Iran: Empire of the Mind (15 page)

The influence was also apparent in the buildings constructed by the Abbasids, and many of the buildings of Baghdad were built by Persian architects. Even the circular ground-plan of the new city may have been copied from the Sassanian royal city of Ferozabad in Fars. Where the Umayyads had tended to follow Byzantine architectural models, Abbasid styles were based on Sassanid ones. This is apparent in the open spaces enclosed by arcaded walls, the use of stucco decoration, the way domes were constructed above straight-walled buildings below, and above all (the classic motif of Sassanian architecture), the iwans: large open arches, often in the middle of one side of a court, often with arcades stretching away on each side, often used as audience-halls. As with other cultural inheritances from Sassanid Iran, these architectural motifs survived for centuries in the Islamic world
¹¹
.

Particularly under the Abbasid caliph Al-Mansur and later, many Persian administrators and scholars came to the court (though they still worked there in Arabic, and many had Arabic names), mainly from
Khorasan and Transoxiana. These Persians encountered opposition from some Arabs, who called them
Ajam
, which means the mute ones, or the mumblers; a disparaging reference to their poor Arabic (not so different from the origin of the term ‘barbarian’ as used by the Greeks of the Persians a thousand years before). The Persians defended themselves and their cultural identity from Arab chauvinism through the so-called
shu’ubiyya
movement, the title of which refers to a verse from the forty-ninth Sura of the Qor’an, where Allah demands mutual respect between different peoples (
shu’ub
). It was primarily a movement among Persian scribes and officials; their opponents (including some Persians) tended to be the scholars and philologians. But the shu’ubiyya sometimes went beyond asserting equality or parity, in favour of the superiority of Persian culture, and especially literature. Given the religious history of Persia and the lingering attachment of many Persians to Mazdaean or sub-Mazdaean beliefs, shu’ubiyya also implied a challenge to Islam, or at least to the form of Islam practised by the Arabs. A satirical contemporary recorded the attitude of a typical young scribe, steeped in the texts that recorded the history and the procedures of the Sassanid monarchy:

… His first task is to attack the composition of the Qor’an and denounce its inconsistencies… If anyone in his presence acknowledges the pre-eminence of the Companions of the Prophet he pulls a grimace, and turns his back when their merits are extolled… And then he straight away interrupts the conversation to speak of the policies of Ardashir Papagan, the administration of Anushirvan, and the admirable way the country was run under the Sasanians
…
¹²

In time, as elsewhere, the solution to such conflicts was assimilation and synthesis, but the shu’ubiyya gave the Persians in Baghdad a collective self-confidence and helped to ensure the survival of a strong element of pre-Islamic Persian culture as part of that synthesis.
¹³
Like the religious controversies about free will and the nature of the Qor’an that were going on at the same time, like other conflicts in other times and places, the shu’ubiyya was a sign of conflict, change and creative energy.

Boosted by the creativity of the Persians, the Abbasid regime set a standard, and was looked back on later as a golden age. Baghdad grew to be the largest city in the world outside China, with a population of
around 400,000 by the ninth century. The Abbasids endeavoured to evade the tensions between piety and government and to cement their support among all Muslims by abandoning the Umayyad principle of Arab supremacy, and by establishing the principle of equality between all Muslims. The same inclusive principle extended even to taking supporters of the descendants of Ali, Christians and Jews into some parts of the government, provided they proved loyal to the regime. The integration of the huge area of the Arab conquests under the peaceful and orderly rule of the Abbasid caliphate brought new and dynamic patterns of trade, and a great release of economic energy. The caliphs encouraged improvements in agriculture, particularly through irrigation, which created new prosperity especially in Mesopotamia, but also on the Iranian plateau, where the following centuries saw the widespread introduction of rice cultivation, groves of citrus fruits, and other novelties.
¹⁴
The region of Khorasan and Transoxiana profited hugely from revitalised trade along the ancient Silk Route to China, from the agricultural improvements, from the mixing of old and new, Arab and Iranian; and entered an economic and intellectual golden age of its own.

The Abbasid system relied first on the local networks of control set up by provincial governors across the vast territories of the empire, and second on the bureaucracy that tied those governors to the centre in Baghdad. The governors collected tax locally, deducted for their expenses (including military outgoings), and remitted the remainder to the Abbasid court. The hand of central government was relatively light, but these arrangements put considerable power in the hands of the governors, which in the long run was to erode the authority of the Caliphate.

The Abbasid court became rich, but it also became very learned. The caliphs, especially caliph Al-Ma’mun (813-833; himself the son of a Persian concubine), encouraged and supported scholars who translated ancient texts into Arabic, initially from Persian, but later also from Syriac and Greek, drawing on writings discovered across the conquered territories. Al-Ma’mun’s predecessor Al-Mansur (754-775) had founded a new library, the
Beyt al-Hikma
(House of Wisdom), which attempted to assimilate all knowledge in one place, and translate it into Arabic. It was
an idea taken directly from the model of the Sassanid royal libraries, and drew extensively on writings and scholars from Gondeshapur in Khuzestan, the most famous of the Sassanid academies.
¹⁵
Gondeshapur had survived up to that time, but seems thereafter to have been eclipsed by Baghdad. At the same time the diffusion of scholarship profited from the introduction of paper manufacture from China, replacing the more expensive and awkward papyrus and parchment. Al-Ma’mun seems to have encouraged a shift in emphasis toward astrology and mathematics, and the translation of Greek texts, under the eye of his chief translator, Hunayn ibn Ishaq. These developments led to what has been called the ninth-century renaissance, as Persian scholars writing in Arabic discovered and applied the lessons especially of Greek philosophy, mathematics, science, medicine, history and literature. The new scholarship was not merely passive, but creative, producing new scientific writings, literature, histories and poetry, of great and lasting quality, forming the basis of much later intellectual endeavour, including in Europe, in the centuries that followed.

Through the translations, Aristotelian and Platonic philosophy were especially influential, through figures like Al-Kindi and Al-Farabi. The great historian al-Tabari (838-923) also worked in Baghdad at this time (he came from Amol in Tabarestan, on the south coast of the Caspian, in what is now the province of Mazanderan). Medicine made significant advances through properly scientific researches into anatomy, epidemiology and other disciplines, building on but eventually far surpassing the work of the classical Greek physician, Galen. Many of these achievements were later collated and made known in the west through the writings of another Persian, the great Avicenna (Ibn Sina: 980-1037). Avicenna’s writings were important in both east and west, for his presentation of Aristotelian philosophical method, and especially logic; disputations along Aristotelian lines became central to teaching at the higher level in eastern
madresehs
from the time of Avicenna onwards. It was a period of great intellectual energy, excitement and discovery, and as the Abbasid court became a model for succeeding generations in government and in other ways, so too it became a model in the intellectual
and cultural sphere. The translations into Arabic done by Persians in Baghdad in the eleventh century were later put into Latin for western readers by translators like Gerard of Cremona, working in Toledo in Spain in the twelfth century, giving a new vitality to western scholarship. Avicenna and Averroes, the latter an Arab and another Aristotelian, became familiar names in the new universities of Europe, and after the time of Thomas Aquinas the philosophy of Aristotle, following their model, dominated European learning for two hundred years or more.

But at the same time there developed a separate tradition of Islamic scholarship across the towns and cities of the empire. This learning was independent of the authority of the caliph, based instead on the authority of the Qor’an and the
hadith
(the huge body of traditions of the Prophet’s life and sayings, and related material, collated with varying degrees of reliability in the centuries after his death). The
ulema
, the scholars practised in the study and interpretation of those religious texts, tended to be hostile to the sophistication and magnificence of the court. This was particularly the case in the time of al-Ma’mun and his immediate successors, when the caliph and the court inclined toward the religious thinking of the group called the Mu’tazilis, who favoured ideas of free will, a doctrine of the created nature of the Qor’an, and (partly under the influence of Greek philosophy) the legitimacy of interpretation (
ijtihad
) of religious texts, based on reason. By contrast many of the ulema outside court circles tended to favour more deterministic positions and a strict traditionalism that insisted on the sufficiency of the texts on their own; and disapproved of extra-Islamic influences. The parallel, fundamentally inimical cultures of the Abbasid court and the ulema expressed the continuing tension between political authority and religion under Islam. In the end, the anti-Mu’tazili, traditionalist tendency was the one that prevailed, with variations and some compromises, in the four schools or
mazhabs
of Sunnism—the Hanbali, Shafi’i, Maliki and Hanafi. But aspects of Mu’tazili thinking endured more strongly in the separate Shi‘a tradition. The great Arab historian and social theorist Ibn Khaldun recognised in the fourteenth century that most of the hadith scholars and theologians were Persians working in Arabic (two
of the four Sunni mazhabs were founded by Persians); so too were the philologists who established the grammar of the Arabic language and recorded it formally.
¹⁶
In the Iranian lands the usages of the ulema were a major conduit for bringing Arabic words into Persian, and to this day the Persian of the mullahs tends to be the most Arabized.

On a more popular level, in the towns and villages of Iran, there was a proliferation of religious sects and groups, including sects in villages and towns that were regarded as heretical by both Muslims and Zoroastrians, often encompassing sub-Mazdakite ideas and labelled Khorramites
¹⁷
(the term may derive from a word meaning ribald or joyous). Some such groups were involved in the initial revolt of Abu Muslim, but also in the revolts of Sonbad the Magian (756), Ustad-sis (767-768), al-Muqanna (780)—all mainly centred on Khorasan — and again in the revolt of Papak in what is now Kurdistan and Azerbaijan in 817-838. Several of these revolts, and others, showed millenarian and other features (including an anti-Muslim celebration of wine and women), drawing in part on Mazdaism, that were to resurface later in Shi‘ism, and Sufism. On women, for example, a contemporary said that some of the Khorramites:

… believe in communal access to women, provided that the women agree, and in free access to everything in which the self takes pleasure and to which nature inclines, as long as no-one is harmed thereby

And another:

They say that a woman is like a flower, no matter who smells it, nothing is detracted from it
¹⁸

As early as the caliphate of Harun al-Rashid (786-809) the processes of dislocation and separation that were to split the united empire of the Abbasids became manifest. Provincial governors, valued for their local authority and retained in place for that reason, began to pass on their governorships to their sons, creating local dynasties. The latter acquired courts of their own; new poles of culture and authority. As they did so their expenses became greater, and less tax revenue was sent to the centre. They quickly became effectively independent, though most of
them still deferred to the Caliphate as the continuing central authority in Islam.

It is in the nature of the history of empires that their history gets told in terms of their decline and fall. Historians are always looking for explanations, causes and the origins of things. When it comes to empires this tends to mean that the story of their end casts a long shadow backwards in time, which can mean that the system and institutions of the Abbasid empire for example look flawed and faulty almost from the very beginning. This is misleading. The Abbasid period was a time of enormous human achievement, in political terms as well as in terms of civilisation, art, architecture, science and literature. The release of new ideas and the exchange of old ones within a huge area held together by a generally benign and tolerant government brought about a dynamic and hugely influential civilisation, way ahead (it need hardly be said) of what was going on in Europe at the time.

The first of the regional dynasties to establish itself as a real rival to central authority was that of the Taherids of Khorasan (821-873), followed by the Saffarids of Sistan (861-1003) and the Samanids (875-999)—all dynasties of Iranian origin. The Samanids were based on Bokhara and the region around Balkh, claiming descent from the Sassanid prince Bahram Chubin. Each of these dynasties (especially the Samanids), and those that followed (notably the Ghaznavids and Buyids), tended to set up courts adorned with Persian bureaucrats, scholars, astrologers and poets in imitation of the great caliphal court of Baghdad, as enhancements of their prestige, and as a disguise for their tenure of power, which otherwise might have appeared as more nakedly dependent on brute military force. The patronage of these provincial courts, working on the intellectual and religious ferment of the eastern Iranian lands at this time, when the potential of the new form of the Persian language was ready to be explored, produced the beginnings of a great outpouring of wonderful poetic literature, including some of the most sublime poetry ever created. The poetry is so unfamiliar to most western readers, so fresh and surprising in its content, and so important
in its effect on later Iranian and Persianate culture across the region, that it warrants more detailed attention.