Harun al-Rashid (ruled 786-809; in full, Harun al-Rashid ibn Muhammad al-Mahdi ibn al-Mansur al-Abbasi) was the son of al-Mahdi, the third ‘Abbasid caliph (ruled 775-785). His mother, al-Khayzuran, was a former slave girl from Yemen and a woman of strong personality who greatly influenced affairs of state in the reigns of her husband and sons. In 780 and 782 Harun was nominal leader of expeditions against the Byzantine Empire, though the military decisions were doubtless made by the experienced generals accompanying him. The expedition of 782 reached the Bosporus, opposite Constantinople, and peace was concluded on favourable terms. For this success Harun received the honorific title of al-Rashid, “the one following the right path,” and was named second in succession to the throne and appointed governor of Tunisia, Egypt, Syria, Armenia, and Azerbaijan, with his tutor, Yahya the Barmakid, acting as actual administrator. After a brief period of rule by his elder brother al-Hadi, Harun al-Rashid became caliph in September 786, with Yahya as his vizier.
The fabulous descriptions of Harun and his court in The Thousand and One Nights are idealized and romanticized, yet they had a considerable basis in fact. Untold wealth had flowed into the new capital of Baghdad since its foundation in 762. The leading men, and still more their wives, vied in conspicuous consumption, and in Harun’s reign this reached levels unknown before. Harun’s palace was an enormous institution, with numerous eunuchs, concubines, singing girls, and male and female servants. He himself was a connoisseur of music and poetry and gave lavish gifts to outstanding musicians and poets. In the stories of his nocturnal wanderings through Baghdad in disguise, he is usually accompanied by Masrur the executioner as well as friends like Ja‘far the Barmakid (Yahya’s son) and Abu Nuwas, the brilliant poet.
The less pleasant aspects of Harun’s character are highlighted by the fall of the Barmakids, who for more than 16 years had been mainly responsible for the administration of the
Empire and who had provided the money for the luxury and extravagance of the court. Moreover, Ja‘far the Barmakid had become Harun’s special friend, so that gossip spoke of a homosexual relationship. Gossip also alleged that Harun had arranged that Ja‘far should secretly marry his sister Abbasah, on condition that he did not consummate the marriage, but Ja‘far fell in love with her, and she had a child. Whether in anger at this or not, Harun hadJa‘far executed onJan. 29, 803. The other members of the family were imprisoned and their goods confiscated. Modern historians reject this gossip and instead suggest that Harun felt dominated by the Barmakids and may even have coveted their wealth. Moreover, diverse interests within the empire were being attracted to two opposing poles. On the one side were the “secretaries,” or civil servants, many Persians, and many men from the eastern provinces; on the other side were the religious scholars (ulama), many Arabs, and many from the western provinces. Since the Barmakids favoured the first group of interests and the new vizier, al-Fadl ibn al-Rabi‘, favoured the second, it is likely that this political cleavage was involved in the change of ministry.
The struggle between the two groups of interests continued for at least half a century. Harun recognized its existence by assigning Iraq and the western provinces to his son al-Amin, the heir apparent, and the eastern provinces to the second in succession, his son al-Ma’mun. The former was son of the Arab princess Zubaydah and after 803 had al-Fadl ibn al-Rabi‘ as tutor. Al-Ma’mun was son of a Persian slave girl and after 803 had as tutor a Barmakid protege, al-Fadl ibn Sahl. Harun has been criticized for so dividing the empire and contributing to its disintegration, for there was war between his two sons after his death; but it may well be that by making the cleavage manifest, he contributed to its eventual resolution after 850.
Algebra derives from the title of his major work, Kitab al-jabr wa al-muqabalah (“The Book of Integration and Equation”). Movements such as falsafah (a combination of the positive sciences with logic and metaphysics) and kalam (systematic theological discourse) applied Hellenistic
Thought to new questions. The translation of Indo-Persian lore promoted the development of adab, a name for a sophisticated prose literature as well as the set of refined urbane manners that characterized its clientele. Soon a movement called shu‘ubiyyah arose to champion the superiority of non-Arabic tastes over the alleged crudeness of the poetry so dear to Arabic litterateurs. However, the great writer of early Abbasid times, al-Jahiz, produced a type of adab that fused pre-Islamic and Islamic concerns in excellent Arabic style. Many of these extra-Islamic resources conflicted with Islamic expectations. Ibn al-Muqaffa‘, an administrator under al-Mansur (ruled 754-775), urged his master to emulate pre-Islamic models, lest the law that the religious specialists (the ulama) were developing undermine caliphal authority irrevocably.
The Abbasids never acted on such advice completely; they even contravened it by appealing for piety-minded support. Having encouraged conversion, they tried to “purify” the Muslim community of what they perceived to be socially dangerous and alien ideas. Al-Mahdi (ruled 775-785) actively persecuted the Manichaeans, whom he defined as heretics so as to deny them status as a protected community. He also tried to identify Manichaeans who had joined the Muslim community without abandoning their previous ideas and practices. ‘Abbasid “purification of Islam” ironically coincided with some of the most significant absorption of pre-Islamic monotheistic lore to date, as illustrated by the stories of the prophets written by Al-Kisa’i, grammarian and tutor to a royal prince. Even though, like the Marwanids, the Abbasids continued to maintain administrative courts, not accessible to the qadis, they also promoted the study of ‘ilm and the status of those who pursued it. In so doing they fostered what Ibn al-Muqaffa‘ had feared—the emergence of an independent body of law, Shari‘ah, which Muslims could use to evaluate and circumvent caliphal rule itself.
Shari‘ah
A key figure in the development of Shari‘ah was Abu ‘Abd Allah al-Shafi‘i, who died in 820. By his time Islamic law was extensive but uncoordinated, reflecting differing local needs and tastes. Schools had begun to form around various recognized masters, such as al-Awza‘i in Syria, Abu Hanifah in Iraq, and Malik ibn Anas, all of whom used some combination of local custom, personal reasoning, Qur’an, and Hadith. Al-Shafi‘i was raised in Mecca, studied with Malik, participated in a Shi‘ite revolt in the Yemen, and was sent to Baghdad as a prisoner of the caliph. After his release he emigrated to Egypt, where he produced his most famous work. Like most other faqihs (students of jurisprudence, or fiqh), al-Shafi‘i viewed Muhammad’s community as a social ideal and his first four successors as rightly guided. So that this exemplary time could provide the basis for Islamic law, he constructed a hierarchy of legal sources: Qur’an; Hadith, clearly traceable to Muhammad and in some cases to his companions; ijma‘ (consensus); and qiyas (analogy to one of the first three).
The way in which Islamic law had developed had allowed many pre-Islamic customs, such as the veiling and seclusion of women, to receive a sanction not given to them in the Qur’an or Hadith. Al-Shafi‘i did not change that entirely. Law continued to be pursued in different centres, and several major “ways” (madhhabs) began to coalesce among Sunnis and Shi‘ites alike. Among Sunnis, four schools came to be preeminent—Shafi‘iyyah (Shafiites), Malikiyyah (Malikites), Hanafiyyah (Hanafites), and Hanabilah (Hanbalites)—and each individual Muslim was expected to restrict himself to only one. Furthermore, the notion that the gate of ijtihad (personal effort at reasoning) closed in the 9th century was not firmly established until the 12th century. However, al-Shafi‘i’s system was widely influential in controlling divergence and in limiting undisciplined forms of personal reasoning. It also stimulated the collecting and testing of hadiths for their unbroken traceability to Muhammad or a companion. The need to verify Hadith stimulated a characteristic form of premodern Muslim intellectual and literary activity, the collecting of biographical materials into compendiums (tabaqat). By viewing the Qur’an and documentable Sunnah as preeminent, al-Shafi‘i also undermined those in Abbasid court circles who wanted a more flexible base from which the caliph could operate. The Shari‘ah came to be a supremely authoritative, comprehensive set of norms and rules covering every aspect of life, from worship to personal hygiene. It applied equally to all Muslims, including the ruler, whom Shari‘ah-minded Muslims came to view as its protector, not its administrator or developer. While the caliphs were toying with theocratic notions of themselves as the shadow of God on Earth, the students oflegal knowledge were defining their rule as “nomocratic,” based only on the law they protected and enforced.
According to the Shari‘ah, a Muslim order was one in which the ruler was Muslim and the Shari‘ah was enshrined as a potential guide to all; Muslims were one confessional community among many, each of which would have its own laws that would apply except in disputes between members of different communities. The Shari‘ah regulated relations and inequities among different segments of society-freeborn Muslim, slave, and protected nonMuslim. The process that produced Shari‘ah resembled the evolution of oral Torah and rabbinic law, which the
Shari‘ah resembled in its comprehensiveness, egalitarianism, and consensualism, in its absorption of local custom, in its resistance to distinguishing the sublime from the mundane, and in its independence from government. Like many Jews, many ultra-pious Muslims came to view the law as a divine rather than human creation.
The Fourth Fitnah
During the reign of al-Ma’mun (813-833) the implications of all this ‘ilm-based activity for caliphal authority began to become clear. Al-Ma’mun came to the caliphate as the result of the fourth fitnah, which reflected the persisting alienation of Khorasan. Al-Ma’mun’s father, Harun al-Rashid, provided for the empire to be divided at his death between two sons. Al-Amin would rule in the capital and all the western domains, and al-Ma’mun, from his provincial seat at Merv in Khorasan, would rule the less significant east. When Harun died, his sons struggled to expand their control. Al-Ma’mun won. During his reign, which probably represents the high point of caliphal absolutism, the court intervened in an unprecedented manner in the intellectual life of its Muslim subjects, who for the next generation engaged in the first major intra-Muslim conflict that focused on belief as well as practice. The Muslims, who now constituted a much more sizable proportion of the population but whose faith lacked doctrinal clarity, began to engage in an argument reminiscent of 2nd-century Christian discussions of the Logos. Among Christians, for whom the Word was Jesus, the argument had taken a Christological form. But for Muslims the argument had to centre on the Qur’an and its created or uncreated nature. Al-Ma’mun, as well as his brother and successor al-Mu‘tasim (833-842), was attracted to the Mu‘tazilah (Mutazilites), whose school had been influenced by Hellenistic ideas as well as by contact with non-Muslim theologians. If the Qur’an were eternal along with God, his unity would, for the Mu‘tazilah, be violated. They especially sought to avoid literal exegesis of the Qur’an, which in their view discouraged free will and produced embarrassing inconsistencies and anthropomorphisms. By arguing that the Qur’an was created in time, they could justify metaphorical and changing interpretation. By implication, Muhammad’s position as deliverer of revelation was undermined because Hadith was made less authoritative.
The opponents of the Mu‘tazilah, and therefore of the official position, coalesced around the figure of Ahmad ibn Hanbal. A leading master of Hadith, he had many followers, some of them recent converts, whom he was able to mobilize in large public demonstrations against the doctrine of the created Qur’an. Because viewing the Qur’an as created would invalidate its absolute authority, Ibn Hanbal argued for an eternal Qur’an and emphasized the importance of Muhammad’s Sunnah to the understanding of it. By his time, major literary works had established a coherent image of the indispensability of Muhammad’s prophet-hood. In fact, just before the Mu‘tazilite controversy began, Ibn Hisham had produced his classic recension of the sirah, or life, of Muhammad, composed half a century earlier by Ibn Ishaq. As in the early Christian church, these were not merely dogmatic issues. They were rooted in the way ordinary Muslims lived, just as affection for a divine Christ had become popular sentiment by the time Arius and Athanasius debated. Although Muslims lacked an equivalent of the Christian church, they resolved these issues similarly; likeJesus for the Christians, the Qur’an for the Muslims was somehow part of God. Hadith-mindedness and emulation of Muhammad’s Sunnah had become such an essential part of the daily life of ordinary people that the Mu‘tazilite position, as intellectually consistent and attractive as it was, was unmarketable. In a series of forcible inquiries called mihnah, al-Ma’mun and al-Mu‘tasim actively persecuted those who, like Ibn Hanbal, would not conform, but popular sentiment triumphed, and after al-Mu‘tasim’s death the caliph al-Mutawakkil was forced to reverse the stand of his predecessors.
This caliphal failure to achieve doctrinal unity coincided with other crises. By al-Mu‘tasim’s reign the tribal troops were becoming unreliable and the Tahirid governors of Khorasan more independent. Al-Mu‘tasim expanded his use of military slaves, finding them more loyal but more unruly too. Soon he had to house them at Samarra’, a new capital north of Baghdad, where the caliphate remained until 892. For most of this period, the caliphs were actually under the control of their slave soldiery, and, even though they periodically reasserted their authority, rebellions continued. Many were antiMuslim, like that of the Iranian Babak (whose 20-year-long revolt was crushed in 837), but increasingly they were intra-Muslim, like the Kharijite-led revolt of black agricultural slaves (Zanj) in southern Iraq (869-883). By 870 then, the Baghdad-Samarra’ caliphate had become one polity among many; its real rulers had no ideological legitimacy. At Cordoba the Umayyads had declared their independence, and the Maghrib was divided among several dynasties of differing persuasions—the Shi‘ite Idrisids, the Kharijite Rustamids, and the Jama‘i-Sunni Aghlabids. The former governors of the Abbasids, the Tulunids, ruled Egypt and parts of Arabia. Iran was divided between the Saffarids, governors of the ‘Abbasids in the south, and the Persian Samanids in the north.
The centrifugal forces represented by these administrative divisions should not obscure, however, the existence of numerous centripetal forces that continued to give Islamdom, from Andalusia to Central Asia, other types of unity The ideal of the caliphate continued to be a source of unity after the reality waned; among all the new states, no alternative to the caliphate could replace it. Furthermore, now that Muslims constituted a majority almost everywhere in Islamdom, conflict began to be expressed almost exclusively in Islamic rather than antiIslamic forms. In spite of continuing intra-Muslim conflict, Muslim worship and belief remained remarkably uniform. The annual pilgrimage to Mecca helped reinforce this underlying unity by bringing disparate Muslims together in a common rite. The pilgrimage, as well as the rise of prosperous regional urban centres, enhanced the trade that traversed Islamdom regardless of political conflicts. Along the trade routes that crisscrossed Eurasia, Islamdom at its centre, moved not only techniques and goods but ideas as well. A network of credit and banking, caravansaries, and intercity mercantile alliances tied far-flung regions together. Central was the caravan, then the world’s most effective form of transport. The peripatetic nature of education promoted cross-fertilization. Already the faqir (fakir), a wandering mendicant Sufi dervish, was a familiar traveler. Across Islamdom, similar mosque-market complexes sprang up in most towns; because municipal institutions were rare, political stability so unpredictable, and government intervention kept to a minimum (sometimes by design, more often by necessity), the Shari‘ah and the learned men who carried it became a mainstay of everyday life and social intercourse.
World History
