The Worlds of Islam: Fragmented and Expanding

The Worlds of Islam: Fragmented and Expanding Finding the Main Point: What political and intellectual transformations took place in Islamic civilization as it spread? By around 1200, what Muslims called the Dar al-Islam or the House of Islam was firmly established along a vast and continuous expanse of Afro-Eurasia, stretching from Spain and Morocco in the west to northern India in the east, with its heartland in the Middle East and Egypt. Many of these territories had been incorporated into the Islamic world through the construction of the Arab Empire in the century and a half following Muhammad’s death in 632, even if wide-scale conversion of subject peoples to the faith took considerably longer (see Chapter 1). From around 1000, a second major expansion by conquest brought India, Anatolia, and a little later the Balkans into the world of Islam, spearheaded by Turkic-speaking groups who had recently converted to the Muslim faith. By 1200, Islam was also spreading far beyond these regions of conquest into Southeast and Central Asia and sub-Saharan Africa through the activities of Muslim merchants and missionaries (see Map 2.3; see Chapter 3). Between 1200 and 1450, the Islamic world was politically fragmented, but Islamic culture and religion remained vibrant in the Middle East, while the continuing spread of the faith gave rise to cultural encounters with Hindu, Christian, and African civilizations. The Islamic Heartland In 1200, the Abbasid caliphate, an Arab dynasty that had ruled the Islamic world in theory if not practice since 750, was a shadow of its former self. At the start of their rule, the Abbasids built a splendid new capital in Baghdad, from which the dynasty presided over a flourishing and prosperous Islamic civilization. But for all its accomplishments, the Abbasid dynasty’s political grip on the vast Arab Empire slipped away quickly. Beginning in the mid-ninth century, many local governors or military commanders asserted the autonomy of their regions, while still giving formal allegiance to the caliph in Baghdad. A major turning point in both the political and cultural history of the Islamic Middle East was the arrival, starting around 1000, of Turkic-speaking pastoralists from the steppes of Central Asia into the fragmenting political landscape of the Abbasid Empire. At first, they served as slave soldiers within the Abbasid caliphate, and then, as the caliphate declined, they increasingly took political and military power themselves. In the Seljuk Turkic Empire of the eleventh and twelfth centuries, for instance, rulers began to claim the Muslim title of sultan (ruler) rather than the Turkic kaghan as they became major players in the Islamic Middle East. Even as their political power grew, the Turks were themselves experiencing a major turning point in their history as ever more groups of Turkic-speaking warriors converted to Islam between the tenth and fourteenth centuries. This extended process represented a significant expansion of the faith and launched the Turks into a new role as a major sustainer of Islam and carrier of the faith to new regions. By 1200, the Islamic heartland had fractured politically into a series of “sultanates,” many ruled by Persian or Turkish military dynasties. In the thirteenth century, the Mongols, another pastoral people, invaded the region, put an official end to the Abbasid caliphate in 1258, and ruled much of Persia for a time. In the long run, though, it was the Ottoman Empire, a creation of one of the many Turkic warrior groups that had migrated into Anatolia (what is now Turkey), that brought greater long-term political unity to the Islamic Middle East and North Africa. By the mid-fifteenth century, the Ottoman Turks had already carved out a state that encompassed much of the Anatolian peninsula and had pushed deep into southeastern Europe (the Balkans), acquiring in the process a substantial Christian population and a capital city in Constantinople. (See Zooming In: 1453 in Constantinople.) During the sixteenth century, the Ottoman Empire extended its control to much of the Middle East, Egypt, coastal North Africa, the lands surrounding the Black Sea, and even farther into Eastern Europe. This impressive and enduring new empire lasted in one form or another from the fourteenth to the early twentieth century. The Ottoman Empire was a state of enormous significance in the world of the fifteenth century and beyond. In its huge territory, long duration, incorporation of many diverse peoples, and economic and cultural sophistication, it was one of the great empires of world history. In the fifteenth century, only Ming dynasty China and the Incas matched it in terms of wealth, power, and splendor. That empire represented the emergence of the Turks as the dominant people of the Islamic world, ruling now over many Arabs, who had initiated this new faith more than 800 years before. In adding “caliph” (successor to the Prophet) to their other titles, Ottoman sultans claimed the legacy of the earlier Abbasid Empire. They sought to bring a renewed unity to the Islamic world, while also serving as protector of the faith, the “strong sword of Islam.” Along with the Safavid dynasty that emerged to the east in Persia in the sixteenth century, the Ottomans brought to the Islamic Middle East a greater measure of political coherence, military power, economic prosperity, and cultural brilliance than it had known since the early centuries of Islam. (See “In the Islamic Heartland: The Ottoman and Persian Safavid Empires” in Chapter 4) On the Peripheries of the Islamic World: India and Spain Even as Turkish political and cultural influence increased in the Islamic heartland, Turkic-speaking warrior groups were also spreading the Muslim faith into India, initiating an enduring encounter with an ancient Hindu civilization. Beginning around 1000, those conquests gave rise to a series of Islamic regimes that governed much of India into the nineteenth century. The early centuries of this encounter were violent indeed, as the invaders smashed Hindu and Buddhist temples and carried off vast quantities of Indian treasure. With the establishment of the Sultanate of Delhi in 1206 (see Map 2.4), Turkic rule became more systematic, although the Turks’ small numbers and internal conflicts allowed only a very modest penetration of Indian society. In the centuries that followed, substantial Muslim communities emerged in northern India, particularly in regions less tightly integrated into the dominant Hindu culture. Aside from the spiritual attractions of the faith, the egalitarian aspects of Islam attracted some disillusioned Buddhists, low-caste Hindus, and untouchables (people considered beneath even the lowest caste), along with those just beginning to make the transition to settled agriculture. Others benefited from converting to Islam by avoiding the jizya, a tax imposed on non-Muslims. Muslim holy men, known as Sufis, were particularly important in facilitating conversion, for India had always valued “god-filled men” who were detached from worldly affairs. Unlike the earlier experience of Islam in the Middle East and North Africa, where it rapidly became the dominant faith, in India it was never able to claim more than 20 to 25 percent of the total population. Furthermore, Muslim communities were especially concentrated in the Punjab and Sind regions of northwestern India and in Bengal to the east. The core regions of Hindu culture in the northern Indian plain were not seriously challenged by the new faith, despite centuries of Muslim rule. Muslims usually lived quite separately, remaining a distinctive minority within an ancient Indian civilization, which they now largely governed but which they proved unable to completely transform. However, these religious and cultural boundaries proved permeable in at least some contexts. Many prominent Hindus, for instance, willingly served in the political and military structures of a Muslim-ruled India. Further south, well beyond the boundaries of the Delhi sultanate and its successors, several Hindu states flourished. Perhaps the most impressive was the powerful Vijayanagar empire (1336–1646), which at its height controlled nearly all of southern India from a thriving capital city of perhaps half a million people, described by one sixteenth-century European visitor as “the best provided city in the world… as large as Rome and very beautiful to the sight.”13 Formed in part to resist Muslim incursions from the north, the Vijayanagar empire was also a site of sustained and more peaceful Hindu-Muslim encounters. Muslim merchants were a prominent presence in many trading ports, and a scholar has recently described a Muslim district of the capital as being “as vibrant as the Hindu precincts of the city.”14 As in northern India, the Hindu faith predominated, but a permanent Muslim presence in the south fostered an ongoing encounter between the two faiths and cultures. In the far west of the Islamic world, Spain, called al-Andalus by Muslims, was also the site of a sustained cross-cultural encounter, this time with Christian Western Europe. Muslims, Christians, and Jews mixed more freely in Spain than Muslims and Hindus did in India, though there were still waves of religious persecution. Conquered by Muslim forces in the early eighth century during the first wave of Islamic expansion, Muslim Spain became a vibrant civilization by the 900s. Its agricultural economy was the most prosperous in Europe during this time, and its capital of Córdoba was among the largest and most splendid cities in the world. Muslims, Christians, and Jews alike contributed to a brilliant high culture in which astronomy, medicine, the arts, architecture, and literature flourished. Furthermore, social relationships among upper-class members of different faiths were easy and frequent. By 1000, perhaps 75 percent of the population had converted to Islam. Many of the remaining Christians learned Arabic, veiled their women, stopped eating pork, appreciated Arabic music and poetry, and sometimes married Muslims. During the reign of Abd al-Rahman III (r. 912–961), freedom of worship was declared, as well as the opportunity for all to rise in the state bureaucracy. But this so-called “golden age” of Muslim Spain was both limited and brief. Even assimilated or Arabized Christians remained religious infidels and second-class citizens in the eyes of their Muslim counterparts, and by the late tenth century toleration began to erode. The Córdoba-based Muslim regime fragmented into numerous rival states. Warfare with the remaining Christian kingdoms in northern Spain picked up in the tenth and eleventh centuries, and more puritanical and rigid forms of Islam entered Spain from North Africa. Tolerance turned to overt persecution against Christians and Jews. Social life also changed. Devout Muslims increasingly avoided contact with members of other faiths, and Arabized Christians were permitted to live only in particular places. Thus, writes one scholar, “the era of harmonious interaction between Muslim and Christian in Spain came to an end, replaced by intolerance, prejudice, and mutual suspicion.”15 That intolerance intensified as the Christian reconquest of Spain gained ground after 1200. The end came in 1492, when Ferdinand and Isabella, the Catholic monarchs of a unified Spain, took Granada, the last Muslim stronghold on the Iberian Peninsula. Despite initial promises to maintain the freedom of Muslims to worship, in the opening decades of the sixteenth century the Spanish monarchy issued a series of edicts outlawing Islam in its various territories, forcing Muslims to choose between conversion or exile. Many Muslims were thus required to emigrate, often to North Africa or the Ottoman Empire, along with some 200,000 Jews expelled from Spain because they too refused to convert. In the early seventeenth century, Muslim converts to Christianity were also banished from Spain. And yet cultural interchange persisted for a time. The translation of Arab texts into Latin continued under Christian rule, while Muslim palaces and mosques were often converted to Christian uses and new Christian buildings incorporated Islamic artistic and architectural features. Thus Spain, unlike most other regions incorporated into the Islamic world, experienced a religious reversal between 1200 and 1450 as Christian rule was reestablished and Islam was painfully eradicated from the Iberian Peninsula. In world historical terms, perhaps the chief significance of Muslim Spain was its role in making the rich heritage of Islamic learning available to Christian Europe. As a cross-cultural encounter, it was largely a one-way street. European scholars wanted the secular knowledge — Greek as well as Arab — that had accumulated in the Islamic world, and they flocked to Spain to acquire it. That knowledge of philosophy, mathematics, medicine, optics, astronomy, botany, and more played a major role in the making of a new European civilization in the thirteenth century and beyond. Muslim Spain remained only as a memory (see “Society, Economy, and Culture in the West.”)