Moorish arches from Medina Azahàra (Madinat al-Zahra) Palace, built during the reign of ‘Abd al-Rahman III. Remains of this large, luxurious testament to the caliph’s power sit outside of Cordoba, Spain. Xavi Gomez/Hulton Archive/Getty Images
The unifying forces operative at the end of the period of conversion and crystallization persisted during the period of fragmentation and florescence, but the caliphal lands in Iraq became less central. Even though Baghdad remained preeminent in cultural prestige, important initiatives were being taken from surrounding “regions”: Andalusia; the Maghrib and sub-Saharan Africa; Egypt, Syria, and the holy cities (Mecca and Medina); Iraq; and Iran, Afghanistan, Transoxania, and, toward the end of the period, northern India.
The rise of competitive regions signified a number of important realities. Increasingly, regional courts could compete with the ‘Abbasids and with each other as patrons of culture. Interregional and intraregional conflicts were often couched in terms of loyalties formed in the period of conversion and crystallization, but local history provided supplemental identities. Although the ‘Abbasid caliphate was still a focus of concern and debate, other forms of leadership became important. Just as being Muslim no longer meant being Arab, being cultured no longer meant speaking and writing exclusively in Arabic. Certain Muslims began to cultivate a second language of high culture, New Persian. As in pre-Islamic times, written as well as spoken bilingualism became important. Ethnic differences were blurred by the effects of peripatetic education and shared languages. Physical mobility was so common that many individuals lived and died far from their places of birth. Cultural creativity was so noticeable that this period is often called the Renaissance of Islam.
Economic changes also promoted regional strengths. Although Baghdad continued to profit from its central location, caliphal neglect of Iraq’s irrigation system and southerly shifts in the trans-Asian trade promoted the fortunes of Egypt. The opening of the Sahara to Maghribi Muslims provided a new source of slaves, salt, and minerals; and Egyptian expansion into the Mediterranean opened a major channel for Islamicate influence on medieval Europe. Islamdom continued to expand, sometimes as the result of aggression on the part of frontier warriors (ghazis) but more often as the result of trade. The best symbol of this expansiveness is Ibn Fadlan, who left a provocative account of his mission in 921, on behalf of the Baghdad caliph, to the Volga Bulgars, among whom he met Swedes coming down the river to trade.
By the beginning of the period of fragmentation and florescence, the subject populations of most Muslim rulers were predominantly Muslim, and nonsedentary peoples had ceased to play a major role. The period gave way to a much longer period (dated 1041–1405) in which migratory tribal peoples were once again critically important. In 1041 the reign of the Ghaznavid sultan Mas‘ud I ended. By then the Ghaznavid state had lost control over the Seljuq Turks in their eastern Iranian domains and thus inaugurated Islamdom’s second era of tribal expansion. Because localism and cosmopolitanism coexisted in the period of fragmentation and florescence, the period is best approached through a region-by-region survey that underscores phenomena of interregional significance.
Andalusia, far from the centre of Islamdom, illustrated the extent of ‘Abbasid prestige and the assertion of local creativity. In the beginning of the period, Islamicate rule was represented by the Umayyads at Córdoba. Established in 756 by ‘Abd al-Rahman I (known as al-Dakhil, “the Immigrant”), a refugee from the ‘Abbasid victory over the Syrian Umayyads, the Umayyad dynasty in Córdoba replaced a string of virtually independent deputies of the Umayyad governors in the Maghrib. At first the Cordoban Umayyads had styled themselves emirs, the title also used by caliphal governors and other local rulers. Though refugees from ‘Abbasid hostility, they continued to mention the ‘Abbasids in the salat al-jum‘ah (Friday prayer) until 773. Their independence was not made official, however, until their best-known member, ‘Abd al-Rahman III (ruled 912–961), adopted the title of caliph in 929 and began having the Friday prayer recited in the name of his own house.
The fact that ‘Abd al-Rahman declared his independence from the ‘Abbasids while he modeled his court after theirs illustrates the period’s cultural complexities. Like that of the ‘Abbasids and the Marwanids, ‘Abd al-Rahman’s absolute authority was limited by the nature of his army (Amazigh tribesmen and Slav slaves) and by his dependence on numerous assistants. His internal problems were compounded by external threats, from the Christian kingdoms in the north and the Fatimids in the Maghrib. The Umayyad state continued to be the major Muslim presence in the peninsula until 1010, after which time it became, until 1031, but one of many independent city-states. Nowhere is the connection between fragmentation and florescence more evident than in the courts of these muluk al-tawa’if, or “party kings”; it was they who patronized some of Andalusia’s most brilliant Islamicate culture. This florescence also demonstrated the permeability of the Muslim-Christian frontier. For example, the poet and theologian Ibn Hazm (994–1064) composed love poetry, such as Tawq al-hamamah (The Ring of the Dove), which may have contributed to ideas of chivalric love among the Provençal troubadours.
Moorish arches from Medina Azahàra (Madinat al-Zahra) Palace, built during the reign of ‘Abd al-Rahman III. Remains of this large, luxurious testament to the caliph’s power sit outside of Cordoba, Spain. Xavi Gomez/Hulton Archive/Getty Images
In 870 the Maghrib was divided among several dynasties, all but one of foreign origin and only one of which, the Aghlabids, nominally represented the ‘Abbasids. The Muslim Arabs had been very different rulers than any of their predecessors—Phoenicians, Romans, Vandals, or Byzantines—who had occupied but not settled. Their interests in North Africa had been secondary to their objectives in the Mediterranean, so they had restricted themselves to coastal settlements, which they used as staging points for trade with the western Mediterranean or as sources of food for their “metropolitan” population. They had separated themselves from the Imazighen with a fortified frontier. The Arabs, however, forced away from the coast in order to compete more effectively with the Byzantines, had quickly tried to incorporate the Imazighen, who were also pastoralists. One branch of the Imazighen, the Sanhajah, extended far into the Sahara, across which they had established a caravan trade with blacks in the Sudanic belt. At some time in the 10th century the Sanhajah nominally converted to Islam, and their towns in the Sahara began to assume Muslim characteristics. Around 990 a black kingdom in the Sudan, Ghana, extended itself as far as Audaghost, the Sanhajah centre in the Sahara. Thus was black Africa first brought into contact with the Muslim Mediterranean, and thus were the conditions set for dramatic developments in the Maghrib during the 12th and 13th centuries.
In the late 9th century the Maghrib was unified and freed from outside control for the first time. Paradoxically, this independence was achieved by outsiders associated with an international movement of political activism and subversion. Driven underground by ‘Abbasid intolerance and a maturing ideology of covert revolutionism, the Isma‘ili Shi‘ites had developed mechanisms to maintain solidarity and undertake political action. These mechanisms can be subsumed under the term da‘wah, the same word that had been used for the movement that brought the ‘Abbasids to power. The da‘wah’s ability to communicate rapidly over a large area rested on its traveling operatives as well as on a network of local cells. In the late 9th century an Isma‘ili movement, nicknamed the Qaramitah (Qarmatians), had seriously but unsuccessfully threatened the ‘Abbasids in Syria, Iraq, and Bahrain. Seeking other outlets, a Yemeni operative known as Abu ‘Abd Allah al-Shi‘i made contact, on the occasion of the hajj, with representatives of an Amazigh tribe that had a history of Kharijite hostility to caliphal control. The hajj had already become a major vehicle for tying Islamdom’s regions together, and Abu ‘Abd Allah’s movement was only one of many in the Maghrib that would be inaugurated thereby.
In 901 Abu ‘Abd Allah arrived in Little Kabylia (in present-day Algeria). For eight years he prepared for an imam, preaching of a millennial restoration of justice after an era of foreign oppression. After conquering the Aghlabid capital al-Qayrawan (in present-day Tunisia), he helped free from a Sijilmassa prison his imam, ‘Ubayd Allah, who declared himself the mahdi, using a multivalent word that could have quite different meanings for different constituencies. Some Muslims applied mahdi to any justice-restoring divinely guided figure; others, including many Jama‘i-Sunnis, to the apocalyptic figure expected to usher in the millennium before the Last Judgment; and still others, including most Shi‘ites, to a returned or restored imam. Abu ‘Abd Allah’s followers may have differed in their expectations, but the mahdi himself was unequivocal: he was a descendant of ‘Ali and Fatimah through Isma‘il’s disappeared son and therefore was a continuation of the line of the true imam. He symbolized his victory by founding a new capital named, after himself, al-Mahdiyyah (in present-day Tunisia). During the next half century the “Fatimids” tried with limited success to expand westward into the Maghrib and north into the Mediterranean, where they made Sicily a naval base (912–913); but their major goal was Egypt, nominally under ‘Abbasid control. From Egypt they would challenge the ‘Abbasid caliphate itself. In 969 the Fatimid army conquered the Nile valley and advanced into Palestine and southern Syria as well.
The Fatimids established a new and glorious city, Al-Qahirah (“The Victorious”; Cairo), to rival ‘Abbasid Baghdad. They then adopted the title of caliph, laying claim to be the legitimate rulers of all Muslims as well as head of all Isma‘ilis. Now three caliphs reigned in Islamdom, where there was supposed to be only one. In Cairo the Fatimids founded a great mosque-school complex, al-Azhar. They fostered local handicraft production and revitalized the Red Sea route from India to the Mediterranean. They built up a navy to trade as well as to challenge the Byzantines and underscore the ‘Abbasid caliph’s failure to defend and extend the frontiers. Fatimid occupation of the holy cities of Mecca and Medina, complete by the end of the 10th century, had economic as well as spiritual significance: it reinforced the caliph’s claim to leadership of all Muslims, provided wealth, and helped him keep watch on the west Arabian coast, from the Hejaz to the Yemen, where a sympathetic Zaydi Shi‘ite dynasty had ruled since 897. Fatimid presence in the Indian Ocean was even strong enough to establish an Isma‘ili missionary in Sind. The Fatimids patronized the arts; Fatimid glass and ceramics were some of Islamdom’s most brilliant. As in other regions, imported styles and tastes were transformed by or supplemented with local artistic impulses, especially in architecture, the most characteristic form of Islamicate art.
The reign of one of the most unusual Fatimid caliphs, al-Hakim, from 996 to 1021, again demonstrated the interregional character of the Isma‘ili movement. Historians describe al-Hakim’s personal habits as eccentric, mercurial, and unpredictable to the point of cruelty and his religious values as inconsistent with official Isma‘ili teachings, tending toward some kind of accommodation with the Jama‘i-Sunni majority. After he vanished under mysterious circumstances, his religious revisionism was not pursued by his successors or by the Isma‘ili establishment in Egypt, but in Syria it inspired a peasant revolt that produced the Druze, who still await al-Hakim’s return.
Al-Azhar University (Arabic: Jami‘at al-Azhar) is a chief locus of Islamic and Arabic learning centred on the mosque of that name in the medieval quarter of Cairo. It was founded by the Shi‘ite (specifically, the Isma‘ili sect) Fatimids in 970 CE and was formally organized by 988. Its name may allude to Fatimah, the Prophet’s daughter, known as “al-Zahra’” (“the Luminous”), from whom the Fatimid dynasty derives its name. The format of education at al-Azhar remained relatively informal for much of its early history: initially there were no entrance requirements, no formal curriculum, and no degrees. The basic program of studies was—and still is—Islamic law, theology, and the Arabic language.
An Isma‘ili centre of learning, al-Azhar fell into eclipse after Egypt’s conquer by Saladin, founder of the Ayyubid dynasty and a Sunni, in the second half of the 12th century. It was revived under the Mamluks (1250–1517), however, and continued to thrive thereafter as a centre of Sunni scholarship. It was damaged in an earthquake in the early 1300s and subsequently repaired, and additions, alterations, and renovations to its structures were undertaken at various points throughout the 14th and 15th centuries, particularly in the later Mamluk period, when it came under direct patronage.
Muslim worshippers wait to begin Friday prayers at the al-Azhar mosque in Cairo, Egypt. Marwan Naamani/AFP/Getty Images
With the defeat of the Mamluks in 1517, substantial architectural projects were few until the mid-18th century. In spite of this, al-Azhar’s significance continued, and under Ottoman rule it held preeminent status among Egyptian institutions of learning. Opposition to the French in the late 18th century led to an uprising in 1798 centred on al-Azhar, and as a result it was bombarded by the French and temporarily closed. Nineteenth-century reform at al-Azhar owed in part to the involvement of a number of individuals. These included Jamal al-Din al-Afghani, who taught at al-Azhar in the 1870s and emphasized that modern science and other subjects were not incompatible with the Qur’an, and Muhammad ‘Abduh, who was influenced as a young intellectual by al-Afghani and later proposed, as a member of a government committee, a number of broad measures for reforming al-Azhar. In the late 19th century, procedures, including admission requirements and examinations, were formalized, and a number of modern subjects—some of them obligatory—were introduced.
Al-Azhar was nationalized and again underwent substantial reforms in the early 1960s. Since that time, faculties such as those of medicine and engineering have been established; women were first admitted in 1962. The modern university offers a number of faculties, some of them for women, as well as regional facilities.
When the Fatimids expanded into southern Syria, another Shi‘ite dynasty, the Hamdanids, of Bedouin origin, had been ruling northern Syria from Mosul since 905. In 944 a branch of the family had taken Aleppo. Under the leadership of their most famous member, Sayf al-Dawlah (ruled c. 943–967), the Hamdanids responded aggressively to renewed Byzantine expansionism in eastern Anatolia. They ruled from Aleppo until they were absorbed by the Fatimids after 1004; at their court some of Islamdom’s most lastingly illustrious writers found patronage. Two notable examples are the poet al-Mutanabbi (915–965), who illustrated the importance of the poet as a premodern press agent of the court, and al-Farabi, who tried to reconcile reason and revelation.
Al-Farabi contributed to the ongoing Islamization of Hellenistic thought. Falsafah, the Arabic cognate for the Greek philosophia, included metaphysics and logic, as well as the positive sciences, such as mathematics, music, astronomy, and anatomy. Faylasufs often earned their living as physicians, astrologers, or musicians. The faylasuf’s whole way of life, like that of the adib, reflected his studies. It was often competitive with that of more self-consciously observant Muslims because the faylasuf often questioned the relationship of revelation to real truth. The faylasufs felt free to explore inner truths not exposed to the view of ordinary people; they practiced prudent concealment (taqiyyah) of their deeper awareness wherever making it public might endanger the social order. The faylasufs shared the principle of concealment with the Shi‘ites; both believed, for rather different reasons, that inner truth was accessible to only a very few. This esotericism had counterparts in all premodern societies, where learning and literacy were severely restricted.
By the late 9th and early 10th centuries the last remnant of the caliphal state was Iraq, under control of the Turkic soldiery. Political decline and instability did not preclude cultural creativity and productivity, however. In fact, Iraq’s “generation of 870,” loosely construed, contained some of the most striking and lastingly important figures in all of early Islamicate civilization. Three of them illustrate well the range of culture in late 9th- and early 10th-century Iraq: the historian and Qur’anic exegete al-Tabari (c. 839–923), the theologian Abu al-Hasan al-Ash‘ari (c. 873–c. 935), and the ecstatic mystic al-Hallaj (c. 858–922).
Al-Tabari was born in Tabaristan, south of the Caspian Sea, and as a young man he traveled to Baghdad. Rarely could a man earn his living from religious learning; unless he found patronage, he would probably engage in trade or a craft. All the more astounding was the productivity of scholars like al-Tabari, who said that he produced 40 leaves a day for 40 years. The size of his extant works, which include a commentary on the Qur’an and a universal history, testifies to the accuracy of his claim. His history is unique in sheer size and detail and especially in its long-term impact. His method involved the careful selection, organization, and juxtaposition of separate and often contradictory accounts cast in the form of Hadith. This technique celebrated the ummah’s collective memory and established a range of acceptable disagreement.
Al-Ash‘ari, from Basra, made his contribution to systematic theological discourse (kalam). He had been attracted early to a leading Mu‘tazilite teacher, but he broke away at the age of 40. He went on to use Mu‘tazilite methods of reasoning to defend popular ideas such as the eternality and literal truth of the Qur’an and the centrality of Muhammad’s Sunnah as conveyed by Hadith. Where his approach yielded objectionable results, such as an anthropomorphic rendering of God or a potentially polytheistic understanding of his attributes, al-Ash‘ari resorted to the principle of bila kayf (“without regard to the how”), whereby a person of faith accepts that certain fundamentals are true without regard to how they are true and that divine intention is not always accessible to human intelligence. Al-Ash‘ari’s harmonization also produced a simple creed, which expressed faith in God, his angels, and his books, and affirmed belief in Muhammad as God’s last messenger and in the reality of death, physical resurrection, the Last Judgment, and heaven and hell. Taken together, al-Tabari’s historiography and al-Ash‘ari’s theology symbolize the consolidation of Jama‘i-Sunni, Shari‘ah-minded thought and piety.
The most visible and powerful 10th-century exponent of Sufism was al-Hallaj. By his day, Sufism had grown far beyond its early forms, which were represented by al-Hasan al-Basri (died 728), who practiced zuhd, or rejection of the world, and by Rabi‘ah al-‘Adawiyyah (died 801), who formulated the Sufi ideal of a disinterested love of God. The mystics Abu Yazid Bistami (died 874) and Abu al-Qasim al-Junayd (died 910) had begun to pursue the experience of unity with God, first by being “drunk” with his love and with love of him and then by acquiring life-transforming self-possession and control. Masters (called sheikhs or pirs) were beginning to attract disciples (murids) to their way. Like other Muslims who tried to go “beyond” the Shari‘ah to inner truth, the Sufis practiced concealment of inner awareness (taqiyyah). Al-Hallaj, one of al-Junayd’s disciples, began to travel and preach publicly, however. His success was disturbing enough for the authorities in Baghdad to have him arrested and condemned to death; he was tortured and beheaded, and finally his body was burned. Yet his career had shown the power of Sufism, which would by the 12th century become an institutionalized form of Islamic piety.
Long before, however, a major political change occurred at Baghdad. In 945 control over the caliphs passed from their Turkish soldiery to a dynasty known as the Buyids or Buwayhids. The Buyids came from Daylam, near the southern coast of the Caspian Sea. Living beyond the reach of the caliphs in Baghdad, its residents had identified with Imami Shi‘ism. By about 930 three sons of a fisherman named Buyeh had emerged as leaders in Daylam. One of them conquered Baghdad, not replacing the caliph but ruling in his name. The fact that they were Shi‘ite, as were the Idrisids, Fatimids, and Hamdanids, led scholars to refer to the period from the mid-10th to mid-11th century as the Shi‘ite century.
Like other contemporary rulers, the Buyids were patrons of culture, especially of speculative thought (Shi‘ism, Mu‘tazilism, kalam, and falsafah). Jama‘i-Sunni learning continued to be patronized by the caliphs and their families. The Buyids favoured no one party over another. However, their openness paradoxically invited a hardening in Jama‘i-Sunni thought. Buyid attempts to maintain the cultural brilliance of the court at Baghdad were limited by a decline in revenue occasioned partly by a shift in trade routes to Fatimid Egypt, and partly by long-term neglect of Iraq’s irrigation works. The caliphs had occasionally made land assignments (t) to soldiers in lieu of paying salaries; now the Buyids extended the practice to other individuals and thus removed an important source of revenue from central control. After 983, Buyid territories were split among various members of the family, and pressure was applied to their borders from both the west (by Hamdanids and Fatimids) and the east (by Samanids, Ghaznavids, and Seljuqs).
The economic difficulties of Buyid Iraq promoted urban unrest, accounts of which provide a rare glimpse into the lives of ordinary Muslim town dwellers. Numerous movements served as outlets for socioeconomic grievances, directed most often toward the wealthy or the military. The concentration of wealth in the cities had produced a bipolar stratification system conveyed in the sources by a pair of words, khass (special) and ‘amm (ordinary). In the environment of 10th- and 11th-century Iraq, an instance of rising food prices or official maltreatment could easily spark riots of varying size, duration, and intensity. Strategies for protest included raiding, looting, and assault. Some movements were more coherently ideological than others, and various forms of piety could reflect socioeconomic distinctions. Some movements were particularly attractive to artisans, servants, and soldiers, as was the case with the proponents of Hadith, whose mentor, Ahmad ibn Hanbal (died 855), was viewed as a martyr because of his suffering at the hands of the caliph. Other forms of piety, such as Shi‘ism, could be associated with wealthier elements among the landowning and merchant classes.
Beneath the more organized forms of social action lay a more fluid kind of association, most often described by the labels ‘ayyar and futuwwah. These terms refer to individuals acting in concert, as needed, on the basis of certain rough-hewn concepts of proper male public behaviour. Such associations had counterparts in the late Hellenistic world, just as they have parallels in the voluntary protective associations formed in the 19th and 20th centuries whenever official institutions of protection were either chronically or temporarily deficient. For some of the Islamicate “gangs” or “clubs,” thuggery may have been the norm; for others, the figure of the fourth caliph and first imam, ‘Ali, seems to have provided an exemplar. Even though Shi‘ites had become a separate group with a distinctive interpretation of ‘Ali’s significance, a more generalized affection for the family of the Prophet and especially for ‘Ali was widespread among Jama‘i-Sunnis. ‘Ali had come to be recognized as the archetypal young male (fata). A related word, futuwwah, signified groups of young men who pursued such virtues as courage, aiding the weak, generosity, endurance of suffering, love of truth, and hospitality.
Premodern Islamicate societies were characterized by a high degree of fluidity, occasionalism, and voluntarism in the structuring of associations, organizations, loyalties, and occupations. Although all societies must develop ways to maintain social boundaries, ease interaction among groups, and buffer friction, the ways in which Muslim societies have fulfilled these needs seem unusually difficult to delineate. For example, in Muslim cities of the period under discussion, the only official officeholders were appointees of the central government, such as the governor; the muhtasib, a transformed Byzantine agoranomos who was monitor of public morality as well as of fair-market practice; or the sahib al-shurtah, head of the police. In the absence of an organized church or ordained clergy, those whose influence derived from piety or learning were influential because they were recognized as such, not because they were appointed, and men of very different degrees of learning might earn the designation of ‘alim. Although the ruler was expected to contribute to the maintenance of public services, neither he nor anyone else was obligated to do so. Though the ruler might maintain prisons for those whose behaviour he disapproved, the local qadis had need of none, relying generally on persuasion or negotiation and borrowing the caliphal police on the relatively rare occasion on which someone needed to be brought before them by force. There was no formalized mode of succession for any of the dynasties of the time. Competition, sometimes armed, was relied upon to produce the most qualified candidate.
Patronage was an important basis of social organization. The family served as a premodern welfare agency; where it was absent, minimal public institutions, such as hospitals, provided. One of the most important funding mechanisms for public services was a private one, the waqf. The waqf provided a legal way to circumvent the Shari‘ah’s requirement that an individual’s estate be divided among many heirs. Through a waqf, an individual could endow an institution or group with all or part of his estate, in perpetuity, before his death. A waqf might provide books for a school, candles or mats for a mosque, salaries of religious functionaries, or land for a hospital or caravansary. Waqf money or lands were indivisible, although they might contribute to the welfare of a potential heir who happened to be involved in the waqf-supported activity. The waqf, like other forms of patronage, provided needed social services without official intervention. On other occasions, wealthy individuals, especially those connected with the ruling family, might simply patronize favourite activities. In addition to patronage, many other overlapping ties bound individual Muslims together: loyalties to an occupation—soldier, merchant, learned man, artisan, government worker—and loyalties to a town or neighbourhood, or to a form of piety, or to persons to whom one made an oath for a specific purpose; and ties to patron or to family, especially foster-parentage (istina‘), the counterpart of which was significant in medieval Christendom.
The Qur’an and Shari‘ah discouraged corporate responsibility in favour of individual action; even the legal scope of partnership was limited. Yet the unstable political realities that had militated against the emergence of broad-based institutions sometimes called for corporate action, as when a city came to terms with a new ruler or invader. In those cases, a vaguely defined group of notables, known usually as a‘yan, might come together to represent their city in negotiations, only to cease corporate action when the more functional small-group loyalties could safely be resumed. Within this shifting frame of individuals and groups, the ruler was expected to maintain a workable, if not equitable, balance. More often than not the real ruler was a local amir of some sort. For this reason, the de facto system of rule that emerged during this period, despite the persistence of the central caliphate in Baghdad, has sometimes been referred to as the a‘yan-amir system.
The city’s physical and social organization reflected this complex relationship between public and private and between individual and group. It was marked by physically separated quarters; multiple markets and mosques; maze-like patterns of narrow streets and alleys with dwellings oriented toward an inner courtyard; an absence of public meeting places other than bath, market, and mosque; and the concentration of social life in private residences. The qadi and adib al-Tanukhi provides a lively and humorous picture of 10th-century Baghdad, of a society of individuals with overlapping affiliations and shifting statuses: saints and scoundrels, heroes and rogues, rich men and poor. This mobility is illustrated by al-Tanukhi’s boast to a rival, “My line begins with me while yours ends with you.” The prose genre of maqamah, said to have been invented by al-Hamadhani (died 1008), recounted the exploits of a clever, articulate scoundrel dependent on his own wits for his survival and success.
In the middle of the “Shi‘ite century” a major Sunni revival occurred in eastern Islamdom in connection with the emergence of the second major language of Islamicate high culture, New Persian. This double revival was accomplished by two Iranian dynasties, the Samanids and the Ghaznavids; Ghaznavid zeal even spilled over into India.
The Samanid dynasty (819–999) stemmed from a local family appointed by the ‘Abbasids to govern at Bukhara and Samarkand. Gradually the Samanids had absorbed the domains of the rebellious Tahirids and Saffarids in northeastern Iran and reduced the Saffarids to a small state in Sistan. The Samanids, relying on Turkic slave troops, also managed to contain the migratory pastoralist Turkic tribes who continually pressed on Iran from across the Oxus River. In the 950s they even managed to convert some of these Turkic tribes to Islam.
The Samanid court at Bukhara attracted leading scholars, such as the philosophers Abu Bakr al-Razi (died 925 or 935) and Avicenna (Ibn Sina; 980–1037), who later worked for the Buyids; and the poet Ferdowsi (died c. 1020). Though not Shi‘ites, the Samanids expressed an interest in Shi‘ite thought, especially in its Isma‘ili form, which was then the locus of so much intellectual vitality. The Samanids also fostered the development of a second Islamicate language of high culture, New Persian. It combined the grammatical structure and vocabulary of spoken Persian with vocabulary from Arabic, the existing language of high culture in Iran. A landmark of this “Persianizing” of Iran was Ferdowsi’s epic poem, the Shah-nameh (“Book of Kings”), written entirely in New Persian in a long-couplet form (masnavi) derived from Arabic. Covering several thousand years of detailed mythic Iranian history, Ferdowsi brought Iran’s ancient heroic lore, and its hero Rustam, into Islamicate literature and into the identity of self-consciously Iranian Muslims. He began to compose the poem under the rule of the Samanids; but he dedicated the finished work to a dynasty that had meanwhile replaced them, the Ghaznavids.
The Ghaznavid dynasty was born in a way that had become routine for Islamicate polities. Sebüktigin (ruled 977–997), a Samanid Turkic slave governor in Ghazna (now Ghazni), in the Afghan mountains, made himself independent of his masters as their central power declined. His eldest son, Mahmud, expanded into Buyid territory in western Iran, identifying himself staunchly with Sunni Islam. Presenting himself as a frontier warrior against the pagans, Mahmud invaded and plundered northwestern India, establishing a permanent rule in the Punjab, but it was through ruling Iran, which gave a Muslim ruler true prestige, that Mahmud sought to establish himself. He declared his loyalty to the ‘Abbasid caliph, whose “investiture” he sought, and expressed his intention to defend Sunni Islam against the Shi‘ite Buyids. Although he and his regime were proud of their Turkic descent, Mahmud encouraged the use of New Persian, with its echoes of pre-Islamic Iranian glory, for administration and for prose as well as poetry. This combination of Turkic identity and Persian language would characterize and empower many other Muslim rulers.
The city of Bukhara in modern Uzbekistan. In the foreground is the Mir-e ‘Arab Madrasa, an educational institution. Christopher Herwig/Aurora/Getty Images
To Ghazna Mahmud brought, sometimes by force, writers and artisans who could adorn his court. Among these was al-Biruni (973–c. 1050), whose scholarly achievements no contemporary could rival. Before being brought to Ghazna, al-Biruni had served the Samanids and the Khwarazm-Shahs, a local dynasty situated just west of the Oxus River. Al-Biruni’s works included studies of astronomy (he even suggested a heliocentric universe), gems, drugs, mathematics, and physics, but his most famous book, inspired by accompanying Mahmud on his Indian campaigns, was a survey of Indian life, language, religion, and culture.
Like most other rulers of the day, Mahmud styled himself an emir and emphasized his loyalty to the caliph in Baghdad, but he and later Ghaznavid rulers also called themselves by the Arabic word sultan. Over the next five centuries the office of sultan would become an alternative to caliph. The Ghaznavid state presaged other changes as well, especially by stressing the cleavage between ruler and ruled and by drawing into the ruling class not only the military but also the bureaucracy and the learned establishment. So tied was the ruling establishment to the ruler that it even moved with him on campaign. Ghaznavid “political theory” shared with other states the concept of the circle of justice or circle of power—i.e., that justice is best preserved by an absolute monarch completely outside society; that such a ruler needs an absolutely loyal army; and that maintaining such an army requires prosperity, which in turn depends on the good management of an absolute ruler.
Abu al-Fadl Bayhaqi (995–1077) worked in the Ghaznavid chancery and wrote a remarkable history of the Ghaznavids, the first major prose work in New Persian. He exhibited the broad learning of even a relatively minor figure at court; in his history he combined the effective writing skills of the chancery employee, the special knowledge of Qur’an and Hadith, and the sophisticated and entertaining literature—history, poetry, and folklore—that characterized the adib. He provided a vivid picture of life at court, graphically portraying the pitfalls of military absolutism—the dependence of the monarch on a fractious military and a large circle of assistants and advisors, who could mislead him and affect his decision making through internecine maneuvering and competition. In the reign of Mahmud’s son, Mas‘ud I, the weaknesses in the system had already become glaringly apparent. At the Battle of Dandanqan (1040), Mas‘ud lost control of Khorasan, his main holding in Iran, to the pastoralist Seljuq Turks. He then decided to withdraw to Lahore in his Indian domains, from which his successors ruled until overtaken by the Ghurids in 1186.
By the end of Mas‘ud’s reign, government in Islamdom had become government by emir. Caliphal centralization had lasted 200 years; even after the caliphal empire became too large and complex to be ruled from a single centre, the separate emirates that replaced it all defined their legitimacy in relation to it, for or against. In fact, the caliphate’s first systematic description and justification was undertaken just when its impracticality was being demonstrated. As the Ghaznavids were ruling in Iran as “appointed” defenders of the caliph, a Baghdadi legal scholar named al-Mawardi (died 1058) retrospectively delineated the minimal requirements of the caliphate and tried to explain why it had become necessary for caliphal powers to be “delegated” in order for the ummah’s security to be maintained. Whereas earlier legists had tied the caliph’s legitimacy to his defense of the borders, al-Mawardi separated the two, maintaining the caliph as the ultimate source of legitimacy and the guardian of pan-Islamic concerns and relegating day-to-day government to his “appointees.” Al-Mawardi may have hoped that the Ghaznavids would expand far enough to be “invited” by the caliph to replace the uninvited Shi‘ite Buyids. This replacement did occur, three years before al-Mawardi’s death; however, it was not the Ghaznavids who appeared in Baghdad but rather the migratory pastoralist Turks who had meanwhile replaced them. The Seljuqs joined many other migrating groups to produce the next phase of Islamicate history.