PAUL FREEDMAN: OK, in 743,
civil war started within the Umayyad my family over
the caliphal succession. This war broke out in Persia,
which is a little unusual because until this point the
subversive, discontented, proto-Shiite region had been
what is called Kufa, basically southern Iraq as it now is. It's thought that this revolt
against the Umayyads had the support of the mawali. And it makes sense that if it
was in Persia, the largest non-Arab Muslim country, it
makes sense that you would have the most concentration of
non-Arab Muslims, that is to say converts or the descendants
of converts, who might feel that the egalitarian
promises of Islam had been betrayed and that in
fact the religion was an Arab one in which non-Arabs were
in a subordinate position. The non-Arab Muslims of Persia
had converted, some from Christianity, most from
Zoroastrianism, a religion of central Asia. Wickham takes issue with this. If you go back to your reading,
pages 292-294, he says that he doesn't think
that the discontent was related to somehow the Umayyads,
being an excessively Arab, rather than Muslim,
dynasty or that they provoked discontent among recent
converts. So this is an open question. I think there's got to be some
Mawali discontent, but as we've seen already there's
plenty of discontent; Shiite-Sunni being the most
obvious, inter-tribal, regional, problems of holding
this empire together. At any rate, in 749-750, the
Umayyad caliph was deposed by a member of another family
known as the Abbasids. This new caliph, Abu'l Abbas,
Abbas- the Abbasids. The Abbasids were early
followers of Muhammad, although not particularly
heroic ones. The family had been supporters,
but hadn't taken very many risks. So the Abbasids are
not heroes, though they are an old family. The Abbasids came to power with
support from the Shiites. This is what Wickham means
by what he calls their "salvationist theology";
salvationist meaning that they were going to restore the
religious fervor that the Umayyads had dissipated. So that they were originally
supposed to represent a return, a reformation, of Islam
to its austere roots in which the caliph was a modest,
clean-living, austere figure. They very quickly, if that was
the hope of the Shiites, the Abbasids very, very quickly
betrayed this. They moved their capital from
Damascus, the Umayyad capital, to a new city that
they constructed in the desert, Baghdad. A city built in concentric
circles as a planned round fortress city, but also a
commercial city and, of course, predominately city
of administration. It was located thirty miles from
the old Persian capital. The Persian Empire was
ruled from Ctesiphon. Relocating the capital of the
caliphate to Baghdad has a number of obvious
implications. While most historians would not
be quite as confident as Peter Brown, whom you're reading
for Wednesday is, that this represents the
Persianization of the caliphate, it is certainly true
that moving the capital to modern Iraq, to the
Mesopotamian part of the former Persian Empire, orients
the caliphate further to the East. It changes the center of
gravity of the caliphate from the Mediterranean, as in
Damascus, basically to Persia, India, the lands between them,
modern Afghanistan, Pakistan. At least those are as important,
if not more so now, than the Mediterranean. Even though the empire stretches
from the Indus River to the Atlantic, its center of
gravity has clearly shifted This has implications also for
culture, as we'll talk about in a moment. The accomplishment of the
Abbasid caliphate in terms of culture is to bring together
realms that had not been in very much contact with each
other, certainly not in terms of ideas, namely India, Persia,
and the Roman Empire, the former empire of the
Mediterranean East. Persia stands in the middle between
India and the West. To the extent that Persia is not an
isolated empire of its own but a crossroads, this means that
there's all this exchange of information, techniques,
science, art, and culture. But most of all, the
establishment of Baghdad clearly means a different
kind of rulership. One that it does not break with
the Umayyads, but rather, to some extent, elaborates
on it. This is an empire. It is not a kind of
sacred kingdom of people living in tents. This is an empire more open
to Eastern influences. That is to say somewhat more
Persian in its style. Less Mediterranean and
originally more Shi'ite. So the significance of the
Abbasid takeover is really basically twofold. One is this move east to Baghdad
with all that it symbolizes that I just got
through saying, the influence of non-Arab Muslims, and the
creation of a complex administration, an even more
complex administration than that of the Umayyads. And then, two, it shows the
influence of the Shi'ites. This begins as a Shi'ite
victory, but very quickly the Shiites, as I said, are
disillusioned, and so it also shows the limitations
of the Shi'ites. The Shi'ites don't just want a
non-Arab dominated Islamic world, they want what we called
last week a "republican administration", a
non-monarchical polity. And the Abbasids are monarchical if they're anything. Until the early tenth century,
when the Abbasid caliphate starts to break up, the world
of Islam was splendid, rich, cultivated, and scientifically
progressive. There would be no more great
conquests, particularly in the West. Already, before the
Abbasids took power, we've pointed to two moments in which
the Arab expansion, or the Islamic expansion,
was stopped. One in 717 before the walls of
Constantinople, in the failed Siege of Constantinople. Two, the battle of Poitiers,
not that far from Paris in northern France, in 733. A battle at which the
Merovingians, or really their high servants, the so-called
Mayors of the Palace, defeated Arab raiders who then retreated basically back to Spain. To some extent these defeats in
the West were not so much defeats from the caliph's
point of view as a reorientation. In 750 moving the capital to
Baghdad from Damascus also means less interest in the West;
less interest in trying to take over France, if that was
ever a serious goal; less interest in the besieging
Constantinople. The Abbasids begin by inviting
all of the Umayyad survivors to a banquet supposed to be a
banquet of reconciliation. And instead they had their
servitors kill all of the Umayyads at the dinner table,
spread a leather cloth over them-- some of them were already
dead, some of them merely wounded-- and with the leather cloth over
them set the table again and banqueted on their dead
and dying enemies. Satisfying, definitely. One Umayyad escaped. Not from the banquet, but
he had the foresight to say he was busy. And he escaped as far as he
could go in the Muslim world, namely Spain. The last Umayyad, then, Abd
al-Rahman, came to Spain and was acclaimed by the population,
or got himself to be acclaimed by the population,
and ruled in Spain as the first Islamic ruler
to defy the caliphate. Thus the first independent
Islamic kingdom, we can call it-- although they don't
use that term-- the first independent Islamic
kingdom, independent of the caliphate, would be Spain. The Umayyad ruler actually
recognized Baghdad. He did not proclaim himself
a rival caliph. It was easy for him to recognize
Baghdad 3,000 miles away, or whatever it is,
they weren't going to come and get him. He took the title of emir, a
ruler who is more like a title of a governor than
that of a king. Nevertheless, as I said, Islamic
Spain represents the first piece of the caliphal
empire to break off. When the Abbasid caliphate ran
into trouble in the early 10th century, then the Umayyad ruler
of Spain proclaimed himself caliph. In 929 he proclaimed himself
caliph of Cordoba. Cordoba was the capital
of Umayyad Spain. So at this point Spain becomes
the most splendid, most cultivated part of the
Islamic world. So if the period of the maximum
power and splendor of the Abbasid caliphate was
roughly 750-910, the period of maximum splendor of the
caliphate of Cordoba in Al-Andalus, or Spain, was
about 850 to its sudden collapse in 1009. Questions? Problems? Lot of names here. We don't have a final exam,
so what do you care? But I realize it is a dramatic
story, but one with a large cast of characters. By now you're used to
this in history. Whether these are good cat names
or not, I'm not as sure as I am with the barbarians,
but worth experiments. As Wickham has described, the
Abbasid caliphate was based on tax collection and
administration. And your response to that may
be, "Yeah, well so what?" But that's not true of
all the states that we've been studying. If you take something like
Merovingian Gaul, even though in the early period they're
still collecting taxes-- remember Fredegund tells
Chilperic, "Let's burn these tax records and maybe our
sons will be cured of their disease by God."-- but you'll have scene in
Gregory of Tours, that basically the Merovingians are
rich because of plunder, military expeditions,
and land. Land, above all, is the source
of wealth in the kingdoms of Western Europe. Land, and the peasants
to till it. Obviously it's no good if
it's just empty land. Usually not, at least. It's
productive land, and this is the source of wealth. Therefore the state gains its
wealth on the basis of things like land, military power, and
not on the basis of taxing an economy that is more sluggish,
has less trade, less income than in the cities of
the Muslim world. The caliphate was a tax-paying
state with a central army. Therefore the nobility, as
such as it was, was not a group of local potentates, as
they had been under the late Roman Empire, great landowners
for example. Nor was it a military elite
quasi-independent, whose loyalty to the ruler was
conditional on their own interests, as we've seen with
the Merovingian knights. Rather, it was a complicated
administration, served as a structure of a vast empire, and
the tax revenue came into the caliph, whose
administration, whose civilian administration, was supreme over
army, over local elites, over great landowners,
at least for a time. The Abbasid Empire was the
greatest state in the world at that time. Its only rival might have been
T'ang, China, but this is the period of the decline
of that empire. Baghdad was the wealthiest and
largest city in the world. Among the programs of the
Abbasids, in addition to building this planned city,
creating a certain kind of military structure,
consolidating their conquests, among their plans was
a cultural program. The cultural flowering of the
Abbasid caliphate is, in part, a planned flowering. Not just a spontaneous one. The caliphs funded translations
into Arabic of Greek and Persian texts
dealing with science, geography, mathematics,
philosophy, and medicine, in particular. In 830, one of the caliphs
established in Baghdad a kind of combination of library and
research institute, called the House of Wisdom. The House of Wisdom, in the
first place, paid for and sponsored translations, but
it also conducted research activities. Things like an effort
to measure the circumference of the earth. The kind of thing that-- you know, how do you actually
do that without modern instrumentation? A lot of the material that they
translated was from Greek scientific works. Where did they get these? In some cases, they got them
from Byzantium, from Constantinople itself. It's said that one treaty
between Constantinople and Baghdad called for, among other
things, the Byzantine emperor to lend to Baghdad a
copy of Ptolemy's geography. Ptolemy, one of the great
geographers of the ancient world, author of a book called
The Great Geography, known in the West later on when it was
translated into Latin from the Arabic as the Almagest, which is
a Latin garbling of an Arab garbling of the original Greek
title of the work. So this was known in the West,
even when it was translated into Latin, as the Almagest.
And it was just one of many works that, when they finally
reached Western Europe in translations from the Arabic,
kept a kind of version of their Arabic name. But the idea that, as part of
a treaty, one of the things was you lend us this copy of
Ptolemy so that we can translate it into Arabic, shows
the commitment of the rulers to the expansion of
practical knowledge. What Islamic scholars,
scientists, and policy makers were most interested in from the
classical world, that is from the world of the
Greek and Roman civilization, was science. Broadly speaking, science. They were less concerned with
Greek plays, Greek poetry, Greek literature in general. This is partly because they
had their own poetic tradition, in Arabic, and partly
because their real source of inspiration for
literature would be Persia. The stories, as in the Arabian
Nights, and the kind of lyrical poetry of the Arabs,
like love poetry, or sensuous poetry, is either home-grown
or Persian. So they translated things like
Euclid on geometry, or the physician Dioscorides, who
wrote, not the only, but the leading pharmaceutical manual. Pharmaceutical manual, a list
of drugs, their properties, what they come from,
what they can cure. However, although they
concentrated on science, they also were interested
in philosophy. They were also interested in
propositions, the nature of reality, metaphysics, and the
major project in this realm was the translation
of Aristotle. Aristotle is someone who wrote
on everything: on drama, poetry, politics, metaphysics,
ethics, animals, physics. And so his influence would be
tremendous in all three religions that we are concerned
with: Islam, Christianity, and Judaism. His influence tends
to be in two related realms, or factors. One is its comprehensiveness. They didn't translate everything
of Aristotle's, but all three civilizations were
aware of Aristotle as a universal thinker. That somewhere, in the work of
Aristotle, there's something about everything that's
worth studying. He is then, an encyclopedic
thinker in a way that Plato is not. Plato is not interested
in the natural world. If you go to Plato for
information about animals, or plants, you're going to be out
of luck because Plato despises things like that. Plato is very interested in
ethics, in how to live life, in reality, in the relationship
between matter and spirit, but he's not
a scientist. He-- to put it mildly-- he's not interested in the
material world, whereas Aristotle believes that the
material world, although not necessarily the be-all
and end-all of everything, is reliable. That our senses can give us
decent information, that observation of the natural
world leads to more than merely practical knowledge of,
say, how to plow, or how to plan things, but leads to
knowledge of what creation, what nature, is. So Aristotle is encyclopedic
and he's also rational. This is the second contribution that Aristotle makes. Rationality, that anything from
plays to rocks can be understood in terms of
logical analysis. This is fine when it comes to
plays and rocks, but what about metaphysics? What about the world
of religion? Aristotle has a profound
influence here, again not only on Islam, but on Judaism and
Christianity, because he essentially encourages a
rational view of God. Now Aristotle is himself not
much of a theist, that is to say, Aristotle doesn't go on
about God very much, and whatever God there is in
Aristotle is not a personal god to whom you would pray on
the assumption, or in the belief, that he was interested
in your well-being. The closest Aristotle gets to
God is the notion of a kind of Great Mechanic. The Prime Mover, as he would
be called in Western philosophy. The guy who makes the mechanism,
sets it going, and maybe, every so often
maintains it. Maybe. A little oil here, a little bit
of timing there, but he's not the God of Gregory
of Tours. He's not the God who is
inspiring saints to get revenge when their powers are
questioned, or when somebody steals hay from them. This is not Aristotle's god. Aristotle's god is not concerned
with our little petty squabbles. It's not Muhammad's God
exactly, either. It's not a god who brings a
victory in battle, who's interested in a new prophecy
that will seal all the previous prophets, it's a
somewhat mechanistic god. It's an eighteenth-century god,
even a sort of deist god, for those of you who
have studied that. The notion that the world must
have been created by God, because it has a lot
of design in it. It works. One animal gives birth to
another animal just like it, the tides go in and out, the
weather is usually rational: winter is usually cold,
Halloween is usually crisp. That's imposed by some kind
of original order. Just like if you went and found
a watch on a deserted pathway, you wouldn't assume
that nature had constructed the watch, that it just was
growing there the way the ferns were growing
by the path. You would assume some artificer
had made it. But that doesn't mean that the
artificer is still alive, still interested in the watch,
inclined to take care of you. I go on this detour, or
seeming detour about Aristotle, because he's
important to everything in the period that we're discussing,
and also in the period that is concerned for the West in the
continuation of this course in History 211. There are three thinkers, just
to take examples, the most famous thinkers in each of the
Jewish, Christian, and Islamic traditions, who embrace
Aristotle and in doing so embrace the idea of god as a
rational companion to man. These are the Arab philosopher,
known in the West as Averroes. Here again, as with Almagest,
we're using his sort of Latin-garbled name. Averroes, active in
Spain, 1126-1198. Maimonides, perhaps the greatest
Jewish philosopher. A rabbi, a physician, a
courtier, and a philosopher, also active in Spain, but
also in Egypt 1135-1204. And Thomas Aquinas, who spent
most of his career teaching at the University of Paris,
1225-1274. All of these thinkers
embraced Aristotle. The Latin ones, like
Aquinas, via translations from the Arabic. Aristotle was known in the
medieval West, not from the Greek originals, but from
translations made from Arabic into Latin. All believe that reason and
faith are compatible. All based their outlook, not
only on nature, but on God, on an Aristotelian form
of knowledge. Interesting, in that Aristotle
knew nothing about Judaism, Christianity, or Islam. So, what is it about Aristotle,
what is it about Diascordes, what is it about
Ptolemy, of all of these scientists and philosophers that
is of such fascination to the Islamic world? All of this emphasis that we've
made on Islamic culture and its openness to other
influences may seem strange to you in light of the reputation
Islam has in modern America, or at least in many circles of
modern America and Europe, as being obscurantist, or
anti-modern, or religiously inflexible. I teach a group of retired
people where I live, just outside New York, and we're
studying Islamic Spain. And they are astounded at what
I've just described, at the openness of Islam to other
civilizations, at its tolerance, at its
curiosity about classical and Persian science. And I was surprised because this
is not new information. This is not something that
historians have just come up with and just discovered. If you read medieval history
textbooks of a hundred years ago, it's in there. Everybody knows that Aristotle
was translated from Arabic into Latin. "Everybody knows", everybody
who studied the Middle Ages knows. And I said to them, because you
can't say to older people, "Oh, well you know your
education is actually not very good," the way we say
to you all the time. Or, "Your attention span is
not very good, because all you're doing is you're plugged
in to your social world". No, these people went to college
in the tough old days, allegedly, and they're like,
"God, I thought Islam was just this sort of frozen religion
that had never changed." So you don't have that
disadvantage. You don't have that idea, and
so I'm not going to browbeat you with it on the basis of
the experience of teaching seventy-year-olds. But there it is. I do not accept the notion, well
with one exception, with of one honorable exception-- STUDENT: I'm forty-nine. PROFESSOR: Right, me too. I don't want to go into a long
discussion about, "Islam, right or wrong?" Or, "Islam,
progressive or regressive?" I will say this: there are those
who believe, wrongly in my opinion, that there's always
been this "clash of civilization", as it's sometimes
called, between the progressive Christian West and
the obscurantist Islamic East. I don't accept that, in part for
reasons you've just heard. There is no consistent Islamic
tradition of the maintenance of dogma, or the conversion
of the world by force. Insofar as that exists now, it
is, in my opinion, a modern phenomenon. It is a phenomenon that results
from an encounter with the West beginning around the
time of Napoleon's conquest of Egypt, perhaps. It's about two centuries old. There's another kind of
belief that at some point things changed. There's a book by Bernard
Lewis, the most eminent Western scholar of
Islamic culture, called "What Went Wrong". And so Lewis' assumption is
that the world that I'm describing, the Abbasid
caliphate, is an open society and at some point and for some
reasons, the Islamic world closed itself. It became less susceptible to
outside influence, more suspicious of it, more dogmatic,
more anti-modern, more fixated on literalism, what
in the Western Christian tradition would be called fundamentalism, and on
tradition. I don't really like this either,
because it sees all progress as the property of
Western civilization. And it's not that I am not
interested in Western civilization. I've taught it. I've taught it because
I liked it. I'm not somebody who believes
that it's all a tale of oppression, but I don't think
that anybody who diverts from the path of Western civilization
at some point is going off the cliff, or off the
trail, and into the woods. There are a lot of different
civilizations out there. There's a third related idea
that the Arabs are just intermediaries. Yeah, it's great, they translate
Aristotle so that the real guys who can really use
Aristotle, Thomas Aquinas et al, can get started. I don't accept that, either,
because they do more than that. They do an awful lot of original
research in medicine, in mathematics, in philosophy. But, within all of this, to my
mind, fruitless speculation, there is a kernel of what is
an interesting problem. And the interesting problem is,
why were the Arabs so much more successful in assimilating
conquered cultures than other
invaders were? Say, for example, the Germans. You don't get this kind of
efflorescence of culture under the barbarian occupants of
the former Roman Empire. We're talking, not just about
cultural survival, keep in mind, but about an expansion
of science and allied arts. I'd say there are maybe four
factors that encouraged the Arab conquest to absorb
these new influences. They're not in themselves
explanations, but they are certainly background factors. The fact that the conquest was
quick and relatively painless, and that it was not really
a religious war. Two, and I think here
very important, the elimination of frontiers. I mentioned this
briefly before. You get Persian as well
as Greek astronomy. From India you get things like
chess, so called Arabic numerals, which actually, as we
all know, come from India. These things come into the Arab
and Persian worlds from India and eventually to Europe
as well, in a world in which there are no frontiers between
India and North Africa. They could go these thousands
of miles peacefully. The elimination of linguistic
boundaries. Arabic becomes the language of
learning, as much as Latin would be in the European Middle
Ages, much as English has tended to become
in our era. So Maimonides, the great Jewish
philosopher, wrote largely in Arabic. The Christians of Spain, so
called Mozarabic Christians, studied Arabic, fought in
Arabic, wrote in Arabic. And finally, number four, the
attitude of the conquerors and the conquered. The attitude of the conquerors
was what Peter Brown in the reading for Wednesday will call,
"a garden protected by our spears". This is a quote from one
of the conquerors. The Arab conquerors considered
these to be wonderful civilizations that they were
not going to pillage or destroy, but rather protect.
"A garden protected by our spears." But they were planning
on enjoying the garden, not merely standing on
the outside defending it for other people to enjoy. The conquerors were confident
in their religion, so confident that they didn't need
for others to recognize it or convert. It also gave them the confidence
to accept new ideas from Greek civilization,
from Persian civilization, from India. But there's also the attitude
of the conquered. Brown says that, "as the storm
of the Arab armies rolled over the horizon, the population of
the Near East sat back to enjoy the sunshine." The
Islamic conquest was of benefit, and perceived as of
benefit, by most of the people who were conquered. A kind of counter example,
in a way, explains this. In Cordoba, the capital of
the Umayyad caliphate, or soon-to-be caliphate of Spain,
a group of Christians around 850, were so upset at the
contented attitude of the Christians of Islamic Spain-- who were, if not a majority,
probably about fifty percent, close to fifty percent
at this time-- these more fanatical, or at
least more serious Christians, were so angry that all of their
compatriots seemed to be just fine with Islamic rule
that they got up in the marketplace of Cordoba and
denounced Muhammad as a charlatan, as a false god,
and as not a prophet. And while Islam is tolerant,
that is something that you couldn't do. So they did the thing that was
most defiant of the regime, really the moral equivalent
of burning yourself in the marketplace, and indeed they
were imprisoned, told to recant, and when they didn't
recant, they were executed. There are about fifty of these
"Martyrs of Cordoba", as they're called. But they have to seek martyrdom
because they have to look for it, they have to create
it, because almost all the rest of their compatriots
are perfectly happy to be Mozarabic Christians, practicing
the freedom of their religion under a
beneficent regime. Beneficent in the eyes of these
Martyr Christians, but nevertheless the regime
of the devil. This shows you something about
the nature of the Arab conquest and occupation. Let me just speak briefly about
a couple of aspects of what the Islamic world was
interested in studying, and we may continue over into next time
since the lecture on the seventh century is actually
rather short. Let's start with mathematics. The great accomplishment of this
time is the introduction of Arabic numbers, which if
you've ever tried to multiply or divide with Roman numerals,
are superior. Arabic numbers come from India,
and along with this system of numerals, they
imported zero-- both the number, or the
non-number, and the concept. The concept of zero allows for
things like decimal places, which are also developed
at this time. From India the Arabs get the
kind of very basic ideas of trigonometry, the
sine function. But it is their own researches,
their own progress, that leads to the
discovery, or development, of the five other functions. And here I'm on kind of tricky
ground, because despite what they tell you about math
literacy and how important it is, I haven't used this
since tenth grade. But I do remember the cosine,
the tangent, the cotangent, the secant, and the
cosecant, right? All of these are discovered
by the Arabs. They built on an edifice who's
foundation is Indian mathematics. In the early ninth century, a
scholar attached to that House of Wisdom in Baghdad, named
Al-Khuarizm, in the early ninth century, Al-Khuarizmi
writes a book with the title that can be translated as
something like, The Book of Addition and Subtraction
According to the Hindu Calculation. And this is what incorporates
zero and decimal places, and interestingly enough this book
is known only from its translation into Latin. The Latin version survives,
whereas the original Arabic does not. Within a century of the
publication of this book, decimal fractions have been
developed, square roots, the value of pi to sixteen decimal
places had been calculated. Al-Khuarizm is also the author
of a treatise on algebra. The word "algebra" comes from
al-jabr, which is sort of restoring, restoring something
that has been imbalanced and that you're now going about to
balance, which of course is, in a way, the visual
nature of algebra. Al-Khuarizmi was also
an astronomer. He developed star tables that
allowed one to locate the planets and stars at different
times of year and at different latitudes. This is what allows the making
of things like astrolabes or, later, sextants. These are things that describe
the sky at a particular [correction: place]-- that allow you then to keep
time; and also to navigate; to calculate time for things
like prayers, or feasts, celebrations; also to
cast horoscopes. I'll work a little more with
you on geography, medicine, and then summarize the Abbasids
at the beginning of our next class. So I'll let you go for now. Thanks.
