The Sufi ascetics were a thorn for the ruling class, a reminder of how removed those rulers were from Muhammad’s life. Though the Abbasid caliphs were diligent about leading the annual pilgrimage to Mecca as often as feasible, the frequency diminished. By the late ninth century, most caliphs went on the pilgrimage once or at most twice during their reign. That was only one example of the untethering from the early roots of Islam, and that disturbed the ascetics. They urged more attention to personal faith and less to the affairs of the world. They borrowed techniques from Christian monks, and from the Buddhists of Khurasan, and emulated their rituals. Often, communities would form around one holy individual, usually but not always male. That person would dictate how the group prayed, what verses of the Quran would be recited and when. In time, as Sufi movements proliferated, Sufis split into different camps, some stressing silent prayer and self-restraint, others emphasizing dancing and ecstatic rituals that would send the practitioner into a frenzy of faith.
What made Baghdad and much of Abbasid culture so vibrant, however, was that these opposed elements lived together in relative peace. Sometimes, that meant distinct and separate groups. But it was also true that individuals could seamlessly fit into different, and seemingly contradictory, categories. A caliph might be pious on Friday and deliver a sermon from the mosque pulpit and then be drunk Saturday night while listening to erotic poetry. A merchant attached to his material possessions might take two months for the pilgrimage, or spend one day a week praying under the leadership of a holy man or ascetic. A soldier might be a farmer when he wasn’t fighting, and a government official could both serve a Muslim caliph and belong to one of several religions.
Even the line between Muslims and Christians blurred. Prayer and
ritual were often a mix of Muslim customs and Christian. In Baghdad, Christians lived in the eastern districts, near a large Jacobite monastery that had been built on the banks of the Tigris. But Muslims took part in Christian celebrations like Palm Sunday, and Christians honored Muslim festivals such as Eid al-Fitr, which is the ritual breaking of the fast at the end of the month of Ramadan. According to a medieval Egyptian historian, this mixing and matching of festivals “was a sign of mutual respect and brotherhood between the religions…. Moreover, some of the converts to Islam, as Muslims, continued their old practices even after accepting Islam.”
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Slowly, Muslim converts gained more acceptance, especially in the eastern parts of the empire, where Arabs were few and far between. Where some Umayyad governors had humiliated the converts, the Abbasids began to welcome them. The spread of Islam was facilitated by urbanization. As more people moved to urban centers, they left their old lives behind for new opportunities. In order to participate fully in society and in order to have more social mobility, many of these immigrants to the cities converted, especially as the stigma attached to conversion waned. The act of conversion, however, did not mean that all aspects of one’s older identity suddenly disappeared. That took several generations, and even then, non-Muslim rituals, habits, and attitudes survived in different guise. Whether it was the way Sufis prayed or the way Abbasid judges approached questions of law and philosophy, elements of Byzantine, Christian, Jewish, and Persian culture were incorporated into Abbasid society
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In North Africa and Spain, there was even more of a synthesis, and Muslim culture took on attributes of the Berber and Roman culture that the Arabs had conquered.
Open religious debate was simply one facet of the Abbasid court. Until late in the ninth century, Muslim society was a messy mélange of philosophy, piety, politics, and passion. The caliph Harun al-Rashid, who succeeded his father, al-Mahdi, after the brief rule of his brother, is one of the few caliphs whose name in known in the West. That is because he figures prominently in
A Thousand and One Nights
, but his centrality in those fables in no accident. To later generations, his reign and those of his second son and grandsons were seen as the apex of Muslim greatness. Harun may have fostered learning, but he seems to have celebrated poetry and indulged in wine and women with at least as much enthusiasm.
It is too easy, in the harsh light of the modern world, to forget the complexity
of these centuries. In the West, there is only the vaguest sense that Arabs, Persians, and Islamic society in general were once at the cutting edge of innovation, science, and creativity. The prevailing image is that Muslim history has been the story of stern orthodoxy, hostile to other creeds and foreign influences. Even within the Muslim world, the memory of the age of the great caliphs has been distorted and sanitized to fit the mold of today’s traditionalists. It is remembered as a golden age, after which there was a slow, steady decline. But for many in the contemporary Muslim world, who equate power with moral and spiritual purity, the decadence of the Abbasid court might be hard to reconcile. The Abbasids were powerful, but they were not pure. In their daily lives, they were like other rulers from time immemorial. Islam was a distinguishing characteristic, but the caliphs shared more with Chinese emperors and Byzantine rulers than they did with the companions of Muhammad. They were cosmopolitan, erudite, and attached to the pleasures of wealth.
Even al-Mahdi, known for his piety, had a court full of eunuchs and female slaves. According to the ninth-century historian al-Tabari, “al-Mahdi had a profligate streak and was passionately fond of talking about women and sexual relations.” He could also be cruel in his punishments, and was not above taunting his concubines, one of whom, a Christian slave girl, cried when he snatched a cross from her neck. Rather than giving it back to her, he ordered a poet to compose a song about her distress.
Poets and singers loomed large at the court. That was an artifact from pre-Islamic Arabia as well as a legacy of Persian culture. Songs were often paeans to the virtues of the ruler, occasionally parables about the right way to live and rule, and sometimes odes to sex and wine. One of the most celebrated poets was Abu Nuwas, who was a fixture at the court of Harun al-Rashid. Part jester, part comic, and part philosopher, Abu Nuwas regaled the caliph with the high and the low. Once, when Harun al-Rashid was overcome with one of his periodic bouts of melancholy, Abu Nuwas greeted him, “By God, I never saw a man so unfair to himself as the Prince of True Believers is. The pleasures of this world and the Other are in your hand; why not enjoy them both? The pleasures of the world to come are yours for the sake of your charity to the poor and the orphans, your performance of the Pilgrimage, your repairing of mosques…. As for the pleasures of this world, what are they but these: delicious food, delicious drink, delicious girls.”
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The line between the holy and the profane was not as sharp as
it became in later centuries. The poetic style of Abu Nuwas—who employed it for profane purposes—was also used by Sufis to describe the experience of approaching unity with God. Sufis appropriated the language of passion and wine to describe God as a lover, much as Christian monks and Jewish mystics did. Instead of that love culminating in sex, the apex was the union of the devout believer with God. Not all mystics approved of this approach, and some pious-minded found it as distasteful and immoral as they found the court. But at the height of its power, the Abbasid Empire was a mélange of contradictory elements, and thrived accordingly.
While there are considerable differences between now and then, the similarity to the contemporary West is hard to deny. In Europe and America of the twenty-first century, the language of pop culture makes its way into churches, rock music is appropriated by evangelicals to spread the word, and material extravagance is part and parcel of the lives of the rich and famous. Western society has been a mix of the holy and the profane for some time. Materialism and the pleasures of the flesh don’t negate faith and piety. It may even be that the friction has been a source of creativity and dynamism, and that Abbasid culture flourished because of, not in spite of, this delicious stew of piety, intellectual curiosity, and decadence.
While Harun al-Rashid may be the most famous of the Abbasid caliphs, his son al-Ma’mun presided over an equally magnificent court, which surpassed his predecessors in both hedonism and erudition. Al-Ma’mun not only continued the translation movement begun by his grandfather; he expanded it. He funded an extensive group of scholars, physicians, and astronomers, and their works were assembled in a state-funded library known as the
bayt al-hikma
, the House of Wisdom. The library was a center for translations from Greek to Arabic, and it was said to be the intellectual hub of the empire. It is difficult to untangle the myth from reality, and it may be that the actual House of Wisdom was little more than an administrative office that coordinated the translation not of Greek works of philosophy, but of Persian works into Arabic.
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But even if the actual, physical place were less than the legend, it is still a powerful symbol.
Al-Ma’mun was a man of contradictions. He initiated a theological inquisition over the createdness of the Quran, yet he also sent envoys to the Byzantine emperor asking for as many manuscripts as the emperor
cared to share. The Abbasids and the Byzantines were in a constant state of war, with regular campaigns and frequent skirmishes. Yet that did not stop al-Ma’mun from politely requesting treatises ranging from Euclid the mathematician to the physicians Hippocrates and Galen. It’s not known what the emperor said in response, but the manuscripts were obtained and added to the already considerable trove being assembled in Baghdad.
Al-Ma’mun’s encounter with Theodore Abu Qurra was one of many similar debates staged between Christians and Muslims at the court. According to one account, the caliph held a salon every Tuesday afternoon where questions of theology and law were explored. Food and drink were served first. When everyone had relaxed at the end of a meal, the discussions began and lasted well into the evening. On one occasion, the chamberlain interrupted a debate to inform the caliph that a Sufi was at the gate, wearing a “coarse white frock,” who asked to be admitted. Addressing the caliph, the Sufi did not mince words. “This throne here, on which thou sittest—dost thou sit thereon by common agreement and consent of the body of True Believers, or by abuse of power and the violent forcing of thy sovereignty upon them?” Few rulers in any century allow their legitimacy to be questioned. The usual response would have been to throw anyone who spoke in this fashion into a dark dungeon and then execute him. Instead, al-Ma’mun answered the challenger and replied that he had been chosen by his father, Harun al-Rashid, and that he held power only in order to protect all true believers and maintain order. If those believers found some other man more worthy, the caliph concluded, he would happily resign his position and bow to the new caliph’s authority
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This willingness to engage controversial issues created an environment where ideas could flourish. The historian al-Tabari described another incident, when al-Ma’mun hosted a debate on Shi’ism at the court. One of the debaters, who was hostile to the party of Ali, lost his temper and began shouting at his opponent, calling him “an ignorant peasant.” The caliph admonished him, “Hurling insults is unseemly, and unpleasant language is reprehensible. We have allowed theological disputation to take place and have staged the open presentation of religious viewpoints. Now upon whoever speaks the truth, we bestow praise; for whoever does not know the truth, we provide instruction.” Al-Ma’mun understood that only in an atmosphere where divergent views were welcome
could knowledge advance, and that such advancement was to the greater glory of God. The Abbasids in their prime reaped the rewards of this openness.
For example, during al-Ma’mun’s reign, a young man came to court looking for patronage. His name was Abu Yusuf Yaqub ibn Ishaq al-Kindi, and he became one of the great minds of his age. Al-Kindi was credited with more than 260 works on subjects ranging from philosophy to logic, music to astronomy, geometry to medicine, astronomy to the natural sciences. He believed that the only way to live as a true Muslim was to understand the meaning of the Quran and the life of the Prophet, and that the only way to understand either of those was to use the power of the mind to interpret what the Quran said. His defense of philosophy was simple and timeless: God gave man the power to think, and only by using that power could humans submit to God fully. Al-Kindi also believed, like the Neoplatonists before him, that the material world often prevented people from seeing the true nature of God and his creation. With reason and intellect, the truth could be discerned.
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The glories of his court may have sparkled, but al-Ma’mun had another, less noble side. Though he fostered debate and translations, he also conducted an inquisition against the traditionalists. He was, in short, tolerant of all except those who were intolerant of him. Granted, the traditionalists tended to be enemies of inquiry, reason, and philosophy, but al-Ma’mun was willing to violate his own principles of open disputation when that suited his interests. Abbasid culture was tolerant, but there were limits. As much as Christians, Jews, and others who did not share the faith were accepted, there were times when they were not.
For instance, in 806, during the height of Harun al-Rashid’s power, violence erupted between Christians, Jews, and Muslims. This may have been triggered by a Byzantine attack on an Abbasid outpost, but the result was not good for the People of the Book. In retaliation, the caliph ordered his soldiers to destroy a number of churches. Rumors then spread that the churches had actually been burned down by Jews looking to stoke animosity between Christians and Muslims. Somewhat later, the writer, philosopher, poet, and jester al-Jahiz penned a lengthy exposition in which he mocked Christians and excoriated the Jews. He made a special point of ridiculing the Christians as unappealing to look at, and the Jews as downright ugly—which is ironic, given that al-Jahiz himself had a reputation as one of the most physically hideous, albeit intellectually
luminous, men of his time. Also during Harun al-Rashid’s reign, the chief judge of Baghdad issued an opinion that “no
dhimmi
should be beaten in order to extract payment of the poll tax, nor made to stand in the hot sun, nor should hateful things be inflicted upon their bodies, or anything of the sort. Rather they should be treated with leniency.” However, according to the judge, they should be imprisoned for failure to pay the tax, and held in prison until they did.
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