4

THE CULTURE OF THE ABBASID CALIPHATE

IN THE YEAR 932 the new caliph, Qāhir, asked one of his courtiers, Muhammad b. Alī al-Abdī, to chronicle the achievements of his Abbasid predecessors. It was a difficult time for the caliphate. Muqtadir had just been killed fighting his own army and enemies pressed in on every side. It was a far cry from the glory days of Hārūn al-Rashīd. The courtier, who was a specialist in history, responded with a short but fascinating series of portraits of the caliphs of the dynasty, and gives some guidance as to what the people remembered about them. This was then recorded by the leading historian of the day, Masūdī, in his ‘Meadows of Gold’ (Murūj al-dhahab), which is why it comes down to us.1

Caliph Qāhir was a genuinely frightening man, given to violent and unpredictable outbursts, which, combined with his heavy drinking, soon led to him being deposed and blinded. With a spear in his hand, he had the historian stand before him, and demanded the truth on pain of death.

Abdī began with the first Abbasid caliph Saffāh (749–54), who was ‘quick to spill blood . . . but atoned for this defect by considerable nobility of spirit and great generosity. He gave constantly and scattered gold with an open hand.’ His successor Mansūr (754–75) was

the first to sow discord between the family of Abbās and the family of Alī who until then had made common cause. He was the first of the caliphs to bring astrologers to his court and make decisions according to the stars. . . . He was also the first caliph to have foreign works of literature translated into Arabic, for example, Kalīla wa Dimna [celebrated animal fables translated from the Persian], the Sindhind [presumably a book about India], Aristotle’s treatises on logic and other subjects, Ptolemy’s Almagest, the book of Euclid, the ‘treatise on arithmetic’, and all the other ancient works, Greek, Byzantine, Pahlavi [Middle Persian] and Syriac. Once in possession of these books, the public read and studied them avidly.

According to Abdī, Mansūr was also the first ruler to distribute public offices among his freedmen and pages. He employed them in matters of importance and advanced them over the Arabs. This practice was followed after his time by the caliphs who were his heirs and it was thus that the Arabs lost the high command, the supremacy and the honours they had enjoyed until then.

From the time of his accession to the throne, Mansūr devoted himself to learning. He applied himself to the study of religious and philosophical ideas and acquired a profound knowledge of the different Muslim sects as well as of the Muslim Tradition. During his reign, the schools of the Traditionists (that is, those who studied the hadīth of Muhammad) increased in number and widened the scope of their studies.

Abdī’s account continued:

Mahdī [775–85] was good and generous and his character was noble and liberal. . . . This caliph had the habit, when appearing in public, of having purses filled with gold and silver carried before him. No one solicited his charity in vain and the steward who walked ahead had orders to give alms to those who did not dare to ask, anticipating their need. . . . He was merciless in exterminating heretics.

Here Abdī lists the dualists and other sects that appeared during Mahdī’s reign, adding that Mahdī

was the first to order the polemicists of the theological schools to refute them. They produced convincing proofs against their wrong-headed adversaries and overthrew the weak arguments of the heretics and made the truth shine forth to all who doubted. He rebuilt the mosque in Mecca and that of the Prophet in Medina in the form they stand today and he rebuilt Jerusalem, which had been damaged by earthquakes.

Of Hārūn al-Rashīd (786–809), Abdī said that he was

scrupulous in fulfilling his role as a pilgrim and in waging holy war. He undertook public works, wells, cisterns, and forts on the road to Mecca, and also in that city at Mina and Arafat [both important sites in the hajj rituals], and in Medina. He scattered both wealth and the treasure of his justice on all his subjects. He strengthened the frontiers against the Byzantine Empire, built cities, fortified several towns such as Tarsus and Adana, revived the prosperity of Massissa and Marash [all now in southern Turkey but then part of the network of Muslim settlements along the frontier] and carried out innumerable works of military architecture, as well as building caravanserais. His officials followed his example. The people imitated his behaviour and followed the direction he pointed out. Error was repressed, the truth reappeared and Islam, shining with new splendour, eclipsed all other nations.

The very type of generosity and charity in this reign was manifested in the person of Umm Jafar Zubayda, the daughter of Jafar and the granddaughter of [the caliph] Mansūr. This princess had numerous caravanserais built at Mecca and she filled this city, and the pilgrim road which bears her name, with cisterns, wells and buildings which survive to this day. She also built several hospices for travellers along the Syrian frontier and at Tarsus and endowed them.

The Barmakids then get a mention for their generosity before the author returns to Hārūn as the first caliph to popularize the game of polo, shooting arrows at the birjās (quintain, a movable target on a pole) and playing with balls and rackets. He rewarded those who distinguished themselves in these various exercises and these games spread among the people. He was also the first among the Abbasid caliphs to play chess and backgammon. He favoured players who distinguished themselves and paid them salaries. Such was the splendour, wealth and prosperity of his reign that they called this period the Days of Marriage and Feast.

The narrator was then interrupted by the caliph, who demanded that he say more about Zubayda. ‘I obey,’ he said. ‘The nobility and magnificence of this princess, in serious matters as well as frivolous, have led her to be placed in the very first rank.’ As regards the more serious matters, he gives more details of her pious building works and especially the water supply of Mecca. He then moves on to the more frivolous expenses:

those of which kings are most vain. . . . She was the first to be served on dishes of gold and silver enriched with precious stones. For her the finest clothes were made of the multicoloured silk known as washī, a single length of which, designed for her, cost 50,000 dinars. She was the first to organize an escort of eunuchs (who, of course, could serve her in a personal capacity) and slave girls who rode by her side, fulfilled her orders and delivered her messages. She was the first to make use of tents of silver, ebony and sandalwood, decorated with clasps of gold and silver and hung with embroidered silk, sable, brocade and red, yellow, green and blue silk. She was the first to introduce the fashion for slippers embroidered with precious stones and for candles made of ambergris, fashions which spread to the public. Then, O Commander of the Faithful, when the caliphate passed to her son [Amīn 809–13], he favoured his eunuchs and showed his preference by bestowing on them the highest honours. Zubayda, noticing her son’s marked taste for these eunuchs and the influence they were having over him, chose young girls remarkable for the elegance of their figures and the charm of their faces. She had them wear turbans, and gave them clothes woven and embroidered in the royal factories, and had them fix their hair with fringes and lovelocks and draw it back to the nape of the neck after the fashion of young men. She dressed them in the close-fitting, wide-sleeved robes called qaba and wide belts which showed off their waists and their curves. Then she sent them to her son Amīn and as they filed into his presence he was enchanted. He was captivated by their looks and appeared with them in public. It was then that the fashion for having young slave girls with short hair, wearing qaba and belts, became established at all levels of society. They were called ‘page girls’.

Here the caliph interrupted again. ‘Page,’ he cried out, ‘a cup of wine in honour of the slave girls!’ Immediately a swarm of young girls appeared, all the same height and all looking like young men. They were all wearing tight-fitting jackets, qaba and all had fringes. They wore their hair in lovelocks and had belts of gold and silver. While the caliph was raising his cup, I admired the purity of its jewels, the sparkle of the wine which gilded it with its rays, and I went into raptures about the beauty of these young girls.

But Qāhir was still holding his frightening lance. He drank the cup straight off and said to me, ‘Go on!’

The historian went on, diplomatically avoiding discussion of the deposed and murdered Amīn, and moving on to his brother, Ma’mūn (813–33):

At the beginning of his reign this caliph was under the influence of Fadl b. Sahl [his Persian vizier] and other courtiers. He devoted himself to the study of astrology and its rulings. He modelled his conduct on the Sasanian kings like Ardashir son of Babak [224–41] and others. He had a passion for old books and studied them constantly, pursuing his researches until he succeeded in understanding them and getting to their very heart. . . . On his arrival in Iraq, Ma’mūn gave up his favourite studies and professed the doctrine of Unity and the Promise and the Threat,2 that is, the doctrines of the Mutazilites. He presided over conferences of theologians and attracted to his court polemicists famous in debate. His meetings were always attended by learned jurists and literary men whom he brought from many different cities and to whom he gave salaries. The populace acquired a taste for philosophical speculation, the study of dialectic became fashionable and each school wrote works in support of their arguments and the doctrines they professed.

As for Ma’mūn himself:

He was the most clement and patient of men. No one has made better use of their power, been more open-handed, more general in their gifts or less inclined to regret them. Ministers and courtiers all imitated him carefully; all followed his example and walked in his footsteps.

The historian finishes with brief accounts of Mutasim (833–42), ‘fond of horses and wishing to imitate Persian kings in his table service’; Wāthiq (842–7), strict in his religious beliefs and a great gourmet; and Mutawakkil (847–61), ‘who forbade the study of different religious opinions and re-established belief in authority and the teaching of the Traditions. His reign was happy and his government stable and well founded’. None of the later caliphs is mentioned.

Masūdī’s account is interesting for all sorts of reasons. Perhaps the most striking is that the leading role is played by a woman, Zubayda, who is admired for her pious works but also as the epitome of court style. He also makes some political judgements, for example about Mansūr’s promotion of freedmen and the consequent loss of status for the Arabs. It is surprising to see Mansūr, who comes across in other sources as the ultimate hard-headed politician, depicted as a patron of astrology and the translation of philosophical literature. We know of Ma’mūn’s interest in ancient literature and old books from other sources but he, like Mansūr, is also credited here with the encouragement of the religious sciences like the study of the Qur’ān and the Traditions of the Prophet. Mahdī’s active protection of the faith against heresy and Mutawakkil’s return to strict orthodoxy after the more speculative intellectual atmosphere of the court of his predecessors both demonstrate the important influence individual caliphs could exert as leaders of the Muslim community.

THE KNOWLEDGE ECONOMY UNDER THE ABBASIDS

The period of the greatness of the Abbasid caliphate, from 750 to 945, saw an extraordinary explosion of cultural activity. It was a time of intellectual openness and diversity which has few parallels in human history. What caused this tremendous cultural efflorescence?

Let us begin by looking at the infrastructure of knowledge. It has already been pointed out that the administrative systems developed by Umar I after the great Arab conquests, and subsequently elaborated by both Umayyad and Abbasid government led to the emergence of very large towns, first in Iraq in Kufa and Basra, later in Egypt at Fustat, in Tunisia at Qayrawan and in Khurasan at Merv. To these centres were added, from the middle of the eighth century, the two greatest Muslim cities of the early Middle Ages, Baghdad and Córdoba. In all these cities, there were bureaucrats and soldiers who were paid salaries on a regular basis. These salaries meant that they could spend money on the necessities of everyday life, food and clothing and so on, but many of them also had money to spend on discretionary purchases, which might include fine textiles, ceramics and exotic foods but also books and intangible but very important cultural productions like poetry, song and the Traditions of the Prophet. All these items bore cultural capital and social prestige.

The administrative arrangements led to the development of an infrastructure of skilled people who could manage it. It is well known that the Umayyad caliph Abd al-Malik made Arabic the language of administration throughout the caliphate. The effect of this was to produce a class of secular bureaucrats who could read and write. It also generated a demand for education in mathematics, not only accounting skills to deal with tax receipts but also the geometrical skills required for assessing areas of land for taxation purposes. If these skills had not been essential for the needs of government, it is unlikely that either Arabic literacy or mathematical knowledge would have developed in the way they did.

The rise of the importance of the bureaucracy coincided with the emergence of a wide reading public. Levels of literacy are impossible to assess in the absence of any statistical data, but it appears from accounts of literary activity in, say, Baghdad in the ninth century, that the ability to read and write was regarded as normal and taken for granted, not just among an intellectual elite but in a wide cross-section of society. Of course, this was encouraged by the need to read and understand the text of the Qur’ān for the proper practice of the Muslim faith. All the Umayyad and Abbasid caliphs were literate, although the warrior caliph Mutasim is said to have had difficulty with his letters, whereas it is worth remembering that the first English king who is known to have been able to read and write, with the exception perhaps of Alfred, was Edward I in the late thirteenth century.

A substantial reading population was of course essential to the growth of what literary historian Shawkat Toorawa has called a ‘writerly culture’ in ninth-century Baghdad,3 but other developments were important for the infrastructure of culture as well. One of these was the introduction of paper. Paper had been invented and used in China for many centuries, but the arrival of this technology in the Islamic Middle East can be dated fairly precisely. There was a story current in the eleventh century that the art of paper-making was brought by Chinese prisoners of war captured by the Abbasid armies at the Battle of Talas (now in Kazakhstan) in 751, the only occasion on which Muslim and Chinese imperial armies came into direct conflict. Of course, historians have treated such simple explanatory narratives with some scepticism, but this may be unjustified. We know that Chinese prisoners of war were active in Iraq in the decades after the battle because one of them wrote an account of Iraq, in Chinese, after his return to his homeland. He does not mention paper, but the story provides a plausible context for this important transfer of technological know-how.

Just as important is the fact that there was a ready demand for new and more efficient writing materials in the society of the early Abbasid period: without this demand the introduction of paper would have been no more than a diverting curiosity. This paper, like almost all paper before the nineteenth century, was rag-paper, that is to say it was made of old textiles: wood-pulp paper was effectively unknown at this time. This was fortunate: there was probably not much timber to harvest in Abbasid Iraq in lands that had been intensively cultivated for millennia, but there were plenty of old clothes.

Jonathan Bloom, the historian of Islamic art, has shown how important the advent of paper was in cultural development, for, in a very fundamental way, paper democratized writing. It was both cheaper than parchment (animal skins) and more efficient than papyrus, the most widely used writing surfaces before this time. Paper meant that books could be produced cheaply and economically. Bloom points out that the invention transformed book production in a way which is perhaps comparable with the coming of printing in early modern Europe.4

There was another innovation at this time, again generated by the demand for easier and quicker production of reading materials, and that was the development of new forms of writing. We have a number of manuscripts, mostly but not entirely Qur’anic, which show Arabic hands of the seventh and early eighth century in a style of writing known as Kufic. It is formal, careful and often very elegant, but at the same time it was slow to write, each letter being carefully formed individually. In the early tenth century, if not before, a new hand emerged. It is said to have been first developed by Ibn Muqla, vizier to the caliph Muqtadir, but it is probable that his achievement was the culmination of some decades of experimentation. The new script, known as naskhi, or copyists’ hand, was much faster and easier to write, almost a sort of shorthand, and while grand Qur’āns may still have been produced in Kufic, this new script was widely used for most other literary publications.

The use of paper and the new Arabic hand in turn made writing accessible to those without private means. It could be argued that Baghdad under the Abbasid caliphate was the first society in the history of the world in which a man or a woman could make a living as an author. Of course, people had written books before, thousands of them, but they had always been wealthy in their own right, employed or subsidized by rich patrons, or attached to institutions, like Christian monasteries, which gave them the space and security to write. In the ninth century Baghdad could boast a Grub Street culture where a would-be author could write a work, have it copied and sell it in the hundred or more shops in the Book Suq (Sūq al-warrāqīn), and make enough money to stay alive. It was not easy to live off one’s writing, any more than it is in Britain today, but it was at least possible. And if your own books were not selling well, you could always fall back on copying other people’s work to tide you over in the lean periods.

The technologies were in place, the demand was there, so what did the writers, poets and artists of the Abbasid caliphate produce? In the second half of the tenth century a Baghdadi writer called Ibn al-Nadīm (d. 995) compiled a book called Fihrist, which can best be translated as ‘The Catalogue’. We do not know whether this is a library or a bookseller’s catalogue, but in it the author lists some 3,500 authors with the names of the books they wrote and some information about their contents. Many of these books must have been very short, little more than pamphlets, but equally many were more substantial works. The variety of subjects they covered was truly astonishing. He divides his list into ten chapters:

  1. Languages and scripts: the scriptures of the Muslims and other people of the book (37 pages)
  2. Grammar and lexicography (51 pages)
  3. History, belles-lettres, biography and genealogy (73 pages)
  4. Poetry (22 pages)
  5. Scholastic theology (47 pages)
  6. Law and Tradition (38 pages)
  7. Philosophy and the ‘ancient sciences’ (62 pages)
  8. Stories, legends, romances, magic and conjuring (32 pages)
  9. Doctrines of the non-monotheistic religions (32 pages)
  10. Alchemy (9 pages)

We might expect to find Islamic religious sciences and Arabic poetry in such a list, but what is more surprising is the amount of material relating to other religions, to non-Arabic scripts and to science and philosophy. It seems that all human knowledge, as it existed at the time, is there somewhere and there is no hint that any subject was banned, censored or felt to be forbidden.

THE ABBASID POETS

Poetry was the queen of the arts of the time. Since the great pre-Islamic poets of the Jābiliyya, with their images of the lone warrior and his camel, riding, fighting and loving in the harsh environment of the Arabian desert, poetry had conveyed the aspirations of men who lived more prosaic lives. It had also intrigued grammarians and literary critics who sought in it the origins of the Arabic language and more obscure points of grammar and lexicography. But of course most readers and listeners in the Abbasid caliphate did not live in the wild desert and their knowledge of, and enthusiasm for, camels was probably almost as limited as ours, so the poets of the Abbasid age moved on from the ancient and revered paradigms to reflect the largely urban and courtly world in which they participated.

Panegyric poetry was still the best way to make money: it is also the most difficult form of verse for us to appreciate. The extravagant and complex metaphors seem simply contrived and insincere, clearly designed to encourage rewards from the caliph or other patron. People at the time, however, had a different opinion. Just as we today can admire the flattering portraits of the powerful and wealthy painted by Velázquez or Goya because we can say that they are superb examples of the painter’s art, so contemporaries valued praise poetry in the same way, for the startling new image or the subtle variations of common tropes.

Hunting poetry can also leave many of us cold, and poetry in praise of wine we can no longer taste is not much better, but the poetry of love can still resonate through the centuries, even in translation. Perhaps the best known of Abbasid love poets was Abū Nuwās, the ‘father of locks (of hair)’. He flourished in the reign of Hārūn al-Rashīd, and especially in the circle of the young prince Amīn, where his innovative and unconventional poetic talents could develop. He writes of wine and love, openly glorifying both. The tavern, and the groups of young men drinking there, are celebrated with uninhibited enthusiasm. It may come as something of a surprise to find that drinking poetry was so popular in the Muslim society of the time, but it was one of the measures of the confidence and diversity of this society that it could accept such challenging images if they were presented elegantly and wittily. Abū Nuwās presents a world of common taverns, but the enjoyment of wine was also a central part of Abbasid court culture. Some caliphs, such as Mahdī, did not drink out of religious scruples, but many others did as part of princely display and performance.

Abū Nuwās wrote love poetry about women, but more often about young men and boys. Nor are the poems abstract and chaste fantasies. He celebrates gay sex with unconcealed enthusiasm which can sometimes catch modern readers by surprise: poems by middle-aged men praising the sexual attractiveness of schoolboys would, after all, be regarded as dangerously transgressive even, or perhaps particularly, in the early twenty-first century, but the celebration of same-sex love was a widely accepted literary form in both Arabic and later Persian poetry in the Islamic Middle East.

It is easy to seize on Abū Nuwās because his poetry was clever, eloquent, original and very popular, but it would be wrong to assume that he was typical of all the poets and writers of his time. Some, like his contemporary and sometime rival Abū’l-Atāhiya, became deeply pious and devoted themselves to religious themes, while others, like Abū Tammām in the ninth century, found new and interesting ways of praising their patrons, in his case the warrior caliph Mutasim, and celebrating their victories over the Byzantines. Perhaps the most striking feature of this poetry to the modern reader is its sheer variety: all male human life is there, and there was no attempt, either official or unofficial, to censor it. Pious people certainly disapproved of some of the sentiments expressed, but, in general, books were not burned, nor were poets imprisoned and punished.

The majority of poets in this era were male, but women played an important role in the performance of the culture. The singing girl ( jāriya) is a characteristic presence in descriptions of gatherings, whether domestic or public, in which poetry was discussed. Most poems were sung and the singers were mostly young women. It is easy to forget this because there was at the time no form of musical notation; so while we have the lyrics of hundreds of songs, the tunes are completely lost to us. The singing girls learned and passed on the musical tradition. They appear in countless stories. They are clever and sassy and, needless to say, beautiful. They are also learned not only in music but sometimes in the Traditions of the Prophet and the religious sciences. They were usually slaves, trained up by masters in the Holy City of Medina and sold on in Baghdad, but before we consider the implications of their servile status we should remember the anecdote of one of Zubayda’s (Hārūn’s wife) conversations with one of the girls in her entourage. ‘Are you a slave or free?’ the queen asks, to which the girl replies, ‘I don’t know,’ and Zubayda responds, ‘No, nor do I.’ In their knowledge and personalities the singing girls were major figures in the artistic environment. They were an integral part of the court culture of the caliphate, and when the caliphate collapsed in the middle of the tenth century, the singing girls disappeared from the cultural landscape at the same time.

The richness and variety of this literary and musical culture is evoked in one of those great compilations which the new technologies of writing had made possible, the great Book of Songs (Kitāb al-aghāni). Abū’l-Faraj al-Isfahānī (d. 967) began his great work by selecting the hundred best songs he could find and used this list as a framework to attach numerous other poems and, just as important, prose anecdotes about the lives and deeds of many of the poets and singers. The result is fascinating. The stories about the artists are unusual in their detailing of non-elite lives. An abiding theme of the collection is the way in which people from low and even outcast social backgrounds can rise to fame and fortune through their artistic talents, and this means that tales of the struggling poor form a central part of the work. Isfahānī was writing after the collapse of the Abbasid caliphate in the tenth century and his collection is, in some aspects, a memorial to a culture which was vanishing, but the riches it preserves gives us a wonderful panorama of this world.

THE ABBASID SCIENTISTS

If poetry and song were the only literary products of this caliphal culture, it would be interesting but limited. In fact, cultural activity spread in many different directions. One of the most famous achievements of the period is the translation of ancient Greek works into Arabic and the intellectual ideas that emerged as a result. The Greek-speaking and -writing Byzantines, the Rūm of the Arabic sources, were of course arch-enemies of the early Muslims and warfare against them was maintained as a regular and pious exercise. This did not prove an obstacle, however, to the acquisition and appropriation of Greek learning. Muslims wanted Greek learning because they believed it to be useful and they translated and read those parts of the Greek canon which are almost completely ignored by modern western readers. They wanted Euclid’s geometry, Ptolemy’s astronomy, Galen’s medicine and Dioscorides’s knowledge of the usefulness of herbs and plants. Above all, they wanted to acquire and use the philosophy of Aristotle, both as a way of viewing the world, and as a tool box of logical techniques for constructing arguments.

On the other hand, they had no interest in ancient Greek poetry: after all they had plenty of ancient poetry of their own, so the Iliad and the Odyssey and all later poetry were completely ignored. Greek drama was an unopened book to them and they had no interest either in historical works. The Histories of Herodotus, which would have told them so much about the ancient Persians who built the ruins they saw at Persepolis and the ancient Egyptians who built the pyramids, were unknown to them.

Caliphs and others had commissioned translations from the Greek from the Umayyad period onwards and, as we have seen, Mansūr was credited with initiating this practice, but it was the personal enthusiasm of Caliph Ma’mūn that really gave impetus to the translation movement. He was perhaps the most genuinely intellectual of the caliphs we encounter in this book and the fashion he set encouraged his courtiers to patronize translators and other intellectuals, paying them for their work and employing them in their great households as tutors for their children.

There are mentions in our sources from this period of an institution called the House of Wisdom (Bayt al-hikma). Enthusiastic modern historians have taken this to be a sort of proto-university, a college where distinguished scholars could work and debate in peace and a measure of prosperity. In reality, the House of Wisdom was simply a library where books were stored. To find scholars at work you had to go to the great houses where patrons would maintain resident intellectuals. In this sense Abbasid Baghdad was a bit like London and Paris during the Enlightenment: it was in the salons and the studies of government officials, including, of course, caliphs and private individuals, that learning flourished.

Many of the works which were translated into Arabic had previously been translated from Greek into Syriac, another Semitic language. Syriac was the literary version of Aramaic, the Semitic lingua franca of the Middle East before the Muslim conquests, and the translations had mostly been made in Christian monasteries, which were centres of Syrian intellectual activity. In this way they had already been through a filter. The monks were mainly interested in the same sort of practical texts as the Muslim scholars were. They did not, on the whole, translate theological or devotional writings, as one might imagine, because they held the Byzantines to be heretics whose works were useless and corrupting.

The people who knew Greek and Syriac were mostly Christians and almost all the translations were carried out by members of the religious minorities. Let us take the example of Hunayn b. Ishāq (d. 873). Hunayn was a Christian from the city of Hira, near Kufa, in central Iraq. It had been a centre of Iraqi Christianity before the coming of Islam and the traditions of learning were clearly still alive. Hunayn was a skilled stylist in Greek, Syriac and Arabic and made a good living as a translator. A later biographer gives us a glimpse of his agreeable lifestyle:

He went to the bath every day after his ride and had water poured on him. He would then come out wrapped in a dressing gown and, after taking a cup of wine with a biscuit, lie down until he had stopped perspiring. Sometimes he would fall asleep. Then he would get up, burn perfumes to fumigate his body and have dinner brought in. This consisted of a large fattened pullet stewed in gravy with a half kilo loaf of bread. After drinking some of the gravy and eating the chicken and the bread he would fall asleep. On waking up he drank four ratls [perhaps two litres] of old wine. If he felt like fresh fruit, he would have some Syrian apples and quinces. This was his habit until the end of his life.5

Despite his relaxed approach, he was a prodigious worker. His output was enormous and his standards high.

The translation of Greek texts was much more than a passive reception of works from another culture. These writings stimulated a wave of new research and discussion in the Muslim world. Greek philosophy inspired Yaqūb b. Ishāq al-Kindī, known as ‘Philosopher of the Arabs’. Unlike many of the scholars who worked in Abbasid court circles, Kindī was an Arab from an ancient and aristocratic Bedouin lineage, but he spent his life in Baghdad and was a familiar figure at the courts of the caliphs Ma’mūn, Mutasim and Wāthiq. He also had a very extensive private library, which was a source of pleasure and pride until it was confiscated at the instigation of his intellectual rivals, the Banū Mūsā, though it was eventually returned to him. He was not himself a translator, but he was the first to use Aristotle’s work to create an Islamic philosophical discourse in Arabic. He was also the first to grapple with the problem of reconciling faith with logical investigation.

This approach to Muslim doctrine aroused the suspicion and hostility of more conservative elements in society and there were continuous disputes between the philosophers and the Traditionists, who held that one should accept the teachings of the Qur’ān and sunna without further question. The issues were very similar to the discussions in twelfth-century France between the radical and flamboyant philosopher Peter Abelard and his opponent, the austere and dogmatic St Bernard, Abbot of Clairvaux. In both cases this was not a dispute about the truth of religion, between believers and atheists, but about ways of understanding and investigating religious ideas. For philosophers in both Baghdad in the ninth century and Paris in the twelfth, the ideals were fides quaerens intellectum, faith seeking understanding, and in both cases they came up against those who believed that investigating the divine mysteries could lead to heresy and unbelief. As long as caliphs like Ma’mūn and Wāthiq reigned, Kindī and those who thought like him were protected by the patronage of the court. But when in 847 Mutawakkil came to the throne, he reverted to strict orthodoxy, seeking the favour of the Traditionists, and the influence of philosophers was eclipsed.

Despite this hostility, the Arab philosophical tradition survived for centuries. In Andalus, at the time of the Almohad caliphs, the great Ibn Rushd (d. 1198) initiated the last original discussions in the canon. Arabic philosophy would ultimately survive the loss of caliphal patronage, but, without the initial protection and support of the court of the caliphs in the ninth century, it is unlikely that it would have developed and matured in the way it did. This openness to, and delight in, new ideas was fundamental.

The caliph Ma’mūn certainly showed a real interest in natural and experimental science. This can be seen in the story of his project to measure the circumference of the earth. There was no question that the earth was round: every educated person in ninth-century Baghdad knew that. But no one knew how big it was, and the caliph was determined to find out. He knew that the ancient Greeks had calculated it at 24,000 miles and he wanted to determine whether this was accurate. He asked the Banū Mūsā, who were his main scientific advisers, to investigate. As Ibn Khallikan recorded:

They enquired where a level plain could be found and were told that the desert of Sinjar [in north-west Iraq] was completely flat as was the country around Kufa. They took with them a number of people whose opinion Ma’mūn trusted and whose knowledge of this area could be relied on. They set out for Sinjar and came to the desert. They halted at a spot where they took the altitude of the Pole Star with certain instruments. They drove a peg into the ground and attached a long cord to it. They walked due north, avoiding as much as possible going off to left or right. When the cord ran out, they stuck another peg into the ground and fastened a cord to it and carried on walking to the north as they had done before until they reached a spot where the elevation of the Pole Star had risen one degree. Then they measured the distance they had travelled on the ground by means of the cord. The distance was 66⅔ miles. Then they knew that every degree of the heaven was 66⅔ miles on earth. Then they returned to the place where they had stuck in the first peg and continued to the south, just as they had previously done to the north, sticking in pegs and fastening cords. When they had finished all the cord they had used when going north, they took the elevation of the Pole Star and found it was one degree lower than the first observation. This proved that their calculations were correct and that they had achieved what they had set out to do.

Anyone who knows about astronomy will see that this is true. It is well known that the number of degrees in the heavens is 360 and that the heavens are divided into twelve constellations and that each constellation is thirty degrees. This makes 360 degrees in all. They then multiplied the number of degrees in the heavens by 66⅔, that is the length of each degree, and the total was twenty-four thousand miles. This is certain and there is no doubt about it.

Then the Banū Mūsā returned to Ma’mūn and told him what they had done, and that this agreed with what he had seen in the ancient books. He wished to confirm this in another location so he sent them to the Kufa area where they repeated the experiment they had conducted in Sinjar. They found the two calculations agreed and Ma’mūn acknowledged the truth of what the ancients had written on the subject.6

The account reveals the respect that intellectuals in the caliph’s circle had for the ancients, whose works they could now read in the new translations. But their respect was not uncritical, and they needed to test what they had read rather than being overawed by the ancients’ authority. We can also see their commitment to practical scientific method, the statement of a hypothesis and the use of experimental evidence to prove it and, perhaps most impressive, the care taken to make sure that the experiment could be replicated, in the same area and then in an entirely different one. All this demonstrates a truly scientific approach that has few parallels in the post-classical, pre-modern age.

THE RELIGIOUS SCIENCES AND HISTORY WRITING

The prolific literary culture of the Abbasid caliphate expressed itself in many different ways. For a lot of people in ninth-century Baghdad, both intellectuals and commoners, the most important of these were probably the collections of Traditions of the Prophet, which were being gathered and discussed in numerous assemblies in the city. People came from all over the Muslim world to the great city to listen to the masters expound and to garner new and unusual material. At the same time leaders of the emerging law schools, such as Ahmad b. Hanbal, lectured and wrote. At one level this activity was a result of the caliphal system of government. Without the financial impetus and the development of this huge city, the circles and gatherings would never have appeared. At another level, however, the Abbasid court in the ninth century was not where these Islamic sciences developed, and indeed the court and the scholars were in many ways at odds. Poetry and science could thrive in the Abbasid palaces and the homes of their rich and powerful courtiers, but the collection of Traditions did not. These religious studies were taught in mosques and private houses, not at court.

Abbasid court culture also encouraged the development of historical writing, though here again much of it took place in studies and libraries far removed from the palace. The greatest master of the age was Abū Jafar al-Tabarī (d. 923). Tabarī was a Persian by origin from the area of Tabaristan (hence the name) on the southern shores of the Caspian Sea. He came to study in Baghdad when still a young man and lived there for most of the rest of his adult life. He seems to have led an austere bachelor life—there is no mention of any close family—and he lived off the rents of the family estates in his native Tabaristan, which were brought to him every year by pilgrims passing through the capital on their way to the Holy Cities. Despite his Persian origins, he wrote exclusively in Arabic. His History of the Prophets and Kings is a huge collection of material relating to the pre-Islamic and Islamic past, virtually a one-man library. In the English translation it appears in thirty-eight volumes, each of them more than 250 pages long. Nor was this all: Tabarī also wrote a Commentary on the Qur’ān which was almost as long.

Tabarī’s economic independence meant that he was not a court historian and there seems to be no record that he ever met any of the caliphs of his time or attended their courts. He did not actively criticize their regime, but he records with vivid honesty such discreditable episodes as Caliph Mansūr’s execution of Abū Muslim or the avoidable disasters of the civil wars which followed the death of Hārūn al-Rashīd in 809. He also incorporates the biography of the Shiite Muhammad the Pure Soul, who led an uprising against Abbasid rule in 762, which is deeply sympathetic to the rebel. There is no evidence, either, that he denigrated the Umayyad caliphs whom the Abbasids had overthrown. In short, there is no evidence that he wrote to please the court or that he was subject to any sort of censorship. He had his prejudices—a dislike of popular rebellions and uprisings and extreme religious views—but they were essentially those of the pious Baghdad bourgeoisie of his era.

In the later parts of his chronicle, he does incorporate what might be called official history. This reflects the policies of Abbasid caliphs anxious to publicize their roles as military champions of Islam. The warrior caliph Mutasim appears to have commissioned long and detailed accounts of his campaigns against the Byzantines, notably the sack of Amorion in 833 and the campaigns of his generals against non-Muslim rebels in northern Iran. Later on Caliph Mutadid asked for his campaigns against the Zanj rebels in southern Iraq to be recorded with the same care. We also know that in the later ninth century letters from generals and provincial governors describing the defeats of rebels were read out in the mosque at Friday prayers and some of these were included by Tabarī in his great work. In general, though, Tabarī’s multifaceted history reflects the pluralist society in which it was written, a society in which the caliphal government made no effort to control or dictate what intellectuals wrote.

The history writing of this period was deeply humanist, that is to say that it portrayed events as being caused primarily by human agency, and it attached enormous importance to human character, describing the main actors with all their faults and strengths. Direct divine intervention in the course of human affairs was rarely invoked. Of course, it was acknowledged that God protected some virtuous people and equally that he punished some wicked ones, but it was human beings who made the decisions about whether to act well or badly. The measure of good or bad behaviour among rulers was rarely that of strict piety, only the Umayyad caliph Umar II was credited with being motivated by religious goals and his reign was too short to come to any conclusions. The qualities expected of a good ruler were a concern to defend Islam and Muslims, wisdom and foresight, behaving in moderation in all things and dealing justly with all men. Caliphs and other rulers failed because of their stupidity, vanity and arrogance. It was a scale of values that Shakespeare, among others, would have recognized.

THE INCLUSIVENESS OF CALIPHAL CULTURE

One important aspect of this cultural activity was its inclusiveness. The Abbasid caliphate was a deeply Muslim polity; it was ruled by Muslims and the caliph was, as we have seen, God’s representative on earth. At the same time, it was broadly tolerant of religious difference and there is very little evidence for the ill-treatment of non-Muslim populations. The city of Baghdad itself had been founded as the capital for a Muslim dynasty and its official name, Madinat al-Salam, the City of Peace, suggested an Islamic identity. Yet within this new city a Christian community had developed. They built churches and monasteries and no one seems to have stood in their way. The hierarchies of the various Christian churches in the caliphate were recognized by the caliphs. One patriarch of the Church of the East, Timothy, was a regular visitor to the court of Caliph Mahdī. Christian administrators continued to work in the higher echelons of the bureaucracy, though vastly outnumbered by Muslims, and, as we have seen, Christians played an important part in translating Greek into Arabic.

By and large, churches and synagogues were respected and there are few reports of deliberate attacks on these places of worship. The cathedral in Damascus was demolished by the Umayyad caliph Walīd, but that was because he wanted to build a (still surviving) mosque on the site and the Christians were amply compensated in cash and by the restoration of some churches which they had lost at the time of the original Muslim conquest of the city seventy years before. The great cathedral at Edessa (now Urfa in southern Turkey) was damaged when some of the marble columns were taken for building mosques. In Baghdad we hear of churches being attacked by mobs, but this was part of a general civil disturbance rather than a product of caliphal policy.

Just as there was no attempt to take over or destroy churches in general, so Zoroastrian fire temples continued to exist in areas like Fars, in southern Iran, where large numbers of them were still functioning in the tenth century. Indeed they were valued by at least some Muslims because the old soot from the eternal flames in the fire temples made the blackest and most permanent ink. Most were abandoned from the eleventh century onwards because increasing conversion to Islam meant that they no longer attracted worshippers, but there was no official move to close them.

The disused temples and other monuments of classical antiquity were often admired and, while they might also be used as quarries for building materials, there was no attempt to destroy them for ideological reasons. On this subject, Tabarī records an interesting discussion which is said to have occurred between Caliph Mansūr and his Persian adviser Khālid b. Barmak, who was one of the men in charge of the building operations in Baghdad. Mansūr suggested demolishing the huge brick palace of the Sasanian Persian kings in the old capital of Ctesiphon nearby and using the rubble in his new city. Khālid replied, ‘I do not think that is a good idea, O Commander of the Faithful,’ and when the caliph asked him why, he said, ‘It is one of the proofs of Islam by which the observer is convinced that people like its lords were not swept away by the power of this world but only by the power of God.’ The caliph said he was wrong and that he only said that because of his Persian connections.

Mansūr ordered that the palace be demolished and a section of it was, but it was soon apparent that the demolition and transport of the materials was more expensive than making them new on site. When he consulted Khālid again about what should be done, the reply was that he should complete the demolition or people would say he had given up. Once again, the caliph rejected his advice and the great Ctesiphon arch still stands to this day.

It would be misleading to say that this was an equal society where people of different faiths lived together as fellow citizens. Christians, Jews and other non-Muslim religious minorities were second-class citizens in a number of ways, not being allowed, at least in theory, to bear arms or ride horses, both public indications of status. At the same time, they participated in the economic and intellectual life of the society and their cultural contributions were accepted and admired as an important part of the vibrant mix which characterized the life of the Abbasid caliphate.

ABBASID CULTURE REMEMBERED

The memory of the glories of Abbasid court culture lingered on in less expansive days. The personalities of the period, their characters, deeds and sayings remained part of the intellectual hinterland of Arab writers and thinkers for centuries. An interesting example of this is Ibn al-Sāī’s Consorts of the Caliphs. Ibn al-Sāī (d. 1276) lived in Baghdad and he was actually in the city at the time when it was sacked by the Mongols and the Abbasid caliph was put to death, in 1258. He himself survived this trauma and lived to a ripe old age. The book was probably written before that date. It consists of thirty-eight brief lives, some of them only a few lines long, of the female partners of the caliphs, celebrating their wit, their wealth and their piety. The author takes the story down to his own days, trying to show that the great women of the contemporary (thirteenth-century) Abbasid court were worthy inheritors of a great tradition, but the women of his own time lived virtuous and sober lives and talked only in prose. It was the women of the early Abbasid period who had panache and wit and the ability to make poetry come alive.

There are many memorable figures in the collection, but, to give a flavour, let us hear some of the story of Mahbūba, beloved of Caliph Mutawakkil. She was one of a group of 400 slave girls given to the caliph by one of his courtiers, but ‘in his eyes she surpassed them all’. She was famous for her ready wit and clever ripostes. One of the courtiers tells the following story:

I was once in the presence of Mutawakkil when he was drinking. He handed Mahbūba an apple perfumed with a scented musk blend. She kissed it and took her leave. Then one of her own slaves appeared with a piece of paper which she handed to Mutawakkil. He read it, laughed, and tossed the paper to me to read. This is what it said:

       ‘You-fragrance of an apple I had to myself

       You ignite in me the fire of ecstasy

       I weep and complain of my malady

       And of my grief’s intensity.

       If an apple could weep, then the one I hold

       Would shed such tears of pity

       If you do not know what my soul has suffered,

       Look, the proof is in my body.

       If you gaze upon it you will see

       One unable to suffer patiently.’

The poem was set to music and became a popular song.

The same courtier remembered another occasion:

The caliph said, ‘I paid Qabīha7 the Poetess a visit and found she had written my name on her cheek using scented musk blend. I swear, Alī [the court poet who was sitting with him], I have never seen anything more beautiful than that streak of black against her white cheek. Go ahead and compose a poem about that!’

Mahbūba was sitting behind the curtain, listening to us talk and in the time it took for an inkstand and a scroll of paper to be brought and for Alī to formulate his thoughts, she had already improvised the following verses:

       ‘She wrote “Jafar”8 in musk on her cheek

       How lovely that streak where the musk left its mark!

       On her face she wrote just one line,

       But she etched many more on my heart.

       Who can help a master in thrall to his slave,

       Subservient in his heart, but plain to see,

       Or one whose secret desire is Jafar

       May he drink his fill from your lips.’

Alī was dumbfounded by being upstaged like this.

In another story from the same courtier we hear:

Mutawwakil had a falling-out with Mahbūba and found it very hard to be apart from her. In the end the pair made up. Meanwhile I went to see him. He told me he’d had a dream that they had been reconciled, so he called a servant and said to him, ‘Go and find out how she is and what she is doing.’

The servant returned and told him that she was just singing.

‘Can that woman really be singing when I am so angry with her?’ he said to me. ‘Come on, let’s find out what she is crooning about.’

We headed to her room and this is what she was singing:

       ‘I wander the palace, but I see no one,

       No one will answer my plaint it would seem.

       I feel as though I’ve committed a sin,

       One I can repent of but never redeem.

       Will someone plead my case to a king

       Who ended a quarrel when he came in a dream?

       Yet when the dawn broke and the sun shone,

       He forsook me again and left me alone.’

Mutawakkil was visibly moved. Realizing he was there, she came out of her room, and I made myself scarce. She told him she’d had a dream in which he’d come to her and they’d made up.

That is why she had composed the poem, put it to music and sung it. Mutawakkil was so touched that he decided to stay and drink with her. She made sure I was well rewarded.

But the days of musk and wine were brought to a brutal end with the caliph’s assassination in 861. For all her beauty, intelligence and wealth, Mahbūba was still a slave. When Mutawakkil was killed his slaves were divided up and Mahbūba went to a Turkish soldier, Wasīf, one of the conspirators who had plotted the caliph’s death.

The courtier’s account continues:

One day, as he was having his morning drink of wine, Wasīf ordered that Mutawakkil’s slaves should be brought before him. They arrived in all their splendour, adorned, perfumed and dressed in brightly coloured clothes, bedecked with jewels, except for Mahbūba who came dressed in pure mourning white and not wearing any make-up.

The slaves sang, drank and made merry, as did Wasīf. Carried away by it all, he commanded Mahbūba to sing. She picked up her lute and sobbed as she sang:

       ‘What sweetness does life hold for me

       When I cannot see Jafar?

       A king I saw with my own eyes

       Murdered, rolled in the dust.

       The sick and the sorrowful

       They can all heal;

       But not Mahbūba—

       If she saw death for sale

       She would give everything she has to buy it

       And join him in the grave.

       For the bereaved

       Death is sweeter than life.’

The song struck home. Enraged, Wasīf was on the point of having her killed when Bughā [another Turkish soldier], who happened to be present, said, ‘Give her to me!’

Bughā took her, gave her her freedom and allowed her to live wherever she pleased. She left Samarra for Baghdad where she lived in obscurity and died of grief.

May God have mercy on her and reward her for her devotion to the memory of her beloved master.9

The story is interesting in so many ways. The brilliant court culture where a quick wit and good poetic style were passports to success; the role of the women, virtually princesses and slaves as the same moment but major actors in court life; and the touching epitaph written by the author 400 years after the events but still remembering them as fresh and poignant.

The court culture of the Abbasids in their heyday had an unrivalled variety and éclat. It was an environment in which many different talents, from many different backgrounds, could flourish. Apart from the world of theology and the disputes about the createdness of the Qur’ān, disputes which were, as we have seen, as much political as intellectual, there was no official line which had to be obeyed, no censorship of views on a whole world of matters. It was the sheer vigour and variety of this culture which makes the Abbasid caliphate such an inspiring and powerful model.

For all its splendour, however, Abbasid culture has little resonance with modern audiences, both in the Muslim community and, more especially, beyond. In a world dominated by visual images the Abbasids have virtually nothing to offer. Abbasid Baghdad has left no traces and the detailed descriptions only mean that we can reconstruct it in our imaginations. The outlines of the great palaces at Samarra can be drawn in the dust and gravel of central Iraq, but the mud-brick of which they were built has dissolved into the soil from which it was made, while the plaster, mosaics and frescoes which covered and beautified the walls only survive in the smallest fragments. The gorgeous silks and intricate carpets which the sources constantly refer to have vanished without trace. Huge numbers of books were produced and read, but there were no illustrated manuscripts to preserve a visual image of the caliphal court. The Umayyad caliphs left their stone-built palaces in the Syrian desert which we can still admire. The courts of later medieval Iran are shown in the book-paintings so evocative of court life and the Ottomans have bequeathed not just illustrations of court life but the grand palaces in which they, their courts and their harems lived and moved. This great gap should not, however, blind us to the fact that the court of the caliphs was, in its time, the most important and the richest cultural centre on the planet.