Baghdad is not a place one automatically links with philosophy, learning, poetry, literary criticism or cutting-edge science. Nightly news bulletins showing bombed and shrapnel-marked buildings, shabby backstreets and unshaven youth firing mortars at each other have given the city a quite different set of associations. Yet just as Gaza was once a Byzantine port of fabulous richness, so Baghdad was once the sophisticated capital of the Muslim world at a time when the Caliph ruled from Tunisia to the Indus and presided over a court culture more brilliant even than that of Constantinople.
The Abbasid rulers, who founded Baghdad in AD762, have a good claim to be regarded as one of Islam’s greatest dynasties: certainly this seems to be the view of Osama bin Laden, whose ultimate aim is the re-establishment of the caliphate. The publication this month of a remarkable narrative history of the Abbasids is thus a major event and should be required reading for the Washington neocons and their Islamist theocon adversaries. Professor Hugh Kennedy’s lively and compelling study, The Court of the Caliphs, shatters many of the preconceptions held by both sides and gives some indication of the roots of our current impasse.
On one hand, the book presents a picture of a tolerant, cultured and pluralistic Islam that effortlessly salvages and absorbs the learning that survived the wreckage of both Classical and Persian antiquity. On the other, amid this busy scholarship, Kennedy sketches a looming conflict with the clerical establishment that eventually succeeds in closing down whole avenues of speculative theological and philosophical thought, so setting the stage for the current clerical veto on what is and is not permissible in the intellectual life of Islam. The consequences of that defeat are still with us.
Sir Steven Runciman, arguably the greatest medievalist of recent times, believed that the real heirs of Roman civilisation were not the chain-mailed knights of the rural West, but the sophisticated Byzantines of Constantinople and the cultivated Arab caliphate, both of whom had preserved the Hellenised urban civilisation of the ancient world long after it was destroyed in Europe. It followed, said Runciman, that the Crusades should be understood less as an attempt to reconquer the Christian heartlands lost to Islam so much as the last of the Barbarian invasions. Certainly, as Kennedy’s narrative unfolds, it is easy to see the degree to which Abbasid science and thought grew directly from Classical Greek and Roman roots.
Although the Abbasids moved the heart of the Islamic world east, away from the old Ummayad capital of Damascus, where the bureaucracy still operated in Byzantine Greek, they had no doubts about the importance of studying the works of Classical antiquity, in striking contrast to Byzantium, where pagan philosophers were often regarded as rather dangerous, heretical figures.
According to the Hadith, or Traditions, the Prophet had commanded his followers to “seek knowledge, even unto China”; and it was an instruction that the inquisitive Abbasids took literally. They sent secret agents to Byzantium to buy up Greek manuscripts on astronomy, science, botany and medicine and then smuggle them across the border. Once in Baghdad, the works of Hippocrates, Aristotle, Plato, Euclid and Galen were eagerly translated into Arabic, often via Syriac, with the Christian communities of Mesopotamia acting as the conduit. The position of Baghdad at the crossroads of trade routes leading to Persia, India and China meant that the learning of the Arab capital was also cross-fertilised by the ancient learning of the East.
Yet, as Kennedy makes clear, the Abbasid court was a lively place. Poetry was highly valued, and Abbasid poets appear to have been as drunken and disreputable as literary figures in any age — falling inebriated off rooftops, composing scurrilous ditties and expiring under collapsed piles of their books. Abbasid poetry was often set to music, in direct contravention of the strictures of the more puritanical schools of Islamic thought, and was accompanied by the lute, an instrument of Arabic invention: the English word derives from the Arabic al-ud.
Those modern Islamists who imagine the Caliph’s court as a place of puritanical propriety would be shocked by the outpourings of poets such as Umar ibn Abi Rabia, who is chiefly remembered for his descriptions of picking up girls during the Hajj, even as they walked around the Kaaba itself. There was also a great deal of versification on the delights of attractive young boys and impassioned debate as to whether such pleasures exceeded those of the harem. Another important writer at the court was Ibn al-Shah al-Tahiri whose oeuvre included works on The War of Bread and Olives, Adultery and its Enjoyments, Stories about Slave-boys, Stories about Women and a work simply called Masturbation. As Kennedy succinctly summarises his output: “Basically, he was concerned with food and sex.”
Such developments were made possible by the prevailing liberalism of the dominant Mutazalite theology. The Mutazalites believed that the Koran had been created at a certain point in time by God. This was opposed to the rival view which taught that the Koran was eternal. Though this may seem a small distinction to us, this obscure theological controversy has had huge repercussions. As Kennedy explains: “If the Koran was created, then it could be interpreted and even, conceivably, modified by new revelation or human investigation to suit changed circumstances. However, if it had existed throughout all eternity, it clearly had an absolute and universal status that could not be challenged in any way.”
The great villain in this story is the mid-9th-century Caliph Mutawwakil: a cruel, narrow-minded sadist who not only did away with much of his court and army in a series of Stalinesque purges, but who also imposed restrictions on the caliphate’s Christians and Jews, who had flourished under Islamic rule. More damagingly still, he abandoned the free-thinking spirit of the Mutazilites, so discouraging philosophy and in particular the study of the secular sciences. The historian Masudi, writing a century later, was clear about the change: “When Mutawwakil succeeded the caliphate, he ordered the abandonment of investigation and discussion and debate and everything which people had enjoyed in the days of (the previous caliphs). He ordered submission and the acceptance of tradition.”
Today, many modern Islamic reformers look back to this change in 9th-century Baghdad as a crucial wrong turning in Islamic intellectual history. Indeed some, such as the leading Indonesian scholar Harun Nasution, have tried to reintroduce Mutazilite ideas in an attempt to free modern Islam from the theological dogmatism that they believe has stunted its development, and allow it to embrace the full modern range of philosophical inquiry.
So far, such attempts have met a mixed response: when the Egyptian linguistic scholar Nasr Abu Zied recently suggested that some parts of the Koran might be better understood as allegories rather than as literal fact, he was quickly accused of blasphemy. After a bizarre court case when an Islamist sheikh tried to get Dr Abu Zied forcibly divorced from his wife on the grounds that he was no longer a proper Muslim, the couple eventually fled to the Netherlands where Dr Abu Zied now teaches. When I went to see him in Cairo just before he left, he was deeply depressed. The Islamists, he said, “want to suppress rational thought; they won’t let anyone oppose them”. But he had no intention of backing down: “This,” he said, “is a battle which had to be fought.” Seen from this perspective, the defeat of the Mutazalites is the great failure of the Abbasid period; but it is not a failure that is irreversible. Moreover, it should be recognised that even Mutawwakil, the most monstrous Abbasid Caliph, had a more liberal attitude to other religions than most of the monarchs of the medieval West. He forced clothing restrictions on the caliphate’s Christians and Jews, yet even he still had a Christian as his secretary. Other Abbasid rulers had a better record, and Kennedy’s book is full of prominent Christian and Jewish scholars, translators, courtiers and generals. Though by modern standards Muslims and Jews — the dhimmi — were often treated as second-class citizens, there was at least a kind of pluralist equilibrium (what Spanish historians have called convivencia or living together) which had no parallel in medieval Christendom.
Such pluralism arguably reached its climax in Islamic Spain, where Muslim, Christian and Jew lived and worked together in an atmosphere of creative tolerance: indeed it was probably through Islamic Spain that such basic facets of Western civilisation as paper, the pointed arch, ideas of courtly love and the abacus passed into Europe — the same route as taken by many of the Greek and Roman classics, lost in the West but carefully translated in Abbasid Baghdad and passed on to the libraries of alAndalus. After the conquest of Granada, however, this creativity was lost: the Catholic kings promptly expelled most of the Moors and Jews, and let loose the Inquisition on those — the new Christians — who were converted. There was a similar pattern in Sicily. After a fruitful period of tolerant coexistence under the Norman kings, the Muslims were later given a blunt choice of transportation or conversion.
This forgotten Islamic pluralism is the theme of another important book to be published this month: Mark Mazower’s wonderful Salonica, City of Ghosts. Mazower follows the fate of the expelled Spanish Jews as they flourished in their new Ottoman home, a city where “as late as the First World War Salonican bootblacks commanded a working knowledge of six or seven languages”. As Mazower shows, Salonica’s hybrid “multi-confessional, extraordinarily polyglot Ottoman” multiculturalism survived until imported European ideas of the nation state irreparably shattered the mosaic. Pluralism slowly gave way to polarisation as Muslims came to be seen as Turks and Christians as Greeks. The final chapter came in 1943 with the arrival of Western Christian troops in the form of the Nazis. If the Catholic kings expelled the Spanish Jews from Europe, the Nazis deported them back westwards again — to Auschwitz. Forty-five thousand Salonica Jews — a fifth of the city’s population — died in the gas chambers.
Today, as we watch the anarchy unleashed in Baghdad by the American invasion, the works of Kennedy and Mazower should give us pause for reflection on the deeper roots of the current mess. As these books show, there are many Islams, just as there are many forms of Christianity. If there is a clash of civilisations taking place, it is happening as much within the Islamic world as between East and West. Islam has long and proud traditions of pluralism, moderation and religious toleration. The disaster is that by our current heavy-handed and illegal actions in the Middle East, we seem to be liberating the extremists, radicalising the unaffiliated and making life more difficult than ever for our natural allies: ordinary, decent, moderate Muslims.
The Court of the Caliphs: The Rise and Fall of Islam’s Greatest Dynasty by Hugh Kennedy (Weidenfeld & Nicolson, £20; offer, £16)
Salonica, City of Ghosts: Christians, Muslims and Jews by Mark Mazower (HarperCollins, £25; offer, £20)
William Dalrymple’s most recent book, White Mughals (Harper Perennial), won the Wolfson Prize for History
