The New Cambridge History of Islam, Volume 1

The New Cambridge History of Islam #1

by Chase F. Robinson (Editor)

Volume One of The New Cambridge History of Islam, which surveys the political and cultural history of Islam from its Late Antique origins until the eleventh century, brings together contributions from leading scholars in the field. The book is divided into four parts. The first provides an overview of the physical and political geography of the Late Antique Middle East. The second charts the rise of Islam and the emergence of the Islamic political order under the Umayyad and the Abbasid caliphs of the seventh, eighth and ninth centuries, followed by the dissolution of the empire in the tenth and eleventh. 'Regionalism', the overlapping histories of the empire's provinces, is the focus of Part Three, while Part Four provides a cutting-edge discussion of the sources and controversies of early Islamic history, including a survey of numismatics, archaeology and material culture.

Genres: History, Islam

870 pages, Hardcover

First published January 1, 2009

About the author

Chase F Robinson is Distinguished Professor and Provost of the Graduate Center, The City University of New York. A specialist in early Islamic history and historiography, he is the author or editor of several books, most recently The New Cambridge History of Islam, Volume 1: The Formation of the Islamic World, Sixth to Eleventh Centuries (2011, ed).

Reviews

[howl of minerva · Rating 4 out of 5]

In the year 600AD who would have predicted that a newly founded cult from a deeply unpromising corner of the dusty Arabian desert would topple the mighty Byzantine and Sasanian empires and replace them – only a hundred years after the death of the prophet - with the largest empire the world had ever seen?

We know less about how this happened than one might expect; the origins and early history of Islam blur into myth and legend; socio-political struggles from centuries later have been transposed backwards and claimed as foundational histories and ideologies, a tradition has been invented, stories are inseparable from histories.

These multi-volume, multi-author behemoths from Cambridge UP are sober and grown-up about the problems of historiography. In a way, they make for difficult, uneven, unsatisfying reading that opens many questions and controversies and answers few. There is no neat story to be told. You should know that anyone who tells you one is almost certainly bullshitting you and bullshitting themselves.

The bookending of this volume with two superb essays by Chase Robinson renders it readable. If you’re interested in the topic, you could do worse than to simply read those first and last chapters. Of course, they will be more meaningful if you struggle through the rest. I will admit to skipping the chapters on numismatics and archaeology.

Anyone hoping to find the story of Muhammad’s life here, or a description of Islam itself, or an attempt to explain how such a religious ideology could command such fanatical devotion and exert such power, will be disappointed.

This volume puts the rise of Islam in its historical context: the religious and political order of Late Antiquity, and follows it from its founding through to the 11th century. The political story of empire building is inextricable from the ideological, spiritual, cultural aspects of Islam because each created and enabled the other. “Christianity was born on the margins of an empire, which it colonised only fitfully; in Islam belief and empire fused in quick succession… This synchronicity – early Muslims were founders of both world empire and world religion, possessors of both power and truth – is perhaps the most striking feature of Islamic history. ”

I can just sketch some broad strokes of some of the themes covered here.

The late Roman/Byzantine Empire and the Sasanian Empire of Iran - the indisputable great powers of Eurasia at the time of Islam’s birth – were weakened by 25 years of war between them that broke out in 603 and by the great Justinian plague of the 6th century. In about a decade, Muhammad had taken control of the entire Arabian peninsula (!), “setting his polity on a policy of local expansion that his successors transformed into regional conquest. [...] Having destroyed the Sasanian and dismembered the Byzantine empires in the middle of the seventh century, by the second decade of the eighth Muslim rulers shared continental hegemony with Eurasia’s other great superpower, the Tang, whose armies they would defeat a generation later on the Talas river. “

The combined wealth and income of the fertile Byzantine and Sasanian empires now poured through the hands of Muslim rulers, first through the Umayyad and then the Abbasid Caliphate. The Umayyad Caliphate had established its capital in Damascus; the Abbasids founded a new city as their capital: Baghdad. Surprisingly, the conversion of conquered populations to Islam does not seem to have been a deliberate goal of the expanding empires; there is little evidence of mass forced conversion. Rather, conversion was a gradual result of socio-political and economic pressures (non-Muslims were required to pay a special tax, which was enough to convince many to convert), a desire to be on the side of the victors and perhaps a real fascination with the new religion.

The Abbasid Empire grew in wealth and influence, peaking around the time of the (now legendary) Caliph Harun al Rashid. Infighting, bloody civil wars, struggles of succession (these chapters read like one damned king after another), political intrigues, squandering of wealth in opulence and the logistical difficulty of ruling such a vast area led to the eventual dissolution of the Abbasid Empire. “Be this as it may, in both its late Umayyad and early Abbasid forms the caliphate was the most spectacular instalment of Mediterranean and Near Eastern empire building between the Achaemenids, about a millennium earlier, and the Ottomans, about half a millennium later.“

Conquest is easy but rule is not. The prophet and his immediate successors united in themselves spiritual, legal, economic and military authority. Though later Caliphs claimed the same, the enormity of their task inevitably led to delegation, to professionalisation in each domain and internecine struggles between them, to wily Viziers and provincial governors of the Caliph who grew to wield as much power as the Caliph and then deposed him...

The story of a peripheral group that combines fanatical belief with marauding brutality, that claims "the true mantle of Islam" and seeks to take power from rulers it sees as weak and corrupt is a story that repeats itself so often in the late Abbasid that it seems impossible not to draw parallels with ISIS today.

Islam built an empire, but it was also building itself. The codification of Islamic tradition occurred largely in the 8th and 9th centuries. The intertwining of the political and religious can be illustrated by the debates over the createdness of the Quran. Early Abbasid Caliphs encouraged scholars of the Mutazilite school to promulgate the view that the Quran was created in time, not eternal, hence subject to rational thought and inquiry (and hence interpretation by the Caliph). A Mihnah (inquisition) was established to persecute those holding heterodox opinions. But the concept of createdness was so unpopular (or at least its opposition by "traditionalists" was so strong) that later Abbasid Caliphs were forced to abandon it and then to explicitly condemn it. The victory of the absolutists/traditionalists over the ahl-al Ray’ or the people of reason, has continued reverberations in Islamic theology today.

The hardening of the distinction between Shia (Shia’t Ali – Party of Ali) and Sunni (Sunnah - tradition of Muhammad) branches of Islam also occurred in the late Abbasid period. “It would be fair to say that in 900 many Muslims did not consider themselves either Sh ̄ıite or Sunn ̄ı.“. The distinction has its origins in the disputes following Muhammad’s death. Shia believe that the first three Caliphs were usurpers who took the place of the fourth, Ali, who they view as the prophet’s rightful heir and successor. In the struggles between various factions and competing claims to Caliphate in the late Abbasid, these differences became badges of identity and mutually exclusive schools of thought, with distinct rites, practices and theologies. The Shi'a claims served to delegitimise the ruling class.

The Abbasid Caliphs positioned themselves in opposition as the defenders of the Sunni faith and portrayed the Shi'a as dangerous heretics. Wars and pogroms were a short step away.

Despite these explanations, it seems to me entirely surreal that in the 21st century, human beings are killing each other over differences of opinion on a religious succession that occurred 1400 years previously. Faulkner put it best: The past isn’t dead. It isn’t even past. I look forward to the other volumes in this series.

[Luke · Rating 2 out of 5]

This book gives an excellent account of the standard view of Islamic history. Unfortunately that standard view is full of holes as vast as Arabia. While the authors make the necessary caveats and discuss the lack of documentation and archaeology, they then simply carry on and merrily outline what the Muslim sources tell us from centuries later, apparently unconcerned by the weight of counter evidence. When the NEW New Cambridge History of Islam comes out, I expect the content to be almost unrecognisable.

[Hisham Khan · Rating 3 out of 5]

This an excellent introduction to the formative years of Islamic history. Touches upon a lot of aspects however as it is a primarily academic book, its language can be quite clinical with several instances where one gets bored. In addition, the rapidity and sheer diversity of names, places and dates can leave one feeling overwhelmed while the necessary summarization can often seen as too shallow but that's a given due to the sheer scope of the timeline. All in All a solid read

[Aicha Adoui · Rating 4 out of 5]

The more I read about the Islamic history, the more questions go through my mind !!