Yet because of its sheer size, the empire was rarely stable and faced constant threats from within. The revolutionary genii unleashed against the Umayyads could not be so easily rebottled, and each one of the Abbasid caliphs was confronted with internal revolts and ideological challenges. Rarely did a year pass without some uprising in some town or province. These hardly jeopardized the regime, but they still required dispatching troops, fighting battles, and bringing the perpetrators to justice, usually be executing them in dramatic fashion. Dismemberment, gibbeting disfigured corpses, and other forms of ritual humiliation were common, in the hope that future rebels would think twice about mounting a challenge. Judging from how frequently the caliph and his representatives had to resort to such punishments, that hope was in vain.
These uprisings could be dealt with easily when they were within a few hundred miles of Iraq or Iran, but the farther away they were, the harder they were to suppress. The journey from the central regions to distant North Africa took months, and already the Abbasids had failed to retain Andalusia, which remained under the control of the last of the Umayyad princes. Even Khurasan, the seat of Abbasid power, was susceptible to rebellion, especially after the Abbasids turned their back on the more fervent believers in the end of days. But while the loss of Spain could be managed, the loss of Khurasan and the central lands could not.
The Abbasids understood this from the start. Having staged a revolution from Khurasan, they knew that distant provinces needed to be tethered to the center. But they also realized that the empire was too large and that it would be nearly impossible to govern both North Africa and Central Asia. The choice to tilt toward Iran and Central Asia was automatic. Sometime after 760, the caliph al-Mansur decided to build a new capital on the banks of the Tigris, which would become Baghdad. He needed to be closer to Khurasan but still near the heart of the Near East, and he wanted his base to be a city without entrenched factions that might undermine his authority. The location he chose was not far from the ancient Persian capital of Ctesiphon, and it was in the middle of the major agricultural provinces of the Fertile Crescent, connected by a canal to the Euphrates River to the west, and along the trade routes linking Egypt to Central Asia and China. By building a new capital, the caliph could also determine who would live there, further enhancing his power.
Baghdad was conceived as a round, walled city with four gates and circles emanating from the caliph’s palace at the center. Markets, schools, and mansions filled the districts beyond the walls, and in the suburban outskirts, troops and retainers were rewarded with tracts of land irrigated by canals extending from the river. Baghdad was an artificial creation that soon became the only island of stability in a tumultuous, ever-disintegrating imperium, a place that the caliph and courtiers would retire to as a respite, to ponder the impenetrables of God, poetry, wine, and women.
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The move to Baghdad was more than geographic. With it, the empire shifted toward Persia and away from Arabia, toward an Islam that was more diverse and less Arab, and toward a culture that celebrated the divine right of kings and sybaritic pleasures. It was also a more urban and cosmopolitan society—which shaped the evolution of Muslim theology. Creativity, reason, and openness to new ideas were embedded in early Abbasid culture. “A city without peer in the world was Baghdad then,” said one medieval historian, and for a time, Baghdad thrived as few cities ever have or ever will.
One of the hallmarks of that openness was the easy toleration of Christians and Jews, who still made up a majority of the population ruled by the Abbasids. That toleration ran the gamut from cool coexistence to fruitful dialogue and active collaboration. Muslim scholars
studied the wisdom of the societies they had conquered and liberally borrowed and incorporated ideas and practices. In the two centuries after the Abbasids gained power, Islam took on most of the characteristics that were to define it for the next thousand years, and a fair number of those characteristics drew on the pre-Islamic traditions of Christians, Jews, and Persians. In those two centuries, the four major Muslim schools of law emerged, and judges and scholars placed their stamp on thousands of questions about how a Muslim should act and behave.
This openness to the wisdom of the pre-Islamic past stemmed in part from the regime’s focus on maintaining power. Having overthrown one dynasty, the Abbasids were acutely aware that they too might be overthrown, and they were determined not to be. Any tool, technique, or philosophy that might help them govern was welcome, regardless of its provenance. In addition to studying the legacy of the Christian states that they had supplanted, they examined classical Greece and the imperial legacy of the Persian shahs. They were also utilitarian about people, and the Abbasid caliphs invited Christians, Jews, and Zoroastrians to serve the state.
As a result, non-Muslims held high administrative posts in the government bureaucracies
(diwans).
From the treasury to the department of public works to the department of war, the People of the Book and
dhim-mi
s were employed as tax collectors, guards, and scribes. One of the most influential tax collectors under Caliph al-Mansur was a Jew, and many of the ninth-century viziers of the Abbasids were Nestorians or Nestorian converts, who had replaced the first family of viziers, the Barmakids, who were Buddhist converts from what would now be Afghanistan. These non-Arabs and non-Muslims had crucial skills that the caliphs needed. They were often multilingual, and knew Greek, Persian, and Arabic, as well as Syriac. The Byzantine administration of Syria and the Near East had been conducted in Syriac and Greek, and the Abbasids were able to maintain continuity and stability by drawing on individuals who knew those languages and were in some way connected to that legacy. Al-Mansur was aware, however, that he could not simply rely on their knowledge. That would give the People of the Book too much influence over the court and the empire. In order to build up a Muslim alternative, he ordered the translation of Syriac, Greek, and Persian texts.
The consequences of this state-sponsored translation movement were tectonic. The impetus may have been banal—how to govern an
empire using a predecessor’s tools. But the translation of Greek knowledge into Arabic eventually paved the way for the transmission of classical knowledge into Western Europe. It is not a stretch to say that the West as we know it could not have emerged had it not been for the translations commissioned by the Abbasids in Baghdad as well as in Basra. Similar efforts occurred in Egypt and later in Andalusia, but the movement began in the late eighth century under the caliph al-Mansur, his children, grandchildren, and great-grandchildren.
The range of translated works stretched from classical Greece through the early years of the Roman Empire. There was a particular focus on the Neoplatonists, who, beginning in the third century
B.C.
, had combined the philosophy of Plato and Aristotle with the science of Hellenistic geniuses such as Ptolemy and the mysticism of later thinkers such as Plotinus. The subjects covered by these writers were eclectic and sometimes obscure, but the net effect for the Abbasids was a burst of theological discourse as complicated, arcane, and divisive as the debates over the nature of Christ had been in early Christianity.
Among the central concerns of the Neoplatonists was the divide between the material and the spiritual, between the body and the soul. That in part accounts for the almost obsessive concern in early Christianity over whether Christ was fully divine, fully human, or an alchemical combination of the two. It also explains the evolution of Muslim theology under the Abbasids, and the emergence of three distinct approaches to Islam.
Encouraged by successive caliphs, philosophers debated whether the Quran was the “uncreated” word of God or created by God. Those who believed that the Quran was created came to be known as the rationalists, as opposed to traditionalists, who believed that the Quran was the pure emanation of God. The traditionalists were not open to using Greek philosophy to illuminate the Quran, and they did not approve of debates with the People of the Book. For them, the Quran was part of God, and hence unquestionable, unalterable, and not subject to human interpretation. The rationalists (or
mu’tazaliin
Arabic) disagreed. They felt that the idea of an uncreated Quran came perilously close to the Christian idea of the Trinity, which to their thinking meant worshiping more than one God. That was heresy. Not only was the Quran created by God, and hence separate from him, but it could, as one of God’s creations, be examined by human reason in order to understand it better. It
could be “interpreted,” and humans were entitled to use their minds in order to become better acquainted with God’s will.
This split between rationalists and traditionalists has continued in one form or another to the present day. At various points, rationalists, by whatever name, have had the upper hand. At other points, the traditionalists have. In the modern era, the rationalists have been the reformers, those who have argued for change and modernization in the Muslim world. The traditionalists have resisted science and innovation as contrary to God’s will, and the most extreme have turned toward forms of radical fundamentalism. Over the course of centuries, however, the rationalists have been just as central, perhaps more so, and they were the guiding force in the heyday of Baghdad.
There was another group, loosely defined but still part of the warp and woof of society, that distanced itself from both factions and refused to enter the debate or serve as judges and officials. They were men, and not a few women, of quiet piety. At some point, they began to call themselves Sufis, named for the wool cloth they wore. They preferred to stay clear of the court and worship God as simply and purely as they could. They too borrowed from Christianity, but from the tradition of hermits and ascetics. Like the Desert Fathers and Saint Antony, they embraced physical extremes and practiced self-denial, isolated themselves in remote and unforgiving regions, and engaged in constant prayer.
These ninth-century divisions—between rationalists and traditionalists, between those who believed that reason, science, and philosophy were tools meant to be used for God’s glory and those who looked to a literal reading of the scripture with minimal human innovation, along with the emerging Sufis and the ever-present Shi’ites—not only deepened over time, but became hydraheaded. Each one produced its own sects and splinter groups, until centuries later, Islam was as fragmented and varied as Christianity with its many sects and offshoots. The early fissures within the Muslim community are a guide to how Islam evolved in much the same way as the debates among the Founding Fathers in the United States are crucial to understanding the American soul.
These divides also shaped how Muslims related to the People of the Book. The rationalist approach that found favor at the Abbasid court welcomed discourse with Christians, Jews, Zoroastrians, Buddhists, and many others. The dialogue between Timothy and al-Mahdi was repeated nearly fifty years later, when the caliph al-Ma’mun invited
Theodore Abu Qurra, a Greek Orthodox bishop from Syria, to the court. Much like Timothy years before, Abu Qurra stood before the caliph to defend Christian theology. Al-Ma’mun, in turn, tried to expose what he saw as the inconsistencies of the Christian faith. Abu Qurra had written extensively about the competing religions of the Near East, and he had concluded that only Christians could lay claim to possessing the one true religion.
Rather than simply asserting the truth of the gospel, Abu Qurra used analogies, hypotheticals, and parables to prove his point. “Let’s say that I grew up on a mountain ignorant of the nature of people,” he wrote in one treatise, “and one day… I went down to the cities and to the society of people, and I perceived them to be of different religions.” He would have noticed that most religions forbid some things and permitted others, and most “claimed to have a god.” How then could he tell which was true? Well, God, in his wisdom, would have sent a messenger to inform people of the truth. But that person who came down from the mountain would also notice that different people had claimed to be messengers and put forth a set of teachings. How then to separate the wheat from the chaff? By studying each tradition, Abu Qurra claimed that he could identify inconsistencies and weaknesses in all of them except for the gospel.
Like Abu Qurra, Muslim scholars dissected competing scriptures, and the rationalists delighted in analyzing the Torah and the gospel to find errors of logic. Both sides could be mean-spirited. Abu Qurra frequently disparaged Muslims in subtle ways, calling them “those who claim to have a book sent down to them by God.” Muslims responded by ridiculing the inconsistencies in the New Testament. They also excoriated the idea of virgin birth and the Trinity as inherently illogical and hence proof that Christianity was not the true religion. From the vantage point of the early twenty-first century, what is most striking about these debates is not just that they took place, but that such a premium was placed on logic rather than faith. An elite group of Muslims and Christians in the Abbasid ninth century relied on reason and philosophy, not personal piety or the strength of belief, in order to demonstrate the truth of their religions.
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What also stands out is how much common ground there was, not just between the philosophers, caliphs, and theologians, but between Sufis and Christian and Jewish hermits and monks. Those ascetics who recoiled from the imperial opulence that accompanied empire looked at
the life of Muhammad and saw a man and a society characterized by piety uncluttered by materialism. Like the Jewish Essenes at the time of Christ and the Desert Fathers of Egypt in the fourth century, they were disgusted by the finery of the court, and they viewed the elaborate theological debates and the exquisite complexity of Greek philosophy as signs of decadence. Rather than fight to change the system, they retreated from the material world. These early ascetics were the precursors to the more organized Sufi movements of later centuries. They believed that the greatest good was unity with God, and that only with strict and arduous spiritual discipline could that unity be achieved.