SLAVES ON HORSES THE EVOLUTION OF THE ISLAMIC POLITY SLAVES ON HORSES THE EVOLUTION OF THE ISLAMIC POLITY PATRICIA CRONE Lecturer in Islamic History University of Oxford CAMBRIDGE UNIVERSITY PRESS CAMBRIDGE LONDON NEW YORK NEW ROCHELLE MELBOURNE SYDNEY PUBLISHED BYTHE PRESS SYNDICATE OF THE UNIVERSITY OF CAMBRIDGE The Pitt Building, Trumpington Street, Cambridge, United Kingdom CAMBRIDGE UNIVERSITY PRESS The Edinburgh Building, Cambridge CB2 2RU, UK 40 West 20th Street, New York NY 10011-4211, USA 477 Williamstown Road, Port Melbourne, VIC 3207, Australia Ruiz de Alarcon 13,28014 Madrid, Spain Dock House, The Waterfront, Cape Town 8001, South Africa http './/www. Cambridge, org ©Cambridge University Press 1980 This book is in copyright. Subject to statutory exception and to the provisions of relevant collective licensing agreements, no reproduction of any part may take place without the written permission of Cambridge University Press. First published 1980 First paperback edition 2003 A catalogue record for this book is available from the British Library Library of Congress Cataloguing in Publication data Crone, Patricia, 1945- Slaves on horses. Based on part of the author's thesis, University of London, 1974. Bibliography: p. Includes index. 1. Islamic Empire - Politics and government. I. Title. DS38.5.C76 9O9'.O9767O1 79-50234 ISBN 0 521 22961 8 hardback ISBN 0 521 52940 9 paperback For T. C. and V. C. I have seen slaves upon horses, and princes walking as slaves upon the earth. Eccles. 10 :j. CONTENTS Preface ix A note on conventions x PART I: INTRODUCTION 1 Historiographical introduction 3 2 The nature of the Arab conquest 18 PART II: THE EVOLUTION OF THE CONQUEST SOCIETY 3 The Sufyanid pattern, 661—84 [41—64] 29 4 Syria of 684 [64] 34 5 The Marwanid evolution, 684—744 [64—126] 37 6 The Marwanid faction 42 7 Syria of 744 [ 126J 46 8 Umayyad clientage 49 PART III: THE FAILURE OF THE ISLAMIC EMPIRE 9 The abortive service aristocracy 61 10 The emergence of the slave soldiers 74 11 The emergence of the medieval polity 8 2 APPENDICES I The ashrafoi Syria and Iraq 93 II The subgovernors of Syria, 685 — 744 [65 — 126] 123 III The subgovernors of Iraq and its dependencies, 694—744 129 [75-126] IV The Yamaniyya and the Qaysiyya 154 V The 'Abbasid servants, 750—813 [132—98] 173 VI Mawlfi in the sense of 'kinsman' Notes 201 vii viii Contents Bibliography General index 2 7 2 Prosopographical index 2 9 3 PREFACE This book is a reincarnation of the first part of my thesis ('The Mawali in the Umayyad Period', University of London Ph.D., 1974) in a form so different that theologians might dispute the identity. I should like to thank Professor B. Lewis, who supervised me in 1969—73, Professor M. J. Kister, who helped me during a term in Jerusalem in 1972, Robert Irwin, whose queries inspired two pages of part III, and Dr Martin Hinds, whose criticisms inspired many more. Above all I wish to thank Michael Cook, who read the entire typescript in both its past and its present form, and whose advice I have nearly always followed, if not always with good grace. I also owe a special debt to Magister E. Iversen for suggesting to me, many years ago, the unfamiliar idea of becoming a historian. Needless to say, not even Magister Iversen can be held res- ponsible for the result. P.C. A note on conventions Dates in the text are A.D., but hijri&axzs have been added in square brackets where appropriate; in the appendices and notes all dates are hijn unless otherwise specified. The full names of Arabic authors are given in the bibliography, but only the short forms are used elsewhere. PART I INTRODUCTION HISTORIOGRAPHICAL INTRODUCTION This work presents an explanation of how and why slave soldiers came to be a central feature of the Muslim polity. The conceptual framework in which the explanation is set is that of Hagarism, and to the extent that the crux of the explanation has already appeared there,1 this work maybe regarded as simply an overextended footnote. There is, however, one respect in which the two works differ radically; for where Hagarism re- jected the Islamic tradition, the present work is squarely based upon it. This apparent lack of historiographical morality may meet with some disapproval, but it arises from the nature of Islamic historiography itself. Whereas the religious tradition is such that it must be accepted or rejected in toto, the secular tradition can to some extent be taken to pieces, and though a great deal of it has to be discarded, there remains enough for a coherent historical account. Before going on to the subject of this book, it is worth lending substance to this claim. Muslim knowledge of the Muslim past was transmitted orally for about a century and a half.2 Whatever the attitude to the permissibility of writing history,3 little history was actually written until the late Umayyad period,4 and the first historical works proper were only com- posed in early 'Abbasid Iraq.5 The fact that history was transmitted orally does not, of course, in itself mean that it was transmitted unreliably. Human brains can become memory banks of astonishing capacities, pro- cedures can be devised for the transfer of memory from one bank to another, and professional memorizers easily hold their own against copyists in the business of perfect replication: the Vedas, Panini's gram- mar and the Avesta were all transmitted for centuries by such men. But rigorous procedures along these lines are only adopted for the trans- mission of highly authoritative works which need to be immutably preserved, not for works of religious innovators; for where classics need to be preserved, new ideas need above all to be spread, and inasmuch as they engender change, they cannot well be shielded from it. Adherents of a new religion necessarily inhabit a different world from that of the founder himself: were it otherwise, his attempt at a religious paradigm 3 4 Introduction shift would have failed. Hence they will go over their tradition oblivious of the problems with which the founder struggled, struggling with prob- lems which the founder never envisaged, and in so doing not only elaborate, but also reshape the tradition which they received. And since the world of our grandparents, as not quite that of our parents, easily becomes ancient history of which we know little and understand even less, the founder must resign himself to the fact that it takes only three generations for his life and works to be thoroughly reshaped:6 the only insurance policy he can take out against it is to write his own authoritative works.7 Oral transmission in the formative period of a new religion, in short, does not mean faithful preservation, but rapid transformation of the tradition. Thus against the Hindu Vedas we can set the Buddhist Skandhaka, in which the life of the Buddha was first presented.8 It was a grandchild of the Buddha's generation who created this authoritative work in an effort to outbid the Vedas. Formally it was a biography. Substantively it was an exposition of monastic rules interspersed with entertaining legends, in which remains of the tradition from which the biography was recast could still be found, but which was otherwise devoid of historicity. And thanks to its success it is directly or indirectly the source for the bulk of our knowledge of the Buddha's life today.9 Similarly thanks to its success, the Sira of Ibn Ishaq is practically our only source for the life of Muhammad preserved within the Islamic tradi- tion. The work is late: written not by a grandchild, but a great-grandchild of the Prophet's generation, it gives us the view for which classical Islam had settled.10 And written by a member of the 'ulama\ the scholars who had by then emerged as the classical bearers of the Islamic tradition, the picture which it offers is also one sided: how the Umayyad caliphs remembered their Prophet we shall never know. That it is unhistorical is only what one would expect, but it has an extraordinary capacity to resist internal criticism, a feature unparalleled in either the Skandhakaot the Gospels, but characteristic of the entire Islamic tradition, and most pro- nounced in the Koran: one can take the picture presented or one can leave it, but one cannot work, with it.l ' This peculiar characteristic arises from a combination of the circum- stances and the method of transmission. The circumstances were those of drastic change. Whereas Buddhism and Christianity spread by slow in- filtration, the coming of Islam was by contrast an explosion. In the course of a few decades the Arabs exchanged their ancestral paganism for mono- theism, the desert for a habitation in the settled Middle East, tribal innocence for state structures, poverty for massive wealth, and undisturbed Historiographical introduction 5 provinciality for exposure to the world's polemical attention. Rarely have a preacher and his followers lived in such discontinuous environments: what made sense to Muhammad made none to Mu'awiya, let alone to 'Abdal-Malik. Even so, the Arabs might well have retained a more integral recollec- tion of the past had they not proceeded to adopt an atomistic method of transmission. The transmitters memorized, not coherent narratives or the components of one, but isolated sayings, short accounts of people's acts, brief references to historical events and the like. It was a method evolved by the Jewish rabbis for the transmission of the Oral Law, and the Mishnah was handed down with the same rigorous attention to immutability as were the Vedas.