IN THE LAST CHAPTER I ARGUED that the economics of bringing new land under production and raising summer crops in qanat-irrigated fields made Iran’s cotton boom possible in piedmont districts like Qom. But the boom affected nonpiedmont districts as well. The ninth-/third-century geographers who often list the notable products of different districts do not single out either Qom or Hamadan as major cotton-producing areas. Instead they mention Nishapur, Rayy, and Isfahan, the three largest cities of northern Iran, along with Bukhara and Samarqand in Uzbekistan, and Marv, which is today in southern Turkmenistan but was then considered, along with Nishapur, one of the capitals of the province of Khurasan. Geographically, Nishapur, Rayy, and Isfahan share the piedmont terrain of the Qom district and the eastern part of the Hamadan district, from which our tax data emanate. Agriculture in Marv, however, was based on canal irrigation on the lower reaches of the Murghab River, where it disappears into the Karakum desert. Farmers around Bukhara and Samarqand utilized the waters of the Zeravshan River. Both rivers drained the snow-capped mountains of Afghanistan and Tajikistan, which, unlike the much scantier snow cover of Iran, produced a perennial flow sufficient to irrigate summer crops like cotton. What all these districts had in common was a long, hot growing season; an abundant and steady water supply; and a growing community of Muslims. The first two of these elements speak for themselves. The third calls for examination, especially since cotton growing predated the Arab conquest of Central Asia but expanded greatly under Muslim rule.
Who grew the cotton? How was it marketed? Who bought it? Who turned it into cloth? Where was it sold? Why did a crop that was almost entirely unknown in Sasanid Iran become so phenomenally lucrative after the Arab conquest? And how was cotton connected with Islam?
A shift from questions of “what happened?” to questions of “who was involved and why?” necessitates a shift in data sources from the economic and geographic to the social and religious. The beginning of the last chapter tapped information from a biographical dictionary containing the names of the religious elite of Nishapur. Sources of this sort have more to tell us. Islamic biographical dictionaries vary greatly from region to region and century to century, but a number of those that deal with Iran during this period are quite similar in structure and consistent in content.1 Each focuses on a single city with its surrounding region. And each includes 1000 or more biographical notices, alphabetically arranged, of religiously eminent Muslims, especially scholars who were involved in transmitting the traditions (hadith) of the Prophet and who were natives of or sojourners in that city.
As in the earlier discussion of cotton in Nishapur, the names of the biographical subjects will be our primary concern. Early Islamic naming practices could be quite complicated, but some names, called nisbas, or adjectives indicating a relationship, specified a person’s occupation. Within the subset of biographical subjects whose names include mention of an occupation, some of the occupational nisbas were doubtless inherited from a father or grandfather, with the individuals themselves never practicing the trade indicated. Nevertheless, occupational names were not then frozen into immutable surnames the way Smith, Farmer, Cooper, and Sawyer are today. Anecdotal and literary sources often confirm that Ahmad the Baker did indeed bake bread and that Mohammad the Coppersmith did hammer out copper pans. One indirect confirmation of this statement comes from Sam Isaac Gellens’s tabulation of occupational names on Egyptian tombstones, a presumably “democratic” (i.e., not obviously socially stratified) onomastic source.2 Some of the most common trades—carpenter, fisher, saddler, milkman, and dyer—were too low in social status to show up on a parallel list Gellens compiled of occupational names among the Egyptian ulama. Had occupational names simply been inherited and the association with the actual trade lost, this would not have been the case. In addition, the fact that certain occupational epithets reflect clear geographical differences (Khayyash, or “dealer in coarse linen,” shows up as a personal name in linen-producing Egypt but not in cotton-producing Khurasan, and vice versa for Karabisi, or “dealer in heavy cotton”) reinforces the impression that these names are not entirely conventional but relate in many instances to the actual economic activities of a given region.
Two names will be the primary focus of our attention: Qattan, meaning “cotton grower” or “seller of raw cotton” (the word cotton in English is derived from Arabic qutn) and Bazzaz, meaning “dealer in cotton cloth.” As table 2.1 shows, the ratio between these names in the biographical dictionaries of four Iranian cities is roughly one to one, but in the great Iraqi metropolis of Baghdad it is closer to five to one.3
The most straightforward reading of these figures is that in the cotton-producing areas of Isfahan, Nishapur, Qazvin (also a piedmont city), and Gorgan (on the low rainy plain at the southeast corner of the Caspian Sea) there was a near balance between growing cotton and selling cotton cloth. Moreover, both occupations were of sufficiently elevated status for people of religious distinction to include reference to them in their names. Indeed, for most of the chronological periods into which these four dictionaries are divided, Qattan and Bazzaz are among the three most frequently listed occupations. (Tajir, or “general merchant,” is usually the third.)
The situation in Baghdad contrasts sharply with this. Dealers in cotton cloth far outnumber the cotton growers. The explanation for this difference lies in the fact that, then as now, little cotton was grown in Iraq. Prior to large-scale flood control projects undertaken in the twentieth/fourteenth century, spring flooding caused by snow melt in the mountains of Turkey made the Tigris and Euphrates too unruly for summer cropping. The only exceptions to this seem to have been along the lengthy Nahrawan Canal, which channeled water from the Tigris into the farming countryside east of Baghdad, and in the Ahwaz region, today part of Iran, which received its irrigation water from the less tumultuous Karun River. These are the only two regions identifiable in the biographical dictionary of Baghdad as the home districts of people named Qattan. (That this name actually did mean a “grower or marketer of raw cotton” is apparent from the fact that several of the people named Qattan are described as living or working in the Dar al-Qutn, or House of Cotton, which seems to have been the ware house building where cotton marketing was centered in Baghdad. Daralqutni, an uncommon personal name derived from this building, probably signifies the profession of cotton dealer as well.)
TABLE 2.1 Occupational names relating to fibers in biographical dictionaries
The great disproportion between cotton growers and cotton cloth merchants in Baghdad raises an obvious question: Assuming that the cloth merchants were so numerous because of a high demand for their goods (as opposed, say, to each Baghdad merchant having a smaller volume of business than his counterpart in Iran), where did they get their merchandise? Iraq itself clearly produced too little cotton to supply the Baghdad market. Egypt, the great cotton producer of modern times, then produced no cotton at all. Since ancient times, linen had been the everyday fabric worn by Egyptians, and Egyptian linen was widely exported. As for Syria, the geographers report that cotton was indeed grown in the area north of Damascus, and Syrian cottons played a minor role in Mediterranean trade; but there is no indication that Syrian cotton was exported to Baghdad.4 Yemen, the only other cotton-producing area of the medieval Arab world, supplied the holy cities of Mecca and Medina, but it had only limited trade with Iraq. The conclusion that presents itself, therefore, is that most of the cotton cloth sold in Baghdad and other Iraqi cities like Kufa and Basra was imported from Iran, though India, a major cotton-producing region, cannot be entirely ruled out.
Baghdad alone constituted a huge market: a thriving caliphal capital that was five to ten times the size of the major Iranian cities. What Manchester was for the plantation owners of the American South, Baghdad seems to have been for the Iranian cotton industry, except that the Iranians shipped finished cloth to Iraq rather than raw cotton. This thriving trade with the caliphal center at last explains how Iran’s cotton farmers could have earned enough from their crops to pay taxes at a rate two to ten times higher than that for staple grains at different points in the ninth/third century. But as we shall see, it also contributes to our understanding of the transformation of the Iranian plateau from an overwhelmingly rural land dominated by Sasanid regional barons to a land where flourishing cities became centers for the weaving and export of cloth, on the one hand, and for the growth of a specifically Muslim culture and scholarly community, on the other.
The skeptically inclined will again raise an eyebrow at the claim that significant variations in economic activities can be deduced from biographical dictionaries devoted primarily to religious scholars. At first glance, an argument of this sort seems a bit like trying to dissect the American national economy on the basis of the occupational names borne by college professors in Who’s Who in America. But although the latter calculation would indeed be misguided, the relation between occupations and religious scholarship in early Islamic Iran is robust and significant.
The first hint of the relationship between religion and cloth can be found in the data on wool and silk presented in table 2.1. There is no question but that wool was common and ubiquitous throughout the Middle East in both the Sasanid and Islamic periods. Vast quantities of wool must have been marketed every year. Yet wool dealing is almost totally absent from the occupational names of religious scholars in Iran and Iraq. In part, this derives from the fact that wool came from the pastoral nomadic sector of the economy. What profit there was to be made from wool sales, therefore, went to individuals from the least educated and least literate stratum of society, or to brokers who associated with them and conveyed their products to market. To be sure, there were doubtless a few great wool wholesalers who were not themselves from pastoral backgrounds, but wool was also a crude fiber unsuited to the dignity of the religious elite. Like Weaver, Potter, and Fisher, occupational names that almost never appear in biographical dictionaries, the name Sawwaf, or “wool dealer,” bespoke a trade that cast no credit on a person who aspired to be counted among the ulama. Since an occupational epithet was a completely optional part of a person’s name, association with an undignified trade could easily be suppressed. To be sure, the association of wool, suf in Arabic, with poverty and abjection is commonly believed to be the source of the term Sufi, which denotes a current of Islamic mysticism that incorporated many esteemed ascetic practices and beliefs. Yet wearing wool to show one’s humility was not at all the same as trading in wool.
If wool was humble, silk was the opposite. The aristocratic elite of the Sasanid era favored both silk cloth (harir) and figured silk brocade (dibaj). Evidence for this preference abounds in pictorial representations from that period and is also reflected in the Quran. In describing the bliss of Paradise, verse 23 of the Surat al-Hajj reads: “Allah will admit those who believe and work righteous deeds, to Gardens beneath which rivers flow: they shall be adorned therein with bracelets of gold and pearls; and their garments there will be of silk.”
For Muslims, however, this vision of luxury was reserved for saved souls. The hadith of the Prophet are unequivocal in their condemnation of Muslim men wearing silk in this world. The hadith collection of al-Bukhari contains the following examples:
1. Abu ʿAmr or Abu Malik al-Ashʿari narrated that he heard the Messenger of God say: “From among my followers there will be some people who will consider illegal sexual intercourse, the wearing of silk, the drinking of alcoholic drinks, and the use of musical instruments as lawful. And [from them], there will be some who will stay near the side of a mountain, and in the evening their shepherd will come to them with their sheep and ask them for something, but they will say to him, ‘Return to us tomorrow.’ Allah will destroy them during the night and will let the mountain fall on them, and Allah will transform the rest of them into monkeys and pigs and they will remain so till the Day of Resurrection” [7:494].
2. Uqba b. ʿAmr narrated: “A silken farruj [a kind of shirt] was presented to the Messenger of God and he put it on and offered the prayer in it. When he finished the prayer, he took it off violently as if he disliked it and said, ‘This [garment] does not befit those who fear Allah!’” [7:693].
3. Abu ʿUthman al-Nahdi narrated: “While we were with ʿUtba b. Farqad in Azerbaijan, there came ʿUmar’s letter indicating that the Messenger of God had forbidden the use of silk except this much. Then he pointed with his index and middle fingers. To our knowledge, by that he meant embroidery” [7:718].
4. Abu ʿUthman narrated: “While we were with ʿUtba, ʿUmar wrote to us: The Messenger of God said, ‘There is none who wears silk in this world except that he will wear nothing of it in the Hereafter.’ Abu ʿUthman pointed out with his middle and index fingers” [7:720].
5. Ibn Abi Laila narrated: “While Hudhaifa was at al-Madaʾin, he asked for water whereupon the chief of the village brought him water in a silver cup. Hudhaifa threw it at him and said, ‘I have thrown it only because I have forbidden him to use it, but he does not stop using it. The Messenger of God said, “Gold, silver, silk and dibaj are for them [unbelievers] in this world and for you [Muslims] in the Hereafter” ’” [7:722].
6. Anas b. Malik narrated: “The Messenger of God said, ‘Whoever wears silk in this world shall not wear it in the Hereafter’” [7:723].
7. Al-Baraʾ narrated: “The Messenger of God was given a silk garment as a gift, and we started touching it with our hands and admiring it. On that the Messenger of God said, ‘Do you wonder at this?’ We said, ‘Yes.’ He said, ‘The handkerchiefs of Saʿd b. Muʾadh in Paradise are better than this’” [7:727].
8. Hudhaifa narrated: “The Messenger of God forbade us to drink out of gold and silver vessels, or eat from them, and also forbade the wearing of silk and dibaj or sitting on it” [7:728].
9. ʿAli b. Abi Talib narrated: “The Messenger of God gave me a silk suit. I went out wearing it, but seeing the signs of anger on his face, I tore it and distributed it among my wives” [7:731].
10. ʿAbdullah b. ʿUmar narrated: “ʿUmar saw a silk suit being sold, so he said, ‘O Messenger of God! Why don’t you buy it so that you may wear it when delegates come to you, and also on Fridays?’ The Messenger of God said, ‘This is worn only by him who has no share in the Hereafter.’ Afterwards the Messenger of God sent to ʿUmar a silk suit suitable for wearing. ʿUmar said to the Messenger of God, ‘You have given it to me to wear, yet I have heard you saying about it what you said?’ The Messenger of God said, ‘I sent it to you so that you might either sell it or give it to somebody else to wear’” [24:5144].
The long-simmering scholarly debate over whether hadith such as these—or indeed any hadith—stem from the seventh-/first-century milieu of the Prophet and his Companions in Mecca and Medina or whether some or all of them emanate from an Iraqi milieu of the late eighth/second century need not detain us. Religious disapproval of Muslim men wearing silk was absolute whether it was first articulated in remote western Arabia, where silk garments were rare, costly, and admired (see hadith 7, 9–10 in the preceding list), or whether it reflects a desire to avoid the luxurious practices of the non-Arab elite that the Muslim armies encountered during the conquests that began after Muhammad’s death (see hadith 3, 5).
If silk was forbidden, what was a pious Muslim man to wear? Maureen Fennell Mazzaoui, the historian of the transfer of the Middle Eastern cotton industry to Italy in the twelfth/sixth century, provides the following overview:
The Arab conquest marked a complete re orientation of Near Eastern and Mediterranean commerce, including the cotton trade. The Arabs were the first people in the Near East to adopt cotton on a wide scale for ordinary clothing and other purposes … Indian cloth was from earliest times an important object of Arab trade while the Arabian peninsula [notably Yemen—RWB] was one of the first areas outside India to which the cotton plant was brought.
The widespread use of cotton clothing among the Arab tribes dates back certainly to the time of Mohammed and probably much earlier. The prophet himself is reported to have worn a white cotton shirt with trousers, presumably of the same material, covered by a woolen cloak. The cloth may have come from Oman and the Yemen where there was an old and well-established cotton manufacture. The same costume, which undoubtedly reflected the simple mode of dress already prevalent in the area, was worn by the caliphs Omar and Ali and their followers. This form of attire was consonant with Mohammed’s pronouncements on modesty and the avoidance of ostentation in dress which became the basis for a system of sumptuary legislation worked out by Islamic jurists. Islamic law prohibited the use of gold, silk, or other luxury materials in masculine attire. Cotton, linen, and wool were acceptable fabrics. The approved colors were black and white.5
What this skillfully crafted and generally unimpeachable summary fails to observe is that the plain-dressing Arab tribes constituted but a small and dispersed minority within the vast realm of the caliphate established by their feats of arms. The transfer of the clothing preferences of these Arabs to what in time becomes a vastly larger population of non-Arab converts to Islam is what needs examination. How do Arab tastes become Muslim tastes, particularly when the elite of the non-Arab peoples had been indulging a taste for silk brocade for many centuries?
Oddly enough, neither cotton nor linen nor wool is referred to more than a few times in the hadith. Condemning silk called for the moral authority of the Prophet; approving other fibers apparently did not. What references there are sometimes specify the place of origin. For linen it is Egypt:
11. Dihya b. Khalifa al-Kalbi narrated: “The Messenger of God was brought some pieces of fine Egyptian linen and he gave me one and said: Divide it into two; cut one of the pieces into a shirt and give the other to your wife for a veil” [Sunan of Abu Daʾud, 32:4104].
For cotton it is Yemen. Al-Muwattaʾ, a compendium of hadith by Malik b. Anas, contains the following:
12. Yahya related to me from Malik, from Hisham b. ʿUrwa, from his father, from ʿAʾisha, the wife of the Messenger of God, that the Messenger of God was shrouded in three sahuli white cotton garments, none of which was a long shirt or turban. [Sahuli refers to pure white cotton cloth that came from Sahul, a town in Yemen.]
13. Yahya related to me from Malik that Yahya b. Saʿid said that he had heard that when Abu Bakr al-Siddiq was ill, he asked ʿAʾisha, “How many shrouds did the Messenger of God have?” and she replied, “Three sahuli white cotton garments.”
As for wool, there is little to be found in the way of Prophetic endorsement:
14. ʿAʾisha, the Mother of Believers, narrated: “I made a black cloak for the Messenger of God and he put it on; but when he sweated in it and noticed the odor of the wool, he threw it away [Sunan of Abu Daʾud, 32:4063].
On the matter of color, several hadith confirm that white was preferred, though black became the officially favored color of the Abbasid dynasty that seized power in 750/132:
15. Ibn al-ʿAbbas narrated: “I heard the Messenger of God saying, ‘Put on white clothes because they are the best; and use them for shrouding your dead’” [al-Tirmidhi and Abu Daʾud].
16. Samura narrated: “The Messenger of God said, ‘Wear white clothes because they are the purest and they are closest to modesty; and shroud the dead in it” [i.e., white cloth; al-Nasaʾi and al-Hakim].
Looking at hadith evidence as a whole, the strident disapproval of silk and silk brocade and the somewhat lukewarm piety attached to white linen and cotton, both for garments and for shrouds (one could also add for pilgrimage costume) raise the likelihood that the early Islamic period was less one of easy dissemination to the entire Muslim community of Arab tribal clothing preferences than one of dueling aesthetics in those territories that had been part of the Sasanid empire. Silk brocade continued to stand for aristocracy, wealth, and luxury; and names for specific types of silk far outnumber words for cotton and linen fabrics in narrative sources emanating from Muslim ruling circles.6 But silk also marked its wearer as sentimentally attached to Sasanid aesthetics and an insincere Muslim to boot. By contrast, plain white cotton (or linen in Egypt) signaled sincere Islam and marked its wearer as one who shared in the aesthetic of the conquering Arabs.
Xinru Liu has argued the opposite on the basis of an abundance of evidence showing that silk was continuously appreciated and consumed in ruling circles. “The thrust of Islamic sumptuary rules [i.e., prohibitions of silk] was not to demarcate the ruling from the ruled, but to facilitate a compromise between religious asceticism and hedonism in Arabian traditional culture.”7 Liu’s descriptions of caliphal treasures and gift s and anecdotes about luxurious living cannot be gainsaid. Silk continued to be purchased and worn. But presenting an interpretive choice between distinguishing “the ruling and the ruled” and compromising between “religious asceticism and hedonism” ignores the evolving relationship between Muslims and non-Muslims.
If all Muslims fell into the category of rulers and all non-Muslims into the category of the ruled, or alternatively, if everybody professed Islam but split into two parties, one favoring ascetic and the other hedonistic lifestyles, Liu might have a point. In fact, however, the Muslims evolved from a small Arab minority governing a vast number of non-Arab non-Muslims into a society in which Islam was the common religion of rulers and ruled alike. It is unrealistic and, as we shall see, contrary to the historical evidence, to think that sumptuary prohibitions maintained a constant meaning throughout that evolution.
In the earliest period, it is not unreasonable to see the clash between Muslim and non-Muslim styles in the public arena as part of a policy formally distinguishing the rulers from the ruled. The Pact of ʿUmar, a document of somewhat uncertain date, purports to specify practices permitted to Christians living under Muslim rule in Syria.8 Among other things, the Christians who are presented as signatory to the document affirm that: “We shall not seek to resemble the Muslims by imitating any of their garments, the qalansuwa [a skullcap or fez], the turban [usually cotton, linen, or silk], footwear, or the parting of the hair.” This mirror image of the Muslim ban on silk—“silk and dibaj are for them [unbelievers] in this world and for you [Muslims] in the Hereafter”—can plausibly be interpreted as reflecting a desire by the ruling Muslims to retain their visible distinctiveness at a time when they were a small ruling minority. One might look for comparison to the Manchu insistence during the Qing dynasty that ethnic Chinese men wear a queue, or to the various clothing codes separating Jews from Christians at different periods of European history, or to the contrast between the sumptuous dress of Catholic Cavaliers and the unadorned clothing of Protestant Dissenters during the English Revolution.
Although the provenance of the Pact of ʿUmar is questionable, two anecdotes firmly anchored in early tenth-/fourth-century writings tend to support this interpretation. In one, an Umayyad prince fleeing the downfall of his dynasty in 750/132 is said to have reached Nubia (northern Sudan) and to have there entertained a visit from a local king. The local king refused to sit on the carpet laid out for him because he wished to be humble before God. Then he asked about the Umayyads’ blameworthy practices, such as drinking wine and wearing sumptuous garments: “‘Why,’ proceeded the king, ‘do you wear brocade and silk and gold, in spite of the prohibitions of your Book and your religion?’ I retorted: ‘As power fled from us, we called upon the support of alien races who have entered our faith and we have adopted these clothes from them.’”9
The other anecdote concerns al-Afshin, the hereditary ruler of a small principality in Tajikistan who wielded enormous power under the Abbasid caliph al-Muʿtasim (r. 833–842/217–227) through his military prowess and command over troops from Central Asia. When he was accused of being an insincere Muslim, for which he was eventually put to death, the court was told that in private he had once said: “Truly I have given in to these people [the Arabs] in everything I hated, even to the extent that because of them I have eaten oil and ridden camels and worn sandals. But not a hair has fallen from me!” Meaning that he had not used depilatories nor been circumcised.10
On the one hand, a fallen eighth-/second-century prince says that foreigners prevailed on his family to abandon the pure Arab ways; on the other, a ninth-/third-century Iranian prince serving a Muslim ruler testifies that he has abandoned his own traditions and adopted odious Arab customs. The former anecdote fits better the Abbasid period, when Persian styles prevailed in Baghdad and when the text containing the anecdote was composed. Unlike the Abbasids, the Umayyads never relied on “alien races.” The latter story is equally dubious because it is part of a calumnious accusation. But both of them concur with the Pact of ʿUmar in affirming the symbolic importance of costume—headdress and footwear in the Pact, brocade and sandals in the anecdotes—in distinguishing ruling Arabs and subject non-Arabs. However contrived and ahistorical each story may be, both reflect a concern for personal appearance that must have seemed realistic to those who read them.
As already shown, the religious elite themselves had far greater involvement with cotton than with silk, despite the continuing popularity of the latter. As for those ulama who did deal in silk, there is no way of telling whether the consumers they catered to were men or women. The latter were clearly permitted to wear silk garments:
17. Ali b. Abi Talib narrated: “The Messenger of God took silk and held it in his right hand, and took gold and held it in his left hand and said: both of these are prohibited to the males of my community” [Sunan of Abu Daʾud, 32:4046, emphasis added].
This allowance probably derives from the fact that the silks worn by women were seldom seen outside the home because women covered themselves, usually with plain cotton, linen, or wool when they went out in public. The same situation continues today in Saudi Arabia and the Islamic Republic of Iran and among pious women in many other countries. Thus the wearing of silk by women at home would not have detracted from the visual contrast between austere Arab/Muslim dress and luxurious Sasanid/Zoroastrian dress in the public arena.
In table 2.1 the number of silk dealers ranges between 5 percent and 12 percent of the total number of cotton merchants (Qattan + Bazzaz) in three of the four Iranian cities; The ratio in Baghdad, whence much of the information about silk fabrics emanates, is 12 percent. In quantity if not in luxury, therefore, cotton greatly exceeded silk, at least in shops run by families that included notable religious figures. Even in Gorgan, which was the only one of the five cities to be famous for producing silk locally, there were three ulama cotton growers and cotton cloth merchants for every dealer in silk.
It is true, of course, that religious disapproval of wearing silk may have rendered the trade undesirable for some ulama, thus skewing samples drawn from biographical dictionaries of ulama. But there is no ignoring the favor that the caliphal governments accorded to the cotton and linen industries in their official establishment of factories for manufacturing tiraz. Tiraz was a fabric made of plain linen or cotton decorated only by a narrow woven or embroidered band of ornamental Arabic writing (see fig.2.1). The calligraphy was invariably in silk. This explains the exceptions to the general prohibition on wearing the luxury fabric mentioned in hadith 3 and 4: the “middle and index fingers” denote the width of the band of tiraz calligraphy.11 The reason for the caliphs establishing factories for tiraz production was to provide a special fabric for robes of honor granted as gifts to officials and favorites. The calligraphy usually contained the name of the caliph.
FIGURE 2.1. Tiraz-style cotton textile with printed rather than embroidered calligraphy. (By permission of the Royal Ontario Museum.)
Not only was tiraz produced in government factories, but a number of religious scholars had names associated with its manufacture, to wit, Mutarriz or Tirazi. Upward of 1000 examples of tiraz still survive in museums, mostly in the form of calligraphic bands that have been cut from the cloth they once bordered. Yet even though the ground cloth has mostly been discarded, it is clear from these specimens that the calligraphic band normally appeared at the edge of a piece of plain or simply striped cloth large enough to be tailored into a floor-length garment. Linen is by far the most common ground fiber in these extant examples because most of them come from Egypt, where climatic conditions favor the preservation of organic materials in archaeological excavations. But the near absence of the name Kattan, or linen dealer, in the biographical dictionary of Baghdad, where tiraz consumption was concentrated, suggests that cotton was the common ground cloth in Iraq and Iran.
By ignoring the ground fabric and considering tiraz solely as a component of the silk trade in the Islamic world, Xinru Liu misrepresents an industry in which weavers produced many yards of ground fabric, whether cotton or linen, to provide the background for just a few spools of silk thread.12 Tiraz is at the heart of Liu’s putative compromise between “religious asceticism and hedonism” because it supposedly allowed people to avoid the “hedonism” of all-silk garments while relieving them of the “asceticism” of draping their bodies with unornamented fabrics. (Wearing mulham, a fine textile woven of both cotton and silk, provides a better example of this combination.) A more plausible interpretation is that rulers who coveted silk garments and fabrics for themselves granted just a touch of silken luxury to those whom they favored with a robe of honor (khilʿa). Beneath this noblesse oblige, they were in fact underwriting the production of the finest cotton and linen fabrics while observing the spirit of the religious prohibition of silk.
The dueling aesthetics represented by Sasanid brocade (dibaj) and Abbasid tiraz have left a trace in another area of manufacturing: ceramics. A type of ninth–tenth-/third–fourth-century pottery known as “Nishapur ware” or “Samarqand ware” constitutes a ceramic equivalent of tiraz (fig. 2.2).13 The potter coated a plate or shallow dish made of red clay with a thin layer of pure white clay known as a “slip.” Ornamental Arabic calligraphy was then painted in black or aubergine on top of the slip around the rim of the dish, and sometimes in a single line across the center as well. The calligraphy is difficult to decipher and usually devoted to moralistic aphorisms (e.g., “Your modesty keep to yourself; behold, my actions prove my generosity” or “He who professes the faith will excel; and to whatever you accustom yourself you will grow accustomed”).14 Assuming that the dishes, which were made in vast quantity, were actually used for serving meals, it was probably deemed improper to place food on the name of God or on an actual Qurʾanic quotation. Known to art historians as “slip-painted ware,” this austere white pottery with aubergine calligraphy around the rim was produced in Nishapur and Samarqand—both, not coincidentally, major cotton-producing cities—and exported to other lands. The inscriptions on this pottery were always in Arabic, despite Persian being the common language of the cities where it was made and Arabic being the language that was the exclusive attainment of Arab immigrants and of the learned elite of Iranian converts to Islam.
FIGURE 2.2. Example of Nishapur slip-painted ware. (By permission of Louvre/Art Resource, NY.)
A nearly contemporary pottery style in Nishapur, known to art historians as “buff ware,” contrasts strikingly with this slip-painted ware in that it preserves the imagery and styles associated with the pre-Islamic landed aristocracy (fig. 2.3). Many pieces—deep bowls for the most part—show birds and animals or geometric patterns. But the occasional figurative design picks up hunting and banqueting motifs from Sasanid silver feasting vessels. The men depicted wear form-fitting brocade tunics with full skirts over boots and amply cut trousers, sometimes with a short cape added. Though these motifs are pre-Islamic and early specimens of buff ware have been found at Sasanid excavation levels at Marv, they seem for the most part to date from the ninth/third century in Nishapur and to vanish in the eleventh/fifth century.15 Though these two pottery styles overlap at specific excavation sites in the ruins of Nishapur, the popularity of the calligraphic slip-painted ware seems to diminish over time relative to the buff ware with Sasanid-era figurative designs.16 We shall return to this chronological succession of styles in considering the waning of the cotton boom in chapter 3. Their contribution for the discussion here is to give another example of how the balance between visual motifs—Muslim vs. non-Muslim, Arab vs. Persian, elite vs. common—evolved over time.
FIGURE 2.3. Example of figurative buff ware from Nishapur. (By permission of Islamic Art Berlin/Art Resource, NY.)
In two important areas of daily urban life, then, clothing styles and dining styles (the different vessel shapes surely imply different dinner menus) there was a clear clash between a Sasanid visual aesthetic and an Islamic visual aesthetic. As the politically dominant minority, Arabs and Muslim converts sought to assert their place in the public arena through visual symbolism. For Muslims to persevere with their distinctive look they had to institute changes in production, marketing, and technology. This has long been recognized with respect to pottery because so many distinctive specimens have survived the centuries, and because there are great stylistic and technical differences between Sasanid and Islamic ceramics. Pots made before the Arab conquest were mostly unglazed, or glazed in a monochrome green. In neither case was there an effort to imitate the silver and gold feasting vessels of the Sasanid aristocracy. By contrast, wares of the Muslim period show great variety and technical innovation, including imitation Tang Chinese splash-painted ware alongside the types already mentioned. Evidently the urban market for better-quality ceramics grew and potters developed new techniques and designs to supply it. Meanwhile the aristocratic market for precious plates and goblets waned. The evidence from place-names, personal names, and tax assessments has shown us that parallel innovations took place in the clothing industry.
To dress, eat, and ornament their homes in the Muslim style, the Arabs and Iranian converts of the ninth/third and, to a lesser degree, tenth/fourth centuries both fostered and patronized new forms of agricultural and industrial production. In the process they transformed the Iranian highlands from a rural land of autarkic villages traversed by luxury trade routes from China to a land of burgeoning cities producing cloth and high-quality ceramics for local consumption and export. The profits of trade financed the development of a distinctively Islamic urban society. Therefore, it is entirely appropriate that 80 percent of the fulanabad villages listed in the Taʾrikh-e Qom have Arabic names and that cotton production correlates so positively with the occupational names used by Muslim religious scholars. Despite the silken luxury of the caliphal court, in Iran Islam meant cotton, and cotton meant Islam—at least in the ninth/third century.
It is no coincidence that the people who transmitted (and possibly in some cases invented) the hadith prohibiting the wearing of silk were themselves often involved in the cotton trade. Conversion to Islam gained momentum in Iran in the middle of the ninth/third century. From a cotton grower’s perspective, every new convert was a potential customer. New Muslims emulated the way of life manifested by the Arabs and sought to distinguish themselves from the Zoroastrian, Christian, or Jewish communities they were leaving behind. Not only were they inclined to swathe themselves in cotton gowns and turbans, but they would have purchased cotton cloth for their tightly wrapped burial shrouds, unlike the Zoroastrians whose corpses were covered in white for funerary purposes but eventually laid out naked in Towers of Silence (dakhmas) to be consumed by vultures.17 For some Iranian Muslims, karbas, a heavy-duty cotton fabric similar to canvas, became synonymous with “burial shroud.”18 Needless to say, the domestic market for cotton generated by conversion to Islam in Iran was augmented by the growth of the convert population in Iraq, which created a demand for imported cotton goods that the well-established caravan routes leading from Iran and Central Asia were ideally situated to supply, particularly after the cotton boom reached the latter region.
In Iran there is a strong likelihood that the entrepreneurs who created new villages for growing cotton saw their own villagers as potential customers. A model of how this may have occurred can be found in Richard Eaton’s The Rise of Islam and the Bengal Frontier, 1204–1760.19 Eaton puts forward a persuasive and well-documented explanation for the dramatically successful spread of Islam in east Bengal, today the country of Bangladesh. In outline, he argues that Mughal sultans made land grants to government officials, who in turn contracted with entrepreneurs to convert jungle and woodland into rice paddies. These entrepreneurs, who were mostly but not exclusively Muslim, engaged local people to clear the jungle, build a village, and cultivate rice. When the entrepreneurs were Hindu, the resulting villages became Hindu. When they were Muslim, the villages became Muslim. Yet the local people who were recruited for the jungle clearing and rice planting were more often than not neither Hindu nor Muslim before becoming enmeshed in the land development scheme. Rather, they identified with local or tribal deities that were not associated with any literate religious tradition. As a result of village entrepreneurship triggering a large-scale change in religion, east Bengal became overwhelmingly Muslim in spite of its comparatively late incorporation into the Mughal Empire and a relative paucity of Muslim religious scholars and mosques.
Although Eaton suggests that this association between religious change and agricultural development could be a product of the economic advance represented by the transition from forest foraging to rice growing, or of the simultaneous transition from an illiterate to a literate religious tradition, the village scale of the transition may have been an equally important factor. In Malcolm Gladwell’s The Tipping Point, a popular presentation of several sociological approaches to the problem of sudden change, the point is made, with sundry examples, that uniformity of outlook and fruitful interaction within a group arise most readily when the population of the group does not exceed approximately 150.20 Looking at east Bengal with this observation in mind, one might wonder whether the scale at which the land development took place, namely, the small agricultural village, in and of itself contributed substantially to the homogeneity that subsequently appeared in social and religious outlook, whether Muslim or Hindu. In such a small community, there may have been neither room for nor tolerance of religious diversity. This would explain why the religion of the entrepreneur determined the religion of the village. By comparison, the larger populations of towns and cities could have more readily retained or sustained religious variety.
I am only guessing that the average size of the new rice villages in east Bengal fell roughly into the range suggested by Gladwell. But for Iran, even in the 1950s, 150 souls was fairly close to the average village size—and for a good reason.21 In a village watered by qanat, the rate of flow from the underground canal strictly limited the area that could be farmed, and therefore the quantity of food that could be produced. This lack of elasticity meant that natural population growth required the building of new villages or migration to a city. It seems likely, therefore, that the Muslim entrepreneurs who established cotton villages in the ninth/third century functioned analogously to the village entrepreneurs whose activities Eaton documented in east Bengal. That is to say, if the founder of a new fulanabad village in the Qom district happened to be a Muslim, as 80 percent seemingly were, then in recruiting workers he would either have required them to become Muslims or have prevented them from continuing in their previous faiths by the social pressures inherent in such small communities.
An East Bengal-style conversion mechanism of this sort would directly link the growth of the Iranian Muslim population to cotton farming and help explain why Iran seems to have converted more rapidly, particularly in urbanizing districts, than various other provinces conquered by the Arabs in the seventh/first century.22 It would further provide an economic motivation for Islam penetrating the countryside around the Arab governing and garrison nodes as they evolved into regional marketing and manufacturing centers. Finally, it would help explain the persistence of non-Islamic beliefs in parts of Iran that were less amenable to the growing of cotton, such as the Alborz and Zagros mountains in the north and west and the torrid, waterless lands of the far south.
These suppositions cannot be directly confirmed, but the institution of “labor teams” lends them some credence. Javad Safinezhad, the previously mentioned Iranian geographer who demonstrated that the “labor team,” or boneh, system of village organization almost perfectly overlaps the parts of Iran that irrigate with qanats, called his book on the subject Boneh because that is the term currently in use in the area of Iran around Tehran. But he observes that in other parts of Iran other terms are used. One of these terms is sahraʾ , and the region where it is in use is Khurasan, the center of the early Islamic cotton boom.23
One might well ask whether it makes sense to pursue a technical term attested in the twentieth/fourteenth century back to an early Islamic text such as the Taʾrikh-e Qom, but even on the face of it, the term sahraʾ appears antique. More commonly spelled “sahara” in English, it is the Arabic word for “desert,” and Arabic has not been commonly used in Khurasan for more than 1000 years. Moreover, Persian has its own word for “desert,” biyaban, literally “place without water,” and hardly needs to borrow from the Arabs in this particular. Thus it seems more than likely that the use of sahraʾ to mean “labor team” dates to a period when Arab influence was high.
Assuming that it does, we suggest that it is connected with the ten taxable locales in the pattern of sahra-ye fulan, ostensibly “the ‘desert’ of so-and-so,” listed in the Qom tax schedules and briefly mentioned in the previous chapter. In nine of those ten locales, the fulan component was an Arabic Muslim name. If the word sahraʾ were to be taken literally, the fact that these “deserts” were all named for Muslims would be decidedly anomalous. As we have seen, the only other place-name types around Qom that can be specifically identified as Muslim are bagh-e fulan, or “garden of so-and-so,” with nineteen out of twenty-five names being Muslim, and the fulanabad villages themselves, eight out of ten of which were named for Muslims. In both of these comparative cases, the names can be plausibly associated with qanat irrigation. Moreover, the pattern biyaban-e fulan, which would be the Persian equivalent of sahra-ye fulan, never occurs as a place-name.
The word sahraʾ as it appears among the Qom place-names, probably refers to a specific piece of “desert” (i.e., a tract of uncultivable arid land that was made arable by digging a qanat). Sahra-ye fulan would thus denote the same thing as the much more common fulanabad. Twisting a foreign word for “desert” into a word for “cultivable land,” moreover, provides a plausible route by which the same word has come to mean “field” in modern Persian and “work team” in the province of Khurasan.
If work teams did already exist in the ninth/third century, it would help explain how the entrepreneurs of the new cotton villages recruited their labor force. Membership in a work team that was guaranteed a fixed portion of the proceeds from a highly marketable crop may have been a very attractive proposition, even if the qanat owner made settlement in his village conditional upon at least nominal acceptance of the Islamic religion.
An impressionistic narrative of how the plateau region of Iran developed over the three centuries following the Arab conquest will draw together the arguments of the past two chapters and set the stage for the discussion to come of the near disappearance of cotton in the eleventh/fifth century. The economic basis of Iranian society remained rural and agricultural in the aftermath of the Arab conquests. The dihqans, the aristocratic landowners who survived the conquests and continued to reside in their country seats, also continued to provide local order and security. As before, they supported themselves from the surplus production of grain-producing villages that they either owned or had rights to. Some of them also helped collect taxes for the new caliphal government.
By the beginning of the ninth/third century, after 150 years of unsettled times marked by military expeditions from Iraq and the implantation of Arab garrisons, Muslim Arabs, including influential Yemeni families with knowledge of cotton growing, began to develop the economy in new directions. A very small number of non-Arab Muslim converts joined in this endeavor. These Muslim entrepreneurs had abundant financial means derived from war booty, local retention of tax revenues, and the conversion into coin of treasure seized from the Sasanian royalty, the higher aristocracy, and the Zoroastrian fire temples. But for the most part, they did not own farmland.
Islamic law, based ostensibly on the traditions of the Prophet, made it possible for a Muslim to gain freehold ownership of land through the process of bringing dead land (ard al-mawat) into production. Iran provided unique opportunities for this because of the indigenous qanat technology that made it possible to irrigate desert land throughout the piedmont districts that ringed the interior of the plateau. But qanats were expensive to build, which made it uneconomical to grow wheat and barley, the staple crops of the Sasanid era. So the entrepreneurs who built the qanats and established villages on the newly arable land turned to summer cropping, for which their year-round water supply afforded a competitive advantage. Their crop of choice was cotton, which could not be grown on land that depended solely on winter precipitation and was afflicted with extreme dryness in the summer.
Cotton fit perfectly into Muslim efforts to make their rule distinctive. A competition developed between the lifestyle preferred by the old Sasanid elite and that preferred by the small minority of Arab intruders and their convert allies. The Muslims promoted the wearing of plain white, or sometimes colored or striped clothing, a preference based on Arab traditions that dated either to the time of Muhammad or, less likely, to the period after the conquests, to justify the new lifestyle distinction between Muslim and non-Muslim.
Nevertheless, the Sasanid-era preference for silk brocade with figural designs continued to have great appeal, as can be seen in the luxury consumption of the caliphal court at the elite level and in the motifs on Nishapur’s buff ware at the popular level. Though tailoring practices have not been discussed in detail, this too became an area of dueling aesthetics. Arab tastes favored draped rather than fitted garments: gowns, robes, turbans, kaffiyehs, and so on. The rival Sasanid-era wardrobe featured tunics with closely fitted bodices, short capes, and baggy trousers.
Muslims who were known for their piety or religious scholarship were active in developing the summer cropping of cotton. This is apparent from the comparison between occupational names among the ulama of four Iranian cities and Hayyim Cohen’s in de pen dent survey of medieval Muslim religious dignitaries derived from geographically unrestricted compilations. The percentage of Iranian ulama engaged specifically in the cotton trade was almost twice as great as that for all textile dealers taken together in the general survey. Growing cotton and marketing cotton cloth became integral to ulama life, and they endorsed it religiously by teaching that it was sinful to wear silk. To this day cotton gowns and turbans in plain white, black, or brown constitute the standard dress of Iran’s ulama.
It is also probable that the Muslim cotton entrepreneurs insisted that the farmers who settled in the villages that they founded adhere, at least nominally, to the Muslim faith. They had the money to entice laborers to leave their existing villages and join the work teams of the new villages. And the profitability of the new crop probably assured the labor force that they would enjoy an improved standard of living. For many, affirming membership in the Muslim community, which then required little in the way of knowledge of Islam, may have been only a minor inconvenience. Moreover, if Zoroastrian landowners had a traditional right, even a right sanctioned by Zoroastrian law, to demand that workers lured away by the new cotton economy return to their former villages, conversion to Islam, even in nominal terms, would have made such a right difficult to enforce.
In this fashion the cotton industry contributed to Islam’s rapid spread in the rural districts close to key Arab governing and garrison centers. During the ninth/third and early tenth/fourth centuries, these centers developed into full-fledged cities in one of the most striking episodes of urbanization in world history. As the first major commodity ever to be produced and fabricated in Iran for large-scale export to other regions, primarily Iraq, cotton was a primary driver of this development. The bandwagon growth through conversion of the Muslim communities of Iran and Iraq provided an expanding market for domestic consumption and export, thus bringing great wealth to the cotton entrepreneurs, including many religious scholars. The consistently high taxation rate for cotton confirms this.
A contemporary anecdote from Isfahan reflects the assumption people made that a caravan traveler with a load of cloth could be indistinguishable from a religious scholar traveling to collect the hadith of the Prophet. The grandson of a noted hadith scholar was journeying with his uncle on the road to Nishapur. When they stopped at a certain well, the uncle recalled encountering an old camel-puller during a stop at the same well on an earlier trip. The camel-puller had told him the following story:
I was on a caravan from Khurasan with my father, and when we came to this place, there were forty bales done up as camel loads. We thought they were woven cloth. There was also a small tent with an old man [shaikh] in it. (He was, in fact, your father.) Some of us asked about the bales, and he said: “This commodity [in those bales] is one that is sadly rare in these times. It is the hadith of the Messenger of God, prayers and peace be upon him.”24
The cotton boom did not affect all parts of the country equally. Areas that were less suited to cotton production because of torrid temperature, lack of water, or mountainous terrain lost some of the prominence they had had in pre-Islamic times. In their place, Khurasan, the plains at the southeast corner of the Caspian Sea, and the inland slopes of the Zagros and Alborz mountains became more prosperous and developed a robust urban culture. These regions are still today the best suited for growing cotton. Isfahan, Rayy, Nishapur, and Marv (then part of Khurasan) swelled in population and developed extensive trade relations with regions beyond the plateau. Bukhara and Samarqand shared this prominence, but they were already substantial cities and the capitals of local principalities in the pre-Islamic period. Where earlier they were known for silk, now cotton was their main export.
A case in point is a large piece of pre-Islamic silk in the collegiate church of Notre-Dame de Huy in Belgium. A Sogdian text on the back identifies the fabric as zandanichi, meaning “from the town of Zandana.” This same town near Bukhara was still producing fine textiles in the tenth/fourth century, but the word zandaniji by then signified cotton rather than silk. A local historian of Bukhara tells us how widespread the trade in this fabric was:
The specialty of the place is Zandaniji, which is a kind of [cotton] cloth (karbas) made in Zandana. It is a fine cloth and is made in large quantities. Much of that cloth is woven in other villages of Bukhara, but it is also called Zandaniji because it first appeared in this village. That cloth is exported to all countries such as Iraq, Fars, Kirman, Hindustan and elsewhere. All of the nobles and rulers make garments of it, and they buy it at the same price as [silk] brocade (diba).25
Continuing this impressionistic narrative into the tenth/fourth century will take us beyond the quantifiable data that has so far been presented, but it will set the stage for the discussion of climate change in the next two chapters. Two developments are of particular significance.
First, as has already been mentioned, the tax rates for wheat and barley plummeted between the beginning and the end of the ninth/third century, at least in the districts of Qom and Hamadan. Since there is nothing to indicate that the total Iranian population grew substantially during the first century and a half of Muslim rule, which was marked by repeated military campaigns and extensive social and economic dislocation, the combination of cotton and conversion must have drawn down the rural workforce engaged in food production. At the same time, from the mid-ninth/third through the early tenth/fourth century, urbanization dramatically increased. Whatever the complex of factors that contributed to urban growth (conversion to Islam and the manufacture and export of cotton were certainly two), migration from the countryside must have become a further drain on the agricultural workforce. It seems likely, therefore, that the reduction in the tax rate for wheat and barley reflects a growing realization in the tenth/fourth century that certain heavily urbanized districts of Iran were running out of food.
Second, as the number of Iranians and Iraqis not yet converted grew smaller and smaller in the tenth/fourth century, the cotton industry became less exuberant. Moreover, the Sasanid-era clothing aesthetic began to return. Late converts had more conservative tastes and were more likely to come from the old land-holding class of dihqans and their dependents, which might reasonably be supposed to favor the old Sasanid aesthetic. The heyday of the Arabs in Iranian society had come to an end, and dressing like an Arab no longer had the appeal it once had. Stark white pottery decorated with ornamental Arabic characters, but never containing words in the Persian language, faded out as buff ware featuring hunting and feasting scenes derived from Sasanid silverwork rose in popularity. Imported silk, and silk produced locally in regions like Gorgan, regained its cachet (at the highest social levels it had never truly lost it), leaving plain white gowns as the garb of the ulama and karbas shrouds as the garb of the dead.
