Idris I of Morocco, 788-791

Posted on December 16, 2021 by Ruth

Idris was one of the family members of Ali’s descendants who attempted to rebel against the Abbasid Caliphs. His great-grandfather was Hassan, the older son of Ali and Fatimah. His half-brother was al-Nafs al-Zakiyyah, the Pure-Hearted One, whose uprising against Caliph Mansur had lasted nearly a year before its inevitable crushing. Idris participated in a 786 uprising near Mecca. Survivors blended in with Hajj pilgrims and slipped away.

Idris went to Egypt, then into North Africa. The safest place for him was to be as far from Baghdad as possible, so he continued until he reached Morocco. At the ruined Roman fort of Volubilis, now Walila, he joined the resident Berber tribe by marriage. They proclaimed him their Imam. With a Berber army, Idris conquered much of northern Morocco and some of Algeria, including the city of Tlemcen. Baghdad didn’t mind that much if Morocco went rogue, but moving eastward across North Africa meant a real threat. On orders of Haroun al-Rashid, assassins poisoned Idris in 791.

But Idris’ Berber wife delivered a baby boy two months after his death. This child, Idris II, was raised among his mother’s Berber people, but they were quite aware that the Prophet’s bloodline was carried on in him. He was proclaimed Imam after his father, and the Berbers were careful to have him educated in Islamic traditions. Although they were of the family of Ali, the education Idris II received was more Sunni than Shi’ite, probably just by geography and circumstance, not intent.

Idris I and II, father and son, founded the city of Fez to be their capital. The Idrisid dynasty seems to have been competent and Morocco flourished. Their independent kingdom lasted until they were expelled from Fez in 927 by the rising Fatimid dynasty. Islam was firmly rooted under their rule; the local Berbers all entered Islam. Morocco also became very Arabized, with its court in Fez welcoming other refugees from the Arab heartland.

The current ruling dynasty claims descent from Hassan, like Idris, but they came to Morocco three centuries later.

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Europe’s First Great Mosque, Cordoba 786

Posted on December 16, 2021 by Ruth

Abd Al-Rahman, the half-Berber Umayyad prince, was firmly in control of the Iberian peninsula by the time Charlemagne became King of the Franks. He ruled until his death at age 58, which was long past the average life-expectancy of the time. The previously loosely-administered territory of Andalusia became a tightly-controlled kingdom where rebellion was not tolerated.

Abd al-Rahman’s last act to establish a legacy began to make Cordoba into a city of wonders in the time of his sons and grandsons. The mosque of Cordoba had been a primitive cathedral divided in two, for the use of Christians and Muslims. The emir bought out the Christian half and leveled the building site in 785.

There’s no question that Abd al-Rahman was openly competing with the new Abbasid capital, Baghdad. Baghdad was built in a few years by a massive workforce; the remodeling of Cordoba was on the same scale and speed. In one year, the mosque was complete. It’s still standing; it is the oldest Muslim structure in Europe.

The mosque’s building plan was simple. It traced a square with an open courtyard full of orange trees on one side, and a great hall for prayer on the other. The square was as nearly perfect as measurement of that time permitted. The hall was very large and open; its roof was supported by rows and rows of columns and arches.

D. L. Lewis, in God’s Crucible: Islam and the Making of Europe, says that the mosque was made entirely of stones cut for other purposes during Roman and Visigothic times. Marble and granite were mixed with some rare imported porphyry, probably brought from Egypt in Roman times. The pillars were all of Roman regulation height, topped with Roman capitals that didn’t always match each other.  But the Muslim architects made the roof much higher by placing a second tier of arches on top of the first, doubling the possible height. It’s an amazing feat to take columns and blocks cut for other buildings and use them with such precision.

The horseshoe-shaped arches were not much for load-bearing, but they were pretty. The arches were made of alternating slabs of sandstone and brick: red and white. The inner great prayer hall was a dizzying display of red and white arches in a forest of columns that mounted forty feet high. Over the next centuries, the original square expanded in all directions with rebuilding and remodeling. (Wikimedia Commons has a cute graphic showing each stage of remodeling.)

Arabic script (probably the newly reformed kind coming out of Baghdad) was carved into the stonework all around the mosque. Arabic’s flowing letters are not the easiest script to learn to read, but they are undeniably artistic. By the time Abd al-Rahman built the Great Mosque, Arabic had been ascendant for a hundred years. The translation project in Baghdad was soon copied in Cordoba. Arabic became an international academic language simply because it was the target into which everything was translated. Without a long written tradition of its own, it became the medium of everyone else’s written traditions. Anyone who mastered spoken and written Arabic could learn anything he wanted: Greek philosophy, Indian mathematics, Persian poetry, or Hebrew theology.

Arabic had no effect on the northern kingdoms of England, France and Germany, but it was the dominant language of the Mediterranean. It was spoken as a native language in Sicily and Malta, in addition to nearly all of Iberia. The language still spoken in Malta is a patois of Arabic blended with Latin and Italian. In medieval times, all serious scholars learned Arabic and even Christians and Jews wrote some treatises in Arabic. The Roman Catholic Church, far from being all-powerful, was seriously threatened as a cultural institution. Both Cordoba and Baghdad, on the other hand, were competitively ascendant.

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Cordoba, the new Umayyad Capital

Posted on December 16, 2021 by Ruth

Cordoba probably became the capital of Muslim administration because during the conquest years, around 711-715, it did not surrender. It was conquered militarily. When cities surrendered, their current officials could work out a deal to send tribute; when they didn’t, they ended up directly ruled. That’s how it went with Cordoba, a former Roman town. It was centrally located in the southern region, and it required a military force and appointed Muslim governor, so it turned into an administrative center.

Abd al-Rahman found that controlling Cordoba allowed him to control most of the Muslim regions. Coming from the East, he had grander visions of what a capital city should look like. Its Roman arched bridge was a start, and as we know, he built a large new mosque on the site of an old cathedral and monastery. Each of his successors added to the mosque until it was fully four times larger, but still and always in a large square with an orange grove on one side.

Cordoba had been supplied with Roman aqueduct water since the first century. Roman engineers built stone-and-mortar tunnels to bring water from any springs in the region. Roman engineers had built so that the water pressure was kept even; when the water was conducted down a steeper hill, the aqueduct was smaller.

Water pressure coming down from springs in the hills allowed Cordoba to supply fountains. In the Middle Ages, fountains were the highest mark of civilization. Northern Europe had not yet learned how to create them either with natural water pressure or with cisterns. Travelers from Frankia and England were amazed at Cordoba’s Golden Fountain. Engineers under Muslim rule also re-routed the aqueducts to supply the Great Mosque with running water.

With water in apparently endless supply, Cordoba could also keep many parks and gardens. It was an island of green on a relatively arid plateau. It had two more urban features to surprise visitors: paved streets and public lighting. Roman roads of stone stretched all through France and parts of England, but the new Germanic Europeans had not yet learned to build their own. Their cities had only hard-packed dirt streets. Cordoba’s streets were cobbled some time between 800 and 900; Paris didn’t pave some streets until the late Middle Ages.

The al-Rahman dynasty wanted to rival Baghdad in every way, as ongoing revenge for the Abbasid overthrow of Umayyad rulers. So Cordoba had a House of Wisdom too, like Baghdad’s Persian-modeled study center. The two dynasties raced to accumulate the largest book collection; Cordoba also became a center of book copying and publishing. It’s possible that book copying was one of the few trades that a single woman, for example a widow, could fall back on. We know that at later times in medieval Europe, women who had been educated beyond the usual, by scholarly fathers, could make a living that way.

With book copying and libraries came other kinds of learning. Cordoba was the center of European scholarship between 800 and 1000. Muslims traveled freely between Cordoba and Eastern cities like Alexandria and Damascus, which in turn had travelers coming and going to places farther east. That’s how much of the technology and science of China, India and Persia reached Europe. Franks and other northern Germanic types, with names like Lothar, Otto and Conrad, could come to Cordoba or nearby Sicily for a time to acquire a graduate-school education in the latest learning from far off.

Starting in Abd al-Rahman I’s time, the emirs (later caliphs) built a private family residence about four miles away, modeled on the family palace compound of Umayyad Damascus. A town grew up around it, with suburban estates and villages between. It was called al-Zahra and became the capitol of the capitol, the place where Andalusian Caliphs received visiting kings and ambassadors. It was destroyed in the eventual downfall of the dynasty, around 1000.

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Downfall of a Family: Who was Jafar? 803

Posted on December 16, 2021 by Ruth

The Barmakids were the wealthiest, most important family during early Abbasid years. “Barmak” may have been a hereditary title for the guardians of a Buddhist shrine in Balkh. The family converted to Islam very early and became part of the government. With their wealth, they supported the Abbasid revolution, and the family came to the new city of Baghdad as courtiers.

During Mansur’s reign, father Khalid and son Yahya were often sent as administrators to far-off cities in Iran, where they were faithful and efficient. In the city of Rayy, Yahya met Mansur’s son Mahdi, and their wives seem to have become friends. Both wives foster-nursed the other’s newborn son, a year apart. So the sons grew up as close friends. Both Mahdi and Yahya had two sons: Musa and Harun for the Caliph, and Fadl and Jafar for the vizier. (Mahdi had more sons, but only those two count in the story.)

Yahya became the all-powerful judge and fixer, the man who got done in a day more than other men in a week. He fixed canals and built levees against flooding, listened to hundreds of petitioners every day, and arranged for wheat from Egypt to be shipped to the Prophet’s cities of Mecca and Medina, to alleviate their comparative poverty. He also commissioned translation of scientific works from Greek and Sanskrit. He was also tutor to the Caliph’s younger son, Harun.

In 785, Mahdi died in a freak hunting accident, and the older son Musa became Caliph al-Hadi, and in Arab fashion it was stipulated that his brother Harun was his successor. Yahya ensured that when Musa al-Hadi died unexpectedly, Harun became Caliph al-Rashid.

Fadl was appointed governor of Khurasan (he seems to have done a very good job), but Jafar stayed in Baghdad. All three, Yahya, Fadl and Jafar played key roles in administration in the Abbasid state, but Jafar was the one who spent evenings with the Caliph listening to music or talking. In the Arabian Nights stories, Jafar is the Caliph’s companion when they disguise themselves and go out into the city. The Caliph even had Jafar contract a technical marriage with his sister, Abbasa, so that the three of them could spend time alone (and probably in Raqqa, which Harun preferred to Baghdad, despite the stories!).

The Caliph had two sons, Muhammad al-Amin and Abdallah al-Mamun, and he had court officials swear loyalty to both sons, which gave him a stable succession of two heirs. Al-Amin was the son of an Abbasid princess, Harun’s cousin, but al-Mamun’s mother was probably Khurasani. That made her son interesting to the far eastern power base. Jafar was appointed tutor to al-Mamun, as his father Yahya had been for Harun.

The Caliph took the unusual step of drawing up documents for each son to sign, promising to support the other and uphold his rights. Al-Mamun was to govern Khurasan while al-Amin was Caliph, but he was to inherit the Caliphate even if al-Amin’s sons were old enough to rule. The documents were signed in Mecca, while they were on pilgrimage in 802.

When they came home, the Caliph very suddenly ordered the execution of Jafar and the arrest of Yahya and Fadl. The Barmakid family was destroyed, overnight. Jafar’s body was cut up and nailed to three bridges.

The Caliph had probably become distant from the Barmakid family over time, though outsiders didn’t know this. A serious point of conflict was the family’s choices to be conciliatory with the Alids, the descendants of Ali. Fadl as governor of Khurasan had to deal with a rebellious Alid who lived in his territory. He got the man to agree to go live in Baghdad where the Caliph could watch him, and Jafar was appointed jailer. Jafar was a poor jailer, and the Alid family member was seen out in public. This could have felt, to the Caliph, like an early warning sign that the Barmakid family could use its money and Persian connections to set up a descendant of Ali in place of the Abbasids. Perhaps, given a bit more time, they would have tried.

There is also a story that Harun’s sister Abbasa was Jafar’s downfall. The deal was that they would never touch each other, but Abbasa secretly became pregnant and hid her child in Mecca. Someone in the harem, either Harun’s wife or some jealous slave girl, told her secret to Harun, who exploded in rage. If you look at Wikipedia, that is the story you will find to explain Jafar’s downfall, but apparently it is far from certain. Ibn Khaldun, the famous Muslim historian of the 14th century, doubted the story was true. At the end of it all, apparently we just don’t know anything for sure except that the Barmakids were destroyed and Jafar executed.

Jafar’s fallen reputation tarnished how he’s seen in later legends. In some of the Thousand Nights stories, he serves as a detective. But in the 1940 movie “The Thief of Baghdad,” he is an evil vizier who tries to usurp the throne by dark magic and take the princess. He has the same role in the video game “Prince of Persia,” and Disney’s Jafar character in its 1992 “Aladdin” is also an evil sorcerer threatening the throne and the princess. Maybe next the movies will discover that Jafar ibn Yahya al-Barmaki had a hand in building the first paper mill in Baghdad and he can star as the villain threatening the Lorax.

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Early Abbasid Queens, 754-809

Posted on December 14, 2021 by Ruth

The early Abbasid period was a time of unimaginable wealth. The empire was at its fullest extent, although tax and tribute from al-Andalus had dried up with going independent under Abd al-Rahman the Umayyad. Still, gold and jewels rolled in from the far East, which would later go independent—and from Egypt, which would also later go its own way. So it was a time of maximum income.

During the 8th century, the Abbasid Caliphs followed old Arab family traditions. Each of the first four Caliphs was married to an Arabian lady of rank as a first wife, and in several cases she was a cousin (that’s one way to ensure equal rank). Instead of living in a “harem” section of a general palace, these wives — and some of their daughters — sometimes had their own mansion. One of these independent palaces later became the main residence for the later Abbasid Caliphs, so we can be sure they were roomy and luxurious.

During the 9th century, the Caliphs stopped even getting married. They had sons with any number of concubines in a harem that’s a step closer to the Ottoman model most of us have in mind, then chose the strongest or smartest sons and groomed them as heirs. But during the 8th century, there was a presumption that the Arabian queen’s sons were the heirs. These sons, and the sons of concubines, were sent out to provinces to govern cities or regions. This gave them worldly experience and a network of supporters. In the 9th and 10th century’s system, sons were kept home lest they gain worldly experience and their own network and overthrow the father. The concubine who was mother to the current Caliph ruled the household as Queen Mother, even if she had never been “Queen” as a wife. But in the 8th century, we see wives and even daughters who had influence.

Arwa, the queen of Caliph al-Mansur, had married him before he was rich and powerful. She was from an old aristocracy in South Arabia that went back to the kings of Himyar, one of the Yemeni kingdoms. Before he was Caliph, all he had to offer was that he was of the Abbasid family, related to the Prophet. In the marriage negotiation, she stipulated that in her lifetime he could take no other women. When Caliph Mansur tried to annul this agreement, she won in court.

Arwa’s son Mahdi was married to his cousin Raita, keeping power among the Abbasids, and later he married a cousin and a descendant of Caliph Uthman. But he obtained a slave girl who was herself from South Arabia. Her name was Khayzuran, and she quickly became his real consort, and eventually his legal wife as well (one of four). Khayzuran’s sons became the heirs. She had her own household and even her own royal court — in the senses of both deciding legal cases and receiving ambassadors. She was educated in astronomy and Islamic law so that she could mix with men in the court on an equal footing. There was no precedent for this role in any Arab tradition. It seems to have been carried off entirely by her force of personality.

As Queen Mother, Khayzuran expected to maintain her power and her public role. Her older son al-Hadi opposed this, and it may have contributed to his early death. Harun al-Rashid welcomed his mother’s public role (and lived longer). Khayzuran had coins minted in her own name and personally commissioned public works in both Iraq and Arabia. When Harun al-Rashid went to other cities or on campaigns, Khayzuran ruled as regent. She may have been the model for the fictional Scheherazade, the story-telling queen of the Arabian Nights.

Harun al-Rashid’s wife Zubaydah was the daughter of Khayzuran’s sister and Mahdi’s brother. Harun started out as a very introverted person who might have accepted being cut out of the succession, as his brother tried to do, so that he could stay home and talk to Zubaydah. She was his first and official wife, but her son Muhammad al-Amin was not the oldest son. A concubine from Sogdia had given birth to Abdallah al-Ma’mun on the same day Harun became Caliph. Al-Amin was named first heir because of Zubaydah’s much higher rank.

As queen and queen mother, Zubaydah also had her own household. She didn’t mix in politics like her aunt/mother-in-law Khayzuran, but she took on independent projects and ventures. Like Khayzuran, she lived in her own palace. She was unusually pious; her female attendants had to be from among the women who had memorized the whole Quran. Zubaydah went on Hajj one year and learned that Mecca’s Well of Zamzam had slowed to a trickle. She paid to have the well redug, and not only that. She paid for an aqueduct to Mecca and improved the road between Mecca and Kufa to encourage more people to go on the Hajj. Rocks were removed, and wells and cisterns put in place.

Harun married five other wives. They were all women of rank, including cousins. His son al-Ma’mun married one rich heiress, Buran, long after he had fathered a number of children with concubines. The wedding was the greatest show of wealth in the dynasty, but Buran herself had no political power and may not have had children. Her lasting mark on the dynasty was to cede her personal palace to a later Caliph, who made it the primary residence. Buran was the last queen to have her own house, and pretty much the last legally married queen. From her time forward, the Caliphs collected women in a harem. Their position was not secure enough to permit a wife or mother with her own power base.

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Shi’ites: Imam Kazim, 745-799

Posted on December 13, 2021 by Ruth

Let’s review the Shi’ite Imam line that’s going on outside the spotlight, all this time. Ali is counted as the first Imam, since he claimed that title when he became Caliph—saying that “Caliph” had become corrupt, so he would be only the Imam, the one who stood in front. His son Hassan is counted as the second Imam, and Husayn as the third.

Husayn died at Karbala with his son and grandson present, and both of them survived. His son became the fourth, known as Imam al-Sajjad, and was poisoned by Caliph Walid. The fifth Shi’ite Imam, Husayn’s grandson who was at Karbala as a four year old child, was known as al-Baqir. He was poisoned by order of Caliph Hisham, the Umayyad who ruled the longest just before their overthrow by the Abbasids.

Life actually got harder under the Abbasids, because they were distant relatives of the Imams, therefore the Imams were a greater threat to their claims to secular rule. The Umayyads at least didn’t try to claim descent from the Prophet, but the Abbasids argued that descent from his uncle was good enough. Once the Umayyads had been overthrown in favor of the Abbasids, the same forces could overthrow the Abbasids in favor of the Alids — the descendants of Ali and Fatima. So the Abbasids had very mixed feelings about them. Sometimes, they acted friendly, but other times, they murdered these relatives.

The sixth Imam al-Sadiq lived through the Abbasid Revolution by staying out of all controversy. Even so, eventually the second Abbasid Caliph al-Mansur ordered him to be poisoned. Imam al-Sadiq had three sons, but he favored his son Musa, who became known as al-Kazim, Imam #7. Kazim (or Kadhim) meant confined or self-controlled. Imam al-Kazim had to be Imam only in secret, whereas his father and grandfather could be open about it as long as they stayed non-political. The secrecy of his appointment is one reason why Ismailis believe that his brother, Ismail, was the actual choice to be Imam. (They trace a line of Imams from Ismail’s son down to today’s Aga Khan.)

Imam al-Kazim tried to meet with students in a more indirect way, and he controlled alms funds also indirectly, trying to make it unclear to the Caliph whether he or someone else was in charge. He told his followers to have nothing to do with the government, not even to take government contracts for work. There was one exception, an official placed high in the Baghdad government. This man used his position to try to rescue or help Shi’ites who were arrested or illegitimately taxed.

Caliph al-Mahdi arrested the Imam once, but it was his son Harun al-Rashid who had more contact with the Imam. It was a mix of good and bad contacts. Considering himself a family member of the Prophet, Harun al-Rashid decided to honor the grave of Ali at Najaf. Until that time, the location was a closely-guarded secret among his descendants. There were other times when Harun al-Rashid met with the Imam and asked him questions, something all of the Caliphs had periodically done.

But at last, Harun al-Rashid arrested Imam Kazim. A careless (and possibly bribed) Alid relative told the Caliph that Kazim was the Shi’ite leader and accused him of making his own coins. Imam Kazim was arrested in the mosque and sent under guard to Basra — while a decoy caravan went to Kufa in case there were rescue attempts. In Basra, he was imprisoned in the house of the governor, the Caliph’s cousin. This cousin kept him in solitary confinement but did not want to kill him.

Imam Kazim was moved to Baghdad, imprisoned in the houses of two courtiers, then passed on to Sindi ibn Shahak, the chief of the royal police. Sindi ibn Shahak kept him for several years. Later, Sindi’s grandson became a prominent Shi’ite, so it’s likely that as severe as the imprisonment may have been, a grandson was able to get in to visit the inmate.

After about four years of these imprisonments, Harun al-Rashid gave orders for Kazim to be fed poisoned dates while he himself was out of town. Sindi wanted Kazim’s death to appear natural, even propping up the dying man in view of some court officials to show what a nice soft bed and good care he had. Kazim unexpectedly piped up and said that he had been poisoned. After death, Harun’s uncle took charge of the body and gave it a full burial, because he was afraid there would be a Shi’ite uprising. A Baghdad neighborhood still bears Kazim’s name.

Imam Kazim’s son Ali became the eighth Imam, although the family had many other sons. He was known as al-Reza, the Contented or Pleasing one. His mother had been a slave from Sudan, so we should imagine him as biracial. She was freed and married to the Imam as a reward for conspicuous piety. Imam al-Reza, unlike his father, did not face conflict over which son was chosen, because in spite of the danger, Kazim named him in his will. Still, Reza stayed in the shadows. Later, he became quite public: but that’s another story that we’ll come back to.

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Baghdad of Legend: the Arabian Nights

Posted on December 3, 2021 by Ruth

At the Round City’s House of Wisdom, the first work was to collect and translate the Persian books sitting in local libraries. We don’t know at what point they began to translate the Persian storybook that became the most successful Islamic cultural ambassador ever sent to Europe. It was probably pretty early.

The Persian story was about a Shah who, angry at all women because his wife was unfaithful, married and then beheaded one virgin per day. In this Persian kingdom, his chief minister was called the Dapir, the Scribe. The Dapir’s daughter had studied history intensely; she decided to volunteer as the next bride, confident that she could tell stories long enough to save her life. Within this frame story, she tells a core of stories that originated in Persian. The girl herself seems to be modeled on several legendary Persian queens.

In Arabic, the king’s chief minister was now the Wazir, an Arabic word. Religious references were altered to be consciously Muslim, and during the 9th century, stories about Harun al-Rashid were added. The culture presented in the new blended stories was that of Baghdad: Arabicized Persian. The book’s title was usually Alf Layla: One Thousand Nights.

Harun al-Rashid was the 5th Abbasid caliph, presiding over the new city at the height of its early glory. His mother had been a slave who rose to influence with her intelligence. Praising the Caliph’s mother could have been one reason for the way the stories multiplied. The Caliph appears in the stories as a daring, clever hero; he likes to go out disguised at night to learn the truth about affairs in the city. His faithful vizier Jafar often goes with him.

The stories first entered Europe’s consciousness in a French collection. Noticing that the stories did not live up to their name (there were not even close to one thousand of them), Antoine Galland added many more stories that he said were taken from storytellers in Syria. Galland’s version, published in 1717, set the spelling of names that we’ve come to expect: Scheherazade, the Vizier, Aladdin, Sindbad, and Ali Baba first come to us in Galland’s Mille Nuits. By this time, the stories were from all over the Silk Road, over several centuries.

Galland’s stories are set in Harun al-Rashid’s Baghdad, but some of the sub-stories are set in China, Bengal, or out in the Indian Ocean. Some stories have muskets, while some are very primitive; some are more Muslim than others. Some are science fiction (the flying horse) and some are detective stories; a second recurring character, with the caliph, is the Cadi, the sharia judge of Baghdad.

One core story that has been in the collection from the first Persian versions is about a fisherman and a Jinn. The fisherman finds a large vase, sealed with lead, in his nets. He opens it and out comes the Jinn, who offers him his choice of deaths. The Jinn explains that for the first century he was trapped, he promised to give his savior a choice of riches; the second century, riches and a choice of kingdoms; the third century, riches, a kingdom and a choice of everlasting life. But in the fourth century, he gave up and angrily vowed only to give his rescuer death for taking so long. The fisherman gets out of his predicament by tricking the Jinn back into the vase, and in some versions he has a lot more improbable adventures and fortunes. I’ve always loved that story for what it says about human psychology. Don’t we just do that?

If you haven’t read The Arabian Nights, as they’re commonly called, you really should try a few stories. C. S. Lewis borrowed his “Calormene” culture in Narnia straight from the 1000 Nights, and many other writers have used the stories as models. Victor Hugo wrote a poem about “Les Djinns,” inspired by Galland’s stories.

Here is a recent film cover, in which the Sultan is mentally ill with paranoia and has to be saved from himself by Scheherazade’s stories. Victor Hugo wrote a poem about “Les Djinns,” inspired by Galland’s stories. Here is a link to the poem in French and with translation.

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Baghdad: Paper Technology

Posted on December 3, 2021 by Ruth

Around 750, just before the Umayyads were overthrown in Damascus, you may remember that there was a battle at the far eastern front. It was like any other battle, but it was so close to the Chinese border that the Muslim victors captured craftsmen who knew a secret of the Chinese. (Of course, not for the last time; it became a pattern. This secret had to do with boiling rags and pressing the ground pulp into sheets that dried stiff and smooth.

Paper.

Shortly after the Abbasid capital moved farther east, some paper craftsmen came to Baghdad from Khurasan. It didn’t take long for the city’s industrial shops to realize the new product’s potential, since the grand translation project was beginning to ramp up already in the early Abbasid years. By the time Harun al-Rashid and his son Al-Mamoun were ordering mass translations, the paper industry was well-established.

Without paper, it would have been very difficult to keep up with their demands. Writing surfaces had been of three types until now: clay tablets, papyrus sheets, and parchment. Parchment was the most satisfactory: it was smooth and stiff, but it turned easily. It didn’t grow brittle within a short time like papyrus. It could be rubbed out or even whited over to re-use.

But making parchment was a messy process. It was a side industry to butchering, competing with tanning to process the skins. Like tanners, parchment makers had to soak, stretch, and scrape skins, throwing away most of the substance until all that was left was the integument itself and not much more. Parchment could be scraped too thin and suddenly break through in holes. It couldn’t be mass produced, since every piece had to be worked by hand.

Paper, on the other hand, needed drying time and only minimal (compared to parchment) hand processing. A Baghdad or Kufa merchant could spend a few years investing in wool felt, wooden frames, and wire screens, and at the end of it, he could turn out large amounts of paper with minimal human labor. Paper was as durable as parchment and soon became as popular or more popular for books. It certainly fed the House of Wisdom’s massive library expansion.

Paper remained an Eastern technology for a long time. It entered Europe via Spain, the other outpost of the Muslim empire. The town of Jativa in Valencia became a paper-making center some time between 800 and 1200. Eventually, the Reconquista brought Valencia back into Christian control. After 1260, paper-making spread to Italy and into the north.

Paper was quickly adopted by universities in Europe; book copyists made a decent living in those areas by copying the most in-demand portions of Aristotle and so on into informal books with wide margins for taking notes. Fine art books adopted paper more slowly, but the financial hub of Italy saw another advantage in it. Paper could be erased, but not as easily as parchment. Especially after the digit number system was adopted around the same time (13th and 14th centuries), paper financial records kept people honest. Official documents resisted the change, seeing paper as the cheapo, ephemeral alternative. Perhaps that’s why we still expect official documents like diplomas to be written on heavy paper, which we elevate by the name of “parchment.”

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Baghdad: the House of Wisdom

Posted on December 3, 2021 by Ruth

Baghdad’s Round City featured a large building that was called, at first, The Bookstore. It was modeled after the Persian Empire’s library in Ctesiphon, but its chief purpose was to transfer civilization into the Arabic script of the recently-literate nomads. It was a translation hub, and soon it was called simply the House of Wisdom.

The Abbasids in Baghdad started with al-Mansour, then his son al-Mahdi, and grandson Harun al-Rashid, then the great-grandson al-Mamoun. Al-Mansour began the book collection, expanded by his son. Harun al-Rashid created the first building and established scholars to begin translating, while al-Mamoun expanded it into a multi-wing institution and increased its funding and scope. These four caliphs spanned from 754 to 833. Baghdad’s Golden Age continued after, but the real glory years were these early ones centered around the year 800.

The first task of translation scholars was to put Persian books into Arabic, to make them accessible to the new dynasty. By this time, many Arabic nobles had married Persian heiresses, so there were multi-lingual children to step into translation roles. (Caliph al-Mamoun was among them; his mother had been Persian, so he was naturally bilingual.) Coming from Damascus, other scholars translated the Aramaic and Syriac books of the Levant into Arabic. They also recruited some Sanskrit scholars to import the works of captured northern India into Arabic. Every Muslim government included Jewish scholars and officials, so they had ready ability to translate Hebrew as well.

During the time of Caliph al-Mamoun, there were two huge book importation projects. By this time, the mission of the House of Wisdom had shifted from translating conquered literature to translating all literature. Greek literature resided primarily in Constantinople, but there was also a good library in Sicily. Sicily agreed to sell the contents of its library to Baghdad. According to Islamic tradition, the books were imported in mass quantity by ship and camel caravan. Then the Caliph arranged for some of his officials to enter Constantinople as visiting scholars to translate Greek and Latin works stored there. It was at this time that the original building was massively expanded to include many wings and courtyards, each dedicated to a branch of learning.

There was a particular focus on astronomy and mathematics. Sanskrit mathematical treatises, often from the Jain sect of northern India, were now available in Arabic and Persian. There was no original plan to make the House of Wisdom into a university, but of course, by making the works available, Baghdad spurred further study. Al-Mamoun funded an observatory to continue the study of astronomy, and during this time, the first astrolabe was invented in Baghdad. The principles of algebra, too, were worked out in Baghdad by Arab-Persian scientists.

The words beginning with “al” come from this time: alchemy, algebra, algorithm, almanac, alcohol, alkali. Greek Ptolemy’s astronomical calculation tables have come to us with the title “Almagest,”also from their passage through Arabic. Even more words entered through Spanish, but more of that later.

For about 400 years, the Abbasid-founded library center served its purpose of transferring scientific knowledge from one part of the empire to another, and from one language to another.

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Back to Baghdad: Writing Arabic

Posted on December 3, 2021 by Ruth

During the Abbasid Caliphate’s Golden Age, the Arabic script was reformed. The Abbasids moved their capital from Damascus, a Semitic (Aramaic) language center, to Baghdad in Persia. Arabic became a second language for most of its speakers in Baghdad, people with a completely different (Indo-European) language background. They began to study it carefully, as few languages had been studied at that time.

In nearby Basra, a linguist known as al-Farahidi began to update and reform Arabic writing. His goal was to standardize writing for poetry, and he also wrote a dictionary. The chief reform was to use a simpler vowel marking system. There had been experiments with using dots over and under the flowing consonants, sometimes with different color. Al-Farahidi worked out a simpler way, and he also added an extra consonant.

Al-Farahidi’s patches on the system made it possible to actually read Arabic without being a Bedouin. The enormous effort put into translation in Baghdad was only possible because they now had a workable writing system. Eventually, the Koran was rewritten with the new system. Persian, previously written with cuneiform, moved to the Arabic script. When the Turks began to invade and gradually got converted to Islam, their languages were first written in it, too. Eventually, all eminent scholars had to know the Arabic script.

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