Until the middle of the eighth century Damascus, the seat of the Umayyad dynasty, had been the capital of a vast and complex empire which stretched from the Atlantic to Central Asia. It was an empire largely administered by Syrians, Christians as well as Muslims. The Arabs were the ruling class, but in turn the Umayyads were deeply influenced by the Graeco-Aramaic civilisation they found in Syria with its many links, intellectual, cultural and mercantile, to the Mediterranean world. The replacement of the Umayyad by the Abbasid caliphs and the shift from Damascus to Baghdad marked a rejection of these influences.
The advance of Christian forces against the Muslim empire from both the West and the East came as evidence of the decay and division in the Arab world. The empire had become a rapacious tax-gathering machine run by provincial governors who paid kickbacks to Baghdad but otherwise offered the caliph no more than the barest homage and granted their subjects even less than that. With the triumph of an authoritarian and incurious religious dogma, with the failure to develop resources or technological advances, and with civil administrations replaced by local military autocrats, the empire of the Arabs fell into intellectual, political and economic decline.
There were uprisings against the Arabs throughout their empire. In Egypt, where the population had been three million at the time of the Arab conquest, the mismanagement of the country’s resources was so appalling that there were not many more than one and a half million Egyptians by AD 1000. Muslim discrimination and oppressive taxation stoked up resentment among the Copts, that is the native Egyptians. Their national pride was already wounded by the coming of the Arabs and the continuing infiltration of Egypt by nomadic tribes and led to repeated Coptic revolts, which were only suppressed with much bloodshed. Many Copts converted to Islam after the ferocious repression of 832; being unable to meet taxation demands, partly because the irrigation system was falling into further disrepair, they migrated into the towns, leaving large areas of land uncultivated. Even so, not until the eleventh century, four hundred years after the Arab occupation, did the majority of Egyptians finally adopt Islam.
Similarly the prosperity of Syria declined along with its population. Marginalised and oppressed by their new rulers in Baghdad the Syrians more than once rose up in revolt. fet under the Abbasids the Arabic language became virtually universal in Syria, and Islam became the religion of the majority of its inhabitants-partly because of fresh immigration from Arabia, and partly from persecutions, pressures and inducements. Many Christians moved to the safety of the Lebanese mountains, among them the Maronites, who established themselves there in the ninth century.
Apart from the tensions between the Arab elite and their eventually Arabised subjects, Islam itself was split between the orthodox Sunni, who controlled the Baghdad caliphate, and the Shia, that is the partisans of All, so that religious dissensions added to the original cultural, ethnic and political differences. The Fatimids, who were Arabs originally from Syria but had settled in North Africa, returned eastwards to Egypt where they established a Shiite caliphate in 969, and by the end of the century they had extended their empire over Palestine and southern Syria.
Islam Divided: Shia versus Sunni
In 656 after insurgent Arab troops murdered Uthman, the third caliph, who was a member of the powerful Umayyad family of Mecca, All put himself forward as the natural inheritor of the caliphate, basing his claim on his marriage to Mohammed’s daughter Fatima, as well as on his considerable religious learning. But Ali was opposed by Aisha, who had been Mohammed’s favourite wife, along with her Umayyad family and many of Mohammed’s surviving companions. He took to arms and won his first battle, but later saw his authority dissolve when rebels advanced on his army with copies of the Koran fixed to the points of their spears and his troops refused to fight.
Ali was assassinated and the Umayyads were installed once again in the caliphate. But the real wound to Islam occurred when Hussein, All’s son by Fatima, and therefore of Mohammed’s blood, led a revolt against the Umayyads and after a fanatical struggle was killed with all his men. In a sense the Prophet’s own blood had been shed, so that for the partisans, or Shia, of Ali, Hussein’s death was a martyrdom and also a stain on the Sunni, that is on orthodox Muslims who then as now constituted the greater part of Islam.
From then on the Shia refused to accept as caliph any but All’s descendants, while the Sunni barred the caliphate to the Prophet’s descendants for all time.
Shiism took hoid in Persia and in much of iraq, but aiso, aimost three centuries after the death of Aii, his foiiowers in the form of the Fatimids wouid invade Egypt with the intention of using it as a base from where to oppose the Sunni Abbasid caiiphate in Baghdad and to impose Shia dominance throughout the entire isiamic worid.
World History
