Political and administrative change occurred at a pace different from that of social and economic processes. Conversion to Islam remained rare among the indigenous populations of the conquered territories: perhaps 10 percent of the urban population of Iran had converted by ad 750 (Bulliet 1979: 23). The figure may be taken as indicative for other regions. It might be expected to have been higher in areas like Syria that were conquered early and had large Arab populations, but what evidence there is suggests limited conversion even there (Schick 1995: 139-58). It is evident, meanwhile, that existing economic trends in Late Antiquity continued in the early Islamic period (Morony 2004), as did patterns of urban and rural settlement; the ‘‘classical’’ city had already begun to change before the coming of Islam (Kennedy 1985), and archaeology and field surveys do not suggest any dramatic ‘‘bedouiniza-tion’’ of the rural economy after the conquests (Gatier 1995; MacAdam 1995).
The most significant new departure was the foundation of the amsar, the new garrisons for the Arab-Muslim conquerors. Most of them eventually became genuine cities - indeed, many of them (such as Basra) have been continuously occupied down to the present. Although conversion to Islam did not have a great effect on the indigenous population, the comparatively small numbers of the Arab-Muslims meant that the converts had a significant impact on them. Many of the new Muslim ‘‘clients’’ (mawali, sing. mawla) settled in the amsar, where cultural interaction was already a significant influence on the development of Islam in the Marwanid period.
The foundation of the amsar reflected the importance of conquest and settlement in nascent Islam: emigration (hijra) and holy war (jihad) were the engines of the ‘‘conquest society’’ (Crone 1994a). These garrisons were the ‘‘houses of emigration’’ ( dur al-hijra), and they became the administrative and political capitals of the conquered provinces. Thus, Basra (ad 635/6) and Kufa (ad 636-40) became the capitals of the two districts of Iraq, and al-Fustat (ad 642) became the capital of Egypt. As the conquests continued, the misr remained the pattern for new garrisons: Qayrawan became the capital of the Maghrib in ad 682, replacing an earlier nearby foundation of AD 654/5 (Sakly 2000: 57). An exception to this pattern was Syria, where garrisons were abandoned for settlement in existing towns, perhaps because of the presence of Arabs there.
The new foundations combined the urban traditions of the Arabian Peninsula with those of the conquered provinces. It has recently been proposed that all of them were based on the form of the late Roman quadrilateral Roman legionary fortress (Whitcomb 1995: 278-82). That may attribute too much weight to al-‘Aqaba (a possible misr on the Red Sea, dating perhaps from the ad 640s or 650s) and to the evidence of later foundations in Syria, but literary evidence does indicate that the amsar in Iraq were also quadrilateral in layout (Wheatley 2001: 42-3). It is also striking that those garrisons are reported to have been established at the behest of ‘Umar, the conqueror of Roman Syria (Wheatley 2001: 42, 45). Archaeology has confirmed the literary evidence that all the new foundations had a congregational mosque, with the house of the governor and the administrative buildings (such as the treasury) at their center. This architectural pattern was the chief material expression of the new religion and the focus of public life. Congregational prayers took place there, and the speeches and sermons of the commander (amir), who was also the prayer-leader (imam), were given there. The fundamental elements of that architectural arrangement were probably derived from the Hijaz and institutionalized under the first caliphs, in the era of the foundation of the amsar (Johns 1999: 86-8), although they also had analogues in the Roman and Iranian cities conquered by the Muslims.
Other elements of the new cities certainly came from pre-Islamic Arabia. The Arab-Muslims were settled in cantonments ( khitat, sing. khitta) according to their tribal affiliations. Given that Mecca and Medina were only small settlements before Islam and that the Muslim conquerors were from tribes right across the peninsula, it seems likely that precedents should be sought outside the Hijaz, particularly in south Arabia (Whitcomb 1996).
It was in these new foundations, and in the places where Arab-Muslims settled in Syria, that early Islamic society developed. The advent of Islam suddenly and dramatically rearranged the power relationships of Late Antiquity. Previously dominant religious groups - Zoroastrians and Christians - were now subordinate, and Jews, already subordinate, had to come to an accommodation with the new faith. Other aspects of identity were also transformed: culture, language, and ethnicity became markers in new hierarchies. Many aspects of the process will probably remain opaque because of the late date of the sources. These tend to presuppose the existence of a ‘‘classical’’ Islam, underestimating the extent to which Islamic culture and dogma had been formed out of the encounter between the Arabs and the people of the defeated empires. One of the best hopes for reconstructing aspects of the early encounters between the Arab conquerors and the late antique populations lies in the hadith literature - the corpus of traditions about the actions of the Prophet and of early Muslims that had acquired the classical status of sunna (‘‘normative practice’’) by the ninth century. Because these texts are compilations of material generated during the first two centuries, they contain traces of the negotiations that took place between the different communities in that period.
As in the successor states in the west during the fifth and sixth centuries, one of the major controversies in the Islamic world in the eighth century was the question of the legitimacy and desirability of mixed marriages (Bashear 1997: 118). Whereas only a poor sort of Roman would want to be like a Goth (the reputed sentiment of the Ostrogothic king Theodoric), many of the wealthiest Persians and Greeks wanted to affiliate themselves with the Arabs. There are plenty of hadith, therefore, linking the Persians to the Arab-Muslims through genealogies reaching back on both sides as far as Abraham, and in sayings such as, ‘‘the Persians are a band (related) to us, the people of the house (of the Prophet)’’ (Bashear 1997: 67-8). Attitudes among the Arab-Muslims were ambivalent, however, and the dominant theme of the hadith remains the superiority of the Arabs: ‘‘I am an Arab, the Qur’an is Arabic, and the speech of the people of Paradise is Arabic,’’ said Muhammad (Bashear 1997: 56). Identities were also defined by cultic and cultural practices, and a great diversity of influences, exchanges, and negotiations are reflected in the hadith literature. ‘‘Persian’’ gestures like greeting by handshake received prophetic approval, but Arab-Muslim identity was mostly defined by difference - the wearing of silk and the kissing of hands were both unacceptable (Bashear 1997: 33-4). Religious material was borrowed and adapted, as the vast corpus of Isra’iliyyat literature confirms. Jewish and Christian material was also adapted and coopted into the interpretation of the Qur’an and the elaboration of Islamic traditions (Adang 1996).
The absence of a priestly class in Islam meant that the caliph could influence this formative process only through his provincial governors. There was no church hierarchy with which the state could make accommodations, as it had done in both Christian Rome and Zoroastrian Iran. In the event, the state’s limited persuasive and coercive power meant that it failed to determine questions of Islamic orthodoxy in its own favor. The burst of creativity in public Islamic art and architecture that characterized the first decades of Marwanid rule faded with the collapse of the siege of AD 717 and, although the Sasanian-influenced architecture and ceremonial of the later Marwanids anticipated the style of the ‘Abbasids who overthrew them, the brand of Islamic absolutism expressed in their chancery output and palace iconography failed to win acceptance. In the eastern cities, where the ferment of cultural interaction was most productive, ideas of orthodoxy and legitimacy were diverging from
Marwanid ones, a divergence fueled by resentment against what was perceived as foreign rule by Syrian Arabs. The trend culminated in the revolution of the mid eighth century and the installation of the ‘Abbasid dynasty in ad 750.
World History
