Another feature that one might have expected to endure, at least for a few centuries, was a single unified imperial government over all the lands that the Arabs had conquered, but in the end it proved to be ephemeral. The Umayyad dynasty (661—750) did quite a good job, despite three civil wars, though of course they were as busy acquiring territory as governing it. The Abbasid dynasty that succeeded them, however, watched parts of the empire break away from day one of their rule. Spain was a direct casualty of the revolution, for some members of the Umayyad family fled there and made it their new home, and the implacable hostility of the Abbasid family toward them left them no choice but to secede. The Berber revolt in northwest Africa, though initially crushed, had set in motion an unstoppable exodus, and by the year 800 there were at least five autonomous dynasties in the region. A bloody civil war (809—13) between the sons of the caliph Harun al-Rashid weakened Abbasid rule in Iran and enabled a number of different types of dynasties of local origin to flourish there. Only a short while afterward the political fragmentation of the Arab Empire extended to the central lands, and in 945 Iraq itself was captured, first by Daylamis from northern Iran, who revived the Persian title “shah of shahs,” and then in 1055 by Turks from Central Asia, which heralded a long period of Turkish domination in the Middle East. Political unity was never to return and the Muslim world remained a multi-polar one forever thereafter. And yet the societies ruled by these petty dynasties did enjoy a broadly similar culture. We can speak of an Islamic commonwealth or Islamdom in the medieval Middle East just as we can speak of a Christian commonwealth or Christendom in medieval Europe, that is, a loose amalgam of polities where Islam was the dominant (though not necessarily the majority) religion and where the general way of life had a significant number of common features. The Muslim geographers who bravely traversed these lands from the tenth to the fifteenth century present a picture that, although exhibiting numerous local differences, has reassuringly recognizable outlines: Turkish soldiers; Jewish merchants; Christian doctors; the symbiotic triad of mosque, church, and synagogue; lively bazaars; a passion for poetry; Arabic religious texts; Persian epic history, and so on.
Why, then, did a unitary Arab Empire last such a short time in comparison to its predecessors, that is, why did it not enjoy the same sort of life span as the Roman/Byzantine Empire (ca. 830 years until the Arab conquests) or the Persian Empire (ca. 1,100 years)?2 There are two main answers to this, one topographical/ecological and the other ideological. The former is perhaps
The most significant and can be put very simply: the Arab Empire was strung out over thousands of miles across deserts and mountains, which made communication and transportation slow and revolts at the margins difficult to contain. A similar problem afflicted many empires acquired in a rapid and relatively unplanned manner, such as that of the Turks (552—630) and Mongols (1206—94). By contrast, the Roman Empire, acquired much more slowly, was organized around the Mediterranean Sea, which allowed comparatively fast and cheap transportation of goods and troops, and the Persian Empire, though less integrated, was still quite manageable, predicated on control of the rich Tigris-Euphrates river system in Iraq by the adjacent Iranian highland peoples. These two water systems (the Mediterranean and the Tigris-Euphrates) were, however, separated by the stony wastes of the Syrian desert, which greatly hampered the efforts of any one power to dominate both of them (only the Achaemenid Persians and the Arabs ever managed it). Furthermore, a large proportion of the territory conquered by the Arabs consisted of marginal/ arid lands, which had two potentially dangerous consequences: their empire was particularly vulnerable to climatic fluctuations and over-exploitation and also to the movements of the large populations of nomads who inhabited these lands, especially the Turk and Mongol tribes of the great Eurasian steppe. The so-called Medieval Warm Period, for instance, which lasted from the tenth to the early fourteenth century, resulted in very volatile climatic conditions in Central Asia, including persistent droughts and cold winters, and prompted the migration of some of these steppe tribes into the eastern part of the Arab Empire and their gradual usurpation of political power.3
Inhospitable terrain also impeded internal conquest. For the whole of the Umayyad period the inhabitants of pretty much every upland region within the lands claimed by the Arab regime maintained a high degree of autonomy. Some did so officially, acknowledged as vassals of the Arabs and accorded a treaty; in this position were the Armenians, Georgians, Albanians, and various peoples of the Caspian region. Many did so unofficially, such as the Berbers of the Atlas and Aures Mountains, and the Kurds and other peoples of the eastern Taurus/northern Zagros range in modern southeast Turkey and northwest Iran. This unofficial category we only tend to hear about when they came into conflict with the Arabs. For example, in 751, the Arabs of Mayferqat in northern Mesopotamia rose up against Abbasid rule and caused many problems for the people in the surrounding area. Those in the mountains organized their own militia under a local Christian named John son of Daddi. “From this point on evils increased between the people of the mountains and the Arabs, for they committed murder against each other every day without end. The people of the mountains seized all the passes; not one Arab was seen in the whole mountain region.” Soon the affair spread and we hear of Armenians and Urartians (from the area around Lake Van) fomenting trouble in this region.4 The mountains of the Middle East continued to harbor distinctive tight-knit communities fiercely attached to their identities and native lands, and it was principally in the cities of the fertile lowlands that the Arabs held sway. But of course it was in these cities that mainstream culture flourished, and so even when desert and mountain peoples succeeded not just in holding their own but also in conquering the lowlands, they were not able to impress much of their own culture upon Islamic civilization.
The second answer to the question of why the Arabs failed to maintain durable political unity concerns ideology. In effect, Islam itself became hostile to an imperial style of government, but that of course only raises the question of why it developed in that direction. Jesus had said that his kingdom was not of this world, but that did not stop Eusebius, bishop of Caesarea, from happily endorsing Constantine the Great as a Christian emperor upon the latter’s conversion in AD 312 and drawing up a theoretical blueprint for Christian imperialism. The Qur’an, though it offers no detailed instructions on how to govern, does insist on obedience to “those in authority” (uli l-amr) and these and similar injunctions could easily have been used in support of an Islamic imperialism. Certainly Umayyad dynasts seemed willing to emulate the emperors of old, as we can see from a fresco in Walid II’s palace of Qusayr 'Amra that portrays him receiving homage from past and present world leaders and from a poem of Yazid III that boasts of his kinship ties to the Persian, Byzantine, and Turkish royal families.5 It was not to be, however, and there are two main reasons for this. First, since Islam, unlike Christianity, had no clergy (especially before the introduction of madrasas in the eleventh century), there was no hierarchy of religious staff to offer ideological support for an imperial Islamic rule in return for political and financial backing.6 The men who began to lay the foundations of Islamic law in the eighth century were amateurs, either independently wealthy or pursuing their studies alongside their main occupation. They were mostly outside the political establishment and so tended to put into their writings an idealized portrayal of what government should be. This can be seen in their characterization of the caliph 'Umar I, the model statesman, who is presented as virulently opposed to the accumulation of wealth and power by the state. The only persons who did recommend a more imperial style of rule were senior administrators, but they did not have the moral authority to make it a part of Islam. One of their number, Ibn al-Muqaffa' (d. 757), did devise a blueprint for an imperial form of Islamic government, and it is telling that he was executed by the Abbasid caliph Mansur in striking contrast to Eusebius, who was personally honored by the Emperor Constantine.7
Second, many of the participants in the early Arab conquests were nomads and they had a nomad attitude toward the spoils of conquest, namely, that they should be redistributed to all directly and not accumulated by the state for apportionment at a later date.8 “You have appropriated our spoils (fay’)” is the most common accusation of rebels against the government throughout the Umayyad period and “equal distribution of the spoils” is the most common pledge of revolutionaries to their followers. Soldiers were paid stipends by the state from the tax revenues that it had collected, but that meant they were dependent on the state, which added to their sense of grievance and made them more determined to reduce the power of the central government so that it could not filch what they felt was due to the rank and file. Arguments over who was entitled to what were legion, and changes to the system were very difficult to implement. The extreme concentration of power—in the hands of a single clan (Umayyads and then Abbasids) from just one tribe (Quraysh)—also exacerbated the situation. In short, a fair proportion of the soldiery of the early Arab army was disgruntled by the center's monopoly of wealth and power and did all they could to constrain an imperial style of government. Their attitude evidently fed into the idealized image of 'Umar I as a Bedouin hero: he wears rough animal-hair clothes, prefers his camel to a horse, is fiercely opposed to affected manners and ostentatious displays of wealth, and favors a simple and austere life over the fineries and fripperies of empire.
World History
