North African Puritans

Posted on February 17, 2014 by Ruth

When the Ismaili Shi’ites were looking for an accepting, protective tribe distant from Baghdad’s central power, they found it in the Kutama tribe of Berbers. With this base, they took over the Mediterranean strip of North Africa, and on across Egypt into Palestine and Syria. But when, eventually, a counter-reaction to Ismaili evangelicalism developed, it came from the very same place.

Unlike Persia, North Africa did not have a deep tradition of either scholarship or tolerance. If Islam’s first mutation came from settling into Persian culture, its second and third mutations came from Berber intolerance. After the eastern Berbers took up Ismaili-Fatimid evangelicalism, the western Berbers were left discontented. What was left for them? A Puritanical, fundamentalist, legalistic reaction that was just as fervent and even less tolerant.

Sunni Islam had mostly been focusing on interpretation of the Quran and Sharia law during the past few centuries. Each of its competing schools of thought was dominant in some region, so that the customs of this theological interpretation turned into cultural norms. It was one of these movements, the Maliki school of thought, that now came to the western Berbers.

Sheikh Malik, the founder of Maliki theology, was a Yemenite whose family moved to Medina when they converted to Islam. He lived in Medina during the 700s, the period when Islamic conquest was expanding rapidly.  The Companions of Mohammed had died by then, but they were still close enough in time that some of young Malik’s teachers may have known the Companions. Their interpretation of the Quran leaned heavily on “original intent,” as we call it in constitutional studies. What was written mattered, but what the original Muslims of Medina believed and practiced mattered *more.* The Maliki school questioned every hadith, custom or issue by asking: What Does Medina Do?

By the 1000s, when Maliki Islam spread to North Africa, there was a tradition of legal books in Medina. The huge library at the trading city of Timbuktu was the African base for Maliki scholarship. However, the use of Medina as a conversation-stopper meant that Maliki Islam lent itself well to illiterate use and dogmatism. A scholar might know what the competing legal philosophies thought about a question, but the right answer was all that really mattered. One of the founding principles of Maliki Islam was “Closing the Door,” a step where once the right things had been looked at (Mohammed’s life, Sheikh Malik’s books, Medina custom), the question had to be closed. It was not at all a value to keep a question open just for discussion.

Maliki Islam also preserved Mohammed’s Medina-era determination to conquer Arabia for the faith. Where Ismailis were looking for conversions to esoteric belief, Malikis were told to go out and conquer. After Ismaili faith moved eastward to Cairo, Maliki faith settled in its place and firmly became the dogma of North Africa. As far as I know, it still is. There’s a Sufi mystical branch associated with it.

Marrakech in Morocco was built as their ruling capital. Then Maliki Tuareg fighters fanned out across northern and western Africa. Over the 11th century, they conquered all of the desert tribes in modern Mali, Chad and Sudan. They defeated the Kingdom of Ghana, forcing its conversion in 1075. Along the West African coast, in the thick jungle, traditional African religions persisted, but inland, where the Maliki warriors could reach, they were all converted to Islam. That’s why northern Nigeria is the Muslim part.

Islam in most parts of Africa, then, took the form of a dogmatic, unscholarly (excepting Timbuktu), expansive and aggressive faith. Islam in Nigeria is Maliki, and it still is dogged by illiteracy and aggression. For this reason, ISIS has found recruiting in Africa very easy.

Ansar al-Dine was affiliated with Al Qaeda when it destroyed saints’ tombs in Timbuktu, in 2012. Al Qaeda is not Maliki but Salafi; but AQ’s vision of true Islam matched the original Maliki customs very well. Boko Haram in Nigeria was also founded by AQ-related Salafists, and now considers itself part of “the Islamic State.” The anti-intellectual, anti-liberal beliefs of Arabian Salafists found an easy connection with the traditional Malikis. They may have felt ashamed for neglecting the Medina mandate of jihad and expansion. AQ and ISIS gave them outside money and weapons, recharging the mission.

At the same time, to the traditional Maliki imams in Nigerian towns, the loss of their young men to Salafism is also a crisis. Salafism has its puritanical narrowness and aggression in common with the original Malikis, but it is not based in Medina customs. They must have very mixed feelings about this new school of thought and its costly jihad. But without a scholarly tradition, they can’t really challenge it.

Posted in Muslim Empire (old series) | Leave a comment

End of Cordoban power

Posted on February 15, 2014 by Ruth

In 976, around the same time that Fatimids were building Cairo, the last powerful descendant of Abd al-Rahman died in Cordoba. He left a 12 year old son, Hisham II, with Hisham’s mother as regent.

As so often happened, this proved a calamity for the nation. Al-Manzur, a powerful vizier, controlled the queen regent’s decisions and isolated the boy in a palace prison. Al-Manzur repeatedly went to war against the Christian kings of Castile and Leon. By 1000, he was ruler over the largest territory of Spain that any Emir or Caliph had ruled yet.

The Fatimid/Ismaili controversies stayed out of Andalusia for the most part. There was no visible sign of trouble in 1000.

Yet at the same time, the vizier al-Manzur was not building a state that could last after his death. After the boy Caliph died, Manzur married the daughter of Sancho king of Navarre as if he were the king himself. He even named his own son Abd al-Rahman, as if they were the real line of Umayyad princes. But he neglected and even ruined some of the traditional Cordoban institutions, such as the library. And in order to win more northern territory, he imported more Berbers as mercenaries.

The Caliphs never seemed to learn the lesson about dangerous mercenaries—or else they really had no other choices. Unlike the Franks, they did not have a feudal tradition with deep loyalty and kinship ties running down through ranks. Frankish kings could count on loyal troops as long as they maintained their traditional duties within feudalism.

Muslim lands didn’t seem to have this social structure. Probably this was due to their being immigrants who were not related to each other, let alone to the farming population. They ruled at the top, collecting tribute. Extended families might build up power and loyalty within a city, but it didn’t extend to the next city. It was pretty easy for loyalties to be changed, too. What’s based on money can be bought.

After al-Manzur’s death, neither of his sons was able to hold onto power. They were too dependent on North African mercenaries, who weren’t actually loyal once “Strongman Daddy” was gone. After 1009, Andalusia was in chronic civil war.

Cordoba had been the central power since Abd Al-Rahman made it his capital in the late 700s. But in 1012, it was ransacked by rebellious Berbers. There must have been so much gold and silver loot in the city to tempt nomadic fighters. The city never recovered in medieval times, and was never again the capital. Scholars fled, perhaps taking with them what books they could carry.

By 1030, Andalusia had no central power. Each city pulled together their local defenses against outside invasion. The strongest leader became a local king. In Arabic, these little city-states were called Taifas. There were at least 30 of them at the start, all fighting and pushing against each other.

More powerful taifas tried to recreate central power. Seville may have had the greatest success, forcing neighboring towns into its tribute/tax structure. Gradually, there were fewer separate taifas, and the map started showing larger mini-kingdoms. But their boundaries were extremely volatile.

Andalusia was ripe for the Reconquista to begin. The Christian kingdoms in the north had sometimes been forced to pay tribute to Cordoba. Now the power balance was reversed. Castile, Leon, and Navarre began to take back town after town. Some taifa rulers paid them tribute in order to stay in power.

Disarray and civil war are always invitations for invasion. But it took about 50 years for a real invasion to happen, so for now, we’ll leave the taifas struggling along like a jigsaw puzzle, with Castile and Leon always growing, pushing southward. Andalusia is no longer part of the regional power balance. This is a shame because it was one of the most successful regional powers while it lasted. When people talk about the way Muslims were more tolerant and cultured than Christians, they are almost always talking about the Cordoban kingdom of the Abd al-Rahman line. RIP, 755-1012.

 

Posted in Muslim Empire (old series) | Tagged , | Leave a comment

The Mad Caliph

Posted on February 14, 2014 by Ruth

By the late 900s, the Fatimid dynasty was in control of all of North Africa, Palestine, and the holy places in Arabia, Mecca and Medina.

Sunni Muslims had been the norm in Egypt; now they were pressured to become Ismailis. This meant they had to denounce the Companions of Mohammed and accept changed customs of public prayer. Prayers were no longer offered for the Abbasid Caliph, since he was the apostate false Imam. With the Ismailis in charge of Mecca, Medina and Jerusalem, Sunni pilgrims were out of luck. It may have been possible to make the official trip to Mecca some or even most of the time, but there were times when Sunni pilgrims were attacked and killed. Only Ismaili Muslims were permitted into Jerusalem.

Imam-Caliph al-Hakim went through three stages in his reign (996-1021). First, he was a pretty good guy like his father al-Aziz. Then he was stark raving mad. Then he mellowed a bit and vanished.

In childhood, he went by the name Mansur; it’s not clear which of al-Aziz’s wives was his mother, but she may have been Greek Orthodox Christian. Little Mansur had blue eyes. When he was only 11, his father the Caliph died, and he took the regnal name al-Hakim bi-Amur Allah, Ruler by God’s Command.

Al-Hakim’s first act on coming into his majority, 10 years later, seems to have been a public posting of curses against Aisha, Mohammed’s wife, and the first 3 Caliphs for not immediately giving power to Ali and Fatima. As an Ismaili Shi’ite, he was deeply hostile to the Sunnis. In retaliation, Baghdad commanded a group of scholars to declare that the Fatimids weren’t actually related to Fatima at all. They also accused al-Hakim of favoring Christians and Jews over (Sunni) Muslims.

Now began the Caliph’s crazy period. He may have been trying to prove he wasn’t that nice to Christians and Jews, but his actions went well past that. Legends of his insane decisions vary; Sunni historians credit him with much worse things than Shi’ite ones (who point out that he established Al-Azhar university and did some pious charitable things). It still seems likely that he had bipolar or schizoaffective disorder.

He banned various vegetables, shellfish, and chess. He ordered all dogs killed because their barking was intolerable. He outlawed wine and the Christian holidays of Easter and Christmas. He ordered Christians to wear a large iron cross around their necks, and Jews to wear a wooden calf (or a bell!). Their women had to wear non-matching shoes, red and black. He sacked a town near Cairo, perhaps due to its large Jewish population (Fustat is where Maimonides later lived).

From 1007 to 1012, he ordered the wholesale destruction of churches, monasteries and synagogues across his realm, which included the Holy Land. Constantine’s Church of the Holy Sepulcher was dismantled stone by stone (1009). By 1012, historians say that no churches or synagogues remained in Palestine.

After that, he backed off considerably on the Christians and Jews, and instead began to persecute Sunni Muslims and people in general. In 1014, he ordered women to stay indoors and forbade the making of women’s shoes. He executed countless people, including close friends and complete strangers. Sometimes, they say, he did the killing personally.

His zeal for the Ismaili faith began to win him significant support among the most fanatical Shi’ites. One Persian preacher, Hamza, declared that al-Hakim was the Incarnation of God, 1000 years after Christ. This was perhaps the only attention Muslims paid to the Millennium, since they counted years since the Prophet. Christians, by contrast, were swept with Millennial zeal and some expected the end of the world. They did get the end of the church built on Jesus’ tomb; it was so noted and never forgotten.

Al-Hakim grew a little more mellow and ascetic with age. His reign wasn’t bad for the Fatimid dynasty in some ways; in others it was a disaster. In 1021, he went into the desert to meditate, and he never came back. History assumes that his older sister had him assassinated; she became regent for his young son.

The Church of the Holy Sepulcher was rebuilt later by the Byzantine Emperor, with the Caliph’s permission. The church that Crusaders later prayed in was this recently-built basilica, begun in 1042. But the stories of Christian persecution and martyrdom remained in circulation. Al-Hakim’s mad ideological rampage was the first step toward international war.

 

 

Posted in Muslim Empire (old series) | Tagged , , | Leave a comment

Fatimid ideology

Posted on February 14, 2014 by Ruth

The IMAM:

During the Abbasid years, Shi’ite believers had turned away from secular power in order to survive. Those who challenged the Caliph openly usually died. Those who developed the ability to go undercover while seeming loyal, survived. We hear this word, “taqqiyah,” sometimes in our time; it was not endorsement of lying, but it was some kind of admission that joining Friday prayers for the Abbasid Caliph would be necessary and therefore permissible.

From this background, Shi’ite ideology developed two opposing fundamental beliefs. First, they believed that only a true Imam should be Caliph: that state and religion should be one. Second, they believed that the true Imam could be known by the way he shunned secular power and wealth in favor of studying esoteric theology. This is the paradox of Shi’ite Islam: the true Imam is both a secular ruler and a secretive mystic.

“Imam” is the key word for Shi’ites. It means leader, path, and guide. In the desert, where Arabic originated, the three concepts were pretty close in meaning: the path was where the leader guided you; it was not marked out separately by paving and yellow lines. The true leader is the one who knows the path to the next oasis.

“Imam” is the key word for Shi’ites. It means leader, path, and guide. In the desert, where Arabic originated, the three concepts were pretty close in meaning: the path was where the leader guided you; it was not marked out separately by paving and yellow lines. The true leader is the one who knows the path to the next oasis.

Their fundamental belief is that Mohammed appointed Fatima’s husband (and his own cousin) Ali to be the next Imam after himself. Imams can be appointed this way in a sort of “laying on of hands” succession. Imams can also arise from God’s appointment through their holiness and devotion to esoteric studies. Imams who are neither appointed nor preoccupied with esoteric mysteries are not true Imams, they are false ones that lead people astray.

Shi’ites agreed on the succession of Imams to a certain point, where they divided. One Imam had two sons; the Twelvers believe the younger son, Musa, was his successor, while the Ismailis (Seveners) follow the older son, Ismail. This division already existed before Fatimid times, but it was not yet important as long as they were only studying mystical writings. Competing branches of Imams discussed law and theology in secret. Once the Fatimids had secular power, factions among Shi’ites started to matter a lot.

DAWA:

Dawa means an invitation or summons to meet Allah. The person who gives this message is the Da’i, the summoner. The words are in the Quran, and the concept has always been part of Mohammed’s message. But nobody really developed the idea until the Fatimids set up Al-Azhar Mosque and school, around 990.

The Ismaili faith (like other branches of Shi’ism) was more intensely spiritual than what the average Sunni Muslim in Damascus or Isfahan practiced. There are two main reasons for this. First, historically the conversion to Islam had been mostly pragmatic for most people. It required them to confess Allah and Mohammed, follow some basic rules, and pray certain words. It was a lifestyle, a cultural habit. Their keenest interests and passions lay elsewhere.

The focus on imitating a holy Imam is the other reason. The line of Imams descended from Hussein’s one surviving child were all ascetic scholars and mystics. Excluded from ruling power, and often forced to live in hiding, they channeled their energies into esoteric knowledge about the structure of Heaven, the names of God, and things like that. Their faith was passionately serious and required deep interest and feeling. They developed a theology of redemption like the Christians; Ali and Hussein had died for their people.

So now, Al-Azhar Mosque and school trained Da’i agents in how to explain Ismaili faith and effect conversions. They sent them out in an organized fashion, in all directions but mostly toward the Iraq/Iran Muslim heartland. The missionaries had to operate in complete secrecy, because although they were merely preaching Islam among Muslims, their message could lead to the overthrow of the pragmatic Sunni government. They were preparing the ground for a possible Fatimid invasion, at the same time that they were soliciting devout personal faith. Mostly, they posed as merchants.

Yemen and the region of Iraq/Iran were the most fertile ground for Dawa activity. If you think about it, the Shi’ite faith is easiest to accept if you are ethnically or geographically related to it. If you’re part of the Arabian tribes, or even in some sense part of the Quraysh, it’s a very welcome message. If you live near Karbala, the holy site of Hussein’s self-sacrifice, it’s also welcome. It’s at this time that Iran became largely Shi’ite in faith, through the work of Egyptian missionaries.

The Seljuk Turks were as adamantly opposed to the Ismaili faith as were the Abbasids. Their conversion to Islam was pragmatic, and they could not fancy themselves part of the Ismaili holy faction. Shi’a appeared to exclude them; it was not appealing. In the Ghaznavid kingdom, or in other cities with Turkic majorities, the Da’i were arrested if found. So too wherever Baghdad’s power was still in force. The Ismaili faith was political treason and merited a death penalty.

INTERFAITH DIALOGUE:

The Fatimid dynasty ruled Egypt and Syria as a very small minority among the native Christian populations, and even as a minority among Muslims. During the 900s, Egyptians were still mostly Christian. If there are numbers to estimate how many had converted to Islam, I can’t find them, but definitely the following century had some really big waves of conversion that hadn’t happened yet. Let’s guess that 20% were Muslims, 5% Jews, and 75% Christians. In rural Egypt, over 90% were still Christians.

The Fatimids had conquered the Abbasid emir’s army, but they still needed some popular support for their rule. They couldn’t rock the boat with harsh or large changes, and they also had to court the favor of all intellectuals and landowners. This meant that they had to show fairness and even favoritism toward Jews and Christians. For this reason, the Fatimid period was a great time for rebuilding synagogues and churches, and for taking a rest period from persecution.

Iman-Caliph al-Aziz (975-996) liked to sponsor three-way interfaith debates. He called this gathering a majlis, the word now used for a parliament. A famous Coptic legendary miracle came out of one of the majlis debates. A rabbi challenged the Caliph to make the Christians prove Jesus’ saying that “if you have faith the size of a mustard seed, you can move a mountain.” The Caliph, perhaps amused, but more likely sincerely interested since Ismailis were interested in the supernatural, gave the Patriarch three days to come up with a mountain-moving solution. If the Christian scriptures were proven false, they would be demoted and persecuted.

The Coptic Patriarch, who was a Syrian monk named Afraham, called for a universal fast. The Patriarch had a vision that told him a one-eyed tanner would move the mountain. This man was called Simon, and he was indeed very pious. As Jews, Christians and Muslims gathered around one of Cairo’s nearby hills to watch, the Christians led by Simon prayed, and then Mt. Moqattam moved. The Caliph rewarded them with permission to rebuild more churches.

The early Fatimids were easy rulers for other faiths. Because they understood devout loyalty and had been persecuted, they did not rush to inflict persecution. We’ll look next at the most infamous Fatimid, an Imam who was unfortunately mentally ill. His rule was uniquely difficult; but afterward, the dynasty faced a rebellion among Ismailis. The Fatimids followed the path of all rulers who begin with idealism: first they had to consolidate power with a slave army, then they had to pacify their own factions by ceasing to favor Jews and Christians.

 

Posted in Muslim Empire (old series) | Tagged , , | Leave a comment

Religious ideology in the early Middle Ages

Posted on February 14, 2014 by Ruth

When the Abbasids overthrew the Umayyads, theology had been only lightly involved, just enough to get most Shi’ite sympathizers on their side while actually shifting power to Persians. These dynasties had been about pragmatic balance of power and maximizing tax revenue. The Fatimids were of a different nature.

All religions go through cycles of purity, pragmatism, mainstreamism, and reformation—which leads to a similar cycle again. During the Middle Ages, each cycle of this type among Christians created a new order of monks, since each one intended to really get it right and never go mainstream. The rise of the Fatimids was the first significant movement like this in Islam. It had many of the same underlying motives: the status quo rulers gradually compromise with strict rules in order to have a “big tent,” and this way they also get richer. Along comes a “have not” to criticize the “haves,” and the first line of criticism is always: they’ve made too many compromises. They shouldn’t be respected for their wealth and power, which are signs of corruption.

At the same time that the Fatimids were overthrowing the Abbasids, the French and German kings were struggling to control the Pope. Both of these were long-term struggles over how the power of religion should work with or against the power of a king’s military and economic rule. Christians began with an independent but fairly helpless Pope, who allied with first Charlemagne and then various of his descendants. The presumption was that the church and state were separate, but various kings and Popes tried to bring them together. It was pragmatically better for church and state to be allied at times, but they were always fighting against the words of Jesus, “My kingdom is not of this world.” Reform movements tried to break the church away from state power.

It went the other way in Islam. Mohammed had been both prophet and military ruler, so his heirs presumed they could be both. When the Umayyads took control of Damascus, they could not claim to be spiritual heirs of Mohammed. Among the people, a tradition of spiritual leadership continued, separate from the Caliph’s power. The Abbasid dynasty temporarily united them again by claiming descent from a Mohammedan family member, but in reality their rule was secular and pragmatic too.

Because the presumption was that the ruler *could* or even *should* be both Imam and Caliph, the purest forms of Islam always insisted on unity of church and state. Reform movements sought to restore religious power to the state, instead of taking it away. The same tug of war occurred, but the attractors and repellers were exactly opposite.

It’s no wonder that Islamic regions of our time still have a different idea of church and state power. In order to understand why they don’t share our baseline ideas of a good church/state balance, I want to look at Shi’ite theology in a few essays. The Fatimid dynasty is the best time to look at the philosophical and theological side of Islam because it came in with missionary fervor. Muslims within the Umma converted to the new faction and then traveled to new regions to preach the gospel of Shi’ite Ismailism. Although any secular rule has pragmatic concerns, the Fatimid dynasty was chiefly ideological.

Posted in Muslim Empire (old series) | Tagged , | Leave a comment

The Shi’ite Revolution: Revenge of Fatima

Posted on February 13, 2014 by Ruth

Ever since the Battle of Karbala, true-believer Shi’ites kept track of a secret line of true Imams descended from one survivor. It was inevitable that someone would emerge to challenge Abbasid power, and to this end, the regime was constantly scanning for candidates to arrest and execute.

The Caliph’s territory was just too large to maintain close control, so it’s not surprising that the first serious challenge to Abbasid power came from the frontier. But instead of emerging in Khorasan or Bukhara in the east, it showed up in Tunisia, among the discontented Berbers.

A man named Abdullah al-Mahdi Billah began to preach to the Kutama Berbers that he was the true Imam: a descendant of the secret 7th Imam, Ismail. Here you need to know about a sectarian split:

Ismailis differ from Twelvers (the Iranian majority) in that they all agree on the first six Imams, ending with Mohammed’s great-great-grandson Jafar, but after that they favor different sons of Jafar. Ismail was one of the sons, Musa the other. Musa outlived Jafar, while Ismail was already deceased; but the Ismailis follow a line through Ismail’s son, not through Musa. They also count only one of the grandsons of Mohammed, so their 7th Imam Jafar is the Twelvers’ 6th Imam Jafar. Ismailis are also called Seveners.

Ismaili Imams 8, 9 and 10 had lived furtively in Syria under constant Abbasid threat, but they believed the 10th century was their moment. They sent some missionaries ahead to Morocco, first. Then, traveling as a merchant, the 11th Imam, Abdullah al-Mahdi Billah, came to Morocco and revealed himself publicly.

By claiming descent from Fatima, he claimed both spiritual and secular power. His movement was generally Shi’ite, and more specifically Ismaili; it is historically named the Fatimid Dynasty. All of the Shi’ite Imams are descended from Fatima, Mohammed’s daughter, but this group ended up with it as a historical name.

The Sunni Muslim governors of North Africa put al-Mahdi in prison, but Ismaili supporters in Syria were ready; they sent a rebel army to rescue al-Mahdi and establish his rule in 909. Al-Mahdi’s forces consolidated power and began moving eastward through Algeria.

In 920, the Imam-Caliph moved into a new capital city, Al-Mahdiyah, on the Tunisian coast. Bulgaria and Constantinople quickly enriched the Fatimid Caliph with a bidding war of alliance gifts. (Bulgaria lost.) The Fatimids took control of Sicily, then moved along the African coast into Libya. So far this was bad (the Fatimid towns stopped paying Abbasid taxes), but its psychological effect on Baghdad was minimal. Egypt was the jewel in the Caliph’s crown, and it had been able to stave off invaders from Libya for centuries. Egypt was safe.

But in 969, the Emir of Egypt was defeated by Fatimid forces. To understand how serious this was, we need to realize that Egypt had been almost single-handedly feeding imperial armies for a long time. Losing Egypt meant famine among the troops; it meant sickness, desertion, and general military weakness. Losing Egypt was always the prelude to losing everything.

The Fatimids took Alexandria and pressed into the Nile Delta heartland. They set up their new government in the town of Fustat, near Memphis, then began to build a city on the ruins of old Fort Babylon. One legend suggests that the name “Cairo” was based on the planet Mars, which was high in the sky as they started construction. That was cutting-edge science in 970, of course. Cairo became the capital city of Shi’ite Ismaili fervor, as well as the ruling city of the Fatimids.

Abbasid Baghdad began to lose its regional influence. The Seljuks came closer, while more eastern provinces broke away. Constantinople made a marriage/conversion alliance with the Kievan Rus (basically, Vikings). With the added territory and manpower, the Byzantines were able to conquer Bulgaria and Serbia. Surrounding armies grew, while Baghdad’s withered.

By 1058, a Fatimid army from Egypt marched right into Baghdad to challenge the Abbasid Caliph. The Caliph had only one possible move: he reached out to the nearby Seljuks, who controlled most of the territory north and east of Baghdad. Turkish help was effective, but it came at a price. After that, the de facto ruler in Baghdad was Toghril Bey, the original Seljuk’s grandson. The Abbasids kept their “Caliph” title a little longer, but it didn’t matter.

 

 

Posted in Muslim Empire (old series) | Tagged , , , | Leave a comment

Mamluks and Seljuks

Posted on February 6, 2014 by Ruth

During the years of white ceramics, mathematics, and water clocks, the Abbasid dynasty was fairly stable. But no dynasty is ever easily stable; the Abbasid ruler had to move east to Samarra once, as power see-sawed. The Central Asia territory was too large to rule centrally; it kept breaking off at the edges into separatist sultanates. Meanwhile there began a new long-term migration wave of Turks, coming from the east in wagons carrying yurts.

The Abbasid caliphs saw the first Turks as a wonderful resource for building up a private army, the way Abd al-Rahman had done. The families could be offered a bit of land on condition that most of the men join the army; or they could be hired directly; or they could be taken as slaves. The Arabic word for a person owned as a possession has come to us as Mamluk.

Mamluk soldiers were drawn from both western and eastern margins of the empire. Best results came from taking boys who were between 9 and 11, then putting them into Spartan training conditions. The boys adopted the new Arabic identity fairly easily because their training units had high morale. Most of them had already faced a life of hard work and poverty; now they had plenty to eat and could earn rank and rewards.

Mamluk armies became the backbone of the Muslim empire, even until modern times. During the Abbasid period, they were Slavs (often blue-eyed and blond) and Turks (black-haired, with slanted Asian eyes). With a tax-supported Mamluk army, the Abbasid dynasty could resist most of the rebellions.

There were many Turkic ethnic groups in the region at this time. The Pechenegs and Bulgars had been living around Bulgaria, Ukraine and Anatolia since the 7th century. A large group called the Oghuz had settled between the Caspian and Aral Seas, roughly Kazakhstan. Nearby was the Kimak Khanate of the Kipchaks, and roughly in modern Ukraine was the Jewish-convert Khazar Khanate. There were also Uyghurs along the Silk Road. Most of these people shared enough vocabulary to communicate basic words.

A group of Oghuz Turks rebelled, and after a few battles, they left Oghuz territory and started moving westward by stages. Their leader, Seljuk Bey, converted to Islam in the late 900s. His followers began using Arabic Muslim names, so they become hard for us to spot in a cursory glance at history. We see Mahmuds and Ahmeds and assume Arabic ancestry.

It was the beginning of a long, slow, but unstoppable cultural shift within Islam. At the start, the Seljuk Turks were starkly different from their Persian neighbors. However, they learned Persian and borrowed many of its words, and they adapted to its culture. Some of them settled where they were, while others kept the nomadic life and kept drifting.

The first real trouble began in the far east, when a Turkish Mamluk slave took over the territory of modern Pakistan, Afghanistan, and Iran. This coup didn’t directly challenge Baghdad, because the Khorasan region had broken away from its rule already. However, it showed the other Mamluks what was possible. All the Mamluk general Alp Tigin had to do was walk away from his command structure with his troops, take his own city (Ghazna), and begin ruling. Within two generations, the Ghaznavids were Persian-speaking Muslim Sultans who ruled a vast area for about three centuries. Any Mamluk could do it.

By the year 1003, when the mathematical Pope Sylvester II died, Baghdad’s eastern provinces were increasingly Turkish, with little interest in imperial obedience. The Round City itself had Seljuk nomads camped not that many miles away. They weren’t hostile invaders, but they definitely put pressure on the Abbasid status quo. And they thought like nomads.

 

 

Posted in Muslim Empire (old series) | Tagged , | Leave a comment

Gerbert as Pope Sylvester

Posted on February 5, 2014 by Ruth

I had trouble writing this entry because writerly discipline suggests I should stick with my main subject: the early Pope who attempted to introduce Arabic numbers, but failed. However, he was appointed Pope by his pupil, whom he was apparently still tutoring between military campaigns. And Otto III is pretty interesting.

His first pupil, Otto II, was married to a Greek princess and fully in control of his kingdoms by age 18. He continued his father’s project of campaigns against the Slavs; the Poles and Bohemians were converting to Christianity, thus joining the Christendom UN-like club. (His French cousins were busy baptizing and integrating the Danes as Normans.)

The Byzantine princess, Queen Theophanu, must have been delighted to find that her husband was well educated. She shocked the German court by taking a bath every day and eating with a golden fork instead of her fingers. Her education was so good that she was often involved with diplomacy; of course, she also spoke Greek, which to Germany was an exotic foreign language, not yet one of its standard school subjects. Theophanu had three girls before producing an heir, Otto III. But not long after, the Holy Roman Emperor Otto II died, probably of malaria. He was only 28.

It took Theophanu about two years to gain control of her tiny son and the regency, and then it was clear that no expense could be spared in educating the young King of the Germans. He would inherit his family’s internal family wars, as well as their battles to subdue/baptize the Slavs and Huns and (incidentally) pack the church with relatives and thus dominate the Pope, too.

So Theophanu sent for Gerbert of Aurillac to start teaching her six-year old, who already spoke both German and Greek. Otto III learned Latin, which he may have spoken a little already, since his grandmother had been born Queen of Italy in Rome. He may have learned basic Arabic reading skills; he certainly learned the mathematics/astronomy curriculum that was Gerbert’s specialty. He was probably the best-educated non-scholar of his era.

Otto III assumed full control of Germany at age 14, and by 16, he rode into Rome to claim his birthright there, too. Poland was brought fully under Germany’s overlordship, with parts of Bohemia. Otto III acted as baptism sponsor to the first Christian King Stephen I of Hungary. He began building a palace in Rome, and he made a contract to marry a Princess Zoe of Constantinople. It was Otto III who also had the colorful experience of entering Charlemagne’s tomb to get relics, only to find his great-great-grandfather seated in a chair, mummified by the dry air, with gold teeth shining in the lantern-light.

Otto III’s attitude to the Papacy was full-on assault. First he appointed his 24 year old cousin; a few short years later, he appointed his best friend and tutor, Gerbert of Aurillac. At this time, it was unclear how Popes should be chosen. If a strong Holy Roman Emperor appointed one, who could say no? Medieval Europe’s history is shaped by the struggles of the Pope to remain separate while French and German kings tried to co-opt his power.

At 21, with his princess bride disembarking in an Italian port, Otto III suddenly died. His legacy was in doubt and disarray, left to his greedy cousins in Bavaria. Only Gerbert remained, as Pope Sylvester II.

Gerbert of Aurillac ruled as Pope Sylvester II for only four years, 999 to 1003. His appointment was almost certainly meant as a stick in the eye of the Roman and Italian hierarchy. He was a Frenchman from Aquitaine, appointed by a Greek-speaking German. Although he was the Archbishop of Ravenna at that point, he had never been much involved with church politics, and when he was, the results were poor.

He was just not interested in theology and church governance; he really wanted to study math.  He had written Latin books on Arabic mathematics, with an emphasis on simple trigonometry for figuring out surveying problems: heights of mountains, areas of fields. Shortly before he became the Pope, his personal letter to a Frankish friend discusses the right way of figuring the area of an equilateral triangle. His career problem was that universities had not yet been founded, so he could not chair a math department. The only career track in which lifelong study was funded was the church; influence in the church entailed promotion in its governing structure. Church politics made faculty meetings look like play groups.

Rome rebelled against Otto III, in spite of (or because of) his plans for an imperial palace there. It rejected his Pope, too. Gerbert/Sylvester II did his best to govern the church, but his time was short since he died only a year after Otto III. One might think he was soon forgotten, but instead, he became legendary in fantastical stories.

The root problem seems to have been that he could read Arabic. Europe was not even close to ready to accept a new mathematics system emerging from Christendom’s enemy Islam. The numbers probably struck them as magic symbols (as opposed to the honest old Roman tally marks and C’s). Although Gerbert of Aurillac had learned math in Barcelona and perhaps Cordoba, rumors spread that he had gone all the way to Morocco to learn magic.

How had such a wicked priest become Pope? The only possible answer was a deal with the Devil. According to later legend, he had a long relationship with a succubus; this was an embodied she-demon named Meridiana who favored him with success and wealth as long as he was true to her. According to another legend, if he went to Jerusalem and said Mass, as Pope, he would instantly be struck dead when the Devil came to take his soul. Some rumors reported that he indeed died that way.

In our terms, Pope Sylvester II’s only great failure was that his understanding of Arabic numerals never really included the power of zero. He taught place value with an abacus, but he used only 1 through 9. Zero came into Latin two centuries later, borrowed from Mozarabic cero. Without zero, the system is interesting but not compelling. In fact, without zero, the place-value method is a “cipher,” borrowed from the Arabic word for zero, tsifr. Cipher came into English with various meanings of mystery: a code, a puzzle we can’t figure out, a character that stands for something mysterious.

When Pope Sylvester II and his star pupil Otto III were both gone, the school at Rheims carried on his curriculum, but Arabic numbers remained an arcane academic subject. There was no celebrity pushing for their adoption, no king ordering their use. Until Italian merchants began to feel the need for the new numbers a few centuries later, Europe just lumbered on with additive numbers like CVIII.

Posted in Muslim Empire (old series) | Tagged , , | Leave a comment

Gerbert of Aurillac: early years

Posted on February 3, 2014 by Ruth

In the 960s, a French monk named Gerbert of Aurillac came to Barcelona under the protection of its Count. The Count met him while traveling, stopping in the Benedictine monastery of Aurillac, and was so impressed with the young man’s intellect that he got permission to carry him south for further advanced study. Gerbert lived for a number of years in a Benedictine monastery in the Pyrenees, studying the scholarship that was now at its height in the Muslim Golden Age (which was ending during his lifetime).

Gerbert studied philosophy, a new field that was opened up by Arabic scholars reading and commenting on Aristotle, and theology. But he also mastered the quadrivium, a set of four academic disciplines that the Greeks had seen as closely related. Mathematics was the foundation, although in Greek mathematics, arithmetic was the junior partner. Mathematics meant the measured relationship of things (such as lines) to each other. It began with Euclid’s geometry, but it continued into studies of 3-dimensional figures like cones. The other related fields were music and astronomy.

Music was seen as a mathematical field because tones could be measured relative to each other, like lines or angles. Although they did not yet measure pitch by hertz, they knew that the 8-note scale represented something real in physics. We can now say that a violin is tuned to A = 440 hz, while the A one octave lower is tuned to 220. Medieval music knew this, without the numbers attached. Similarly, astronomy was about the relationship of measurements between stars and planets over time.

By the late 900s, Mozarabic culture in Cordoba was at its height. Christian bishops spoke Arabic and dressed in Arab fashions; Christians and Jews wrote Arabic treatises and poetry. We aren’t sure if Gerbert traveled to Cordoba or beyond; some legends place him even in Morocco. At the very least, he used his perch in the Pyrenees to obtain Arabic language skills and books.

Gerbert accompanied the Count of Barcelona on pilgrimage to Rome in 969. (That’s a significant year that we’ll loop back to shortly, but its events did not affect Gerbert in Rome.) In Rome, he met the new German Emperor, Otto I. Otto was looking for a tutor for his son, the future Otto II, so he hired Gerbert on the spot. This brought Gerbert north to Aachen.

Otto I, a descendant of Charlemagne, had ambitions to pull Germany out of the shadows. He himself had married an Anglo-Saxon princess and then a widowed Queen of Italy, the boy Otto’s mother. Italy was the crown jewel of the German empire, and it was always in danger of slipping away. That’s why Otto II needed a world-class education; eventually he married a Byzantine princess, which also made peace with Byzantine claims to Italy.

After Otto II grew up, Gerbert became the head teacher at the cathedral school in Reims, France. This was before the establishment of any of Europe’s universities; the school of Bishop Hincmar was one of the first ambitious, modern schools. Gerbert brought its curriculum up to date and began teaching Arabic mathematics. He also introduced a new kind of abacus that, in simplified form, became the “counting board” of European merchants. (Hence our term “counter” for the place next to the cash register.)

At Reims, Gerbert improved and innovated to create a hydraulic pipe organ. It was certainly part of his music curriculum, since a pipe organ is clearly based on mathematics. He also created an armillary sphere, a sort of globe of the skies. This was part of bringing in the latest in astronomy from Arabic treatises.

 

Posted in Muslim Empire (old series) | Tagged , | Leave a comment

Mechanical engineering

Posted on February 2, 2014 by Ruth

Baghdad’s House of Wisdom also produced a collection of all of the mechanical engineering devices known at that time. It’s certainly a collection from China, India, Persia and Greece, like the other scientific works. We aren’t sure if the pictures in “The Book of Tricks” (or “Book of Ingenious Devices”) show us common devices, or rare ones, or even just theoretical ones.

The book was compiled by three brothers who were a major force in Baghdad’s scholarly community for many years. Their father was from Khorasan, an area of western Persia that was at first only lightly Islamicized. He was some kind of robber on the Silk Road, but the governor of Khorasan befriended him and took his three sons Ahmed, Mohammed and Hasan into guardianship. They were given the finest Persian and Arabic education and are credited with writing twenty scholarly books, mostly now lost. Some of the books were written by only one of them, while others are credited generally to the brothers, the “Banu Musa.”

Kitab al-Hiyal, the book of mechanical tricks, may have survived due to its popularity and many copies. The devices are basically elaborate toys, not productive machinery, but they show the array of possibilities to automate with merely mechanical methods. While the book collects the mechanical tricks invented by the Greeks, some of them appear to have been improvements or original inventions by the Musa brothers.

They were interested in how physical forces could automate processes, often using air and water pressure. They described different kinds of valves: plug, float, tap, and conical (presumably the last was their invention). They explained how to automate a fountain so that it alternated in the jet’s shape and type.

Some basic mechanical devices make a first appearance, although in primitive form. There is a very simple crankshaft, although not complete in its design. One device has a simple worm-and-pinion gear. The Banu Musa describe, for the first time, the action of a clamshell bucket for reaching to the bottom of a lake or river and dredging mud or removing lost objects.

They have a few automated musical instruments. We’ve all seen the mechanism inside a music-box: a cylinder with pins to trigger different-toned bars in a tune as the cylinder turns. Their water-powered organ seems to have used this idea. It’s one of the few devices we still know today, in a time when so few things need mechanical “programming.” They also had a steam-powered automated flute.

Steam, the power of the future, was only noted in passing in the book. It’s used only for toys that build up pressure, then suddenly let off a whistle or blow something into the air, to surprise and amuse a rich man’s dinner guests.

The High Middle Ages in Europe was a time of rapid industrial invention and change. It’s hard to know how much influence this book had on Europe’s blue-collar inventors. It was certainly valuable for collecting and preserving the inventions of Greece and adding some from China. Later books on mechanical devices used the Banu Musa book as a first reference; eventually some of these drawings may have come into the hands of practical, ambitious men who wanted something more than toys.

 

 

Posted in Literature, Muslim Empire (old series) | Tagged , | Leave a comment