The Muslim forces were a small population of conquerors in a very large settled agricultural society. Now that they controlled it, they were free to settle or build in it. They could have begun a massive migration from dry Arabia to the Fertile Crescent. If they had blended into the Iraqi population, they would have learned Aramaic and farming, and they might have vanished into the existing demographics as thoroughly as the Goths vanished into Italy. But partly due to concerns about the new climate’s humidity, Caliph Umar ordered the men who stayed in Iraq to do something quite different.
Umar said that they could only settle in a place where camels could thrive, so the humidity of the central Jezirah (“island”) was ruled out. Scouts rode out to find a good place, and the first location they selected was a site on the southern bank of the Euphrates River, where the ground was firm and stony. It was between Ctesiphon and the road to Medina, but it was also centrally situated along the river, so it could easily access other parts of Iraq. Sa’d moved most of his men away from Ctesiphon, where they had camped while tracking down runaway enemies, to the new site that they named Kufa.
Kufa was the first planned Muslim city. They built first a mosque, which was not so much defined by a building, as by an open area. An archer measured out the masjid, the open gathering space, by shooting arrows in all directions. Sa’d laid out the dimensions for a palace, which would chiefly be the government offices, not a lavish house. The treasury had to be in the palace, so they planned the back of this building to face the mosque, where people came at all hours, to make bank robbery less appealing. Around these two central institutions, they laid out markets.
The roads were carefully planned. They radiated out from the city center, and main streets had to be 20 meters wide, while no alley could be narrow than 3 meters. Houses were permitted to be built only outside the bounds of the mosque and market. At first, they built using river reeds, but as the city grew, Umar granted them permission to use clay and stone. The Caliph’s chief concern for this new city was that it should be an ideal Muslim town, not an imitation of Ctesiphon or Damascus. Houses were to be small and egalitarian. Markets were to sell necessities. All gathered in the mosque for prayers on an equal plane, equally bowed before Allah.
To the south near the Persian Gulf, near newly-Muslim Khuzestan, they built a second new town called Basra. The modern city of Basra has moved a bit, just as the modern town of Kufa has merged with nearby Najaf. Basra was created on the same plan as Kufa, and so were other new cities built by the Muslim conquerors. To the north, they also began laying out Mosul, a larger settlement where a small village had been.
Because the Muslim Arabs stayed in these new cities, instead of blending into the existing towns, they maintained their language and culture. There was little resistance to them in the countryside, where the farmers just wanted to live quietly and pay their taxes. Just having these garrison towns full of 20,000 armed Arabs was enough to keep rebellions from starting. Even if some of them married local women, their home language of Arabic was necessary for the market, mosque and government, so the wives had to learn Arabic, and Aramaic didn’t get established in Kufa or Basra.
Just as the fighting units had been raised from clans and tribes, the men who settled in Kufa and Basra built neighborhoods according to their old clans and tribes. It’s who they knew well. This, too, kept the culture preserved. They were forbidden to move into the countryside or take up life as nomads again. The Caliph wanted them to be city-dwellers, no matter what they had been in the old country.
- The War of the Three Gods, by Peter Crawford.
- The Great Arab Conquests, by Hugh Kennedy