A People's History of the World: From the Stone Age to the New Millennium (17 page)

The stagnation of Byzantium after Justinian’s time did not just lead to the sterility of the rump Roman Empire. It also led to a series of dramatic upheavals elsewhere in the Middle East which did contribute something to humanity’s stock of knowledge and techniques—and also produced one of the great world religions.

The starting point was the unlikely venue of Mecca, a trading town in the generally barren lands of the Arabian peninsula. The area was dominated by nomadic pastoralists who used the camel (domesticated about 1000 BC) to travel from oasis to oasis with their herds, and to engage in a certain amount of trade and looting. They were organised into clans, loosely linked in tribes run by assemblies of clan elders, which fought each other and launched periodic raids on settled peoples beyond the edge of the desert.

But there were also settled cultivators around the oases and in some of the coastal regions—especially in the south,
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where there was a civilisation at least 1,000 years old which maintained contact with the equally old Ethiopian civilisation just across the Red Sea. Some of the nomadic families also began to settle in trading centres as they acquired wealth, using camel caravans to carry luxury goods between the Roman Empire and the eastern civilisations. Mecca was one such settlement and had become a thriving town by the beginning of the 7th century.

The traditional values of the nomadic clans centred on the courage and honour of the individual man and his clan. There was no state, and obligations were to one’s kin group, not to society at large. Assaults, murders and robberies were regarded as infringements on the family or clan, to be dealt with through retaliation and blood feuds. Religion was a matter of identification with an individual deity which would travel with the tribal group—rather as the Ark of the Covenant travelled with the ‘Children of Israel’ in their Old Testament wanderings through the desert.

Such values did not provide any easy way to deal with tensions and conflicts which arose as some of the nomads took to a settled life. Long-established peasants and townspeople had long broken with them. Christianity flourished in southern Arabia, and many oasis cultivators had converted to Judaism or one of the varieties of Christianity. In a town like Mecca the mingling of nomads, merchants, artisans and peasants was matched by arguments between the different religious viewpoints. These were arguments which had practical implications, since the old values and gods ruled out the establishment of any single code of law or behaviour which overrode loyalty to clan and tribe.

The crisis was heightened by what was happening in the two great empires bordering on Arabia, Byzantium and Persia. Persia had briefly seized Egypt and Syria from Byzantium at the end of the 6th century, bringing to an end 900 years of Graeco-Roman domination. But Persian society itself was in deep crisis, caused by its landed aristocrats neglecting the Mesopotamian irrigation systems that had allowed cities to flourish. The ravages of war made things worse. In both empires there was mass impoverishment and social unrest.
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The whole world seemed to be in a state of chaos.

This was the world in which Mohammed, a Meccan orphan from one of the less important trading families, grew up and attempted, not very successfully, to make a living as a merchant. He experienced the chaos of the world around him as mental turmoil, in which none of the conflicting worldviews and values seemed to make sense. He felt driven to try to bring some coherence to his own life and to the society in which he lived. He had a series of religious visions in which he believed God (
Allah
in Arabic) spoke to him. These moulded the various religious conceptions he had come across into a new pattern. He recited the words to others, who wrote them down as the Koran, and gradually built up a group of followers, mainly younger members of the different Meccan merchant families.

The message Mohammed preached had much in common with the Christianity and Judaism of the Arabic cultivators and townspeople. It opposed a single god to the many competing gods of the nomadic herders. It substituted belief in ‘universal’ obligations to all fellow believers for the old clan and tribal codes. It appealed to the poor by praising protection against arbitrary oppression, but did not spurn the rich providing they showed charity. It also, like early Christianity, had a certain appeal to urban women (there were wives in Mohammed’s group whose husbands were bitterly hostile to it). Although it assumed women were inferior to men (accepting, for instance, the veiling of women prevalent in the Byzantine Empire), it preached that men, as their ‘superiors’, had to respect rather than mistreat women, and it gave them certain property rights.

Its purely religious aspect involved the incorporation of a range of biblical myths and religious practices from both Jews and Christians. But in one important respect the message differed from the versions of Christianity of the time. It was not simply a set of beliefs or rules for moral behaviour. It was also a political programme for reforming society, for replacing the ‘barbarism’ of competition, often armed, between tribes and ruling families, with an ordered
umma
community based on a single code of laws.

This political aspect of Mohammed’s teaching led to clashes with the ruling families in Mecca, to the enforced emigration of his group to the town of Medina, and to his eventual return with an army to Mecca in AD 630 to begin to establish a new state. He was successful because he was able to build a core of young men committed to a single worldview, while forming tactical alliances with groups whose purpose was very different—with townspeople and cultivators who merely wanted peace, with merchant families who relished the profits a powerful Arab state would bring them, and with tribal leaders hoping for loot from fighting for his cause.

The new state was well positioned to take advantage of the twin crises of the great empires. Mohammed died in 632, but his first two successors, or ‘caliphs’, Abu Bakr and Umar—longtime disciples from merchant families—also knew how to combine religious principle and political pragmatism. They deflected the energies of feuding pastoralist tribes and clans into attacks on the wealthy cities of the two great empires and in the process discovered how weak those empires were. One by one their cities fell to Arab armies—Damascus in 636, the Persian capital of Ctesiphon in 637, the Egyptian city called Babylon (now part of Cairo) in 639, and Alexandria in 642. Within ten years Mohammed’s followers had created a massive empire out of the lands of the historic civilisations of the Middle East.

The successes were, in part, a result of very clever use of the fighting potential of the pastoralist tribes. The Islamic commanders saw that, moving through apparently impenetrable deserts at speed, cavalrymen on camels could hit the cities in the bordering empires unexpectedly and with great force. They could use the vast space of the desert much as the gunboats of the old British Empire used the oceans, striking at will against defending armies which could only move at a fraction of their speed,
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or as modern armed forces use paratroops to hit distant objectives at will.
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But the successes were also a testimony to how hated the rulers of the old empires were by their own peoples. The Jews and the ‘unorthodox’ Christians who often made up the majority of the urban population welcomed the Arab armies, especially as the Muslim conquerors did not at first seek to create new state structures or convert populations to their religion. Rather, they left intact the bulk of the old administrations and respected the beliefs of Christians, Jews and Persian Zoroastrians alike. All that they demanded was the payment of regular taxes as tribute, and the confiscation of lands belonging to the state and those aristocrats who continued to resist their rule. The mass of the population found conditions less oppressive than under the old empires.

A Jewish writer told how ‘the creator has brought the Kingdom of Ishmael [ie the Arabs] in order to save you from wickedness’, while a Syriac Christian historian said, ‘God…delivered us out of the hands of the Romans by means of the Arabs…to be saved from the cruelty of the Romans and their bitter hatred to us’.
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The immediate beneficiaries of the conquest were the leaders of the Arab tribal armies and the leading families of Mecca. They shared the booty of conquest between them, so that within a few years they constituted an Arab aristocracy—an extremely wealthy but very thin upper caste, living in newly built barrack towns on the edge of the desert, exacting tribute in the form of taxes from the population, but leaving the existing landowners and officials to run the lands of the old empires.

However, there was continual friction within the victorious armies, with some of the Arab tribes feeling they had lost out in the distribution of the fruits of victory. The frustrations grew in the 640s until they erupted into a civil war which left its mark on the whole history of Islam. After the murder of the second caliph, Umar, by a slave in 644, power had passed to Uthman, an early supporter of Mohammed but also a member of the most powerful Meccan merchant family. This further increased the bitterness. He was murdered in 656. The choice of Mohammed’s cousin and son in law Ali as caliph led to open warfare between rival Muslim armies, until he was killed by some of his own followers, known as the Khariyites, who objected to his attempts to conciliate his opponents. Power passed to a cousin of Uthman, who established a hereditary dynasty known as the Umayyads, after their family name.

The victorious family was associated in many eyes with the vices which Mohammed had preached against. Ali and his son Husein (murdered by an Umayyad army in 680) became martyrs to all those who harked back to Mohammed’s own time, regarding it as a model of purity that had since been corrupted. Again and again in subsequent Islamic history the cry for a return to the time of Ali or of the first two caliphs has been a call for revolt against the existing state of affairs from one social group or another. It still motivates many ‘Islamic fundamentalist’ organisations today.

For the time being, however, the Umayyads oversaw the consolidation of the empire, establishing its capital in Syria. The Arab armies resumed their advances to take Kabul and Bukhara in the east and to reach the Atlantic in the west. This brought still more wealth to the Arab aristocracy of former tribal leaders and former merchants. They lived in great luxury in the garrison cities, spending vast sums on building palaces for themselves. Beneath them other members of the Arab armies were exempt from taxes and received pensions from the booty and tribute of conquest.

Urban classes and religious revolt

The unification of a vast area into a single empire gave an enormous boost to the trade in luxuries. Merchants, shopkeepers, clerks and artisans flocked to the garrison cities, settling in growing suburbs around their walls and providing for the needs of the Arab rulers, their palaces, their armies and their administrators. Mostly they were non-Arabs, but were attracted to the religion of their rulers—which was, after all, not all that different from the monotheistic religions that had dominated the old empires. But the Arab Muslims were not keen to extend to newcomers their religious right to tax exemption and a share in the tribute. So new converts were designated
mawali
and excluded from the privileges of the Arabs, who regarded themselves as the only genuine Muslims.

By the time the Arab Empire was a century old, the non-Arab Muslims were the majority in the cities of the empire and the key to its industries and trade, which the Arab merchants had abandoned to become a new aristocracy. They were also of growing importance as administrators. But they were still discriminated against.

Dissident Muslim groups who called themselves
Shi’atu Ali
, the party of Ali (or Shi’ites for short), found a ready audience, as did the Kharijites who believed Ali also had succumbed to compromise and corruption. Just as a section of the urban classes in Mecca had once found in Mohammed’s teaching a worldview which enabled them to fight against a disagreeable social order, so now the urban classes found that teaching equally useful in the fight against the state established by his lieutenants. It was a rallying cry for the creation of a new order which would remove the oppression that cramped the further development of those classes.

Some historians see the conflicts which arose as setting Persians against Arabs.
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But in fact the Persian upper class supported the Umayyads, while the discontented included many Arabs:

As class tensions increased, there were a series of revolts headed by various
mahdis
(‘guided ones’), who preached the birth of a new religious and social order. These were defeated. But then in the mid-8th century there was renewed quarrelling among the leaders of the Arab armies.

A descendent of Mohammed’s family along the ‘Hashemite’ line, Abu-I-Abbas, exploited the situation for his own advantage. He gave the go-ahead to one of his family’s freed slaves, Abu Muslim, to undertake religious and social agitation in south western Persia. Abu Muslim worked in secret, building support until conditions were ripe for a popular rising. One after another the west Persian cities declared their support by raising the Abbasid banner—which was black, a colour associated with the millenarian groups. Abu Muslim marched to the Euphrates, where he defeated a major Umayyad army. Such ‘extensive and successful revolutionary propaganda’ paved the way for Abu-I-Abbas to defeat the Umayyads, put the whole family to death and establish a new dynasty, the Abbasids.
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Those of the poor who expected liberation were soon disappointed. The Abbasid rulers quickly turned on their own ‘extremist’ supporters, executing Abu Muslim and several of his companions. Yet this was more than just a change of dynasty.