbasid " Golden Age " : An Excavation
ABSTRACT The application of a Hegelian rise-and-fall narrative to the history of Arabic literature has been erroneously attributed to Ibn Khaldūn and his successors, though it can more probably be traced back to Hammer-Purgstall's Literaturgeschichte der Araber (1850). Although this paradigm has long been out of favor, its disappearance leaves us without a ready answer to the question of what (if anything) was distinctive about what is still sometimes called the early Abbasid golden age. The prominence of this era in later memory is here traced to the adoption of paper, which supported, on the one hand, the simplification and vulgarization of Arab language, lore, and religion; and on the other, the appearance of the first reliably contemporary eyewitness accounts in Arabic literature. These productions made the period the first Islamic space to be imaginable in almost granular detail, as well as the source of much of what we know about antecedent "Arab" and "Islamic" history. These features gave the period an outsized place even in the pre-modern Arabic tradition. They also made it available for popularization by Jurjī Zaydān, whose Taʾrīkh al-tamaddun al-islāmī (1902-1906) proved formative of later attitudes in Arabic-language scholarship.
Biran 2023 Ilkhanid Baghdad 1258-1335 Betwen the Local and the Global
The Mongols in Global History and Art History, 2023
Michal Biran. 2023. “Ilkhanid Baghdad (1258-1335): Between the Local and the Global.” In The Mongols in Global History and Art History, ed. Anne Dunlop, 185-215. Florence: I Tatti - The Harvard University Center for Italian Renaissance Studies ; Rome: Officina Libraria. This paper highlights some of the transformations that took place in Baghdad following the Mongol conquest. The point of departure for this analysis is the prism of mobility—the ability of people, ideas, and artifacts to move or be moved across both space and society—which I see as a main feature of Mongol rule. The essay thus explores the mobility of people, artifacts, and ideas in Ilkhanid Baghdad. More specifically, it deals with emigration and immigration, trade routes and local production, and inter-religious polemics compiled by Baghdadi residents.
The Great Caliphs: The Golden Age of the Abbasid Empire by Amira K. Bennison
Early Islamic history often receives accusations of jihads and barbarism intent on conquest and intolerance. This characterization and stereotyping received new impetus with the recent history of terrorism spreading from radical forms of Islam. Even sympathetic scholars tend to paint a stark picture between the Islamic caliphs and Western culture. Amira K. Bennison presents a much broader picture of the Abbasid caliphates as a center of learning, science, and culture.