Discrimination increased later in the ninth century as the Abbasid Empire began to fray. Laws were passed that limited the ability of Christians and Jews to serve as officials, and edicts forbade the ringing of church bells and made it illegal for non-Muslims to ride horses. They were to ride donkeys or mules only. Both Jews and Christians were told to wear “honey-colored turbans” and their women were instructed to don “honey-colored scarfs.” They were also ordered to wear wooden symbols around their necks that marked them as non-Muslims, and to nail wooden images of the devil to their doors.
Seen through a modern filter disposed to assume religious hatred, those actions are easily interpreted as signs of Muslim animosity toward other faiths. The Abbasids, much like the Umayyads before them, alternated between the noblesse oblige of tolerance and contemptuous indifference, with much more of the former than the later. The mid-ninth-century edicts against the People of the Book need to be placed in the context of an overall strategy to retrench and regain lost ground. The impetus was not animosity toward the People of the Book per se but rather the growing power of Turkish mercenaries, who had become the shock troops for the Abbasids and were becoming a threat to the caliph’s authority. The persecution of the People of the Book was only one small element of a major effort to establish a new power base. That effort relied on traditionalists who would not question the caliph and on troops who would serve only him. Marginalizing the People of the Book and suppressing dissent were necessary, albeit cold-blooded, tactics.
The swing from tolerance in secure times toward intolerance in times of threat would be repeated for the next thirteen hundred years. At their apex, the Abbasids invited questioning, dialogue, and debate. They looked for knowledge wherever they could find it. As their power waned, as provinces started to break away and armies began to mutiny, toleration yielded to us versus them. Feeling that their authority and control were in jeopardy, the Abbasids resorted to predictable paranoid behavior
by turning toward the conservative traditionalists, who were willing to rubber-stamp royal absolutism. Afterward, in the intermittent decades of calm, the court would again embrace philosophy and debate. But the pattern had been established: security and coexistence on the one hand, and insecurity and intolerance on the other.
THE CLASH OF CIVILIZATIONS?
THROUGHOUT THIS PERIOD
, the Abbasids contended with a still powerful Christian empire emanating from Constantinople. After the failed sea assaults of the Umayyads, the war between the Byzantines and Abbasids reverted to the land. Just as the caliphs often led the annual pilgrimage to Mecca as a symbol of their authority, they also led armies to the frontier with the Byzantines to demonstrate their mettle. Young princes were sent to the front for their first taste of battle. In parts of what is now southeastern Turkey, there was a continuous state of war for more than a century, as cities like Malatya were seized and then retaken, seized and then retaken, until the inhabitants learned not to become too attached to one regime or the other. On both sides, there were instances of forced deportation and relocation, but these were not the norm. Rarely did the conquerors take revenge on the local populace, recognizing them for the pawns that they were. In the case of Malatya, famous for its delicious, sweet apricots, it was far wiser for both sides to keep production going and enjoy, in this case literally, the fruits of war.
Ever since Edward Gibbon penned his magisterial
Decline and Fall of the Roman Empire
, in the eighteenth century, the historical reputation of Byzantium has suffered in the West. Gibbon’s literary skills are indisputable, but his choice of title is a bit odd. Constantinople was founded at the beginning of the fourth century, and the Byzantine Empire did not end until the fifteenth century, when the Ottoman Turks finally occupied the once-great city. It took more than one thousand years, an entire millennium, for the empire to “fall.” Either this was the slowest, most drawn out collapse in human history or there was much more to that millennium than decline. Elsewhere in the world, entire civilizations rose, flourished, and evaporated while the Byzantines were supposedly falling apart.
Until well after the year 1000, Byzantium was
the
great Christian
power, and the one that the Muslim world, with the possible exception of Andalusia, used to define Christianity. It was also a constant adversary, and relations between Muslim dynasties and the Byzantines shaped how later Muslims understood the relationship between Christian states and Muslim ones.
The Muslims called the Byzantines “Romans,” which they were and were not. They were the heirs to the eastern part of the Roman Empire, but they spoke Greek. They represented a fusion of Greek and Roman society. They also developed a form of Christianity different from what evolved in the West. The Byzantine emperor was both a political and a religious authority, and he had the last word in matters of both doctrine and law. There was no division between church and state, though there were bitter disputes over theology that pitted the emperor against different factions.
The lack of separation between religion and state in Christian Byzantium helps explain why the war between the Abbasids and the Byzantines always had a religious component. Faced with an adversary that fused the church and the state, the Abbasids relied on the caliph as the defender of his faith. When the two empires fought each other, therefore, it became a war between Islam and Christianity.
The concept of holy war, jihad, is embedded in the Quran, but it is and always has been a word fraught with multiple meanings. Muslims speak of jihad as both a struggle to submit to God’s will and a battle against unbelievers. It was not true, historically, that Muslims were obligated to wage war against those who refused to bow to Allah. As we have seen, Muslims were content to rule over a large population of non-Muslims without expending the slightest bit of effort to convert them or to challenge their beliefs. But when Muslims did face war with non-Muslims, they could draw on the concept of jihad as a source of strength and justification.
The modern West is uncomfortable with the notion that war might be sanctified by God, but the idea that war is something separate from God and faith would have been alien to Muslims, Christians, and Jews for most of recorded history. In the Old Testament, when the Israelites wage war, God is almost always a factor, either urging them on or admonishing them. From Constantine the Great through Justinian and Heraclius, the Byzantine emperor viewed war as a holy errand. Victory was a sign of God’s pleasure, defeat indicative of moral weakness. And the Byzantines
framed their wars against the Persians and then the Muslims as Christian struggles against those who had not seen the light of Christ.
The early Abbasid caliphs believed that war with the Byzantines was a religious obligation. Not all of them pursued it with equal vigor, but Harun al-Rashid relished the task. He got his first taste of battle as a teenage prince, and when he became caliph in his early twenties, he was so eager to fight against the Greeks that he often moved his court out of Baghdad and relocated to the garrison city of Raqqa, more than a hundred miles to the northwest on the Euphrates, so that he could be closer to the Byzantine front. When poets lauded his achievements, as court poets were supposed to do, they spoke of his victories over the “polythe-ists.” One way that Muslims denigrated Christians was to accuse them of polytheism because of the worship of the Holy Trinity. It was easy enough for Muslim propagandists to portray the Trinity not as the three emanations of one God but as three separate Gods. That made the war against the Byzantines much more satisfying.
For Harun the outcome was also satisfying, because he was able to force the Byzantines to pay tribute in return for an end to hostilities. This was celebrated as proof that Islam was the true faith, but the triumph may have had less to do with his strength than with the disarray of his enemy. At the time, the Byzantine Empire was in the midst of a grave theological crisis that led to a near collapse of the state. The Iconoclast Controversy pitted those who believed that images of Christ were no better than idols against those who believed that icons were essential aids. During Harun’s reign, power in Constantinople was seized by the icon-friendly Empress Irene, who had fought a war with her son and had secured the throne after she had him dragged in chains before her and ordered his eyes plucked out. But the victory had taken years, and she was wise enough to fight one fight at a time, even if that meant paying the Abbasid caliph to leave her alone.
She, in turn, was overthrown and exiled by her finance minister, Nicephorus, who discontinued the payments to Harun al-Rashid, saying, “the Queen who was my predecessor put you in the Knight’s square and herself in the square of the pawn and sent you the sort of wealth that you should really have been sending her, but that was because of the weakness of women and their foolishness.” Harun was not pleased. “In the name of God, the Compassionate, the Merciful. From Harun, Commander of the Faithful, to Nicephorus the dog of the Byzantines: I have
read your letter, son of an infidel woman. You shall see my answer, and it will not be in words.” True to his threat, in 806, Harun marched into central Anatolia and captured the city of Heraclea. Though that was still hundreds of miles from Constantinople, it was on the other side of the Taurus Mountains that separated the two realms and on the edge of an unguardable plateau that stretched nearly to the Byzantine capital. Nicephorus was forced to ask for peace and once again pay tribute.
11
Not surprisingly, the campaign against Byzantium coincided with the harsh measures Harun took against Christians in 806. In the tense atmosphere of war, tolerance gave way to something akin to Abbasid nationalism, and the brief, intense persecution of Christians in Iraq was one manifestation of holy war. Once the battle was over and Nicephorus had sued for peace, the restrictions disappeared.
However, just because Harun al-Rashid was fighting a jihad against one Christian power did not mean that he was waging jihad against all Christians. During these years, he made multiple overtures to the Car-olingian, and very Christian, Charlemagne, who had been crowned by the pope as Holy Roman Emperor in Rome on Christmas Day in the year 800. Charlemagne was just as much a Christian monarch as the Byzantine emperor, and had in fact set himself up as the Western alternative to the Byzantines. Members of his court even referred to him as “King David” as a way of linking him to the biblical tradition of rulers who owed their throne to God’s will. But because Charlemagne was a rival of the Byzantines, and a sworn enemy of the remaining Umayyads in Spain, he was seen as a potential ally by Harun al-Rashid. The caliph wooed him with emissaries bearing fulsome praise and lavish gifts, including an elephant transported at great expense from North Africa.
12
Harun’s son al-Ma’mun was equally inconsistent. One moment he was dispatching envoys to Constantinople asking for original works of Aristotle; the next he was sending armies into Turkey looking to inflict as much harm on the Byzantines as possible. Toward the end of his life, al-Ma’mun seems to have become more ardent about waging jihad, and in 833, he too captured Heraclea, just as his father had. The emperor at the time was Theophilus, who was forced to ask for terms and wrote a conciliatory letter to the caliph:
It seems more sensible that the two opposing sides should come together over their respective shares of good fortune than adopt courses injurious to themselves…. I have written you inviting you to make a peace agreement… so that you may remove the burdens of war from upon us and so that we may be to each other friends and a band of associates, in addition to accruing the benefits and widened scope for trading through commercial outlets…. If you reject this offer… I shall penetrate into the innermost recesses of your land.
Al-Ma’mun responded in kind. He told Theophilus that he would not be fooled by a letter that combined honeyed words with threats. Instead, he would send his own armies forth. “They are more eager to go forward to the watering-places of death than you are to preserve your self from the fearful threat of their onslaught…. They have the promise of one of the two best things: a speedy victory or a glorious return” to God as martyrs in battle. He offered the emperor a choice: pay a tribute, or be made to understand Islam by watching the caliph’s armies eradicate his.
13
Not surprisingly, neither man was swayed, but al-Ma’mun died before he could carry out his retaliation.
These battles continued on and off for the next few centuries, but soon enough, both empires were more absorbed in fending off the Turks than in fighting each other. The Abbasids, by the end of the ninth century, had only nominal control over North Africa, and by the middle of the tenth century had lost Egypt. Powerful generals, backed by Turkish soldiers recruited or enslaved from Central Asian steppes and the regions surrounding the Caspian Sea, swore allegiance to the caliph but functioned as autonomous viceroys in distant provinces. Turkish tribes also began to pose a serious problem for the Byzantines, but like the Germanic tribes that had slowly sapped the energies of the Roman Empire, the Turks were anything but unified, and shared little in common except common linguistic roots. Their lack of cohesiveness made life even more difficult for the Abbasids and the Byzantines. Even when one tribe was defeated, others sprang up. And both empires tried, sometimes successfully but usually not, to use the Turks as a weapon against the other.
The Abbasids sank more quickly. Although the caliphate remained intact in Baghdad until the thirteenth century, after the mid-tenth century, the caliph’s reach did not extend much beyond Iraq. At times, the irrelevancy of Iraq and the caliphate meant that the region was calm and stable. Central and southern Iraq were often the only places of peace in
a thousand-mile radius. As a result, Baghdad remained a cultural hub where philosophy, science, and art survived. Throughout much of the tenth century, Baghdad was a center for inquiry, where Arab scholars probed ever more deeply into metaphysical questions that had once been the purview of the Greeks. Philosophers built on the work of al-Kindi and fused mysticism and rationalism. Yet, in relative terms, Baghdad did decline, and the creative flame relocated far to the west, to al-Andalus.