No More Learning

.
However that may be, the Emperor's answer exasperated the Patri-
arch. Enjoying unbounded popularity at Constantinople, he seems to
have had at this epoch a devoted party. A riot soon broke out in the
streets of the town. Constantine IX in alarm sent to the Patriarch
a veritable embassy of the principal dignitaries of the palace, who were
charged to appease him and to represent to him that the Emperor could
not offer any violence to the legates on account of their ambassadorial
rights. This answer did not satisfy the Patriarch, for soon a second
mission, in which the “consul of the philosophers,” Psellus, figured, arrived
with a new message from the Emperor. Constantine made truly humble
excuses for what had occurred and threw the blame on Argyrus. Two
citizens, Paulus and Smaragdus, guilty of having translated the bull into
Greek and of having circulated it, were handed over to him, after having
been scourged. The Emperor affirmed that he had given the order to
burn the bull and had committed to prison the son and the son-in-law
of Argyrus?
By this volte-face the Emperor surrendered to the will of the Patri-
arch and gave him a free hand for the future. It only remained for
Michael Cerularius to consummate his triumph by a sensational rupture
with Rome. With the authorisation of the Emperor he convened a
council on which were represented all the provinces of the Greek Church.
Twelve metropolitans and two archbishops signed the acts of it. The
opening sections of the Synodal Edict, published in connexion with this
assembly, contained a reproduction of the Encyclical sent by Photius
to the Eastern bishops. Michael Cerularius recapitulated in it all the
grievances of the Greeks against the Roman Church : the double Pro-
cession of the Holy Ghost, use of unleavened bread, the Saturday fast,
1 L. Bréhier, Le Schisme Oriental, pp. 118-119.
2 16. pp. 120, 121.
3 16. pp. 121–124.
יל
сн. Іх


## p. 272 (#314) ############################################

272
Definitive rupture (20 July 1054)
רי
celibacy of priests, shaving the beard, etc. He then complained of the
profanation of the altar of St Sophia by the legates, gave a biased
account of their stay at Constantinople, transcribed their bull of ex-
communication, fulminated an anathema against them, and lastly pro-
duced, as a trophy of victory, the pitiable letter which the Emperor had
addressed to him.
Finally, on 20 July 1054, at the patriarchal tribunal, in the presence
of seven archbishops or bishops and of the imperial delegates, judgment
was pronounced not only “against the impious document but also against
all those who had helped in drawing it up, whether by their advice or
even by their prayers. " Five days afterwards all copies of the bull
were solemnly burned before the eyes of the people; one copy only was
preserved in the archives of the Patriarchate?
By the solemn ceremonial with which he had invested these pro-
ceedings, Michael Cerularius had wished to shew that it was no longer
the question of a temporary schism like that of Photius but of a final
rupture. This schism was indeed his personal achievement and due to
his strong and domineering character, but it also reflects the opinion of
the Greek episcopate, which lent little support to the power
of
supreme
jurisdiction claimed by a bishop foreign to the Empire, and had only
an intolerant contempt for the peculiar uses of the Latins.
This separation was, as we have seen, rendered possible by the
weakening of the prestige of Rome in the East in the course of the
tenth century. Directly after the dispute about image-worship, there
had been in Constantinople an ecclesiastical party which saw no salvation
for the Eastern churches except in communion with Rome. This party
had been strong enough to resist Photius himself, and upon it the
Emperors had relied to re-establish unity. But a century later this
Roman party was non-existent in Constantinople. The scandals of
which Rome had continuously been the theatre during this period, and
the equivocal decisions on the marriage of Leo VI, had discouraged its
supporters. Michael Cerularius did not meet with the opposition that
had checked Photius.
Notwithstanding wide divergencies, the mass of the faithful followers
of the two Churches shrank from schism, and were satisfied with com-
promises which guaranteed the maintenance of normal relations between
Rome and Constantinople. Nevertheless, after the events of 1054,
although outside Constantinople no act of religious hostility between
Greek and Latins can be shewn, the members of the two Churches soon
regarded each other as enemies, and from this epoch dates the definitive
rupture between the Churches of East and West.
The results of this schism could not but be disastrous to the Byzan-
tine Empire. It took place precisely when the West was beginning to
1 L. Brehier, Le Schisme Oriental, pp. 124–125.


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The results of the Schism
273
lay aside barbarism. The highly-organised States, which were being
formed there, lost no time in turning these religious divergencies to
profit against the Byzantine Empire. The first consequence of the
schism was the final loss of Southern Italy. The Papacy, no longer
able to reckon upon the Byzantine Empire, made terms with the Nor-
mans?
But this schism was fated to have far more widely-reaching effects,
and, when the Empire fell on evil days, it was to prove a heavy burden
and a constant check on the goodwill of the West. For the Patriarch
of Constantinople the schism had been unquestionably a great victory.
His authority had been established without dispute over the Slav world
and the Eastern Patriarchates. Liberated from fear of subordination to
Rome, he had finally defended the autocephalia of his own Church. But
this victory of the Byzantine clergy was in reality a check for the states-
men who, like Argyrus, looked solely to the interests of the Empire.
After this epoch there are clear traces of that antinomy, which was
henceforward to dominate all the history of Byzantium, between the
political and the religious interests of the Empire. It was the schism
which, by rendering fruitless all efforts at conciliation between the Em-
perors of Constantinople and the West, paved the way for the fall of
the Empire.
1 At the Council of Melfi. Gay, L'Italie méridionale, pp. 516-519 (1059).
C. MED. H, VOL. IV. CH, IX.
18


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274
CHAPTER X.
(A)
MUSLIM CIVILISATION DURING THE ABBASID PERIOD.
When the Abbasids wrested from the Umayyads in 750 the headship
of the Muslim world, they entered into possession of an empire stretching
from the Indus to the Atlantic and from the southern shore of the
Caspian Sea to the Indian Ocean. It had absorbed the whole of the Persian
Empire of the Sasanians, and the rich provinces of the Roman Empire
on the eastern and southern shores of the Mediterranean; but though
Constantinople itself had been threatened more than once, and raids into
Asia Minor were so frequent as at certain periods to have become almost
a yearly occurrence, the ranges of the Taurus and the Anti-Taurus still
served as the eastern barrier of Byzantine territory against the spread of
Arab domination. In Africa, however, all opposition to the westward
progress of the Arab arms had been broken down, and the whole of the
peninsula of Spain, with the exception of Asturia, had passed under
Muslim rule. For ninety years Damascus had been the capital of the
Arab Empire, and the mainstay of the Umayyad forces in the time
of their greatest power had been the Arab tribes domiciled in Syria from
the days when that province still formed part of the Roman Empire ;
but the Abbasids had come into power mainly through support from
Persia, and their removal of the capital to Baghdad (founded by Manşūr,
the second Caliph of the new dynasty, in 762) on a site only thirty miles
from Ctesiphon, the capital of the Sasanian Shāhanshāh, marks their
recognition of the shifting of the centre of power.
From this period Persian influence became predominant and the chief
offices of state came to be held by men of Persian origin; the most
noteworthy example is that of the family of the Barmecides (Barmakids),
which for half a century exercised the predominant influence in the
government until Hārūn destroyed them in 803. It was probably due
to the influence of the old Persian ideal of kingship that under the
Abbasids the person of the Caliph came to be surrounded with greater
pomp and ceremony. The court of the Umayyads had retained something
of the patriarchal simplicity of early Arab society, and they had been
readily accessible to their subjects; but as the methods of government
became more centralised and the court of the Caliph more splendid and
awe-striking, the ruler himself tended to be more difficult of access, and


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Character of the Abbasid dynasty
275
the
presence of the executioner by the side of the throne became under
the Abbasids a terrible symbol of the autocratic character of their rule.
A further feature of the new dynasty was the emphasis it attached to
the religious character of the dignity of the Caliph. In their revolt
against the Umayyads, the Abbasids had come forward in defence of the
purity of Islām as against those survivals of the old Arab heathenism
which were so striking a feature of the Umayyad court. The converts
and descendants of converts, whose support had been most effective in the
destruction of the Umayyads, were animated with a more zealous religious
spirit than had ever found expression among large sections of the Arabs,
who, in consequence of the superficial character of their conversion to
Islām, and their aristocratic pride and tribal exclusiveness, so contrary
to the spirit of Islāmic brotherhood, had been reluctant to accord to
the converts from other races the privileges of the new faith. The
Abbasids raised the standard of revolt in the name of the family of the
Prophet, and by taking advantage of the widespread sympathy felt for
the descendants of 'Alī, they obtained the support of the various Shi'ah
factions. Though they took all the fruits of victory for themselves, they
continued to lay emphasis on the religious character of their rule, and
theologians and men of learning received a welcome at their court such as
they had never enjoyed under the Umayyads. On ceremonial occasions
the Abbasid Caliph appeared clad in the sacred mantle of the Prophet,
and titles such as that of Khalifah of Allāh (vicegerent of God) and
shadow of God upon earth came to be frequently applied to him. As
the power of the central authority grew weaker, so the etiquette of the
court tended to become more elaborate and servile, and the Caliph made
his subjects kiss the ground before him or would allow the higher
officials either to kiss his hand or foot or the edge of his robe.
The vast empire into the possession of which they had entered was
too enormous and made up of elements too heterogeneous to be long held
together under a system, the sole unifying principle of which was payment
of tribute to the Caliph. A prince of the Umayyad family, "Abd-ar-
Raḥmān, who had succeeded in escaping to Spain when practically all
his relatives had been massacred, took advantage of tribal jealousies
among the Arab chiefs in Spain to seize this country for himself, and to
detach it from the empire, in 756. North Africa, which had been placed
by Hārūn under the government of Ibrāhīm ibn al-Aghlab, became
practically independent under this energetic governor, who established a
dynasty that lasted for more than a century (800-909); though his
successors contented themselves with the title of emir, the Caliph in
Baghdad appears to have been powerless to interfere with their administra-
tion. Hārūn himself seems to have realised that the break-up of the Arab
empire was inevitable, since in 802 he made arrangements for dividing
the administration of it between his sons Amīn and Ma’mūn. But on the
death of their father in 809 civil war broke out between the two brothers.
18-2
CH. X.


## p. 276 (#318) ############################################

276
Decline of the Abbasid Caliphate
The Arabs lent their support to Amīn, and under his leadership made a
last effort to regain for themselves the control of the Caliphate; but in
813 Tāhir, Ma’mūn's brilliant Persian general, defeated him, and as a
reward for his successful siege of Baghdad was appointed by Ma’mūn to
the government of Khurāsān, where he and his descendants for half a
century were practically independent. Egypt broke away from the
empire when a son of one of Ma’mūn's Turkish slaves, Aḥmad ibn Țūlūn,
having been appointed deputy-governor of Egypt in 868, succeeded in
making himself independent not only in Egypt but also in Syria, which
he added to his dominions, and ceased sending money contributions to
Baghdad. This breaking away of the outlying provinces of the empire was
rendered the more possible by the weakness of the central government.
Ma'mūn's brother and successor, Mu'tasim (833-842), made the fatal
mistake of creating an army composed almost entirely of Turkish
mercenaries. Their excesses made life in Baghdad so intolerable that the
Caliph, in order to be safe from the vengeance of the inhabitants of his
own capital, moved to a site three days' journey up the Tigris to the
north of Baghdad, and from 836 to 892 Sāmarrā was the Abbasid capital
where nine successive Caliphs lived, practically as prisoners of their
own Turkish bodyguard. While the Turkish officers made and unmade
Caliphs as they pleased, the country was ruined by constantly recurring
disorders and insurrection. In 865, while rival claimants were fighting for
the crown, Baghdad was besieged for nearly a year, and the slave revolt
for fourteen years (869–883) left the delta of the Euphrates at the
mercy of undisciplined bands of marauders who terrorised the inhabitants
and even sacked great cities, such as Başrah, Ahwāz, and Wāsit, shewing
the weakness of the central power even in territories so close to the
capital. A further disaster was soon to follow in the great Carmathian
revolt, which takes its name from one of the propagandists of the Ismāʻilī
Shi'ah doctrine in 'Irāq during the latter part of the ninth century. His
followers for nearly a century (890-990) spread terror throughout
Mesopotamia, and even threatened Baghdad. They extended their ravages
as far as Syria, murdering and pillaging wherever they went. In 930
they plundered the city of Mecca, put to death 30,000 Muslims there,
and carried off the Black Stone together with immense booty.
These movements represent only a part of the risings and revolts that
brought anarchy into the Caliph's dominions and cut off the sources of
his revenue. In the midst of this period of disorder the Caliph Mu'tamid,
shortly before his death in 892, transferred the capital once more to
Baghdad, but the change did not bring the Caliphs deliverance from the
tutelage of their Turkish troops, and they were as much at their mercy
as before.
Deliverance came from Persia where the Buwaihids, who claimed
descent from one of the Sasanian kings, had been extending their power
from the Caspian Sea southward through Persia, until in 945 they
CH. X.


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Ascendancy of the Buwaihids
277
entered Baghdad, nominally as deliverers of the Caliph from his rebellious
Turkish troops. For nearly a century from this date the Caliphs were
mere puppets in the hands of successive Buwaihid emirs, who set them
upon the throne and deposed them as they pleased. The Caliph Mustakfī,
whose deliverance from his mutinous Turkish soldiery had been the pre-
text for the Buwaihid occupation of Baghdad, was in the same year dragged
from his throne and cruelly blinded. So low had the office of Caliph
sunk by this period that there were still living two other Abbasid princes
who like Mustakfi had sat upon the Abbasid throne, but blinded and
robbed of all their wealth were now dependent upon charity or such
meagre allowance as the new rulers cared to dole out to them. His
cousin Muțī was set up to succeed him, but though he held the office of
Caliph for twenty-eight years (946–974) he had no voice in the adminis-
tration, and could not even nominate any of the ministers who carried
on the business of the state in his name; helpless in the hands of his
Buwaihid master, he lived upon a scanty allowance. He was compelled
to abdicate in favour of his son ļā'i', after a riotous outburst of religious
intolerance in Baghdad, and Tā'i' for seventeen years (974–991) suffered
similar humiliations. He was deposed at last in favour of his cousin Qādir
(991–1031), of whose reign of forty years hardly any incident is recorded,
because political events pursued their course without any regard to him.
Meanwhile in Upper Mesopotamia an Arab family, the Hamdānids,
at first governors of Mosul, extended their authority over the surrounding
country, and one member of the family, Saif-ad-Daulah, made himself
master of Aleppo and brought the whole of Northern Syria under his
rule in 944. In North Africa a rival Caliphate had arisen under the Shi'ah
Fāțimids, who annexed Egypt in 969, and after more than one attempt
occupied Syria in 988. By the beginning of the eleventh century the
power of the Buwaihids was on the decline and they had to give way before
the Ghaznawids and the Seljūqs, the latter a Turkish tribe which made
its first appearance in history about the middle of the tenth century. In
1055 the Seljūq chief, Țughril Beg, after having conquered the greater
part of Persia, entered Baghdad and delivered the Caliph from subservience
to the Buwaihids. From Baghdad Tughril Beg marched to the conquest
of Mosul and Upper Mesopotamia, and when he died in 1063 he left to
his successor, Alp Arslān, an empire which eight years later stretched
from the Hindu Kush to the shores of the Mediterranean.
Alp Arslān died in 1072 and his son, Malik Shāh, still further
extended the empire by the conquest of Transoxiana. One of the Seljūq
generals, Atsiz, drove the Fāțimids out of Syria and Palestine, and
occupied Jerusalem in 1071 and Damascus in 1075. Under the protection
of the Seljūgs, the Caliph in Baghdad enjoyed at the hand of these
orthodox Sunnīs a certain amount of respect such as he had failed to
receive at the hand of the Shi'ah Buwaihids, but his political authority
hardly extended beyond the walls of the city.
CU, X.


## p. 278 (#320) ############################################

278
The Seljūq empire
The death of Malik Shāh in 1092 was followed by a period of con-
fusion, during which his four sons fought one another for the succession,
but in 1117 the supreme authority passed to his third son, Sanjar, the
last of the Great Seljūqs to exercise a nominal sovereignty over the whole
empire; before his death in 1155 it had split up into a number of separate
principalities, some of them ruled over by Seljūq princes, others by
officers who, acting first as guardians (or Atābegs) to minors, later
assumed the reins of power and founded dynasties of their own.
One permanent result of the rise of the Seljūq empire was that the
way had been opened for Muslim domination in Asia Minor. During
the whole of the Abbasid period the ranges of the Taurus and Anti-
Taurus had formed the frontier line between the Roman and the Arab
Empires, and though incursions had frequently, and during certain
periods annually, been made by the Muslim troops into Anatolia, no
permanent result of these military expeditions into the great plateau of
Asia Minor had been achieved beyond the temporary occupation of some
fortresses. But the Seljūqs made their way into Asia Minor from Northern
Persia through Armenia, and before the end of the eleventh century had
occupied all the centre of Asia Minor, leaving only the kingdom of
Lesser Armenia and the coast-line which was held by Byzantine troops.
This western movement of the Seljüqs and the consequent alarm of the
Emperor of Constantinople who appealed for help to the Christian
powers of Europe, were among the causes of the Crusades.
When the crusaders entered Syria in 1098, the Seljūq empire had
already begun to break up; the greater part of Mesopotamia and Syria
had been parcelled out into military fiefs in which the military officers
of the Seljūgs had made themselves independent. The political situation
of the Muslim world was but little affected by the establishment of the
Kingdom of Jerusalem in 1099, and the most important effect of the
Crusades upon Muslim history was the rise of the Ayyübid dynasty,
established by Saladin in his long conflict with the crusaders culminating
in the battle of Hițțin and the conquest of Jerusalem in 1187.
Farther east, the fratricidal struggle still went on between rival
Muslim houses fighting one another for the possession of the fragments
of the Seljūq empire. For a brief period the Caliph in Baghdad succeeded
in exerting some authority in the neighbourhood of his capital, and Nāşir
(1180-1225), freed from the tutelage of the Seljūqs, restored to the
Caliphate some of its old independence, though the narrow territory
over which he ruled extended only from Takrīt to the head of the Persian
Gulf. His most formidable rival was the Khwārazm Shāh, whose king-
dom, founded by a descendant of one of the Turkish slaves of the Seljūq
Sultan Malik Shāh, had been gradually extended until it included the
greater part of Persia. Under 'Alā-ud-Din (1199-1220) the kingdom of
Khwārazm embraced also Bukhārā and Samarqand, and in 1214 Afghani-
stan; but his career of conquest was short-lived, for on his eastern border


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The Mongol conquests
279
appeared the Mongol army of Jenghiz Khān which soon involved in a
common devastation and ruin the greater part of the various Muslim
kingdoms of the East. Muslim civilisation has never recovered from the
destruction which the Mongols inflicted upon it. Great centres of culture,
such as Herāt and Bukhārā, were reduced to ashes and the Muslim
population was ruthlessly massacred. With the Mongol conquest of
southern Russia and of China we are not concerned here, but their armies
after sweeping across Persia appeared in 1256 under the command of
Hūlāgū before the walls of Baghdad, and after a brief siege of one month
the last Caliph of the Abbasid House, Musta şim, had to surrender, and
was put to death together with most of the members of his family;
800,000 of the inhabitants were brought out in batches from the city to
be massacred, and the greater part of the city itself was destroyed by
fire. The Mongol armies then moved on into Syria, where first Aleppo
and then Damascus fell into their hands, but when they advanced to the
conquest of Egypt they met with the first check in their westward move-
ment. Egypt since 1254 had been under the rule of the Mamlūk sultans,
and the Egyptian army in 1260 defeated the Mongols at 'Ain Jālūt in
Palestine, and following up this victory drove them out of Syria altogether.
After the death of Jenghiz Khān in 1227, the vast Mongol empire had
been divided among his four sons; of Muslim territories, Transoxiana
fell to the lot of his second son Jagatai; one of his grandsons, Hūlāgū,
the conqueror of Baghdad, founded the Īl-khān dynasty of Persia and
included in his kingdom the whole of Persia, Mesopotamia, and part of
Asia Minor. The Seljūqs of Asia Minor had managed to maintain a
precarious existence as vassals of the Mongols by making a timely sub-
mission; and, under the rule of the Mamlūk Sultans of Egypt, Syria kept
the Mongols out. Such remained the general condition of the eastern
provinces of what had once been the empire of the Abbasid Caliphs,
during the remainder of the thirteenth century.
The Abbasid epoch has dazzled the imagination of the Muslim world
with the vision of a period of great wealth and splendour, and the de-
gradation of its latter days was blotted out by the remembrance of its
earlier glories, though these lasted barely 83 years. The shadowy Abbasid
Caliphate of Cairo bore witness for two centuries and a half (1261-1517)
to the impressive character of the ideal of a united Muslim Empire, under
the leadership of the Imām-Caliph, regarded as the source of all authority,
in spite of the fact that the disruptive influence of national movements
and the self-assertion of provincial groups had irremediably destroyed
the reality centuries before. As the rule of the Caliph was an absolutism,
tempered only by the divinely-inspired law, to which he with every other
Muslim had to submit, the state perished with him. For Muslim political
theory contained no principle of growth, to provide for the development
of self-governing institutions; no attempt had been made to widen the
сн. х.


## p. 280 (#322) ############################################

280
Muslim political theory
basis of government, or train the subjects to co-operate with the state,
and the continuity of city life-so characteristic a feature of political
life in the West-was unknown in the Muslim East.
By its elaboration of systems of law, however, the Abbasid period
bequeathed to succeeding generations authoritative codes which are still
in operation in various parts of the world, but the theocratic origin of
this law, based as it is on the unalterable, eternal Word of God, has
continuously hampered its adjustment to the changing conditions of
political and social life. In other branches of intellectual activity, not-
ably mathematics and medicine, permanent results were attained, of
which some account is given in the following sections.
The foundation for the political theories that find embodiment in
the organisation of the Abbasid Empire was laid during the period of
the Umayyads. These theories were in the main the outgrowth of two
definite factors. In the first place, the conquering Arabs were faced with
the problem of administering the vast Empire that, in the brief space of
a few decades, had fallen into their hands, while their past history had
given them no experience of organised methods of government and
administration, and their tribal system had ill prepared them for any
large outlook upon material problems. But they found in Palestine,
Syria, and Egypt, a large body of trained officials, accustomed to the
smooth working of the traditional method of administration in the
Roman Empire, and familiar with the departmental routine of bureaux
of government. Similarly, within the Persian empire, in spite of the
anarchy that had prevailed after Chosroes II, the administrative machi-
nery of the Sasanids, with its large body of officials for the collection
of taxes, was still available. There is abundant evidence to shew
that in the provinces of both these Empires the Arabs made very little
change in the methods of administering the country. Accordingly, at a
time when Muslim theory was formless and inchoate, it came under the
powerful influence of one of the greatest attempts to systematize social
and political life that the world has ever seen, and just as Muslim law
bears the imprint of the Roman legal system, and the earliest systematic
treatises of Islām
appear to have been modelled on catechisms of Christian
doctrines, so the fiscal system of the Arabs followed the lines that had
been laid down centuries before by Roman administrators.
On the other hand, during the whole of the Umayyad period, there
had been living in Medina the representatives of the apostolic age of
Islām, engaged in attempts to reduce to order the incoherent materials
for a Muslim theory of life based upon the ordinances of the Koran
(Qur'ān) and the traditionary sayings of the Prophet. As these legists
and theologians viewed with horror the heathenish ideals and manners
of the Umayyad court, and accordingly kept aloof from practical con-
cern with the details of political life, the theories of the state and of
legislation which they worked out very largely ignore the more stable


## p. 281 (#323) ############################################

Theory of the Caliphate
281
development of the Arab state. Muslim political and legal theories have
consequently never been able wholly to shake themselves free from the
unreality that marked their beginnings in the rarified atmosphere of
speculation in which early Muslim thinkers lived in Medina. When the
Abbasids came into power, largely with the help of an orthodox reaction
against the alleged heathenism of the Umayyad house, and with the
support of Persian converts whose theological zeal was unknown to the
latitudinarian Arabs, they attracted to their new capital, Baghdad, the
legists and theologians of Medina and lavished a generous patronage on
students of theology; at the same time they exercised control over
these thinkers and, while helping orthodoxy to triumph in the state, the
Abbasids took care to make use of it for their own selfish ends.
According to Islāmic theory, religious dogma, maxims of statecraft,
legal ordinances, and the details of the social life of the believer, all have
their source in the revealed text of the Koran and in the traditionary
sayings and practices of the Prophet; where these fail to provide the
required guidance, the consensus of the community is decisive, and most
Muslim thinkers have allowed also an analogical deduction from the first
two sources to particular cases not expressly mentioned in either of them.
During the third century of the Muslim era were compiled the six great
collections of traditions that are held to be authoritative in the Sunni
world. These fix definitely the theories that had grown out of the ex-
perience of preceding generations of Muslims. These traditions gave
final expression to the theory of the Caliphate, according to which the
head of the Muslim community, as successor (Khalifah) of the Prophet,
carried on the same functions that he had performed, with the exception
of the exercise of the prophetic office which was held to have come to an
end with him. Accordingly the Caliph was supreme administrator, judge,
and general. The legists summed up his functions as comprising the
defence and maintenance of the faith; war against those who refused to
accept Islām or submit to Muslim rule; the protection of the country of
Islām and the provision of troops for guarding the frontiers ; the decision
of legal disputes and the punishment of wrongdoers; the collection and
disbursement of taxes; the payment of salaries and the appointing of
competent officials. The holder of the office had to be a member of the
tribe of the Quraish, to which the Prophet himself had belonged, and
had to possess the physical and intellectual qualities necessary for the
performance of the duties above mentioned. In theory the office was
elective, but the first Caliph of the Umayyad dynasty had made it here-
ditary, and generally each Caliph nominated his successor during his life.
It was not necessary that the succession should follow in the direct line.
Of the fourteen Umayyad Caliphs only four were succeeded by a son, and
of the first twenty-four Caliphs of the Abbasid dynasty only six had a
son as his successor; and though, later, direct succession became more
common, out of the total number of thirty-six the office passed from
CH. X.


## p. 282 (#324) ############################################

282
Organisation of administrative machinery
father to son in sixteen cases only. The fiction of election was kept up
by the institution of the oath of allegiance which was taken by the
highest officials and great nobles of the state to the Caliph on his suc-
cession and sometimes also to the heir apparent.
The Caliph was also at the same time Imām or leader of the faithful
in public worship, and, though he often delegated this religious function
to any ordinary Imām, there were even up to the latter days of the Abbasid
dynasty solemn occasions on which the Caliph came forward as leader of
the faithful in this public act of divine worship. The last Abbasid Caliph
who kept up this practice was Rādī (934-940). Though the Sunni doc-
trine never attached such mysterious significance to the office of the Imām
as was characteristic of the Shi'ah sect, yet a certain degree of reverence
became attached to this office even among the Sunnīs, and the theorists
maintained the necessity of an Imām as leader of the whole body of
believers; it was he alone who could declare a general Jihād, calling
upon all the faithful, both men and women, to join in war against the
unbelievers, and he was held to be the source of all legitimate authority,
both in the state and in the administration of justice. In theory every
governor was appointed by the Imām-Khalīfah, and even when the separate
provinces of the empire had become independent and the Caliph was a
helpless puppet, this fiction was still maintained, and a sultan or emir,
though he might have carved out a kingdom for himself by force of
arms, would apply to the Abbasid Caliph for a diploma of investiture.
The organisation of the administrative machinery is traditionally
attributed to Omar (634-644), who established a Dīwān or public register
of income and expenditure, the original purpose of which was the division
of the revenues of the state among the various members of the Muslim
community. But Omar's fiscal system soon broke down, and the
machinery of government gradually became more complicated by the
establishment of separate administrative departments, the number and
designation of which during the Abbasid period varied from time to
time. Among the most important were the Treasury (Dīwān al-Kharāj),
which kept an account of the taxes, and the State Chancery (Dīwān at-
Tauqi'), which issued the decrees of the Caliph and exercised control over
provincial governors. There were also separate departments for official
correspondence, for the administration of the crown lands, for the army,
for the postal service, for accounts, for general expenditure, and for the
freedmen and slaves of the Imperial House.
In the centralisation of government so characteristic of the new
dynasty, the institution of the Wazīr (Vizier) came into prominence.
Whereas the Umayyads, following the traditionary methods of primitive
Arab society, were surrounded by an aristocracy made up of chiefs of
their own race whom they would consult on special occasions, the more
autocratic government of the Abbasids placed the great army of officials
under the control of a minister, the Wazīr, to whom the Caliph delegated


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The postal system
283
a large portion of the details of administration. When the Caliph
(as was often the case) did not wish to be disturbed in his pleasures by
the cares of state, the Wazīr acquired almost autocratic powers and
could amass immense wealth ; all officials, even the great provincial
governors, owed their appointment to him, and he controlled the whole
machinery of the state. But his was a perilous position, and the annals
of the Abbasid dynasty are full of stories of the sudden ruin that de-
stroyed great and prosperous ministers.
One of the most important departments was that of the State Post
(Dīwān al-Barīd), an institution that the Arabs took over from the
Romans, as the very designation indicates, barīd being a loan-word from
the Latin veredus; but the story that Hārūn's great Persian minister,
the Barmecide Yaḥyà, reorganised the postal system on a new basis,
probably indicates that the Arabs incorporated also into their system the
old organisation of the Persian Empire. Like the Roman cursus publicus,
this department was designed only to serve the interests of the state, by
keeping the central government in touch with the outlying provinces and
providing secret information of the doings of the various governors.
Relays of swift mounts were kept at post stations on the great highways,
and made possible the rapid communication of information and official
orders. In every large province the postmaster had to keep the Caliph
informed of every event of importance, to report on the state of the
finances and the administration of the crown lands, the behaviour of the
officers of the state, and the condition of agriculture and the peasantry.
The cost of keeping up this large establishment of postal officials, to-
gether with the various stations and the camels and horses required, was
very heavy, but as it constituted the only possible means of controlling
the administration of such a vast Empire, the Caliphs rightly attached
much importance to it, and the Chief Postmaster at the capital had to
communicate despatches to the Caliph immediately on their arrival.
Pigeons also appear to have been used for transmitting news. Further, this
organised control of the great highways, where these postal stations were
established, facilitated the movements of the high officials andof the troops.
In addition to this department there was a large force of detective
police, and an elaborate system of espionage became a characteristic
feature of the administration, whereby a Caliph set spies to watch his
officials and even the members of his own family, while they in return
employed their own spies to report upon his movements and utterances.
For this purpose, in addition to regular members of the postal service,
persons of every social grade, merchants, pedlars, physicians, and slave
girls, were employed.
It was in harmony with this inquisition into the affairs of private
persons that the Muḥtasib, or Prefect of Police, should not only be con-
cerned with preventing breaches of the civil and religious law but also
act as a censor of morals.
One of his most important duties was to inspect
сн. х.


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284
Censorship of morals: judiciary: army
weights and measures, and control commercial transactions by preventing
fraud in sales and the counterfeiting of goods or the making of extortion-
ate charges. He forbade the public sale of wine and the playing of
musical instruments in public places. In regard to the practices of
religion it was his duty to see that the correct ritual observances were
followed, for instance, to prevent the utterance of religious formulae not
sanctioned by authority, or the repetition in a loud voice of those
that were to be uttered in low tones; he could stop a man from taking
part in public worship who had not performed the prescribed rites of
ablution, or had not carried them out according to the strict prescriptions
of the ritual law; he could also punish a man who was detected breaking
the fast of Ramadān. He found suitable husbands for widows and took
care that no divorced women married before the expiration of the legal
period. He protected slaves from having tasks imposed upon them that
they were not strong enough to perform, and punished the owners of
beasts of burden if they did not provide their animals with sufficient
provender or overworked them. His authority even extended to the
inspection of dolls, to see whether they bore any resemblance to idols or
served any other purpose than that of accustoming little girls to the
care of infants. Unless he had received express authority, the Prefect of
Police could not interfere with the office of the magistrate, for if an
accused person denied his guilt the matter had to be brought before the
judge.
The judges were appointed either directly by the Caliph or an official,
such as his Wazir, or by a governor to whom authority had been dele-
gated. In the appointment of a judge the locality in which he could
exercise jurisdiction had to be expressly stated, and his authority was
either general or restricted. In the former instance he not only tried cases
but, among other duties, appointed guardians for minors, lunatics, and
others who could not manage their own property, administered religious
endowments, and saw that wills were carried out according to the direc-
tions of the testator. There was a special court of appeal in which were
heard complaints of the miscarriage of justice in the administrative or
judicial department; the earlier Abbasid Caliphs received such complaints
in public audience, but after the reign of Muhtadi (869-870) this office
was put into commission and a special officer appointed as president of
the Board for the investigation of grievances. In the reign of Muqtadir
(908-932), his mother, who controlled the administration, appointed to
this post her Mistress of the Robes.
The organisation of the army varied at different times in Muslim
history. By the Abbasid period the troops were divided into two classes:
the regular Arab army kept on a permanent footing and paid out of the
State Treasury, and the volunteers who were not entered on the register
and received no fixed pay. The latter received grants out of the poor tax,
and took part in the annual raids into Byzantine territory or into the


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The Turkish guard
285
neighbouring countries of the unbelievers. As the Abbasids came into
power largely through the assistance of troops from Khurāsān, these
formed a separate division of the army recruited from that part of their
dominions. Later on, Mu'taşim (833-842) added another separate army
corps made up of Turks, and also enrolled a contingent of slaves mainly
from North Africa. The favour which Mu'taşim extended towards these
foreign troops, and the disaffection excited by the excesses they committed
on the citizens of Baghdad, was one of the reasons that determined him
to transfer his capital to Sāmarrā in 836. Here he built enormous
barracks for his Turkish troops and encouraged Turkish chieftains to
come and live under his protection; he assigned separate sections of the
vast city that grew up around his palace to the Turkish troops according
to their tribes and their original habitat, and, in order to keep them
apart from the surrounding population, he purchased numbers of Turkish
slave girls whom he compelled his troops to marry; fixed stipends were
assigned to these slave girls and registers were kept of their names. These
Turkish guards came gradually to outnumber every other section of the
army, and they grew in wealth and influence as the number of posts con-
ferred upon them increased, until gradually the administration passed
from the hands of the Persians into those of the Turks, and the Caliph
became quite at the mercy of his Turkish guard. Things came to such
a pass that more than one Caliph was put to death by his own troops,
and the election of his successor was determined by his Turkish officers.
Still greater confusion arose when rival factions among the Turks them-
selves came to blows with one another: the administration fell into dis-
order, the provinces ceased to remit revenue to the capital, and the
troops mutinied and clamoured for their arrears of pay. It was to
escape from such an intolerable position that the Caliph Mu'tamid
in 892 abandoned Samarrā as a capital.
As the central authority declined and the Empire broke up into a
number of independent states and fiefs, the character of the military
organisation changed, and in place of the great standing army under a
single command a system of military fiefs grew up, according to which
different members of a ruling house or separate chiefs were given charge
over a town or a district, on condition that they paid an annual tribute
and supplied at their own cost a fixed number of troops to their overlord.
But in all these separate bodies of troops the presence of Turkish soldiers
became a common feature, since fresh accessions to their number were con-
tinuously coming from the East as the Turkish troops learned of the
wealth and power that their fellow-tribesmen could gain by service within
the Muslim Empire.
Many of these Turkish soldiers were slaves, and one reason for the
dependence of the Caliphs upon them was the belief that security could
be obtained by the possession of a bodyguard entirely dependent on the
favour of the sovereign without any ties of family or relationship with
CH
X.


## p. 286 (#328) ############################################

286
Slavery: commerce
the rest of the population. When the Caliphs became disillusioned of
the notion that loyalty could be purchased in this manner from the
Turks, they still continued to place reliance upon their slaves, and
Muqtadir (908-932) in his desire to maintain his authority against the
troublesome Turkish troops acquired as many as 11,000 slaves, some of
whom he promoted to high office and placed in command of his army.
Slavery from the outset had been a recognised institution of Muslim
society, but from the reign of this Caliph the tenure by slaves of some
of the highest offices of the state became an increasingly characteristic
feature of the social organisation. Conquests and raids had from the
earliest days of the expansion of the Arab Empire added to the slave
population of the great cities, but a constant supply was kept up later
through the well-organised slave-trade, which brought such enormous
numbers of black slaves from Africa that their armed risings were at
times a source of serious disorder. The white slaves were brought in
thousands from various Turkish tribes in Central Asia, and also from
Mediterranean ports, especially from Spain and Italy. Many of these
slaves were employed by their masters in trade and commercial enterprises
of various kinds.
The transference of the capital to 'Irāq by the Abbasid Caliphs was
followed by a period of great commercial expansion. Not only did the
possession of enormous wealth create a demand for costly articles, such
as silks from China and furs from northern Europe, but trade was pro-
moted by certain special conditions, such as the vast extent of the Muslim
empire, the spread of Arabic as a world-language, and the exalted status
assigned to the merchant in the Muslim system of ethics; it was remem-
bered that the Prophet himself had been a merchant and had commended
trading during the pilgrimage to Mecca. Not only did the great trade
routes through the empire facilitate commercial relations, but under the
Abbasids navigation received a great impulse ; for the Eastern trade,
Başrah, a Muslim creation, was one of the most flourishing ports; in the
West, the Arabs entered into the inheritance of the great Mediterranean
ports of the Roman Empire. To the sea-faring inhabitants of the coasts
of Syria and Egypt the Arabs were indebted also for the building up
of their fleet, which became so formidable a rival of the Byzantine navy.
The theory of the Arab State was that of a community of believers
holding the primitive faith revealed by God to Adam and successive
prophets, and occupying the heritage of the earth that God had given to
Adam and his descendants; but from the very outset there was a recog-
nition of persons who did not accept the faith of Islām, and the Koran
enjoins toleration towards the “people of the Book,” i. e. the Jews and the
Christians, who are looked upon as professing a religion that is a
corrupted form of God's original and oft-repeated revelation.
According to the theory of the Arab legists based on the practice of
the Prophet and his immediate successors, religious toleration was granted


## p. 287 (#329) ############################################

Toleration
287
to the Jews, Christians, and Zoroastrians, on condition that they paid
tribute. The non-Muslim living under Arab rule was technically called
Dhimmi (literally, one with whom a compact has been made), and the
theory was that agreements were made by the Arab conquerors as they
extended their authority over different cities and districts. The Arab
historians record several examples of such agreements, but by the Abbasid
period the actual practice appears to have become uniform, modified only
by the idiosyncracies of local governors. Under the influence of the
communistic theory of the young Muslim community, in accordance with
which the immense wealth poured into the Public Treasury, as the Arab
conquests were extended in the Roman and Persian Empires, was divided
among the faithful, some attempt appears to have been made to prevent
the Arab Muslims from settling down in conquered territory, with the
intention that they might constitute a permanent army. Consequently
the payers of taxes were the original inhabitants of the conquered
territories, and recent investigations go to prove that the taxes they paid
to the Arabs were much the same as those they had been accustomed to
pay the former governments. But, according to the theory of the legists,
the non-Muslims paid jizyah as a poll tax, in return for which they
received protection for life and property and exemption from military
service. The system broke down when the first conquests were followed
by the conversion to Islām of large sections of the newly-acquired sub-
jects; their claim to be exempted from the land-tax they had been
accustomed to pay threatened the state with financial ruin, and the
government was compelled to levy land-tax from Muslims and non-
Muslims alike. The jizyah in some form or another continued to be
levied upon the members of the protected religious communities that
refused to accept Islām; it is very doubtful, however, whether the
accounts given in legal treatises on the subject correspond to the actual
practice followed in the collection of this tax.
In the Koran the only “people of the Book” expressly mentioned
were the Jews and the Christians. When the conquest of Persia brought
a large Zoroastrian population under Arab rule, it was conveniently
remembered that the Prophet had given orders that the Zoroastrians
were to be treated just like the “people of the Book” and that jizyah
might be taken from them also. A similar policy of religious tolerance
was extended to the heathen Harrānians and Mandaeans, though,
according to the strict letter of the law, they should either have been
put to death or compelled to embrace Islām. The Manichaeans likewise
were not entitled to toleration according to Muslim law, but they survived
as a separate sect up to the tenth century, and during the reign of
Ma’mūn (813–833) the leader of this sect held a public disputation with
the Muslim theologians in Baghdad in the presence of the Caliph himself;
but even on this occasion the Caliph had to furnish this religious teacher
with a bodyguard to prevent his being exposed to insult from the fanatical
לל
CH, X.


## p. 288 (#330) ############################################

288
Religious persecution
populace, and in later reigns the persecution of the Manichaeans became
so severe that those who escaped fled into Turkestan.
During the period of the Umayyads the religious indifference that
characterised most of the rulers of this dynasty, with the exception of
Omar ibn 'Abd-al-Aziz (717-720), lent support to this theory of tolera-
tion, and the condition of the Christians and the Jews appears to have
been tolerable, except, of course, that like all the subject peoples, they
were always exposed to the exactions of rapacious taxgatherers. There was
a change for the worse with the advent of the Abbasids, in consequence
of the emphasis that this dynasty laid upon religious considerations and
its zealous patronage of orthodoxy. Hārūn (786-809) passed an edict
compelling Jews and Christians to adopt a different costume to that of
the Muslims, but it appears to have been put into force only in the
capital and even there to have soon ceased to be applied. This temporary
change of attitude was very possibly the result of the treachery which the
Emperor Nicephorus shewed in his dealings with this Caliph. A more
serious persecution broke out in the reign of Mutawakkil (847-861).
This fanatical Caliph lent the support of the state to the strong orthodox
re-action that had set in against the rationalistic tendencies which had
had free play under former rulers, and he came forward as the champion
of the extreme orthodox party to which the mass of the Muslim popula-
tion belonged. He persecuted the Mu'tazilites, whose doctrines had been
in the ascendancy in the court during the reign of Ma'mūn, and branded
with ridicule their doctrine that the Koran was created. He shewed a
similar persecuting zeal against the Shĩah sect, the members of which
were imprisoned and scourged, and he pulled down the tomb of the
martyred Husain at Karbalā and forbade pilgrimages to its site. The
Christians suffered equally during this period of intolerance. They were
ordered to wear a distinctive dress, dismissed from their employments in
government offices, forbidden to ride on horses, and harassed with several
other restrictions. The churches that had been built since the Arab
conquest were ordered to be pulled down, and the dwellings of some of
the wealthier Christians were turned into mosques. To the reign of this
fanatical ruler belongs the restrictive ordinances which were traditionally
ascribed to Omar, the companion and successor of the Prophet; but
these intolerant regulations appear to have been in force spasmodically
only, and during the confusion into which the administration fell it was
not possible to put them into force any more than any other statutes.
After each fanatical outburst of persecution the Christians returned to
their posts in the government offices; indeed the administration could
not do without them, for it had depended upon their special knowledge
and skill from the very beginning of the Arab conquest. Despite the
complaints repeatedly made by fanatics, the Caliphs persisted in bestowing
high offices on non-Muslims. On one occasion when objections were made
to the Caliph Mu'tadid (892–902) against a Christian being governor of


## p. 289 (#331) ############################################

Position of Christians
289
the important city of Anbār (on the Euphrates about forty-two miles
from Baghdad), he claimed the right to appoint a Christian to any office
for which he might be fitted, and added that such a man might be more
suitable than a Muslim since the latter might possibly shew undue con-
sideration to his co-religionists.
That such a high administrative office should have been entrusted to
a Christian was probably a rare occurrence, but the ministry of finance
seems to have been generally filled with them. As physicians too, the
Christians exercised great influence at court and acquired considerable
wealth. Gabriel, the personal physician to the Caliph Hārūn, was a
Nestorian Christian and is said to have amassed a fortune of more than
three and a half million pounds sterling.
In trade and commerce too the Christians attained considerable
affluence; indeed it was frequently their wealth that excited against them
the jealous cupidity of the mob. The wealth possessed by the Christians
may be estimated by the magnificent churches erected under Muslim rule,
though according to the theory of the legists it was not permissible to
build any new churches in Muslim territory after the conquest. In
addition to the record of the building of many churches under the
Umayyads, several such foundations are mentioned in the Abbasid
period, for instance, in 759 the Nestorian Bishop Cyprian completed a
church in Nisibis, on which he had expended the sum of 56,000 dīnārs.
In the reign of Mahdi (775–785) a church was built in Baghdad for the
use of the Christian prisoners taken captive during the numerous cam-
paigns against the Byzantine Empire, and his son Hārūn gave permission
for the erection of new churches, including a magnificent building in which
the Jacobite Bishop of Mārdin enshrined the bodies of the prophets
Daniel and Ezekiel. The Christian prime minister of the Buwaihid prince
Adud-ud-Daulah (949–982), who administered Southern Persia and 'Irāq,
also built a number of new churches, and the building of churches and
monasteries is recorded as late as the reign of Mustadi (1170–1180).
Some evidence of the wealth in Christian hands is given by the large sums
which were expended in bribes, e. g. in 912 the Nestorian Patriarch in
Baghdad spent 30,000 dīnārs (gold coins) in intrigues against a rival
patriarch of the Orthodox Church; the Nestorian Patriarch, Ishoʻyabh,
in 1190 secured his appointment by means of a bribe of 5,000 dinārs ;
a century later, another patriarch spent 7,000 dinārs for a similar purpose,
and his successor did the same.
Of the literature produced during the Abbasid period it is only
possible to give a brief sketch here. Not only was the number of individual
authors very great, and the output of many of them enormous (e. g. as
many as 70 works by Ghazāli are recorded and of the writings of Avicenna
99 have survived to us), but they left hardly any subject of human
interest untouched. Some estimate of the immense literary activity of
C. MED. H. VOL. IV. CH. X.
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## p. 290 (#332) ############################################

290
Literature under the Abbasids
this period may be formed from the “Index,” compiled in 988 by an-
Nadim, of the Arabic books on every branch of knowledge extant in his
day? . It was in this period also that Arabic began to take on the
characteristics of a world-literature, and became the literary medium of
expression for others besides the Arabs themselves. Some of the most
noteworthy contributions to this literature were made by Persians, and
the decline of Syriac literature marks the ascendancy of Arabic. Not only
did the Nestorian and Jacobite Christians tend more and more to prefer
Arabic to Syriac as a literary language, but the heathen of Harrān
translated into Arabic much of the wisdom of the Greeks, and nearly all
the scientific and philosophic works by Jews between the ninth and
thirteenth centuries were written in the same language.
Of the poetry of the Abbasid period, only brief mention is possible
here. While some poets continued to imitate the ancient models set in the
pre-Islāmic odes and followed by writers of the Umayyad period, there
were many more who grew weary of these antiquated conventions and
poured scorn on what they considered to be the barbarisms of the desert.
The most famous representative of the new school of poetry was Abū
Nuwās (ob. c. 810), one the court poets of Hārūn; his poems in praise
of love and wine made him notorious, and he took the lead among the
licentious poets of that reign. In striking contrast to his rollicking con-
temporary was another poet who enjoyed the patronage of Hārūn, Abu'l-
‘Atāhiyah (ob. 828), whose poetry is marked by a profound scepticism
and a philosophic spirit of asceticism. The growing interest in religious
and ethical problems and the encouragement given by the Abbasids to
theological studies were not without their influence on poetry, and a great
quantity of pietistic verse was produced; but with the widening of
intellectual interest, poetry came indeed to reflect every aspect of the
many-sided culture of this period. Two more names must be mentioned,
that of Mutanabbi (ob. 965), in the judgment of most of his fellow-
countrymen the greatest of the Muslim Arab poets, who was the
panegyrist of the Hamdānid prince, Saif-ad-Daulah, the generous patron
of Abu’ l-Faraj Isfahānī, Fārābī, and many other writers; and that of
Abu' l-Alà al-Ma'arri (ob. 1058), the sceptical blind poet, to whom
Dr Nicholson has devoted an erudite and illuminating monograph”.
Of the vast literature of the Abbasid period a large part is connected
with those various branches of study that grew out of the efforts to
elucidate the Koran. Tradition ascribes the composition of the earliest
work on Arabic grammar to the fact that a learned scholar heard a man,
quoting a verse of the Koran, make such a gross grammatical blunder as
to turn the sense of the passage into blasphemy. But apart from the
need of a scientific exposition of the language for an intelligent under-
standing of the Koran, Arabic was rapidly adopted, at least for purposes
1 E. G. Browne, Literary History of Persia, I, 383 sqq.
2 Studies in Islamic Poetry, chap. 11. Cambridge. 1921.


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Exegesis: law
291
of literary expression, by the subject races, and even the Arabs them-
selves, belonging to different tribes and speaking varying dialects in a
foreign country, were in need of guidance of the purity of their speech
was to be preserved. A school of grammarians sprang up during the
Umayyad period in Başrah, which had been founded just after the con-
quest of ‘Irāq as a great military station to command the approach from
the sea, and a rival school arose later in the city of Kūfah, founded about
the same time as a permanent camp on the desert side of the Euphrates.
Two representatives of these schools may be mentioned here. Sībawaihi
(ob. 793) wrote the first systematic exposition of Arabic grammar and
had a long line of imitators in the Başrah school; to the school of Kūfah
belonged Kisā'i (ob. 805), whom Hārūn appointed tutor to his sons; both
he and Sībawaihi were Persians by birth, and there is a record of their
having met in controversy on points of grammar. By the early part of
the ninth century these rival schools had lost their importance, and the
leading grammarians were to be found in Baghdad.
The study of the Koran also gave a stimulus to the study of
history, pre-eminently the life of the Prophet, and then of earlier
prophets mentioned in the sacred text; to law, the primary source of
which was the Koran; and to other branches of learning. The exegesis
of the text of the Koran itself began as a branch of the science of
tradition, and the oldest systematic collections of traditions, such as
those of Bukhārī (vb. 870) and Tirmidhi (ob. 892), contain comments
on the subject-matter of the Koran. Tabarī's (ob. 923) monumental
commentary was epoch-making; it not only embodies the work of its
predecessors in an exhaustive enumeration of traditional interpretations
and lexicographical notes on the text, supported by quotations from pre-
Islāmic poetical literature, but discusses difficulties of grammar and
deals with questions of dogma and law. The commentaries produced by
succeeding generations are without number, but among these special
mention must be made of the Kashshāf of Zamakhsharī (ob. 1143), one
of the greatest Arabic scholars of his time, though by birth a Persian ;
his work was exploited by succeeding generations of commentators, and
their tribute to his erudition was the more remarkable since the author
was a Mu'tazilite and had embodied in his work some of the heretical
opinions of his sect. This great work formed the basis of the most
widely studied commentary in the Muslim world to the present day,
that of Baidāwi (ob. 1286).
The Muslim system of law claimed to be based on the Koran, but
owing to the scarcity of material provided by the sacred text a distinct
branch of Muslim study with an enormous literature of its own grew up,
technically known as Fiqh. This deals not only with legal matters in the
narrower sense of the term, i. e. criminal and civil law, the law of property
and inheritance, constitutional law, and the principles of administration
of the state and the conduct of war, but also with ritual and religious
CH. X.
19-2


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292
Dogmatic systems
observances and the innumerable details of the daily life falling under
the consideration of a legal system that makes no distinction between the
civil and the religious life of the believer. This system of law was
developed largely under the influence of the Roman law which the Arabs
found operative in Syria and Mesopotamia; in matters of ritual there
were borrowings also from the Jewish law.
The religious character of the Abbasid dynasty gave an impulse to
the systematic codification of Muslim law, and produced a vast literature
embodying the different standpoints of the various schools of legists that
grew up within the Sunni sect to which the government belonged. Ву
the end of the Abbasid period these had become narrowed down to the
four that survive to the present day, but there had been others which
became obsolete. These various schools differed mainly according to the
place the legists allowed to independent judgment and the use of
analogical deduction. In addition to the Sunni schools, the other sects,
particularly the Shi'ahs, developed legal systems of their own.
Dogmatic literature as distinct from exegesis and fiqh appears first to
have grown up in connexion with the problems of the divine unity and
its harmony with the attributes of God, and of the divine justice in
relation to the problem of the freedom or determination of the human
will. This dogmatic literature tended more and more to take on a
metaphysical form as Muslim thinkers came under the influence of Greek
thought, brought to their knowledge through versions of Neoplatonic
and Aristotelean treatises translated into Arabic either from Syriac or
directly from Greek. The writings of the earliest school of speculative
theologians, the Mu´tazilites, have almost entirely perished, but the
teachings of another liberal movement in theology which endeavoured to
harmonise authority with reason and seems to have been connected with the
Isma'ilian propaganda, have been preserved to us in the treatises of the
so-called Brethren of Sincerity (made accessible to the European reader
by Dieterici). They wrote towards the end of the tenth century and put
forth an encyclopaedic scheme of human knowledge, dividing learning
into three branches—the preliminary, the religious, and the philosophic
studies; under the last heading they grouped propaedeutics (consisting of
arithmetic, geometry, astronomy, and music), logic, physics, and theology.
This group of thinkers appears to have been obliged to meet in secret,
for the orthodox reaction, which received the support of the government
under Mutawakkil (847-861) and found expression in the writings of
Ash'arī (ob. 933), the founder of orthodox scholasticism, effectually
crushed liberal movements in theology. Ash'arī had been brought up as
a Mu'tazilite, but when he became converted to orthodoxy he adapted
the dialectic methods of the philosophers to the defence of the orthodox
position. A more popular exposition of the Ash'arite system of theology
was given by Ghazālī (ob. 1111) who, in the reaction from arid scholas-
ticisin, took refuge in Sufiism and gave mystical experience a place in his


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Mysticism. Historical literature
293
reasoned exposition of orthodox doctrines. His literary activity was
enormous, his best-known works being the autobiography of his spiritual
experience in his Deliverer from Error, and the vast compendium of
his religious system, The Revivification of the Sciences of the Faith.
Mysticism in Islām had had a long history before Ghazāli embodied
it in a system of orthodox theology. Beginning as a purely ascetic move-
ment, it came under foreign influences, notably Neoplatonic and Gnostic,
and so took on more theosophic forms of expression. The teachings of
the early Sufis were expressed in sayings handed down by their disciples;.
one of the oldest systematic treatises was the Sustenance of the Souls
by Abū Tālib al-Makki (ob. 996), which was followed by a vast number
of writings too numerous to be recorded here.
Historical literature had its origin in biographies of the Prophet and
his companions. The foundations of this literature were laid in the
Umayyad period, but the oldest extant biography of the Prophet, written
by Ibn Isḥāq, who died in 768 during the reign of the second Abbasid
Caliph, has only survived to us in a recension of it made by Ibn Hishām
(ob. 834), a distinguished grammarian. Another biographer of the
Prophet, Wāqidi (ob. 822), enjoyed the patronage of Hārūn and wrote
The Book of the Wars, a detailed account of the campaigns of the
Prophet and the early successes of the Arab conquerors. His con-
temporary, Ibn Sa'd (ob. 844), wrote an immense biographical work
containing a life of the Prophet and of the various classes of his
companions and those who immediately followed them. Balādhurī
(ob. 892) also wrote an account of the early Arab conquests, which is
one of the most valuable sources for this early period, and began a
vast biographical work on the life of the Prophet and his kinsmen,
among whom the Abbasids are reckoned. Other historians took a larger
range. Dinawarī (ob. 895) in his Book of the Long Histories paid
especial attention to the history of Persia, and Ya'qubi, his contemporary,
wrote a manual of universal history; but all these works were surpassed
in extent by the monumental Annals of the Apostles and the Kings
by Tabarī, whose commentary on the Koran has already been mentioned,
a history of the world so far as it was of interest to a Muslim historian,
from the creation to the year 915. His work was abridged by a later
writer, Ibn al-Athir (ob. 1234), who likewise wrote a history of the world,
but from the beginning of the tenth century gives an independent
record; he also wrote a history of the Atābegs of Mosul and an alpha-
betical dictionary entitled Lions of the Jungle, biographies of 7,500
companions of the Prophet.
Other biographers confined their attention to limited groups, e. g. the
philosophers, scientists, physicians, or distinguished citizens of particular
cities; but none of these equal the interest that attaches to the Book
of Songs composed by Abu'l Faraj Isfahānī (ob. 967); beginning merely
with a collection of songs composed by the most famous musicians at the
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294
Belles lettres
court of the Caliph Hārūn, it contains not only detailed and graphic
accounts of poets and singers, but incidentally is one of the most impor-
tant of our sources for the history of the culture of the Muslim world up
to the ninth century.
An entirely new form of literary activity was introduced in a highly
artificial form of rhymed prose, known as the Maqāmah. The use of
rhyme is characteristic of the earliest work in Arabic prose known to us,
the Koran, and as a literary device it runs through Arabic prose litera-
ture, finding special expression in pulpit oratory and the elevated
epistolary style of official correspondence; but this style of composition
gave rise to a distinct department of literature when Badi-uz-Zamān
Hamadhānī (ob. 1007) conceived the idea of popularising it in a narra-
tive of the adventures of a vagabond scholar, who suddenly appears
in gatherings of wealthy persons and learned assemblies and by the
display of his erudition gains for himself ample reward. The author
makes such compositions an occasion for displaying his erudition by an
abundant use of rare and obsolete words and recondite phrases, illustrating
now the idiom of the Bedouins of the desert and now that of typical
examples of the townsfolk; though clad in a garb of out-of-the-way
learning, these compositions are full of humour and pointed satire against
various classes of contemporary society. The fame of this work was, how-
ever, eclipsed by that of Harīrī (ob. 1122), whose Maqāmāt are regarded
as a masterpiece of Arabic literary style, full of all manner of rhetorical
devices, verbal conceits, and verbal puzzles, intelligible only to trained
students of grammar and philology. Harīrī recounts the wanderings of
a learned knave who also suddenly appears in all kinds of unexpected
circumstances, and after a witty declaration, often in verse, as mysteriously
disappears again. Harīrī claimed that his work was not intended merely
to amuse but had also a deeper moral purpose, and there are indeed
passages in which his hero utters sentiments of the loftiest morals in
language of great dignity and beauty.
Prose literature developed also in various other forms of belles lettres,
notably in translations, such as the stories of Kalilah and Dimnah, largely
under the stimulus of the varied foreign influences that met in the cul-
tured society of Baghdad. Intellectual interest was widened until men of
letters left no subject untouched ; typical of such a wide intellectual
outlook is the Mu'tazilite theologian Jähiz (ob.