The rise of Islam turned the late antique Near East inside out. Rome and Sasanian Iran, who had faced one another across the ‘‘Fertile Crescent’’ of Syria and Mesopotamia for 400 years, were defeated in two decades of campaigning by Arab tribesmen in the ad 630s and 640s. The Roman Empire went on to lose all its African and Asian territories except Anatolia, while the Sasanian Empire was completely destroyed. Christianity, which had long been established as the religion of the Roman Empire and had been gaining ground in Iran, became the faith of a subject people, superseded by a new, Arabic revelation. Syria and Mesopotamia, which had been divided by the heavily fortified frontier between the two empires, became, from the AD 660s, the heartland of the new empire. It was here that the palaces and cities of the caliphs were founded, far from the new frontiers in Anatolia, North Africa, and Transoxiana (see Map 6).
This chapter traces the emergence of the first imperial Islamic state, which replaced the two late antique empires of the Near East. That is, it describes the history of the Islamic polity from Muhammad’s first revelation in c. ad 610 until the fall of the Umayyad caliphate in ad 750. Viewed in the context of late antique history, two features of the development of this polity are particularly striking. The first is the importance of the inheritance of Iran. Although the Umayyad caliphs ruled from what had been Roman Syria, Iranian culture exerted an increasing influence on their court and administration. The ‘Abbasid revolution of ad 750, which began in Khurasan and installed its new caliphs in Iraq, accelerated that development but did not begin it: Mesopotamia already possessed a cultural unity in which Iran was the dominant force, and the later Umayyad caliphs in Syria looked east for models of empire and monarchy. Constantinople was more distant than Ctesiphon, and both short-term events and the longue dur'ee made Iran increasingly influential: the failure,
I am grateful to Simon Loseby, James Montgomery, and Chase Robinson for their helpful comments and criticisms. I am responsible for faults that remain.
A Companion to Late Antiquity. Edited by Philip Rousseau © 2009 Blackwell Publishing Ltd. ISBN: 978-1-405-11980-1
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Map 6 The Islamic World in the Umayyad Period (ad 660-750).
First, of the Arab-Muslim siege of Constantinople in ad 717 ended serious attempts to absorb the Roman Empire in the way that the Sasanian Empire had been overwhelmed seventy years before; and second, economic prosperity in Iraq and the Persian Gulf began before the conquests and continued long after them.
The second distinctive feature of the early Islamic polity was the cultural resilience and self-confidence of the Arab-Muslims: the embryonic religion that they brought with them from the Arabian Peninsula influenced decisively the way in which they used the resources of the defeated late antique empires. This religion had come from the uplands of the Hijaz in west Arabia, on the margins of the late antique world. It shared much of biblical tradition with the conquered peoples’ religions, but was distinct from them. In encounters with the indigenous populations of the empires, that distinctiveness was emphasized and developed, often through reference to an increasingly distant Arab past.
Any discussion of the place of the caliphate in Late Antiquity must therefore begin with the West Arabian origins of Islam; the relationship between the Hijaz and the late antique world is essential to an understanding of the origins and development of the Islamic polity. From there, we can pass to a discussion of the caliphate itself and its development into a quasi-imperial office, after the model of the Roman basileus and the Iranian shahanshah. Then, finally, we can elucidate the formation of the early Islamic state, and its relationship to the empires it replaced, by discussing its fiscal systems, its settlement patterns, and the social changes that occurred within it.
World History
