The Abassid Caliphate
(758 - 1258)
The 'Abassid caliphate was founded on two
disaffected Islamic populations: non-Arabic Muslims and Shi'ites.
For the most part, the Islamic impetus to the Abassid revolution lay
in the secularism of the Umayyad caliphs. The Umayyads had always been outsiders—as a wealthy clan
in Mecca, they had opposed Muhammad—and the secularism and sometime
degeneracy that accompanied their caliphate delegitimized their rule
for many devout Muslims.
The Abassids took their name from al-'Abbas, a
paternal uncle of Muhammad and early supporter of the Prophet. Their
close kinship to Muhammad and the position of al-'Abbas as a
Companion of the Prophet served them well in gaining support. As
early as 718 AD, during the reign of Umar II,
Muhammad ibn 'Ali, a great-grandson of al-'Abbas, began to
proselytize in Persia to rally support for returning the caliphate to
the family of the Prophet, the Hashimites.
What made the 'Abassid seizure of the caliphate
unique was the heavy reliance on client Muslims, or mawali.
The mawali were foreigners who had converted to Islam;
because, however, they were foreigners they could not be incorporated
into the kinship-based society of Arabs. They had to be voluntarily
included into the protection of a clan, that is, they had to become
"clients" of the clan (which is what the word mawali means).
For the most part, they were second-class citizens even though they
were Muslims.
The overwhelming majority of foreigners who
rallied to the Hashimiyya cause were Iranian. Historians have argued
that the 'Abassid caliphate represented a shift in Islam from Semitic
to Iranian culture; other historians argue that there really no such
shift. The truth probably lies somewhere in between. When the 'Abassids
took power, the center of Islamic culture shifted from the Semitic
world in Arabia and Syria to the Iranian or Persian world in Iraq. By
shifting the capital from Damascus to Baghdad, the 'Abassids brought
about a dynamic fusion of Persian and Semitic culture.
The dynasty was started when Abu'l-'Abbass assumed
the caliphate from 750-754 AD / 132-136 AH.
Both he and his successor, Abu Ja'far al-Mansur (754-775 / 136-158),
ruthlessly consolidated power and began a series of administrative
moves that would characterize Islamic government for the next several
centuries. As with Umayyads, they separated themselves from the
general Islamic populace, but they surrounded themselves with
foreigners rather than Arabs, particularly in the military. This bred
bitter resentment, particularly among Arabs, such as the Khorosanian
Arabs, that had helped them rise to power.
The Umayyads
The Umayyads,
however, did not take being removed from power lying down. In 756,
the Umayyads established a rival empire in Spain, though they did not
set up a rival caliphate until 929. They were aided in their seizing
of power by Kharjite North Africans and, in particular, Berbers, who
had been instrumental in the conquest of Spain earlier. The Umayyad
caliphate flourished in Spain for the next three centuries and the
Islamic culture that grew on this fertile soil, the Moorish culture,
was dramatically different from the Iranian-Semitic culture that grew
up around the 'Abbasid Caliphate.
The Early Years
The 'Abassids only came to power with the help of
diverse and disaffected populations; even though they consolidated
power fairly ruthlessly in the beginning, their control over the
world of Islam unraveled quickly. The first threat came with the
establishment of Umayyad rule in Spain which, because of its
distance, obviated any military reconquest of the area. Soon after,
rival Islamic states were set up by Berber Kharjites in North Africa
in 801.
The Shi'ites were a particular thorn in 'Abassid
rule; the 'Abassids had come to power by using both Shi'ite help and
rhetoric. The Shi'ites, however, were not a single, unitary group,
and the 'Abassids abandoned their ties to the Shi'a beliefs. Efforts
were made to make peace with moderate Shi'ites, but these soon broke
down. An uprising in Mecca in 786 led to a massacre of Shi'ite 'Alids—the
survivors, however, fled to the western region of Africa, or the Maghreb,
and established a new and independent kingdom, the Idrisid kingdom.
By the beginning of the ninth century, the
caliph's control over the Islamic world was beginning to crumble. It
was into this increasingly bleak picture that al-Mamun suddenly
appeared.
Al-Ma'mun
Abd Allah, or al-Ma'mun, had not been named as a
successor to the caliphate—this instead fell to his brother,
Muhammad, called al-Amin. The brothers soon fell out, however, and
al-Mamun seized the caliphate in 813. As with his predecessors, he
tried to incorporate Shi'ites into the Islamic government, but his
entire reign was spent in quelling disturbances among Shi'ites and
anit-Shi'ites. He seems to have just held the line in the
disintegration of the 'Abbasid caliphate. There are, however, two
great innovations that irrevocably changed the course of Islamic
history.
The first was a military revolution begun by his
brother, al-Mu'tasim. The constant revolutions and the deep division
in Islamic society convinced al-Ma'mun that he needed a military
force whose only loyalty was to him. So his brother, who would later
become caliph (833-842 / 218-27), assembled a military force of
slaves, called Mamluks. Many of the Mamluks were Turkish, who
were famous for the horsemanship. But the Mamluk military also
consisted of Slavs and some Berbers. By the middle of al-Wathiq's
reign, the Mamluk army had completely displaced the Arabian and
Persian army under the caliph. This army, and al-Mu'tasim's
abandonment of Baghdad for Samarra, caused bitter resentment among
Muslims and would irreperably sever the protective bond between the
Islamic sovereign and the Islamic people. It also introduced a new
ethnic group in the Islamic world, the Mamluks, who would eventually
play a powerful role in the drama of power and decline in medieval
Islam.
More importantly, al-Ma'mun energetically
patronized Greek, Sanskrit and Arabic learning and so altered the
cultural and intellectual face of Islam. He adopted a radical
theological position, called Mu'tazilism, which was regarded as
somewhat heretical by more orthodox Muslims. Nevertheless,
Mu'tazilism had as one of its fundamental beliefs the idea that
Muslims should obey a single ruler. In order to facilitate the spread
of Mu'tazilite teaching, al-Ma'mun established a university, the
House of Wisdom (Bayt al-Hikma).
It was here that Hellenistic and Indian works made
their way into Islamic culture through a series of translations.
Islam incorporated into its culture and belief the philosophical
method of inquiry of the Hellenist world—it is for this reason that
philosophers such as Plato and Aristotle were passed on to succeeding
generations. This incorporation led to a new Islamic intellectual
practice, faylasafa, or philosophy, based on principles of
rational inquiry and to some extent empiricism.
Decline
After the caliphate of al-Mu'tasim and that of his
son, al-Wathiq (842-47 / 227-32), the centralized power of the
caliphate declined centrifugally. By 945, the area around Iraq fell
to a dynasty of Amirs; the Buyid dynasty.
The 'Abbasids remained as caliphs until 1030, but they were only
figureheads.
Islamic history entered a new phase. The history
of early Islam is a history of the spread of a single cultural force
throughout the Iranian, Semitic, North African, and to a lesser
extent, the Hellenistic and European worlds. That single cultural
force was religious, social, linguistic, and political and was based
almost entirely on Arabic culture and world view. In the earliest
years, there is a remarkable consolidation in the regions where Islam
spreads—there is by and large an acceptance of a central authority,
a government structure, a religion, a language, and a cultural
chauvinism. During the latter years of the Umayyad caliphate, that
cultural and political unity began to break down. The 'Abbasids, in
adopting Iranian culture in part and in distancing themselves from
their Semitic origins (for instance, by instituting Mamluk armies),
further accelerated the cultural divisions in the world of Islam.
After only two hundred years in power, the unified cultural and
political world of Islam broke down into a myriad independent
cultural and political units.
And thus began the medieval period in
Islam, a period of cultural and political disunity and
decentralization. This was not, however, a bad thing; Islamic
culture, split into several different groups that were often divided
along ethnic lines, expanded the cultural and intellectual richness
of the religion. By the end of the medieval period, even the fiction
of a cultural or political unity of Islam had been completely
destroyed. The historical process, then, of medieval Islam was
primarily about cultural and political decentralization—modern
Islam would be the history of powerful cultural centers in this
divided world.
Sources: Islam
from Washington State University, �Richard Hooker, reprinted by
permission.
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