The Early Islamic Empire at Work - The View from the Regions Toward the Center
While usually we have a top-down approach as seen from the center, this project takes the view from the regions, to explain the functioning of the caliphal government. The project looks at five key regions from North Africa to Central Asia, establishing their changing political and economic structures and chronologies, and identifying trans regional political, military, judicial, and indigenous elites. The tested hypothesis expects to see the central caliphal government in a more conscious role as moderator between the regions than has hitherto been recognized.
In order to shift our understanding of the functioning of the empire from a chronicle-driven top-down view to a region-driven view, a multidisciplinary and multilayered approach seems to be most appropriate. Parallel to the literary sources, but independent from center-based chronicles and biographical dictionaries, sequences of coins (Islamic coins display up to 150 words, conveying mostly administrative information), the results of archaeological excavations, and regional surveys will be investigated. The study of elite groups connecting the regions with the center is another important element and will ultimately result in the creation of a prosopographical database.
Emphasizing the role of the regions in the formation of the Islamic Empire points the view in a direction different from traditional 'Islamwissenschaft' which since its inception by Carl Heinrich Becker in 1910 has focused on Islam and its caliphate as the major formative force of the Empire.
In contrast to the conventional model of an empire founded on a
religious revelation, the project is the first systematic attempt to
explain the functioning of the empire through focusing on from its
regions and the brokering and management abilities of the caliphate and
its various elites. Three medieval empires arose from the demise of the
antique Hellenistic-Roman world. The first two were the Holy Roman
Empire in Western Europe and the Byzantine Empire in the northeastern
Mediterranean. Common to both was an enforced process of
Christianization and their roles as successor states to the Roman
Empire. The third was the Islamic Empire, which was the largest and most
diverse: for the first time in history, it joined together two large
geographic cultural areas of the ancient Hellenistic world, the
Mediterranean and the Iranian plateau.
Philological and theological borders made it difficult to view these three empires in a comparative context. While we know much about single events and certain institutions, we do not know how the empire was functioning over such a large territory. The Islamic Empire continued in both Roman and Iranian traditions, although the latter prevailed. It reversed the Late Roman ideology of one state religion imposed on all, being content with a dominating position of the new revealed religion of the ruling elite, and tolerating almost all other religious persuasions. As an imperial state religion with a low threshold to join, it gradually extended into the society. Until the 11th /12th century C.E., however, the majority of the population remained Christian, Zoroastrian, and Jewish, with pagan Sabian and Buddhist pockets at the edges of the empire. Neither an imposed state religion nor a central government as the source for legislation were the binding forces of that empire. The project thus emphasizes the regions and their elites rather than the center and religion as defining forces.
This ambitious project attempts to explore the reasons for the enormous administrative and economic success and the cohesion between the regions and the imperial center in the early Islamic period. The investigated period spans from the consolidation of the empire under the Umayyads in 660 C.E. to the breaking up into virtual autonomous regional states in about 940 C.E.. The view is from the regions toward the center. Traditional historiography of the early Islamic Empire mostly seems to encompass a top-down approach, based on the chronicles written in the capitals (Kennedy 1986), and evaluates the policies of the inner circles of power, the caliphs, the viziers and the caliphal military. This perception of the empire continues especially in studies on political thought (for example, Crone 2004). A step forward was Bulliet’s 1994 work “The View from the Edge” in which focuses on Khurasan, a region far removed the center.
Several studies already challenged the view of the dominating imperial center: Humphreys (2006) portrayed the caliph al-Muʿawiya, as a moderator rather than an emperor. Orthmann (2002) also saw the ruler as arbiter. Kennedy (2002) in his study on the caliphal armies recognized that the military organization in the Umayyad period (661-750 C.E.) functioned essentially at the level of the provinces, being fiscally almost autonomous. Later, when Samarra in northern Iraq became the capital (9th century), the centralization became so effective that the provincial governors did not even leave the capital city but instead sent deputies to the provinces (for example, the Tulunids in Egypt) it was the caliphal court where the governor negotiated his power and thereby impacted the administration and course of events in his province. For eastern Iran, Paul (1996) provided a model about the interaction between society and a moderating government at the end of our period of consideration, when the influence of the caliphate in provinces was waning.
The project builds on studies of certain central institutions, such as the “Armies of the Caliphate” (Kennedy 2002, Gordon 2001), or “le vizirate ʿabbāside” (Sourdel 1960) which have led to an almost monolithic perception of the inner workings of the empire, except for some regions at its fringes. How did this pre-modern empire work? Was power distributed to the provinces from a strong imperial center, or did the center function as a power broker between trans-regional and regional elites? The project here looks for innovative venues of research: a bottom-up perspective and a multilayered, multidisciplinary approach. The history of five key regions from North Africa to Central Asia will be reconstructed and their impact on the history of the empire examined by:
(...) which links the history of the territories closely with imperial history [p. 2] (...) [This makes it possible] to see every measure rather within an interdependent network of events and interests, which on the one hand can have a rather long history, sometimes rich with previous conflicts, and on the other hand, is just reported in correct but rather formal terms (p. 4). (...) It will be attempted to overrule the traditional separation between the history of kings, centered on the individual, and the history of territories, and to see both within a network of reciprocal relations, dependencies, and permeations, and finally to synthesize both into a comprehensive imperial history (p. 5).”
Currently, the historiography of the Umayyad and Abbasid Empires seems by necessity to be guided by the narrative of the monumental imperial world histories of the 10th century C.E., and by a cast from extensive biographical dictionaries. We only have a few local chronicles, which are mostly concerned with religious praise (fada’il) and the religious figures of famous cities (for example al-Qushayri, Tarikh al-Raqqa). Our geographical knowledge of the regions of the empire is determined by a few well-known geographical works such as those by al-Muqaddasi (d. 991 C.E.) and Ibn Hawqal (d. after 988 C.E.) (Wheatley 2001). Al-Muqaddasi provides us with his well-informed, but personal perception of the empire, developing his own personal terms and terminology, which he applies to all divisions, centers and sub centers of the empire, and treating all regions alike. His approach leaves us with a much more homogeneous impression of the empire than it probably was in reality. Nevertheless, his book constitutes a rich mine of information. A huge step forward in mapping the early empire was the German Special Research Unit of the “Tübinger Atlas des Vorderen Orients”, which resulted in a reliable mapping of the empire and the location of economic resources (Gaube – Leisten 1994), but it was not interested in the functioning of the empire.
Compared with Europe and its rich medieval archives, we have almost no primary documentary evidence (archival material) of governmental acts prior to 1500 C.E. We are best informed about Egypt because of the richness of its papyri, but mostly only on a very low level of tax collection. Recently Reinfandt published some documents gathered in the palaces in Samarra by Herzfeld (Reinfandt 2010), and Khan (2007) presented material from Khurasan. These documents are mostly concerned with tax payments.
Given the very different nature of literary sources compared to those for Europe and the current state of research, the study of the functioning of the largest of the three empires has to be conducted differently. The starting point for the writing of any history, be it political, social, or economic, remains the above mentioned set of chronicles, many of which are Iraq biased, and the impressive richness of biographical dictionaries. They provide valuable information on the regions and provinces, but this is not systematic as it occurs only as part of the main narrative. Seeking for new, ‘underemployed’ primary sources, the project includes Islamic numismatics and the results of archaeological excavations and surveys, especially as the PI has worked with a number of missions from Egypt to Afghanistan and Mongolia.
The idea of the center as a skillful power broker might give an answer on the one hand to the extraordinary political and economic success of this empire, and on the other hand could perhaps also provide reasons for the decline and fragmentation of the caliphate in the first half of the 10th century C.E. There was no external enemy, the collapse was self-inflicted by the ineptness of the caliphal government (Kennedy 2004). But why were some provinces so greatly affected, why did some decline so rapidly while others were politically and economically more resilient, and even prosperous? Since at least the 9th century C.E., the central caliphal administration and its military had worked to check the centrifugal forces, and to regain provinces in all four cardinal directions that dissociated themselves from the caliphate in various degrees of autonomy, although formally they all always acknowledged the suzerainty of the universal emperor, the caliph. Some provinces, for example North Africa and the Jazira, became autonomous under Arab governors, the Aghlabids and the Hamdanids respectively; Egypt became temporarily autonomous under the Turkish Tulunids and Ikhshids sent from by the imperial center. Other provinces gained a kind of autonomy under local elites, such as the Iranian Saffarids in Sistan and the Samanids in Khurasan. But we also observe regional divisions along religious lines, most importantly the evolution of distinct Shiite groups with their own territories and identities. The apogee of the crumbling ability of the state religion to unite under the caliph was the establishment of the rival Shiite-Fatimid claim of universal ruler ship.
To summarize, contrary to the traditional view, the caliphate will be studied as a mostly successful and skillful broker between the regions and various constituencies rather than as a monolithic empire that gradually lost its sway over the regions. After the collapse of the center, most of the regions continued as regional states. We have to reconstruct the empire from its regions, exploring the political and economic function of the provinces and its elites versus the center and in empire as a whole. The expected results will show the empire at work. Although not focused directly in the project, the results may contribute to the role of the Islamic law within the empire. Compared with the other two empires, it did not develop any imperial legislation, despite attempts. Islamic law which defines almost the Islamic Empire’s reach (dar al-Islam) was instead the result of a discourse among legal scholars spread out over the various regions of the early Islamic caliphate.
The ambitious aim of the project is to understand the political and economic workings of a pre-modern empire, the Islamic Empire (660-940 C.E.), which stretches over almost the entire Hellenistic-Roman world from the Atlantic to the Hindukush. In contrast to the conventional model of an empire founded on a religious revelation, the project is the first systematic attempt to explain the functioning of the empire from its regions and the brokering and management abilities of the caliphate with its various elites.
While usually we have a top-down approach as seen from the center, this project takes the view from the regions, to explain the functioning of the caliphal government. The project looks at five key regions from North Africa to Central Asia, establishing their changing political and economic structures and chronologies, and identifying trans regional political, military, judicial, and indigenous elites. The tested hypothesis expects to see the central caliphal government in a more conscious role as moderator between the regions than has hitherto been recognized.
In order to shift our understanding of the functioning of the empire from a chronicle-driven top-down view to a region-driven view, a multidisciplinary and multilayered approach seems to be most appropriate. Parallel to the literary sources, but independent from center-based chronicles and biographical dictionaries, sequences of coins (Islamic coins display up to 150 words, conveying mostly administrative information), the results of archaeological excavations, and regional surveys will be investigated. The study of elite groups connecting the regions with the center is another important element and will ultimately result in the creation of a prosopographical database.
Emphasizing the role of the regions in the formation of the Islamic Empire points the view in a direction different from traditional 'Islamwissenschaft' which since its inception by Carl Heinrich Becker in 1910 has focused on Islam and its caliphate as the major formative force of the Empire.
New Horizons in Understanding Imperial Politics - State of the Art
In contrast to the conventional model of an empire founded on a
religious revelation, the project is the first systematic attempt to
explain the functioning of the empire through focusing on from its
regions and the brokering and management abilities of the caliphate and
its various elites. Three medieval empires arose from the demise of the
antique Hellenistic-Roman world. The first two were the Holy Roman
Empire in Western Europe and the Byzantine Empire in the northeastern
Mediterranean. Common to both was an enforced process of
Christianization and their roles as successor states to the Roman
Empire. The third was the Islamic Empire, which was the largest and most
diverse: for the first time in history, it joined together two large
geographic cultural areas of the ancient Hellenistic world, the
Mediterranean and the Iranian plateau.Philological and theological borders made it difficult to view these three empires in a comparative context. While we know much about single events and certain institutions, we do not know how the empire was functioning over such a large territory. The Islamic Empire continued in both Roman and Iranian traditions, although the latter prevailed. It reversed the Late Roman ideology of one state religion imposed on all, being content with a dominating position of the new revealed religion of the ruling elite, and tolerating almost all other religious persuasions. As an imperial state religion with a low threshold to join, it gradually extended into the society. Until the 11th /12th century C.E., however, the majority of the population remained Christian, Zoroastrian, and Jewish, with pagan Sabian and Buddhist pockets at the edges of the empire. Neither an imposed state religion nor a central government as the source for legislation were the binding forces of that empire. The project thus emphasizes the regions and their elites rather than the center and religion as defining forces.
This ambitious project attempts to explore the reasons for the enormous administrative and economic success and the cohesion between the regions and the imperial center in the early Islamic period. The investigated period spans from the consolidation of the empire under the Umayyads in 660 C.E. to the breaking up into virtual autonomous regional states in about 940 C.E.. The view is from the regions toward the center. Traditional historiography of the early Islamic Empire mostly seems to encompass a top-down approach, based on the chronicles written in the capitals (Kennedy 1986), and evaluates the policies of the inner circles of power, the caliphs, the viziers and the caliphal military. This perception of the empire continues especially in studies on political thought (for example, Crone 2004). A step forward was Bulliet’s 1994 work “The View from the Edge” in which focuses on Khurasan, a region far removed the center.
Several studies already challenged the view of the dominating imperial center: Humphreys (2006) portrayed the caliph al-Muʿawiya, as a moderator rather than an emperor. Orthmann (2002) also saw the ruler as arbiter. Kennedy (2002) in his study on the caliphal armies recognized that the military organization in the Umayyad period (661-750 C.E.) functioned essentially at the level of the provinces, being fiscally almost autonomous. Later, when Samarra in northern Iraq became the capital (9th century), the centralization became so effective that the provincial governors did not even leave the capital city but instead sent deputies to the provinces (for example, the Tulunids in Egypt) it was the caliphal court where the governor negotiated his power and thereby impacted the administration and course of events in his province. For eastern Iran, Paul (1996) provided a model about the interaction between society and a moderating government at the end of our period of consideration, when the influence of the caliphate in provinces was waning.
The project builds on studies of certain central institutions, such as the “Armies of the Caliphate” (Kennedy 2002, Gordon 2001), or “le vizirate ʿabbāside” (Sourdel 1960) which have led to an almost monolithic perception of the inner workings of the empire, except for some regions at its fringes. How did this pre-modern empire work? Was power distributed to the provinces from a strong imperial center, or did the center function as a power broker between trans-regional and regional elites? The project here looks for innovative venues of research: a bottom-up perspective and a multilayered, multidisciplinary approach. The history of five key regions from North Africa to Central Asia will be reconstructed and their impact on the history of the empire examined by:
- Establishing the political structures and chronologies in five key regions;
- identifying regional and transregional networks of political, military, religious, and judicial elites;
- determining regional economic bases and interregional economic exchange’
- and finally, by connecting layers of policies and decision making in the capital with different regional histories, elites and economies in their dynamic relations with the center.
(...) which links the history of the territories closely with imperial history [p. 2] (...) [This makes it possible] to see every measure rather within an interdependent network of events and interests, which on the one hand can have a rather long history, sometimes rich with previous conflicts, and on the other hand, is just reported in correct but rather formal terms (p. 4). (...) It will be attempted to overrule the traditional separation between the history of kings, centered on the individual, and the history of territories, and to see both within a network of reciprocal relations, dependencies, and permeations, and finally to synthesize both into a comprehensive imperial history (p. 5).”
Currently, the historiography of the Umayyad and Abbasid Empires seems by necessity to be guided by the narrative of the monumental imperial world histories of the 10th century C.E., and by a cast from extensive biographical dictionaries. We only have a few local chronicles, which are mostly concerned with religious praise (fada’il) and the religious figures of famous cities (for example al-Qushayri, Tarikh al-Raqqa). Our geographical knowledge of the regions of the empire is determined by a few well-known geographical works such as those by al-Muqaddasi (d. 991 C.E.) and Ibn Hawqal (d. after 988 C.E.) (Wheatley 2001). Al-Muqaddasi provides us with his well-informed, but personal perception of the empire, developing his own personal terms and terminology, which he applies to all divisions, centers and sub centers of the empire, and treating all regions alike. His approach leaves us with a much more homogeneous impression of the empire than it probably was in reality. Nevertheless, his book constitutes a rich mine of information. A huge step forward in mapping the early empire was the German Special Research Unit of the “Tübinger Atlas des Vorderen Orients”, which resulted in a reliable mapping of the empire and the location of economic resources (Gaube – Leisten 1994), but it was not interested in the functioning of the empire.
Compared with Europe and its rich medieval archives, we have almost no primary documentary evidence (archival material) of governmental acts prior to 1500 C.E. We are best informed about Egypt because of the richness of its papyri, but mostly only on a very low level of tax collection. Recently Reinfandt published some documents gathered in the palaces in Samarra by Herzfeld (Reinfandt 2010), and Khan (2007) presented material from Khurasan. These documents are mostly concerned with tax payments.
Given the very different nature of literary sources compared to those for Europe and the current state of research, the study of the functioning of the largest of the three empires has to be conducted differently. The starting point for the writing of any history, be it political, social, or economic, remains the above mentioned set of chronicles, many of which are Iraq biased, and the impressive richness of biographical dictionaries. They provide valuable information on the regions and provinces, but this is not systematic as it occurs only as part of the main narrative. Seeking for new, ‘underemployed’ primary sources, the project includes Islamic numismatics and the results of archaeological excavations and surveys, especially as the PI has worked with a number of missions from Egypt to Afghanistan and Mongolia.
The idea of the center as a skillful power broker might give an answer on the one hand to the extraordinary political and economic success of this empire, and on the other hand could perhaps also provide reasons for the decline and fragmentation of the caliphate in the first half of the 10th century C.E. There was no external enemy, the collapse was self-inflicted by the ineptness of the caliphal government (Kennedy 2004). But why were some provinces so greatly affected, why did some decline so rapidly while others were politically and economically more resilient, and even prosperous? Since at least the 9th century C.E., the central caliphal administration and its military had worked to check the centrifugal forces, and to regain provinces in all four cardinal directions that dissociated themselves from the caliphate in various degrees of autonomy, although formally they all always acknowledged the suzerainty of the universal emperor, the caliph. Some provinces, for example North Africa and the Jazira, became autonomous under Arab governors, the Aghlabids and the Hamdanids respectively; Egypt became temporarily autonomous under the Turkish Tulunids and Ikhshids sent from by the imperial center. Other provinces gained a kind of autonomy under local elites, such as the Iranian Saffarids in Sistan and the Samanids in Khurasan. But we also observe regional divisions along religious lines, most importantly the evolution of distinct Shiite groups with their own territories and identities. The apogee of the crumbling ability of the state religion to unite under the caliph was the establishment of the rival Shiite-Fatimid claim of universal ruler ship.
To summarize, contrary to the traditional view, the caliphate will be studied as a mostly successful and skillful broker between the regions and various constituencies rather than as a monolithic empire that gradually lost its sway over the regions. After the collapse of the center, most of the regions continued as regional states. We have to reconstruct the empire from its regions, exploring the political and economic function of the provinces and its elites versus the center and in empire as a whole. The expected results will show the empire at work. Although not focused directly in the project, the results may contribute to the role of the Islamic law within the empire. Compared with the other two empires, it did not develop any imperial legislation, despite attempts. Islamic law which defines almost the Islamic Empire’s reach (dar al-Islam) was instead the result of a discourse among legal scholars spread out over the various regions of the early Islamic caliphate.
Geographical Structures
Arabic geographical sources give us
quite a comprehensive overview of the geographical structure of the
regions. Other written sources and archaeological surveys furnish
additional information about elements that are ignored by the
geographical sources, and about changes that took place in physical and
administrative geography. Cities, routes and boundaries are mapped from
satellite images and will be entered in a GIS.
Administrative Structures and Political Chronologies
The Islamic Empire, like all pre-modern
empires, did not extend its power, its political and judicial structure
to all regions in the same way, at the same time, as modern territorial
states are meant to function. In Tabaristan (south of the Caspian Sea)
and Sistan (south-western Iran) for example certain Sasanian structures
continue uninterrupted until the time of Harun al-Rashid and probably
beyond. Instead, the traditional historiography gives us the appearance
of a politically almost coherent empire led by its center. The project
draws on the rich historiography and biographical literature, and
harvests it for information about the political structure in every key
region. Most of the literature, however, was written in the second half
of the 9th and 10th century, the post-Samarran
period, when the political geography had dramatically changed, and so
did its perception of the Umayyad and earlier Abbasid period.
The main tasks for each key province will be
- Harvesting the literary sources for information on the political and military structure and religious institutions.
- Reconstructing a roster of administrative data from coins minted in the regions and corroborating them with information from literary sources.
- Setting this information against a tableau of the specific political history of each key region within the context of the empire.
This phase will profit much from the
numismatic sources that provide a continuous contemporary text of the
government’s hierarchy and suggests a much finer division of power than
we can understand of from the chronicles. This needs explanation. Coins
are the only continuous and geographically widespread primary source for
political information from more than 90 active mints/locations within
the Islamic Empire. Until the period of al-Ma’mun’s coinage reform in
819-822 C.E. minting was basically organized at the provincial and
district level, only supervised for its physical standards by the
central government, but leaving the decision for the protocol text in
the authority of governor or even sub-governor. Islamic coins have up to
150 words on them serving as political document (sikka), parallel in
their political impact with the blessing of the ruler in the
Friday-prayer (khutba). We have up to four or five names on coins
mirroring the political hierarchy, providing more information on the
political structure than any literary source. Under al-Ma’mun the
minting system became centralized, and showing since his successor
al-Muʿtasim (r. 833-842 C.E.) always the name of the caliph and later,
in addition, the names of autonomous regional rulers, thus being a
witness of the fading caliphal authority to keep the empire together.
Again for most of the period there is more than one mint in each of the
key regions reaching its apogee under al-Muqtadir (r. 908-932). Coins as
the only contemporary primary sources provide a finely tuned roster or
layout of a political structure of the empire without major gaps. The
systematic study of coin protocols allows also the reconstruction of
political careers of individuals and their mobility serving in various
provinces; information which could not be yield by any other literary
source.
At the end of this phase, we will have a
systematic roster documenting political and institutional structures of
the regions, changes of their political personnel within the context of
their regional political history. The same systematic approach in every
key region allows a comparison of their interacting and exchange with
the caliphal center. Phase 1 serves as solid historical basis for the
following phases to contextualize the different elites and the
development of the economies.
Regional Economies
How did the regional economies contribute
to the enormous material success of the empire? A modern economic
history of the Abbasid Empire which takes the archaeological and
numismatic evidence into account is still waiting (Ashtor 1976). Here,
the focus is on the economic structures of the key regions and their
empire-wide implications. Bulliet (1975) established that improved
breeding techniques for camels allowed a shift from the maritime
Mediterranean empire to a superior land- and caravan-based empire. New
crops and diet were introduced improving the diversity and productivity
of agriculture (Watson 1983). Bulliet (2009) showed in a seminal study
that cotton - based on superior irrigation techniques - became the main
staples of the Arab civilian elite and thus part of the enormous
economic success story of the empire. Fars and Khurasan were important
regional cotton centers. Legal treatises suggest that the textile
industry produced highly standardized and widely traded commodities.
Technological innovations are visible in the textile, luxury ceramics
(Watson 2004), glass (Henderson 1998), and metal industries within the
material culture. Industrial centers for glass and ceramics were
al-Basra, al-Raqqa, and Nishapur.
Mining areas in Armenia, in eastern
Khurasan (esp. in the Panjhir and the Bamiyan valley), and in western
North Africa, rose to empire wide importance and beyond. There was
export of silver and copper from North Africa to the Carolingian empire
in the eighth century and in the ninth century from the Caucasus and
eastern Khurasan to the Baltic Sea. Chinese luxury ware entered the
empire by land via eastern Khurasan and by sea via the port city of
al-Basra. Within the key regions, major zones of irrigation and
industrial production should be identified, as well as trade routes and
the distribution patterns of commodities.
Literary sources give only little
information on taxes and sometimes summarize the preferred products of a
region. Therefore this phase also includes archaeological reports and
past and ongoing settlement and irrigation surveys—the latter with the
help of satellite images. The difficult integration of literary sources
and archaeological results can be done to produce a detailed historical
and economic narrative of a city or region (Heidemann 2002, 2003, 2009).
Medium-sized cities are proposed as a paradigm for economic development
(Heidemann forthcoming). Medium sized cities are those which usually
reflect the economic prosperity of the agricultural hinterland, are the
narrative sources and do not draw on transfers from the state coffers as
metropolises such as Samarra (government, army) or from prosperous
long-distance trade networks such as Aleppo.
Moving Elites
Regional and Imperial Elites
What was the role of regional elites and
‘imperial’ mobile elites? The conceptualization of elites in the
pre-modern Islamic studies is not well advanced, except for some
segments of military and clergy. In order to use this concept for the
functioning of the empire, the definition has to be refined in regard to
old/new elites, their mobility, exclusivity, and re-productivity.
Jürgen Paul’s study (1996) on the link between government, and society
in eastern Iran at the last century of our period might serve as a
model. Three strata of elites are looked at: the trans-regional
political and military elite in the regions (mainly Arabs and Turks);
the Islamic judicial and theological elite; and non-Islamic elites in
all key regions. This phase sets the elites and their movements into the
political chronologies of the regions, parallelizing and connecting
them with governmental action, rather than seeing each as isolated.
1) Seemingly the most mobile group in the
first hundred years of the empire is the tribally organized Arab-Islamic
military, founding central cities, amsar, as power bases all over the
empire. They were followed by Arab settlers and investors in
agriculture. Do those families of Arab descent ensure the cohesion of
the empire among the provinces, while those elites from the regions
ensure loyalty and re-distribution of resources in the center? Later the
Abbasids based their power on elite of Khurasani military, led by
commanders of Iranian petty nobility, assuming posts and manning
garrisons all over the empire. In al-Rafiqa in the Jazira, at the
beginning of ninth century, Persian was a spoken language. In the middle
of the ninth century a nobility of Sogdian stock with their Turkic
armies arrived to Samarra in Iraq and served as military and governors
of provinces all over the empire (De la Vaissière 2007). Did this elite
serve more the cohesion of the empire or alienated the regional elites ?
2) The role in the formation of the empire
of the mobile Islamic judicial and theological elite in the provinces
and the centers cannot be overestimated (Van Ess 1991-1997). They served
as judges and teachers, and developed the Islamic law as a cohesive
system. In their search for knowledge they established networks over the
empire and at some stage of their career they all always passed by the
centers in Iraq and Mecca and Medina where they met colleagues. How far
these elites contributed to the coherence of the empire by creating
coherent legal system cannot be explored in full within this project
(Jokisch 2007). But their role is apparent, because the Islamic Empire
did not have an imperial central legislation as the Byzantine or the
Holy Roman Empire. The reach of Islamic law became the defining hallmark
of the empire – dar al-islam, the sway of Islamic law, versus dar
al-harb, the sway of violent struggle.
3) The third group, regional, non-Islamic
elites, are more difficult to trace, the Zoroastrians and Nestorians in
Fars and Khurasan, the Buddhists in Khurasan, the Greeks and Jacobites
in al-Sham, the Jacobites and Sabians in the Jazira, and the Jews in the
entire empire. These groups together constitute far more than half of
the population, but they are under-represented in the Arabic-Islamic
sources. Learned people from these constituencies, however, such as the
Sabians and Jacobite Christians, served as scholars and administrative
elite in various capacities in the capital. For example Sabians from the
Jazira moving to the capital Baghdad became influential at the caliphal
court. This had tremendous repercussions on the Jazira: protection for
the remaining communities, but also a brain drain. While this is well
known for the Jazira and studied in the course of the translation
movement of the 8th and 9th century (Gutas 1998), such movements of
non-Muslims to the center are much less known from the other key
regions. For example, before serving as viziers of the empire the
Barmakid family served in a stupa in Balkh. Bulliet reconstructs the
“Patricians of Nishapur” (1972) and the conversion of the local elites
to Islam. The matter of conversion and governmental functions will be
addressed.
Sources in this phase are biographical
dictionaries, which are mainly concerned with theologians and legal
scholars, and chronicles, and Syriac literature. These elites will be
gathered in databases and cross referenced. Major results are expected
for questions of cohesion of the empire, the impact of regional elites
on its policies, and the transmission of imperial Islamic culture to the
provinces.
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