The Umayyad Mosque, located in Damascus, Syria, holds a shrine said to contain the head of John the Baptist. DEA/G. Dagli Orti/Getty Images
The Arab conquests are often viewed as a discrete period. The end of the conquests appears to be a convenient dividing line because it coincides with a conventional watershed, the overthrow of the Umayyad caliphs by the ‘Abbasids. To illustrate their role in broader social and cultural change, however, the military conquests should be included in a period more than twice as long, during which the conquest of the hearts and minds of the majority of the subject population also occurred. Between 634 and 870 Islam was transformed from the badge of a small Arab ruling class to the dominant faith of a vast empire that stretched from the western Mediterranean into Central Asia.
As a result of so long and gradual a period of conversion, Arab cultures intermingled with the indigenous cultures of the conquered peoples to produce Islam’s fundamental orientations and identities. The Arabic language became a vehicle for the transmission of high culture, even though the Arabs remained a minority. For the first time in the history of the Nile-to-Oxus region, a new language of high culture, carrying a great cultural florescence, replaced all previous languages of high culture. Trade and taxation replaced booty as the fiscal basis of the Muslim state; a nontribal army replaced a tribal one; and a centralized empire became a nominal confederation, with all of the social dislocation and rivalries those changes imply.
Yet despite continuous internal dissension, virtually no Muslim raised the possibility of there being more than one legitimate leader. Furthermore, the impulse toward solidarity, inherited from Muhammad and Abu Bakr, may have actually been encouraged by persisting minority status. While Muslims were a minority, they naturally formed a conception of Islamic dominance as territorial rather than religious, and of unconverted non-Muslim communities as secondary members. In one important respect the Islamic faith differed from all other major religious traditions: the formative period of the faith coincided with its political domination of a rich complex of old cultures. As a result, during the formative period of their civilization, the Muslims could both introduce new elements and reorient old ones in creative ways.
Just as Muhammad fulfilled and redirected ongoing tendencies in Arabia, the builders of early Islamicate civilization carried forth and transformed developments in the Roman and Sasanian territories in which they first dominated. While Muhammad was emerging as a leader in the Hejaz, the Byzantine and Sasanian emperors were ruling states that resembled what the Islamicate empire was to become. Byzantine rule stretched from North Africa into Syria and sometimes Iraq; the Sasanians competed with the Byzantines in Syria and Iraq and extended their sway, at its furthest, across the Oxus River. Among their subjects were speakers and writers of several major languages—various forms of Aramaic, such as Mandaean and Syriac; Greek; Arabic; and Middle Persian. In fact, a significant number of persons were probably bilingual or trilingual. Both the Byzantine and the Sasanian empire declared an official religion, Christianity and Zoroastrian-Mazdeism, respectively. The Sasanian empire in the early 7th century was ruled by a religion-backed centralized monarchy with an elaborate bureaucratic structure that was reproduced on a smaller scale at the provincial courts of its appointed governors. Its religious demography was complex, encompassing Christians of many persuasions, including monophysites, Nestorians, Orthodox, and others; pagans; gnostics; Jews; and Mazdeans. Minority religious communities were becoming more clearly organized and isolated. The population included priests; traders and merchants; landlords (dihqans), sometimes living not on the land but as absentees in the cities; pastoralists; and large numbers of peasant agriculturalists. In southern Iraq, especially in and around towns like Al-Hirah, it included migratory and settled Arabs as well. Both empires relied on standing armies for their defense and on agriculture, taxation, conquest, and trade for their resources. When the Muslim conquests began, the Byzantines and Sasanians had been in conflict for a century; in the most recent exchanges, the Sasanians had established direct rule in al-Hirah, further exposing its many Arabs to their administration. When the Arab conquests began, representatives of Byzantine and Sasanian rule on Arabia’s northern borders were not strong enough to resist.
Abu Bakr’s successor in Medina, ‘Umar I (ruled 634–644), had not so much to stimulate conquest as he had to organize and channel it. He chose as leaders skillful managers experienced in trade and commerce as well as warfare and imbued with an ideology that provided their activities with a cosmic significance. The total numbers involved in the initial conquests may have been relatively small, perhaps less than 50,000, divided into numerous shifting groups. Yet few actions took place without any sanction from the Medinan government or one of its appointed commanders. The fighters, or muqatilah, could generally accomplish much more with Medina’s support than without. ‘Umar, one of Muhammad’s earliest and staunchest supporters, had quickly developed an administrative system of manifestly superior effectiveness. He defined the ummah as a continually expansive polity managed by a new ruling elite, which included successful military commanders like Khalid ibn al-Walid. Even after the conquests ended, this sense of expansiveness continued to be expressed in the way Muslims divided the world into their own zone, the Dar al-Islam, and the zone into which they could and should expand, the Dar al-Harb, the abode of war. The norms of ‘Umar’s new elite were supplied by Islam as it was then understood. Taken together, Muhammad’s revelations from God and his Sunnah (precedent-setting example) defined the cultic and personal practices that distinguished Muslims from others: prayer, fasting, pilgrimage, charity, avoidance of pork and intoxicants, membership in one community centred at Mecca, and activism (jihad) on the community’s behalf.
‘Umar symbolized this conception of the ummah in two ways. He assumed an additional title, amir al-mu’minin (“commander of the faithful”), which linked organized activism with faithfulness (iman), the earliest defining feature of the Muslim. He also adopted a lunar calendar that began with the emigration (Hijrah), the moment at which a group of individual followers of Muhammad had become an active social presence. Because booty was the ummah’s major resource, ‘Umar concentrated on ways to distribute and sustain it. He established a diwan, or register, to pay all members of the ruling elite and the conquering forces, from Muhammad’s family on down, in order of entry into the ummah. The immovable booty was kept for the state. After the government’s fifth-share of the movable booty was reserved, the rest was distributed according to the diwan. The muqatilah he stationed as an occupying army in garrisons (amsar) constructed in locations strategic to further conquest: al-Fustat in Egypt, Damascus in Syria, Kufah and Basra in Iraq. The garrisons attracted indigenous population and initiated significant demographic changes, such as a population shift from northern to southern Iraq. They also inaugurated the rudiments of an “Islamic” daily life; each garrison was commanded by a caliphal appointee, responsible for setting aside an area for prayer, a mosque (masjid), named for the prostrations (sujud) that had become a characteristic element in the five daily worship sessions (salats). There the fighters could hear God’s revelations to Muhammad recited by men trained in that emerging art. The most pious might commit the whole work to memory. There too, the Friday midday salat could be performed communally, accompanied by an important educational device, the sermon (khutbah), through which the fighters could be instructed in the principles of the faith. The mosque fused the practical and the spiritual in a special way: because the Friday prayer included an expression of loyalty to the ruler, it could also provide an opportunity to declare rebellion.
The Umayyad Mosque, located in Damascus, Syria, holds a shrine said to contain the head of John the Baptist. DEA/G. Dagli Orti/Getty Images
The series of ongoing conquests that fueled this system had their most extensive phase under ‘Umar and his successor ‘Uthman ibn ‘Affan (ruled 644–656). Within 25 years Muslim Arab forces created the first empire to permanently link western Asia with the Mediterranean. Within another century Muslim conquerors surpassed the achievement of Alexander the Great, not only in the durability of their accomplishment but in its scope as well, reaching from the Iberian Peninsula to Central Asia. Resistance was generally slight and nondestructive, and conquest through capitulation was preferred to conquest by force. After the Sasanian city of Al-Hirah fell in 633, a large Byzantine force was defeated in Syria, opening the way to the final conquest of Damascus in 636. The next year further gains were made in Sasanian territory, especially at the Battle of al-Qadisiyyah, and in the next the focus returned to Syria and the taking of Jerusalem. By 640 Roman control in Syria was over, and by 641 the Sasanians had lost all their territory west of the Zagros. During the years 642 to 646 Egypt was taken under the leadership of ‘Amr ibn al-‘As, who soon began raids into what the Muslims called the Maghrib, the lands west of Egypt. Shortly thereafter, in the east, Persepolis fell; in 651 the defeat and assassination of the last Sasanian emperor, Yazdegerd III, marked the end of the 400-year-old Sasanian empire.
This phase of conquest ended under ‘Uthman and ramified widely. ‘Uthman may even have sent an emissary to China in 651; by the end of the 7th century Arab Muslims were trading there. The fiscal strain of such expansion and the growing independence of local Arabs outside the peninsula underlay the persisting discontents that surfaced toward the end of ‘Uthman’s reign. The very way in which he was made caliph had already signaled the potential for competition over leadership and resources. Perceived as pliable and docile, he was the choice of the small committee charged by the dying ‘Umar with selecting one of their own number. Once in office, however, ‘Uthman acted to establish the power of Medina over and against some of the powerful Quraysh families at Mecca and local notables outside Arabia. He was accused of nepotism for relying on his own family, the Banu Umayyah, whose talents ‘Umar had already recognized. Among his many other “objectionable” acts was his call for the production of a single standard collection of Muhammad’s messages from God, which was known simply as the Qur’an (“Recitation” or “Recitations”). Simultaneously he ordered the destruction of any other collections. Although they might have differed only in minor respects, they represented the independence of local communities. Above all, ‘Uthman was the natural target of anyone dissatisfied with the distribution of the conquest’s wealth, since he represented and defended a system that defined all income as Medina’s to distribute.
The difficulties of ‘Uthman’s reign took more than a century to resolve. They were the inevitable result not just of the actions of individuals but of the whole process initiated by Muhammad’s achievements. His coalition had been fragile. He had disturbed existing social arrangements without being able to reconstruct and stabilize new ones quickly. Into a society organized along family lines, he had introduced the supremacy of trans-kinship ties. Yet he had been forced to make use of kinship ties himself; and, despite his egalitarian message, he had introduced new inequities by granting privileges to the earliest and most intensely devoted followers of his cause. Furthermore, personal rivalries were stimulated by his charisma; individuals like his wife ‘A’ishah, his daughter Fatimah, and her husband ‘Ali frequently vied for his affection. ‘Umar’s diwan had, then, reinforced old inequities by extending privileges to wealthy high-placed Meccans, and it had introduced new tensions by assigning a lower status to those, indigenous or immigrant to the provinces, who joined the cause later (but who felt themselves to be making an equivalent or greater contribution). Other tensions resulted from conditions in the conquered lands: the initial isolation of Arab Muslims, and even Arab Christians who fought with them, from the indigenous non-Arab population; the discouragement of non-Arab converts, except as clients (mawali) of Arab tribes; the administrative dependence of peninsular Arabs on local Arabs and non-Arabs; and the development of a tax system that discriminated against non-Muslims.
The ensuing conflicts were played out in a series of intra-Muslim disputes that began with ‘Uthman’s assassination in 656 and continued to the end of the period under discussion. The importance of kinship ties persisted, but they were gradually replaced by the identities of a new social order. These new identities resulted from Muslim responses to anti-Muslim activity as well as from Muslim participation in a series of controversies focused on the issue of leadership. Because the ummah, unified under one leader, was seen as an earthly expression of God’s favour, and because God was seen as the controller of all aspects of human existence, the identities formed in the course of the ummah’s early history could fuse dimensions that secular modern observers are able to distinguish—religious, social, political, and economic. Furthermore, intra-Muslim rivalries changed during the conversion period; the meaningfulness of the new identities expanded as non-Muslims contributed to Islam’s formation, through opposition or through conversion, and the key issues broadened as the participating constituencies enlarged. At first the disputes were coterminous with intra-Arab, indeed even intra-Quraysh, rivalries; only later did they involve persons of other backgrounds. Thus the faith of Islam was formed in conjunction with the crises that attended the establishment of rule by Muslims. Muslims might have produced an extremely localized and exclusivistic religion; but in spite of, and perhaps because of, their willingness to engage in continuing internal conflicts, they produced one of the most unified religious traditions in human history.
By the end of the period of conversion and crystallization, Muslim historians would retrospectively identify four discrete periods of conflict and label them fitnahs, trials or temptations to test the unity of the ummah. Many historians also came to view some identities formed during the fitnahs as authentic and others as deviant. This retrospective interpretation may be anachronistic and misleading. The entire period between 656 and the last quarter of the 9th century was conflict-ridden, and the fitnahs merely mark periods of intensification; yet the most striking characteristic of the period was the pursuit of unity.
In the first two fitnahs the claimants to the caliphate relied on their high standing among the Quraysh and their local support in either Arabia, Iraq, or Syria. Competition for the caliphate thus reflected rivalries among the leading Arab families as well as regional interests. The first fitnah occurred between ‘Uthman’s assassination in 656 and the accession of his kinsman Mu‘awiyah I in 661 and included the caliphate of ‘Ali, the cousin and son-in-law of Muhammad. It involved a three-way contest between ‘Ali’s party in Iraq; a coalition of important Quraysh families in Mecca, including Muhammad’s wife ‘A’ishah and Talhah and Zubayr; and the party of Mu‘awiyah, the governor of Syria and a member of ‘Uthman’s clan, the Banu Umayyah. Ostensibly the conflict focused on whether ‘Uthman had been assassinated justly, whether ‘Ali had been involved, and whether ‘Uthman’s death should be avenged by Mu‘awiyah or by the leading Meccans. ‘Ali and his party (shi‘ah) at first gained power over the representatives of the other leading Meccan families, then lost it permanently to Mu‘awiyah, who elevated Damascus, which had been his provincial capital, to the status of imperial capital. Disappointed at the Battle of Siffin (657) with ‘Ali’s failure to insist on his right to rule, a segment of his partisans withdrew; another segment of ‘Ali’s party intensified their loyalty to him as a just and heroic leader who was one of Muhammad’s dearest intimates and the father of his only male descendants.
An Iraqi Shi‘ite cleric looks at the minaret of an ancient mosque near the Shi‘ite holy city of Najaf. Joseph Eid/AFP/Getty Images
The second fitnah followed Mu‘awiyah’s caliphate (661–680), which itself was not free from strife, and coincided with the caliphates of Mu‘awiyah’s son Yazid I (ruled 680–683), whom he designated as successor, and Yazid’s three successors. This fitnah was a second-generation reprise of the first; some of the personnel of the former were descendants or relatives of the leaders of the latter. Once again, different regions supported different claimants, as new tribal divisions emerged in the garrison towns; and once again, representatives of the Syrian Umayyads prevailed. In 680, at Karbala’ in Iraq, Yazid’s army murdered al-Husayn, a son of ‘Ali and grandson of Muhammad, along with a small group of supporters, accusing them of rebellion. And even though the Umayyads subdued Iraq, rebellions in the name of this or that relative of ‘Ali continued, attracting more and more non-Arab support and introducing new dimensions to his cause. In the Hejaz the Marwanid branch of the Umayyads, descendants of Marwan I who claimed the caliphate in 684, fought against ‘Abd Allah ibn al-Zubayr for years; by the time they defeated him, they had lost most of Arabia to Kharijite rebels.
During the period of the first two fitnahs, resistance to Muslim rule was an added source of conflict. Some of this resistance took the form of syncretic or anti-Islamic religious movements. For example, during the second fitnah, in Iraq a Jew named Abu ‘Isa al-‘Isfahani led a syncretic movement (that is, a movement combining different forms of belief or practice) on the basis of his claim to be a prophet (an option not generally open to Muslim rebels) and forerunner of the messiah. He viewed Muhammad and Jesus as messengers sent not to all humanity but only to their own communities, so he urged each community to continue in its own tradition as he helped prepare for the coming of the messiah. In other areas, such as the newly conquered Maghrib, resistance took the form of large-scale military hostility. In the 660s the Umayyads had expanded their conflict with the Byzantine Empire by competing for bases in coastal North Africa; it soon became clear, however, that only a full-fledged occupation would serve their purposes. That occupation was begun by ‘Uqbah ibn Nafi‘, the founder of al-Qayrawan (Kairouan, in modern Tunisia) and, as Sidi (Saint) ‘Uqbah, the first of many Maghribi Muslim saints. It eventually resulted in the incorporation of large numbers of pagan or Christianized Amazigh (plural: Imazighen; Berber) tribes, the first large-scale forcible incorporation of tribal peoples since the secession of tribes under Abu Bakr. But first the Arab armies met fierce resistance from two individuals—one a man, Kusaylah, and one a woman, al-Kahinah—who became Amazigh heroes. Amazigh resistance was not controlled until the end of the 7th century, after which the Imazighen participated in the further conquest of the Maghrib and the Iberian Peninsula.
Thousands of Palestinian women pray in front of the Dome of the Rock during Ramadan in Jerusalem. Awad Awad/AFP/Getty Images
During the caliphate of ‘Abd al-Malik ibn Marwan (ruled 685–705), which followed the end of the second fitnah, and under his successors during the next four decades, the problematic consequences of the conquests became much more visible. Like their Byzantine and late Sasanian predecessors, the Marwanid caliphs nominally ruled the various religious communities but allowed the communities’ own appointed or elected officials to administer most internal affairs. Yet now the right of religious communities to live in this fashion was justified by the Qur’an and Sunnah; as peoples with revealed books (ahl al-kitab), they deserved protection (dhimmah) in return for a payment. The Arabs also formed a single religious community whose right to rule over the non-Arab protected communities the Marwanids sought to maintain.
To signify this supremacy, as well as his co-optation of previous legitimacy, ‘Abd al-Malik ordered the construction of the monumental Dome of the Rock in Jerusalem, a major centre of non-Muslim population. The site chosen was sacred to Jews and Christians because of its associations with biblical history; it later gained added meaning for Muslims, who believed it to be the starting point for Muhammad’s mi‘raj (midnight journey to heaven). Although the Dome of the Rock (whose original function remains unclear) and many early mosques resembled contemporary Christian churches, gradually an Islamic aesthetic emerged: a dome on a geometrical base, accompanied by a minaret from which to deliver the call to prayer; and an emphasis on surface decoration that combined arabesque and geometrical design with calligraphic representations of God’s Word. ‘Abd al-Malik took other steps to mark the distinctiveness of Islamic rule: for example, he encouraged the use of Arabic as the language of government and had Islamized coins minted to replace the Byzantine and Sasanian-style coinage that had continued to be used since the conquests. During the Marwanid period the Muslim community was further consolidated by the regularization of the public cult and the crystallization of a set of five minimal duties (sometimes called pillars).
The Marwanids also depended heavily on the help of non-Arab administrative personnel (kuttab, singular katib) and on administrative practices (e.g., a set of government bureaus) inherited from Byzantine and, in particular, late Sasanian practice. Pre-Islamic writings on governance translated into Arabic, especially from Middle Persian, influenced caliphal style. The governing structure at Damascus and in the provinces began to resemble pre-Islamic monarchy, and thus appealed to a majority of subjects, whose heritage extolled the absolute authority of a divinely sanctioned ruler. Much of the inspiration for this development came from ‘Abd al-Malik’s administrator in the eastern territories, al-Hajjaj ibn Yusuf al-Thaqafi, who was himself an admirer of Sasanian practice.
The Marwanid caliphs, as rulers of Muslims and non-Muslims alike, had thus been forced to respond to a variety of expectations. Ironically, it was their defense of the importance and distinctiveness of the Arabic language and the Islamic community, not their responsiveness to non-Muslim preferences, that prepared the way for the gradual incorporation of most of the subject population into the ummah. As the conquests slowed and the isolation of the fighters (muqatilah) became less necessary, it became more and more difficult to keep Arabs garrisoned. The sedentarization of Arabs that had begun in the Hejaz was being repeated and extended outside the peninsula. As the tribal links that had so dominated Umayyad politics began to break down, the meaningfulness of tying non-Arab converts to Arab tribes as clients was diluted; moreover, the number of non-Muslims who wished to join the ummah was already becoming too large for this process to work effectively.
Simultaneously, the growing prestige and elaboration of things Arabic and Islamic made them more attractive to non-Arab Muslims and to non-Muslims alike. The more the Muslim rulers succeeded, the more prestige their customs, norms, and habits acquired. Heirs to the considerable agricultural and commercial resources of the Nile-to-Oxus region, they increased its prosperity and widened its horizons by extending its control far to the east and west. Arabic, which occasionally had been used for administrative purposes in earlier empires, now became a valuable lingua franca. As Muslims continued to adapt to rapidly changing circumstances, they needed Arabic to reflect upon and elaborate what they had inherited from the Hejaz. Because the Qur’an, translation of which was prohibited, was written in a form of Arabic that quickly became archaic to Muslims living in the garrisons and because it contained references to life in Arabia before and during Muhammad’s time, full understanding of the text required special effort. Scholars began to study the religion and poetry of the jahiliyyah, the times of ignorance before God’s revelation to Muhammad. Philologians soon emerged, in the Hejaz as well as in the garrisons. Many Muslims cultivated reports, which came to be known as Hadith, of what Muhammad had said and done, in order to develop a clearer and fuller picture of his Sunnah. These materials were sometimes gathered into accounts of his campaigns, called maghazi. The emulation of Muhammad’s Sunnah was a major factor in the development of recognizably “Muslim” styles of personal piety and public decision making. As differences in the garrisons needed to be settled according to “Islamic” principles, the caliphs appointed arbitrating judges, qadis, who were knowledgeable in Qur’an and Sunnah. The pursuit of legal knowledge, fiqh, was taken up in many locales and informed by local pre-Islamic custom and Islamic resources. These special forms of knowledge began to be known as ‘ulum (singular ‘ilm) and the persons who pursued them as ulama (‘ulama’, singular ‘alim), a role that provided new sources of prestige and influence, especially for recent converts or sons of converts.
Muslims outside Arabia were also affected by interacting with members of the religious communities over which they ruled. When protected non-Muslims converted, they brought new expectations and habits with them; Islamic eschatology is one area that reflects such enrichment. Unconverted protected groups (dhimmis) were equally influential. Expressions of Islamic identity often had to take into account the critique of non-Muslims, just as the various non-Muslim traditions were affected by contact with Muslims. This interaction had special consequences in the areas of prophethood and revelation, where major shifts and accommodations occurred among Jews, Christians, Mazdeans, and Muslims during the first two centuries of their coexistence. Muslims attempted to establish Muhammad’s legitimacy as an heir to Jewish and Christian prophethood, while non-Muslims tried to distinguish their prophets and scriptures from Muhammad and the Qur’an. Within the emergent Islamicate civilization, the separate religious communities continued to go their own way, but the influence of Muslim rule and the intervention of the caliphs in their internal affairs could not help but affect them. The Babylonian Talmud, completed during these years, bears traces of early interaction among communities. In Iraq caliphal policy helped promote the Jewish gaons (local rabbinic authorities) over the exilarch (a central secular leader). Mazdeans turned to the Nestorian Church to avoid Islam, or reconceptualized Zoroaster as a prophet sent to a community with a Book. With the dhimmi system (the system of protecting non-Muslims for payment), Muslim rulers formalized and probably intensified pre-Islamic tendencies toward religious communalization. Furthermore, the greater formality of the new system could protect the subject communities from each other as well as from the dominant minority. So “converting” to Islam, at least in the Nile-to-Oxus region, meant joining one recognizably distinct social entity and leaving another. One of the most significant aspects of many Muslim societies was the inseparability of “religious” affiliation and group membership, a phenomenon that has translated poorly into the social structures of modern Muslim nations. In the central caliphal lands of the early 8th century, membership in the Muslim community offered the best chance for social and physical mobility, regardless of a certain degree of discrimination against non-Arabs. Among many astounding examples of this mobility is the fact that several of the early governors and independent dynasts of Egypt and the Maghrib were grandsons of men born in Central Asia.
The Marwanid Maghrib illustrates a kind of conversion more like that of the peninsular Arabs. After the defeat of initial Amazigh resistance movements, the Arab conquerors of the Maghrib quickly incorporated the Amazigh tribes en masse into the Muslim community, turning them immediately to further conquests. In 710 an Arab-Amazigh army set out for the Iberian Peninsula under the leadership of Tariq ibn Ziyad (the name Gibraltar is derived from Jabal Tariq, or “Mountain of Tariq”). They defeated King Roderick in 711; raided into and through the Iberian Peninsula, which they called al-Andalus; and ruled in the name of the Umayyad caliph. The Andalusian Muslims never had serious goals across the Pyrenees. In 732 Charles Martel encountered not a Muslim army but a summer raiding party; despite his “victory” over that party, Muslims continued their seasonal raiding along the southern French coast for many years. Muslim Andalusia is particularly interesting because there the pressure for large-scale conversion that was coming to plague the Umayyads in Syria, Iraq, and Iran never developed. Muslims may never have become a majority throughout their 700-year Andalusian presence. Non-Muslims entered into the Muslim realm as Mozarabs, Christians who had adopted the language and manners, rather than the faith, of the Arabs. Given essentially the same administrative arrangements, the Iberian Christian population was later restored to dominance while the Syrian Christian population was drastically reduced, but the Iberian Jewish population all but disappeared while the Nile-to-Oxus Jewish population survived.
The Imazighen who remained in the Maghrib illustrate the mobility of ideologies and institutions from the central lands to more recently conquered territories. No sooner had they given up anti-Muslim resistance and joined the Muslim community than they rebelled again, but this time an Islamic identity, Kharijism, provided the justification. Kharijite ideas had been carried to the Maghrib by refugees from the numerous revolts against the Marwanids. Kharijite egalitarianism suited the economic and social grievances of the Imazighen as non-Arab Muslims under Arab rule. The revolts outlasted the Marwanids; they resulted in the first independent Maghribi dynasty, the Rustamid, founded by Muslims of Persian descent. The direct influence of the revolts was felt as late as the 10th century and survives among small communities in Tunisia and Algeria.
Meanwhile, in the central caliphal lands, growing discontent with the emerging order crystallized in a multifaceted movement of opposition to the Marwanids. It culminated in the third fitnah (744–750), which resulted in the establishment of a new and final dynasty of caliphs, the ‘Abbasids. Ever since the second fitnah, a number of concerned and self-conscious Muslims had begun to raise serious questions about the proper Muslim life and the Marwanids’ ability to exemplify it, and to answer them by reference to key events in the ummah’s history. Pious Muslims tried to define a good Muslim and to decide whether a bad Muslim should be excluded from the community, or a bad caliph from office. They also considered God’s role in determining a person’s sinfulness and final dispensation. The proper relationship between Arab and non-Arab Muslims, and between Muslims and dhimmis, was another important and predictable focus of reflection. The willingness of non-Arabs to join the ummah was growing, but the Marwanids had not found a solution that was either ideologically acceptable or fiscally sound. Because protected non-Muslim groups paid special taxes, fiscal stability seemed to depend on continuing to discourage conversion. One Marwanid, ‘Umar II (ruled 717–720), experimented unsuccessfully with a just solution. In these very practical and often pressing debates lay the germs of Muslim theology, as various overlapping positions, not always coterminous with political groupings, were taken: rejecting the history of the community by demanding rule by Muhammad’s family; rejecting the history of the community by following any pious Muslim and excluding any sinner; or accepting the history of the community, its leaders, and most of its members.
In the course of these debates the Marwanid caliphs began to seem severely deficient to a significant number of Muslims of differing persuasions and aspirations. Direct and implied criticism began to surface. Al-Hasan al-Basri, a pious ascetic and a model for the early Sufis, called on the Marwanids to rule as good Muslims and called on good Muslims to be suspicious of worldly power. Ibn Ishaq composed an account of Muhammad’s messengership that emphasized the importance of the ansar, the Yathribi tribes that accepted Muhammad, and by implication the non-Arab converts (from whom Ibn Ishaq himself was descended). The Marwanids were accused of bid‘ah, new actions for which there were no legitimate Islamic precedents. Their continuation of pre-Islamic institutions—the spy system, extortion of deposed officials by torture, and summary execution—were some of their most visible “offenses.” To the pious, the ideal ruler, or imam (the word also for a Muslim who led the salat), should, like Muhammad, possess special learning and knowledge. The first four caliphs, they argued, had been imams in this sense, but under the Umayyads the caliphate had been reduced to a military and administrative office devoid of imamah, of true legitimacy. This piety-minded opposition to the Umayyads, as it has been aptly dubbed, now began to talk about a new dispensation. Some of the most vocal members found special learning and knowledge only in Muhammad’s family. Some defined Muhammad’s family broadly to include any Hashimite; others, more narrowly, to include only descendants of ‘Ali. As the number of Muhammad’s descendants through ‘Ali had grown, numerous rebellions had broken out in the name of one or the other, drawing on various combinations of constituencies and reflecting a wide spectrum of Islamic and pre-Islamic aspirations.
In the late Marwanid period, the piety-minded opposition found expression in a movement organized in Khorasan (Khurasan) by Abu Muslim, a semisecret operative of one particularly ambitious Hashimite family, the ‘Abbasids. The ‘Abbasids, who were kin but not descendants of Muhammad, claimed also to have inherited, a generation earlier, the authority of one of ‘Ali’s actual descendants, Abu Hashim. Publicly Abu Muslim called for any qualified member of Muhammad’s family to become caliph, but privately he allowed the partisans (shi‘ah) of ‘Ali to assume that he meant them. Abu Muslim ultimately succeeded because he managed to link the concerns of the piety-minded in Syria and Iraq with Khorasanian discontent. He played upon the grievances of its Arab tribes against the tribes of Syria and their representatives in the Khorasanian provincial government, and on the millennial expectations of non-Arab converts and non-Muslims disenchanted with the injustices of Marwanid rule.
When in 750 the army organized and led by Abu Muslim succeeded in defeating the last Marwanid ruler, his caliph-designate represented only one segment of this broad coalition. He was the head of the ‘Abbasid family, Abu al-‘Abbas al-Saffah, who now subordinated the claims of the party of ‘Ali to those of his own family and who promised to restore the unity of the ummah, or jama‘ah. The circumstances of his accession reconfigured the piety-minded opposition that had helped bring him to power. The party of ‘Ali refused to accept the compromise the ‘Abbasids offered. Their former fellow opponents did accept membership in the reunified jama‘ah, isolating the People of the Shi‘ah and causing them to define themselves in terms of more radical points of view. Those who accepted the early ‘Abbasids came to be known as the People of the Sunnah and Jama‘ah. They accepted the cumulative historical reality of the ummah’s first century: all the decisions of the community and all the caliphs it had accepted had been legitimate, as would be any subsequent caliph who could unite the community. The concept of fitnah acquired a fully historicist meaning: if internal discord were a trial sent by God, then any unifying victor must be God’s choice.
The historicists came to be known as Sunnis and their main opponents as Shi‘ites. These labels are somewhat misleading because they imply that only the Sunnis tried to follow the Sunnah of Muhammad. In fact, each group relied on the Sunnah, but emphasized different elements. For the Sunnis, who should more properly be called the Jama‘i-Sunnis, the principle of solidarity was essential to the Sunnah. The Shi‘ites argued that the fundamental element of the Sunnah, and one willfully overlooked by the Jama‘i-Sunnis, was Muhammad’s devotion to his family and his wish that they succeed him through ‘Ali. These new labels expressed and consolidated the social reorganization that had been under way since the beginning of the conquests. The vast majority of Muslims now became consensus-oriented, while a small minority became oppositional. The inherent inimitability of Muhammad’s role had made it impossible for any form of successorship to capture universal approval.
When the ‘Abbasids denied the special claims of the family of ‘Ali, they prompted the Shi‘ites to define themselves as a permanent opposition to the status quo. The crystallization of Shi‘ism into a movement of protest received its greatest impetus during and just after the lifetime of one of the most influential Shi‘ite leaders of the early ‘Abbasid period, Ja‘far al-Sadiq (died 765). Ja‘far’s vision and leadership allowed the Shi‘ites to understand their chaotic history as a meaningful series of efforts by truly pious and suffering Muslims to right the wrongs of the majority. The leaders of the minority had occupied the office of imam, the central Shi‘ite institution, which had been passed on from the first imam, ‘Ali, by designation down to Ja‘far, the sixth. To protect his followers from increasing Sunni hostility to the views of radical Shi‘ites, known as the ghulat (“extremists”), who claimed prophethood for ‘Ali, Ja‘far made a distinction that both protected the uniqueness of prophethood and established the superiority of the role of imam. Since prophethood had ended, its true intent would die without the imams, whose protection from error allowed them to carry out their indispensable task.
Although Ja‘far did develop an ideology that invited Sunni toleration, he did not unify all Shi‘ites. Differences continued to be expressed through loyalty to various of his relatives. During Ja‘far’s lifetime, his uncle Zayd revolted in Kufah (740), founding the branch of Shi‘ism known as the Zaydiyyah (Zaydis), or Fivers (for their allegiance to the fifth imam), who became particularly important in southern Arabia. Any pious follower of ‘Ali could become their imam, and any imam could be deposed if he behaved unacceptably. The Shi‘ite majority followed Ja‘far’s son Musa al-Kazim and imams in his line through the 12th, who disappeared in 873. Those loyal to the 12 imams became known as the Imamis or Ithna ‘Ashariyyah (Twelvers). They adopted a quietistic stance toward the status quo government of the ‘Abbasids and prepared to wait until the 12th imam should return as the messiah to avenge injustices against Shi‘ites and to restore justice before the Last Judgment. Some of Ja‘far’s followers, however, remained loyal to Isma‘il, Ja‘far’s eldest son who predeceased his father after being designated. These became the Isma‘iliyyah (Isma‘ilis) or Sab‘iyyah (Seveners), and they soon became a source of continuing revolution in the name of Isma‘il’s son Muhammad al-Tamm, who was believed to have disappeared. Challenges to the ‘Abbasids were not long in coming. Of particular significance was the establishment in 789 of the first independent Shi‘ite dynasty, in present-day Morocco, by Idris ibn ‘Abd Allah ibn Hasan II, who had fled after participating in an unsuccessful uprising near Mecca. Furthermore, Kharijite rebellions continued to occur regularly.
Fifteenth-century vellum by a Persian artist depicting Harun al-Rashid and a barber in a Turkish bath. Or.6810 f.27v/British Library, London, UK/© British Library Board. All Rights Reserved/The Bridgeman Art Library
Legitimacy was a scarce and fragile resource in all premodern societies; in the early ‘Abbasid environment, competition to define and secure legitimacy was especially intense. The ‘Abbasids came to power vulnerable; their early actions undermined the unitive potential of their office. Having alienated the Shi‘ites, they liquidated the Umayyad family, one of whom, ‘Abd al-Rahman I, escaped and founded his own state in Andalusia. Although the ‘Abbasids were able to buttress their legitimacy by employing the force of their Khorasanian army, by appealing to their piety-minded support, and by emphasizing their position as heirs to the pre-Islamic traditions of rulership, their own circumstances and policies militated against them. Despite their continuing preference for Khorasanian troops, the ‘Abbasids’ move to Iraq and their execution of Abu Muslim disappointed the Khorasanian chauvinists who had helped them. The non-Muslim majority often rebelled too. Bih’afrid ibn Farwardin claimed to be a prophet capable of incorporating both Mazdeism and Islam into a new faith. Hashim ibn Hakim, called al-Muqanna‘ (“the Veiled One”), around 759 declared himself a prophet and then a god, heir to all previous prophets, to numerous followers of ‘Ali, and to Abu Muslim himself.
The ‘Abbasids symbolized their connection with their pre-Islamic predecessors by founding a new capital, Baghdad, near the old Sasanian capital. They also continued to elaborate the Sasanian-like structure begun by the Marwanid governors in Iraq. Their court life became more and more elaborate, the bureaucracy fuller, the inner sanctum of the palace fuller than ever with slaves and concubines as well as the retinues of the caliph’s four legal wives. By the time of Harun al-Rashid (ruled 786–809), Europe had nothing to compare with Baghdad, not even the court of his contemporary Charlemagne (ruled 768–814). But problems surfaced too. Slaves’ sons fathered by Muslims were not slaves and so could compete for the succession. Despite the ‘Abbasids’ defense of Islam, unconverted Jews and Christians could be influential at court. The head (vizier, or wazir) of the financial bureaucracy sometimes became the effective head of government by taking over the chancery as well. Like all absolute rulers, the ‘Abbasid caliphs soon confronted the insoluble dilemma of absolutism: the monarch cannot be absolute unless he depends on helpers, but his dependence on helpers undermines his absolutism. Harun al-Rashid experienced this paradox in a particularly painful way: having drawn into his service prominent members of a family of Buddhist converts, the Barmakids, he found them such rivals that he liquidated them within a matter of years. It was also during Harun’s reign that Ibrahim ibn al-Aghlab, a trusted governor in Tunis, founded a dynasty that gradually became independent, as did the Tahirids, the ‘Abbasid governors in Khorasan, two decades later.
The ‘Abbasids’ ability to rival their pre-Islamic predecessors was enhanced by their generous patronage of artists and artisans of all kinds. The great 7,000-mile (11,265–km) Silk Road from Ch’ang-an (now Xi’an [Sian], China) to Baghdad—then the two largest cities in the world—helped provide the wealth. The ensuing literary florescence was promoted by the capture of a group of Chinese papermakers at the Battle of Talas in 751. The ‘Abbasids encouraged translation from pre-Islamic languages, particularly Middle Persian, Greek, and Syriac. This activity provided a channel through which older thought could enter and be reoriented by Islamicate societies. In the field of mathematics, al-Khwarizmi, from whose name the word algorithm is derived, creatively combined Hellenistic and Sanskritic concepts. The word algebra derives from the title of his major work, Kitab al-jabr wa al-muqabalah (“The Book of Integration and Equation”). Movements such as falsafah (a combination of the positive sciences with logic and metaphysics) and kalam (systematic theological discourse) applied Hellenistic thought to new questions. The translation of Indo-Persian lore promoted the development of adab, a name for a sophisticated prose literature as well as the set of refined urbane manners that characterized its clientele. Soon a movement called shu‘ubiyyah arose to champion the superiority of non-Arabic tastes over the alleged crudeness of the poetry so dear to Arabic litterateurs. However, the great writer of early ‘Abbasid times, al-Jahiz, produced a type of adab that fused pre-Islamic and Islamic concerns in excellent Arabic style. Many of these extra-Islamic resources conflicted with Islamic expectations. Ibn al-Muqaffa‘, an administrator under al-Mansur (ruled 754–775), urged his master to emulate pre-Islamic models, lest the law that the religious specialists (the ulama) were developing undermine caliphal authority irrevocably.
The ‘Abbasids never acted on such advice completely; they even contravened it by appealing for piety-minded support. Having encouraged conversion, they tried to “purify” the Muslim community of what they perceived to be socially dangerous and alien ideas. Al-Mahdi (ruled 775–785) actively persecuted the Manichaeans, whom he defined as heretics so as to deny them status as a protected community. He also tried to identify Manichaeans who had joined the Muslim community without abandoning their previous ideas and practices. ‘Abbasid “purification of Islam” ironically coincided with some of the most significant absorption of pre-Islamic monotheistic lore to date, as illustrated by the stories of the prophets written by Al-Kisa’i, grammarian and tutor to a royal prince. Even though, like the Marwanids, the ‘Abbasids continued to maintain administrative courts, not accessible to the qadis, they also promoted the study of ‘ilm and the status of those who pursued it. In so doing they fostered what Ibn al-Muqaffa‘ had feared—the emergence of an independent body of law, Shari‘ah, which Muslims could use to evaluate and circumvent caliphal rule itself.
A key figure in the development of Shari‘ah was Abu ‘Abd Allah al-Shafi‘i, who died in 820. By his time Islamic law was extensive but uncoordinated, reflecting differing local needs and tastes. Schools had begun to form around various recognized masters, such as al-Awza‘i in Syria, Abu Hanifah in Iraq, and Malik ibn Anas, all of whom used some combination of local custom, personal reasoning, Qur’an, and Hadith. Al-Shafi‘i was raised in Mecca, studied with Malik, participated in a Shi‘ite revolt in the Yemen, and was sent to Baghdad as a prisoner of the caliph. After his release he emigrated to Egypt, where he produced his most famous work. Like most other faqihs (students of jurisprudence, or fiqh), al-Shafi‘i viewed Muhammad’s community as a social ideal and his first four successors as rightly guided. So that this exemplary time could provide the basis for Islamic law, he constructed a hierarchy of legal sources: Qur’an; Hadith, clearly traceable to Muhammad and in some cases to his companions; ijma‘ (consensus); and qiyas (analogy to one of the first three).
The way in which Islamic law had developed had allowed many pre-Islamic customs, such as the veiling and seclusion of women, to receive a sanction not given to them in the Qur’an or Hadith. Al-Shafi‘i did not change that entirely. Law continued to be pursued in different centres, and several major “ways” (madhhabs) began to coalesce among Sunnis and Shi‘ites alike. Among Sunnis, four schools came to be preeminent—Shafi‘iyyah (Shafiites), Malikiyyah (Malikites), Hanafiyyah (Hanafites), and Hanabilah (Hanbalites)—and each individual Muslim was expected to restrict himself to only one. Furthermore, the notion that the gate of ijtihad (personal effort at reasoning) closed in the 9th century was not firmly established until the 12th century. However, al-Shafi‘i’s system was widely influential in controlling divergence and in limiting undisciplined forms of personal reasoning. It also stimulated the collecting and testing of hadiths for their unbroken traceability to Muhammad or a companion. The need to verify Hadith stimulated a characteristic form of premodern Muslim intellectual and literary activity, the collecting of biographical materials into compendiums (tabaqat). By viewing the Qur’an and documentable Sunnah as preeminent, al-Shafi‘i also undermined those in ‘Abbasid court circles who wanted a more flexible base from which the caliph could operate. The Shari‘ah came to be a supremely authoritative, comprehensive set of norms and rules covering every aspect of life, from worship to personal hygiene. It applied equally to all Muslims, including the ruler, whom Shari‘ah-minded Muslims came to view as its protector, not its administrator or developer. While the caliphs were toying with theocratic notions of themselves as the shadow of God on Earth, the students of legal knowledge were defining their rule as “nomocratic,” based only on the law they protected and enforced.
According to the Shari‘ah, a Muslim order was one in which the ruler was Muslim and the Shari‘ah was enshrined as a potential guide to all; Muslims were one confessional community among many, each of which would have its own laws that would apply except in disputes between members of different communities. The Shari‘ah regulated relations and inequities among different segments of society—freeborn Muslim, slave, and protected non-Muslim. The process that produced Shari‘ah resembled the evolution of oral Torah and rabbinic law, which the Shari‘ah resembled in its comprehensiveness, egalitarianism, and consensualism, in its absorption of local custom, in its resistance to distinguishing the sublime from the mundane, and in its independence from government. Like many Jews, many ultra-pious Muslims came to view the law as a divine rather than human creation.
During the reign of al-Ma’mun (813–833) the implications of all this ‘ilm-based activity for caliphal authority began to become clear. Al-Ma’mun came to the caliphate as the result of the fourth fitnah, which reflected the persisting alienation of Khorasan. Al-Ma’mun’s father, Harun al-Rashid, provided for the empire to be divided at his death between two sons. Al-Amin would rule in the capital and all the western domains, and al-Ma’mun, from his provincial seat at Merv in Khorasan, would rule the less significant east. When Harun died, his sons struggled to expand their control. Al-Ma’mun won. During his reign, which probably represents the high point of caliphal absolutism, the court intervened in an unprecedented manner in the intellectual life of its Muslim subjects, who for the next generation engaged in the first major intra-Muslim conflict that focused on belief as well as practice. The Muslims, who now constituted a much more sizable proportion of the population but whose faith lacked doctrinal clarity, began to engage in an argument reminiscent of 2nd-century Christian discussions of the Logos. Among Christians, for whom the Word was Jesus, the argument had taken a Christological form. But for Muslims the argument had to centre on the Qur’an and its created or uncreated nature. Al-Ma’mun, as well as his brother and successor al-Mu‘tasim (833–842), was attracted to the Mu‘tazilah (Mutazilites), whose school had been influenced by Hellenistic ideas as well as by contact with non-Muslim theologians. If the Qur’an were eternal along with God, his unity would, for the Mu‘tazilah, be violated. They especially sought to avoid literal exegesis of the Qur’an, which in their view discouraged free will and produced embarrassing inconsistencies and anthropomorphisms. By arguing that the Qur’an was created in time, they could justify metaphorical and changing interpretation. By implication, Muhammad’s position as deliverer of revelation was undermined because Hadith was made less authoritative.
The opponents of the Mu‘tazilah, and therefore of the official position, coalesced around the figure of Ahmad ibn Hanbal. A leading master of Hadith, he had many followers, some of them recent converts, whom he was able to mobilize in large public demonstrations against the doctrine of the created Qur’an. Because viewing the Qur’an as created would invalidate its absolute authority, Ibn Hanbal argued for an eternal Qur’an and emphasized the importance of Muhammad’s Sunnah to the understanding of it. By his time, major literary works had established a coherent image of the indispensability of Muhammad’s prophethood. In fact, just before the Mu‘tazilite controversy began, Ibn Hisham had produced his classic recension of the sirah, or life, of Muhammad, composed half a century earlier by Ibn Ishaq. As in the early Christian church, these were not merely dogmatic issues. They were rooted in the way ordinary Muslims lived, just as affection for a divine Christ had become popular sentiment by the time Arius and Athanasius debated. Although Muslims lacked an equivalent of the Christian church, they resolved these issues similarly; like Jesus for the Christians, the Qur’an for the Muslims was somehow part of God. Hadith-mindedness and emulation of Muhammad’s Sunnah had become such an essential part of the daily life of ordinary people that the Mu‘tazilite position, as intellectually consistent and attractive as it was, was unmarketable. In a series of forcible inquiries called mihnah, al-Ma’mun and al-Mu‘tasim actively persecuted those who, like Ibn Hanbal, would not conform, but popular sentiment triumphed, and after al-Mu‘tasim’s death the caliph al-Mutawakkil was forced to reverse the stand of his predecessors.
This caliphal failure to achieve doctrinal unity coincided with other crises. By al-Mu‘tasim’s reign the tribal troops were becoming unreliable and the Tahirid governors of Khorasan more independent. Al-Mu‘tasim expanded his use of military slaves, finding them more loyal but more unruly too. Soon he had to house them at Samarra’, a new capital north of Baghdad, where the caliphate remained until 892. For most of this period, the caliphs were actually under the control of their slave soldiery, and, even though they periodically reasserted their authority, rebellions continued. Many were anti-Muslim, like that of the Iranian Babak (whose 20-year-long revolt was crushed in 837), but increasingly they were intra-Muslim, like the Kharijite-led revolt of black agricultural slaves (Zanj) in southern Iraq (869–883). By 870 then, the Baghdad-Samarra’ caliphate had become one polity among many; its real rulers had no ideological legitimacy. At Córdoba the Umayyads had declared their independence, and the Maghrib was divided among several dynasties of differing persuasions—the Shi‘ite Idrisids, the Kharijite Rustamids, and the Jama‘i-Sunni Aghlabids. The former governors of the ‘Abbasids, the Tulunids, ruled Egypt and parts of Arabia. Iran was divided between the Saffarids, governors of the ‘Abbasids in the south, and the Persian Samanids in the north.
The centrifugal forces represented by these administrative divisions should not obscure, however, the existence of numerous centripetal forces that continued to give Islamdom, from Andalusia to Central Asia, other types of unity. The ideal of the caliphate continued to be a source of unity after the reality waned; among all the new states, no alternative to the caliphate could replace it. Furthermore, now that Muslims constituted a majority almost everywhere in Islamdom, conflict began to be expressed almost exclusively in Islamic rather than anti-Islamic forms. In spite of continuing intra-Muslim conflict, Muslim worship and belief remained remarkably uniform. The annual pilgrimage to Mecca helped reinforce this underlying unity by bringing disparate Muslims together in a common rite. The pilgrimage, as well as the rise of prosperous regional urban centres, enhanced the trade that traversed Islamdom regardless of political conflicts. Along the trade routes that crisscrossed Eurasia, Islamdom at its centre, moved not only techniques and goods but ideas as well. A network of credit and banking, caravansaries, and intercity mercantile alliances tied far-flung regions together. Central was the caravan, then the world’s most effective form of transport. The peripatetic nature of education promoted cross-fertilization. Already the faqir (fakir), a wandering mendicant Sufi dervish, was a familiar traveler. Across Islamdom, similar mosque-market complexes sprang up in most towns; because municipal institutions were rare, political stability so unpredictable, and government intervention kept to a minimum (sometimes by design, more often by necessity), the Shari‘ah and the learned men who carried it became a mainstay of everyday life and social intercourse. The Shari‘ah, along with the widespread affection for the Sunnah of Muhammad, regulated, at least among pious Muslims, personal habits of the most specific sort, from the use of scent to the cut of a beard. Comprehensive and practical, the Sunnah could amuse as well. When asked whether to trust in God or tie one’s camel, so a popular hadith goes, the Prophet replied, “Trust in God, then tie your camel.”
The significance of Hadith and Sunnah is represented by the ending date of the period of conversion and crystallization. No one can say exactly when the majority of Islamdom’s population became Muslim. Older scholarship looks to the end of the first quarter of the 9th century, newer scholarship to the beginning of the third quarter. In 870 a man died whose life’s work symbolized the consolidation of Islam in everyday life: al-Bukhari, who produced one of the six collections of Hadith recognized as authoritative by Jama‘i-Sunni Muslims. His fellow collector of Hadith, Muslim ibn al-Hajjaj, died about four years later. About the same time, classical thinkers in other areas of Islamicate civilization died, among them the great author of adab, al-Jahiz (died 868/869), the great early ecstatic Sufis Abu al-Fayd Dhu al-Nun al-Misri (died 861) and Abu Yazid Bistami (died 874), the philosopher Ya‘qub ibn Ishaq al-Sabah al-Kindi (died c. 870), and the historian of the conquests al-Baladhuri (died c. 892). Men of different religious and ethnic heritages, they signified by the last quarter of the 9th century the full and varied range of intellectual activities of a civilization that had come of age.