No More Learning

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.


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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.
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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. 869) who, in his numerous
writings, ranged over such subjects as theology, rhetoric, natural history
(as in his Book of Animals), anthropology (in treatises that discussed the
relative merits of the Arabs and the Turks), and studies of contemporary
society (as in his Book of Misers, of Young Gallants, of Scribes, of
Singers, etc). The influence of Jāḥiz on Arabic prose literature was
considerable; his pupil Mubarrad (ob. 898) collected in his Kāmil
historical notices and examples of early poetry and prose, and such com-
pilations became a recognised form of literary activity to which several


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The encyclopaedists and geographers
295
writers of genius devoted themselves. Akin to such writers in their wide
intellectual outlook were the encyclopaedists, of whom Masóūdī (ob. 956)
may be taken as an example. He spent a large part of his life in travel,
and visited almost every part of Muslim Asia from Armenia to India and
from the Caspian to Zanzibar. Everything that he saw interested him,
and his reading was extensive and profound. In his latter years he com-
posed a universal history from the Creation up to his own period, but
his range was not confined to the conventional circle of Islāmic learning,
for he studied the beliefs of rival creeds and the wisdom of the Indians,
and enquired into puzzling problems of natural history, such as the source
of the Nile and the phenomena of tides, and described the sea-serpent
and the rhinoceros.
Masóūdi is typical of the mental curiosity which produced a rich
scientific literature during the Abbasid period. The practical needs of
administrators gave an impulse to the scientific study of geography,
and the oldest geographical work in Arabic that has survived is an
official handbook of Roads and Countries by a Persian postmaster, Ibn
Khurdādhbih, who lived in the first half of the ninth century. The
geographical literature that followed forms an important section of Arabic
literature written by eager and close observers. Maqdisī, who wrote in
985, embodied in an attractive style the accumulated experience of
twenty years of travel from Sind and Sistān in the East to Spain in the
West. But the greatest of the Arab geographers was Yāqūt (ob. 1229),
a Greek slave whose master had him educated in Baghdad; he lived
a wandering life, finally settling down in Aleppo; among his other
writings, he wrote a vast geographical dictionary and a biographical
dictionary of learned men. Zakarīyā of Qazwīn (ob. 1283) summed up
the geographical knowledge of his time in a comprehensive cosmo-
graphy, a kind of geographical encyclopaedia that deals not only with
geography proper but also with astronomy, anthropology, and natural
history; this book, translated into Persian, Turkish, and Urdu, was held
to be the standard work on geographical sciences until a knowledge of
Western learning penetrated the Muslim world.
Philosophy, as distinguished from theological scholasticism, begins
with Kindi (ob. c. 873), one of the few writers of pure Arab descent
who acquired distinction in letters during this period; but he was a
translator rather than a constructive thinker, and among the two hundred
treatises he wrote on such different subjects as astronomy, geometry,
music, politics, and medicine, there are translations of parts of Aristotle's
works and abridgments of others. For his pupil Aḥmad, a son of the
Caliph Mu'tasim, he prepared a version of the first work of Greek
philosophy translated into Arabic; though this was actually made up of
portions of the Enneads of Plotinus, it bore the misleading title of the
Theology of Aristotle, and this absurd designation is responsible for
much of the confusion prevailing in Arabic philosophy when attempts
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## p. 296 (#338) ############################################

296
Philosophy
were made to expound Aristotelean and Platonic doctrines. A more
permanent influence on Muslim philosophic thought was exercised by
Fārābi (ob. 950), a Turk, who pursued his studies in medicine, mathe-
matics, and philosophy in Baghdad, but spent the last years of his life in
Aleppo under the tolerant patronage of the Hamdānid prince, Saif-ad-
Daulah. Like Kindī, his literary activity was enormous, and included a
number of commentaries upon Aristotle as well as independent ex-
positions of metaphysical problems. He certainly presented a fuller
exposition of Aristotelean doctrine than had hitherto been available in
the Arabic language, but, as he, like Kindī, believed in the authenticity
of the Theology of Aristotle and wrote several books to establish the
agreement between the doctrines of Aristotle and Plato, his exposition of
Aristotle is often incorrect. The brief aphoristic form in which he com-
posed many of his treatises, and the mysticism that interpenetrates his
thought, makes his system somewhat obscure. The Aristotelean doctrine
received a much clearer and more methodical exposition in the writings
of Ibn Sinā (Avicenna) (ob. 1037), whose philosophical development was
first stimulated by the study of one of Fārābī's works. He was more
concerned than his predecessor to attempt to reconcile the Aristotelean
metaphysic with Muslim theology. The philosophy of Avicenna, however,
belongs almost as much to Western medieval thought as to that of the
Muslim East, and will be dealt with in another part of this work.
Henceforth, two distinct streams of philosophic thought manifest
themselves; the Spanish philosophers Ibn Bājja (Avenpace) (ob. 1138),
Ibn Tufail (Abubacer) (ob. 1185), and Ibn Rushd (Averroes) (ob. 1198),
continued to work out philosophic problems in the West, but their influence
was more profoundly felt in Christian Europe than in the Muslim East.
Here, particularly in Persia, under the stimulus given to speculation by
Ghazālī, the philosophers tended more and more to become orthodox;
they studied Greek philosophy assiduously and were profoundly influenced
by Greek logic, but they carried on a persistent attack upon separate
Aristotelean doctrines in their defence of Muslim dogma. Fakhr-ud-Dīn
Rāzi (ob. 1209), the author of the great commentary on the Koran,
The Keys of the Unseen, was interpenetrated with Greek ideas, but both
here and in his numerous philosophical works he developed the orthodox
Ash'arite doctrines with a strong element of mysticism.
A strain of mysticism also characterises the idealistic philosophy of
Shihāb-ud-Dīn Suhrawardī (ob. 1191), who attacked the position that
truth could be attained by pure reason in his Unveiling of the Greek
Absurdities, and in his philosophy of Illumination sought to reconcile
with the theology of Islām the ancient Persian doctrine that identified
light and spiritual substance. He founded a school of Persian meta-
physics in which speculation and emotion were united and harmonised.
During the next century Naşir-ud-Dīn Țūsi (ob. 1273) also expounded
Greek philosophy in the spirit of orthodox Muslim dogma, and had


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Medicine
297
numerous commentators who followed him in making similar use of
Greek metaphysics and psychology. His contemporaries, Khawinji (ob.
1248), Abharī (ob. 1264), and Kātibī (ob. 1276), wrote compendiums of
logic, which have been text-books for centuries and have been commented
upon by generations of scholars.
In the science of medicine also the Arabs were the pupils of the Greeks.
The medical system of the Greeks had been studied in the great school
of Jundi-Shāpūr during the Sasanian period, and from the day when the
second Abbasid Caliph summoned Georgios, the son of Bukhtyishū, from
Jundi-Shāpūr to Baghdad in 765, this Nestorian Christian family remained
in high favour at the court for more than two centuries and a half.
Either from Syriac or the original Greek, Christian physicians translated
into Arabic the works of Hippocrates, Galen, Dioscorides, and other
authorities on medicine. Of these translators one of the most active was
Hunain ibn Isḥāq (ob. 873), known to medieval Europe as Johannitius;
he belonged to a Christian Arab tribe, and studied first in Baghdad and
later in Jundi-Shāpūr. Another city that produced translators from
the Greek was Harrān, the seat of a sect known as Sabaeans, to which
belonged an active translator Thābit ibn Qurrah (ob. 901), whose sons and
grandsons were also men of learning. Some knowledge of the Hindu
system of medicine also appears to have reached Baghdad, and a summary
of the Indian medicine is given by 'Ali ibn Rabban, who in 850 compiled
one of the earliest comprehensive works on medical science in Arabic,
The Paradise of Wisdom. Arabic medical literature, however, is by no
means limited to translations, and one of the most prolific contributors
to this literature, Rāzī, who died in the early part of the tenth century,
was a skilled clinical observer, and made distinctly original contributions
to medical science. Out of the fifty works from his pen that are known
to us, representing less than half of his writings, two were translated
into Latin during the Middle Ages under the titles of the Continens
and Liber Almansoris; the first, the Hawī, is a work so enormous that
only wealthy persons could afford to have copies made of it, and it con-
sequently became rare; the other book takes its name from his patron,
one of the Sāmānid princes of Khurāsān, to whom it was dedicated.
Another comprehensive system of medicine, known to the Middle Ages
as the Liber Regius of Haly Abbas, was written by ‘Ali ibn al-'Abbās, a
Persian, for the Buwaihid prince 'Adud-ud-Daulah (949–982). It was
diligently studied until its fame was eclipsed by the Qānūn (Canon) of
Avicenna, who was as great a physician as he was a philosopher, and out
of his 99 works that have survived this was the one most widely studied,
not only in the East but also in the West, since Gerard of Cremona
translated it in the twelfth century. Professor Browne says of this book:
“ Its encyclopaedic character, its systematic arrangement, its philosophic
plan, perhaps even its dogmatism, combined with the immense repu-
tation of its author in other fields besides medicine, raised it to a unique
CH. X.


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298
Mathematics and astronomy
position in the medical literature of the Muslim world, so that the earlier
works of ar-Rází and al-Majúsí, in spite of their undoubted merits, were
practically abrogated by it, and it is still regarded in the East by the
followers of the old Greek medicine, the Țibb-z- Yúnání, as the last appeal
on all matters connected with the healing art. ”? From the tenth
century onward Spain produced a number of great physicians, who, of
course, wrote in Arabic; while in Persia, the birth-place of the Arabic
authors above mentioned, Rāzī, 'Ali ibn al-'Abbās, and Avicenna, a vast
medical literature in the Persian language began with an encyclopaedia
by a physician named Zain-ud-Dīn Ismāʻīl, entitled the Dhakīra-i
Khwārazmshāhi, in honour of his patron who was governor of Khwārazm
(or Khiva) under the Seljūq Sultan Sanjar.
In the Middle Ages students of science often endeavoured to be
encyclopaedic, and several of the philosophers and physicians mentioned
above devoted their attention to other branches of learning. As in the
case of philosophy and medicine, the first impulse came from translations.
These were for the most part made from Greek writings by Syrian
Christians or by the so-called Sabaeans of Harrān; but Sanskrit literature
provided the earliest material, for an Indian in 771 brought to Manşür,
the founder of Baghdad, a work on astronomy, which this Caliph ordered
to be translated into Arabic, and shortly afterwards astronomical tables
compiled under the Sasanians were translated from the Pahlavi. A great
impulse to this work of translation was given by the Caliph Ma'mūn
(813–833), who organised it by establishing a special translation bureau,
to which skilled translators were attracted by offers of large salaries and
were employed in rendering into Arabic works on geometry, astronomy,
engineering, music, and the like. The names of several of the translators
who worked for him are known; among them was Muḥammad ibn Mūsà
al-Khwārazmī, one of whose works translated into Latin at the beginning
of the twelfth century under the title Algoritmi de numero Indorum intro-
duced the Arabic numerals into Europe, while his treatise on algebra was
in use in the West up to the sixteenth century. These men were not
translators merely; their own writings gave an impulse to mathematical
and astronomical studies, which produced fruitful results in the advance-
ment of these branches of knowledge. Astronomy especially was zealously
studied, not only for its own sake but because of its connexion with
astrology, and astronomers continued to enjoy the patronage of the more
barbarous Turkish and Mongol dynasties that dispossessed the Arab
Caliphate; among these may be mentioned Omar Khayyām, known in
modern times for his Persian poetry, who reformed the calendar in 1079,
while as an astronomer he was in the service of the Seljūq Sultan Malik
Shāh. Among astronomers may also be mentioned one of the greatest
intellects of the eleventh century, Berūnī (ob. 1048); he dedicated to
1 Arabian Medicine, p. 62. Cambridge. 1921.


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Astronomy
299
the Sultan Mas'ud ibn Mahmud of Ghaznah a complete account of the
science of astronomy, and wrote a number of smaller astronomical treatises
dealing with the astrolabe and the planisphere. His profound knowledge
of astronomy also reveals itself in his work on the calendars of different
nations. But perhaps the greatest monument of his erudition that this
remarkable man has left is his book on India, in which he gives an account
of the religion, philosophy, astronomy, and customs of the Hindus, based
upon a wide acquaintance with Sanskrit literature and upon his own
personal observations. Naşīr-ud-Dīn ļūsī, to whom reference has already
been made as a philosophical writer, was in charge of an observatory at
Marghah, several of the instruments in which he himself had invented;
in 1270 he dedicated to his patron the Mongol prince Hūlāgū astronomi-
cal tables based on observations of the planets for twelve years, for in the
midst of the appalling devastation that the Mongols inflicted upon Muslim
culture—a ruin from which it has never recovered—they extended their
patronage to one science at least, astronomy.
(B)
THE SELJUQS.
The rise of the Seljūq power and the history of the various dynasties
which were established by princes of that family deserve attention for
more than one reason. Not only were the Seljūqs largely responsible for
the consolidation of Islām during the later days of the Abbasid Caliphate,
but it is from this revival of power, which was, in no small degree, due to
their efforts, that the failure of the Crusaders to make any lasting im-
pression on the East may be traced. Further, it is not alone in politics
and warfare that the Seljūgs achieved success: they have laid mankind
under a debt in other spheres. Their influence may be observed in religion,
art, and learning. Their love of culture was shewn by the universities which
sprang up in their cities and in the crowds of learned men fostered at their
courts. Under them appeared some of the shining lights of Islām. The
philosopher and statesman Nizām-al-Mulk, the mathematician-poet Omar
Khayyām, warriors like Zangi, sultans like Malik Shāh, Nūr-ad-Din, and
it is right to include Saladin himself, were the product of the Seljūq
renaissance. To the Seljūq princes there can be ascribed, to a great ex-
tent, not only the comparative failure of the Crusades, but an unconscious
influence of East upon West, springing from the intercourse between
Frank and Saracen in the holy wars.
The rise of the Seljūq power
CH, X.


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300
Decay of the Caliphate
imparted fresh life to the-Orthodox Caliphate, with which these princes
were in communion, ultimately re-united the scattered states of Islām,
and laid the foundations of the Ottoman Turkish Empire at Con-
stantinople. It is impossible to give more than an outline of the im-
portant events and characters. The object of the present pages is merely
to sketch the rise of the Seljūq power and to mention the states and
dynasties by which the territories under Seljūq sway were ultimately
absorbed. So numerous were the various Atābegs who supplanted them
that sufficient space could not be allotted to their enumeration, which
would in most cases prove both wearisome and superfluous.
The period covered by these dynasties lies between the eleventh and
thirteenth centuries; the territory in which their rule was exercised extends
over large districts of Asia, chiefly Syria, Persia, and Transoxiana. The
name by which they are known is that of their first leader, from whose sons
the different rulers were descended. This leader, Seljūq ibn Yakāk, is said
to have sprung in direct line from Afrāsiyāb, King of Turkestan, the
legendary foe of the first Persian dynasty, but this descent is not his-
torical. Seljūq was one of the chiefs under the Khan of Turkestan, and
with his emigration from Turkestan to Transoxiana and the subsequent
adoption of Islām by himself and his tribe, his importance in history may
be said to begin.
At the time of the appearance of the Seljūqs, Islām had completely
lost its earlier homogeneity. The Umayyad Caliphate had been succeeded
in 750 by the Abbasid, a change of power marked by the transference of
the capital from Damascus to Baghdad. The latter Caliphate actually
survived until the Mongol invasion under Hülāgū in 1258, but at a very
early period schism and decay had set in. Already in 750, when the
Abbasids ousted the Umayyads, Spain became lost to the Caliphate, for
'Abd-ar-Raḥmān, escaping thither from the general slaughter of his kins-
folk in Syria, made himself independent, and his successors never acknow-
ledged the Abbasid rule. The establishment of the Idrīsid dynasty in
Morocco (788) by Idrīs ibn 'Abdallāh, of the Aghlabids in Tunis (800)
by Ibrāhīm ibn Aghlab at Qairawān, the supremacy of the Tūlūnids
(868–905) and Ikhshīdids (935–969) in Egypt, were severe losses to the
Caliphate in its Western dominions. Nor was the East more stable. In
Persia and Transoxiana, as a consequence of the policy pursued by the
Caliph Ma’mūn (813-833), there arose a great national revival, resulting in
the formation of several quasi-vassal dynasties, such as the Şaffārid
(867-903) and the Sāmānid (874-999); from the latter the Ghaznawids
developed, for Alptigīn, who founded the last-named line, was a Turkish
slave at the Sāmānid court. Many of these dynasties became extremely
powerful, and the ascendancy of the heterodox Buwaihids cramped and
fettered the Caliphs in their own palaces. All these kingdoms nominally
acknowledged the spiritual sovereignty of the Caliph, but in temporal
matters they were their own masters. The chief visible token of the Caliph


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The Shiites
301
לי
was the retention of his name in the Khutbah, a “bidding prayer" recited
on Fridays in the mosques throughout Islān, and on the coins. It is
extremely probable that even this fragment of authority was only allowed
to survive for reasons of state, principally to invest with a show of legitimacy
the claims of the various rulers who were, theoretically at least, vassals of
God's vicegerent on earth, the Caliph at Baghdad.
It was not alone in politics that the decay of the Caliphate was
manifest; in religion also its supremacy was assailed. The unity of Islām
had been rent by the schism of “Sunnah” (“Way” or “Law ") and
“Shi'ah” (“Sect”). The former was the name adopted by the orthodox
party, the latter the title which they applied to their opponents. The
Shi'ites believed in the divine Imāmship of Alī, the son-in-law of Mahomet
and the fourth Caliph after him. In consequence they rejected all
the other Caliphs and declared their succession illegitimate. But they
did not, on this account, support the Abbasids, although at first they sided
with them. The Abbasids made skilful use of the Shi'ite "Alids in under-
mining the Umayyad throne; indeed, by themselves the Abbasids could
scarcely have hoped to succeed. Once in power, the allies fell apart. The
Shi'ite doctrine contained numerous elements repugnant to a Sunnī,
elements which may be regarded as gnostic survivals perhaps, but certainly
borrowed from non-Semitic sources. Many held the Mu'tazilite opinion,
which denied the fundamental proposition that the Koran is eternal and
uncreated. They were noted for the number of their feasts and pilgrimages
and for the veneration with which they practically worshipped ‘Ali, since
they added to the profession of Faith “There is no God but God and
Mahomet is his apostle” the words “and 'Ali is his vicegerent (wali). "
In course of time numerous sects grew out of the Shi'ah, perhaps the
most famous being the Ismāʻīlīyah, the Fātimids, the Druses of the
Lebanon, and, in modern times, the Bābi sect in Persia. The kingdom of
the Safavids (1502-1736), known to English literature as “the Sophy,"
was Shi'ite in faith, and Shi'ite doctrines found a fertile soil in India and
the more eastern provinces of Islām. On the whole it may be said
roughly that the Turks were Sunnīs and the Persians Shi'ites.
At the time of the Seljūqs, when the political authority of the Caliphate
was so much impaired, two of the most important Muslim kingdoms sub-
scribed to the Shi'ite tenets. Of these kingdoms, one was that of the
Buwaihids, who ruled in Southern Persia and ‘Irāq. The dynasty had
been founded in 932 by Buwaih, the head of a tribe of mountaineers in
Dailam. The Buwaihids rose in power until the Caliphate was obliged
to recognise them. In 945 the sons of Buwaih entered Baghdad and ex-
tracted many concessions from the Caliph Mustakfi. In spite of their
heterodoxy they soon gained control over the Caliph, who became
absolutely subject to their authority.
The other Shi'ite kingdom, to which reference has been made, was
that of the Fățimids in Egypt (909–1171). As their name implies, these
יר
וי
Сн. х.


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302
Islām saved by the Seljūgs
rulers claimed descent from Fātimah, the daughter of the Prophet, who
married 'Alī. It is therefore easy to understand their leanings towards
the Shi'ah. The dynasty arose in North Africa where ‘Ubaid-Allāh, who
claimed to be the Mahdī, conquered the Aghlabid rulers and gradually
made himself supreme along the coast as far as Morocco. Finally, in 969
the Fātimids wrested Egypt from the Ikhshidids and founded Cairo, close
to the older Fusțāț of ‘Amr ibn al--Aş. By 991 they had occupied Syria
as far as and including Aleppo. Their predominance in politics and
commerce continued to extend, but it is unnecessary to trace their de-
velopment at present. It is sufficient to recall their Shi'ite tendencies and
to appreciate the extent to which the Caliphate suffered in consequence of
their prosperity.
It will thus be seen that at the end of the tenth century the position
of the Caliphate was apparently hopeless. The unity of Islām both in
politics and in religion was broken; the Caliph was a puppet at the mercy
of the Buwaihids and Fāțimids. The various Muslim states, it is true,
acknowledged his sway, but the acknowledgment was formal and unreal.
It seemed as though the mighty religion framed by the Prophet would be
disintegrated by sectarianism, as though the brotherhood of Islām were
a shattered ideal, and the great conquests of Khālid and Omar were
destined to slip away from the weakening grasp of the helpless ruler at
Baghdad.
In such a crisis it would seem that Islam was doomed. It is useful
also to recollect that within a very few years the Muslim world was to
encounter the might of Europe; the pomp and chivalry of Christendom
were to be hurled against the Crescent with, one would imagine, every
prospect of success. At this juncture Islām was re-animated by one of
those periodical revivals that fill the historian with amazement. The
Semitic races have proved to be endowed with extraordinary vitality.
Frequently, when subdued, they have imposed their religion and civilisa-
tion on their conquerors, imbued them with fanaticism, and converted
them into keen propagators of the faith.
Islām was saved from destruction at the hands of the Crusaders by
one of these timely ebullitions. The approach of the Seljūqs towards
the West produced a new element in Islām which enabled the Muslims
successfully to withstand the European invaders; their intervention
changed the subsequent history of Asia Minor, Syria, and Egypt.
The Seljūqs crushed every dynasty in Persia, Asia Minor, Mesopotamia,
and Syria, and united, for certain periods, under one head the vast
territory reaching from the Mediterranean littoral almost to the borders
of India. They beat back successfully both Crusader and Byzantine, gave
a new lease of life to the Abbasid Caliphate which endured till its ex-
tinction by the Mongols in 1258, and to their influence the establishment
of the Ayyübid dynasty in Egypt by Saladin may be directly traced.
It has already been stated that the Seljūgs derived their name from


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The dynasty of Seljūq
303
a chieftain of that name, who came from Turkestan. They were Turkish
in origin, being a branch of the Ghuzz Turks, whom the Byzantine
writers style Uzes.