Destiny Disrupted: A History of the World Through Islamic Eyes

by Tamim Ansary

Some may have converted in pursuit of career opportunities, but this, too, can be overstated, because conversion really only opened up the religion-related careers. The unconverted could still own land, operate workshops, sell goods, and pursue business opportunities. They could work for the government too, if they had skills to offer. The Muslim elite did not hesitate to take from each according to his abilities. If you knew medicine, you could be a doctor; if you knew building, you could be an architect. In the Islamic empire, you could become rich and famous even if you were a Christian or a Jew, the “Abrahamic” religions, or eventually Zoroastrian, even though this was more distant from Islam.

Under their administration, the doctrines of Islam were elaborated, written down, and sealed into codebooks.

All this came at a price however, the usual price of stability, which ensures that whatever is the case one day is even more the case the next day. The rich got richer. The poor increased in numbers. Cities with magnificent architecture sprang up, but so did vast slums sunk in squalid poverty. Justice became a commodity that only the rich could afford.

The rapid expansion of Islamic rule brought many different ethnicities under the Muslim umbrella, and there was some question about how to make the Muslim promise of brotherhood and equality work for all of them.

Umayyad policies may have promoted Arabization and Islamification but not both of them equally everywhere. In North Africa, Arabization proceeded rapidly, perhaps because the patchwork of indigenous cultures had long ago been fragmented by Phoenician colonization—the Romans had deposited a Latin layer, the Vandals had come in with a Germanic glaze, and finally Christianity had permeated the region. North Africa had no single language or culture to bind it together; when the Arabs arrived with their powerful conviction, no correspondingly unified and powerful indigenous conviction was there to resist them. So the Arabs thoroughly dissolved and absorbed whatever was there before.

Egypt and the Levant were somewhat easily digested too, because many of these peoples shared a historical narrative with the Arabs, harking back to common traditional anc...

They had an ancient civilization of their own, a proud history, and a language that would not be subdued. Many Persians accepted Islam, but they would not be Arabized.

Far from making even a show of equal status for all, Umayyad society spawned formal institutions to discriminate among various gradations of folk in society and to keep them layered: pure-blooded Arab Muslims at the top; below them, Muslims with one Arab and one non-Arab parent; then non-Arab Muslims; then non-Arab Muslims with non-Muslim parents; then non-Muslims who at least belonged to one of the monotheistic faiths; and so on down to the lowest of the low, rank polytheists born of polytheistic parents, who had virtually no legal rights.

Their theology had come to focus on extravagant demands for purity. They said the leadership of the Muslim world belonged to the person who most assiduously practiced what the religion preached.

The Shi’ite threat metastasized because of an ominous synchronicity that developed in Umayyad times. It was this: The Shi’i were the suppressed religious underdogs of Islam. The Persians were the suppressed ethnic underdogs of Islam. The Shi’i chaffed against the orthodox religious establishment. The Persians chaffed against the Arab political establishment.

One day, around 120 AH, a mysterious man blew into the city of Merv. This distant outpost of the empire lay almost fifteen hundred miles east of Damascus. Here in the wild, wild east, this stranger began to agitate against the Umayyads by promulgating a millennial religious narrative that spoke of an impending apocalyptic showdown between good and evil.

He went by the handle Abu Muslim, but that was obviously a pseudonym, since it was short for Muslim abu Muslim bin Muslim, which means “Muslim man, son of a Muslim father, father of a Muslim son.”

In truth, Abu Muslim was a professional revolutionary, dispatched to Merv by a secretive underground group based in Iraq, a group called the Hashimites. This group was a cross between a cult and a political party, whose core membership probably never exceeded thirty. Its name referred to the Prophet’s clan, the Banu Hashim, and its purpose, supposedly, was to put a member of the Prophet’s family at the head of the Muslim world.

Sadly for the Hashimites, they didn’t have an actual member of the Prophet’s family to promote. They did, however, have Abu al-Abbas, a fellow who claimed descent from Abbas ibn Abd al-Muttalib, one of Prophet Mohammed’s uncles,

A direct descendant of Ali and Fatima would certainly have been better, but none of the Alids—that is, Ali’s real and putative descendants—would make common cause with the Hashimites, so Abu al-Abbas would have to do.

His recruits could be recognized by the black clothes they wore and the black banners they carried. They even dyed their weapons black. The Umayyad army, incidentally, adopted white as its color. Lest you think this color coding strange for a cult that preached an apocalyptic showdown between good and evil, you should know that in Persia white was regarded as the color of mourning, the color of death. (The recent revolutionary Afghan Muslims called the Taliban favored black clothing as a uniform.)

In the year 125 AH (747 CE) Abu Muslim and his black-suited warriors began moving west.

In 750 CE, the armies of white and black clashed on the banks of the Great Zab River in Iraq. Although outnumbered, the men in black routed the emperor’s forces, and the last Umayyad khalifa had to run for his life, south into Egypt; within the year, Abbasid agents hunted him down there and killed him.

Accordingly, the new ruler invited leading members of the Umayyad clan to break bread with him, just to show that there were no hard feelings. Well, I shouldn’t say “break bread.” That makes it sound like he was going to serve his guests a simple meal of barley bread and soup, such as the Prophet might have shared with Omar. That sort of thing was now out of fashion. No, the Umayyad survivors found themselves lolling on cushions while servants pranced in with lovely trays piled high with gourmet delicacies. The laughter rang out, the conversation turned spirited, and a sense of camaraderie swelled. Just as everyone was getting ready to tie into the meal, however, the waiters threw off their robes to reveal armor underneath. They weren’t waiters, it turned out, but executioners. The Umayyads jumped to their feet, but too late: the doors had all been locked. The soldiers proceeded to club the Umayyads to death. From that time on, Abbas went by a new title, al-Saffah, which means “the slaughterer.”

And yet there was something Mansur just didn’t like about this man, Abu Muslim. Well, perhaps it was one particular thing: Abu Muslim was popular. All right, two things: he was popular, and he had soldiers of his own. A ruler can never trust a popular man with soldiers of his own. One day, Mansur invited Abu Muslim to come visit him and share a hearty meal. What happened next illustrates the maxim that when an Abbasid ruler invites you to dinner, you should arrange to be busy that night. The men got together at a pleasant riverside campsite and Mansur spent the first day lavishly thanking Abu Muslim for all his selfless services; the next night he had his bodyguards cut Abu Muslim’s throat and dump his body in the river.

The Abbasids quickly embraced the orthodox approach to Islam, probably because the orthodox religious establishment, all those scholars, had secured so much social power in Islam that embracing their doctrines was the politic thing to do.

Islam acquired the label Sunnism, since only now did it congeal into a distinct sect with a name of its own.

All this splendor and dynamism accelerated to a crescendo during the Abbasid dynasty, making the first two centuries or so of their rule the one that Western history (and many contemporary Muslims) remember as the Golden Age of Islam.

One of Mansur’s first moves, for example, was to build himself a brand new capital, a city called Baghdad, completed in 143 AH (765 CE).

a place between the Tigris and Euphrates where the rivers came so close together that a city could be stretched from the banks of one to the banks of the other.

Within twenty years, Baghdad was the biggest city in the world and possibly the biggest city that had ever been: it was the first city whose population topped a million.

The waters were diverted through a network of canals that let boats serve as the city’s buses, making it a bit like Venice, except that bridges and lanes let people navigate the city on foot or on horseback too.

The Street of Stationers featured over a hundred shops selling paper, a new invention recently acquired from China (whom the Abbasids met and defeated in 751 CE, in the area that is now Kazakhstan).

Ya’qubi, an Arab geographer of the time, claimed that this city had six thousand streets and alleys, thirty thousand mosques, and ten thousand bathhouses.

Stories such as the one about Aladdin and his magic lamp hark back to the reign of the fourth and most famous Abbasid khalifa, Haroun al-Rashid, portrayed as the apogee of splendor and justice. Legends about Haroun al-Rashid characterize him as a benevolent monarch so interested in the welfare of his people that he often went among them disguised as an ordinary man, so that he might learn first-hand of their troubles and take measures to help them.

Notice both the simplicity and “externalness” of this program. Only one of the five pillars is a belief, a creed, and even that is given in terms of an action: “to attest.” The other four pillars are very specific things to do. Again, Islam is not merely a creed or a set of beliefs: it is a program every bit as concrete as a diet or an exercise regiment.

Once Mohammed died, Muslims had to bring their obligations into focus and get the details down in writing to secure their faith from drift, divergence, and the whims of the powerful. That’s why the first two khalifas collected every scrap of Qur’an in one place and why the third khalifa created that single authorized edition. But the Qur’an did not explicitly address many questions that cropped up in real life.

From the start, therefore, Muslims tried to rely on their memories of the Prophet to fill in any gaps in the Qur’an’s guidelines. It was Omar who really set the course here. Whenever a question came up for which no explicit answer could be found in the Qur’an, he asked, “Did Mohammed ever have to deal with a situation like this one? What did he decide?” Omar’s approach got people motivated to collect everything Mohammed had ever said and done, quotations and anecdotes known to Muslims as hadith.

Omar, as I mentioned, established a body of full-time scholars to examine such questions, thereby establishing a consequential precedent: before Islam had a standing army of professional soldiers, it had a standing army of professional scholars (called “people of the bench” or sometimes “people of the pen”).

Since the authenticity of a hadith was absolutely crucial, the authentication of hadith developed into an exacting discipline. At its core, it consisted of nailing down the chain of transmission and testing the veracity of every link. A hadith was only as good as the people who transmitted it. The chain of transmission had to extend to someone who knew the Prophet personally. Only then could a purported hadith be taken seriously. Ideally, it would trace to one of Mohammed’s close companions, and the closer the companion the more sound the hadith. In addition, every person who transmitted it after that had to enjoy an impeccable reputation for piety, honesty, and learning.

I heard that once the great scholar Bukhari was investigating the chain of transmission for a particular hadith. He found the first link credible; the second man passed muster too; but when Bukhari went to interview the third man in the chain of transmission, he found the fellow beating his horse. That did it. The word of a man who beat his horse could not be trusted. That hadith had to be discarded.

The “science of hadith” thus generated an elaborate discipline of critical historiography.

The enterprise began in late Umayyad times, but it matured in the Abassid era, and new collections kept emerging for centuries.

Even though new hadith kept emerging, however, six collections achieved canonical status by the end of the third century AH. These complemented the Qur’an and came to constitute a second level of authority on the dos, don’ts, shoulds, and shouldn’ts of Muslim life.

Even qualified scholars were to make decisions based strictly on qiyas or analogical reasoning, the method Khalifa Omar used to discover the punishment for drinking (and to make many other rulings). That is, for each unprecedented contemporary situation, scholars had to find an analogous one in classical sources and derive a judgment parallel to the one already made. And if ambiguities arose about the way to apply qiyas, the matter was settled by ijma, the consensus of the community—which really meant the consensus of all the recognized scholars of the time.

If a scholar had exhausted Qur’an, hadith, qiyas, and ijma, then and only then could he move on to the final stage of ethical and legislative thinking, ijtihad, which means “free independent thinking based on reason.” Scholars and judges could apply this type of thinking only in areas not derived directly from revelation or covered by established precedents.

The four schools of Sunni law are named for the scholars who gave them final shape. Thus, the Hanafi school was founded by Abu Hanifa, from the Afghanistan area (though he taught in Kufa, Iraq); the Maliki school, by the Moroccan jurist Ibn Malik (though he worked and taught in Medina); and the Shafi’i school, by Imam al-Shafi’i of Mecca (though he settled finally in Egypt.) The last to crystallize was the Hanbali school, founded by the rigidly uncompromising Ahmed Ibn Hanbal, about whom I will say more later in this chapter.

While they constructed the edifice of doctrine, another host of thoughtful Muslims were hard at work on another vast project: interpreting all previous philosophies and discoveries in light of the Muslim revelations and integrating them into a single coherent system that made sense of nature, the cosmos, and man’s place in all of it. This project generated another group of thinkers known to the Islamic world as the philosophers.

Alexandria possessed a great library and numerous academies, making it an intellectual capital of the Greco-Roman world.

Here, the Muslims discovered the works of Plotinus, a philosopher who had said that everything in the universe was connected like the parts of a single organism, and all of it added up to a single mystical One, from which everything had emanated and to which everything would return.

In this concept of the One, Muslims found a thrilling echo of Prophet Mohammed’s apocalyptic insistence on the oneness of Allah. Better yet, when they looked into Plotinus, they found that he had constructed his system with rigorous logic from a small number of axiomatic principles, which...

Muslims were the first intellectuals ever in a position to make direct comparisons between, say, Greek and Indian mathematics, or Greek and Indian medicine, or Persian and Chinese cosmologies, or the metaphysics of various cultures. They set to work exploring how these ancient ideas fit in with each other and with the Islamic revelations, how spirituality related to reason, and how heaven and earth could be drawn into a single schema that explained the entire universe.

For all their devotion to Plato, the Muslim philosophers had tremendous admiration for Aristotle, as well: for his logic, his techniques of classification, and his powerful grasp of particularities. Following from Aristotle, the Muslim philosophers categorized and classified with obsessive logic. Just to give you a taste of this attitude: the philosopher al-Kindi described the material universe in terms of five governing principles: matter, form, motion, time, and space. He analyzed each of these into subcategories, dividing motion, for instance, into six types: generation, corruption, increase, decrease, change in quality, and change in position. He went on and on like this, intent on parsing all of reality into discrete, understandable parts.

The Greeks invented geometry, Indian mathematicians came up with the brilliant idea of treating zero as a number, the Babylonians discovered the idea of place value, and the Muslims systematized all of these ideas, adding a few of their own, to invent algebra and indeed to lay the foundations of modern mathematics.

but early on they recognized quantification as an instrument for studying nature, which is one of the cornerstones of science as a stand-alone endeavor. They also relied on observation for data upon which to base theories, a second cornerstone of science. They never articulated the scientific method per se—the idea of incrementally building knowledge by formulating hypotheses and then setting up experiments to prove or disprove them.