A People's History of the World: From the Stone Age to the New Millennium (18 page)

In his history of Islam, Bernard Lewis goes so far as to claim it was ‘a revolution in the history of Islam as important…as the French or Russian revolutions in the history of Europe’.
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Some historians even refer to it as a ‘bourgeois revolution’.
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Certainly, the Abbasids used the mobilisation of mass discontent to push through a complete reorganisation of imperial rule. Previously the empire had been run by an exclusively Arab military aristocracy, whose origins lay in war and conquest for tribute. Under the Abbasids, Islam became a genuinely universal religion in which Arab and non-Arab believers were increasingly treated the same and in which ethnic origins were not central—although there were still rich and poor. There was a ‘new social order based on a peace economy of agriculture and trade and with a cosmopolitan ruling class of officials, merchants, bankers and the
ulama
, the class of religious scholars, jurists, teachers and dignitaries’.
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Symbolic of the change was the shift in the court to a grandiose new capital, Baghdad, in the most fertile irrigated area of Mesopotamia and on an important trade route to India, only a few miles from the ruins of the old Persian capital, Ctesiphon.

The Abbasid revolution opened the way to a century or more of economic advance. The great river valleys of Mesopotamia and the Nile flourished, producing wheat, barley, rice, dates and olives. The imperial rulers repaired the irrigation canals of Mesopotamia, and crop yields seem to have been high.
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Cotton cultivation, introduced from India, spread all the way from eastern Persia to Spain. The trade of the empire was vast. Merchants travelled to India, Sri Lanka, the East Indies and China, giving rise to the settlements of Arab merchants in the south China cities. Trade also extended from the Black Sea up the Volga into Russia—with hoards of Arab coins found even in Sweden—through Ethiopia and the Nile Valley into Africa and, via Jewish merchants, into western Europe.

Alongside the expansion of trade there was the emergence of something approaching a banking system. Banks with head offices in Baghdad had branches in other cities of the empire, and there was an elaborate system of cheques and letters of credit,
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which did away with merchants having to carry large sums of gold or silver from one end of the empire to the other. It was possible to draw a cheque in Baghdad and cash it in Morocco. Koranic injunctions against lending money for interest meant that many bankers were Christians or Jews—although, as Maxime Rodinson has pointed out, Islamic businessmen were not slow in finding ways around the rule.
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Artisan-based industries also flourished—mainly textiles, but also pottery, metalwork, soap, perfumes and paper making (learned from China). The flourishing of commercial life and the cities was reflected in literature and thought, where the ‘upright merchant’ was held ‘as the ideal ethical type’.
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The famous stories of the
Arabian Nights
portray ‘the life of a bourgeoisie of tradesmen and artisans with its upper layer of wealthy businessmen, corn merchants, tax farmers, importers and absentee gentlemen farmers’.
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It was in this period that religious scholars began compiling authoritative collections of the sayings of Mohammed (the ‘Hadiths’) and formal codes of Islamic law (the ‘Shariah’). Today these codes are often presented in the West as expressions of pure barbarism as opposed to the allegedly ‘humane’ and ‘civilised’ values of some ‘Judao-Christian tradition’. But in the 9th and 10th centuries the codes represented, in part, the values of traders and artisans who sought to free themselves from the arbitrary rule of imperial officialdom and landed aristocrats—and did so in ways that stood in marked contrast to what prevailed in ‘Christian’ Byzantium, let alone in the developing feudal system of western Europe. As one scholarly history of Islam puts it, the Shariah law was built on ‘egalitarian expectations of relative mobility…which maintained its autonomy as against the agrarian empires’. Tradesmen and artisans could look to ‘the reconstitution of the whole society on more openly structured, more egalitarian and contractual bases, appealing to Islam for legitimation’.
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Overall this was one of those periods of history in which the clashes of values produced by rapid changes in society led to a flourishing of intellectual inquiry. There was not yet a single orthodox interpretation of Islam, and rival schools battled for people’s minds. The lower classes of the towns were attracted to the various Shia heresies—views which repeatedly led to attempted revolts against the empire. Meanwhile poets, scholars and philosophers flocked to Baghdad from all parts of the empire, hoping to receive the patronage of some wealthy courtier, landowner or merchant. They translated into Arabic the works of Greek, Persian, Syriac (the language of ancient Syria) and Indian philosophy, medicine and mathematics. Philosophers such as al-Kindi, al-Farabi and Ibn Sina (usually known in the west as Avicenna) sought to provide a rational account of the world, building on the ideas of Plato and Aristotle. Mathematicians such as al-Khwarazmi, al-Buzjani and al-Biruni combined and developed the heritage of Greece and India. Astronomers constructed astrolabes and sextants and measured the circumference of the Earth.

Parasites and paralysis

The Muslim Empire certainly provided a sharp contrast, not just to Dark Age Europe but also to stagnating Byzantium. Yet it suffered from grave faults which meant it never matched the dynamism, innovation and technical advance of China.

First, the flourishing town life and culture was not matched by a corresponding advance in the techniques of production. The Abbasid revolution created space for the expansion of trade and enabled the urban middle classes to influence the functioning of the state. But real power remained with groups which were still essentially parasitic on production carried out by others. The royal court increasingly adopted the traditional trappings of an oriental monarchy, with vast expenditures designed to feed the egos of its rulers and to impress their subjects. State officials expected to make enormous fortunes from bribes and by diverting state revenues into their own pockets. Even merchants who enriched themselves by trade would see speculation in land ownership or tax farming as more fruitful than investment in improving production.

The urban industries were overwhelmingly based on small-scale production by individual artisans. There was little development of bigger workshops using wage labour, except in a few industries run by the state rather than by private entrepreneurs. It was not long before state officials were encroaching on the profits from trade too. Their attempts to control speculation in vital foodstuffs expanded into efforts to monopolise trade in certain commodities for themselves.

The advances in the countryside during the first few Abbasid decades soon disappeared. Once the irrigation systems had been restored to their old level, there was a tendency for the state funds needed to maintain them to be diverted to other purposes and other pockets. Land increasingly passed into the hands of large landowners only interested in the short term profits needed to maintain an ostentatious lifestyle in Baghdad. They exerted ever-greater pressure on the cultivators and introduced slave labour on the large estates. As in ancient Rome, peasants not only lost their land but also saw the market for waged labour contract. And the slaves did not share the interest of the peasant proprietor in the long term fertility of the soil.

An ever more elaborate ruling class ‘superstructure’ weighed increasingly heavily on a countryside in which production ceased to rise. As an important study of agriculture in successive Mesopotamian civilisations notes, the dominant urban classes ‘exhibited little concern for agricultural advancement. Instead, their preoccupation with court intrigues and corruption, and their involvement in civil wars, further sapped the resources of the peasantry. Short sighted attempts to maintain or enlarge tax revenues through corrupt and predatory tax farming practices further aggravated conditions’.
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Natural conditions—especially the harm that salination (salt deposits) could do to the soil—meant that even with the most careful tending it would have been difficult to raise the output of the land much above the levels achieved centuries before. Now neglect led to devastating collapse. There was a ‘cessation of cultivation and settlement in what had once been the most prosperous areas under the control of the caliphate’.
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By the early 13th century an observer could report:

The economic decline of its heartland resulted in a political fragmentation of the Islamic Empire, which further encouraged the economic decline. As revenues from the land fell, the imperial court tried increasingly to finance itself at the expense of the merchants and handed responsibility for the finances of the provinces to governors, who rewarded themselves from the proceeds. It was not long before the governors were virtually independent in their own regions.

At the same time, attempts by the caliphs to reduce their dependence on potentially rebellious Arab troops backfired. Turkish peoples from central Asia increasingly acted as mercenaries or as
mamlukes
—privileged groups of slaves fulfilling military functions for the imperial household. Over time, the leaders of such troops became powerful enough to make and break the caliphs themselves, until the caliphs were no more than a nominal presence formalising decisions made by others.

By the 11th century the empire had fallen apart. Spain, Morocco and Tunisia had long been separate kingdoms. Eastern Persia was ruled by dynasties which owed no more than titular respect to the caliphs in Baghdad. Insurgents belonging to the Ismaili fragment of Shi’ism had established a rival caliphate over Egypt, Syria, western Arabia and the Sind region of India. Their newly built capital, Cairo, with its magnificent Al Azhar mosque, rivalled Baghdad as a centre of Islam in the 11th century, and their government was a focus for the revolutionary aspirations of dissident Muslims all the way from Egypt to Samarkand—although in time it faced a revolt by its own dissident Ismailis, which gave rise to the Druze sect that still survives in Lebanon.

The fragmentation of the Islamic world did not, in itself, lead to immediate overall economic or cultural collapse. Baghdad declined and was eventually sacked by a Mongol army in 1258, but Egypt continued to prosper for two centuries, and Islamic culture flourished as scholars found rival courts competing to sponsor their efforts all the way from Cordoba in the west to Samarkand and Bukhara in the east.

Many of the problems which had beset the empire were soon afflicting its successor states. They flourished because they were capable, for a period, of putting an existing productive mechanism back to work and of engaging in long distance trade. This was not the same as applying new methods of production that could raise society as a whole to a higher level. In Egypt the economies of the prosperous administrative and trading cities of Alexandria and Cairo were still parasitic on the villages of the Nile Valley and Delta. Food and other raw materials flowed in from the countryside as taxes to the rulers and rents to the landholders. But little in the way of more advanced tools or help in improving production flowed back from the cities to the villages, where life was barely different to what it had been 1,000 years before. Eventually this parasitism was bound to undermine the economies of the cities themselves. By the 12th century parts of the Egyptian domain were weak enough to fall prey to the Crusaders, a bunch of robbers gathered under the direction of religious fanatics and coming from a western Europe with a lower level of civilisation than the Islamic empires. The Crusaders’ successes were testimony to the first advances of western Europe out of its backwardness at a time when the Middle East was stagnating. In the next century only a seizure of power by the leaders of the
mamlukes
, the Turkish military slaves, stopped Egypt falling, like Persia, to the Mongols.

By this time the great period of Islamic culture and science was over. As Islam increasingly penetrated the countryside—for centuries it had been a mainly urban creed—it became dependent on the popularity of ‘Sufi’ movements of ascetics and mystics, some of whom were venerated after death as ‘saints’. In effect, a hierarchy of magical and miraculous lesser gods was reintroduced into what was a supposedly monotheistic religion. Rational debate became a thing of the past as a system of religious schools, the Madrasas, taught a single orthodoxy—especially directed against the Shia heresies—and a religious establishment sought to impose it on society as a whole. Learning came to mean knowing the Koran and the Hadiths rather than developing an understanding of the world. This increasingly stifled independent thought and scientific advance. By the beginning of the 12th century the poet and mathematician Umar Khayyam could complain of ‘the disappearance of the men of learning, of whom only a handful are left, small in number but large in tribulations’
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—although the Arabic cities of Spain remained a beacon of learning for scholars from 13th century Europe, and it was there that Ibn Khaldun developed ideas in the 14th century which anticipated the findings of the French and Scottish thinkers of the 18th century Enlightenment.
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The rise of Islamic civilisation in the 7th and 8th centuries was due to the way that the Arab armies and then the Abbasid revolution united an area from the Atlantic to the Indus behind a doctrine which made the trader and the artisan as important as the landowner and the general. It was this which had enabled products, technical innovations, artistic techniques and scientific knowledge to travel from one end of Eurasia to the other and real additions to be made to the heritage of the ancient empires of Mesopotamia, Egypt, Greece and Rome, of classical India and of contemporary China. But by the same token, the decline of Islamic civilisation from the 10th century on was due to the limitations of the Abbasid revolution. In reality it was only a half-revolution. It allowed the traders and artisans to influence the state, but it did not give them control over it.