Arabic Heritage in the Post-Abbasid Period

Edited by Imed Nsiri

Edited by Imed Nsiri

This book first published 2019

Cambridge Scholars Publishing

Lady Stephenson Library, Newcastle upon Tyne, NE6 2PA, UK

British Library Cataloguing in Publication Data A catalogue record for this book is available from the British Library

All rights for this book reserved. No part of this book may be reproduced, stored in a retrieval system, or transmitted, in any form or by any means, electronic, mechanical, photocopying, recording or otherwise, without the prior permission of the copyright owner.

ISBN (10): 1-5275-1937-6 ISBN (13): 978-1-5275-1937-4

Cover design by Sattar Izwaini For my family

TABLE OF CONTENTS

Acknowledgements ...... ix

Introduction ...... xi Imed Nsiri

Chapter One ...... 1 Arab Heritage and Arab History Mary C. Wilson

Chapter Two ...... 29 A General Outline of the Arabic Language Sattar Izwaini

Chapter Three ...... 49 Islamic Spain after the Thirteenth Century Florinda Ruiz

Chapter Four ...... 89 A Short History of Islamic Science Nidhal Guessoum

Chapter Five ...... 123 The Development of Politico-Religious Movements: A General Overview Meis Al-Kaisi

Chapter Six ...... 141 Arabic Literature in the Post-Abbasid Period Imed Nsiri

Chapter Seven ...... 157 Al Nahḍa: Modern Arabic Awakening O. Ishaq Tijani and Gihan El Soukary

ACKNOWLEDGEMENTS

I would like to acknowledge my indebtedness to many people who helped me with this project. This work would not have been possible without the support of my colleagues and the administration at the American University of Sharjah. I am especially indebted to Aedan Lake for the hard work on helping me streamline the different texts. I would like to extend my thanks to Dr. Ishaq Tijani for his comments and suggestions. I also owe special gratitude to my family.

INTRODUCTION

IMED NSIRI

This book was motivated by students’ need for a textbook on Arabic heritage, particularly from the thirteenth through the nineteenth centuries, an era broadly referred to as post-Abbasid. This period is often called “the age of decadence/decline” (ʿaṣr al-inḥiṭāṭ). This term has been used by some literary historians and critics to refer to the period based, principally, on a comparison between it and the preceding Abbasid period, which is commonly designated “the golden age” of Arab-Islamic civilization.1 As Roger Allen notes, the application of the decadence “label to a substantial segment of the cultural production of the” Arabic speaking world in the post-Abbasid era has “resulted in the creation of a vicious circle, whereby an almost complete lack of sympathy for very different aesthetic forms has been converted into a tradition of scholarly indifference that has left us with enormous gaps in our understanding of the continuities involved.”2 Some of the scholarly works published in the past few decades have provided not only detailed examinations of post-Abbasid Arabic literature and culture, but also convincing arguments that the era was not characterized by decadence or decline after all (as further discussed in chapters six and seven of this volume).3 Nevertheless, most of such scholarly volumes are too cumbersome for undergraduate students—Arabs and non-Arabs alike—to grasp. Hence, the necessity of a volume such as this that presents the subject in a concise and simplified manner for an English-speaking audience. This book aims to introduce the reader to the period not only in the area of

1 For more on the debate on whether Arabic culture declined or not during the post Abbasid period see, for example, J. Brugman, An Introduction to the History of Modern Arabic Literature in Egypt (Leiden: Brill, 1984); H. A. R. Gibb, Studies on the Civilization of Islam. Reprint (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 2016). 2 Roger Allen, “The Post-Classical Period: Parameters and Preliminaries,” in Arabic Literature in the Post-Classical Period, edited by Roger Allen and D. S. Richards (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2006), 2. 3 See, for example, Roger Allen and D. S. Richards (eds.), Arabic Literature in the Post-Classical Period (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2006). xii Introduction literature—which has always deservedly been the focus of attention by scholars—but also in some other aspects of the heritage of the Arabic speaking peoples. The Arabic term for heritage is turāth, a word that derives from irth or mīrāth, meaning “inheritance.”4 Arabic heritage, in its various forms, has been the product of the hard work of many personalities from diverse backgrounds since a least the sixth century CE, a period that marks the emergence of Arab recorded history. This volume places an emphasis on “Arabic heritage,” rather than “Arab heritage,” because not all the people who contributed to it were Arabs by origin. Thus, Arabic heritage is used herein to refer to any work, oral or written, produced using the medium of the Arabic language. Also, at some points in the volume, the reader will find references to phrases such as “Arabic-Islamic,” “Arab-Muslim,” and “Arab- Islamic” since many of the people who contributed to Arabic heritage were not Muslims just as many of them were not Arabs, going by their ethnic backgrounds, as earlier noted. The volume comprises seven chapters, in addition to this introduction. The chapters provide, individually and collectively, the artistic, linguistic, cultural, historical, religious/theological, philosophical, and scientific productions that today constitute parts of what can be designated Arabic- Islamic heritage. In chapter one, Mary C. Wilson examines the difference between heritage and history, both of which are different ways of thinking about the past. Heritage values what remains the same over generations, and can be used to create an idealized past that is often shaped as much by present-day socio-political concerns as it is by history. In the case of Arab societies, the idea of heritage coalesced around the Arabic language, the unifying factor in an otherwise widespread and diverse culture. The chapter looks at how Arab heritage was shaped by Ottoman rule, international trade, Sufism, the Nahḍa or renaissance, European colonization and, finally, independence in the second half of the twentieth century. The chapter serves as an introduction to both Arab heritage—albeit, presented solely from an historical-chronological perspective—and to the entire volume. In chapter two, Sattar Izwaini provides a general overview of the Arabic language and its development from pre-Islamic times to date. Islam plays a critical role in creating a unified or standard form of Arabic known as al- fuṣḥā, which spreads simultaneously with Islam across Arabia and beyond. Modern Standard Arabic, or al-fuṣḥā, emerged alongside the new colloquial forms, as a preserved but somewhat transformed version of Classical

4 For more on the meanings of turāth see, for example, The Encyclopaedia of Islam. Third edition (Leiden: Brill, 2007). Arabic Heritage in the Post-Abbasid Period xiii

Arabic. The chapter also explains some of the basics of Arabic phonology and graphology, morphology, lexis and syntax, before providing an examination of the impact of translation on Arabic and the challenges facing the language today. The chapter is replete with many examples written in the Arabic script accompanied by their transliterations and translations. Chapter three, by Florinda Ruiz, examines the radical changes experienced by Muslims in al-Andalus, or the Muslim domain in the Iberian Peninsula, from the thirteenth to the seventeenth centuries, at a time when the Muslim kingdoms in the region were being re-conquered by Christian states. Many symbols of Arab heritage in al-Andalus remain intact to date, including the famous Qaṣr al-ḥamrāʾ (Alhambra Palace), the powerhouse of the last Arab kingdom, which fell to the Christians in 1492. The chapter encapsulates the processes of how the identities of the Muslims in Spain underwent repeated changes, from citizens of independent states (otherwise called Mulūk al-ṭawāʾif) to Muslim subjects under Christian rule, and then to forced conversion and, eventually, exile, through the so-called crusade wars. The chapter emphasizes the everlasting impacts of Arab-Islamic civilization on not only what is now proudly regarded as the Spanish Golden Age but also on the so-called European Renaissance. Nidhal Guessoum begins, in chapter four, with a discussion of the current revival of interest in Islamic science. He provides some definitions of the relevant terms in the field and challenges the received wisdom that the Islamic world made few and limited contributions to science and that the Arab-Muslim scholars merely translated classical Greek knowledge as a means of preserving it. On the contrary, it is on record that, over a longer period of time and wider geographical range, science had flourished in both the Mashriq (East) and the Maghrib (West) of the Islamic world, with major developments in various fields of science, including mathematics, optics, medicine, astronomy, physics, and so on. The chapter provides short biographies of the key Muslim scientists and their most important scientific achievements in terms of theoretical, explanatory, and experimental works and inventions. In chapter five, Meis al-Kaisi examines the many movements that flourished in the Islamic world from the thirteenth century onward. The Shi’a, which had emerged earlier in the seventh century, split into multiple factions, some militant and others quiescent. Other Islamic movements or groups that further developed include the Sunni schools of law and jurisprudence (madhāhib), Sufism or Islamic mysticism, which was to diverge into brotherhoods (ṭarīqas) spread in different locations throughout the Muslim world to date. In the early modern period, there emerged a most significant movement to tackle the other groups and movements by xiv Introduction preaching the strict adherence to the Islamic religious doctrines and practices of the salaf ṣāliḥ (the righteous earliest generation of Muslims). That is Wahhabism, otherwise called the Wahhabi movement, founded by Muhammad ʿAbd al-Wahhāb of central Arabia in the eighteenth century with the political backing of Muhammad ibn Saud, the first founder of the Saudi state. The chapter ends with the emergence in the twentieth century of another Salafist politico-religious movement, the Muslim Brotherhood, which continues to exert some influence in Egypt and elsewhere in the Arab and Islamic worlds. In chapter six, I provide an overview of the Arabic literary tradition in the post-Abbasid period from the thirteenth century to the al-Nahḍa (modern Arab resurgence) era in the nineteenth century. The chapter discusses Andalusian literature and culture, focusing specifically on the strophic forms known as the muwashshaḥ and zajal. Also discussed is the development of the maqāmāt—pursuant to the Abbasid al-Hamadhānī and al-Ḥarīrī’s legacies—in the post-classical period, ending the topic with the contribution of Nāṣīf al-Yāziji of the nahḍa era. Arabic-Islamic religious (Sufi) poetry is also examined with special focus on al-Būṣīrī’s Burda, which still holds sway in the Islamic cultural milieu to date as evidenced by its sonorous renditions across the world in socio-religious gatherings as well as online. Furthermore, the chapter surveys the Arabic folkloric tradition, especially the sīras (romances) and Alf layla wa-layla (Arabian Nights). Through a discussion of Ibn Baṭṭūṭa’s Riḥla and Ibn Khaldūn’s Muqaddima, the chapter reiterates the point that Arabic literature and culture cannot be designated as decadent considering the vast number of works written during the long period of time in focus here. Chapter seven, by O. Ishaq Tijani and Gihan El Soukary, discusses al- Nahḍa, beginning with the French invasion and occupation of Egypt in 1798. The major players in the modern Arab cultural revival are mentioned and their specific contributions are discussed in a succinct manner. From Napoleon Bonaparte to Muḥammad ʿAlī and Khedive Ismāʿīl, among the rulers of modern Egypt, to intellectuals such as the Egyptian Rifāʿa al- Ṭahṭāwī and Muḥammad ʿAbduh, among others from Egypt, Syria and Lebanon, the chapter examines how the vibrancy of the Arabic literary tradition of the pre-Abbasid periods has been reinvigorated in the nahḍa era—a revival prompted by Arab encounters with the Europeans in the nineteenth century and the changes provoked by new political and cultural relationships. The chapter provides a historical and chronological closure to the topic of the volume in that it surveys Arabic heritage of the immediate past, since heritage often conveys a sense of history, that is, something of the past.

CHAPTER ONE

ARAB HERITAGE AND ARAB HISTORY

MARY C. WILSON

Introduction

At first blush, heritage seems an easy category to grasp. A little thought, however, reveals otherwise. Both are related but distinct ways of thinking about the past. History seeks to record and explore change; heritage is construed as unchanging. History investigates the good, the bad, and the indifferent; heritage includes only what we are proud of. Finally change, the subject of history, is what gives heritage life. For example, in the 1950s and 1960s most schoolchildren in the Arabic-speaking world memorized `Imru’ al-Qays’ poem, beginning:

Stop, let us weep at the memory of a loved one and [her] dwelling at the place where the sands twist to an end between al-Dakhūl and Ḥawmal

And Tudīḥ and al-Miqrāt. Her traces have not been [completely] effaced, with all the weaving of the wind from south and north.1

We may not know where al-Dakhūl and Ḥawmal or Tūdiḥ and al-Miqrāt are, but this poem, evoking place, love, and loss, written in the sixth century CE, took on new poignancy in the twentieth century given the loss of Palestine in 1948. What sorts of things comprise heritage? UNESCO, (United Nations Educational, Scientific and Cultural Organization) adopted a convention for the protection of world heritage in 1972. It divided heritage into two types: cultural heritage and natural heritage.2 A third type was added in 2003: intangible heritage.3 UNESCO defined cultural heritage as large-

1 Translation, Jones, 1960: 55. 2 http://whc.unesco.org/en/conventiontext/ 3 https://ich.unesco.org/

2 Chapter One scale built, sculpted or painted objects. Natural heritage is biological and geological formations and the habitats of threatened species of flora and fauna. Intangible heritage includes oral traditions, performing arts, social practices, rituals and festive events, knowledge and beliefs concerning nature and the universe, and traditional craftsmanship. I do not include natural heritage in what follows but I do attempt to give examples of cultural and intangible heritage as they help to illustrate the relationship between historical change and heritage. I am not sure where or if written works fit into UNESCO’s definition but I regard written products to be of primary importance in considerations of heritage. UNESCO also established a Memory of the World Programme in 1992, which thus far lists 427 documents, including films and photographs. Although some of these may be regarded as heritage, documents per se are in the realm of evidence used by historians in order to understand past events. Each period of Arab history has contributed to a body of creative activity that may be deemed heritage, but the concept of heritage itself did not emerge until the nineteenth century. ‘Heritage’ was part and parcel of another new idea: nationalism. In the Arabic-speaking world the intellectual movement known as the nahḍa arose along with the idea of an Arab nation identified by language. The nahḍa came about as the revolution in communications and production powered the growing armed and economic might of Europe, which in turn enabled European military, economic and cultural domination of the Arab world. France began its conquest of Algeria in 1830 and in 1880 it added Tunisia to its empire; Britain occupied Aden in 1839 and Egypt in 1882; France, Britain and Russia interfered in the affairs of Lebanon and Palestine from 1840 on. In this context, heritage provided an idealized Arab past that could be used to counter European attitudes of superiority that came with imperialism. What follows is a brief history of the Arab world to provide context for the creation of the arts and sciences, the artifacts and learning that could comprise heritage. “Could” is appropriate here because what constitutes heritage depends on who chooses what cultural products constitute heritage and why these particular products are chosen.

Arab and Islamic History Arab and Islamic history are closely intertwined yet, as `Imru’ al-Qays’ poem demonstrates, there are cultural artifacts attributed to Arabs that pre- date Islam. From inscriptions, linguists believe that Nabateans who carved the stone city of Petra out of rock spoke a form of Arabic, as did the population of the great trading city of Palmyra and its queen, Zenobia. The Arab Heritage and Arab History 3

Roman Emperor, Marcus Julius Philippus known as Philip the Arab, ruled the empire from 244-249CE. He was from the Hawran. Arabic was widely spoken in the Fertile Crescent well before the Islamic conquest owing to repeated waves of migrants from the Arabian Peninsula. Arabic was important enough that around 570 the Byzantines inscribed a stone marker in the Taurus foothills (what is today northern Syria) in the three languages of the area at that time: Greek, Aramaic and Arabic. During the Umayyad Caliphate the appellation “Arab” was narrowly guarded and referred only to those Arabic speakers who had come with the Muslim conquerors. Writers of the time divided Arabic speakers into two groups, al-àrab al-`āriba and al-àrab al-musta`riba, genuine Arabs and those who had been Arabized. That distinction began to disappear as time passed, though even today some Arabs from the Arabian Peninsula may still use it. Later, as city people came to dominate both cultural production and power, the term àrab in the mouths of urbanites came to refer only to nomads and carried a detrimental connotation as opposed to ḥaḍar, “civilized”. Later still, and especially in the writings of the nahḍa intellectuals in the late nineteenth and twentieth centuries, àrab became an identity that encompassed all Arabic speakers defined by a culture to be proud of.

The Arab Caliphates 632-1258 After the Arab-Islamic conquest the use of Arabic spread quickly among the inhabitants of Greater Syria and Iraq owing to its similarity to Aramaic, the colloquial language of the place and time. It spread less readily into Persia and across North Africa where the dominant languages, Persian and Berber, were not related to Arabic, although Persian adopted the Arabic script. Conversion to Islam proceeded more slowly and well beyond what has come to be called the Arab world, although study of the Qur`an and Hadith established Arabic as the language of the learned; for all Muslims, Arabic was the language of prayer. The first four Caliphs were largely occupied with conquest and with setting up the rudiments of governance. The development of arts and architecture that could be called Arab was left to the Umayyad and Abbasid Caliphs and the military dynasties that exercised power in the name of the Abbasids. The institution of waqf (endowment or benefice) encouraged the building and maintenance of anything that contributed to the proper practice of Islam and the well-being of the umma. In practice awqāf were established by Christians and Jews as well as by Muslims. Rich and poor alike made such gifts, which could range from endowing a 4 Chapter One supply of candles to light places of worship to endowing major religious complexes including mosques, libraries, schools, hospitals, and soup kitchens. Rulers, their courts and the wealthy patronized artists, writers, and architects in order to glorify God and to demonstrate their own power and standing. According to the tenth century geographer al-Muqdisī, the Umayyad Caliph al-Walīd (r. 705-715):

“beheld Syria to be a country that had long been occupied by Christians, and he noted there the beautiful churches… So he sought to build for the Muslims a mosque that should prevent their gazing at these [churches] and that should be unique and a wonder to the world.”4

The Umayyad mosque in Damascus endowed by al-Walīd is among the earliest Islamic buildings still standing, although it has been grievously damaged in the current war in Syria. The earliest extant Islamic building is the Dome of the Rock in Jerusalem. The Umayyad mosques in Damascus and Aleppo established the basics of Islamic architecture: a domed roof spanning a large interior decorated with verses from the Qur`an in elegant calligraphy, a courtyard with a fountain, a minaret or several, a minbar and a miḥrāb. Since buildings in particular advertised the change of power from Greek-speaking Byzantines and Persian-speaking Sasanians to Arabic-speaking Muslims, the Umayyad ruling elite built mosques in every city that came under Umayyad rule as the empire expanded across North Africa and Spain to the west of the Islamic heartland and Persia and Central Asia to the east. In 750 CE the Abbasids defeated the Umayyads and moved the seat of the caliphate to Baghdad. At the same time a grandson of the Umayyad Caliph Hishām began to create a government based in Cordoba with the aid of Berber tribes from North Africa. In the tenth century yet a third caliphate emerged, the Fatimid Caliphate with its capital in Cairo. Just as the Umayyads had embellished their capital Damascus, the Abbasids, the Andalusian Umayyads and the Fatimids began to turn their capitals into showplaces of imperial splendor and learning. From this period came the classic works of science, medicine, philosophy, theology, jurisprudence, and poetry in addition to the architecture that graced every city. Yet they all, built as well as written works, raise the question: how “Arab” does a building or an idea, or a system of thought need to be to be considered “Arab”? The Dome of the Rock and its mosaic calligraphy was in the tradition of Byzantine art and architecture and was most probably built by Aramaic- or Greek-speaking builders and artisans. The Umayyad mosque

4 Al-Muqaddasi, quoted in Grabar, 1996: 53. Arab Heritage and Arab History 5 in Damascus was built on the footprint of the basilica of St John, which was itself built on the footprint of a temple to the pagan god Hadad. The builders used stone already cut and columns from earlier churches and temples, and the workmen, like the workmen who built and embellished the Dome of the Rock, spoke languages other than Arabic and used Byzantine methods of design and embellishment. The great mosque of al- Qayrawān, originally built when the city was founded in 670 and rebuilt successively by new rulers, had columns with Corinthian capitals from nearby Carthage. Written work raises the same question. For example, Ibn Sīnā (d. 1037) was born in Bukhara and never lived west of Isfahan, he wrote in Arabic and Persian and Persian was his mother tongue. Who gets to claim his work as heritage—Arabs, Persians, both? Debates about the ethnic labeling of heritage demonstrate the problems with such identifications. Cultural products the world over are influenced and shaped by other cultures. Can one group’s heritage also be the heritage of another group? The United Nations has addressed this question by creating a list of world heritage sites, which includes natural sites like Wadi Rum in Jordan, built environments such as the aflāj irrigation systems of Oman, parts of cities like the Kasbah of Algiers, and specific structures such as Crac des Chevaliers and Qalʿat Salah El-Din in Syria. States choose the sites they wish to be considered for the list but the final choice is left to a UNESCO committee. It is noteworthy that less than half the sites listed in the Arab states date from after the Arab Islamic conquest. Egypt, for example, has seven designated heritage sites but only one of them could be said to be Arab, historic Cairo. By comparison, in France’s list of 44 sites well over half were built after 1000 CE. Should we conclude from such a list that in terms of built environments the Arab world has little worth designation as world heritage? Or may this dearth suggest bias on the part of the UNESCO committee or lack of initiative by Arab governments? Written works, whether included in UNESCO categories of heritage or not, have pride of place as evidence for Arab intellectual history and as Arab heritage. In this case we would certainly start with the Quràn, which is Arabic, Islamic and world heritage, no category precluding another. Qurànic studies led to a desire to understand and systematize Arabic so that those who were not native speakers could learn it in a comprehensive manner. As the languages of conquered peoples melded with Arabic, scholars attempted to authenticate words, syntax, and grammar by collecting the pre-Islamic poetry of Arabian tribes. Kufa and Basra were the first centers of such linguistic study and since they were relatively close to the tribal lands of Arabia scholars traveled to oases and 6 Chapter One campgrounds to gather meanings and pronunciations from what they considered to be pure Arabic. From Kufa and Basra the center of language and literature study moved to the Abbasid capital Baghdad where intellectual life blossomed. The libraries of Baghdad were so extensive that when the Mongols sacked the city in 1258, it is said the Tigris ran black with ink. Cities were the centers of government and high culture and all dynasties, whether caliphal or military, broadcast their greatness and justified their legitimacy as Muslim rulers through magnificent building projects and the patronage of intellectuals and artisans. The Fatimids founded Al-Azhar and Dār al-Ùlūm in Cairo. Like Bayt al-Ḥikma in Baghdad they were libraries and centers for the study and propagation of ideas favored by the rulers—Ismaìli thought in Cairo, the rational sciences in Baghdad. From the beginning of the ninth century papermaking techniques brought from China helped to expand the production and availability of written works. Across the Arabic speaking world all the way to Spain the powerful built mosques and their attendant libraries, schools and hospitals. Styles of architecture adopted local materials and styles. The great mosque of Cordoba, for example, had Visigothic and Romanesque elements. Out of the Andalusian amalgam of Arabic, Berber and Spanish styles and Muslim, Christian and Jewish learning came the brilliant culture of Andalusia, which spawned the poetry of Ibn Ḥazm (994-1064), the development of Aristotelian thought by Ibn Rushd (1126-1198), the Guide for the Perplexed by the Jewish thinker Maimonides (1135-1204), and the poetry of Ibn ʿArabī (1165-1240). By the year 1000 Arabic was the dominant language across North Africa, up the Nile Valley, and in the Fertile Crescent in addition to the Arabian Peninsula. It was also the language of law, religion, and learning well beyond these regions. One of the great written works of the fourteenth century, the Riḥla of Ibn Baṭṭūṭa (d. 1377), described his travels from his hometown of Tangier to the Far East and back. Throughout his travels in Africa, the Middle East, Central Asia, and beyond, his skills in the Arabic language and his training in Islamic jurisprudence won him friends, protectors, and sponsors. His recollections, compiled in the well- established genre of riḥla (travel) literature, were unprecedented in world literature for his attention to the individuals he encountered along the way and their lifestyles and cultures. Fifty years after Ibn Baṭṭūṭa recorded his travels, Ibn Khaldūn (d. 1406) developed a unique theory of historical change. Rather than writing in the familiar form of a chronicle, in which event succeeded event with little explanation, he sought to understand causation: what were the Arab Heritage and Arab History 7 sources of dynastic power and why did dynasties rise and fall? He developed his ideas based on his knowledge of Greek, Roman and Islamic history, and on what he saw during his lifetime of the political rivalries that made Andalusia subject to conquest and North Africa unable to aid in its defense. In the Muqaddima, written as an introduction to his universal history, Kitāb al-Ìbar, he developed a theory of historical change resting on the socio-economic division between rural and urban dwellers and the notion of àsabiyya, group cohesion. He saw nomadic peoples as having both a natural àṣabiyya and the martial skills bred of the harsh circumstances of their lives. This cohesiveness allowed them to conquer the seats of power in cities. Once ensconced in urban luxury, however, they lost their àsabiyya and fell prey to discord and conquest by other tribes fresh from the desert with the martial skills and uncorrupted àṣabiyya bred by their harsh lives According to Ibn Khaldūn, the inevitable problem for tribal conquerors was how to maintain tribal cohesiveness once they had conquered and settled in cities. The chief way, he argued, was through a common belief, which in his day meant religion; in our day a common belief system could stem from religion, or from a particular political ideology, a form of government, a shared understanding of human rights, or any combination of these and other alternatives. Ibn Khaldūn was born in Tunis in 1332, where his family had moved from Seville as the Christian reconquista of Spain gathered force. He received a superior education in Quràn and Hadith, Arabic grammar, jurisprudence, law, mathematics, logic, and philosophy at the al-Zaytūna mosque and madrassa, which had the richest libraries in North Africa. Like Ibn Baṭṭūṭa, Ibn Khaldūn found employment thanks to his education and in particular to his knowledge of jurisprudence. He served various emirs in North African cities, moving from one to another as power changed hands. He returned to Spain briefly to serve the ruler of Granada and died in Cairo where he served the Mamlūk Sulṭān al-Ẓāhir al-Barqūq. Today, scholars worldwide consider Ibn Khaldūn the founder of the social sciences for his analysis of the social causes of political change. One of the cataclysmic events that influenced his writing was the breakup of Islamic Spain. He did not live to see the fall of Granada in 1492, when Christian forces burnt the archives and library of the palace, Alhambra. Throughout Andalusia, it is said, the Christian conquerors burnt a million Arabic books. The new rulers of Spain also expelled Jews and Muslims, many of whom fled to North Africa and further east to Mamlūk and Ottoman realms (see below), taking their skills with them. The remembrance of Islamic Spain and the cultural achievements of Muslim, 8 Chapter One

Christian, and Jewish intellectuals who lived there or who came from there remains a high-point of Arab cultural history. Today the Andalusia that produced such heights of art and intellect has become an important part of Arab heritage and an implicit critique of recent and current wars in the region and the use of religion to identify and mobilize an “us” against a “them”.

The Mamlūks In the Eastern Mediterranean the spirit of the reconquista manifested itself in the Crusades, which began in 1095. At roughly the same time Abbasid lands in the east faced new invaders, the Mongols. A new order of warriors, called mamlūks owing to their slave origins, saved the Arab- Islamic heartland from these invaders coming from West and East. At the time of Ibn Baṭṭūṭa’s travels, Mamlūks ruled the core of the Arabic- speaking world from their capitals in Cairo and Damascus. They were military slaves, from north and east of the Black Sea, first recruited by Ṣalāḥ al-Dīn al-Ayyūbī to fight Crusaders. They deposed the last of Ṣalāḥ al-Dīn’s descendants, the Ayyubids, and became rulers in their own right in the 1250s. Neither Ṣalāḥ al-Dīn nor the Mamlūks spoke Arabic as a mother tongue, but without them, Arab cultural achievements would be much diminished. Ṣalāḥ al-Dīn reconquered Jerusalem from the Crusaders, and although he was of Kurdish origin, tales of his valor and chivalry have made him a stock figure of Arab heritage. The Mamlūks stopped the Mongol advance in 1260 at ʿAyn Jalūt in the Galilee, saving the Arab cities of geographic Syria (al-Shām) from the fate of Baghdad. Thirty years later in 1291 Mamlūk soldiers ejected the last Crusaders from Acre. The last ruler that Ibn Khaldūn served was the Mamlūk Sulṭān al- Barqūq. At that time Mamlūk realms faced a new conqueror from the East, Tamerlane (Timur i Lenk). At the behest of al-Barqūq, Ibn Khaldūn went to Tamerlane, who was encamped outside of Damascus, and reportedly convinced him that Egypt and North Africa were not worth invading. Tamerlane did not go further into Arabic-speaking lands although he robbed Damascus of its skilled artisans and builders in order to make Samarqand a capital worthy of a great ruler. Does that make Samarqand a part of Arab heritage? Mamlūks were especially known for their fortifications, but after they defeated Crusaders and Mongols they created other building projects in cities under their control. For example, they moved the city of Tripoli in today’s Lebanon about a mile away from the coastline to protect it from Christian pirates/crusaders and rebuilt it to provide all the institutions Arab Heritage and Arab History 9 necessary to Islamic learning and practice. Until its recent destruction it was a showcase of Mamlūk design and architecture. Cairo still has a Mamlūk core mostly inside the walls built by Ṣalāḥ al- Dīn. The fifteenth-century historian, al-Maqrīzī wrote a detailed account of this Cairo where the Mamlūks turned al-Azhar into a center of Sunni learning and created a vast cemetery outside the walls for their rulers’ tombs. In the twentieth century this cemetery became an integral part of Cairo and the tombs dwelling places for the urban poor. Throughout their vast empire Mamlūks awqaf to fund the building and upkeep of institutions that advertised their power and their Muslim piety, perhaps to justify their legitimacy given their original slave status and recent conversion to Islam.

Enter the Ottomans The same year that Granada fell, Christopher Columbus set off westward, looking for a new route to the Indies. Since Arabic was the lingua franca of the Mediterranean and Indian Ocean trade circuit, Columbus took along an Arabic-speaking Spanish Jew, Luis de Torres, to serve as a translator. He did not find the Indies but rather what he considered a new world where no one spoke Arabic. This discovery eventually shifted the center of world trade from the Mediterranean-Indian Ocean region to the Atlantic, and resulted, centuries later, in shifting the center of world trade away from the Middle East where a new power was emerging: the Ottoman Empire. As Ibn Khaldūn had theorized, the Turkic tribes that comprised Ottoman forces had come from the harsh conditions of the Central Asian plains with a strong `aṣabiyya made stronger by the common belief system that they had adopted, Islam. By chance, Ibn Baṭṭūṭa had seen the beginnings of Ottoman power as he journeyed through western Anatolia in the 1330s: “The Sultan of Bursa is Orkhan [Orhan] Bek, son of Othman Chuk. He is the greatest of the Turkmen kings and the richest [sic] in wealth, lands, and military forces, and possesses nearly a hundred fortresses which he is continually visiting for inspection and putting to rights.”5 Othman’s descendants and followers conquered Constantinople in 1453; they called it Istanbul and made it their capital. In 1516-1517, the Ottomans defeated the Mamlūks and came to rule geographic Syria, Egypt, and the holy cities of Mecca and Medina. Within the century, they also added North Africa and Iraq to their empire, tripling the size of Ottoman realms.

5 Ibn Baṭṭūṭa, 1929: 136-137. 10 Chapter One

The extension of Ottoman power did not bring undue destruction to Arab cities and many of the cultural products that would later be deemed heritage survived. Ibn Iyās, a chronicler of the period, described the conquest of geographic Syria, (al-sham):

Selim Sultan seized the town and the citadel of Aleppo without having to besiege it… Then he went to Damascus, which capitulated… The towns of Hama, Homs and Baalbek did not resist. From Damascus he set out for Egypt after taking Tripoli, Safad, Gaza, Jerusalem, and Jebel Nablus… The whole country was occupied without fighting and no one contemplated defending it, something that had never been seen for any ruler before Selim.6

Except for Morocco and parts of the Arabian Peninsula, the Ottomans ruled most of the Arabic-speaking world for 400 years. Bringing Arab lands under Ottoman control arguably had more impact on the Ottoman Empire than the reverse. Until 1517 there were more Christians in the empire than Muslims. Arab lands contained the most important centers of Islamic learning: al-Zaytūna in Tunis and al-Azhar in Cairo, and the schools of Aleppo, Damascus, Baghdad, Basra, Medina, and Mecca. Moreover, Ottoman sultans gained a new title, guardian of the two holy places (khādim al-ḥaramayn), which raised them above other Muslim rulers internationally. The most important of the sultan’s new religious duties was to protect and facilitate the pilgrimage to Mecca. The ḥajj created a rich architectural heritage as wealthy patrons, women as well as men, endowed caravansarays, orphanages, madrasas, and fountains along the ḥajj route. For example, shortly after the conquest, Sultan Sulaymān (r. 1520-1566) ordered his chief architect Sinan to build a taqiyya to provide for pilgrims in Damascus. Built outside the walls of Damascus, the Taqiyya Sulaymāniyya comprised several structures: mosque, school, hospice, soup kitchen, courtyard and fountain all built in the imperial style then in vogue in Istanbul. Yet even in this most Ottoman of buildings with its wide domes and pencil minarets, the local style of alternate black and white stone stripes graced the walls. Although only Muslims make the pilgrimage to Mecca, Arab lands had many sites of pilgrimage shared by Muslims, Christians and Jews. The most famous of these is Jerusalem. For Jews, it is the site of the first and second temples, for Christians, it is the place of Jesus’ martyrdom and resurrection, for Muslims, it is where the miracle of the Prophet’s journey to heaven occurred. Under Muslim rule, Jerusalem was open to all.

6 Ibn Iyas, 1960: 145-146. Arab Heritage and Arab History 11

Alongside internationally known religious sites, local sites also attracted a variety of believers. The Muslim jurist Ibn Ṭulūn (d. 1546) evokes the culture of shared reverence by describing the tomb of Shaykh Arslān, a Muslim holy man, in Damascus:

Muslims, Jews, Christians, and Zoroastrians believe in him and go to him with votive offerings, such as oil, candles, dirhams and dinars [coins] for the sake of getting near [to God], and whoever seeks him at an occasion of great importance or severe affliction and seeks the intercession of God the Exalted through him, his need is fulfilled.7

Arab cities grew under the Ottoman rule. Estimates put Cairo at 150,000 people in 1517 and twice that in 1800. Aleppo and Damascus also doubled in population. Ibn Khaldūn had noted rulers’ penchant for displaying their power and glory through buildings, and the Ottomans followed suit. In Jerusalem Süleyman’s consort Hürrem, known to Europeans as Roxelana, endowed a mosque complex including an inn, hospice, school, and kitchen for pilgrims and students. The Sultan had the Dome of the Rock restored and its outer walls embellished with faience tiles and marble facing. The Ottoman governor of Aleppo province, Khusru Pasha, endowed a complex of mosque, school, and caravansaray, the first structure in Aleppo to bear the distinctive Ottoman profile. It was completed in 1546. Urban architecture throughout the Ottoman Empire blended local styles with Ottoman conventions. In Cairo, Ottoman builders added pencil minarets and wooden ceilings to Mamlūk mosques with their flat roofs and austere facades. In Tunis, the mosque and mausoleum of Yusuf Dey built in 1616 had a green tile pyramid-shaped roof, which evoked Granada rather than Istanbul. In Algiers, the Ottoman military leaders built the al- Jadīd Mosque with Ottoman style domes but the square minaret and smooth stucco finish characteristic of North African buildings. In Aleppo, the Uthmāniyya madrasa (1730) with its domes and minaret is clearly Ottoman, yet it also has two iwans, reception rooms that give onto an open courtyard in the style of Syrian domestic architecture. In Iraqi cities, Ottoman architectural styles are entirely absent because Iraq, on the frontier with Persia, was very far away from Istanbul and changed hands frequently. Architecture in Iraq adopted Persian styles. Blue tile work dominated Baghdad and brick decoration characterized mosques built in Mosul both before and during the Ottoman period.

7 Meri, 2002: 99. 12 Chapter One

At the center of urban life in the Ottoman period as before stood the configuration of Friday mosque and central marketplace. Since the chief judge of a province regulated supply, price and quality of goods in the central market, he rather than the Ottoman governor served as the target of urban unrest. In any case, Ottoman rule was not regarded as foreign rule at the time, and by the eighteenth century local elites were increasingly drawn into the Ottoman bureaucracy as tax farmers, judges, and governors. Locally elected heads of guilds and quarters in cities and the customary leadership of villages served the security, tax collecting, and regulating needs of the state. Bedouin had the advantage of being able to move their herds out of range of tax collectors; they collected taxes in the form of produce from villages in their orbit. They also, at times, served Ottoman needs as auxiliary forces and were paid not to raid the hajj caravan. The Pax-Ottomana made trade routes more secure; Ottoman officials built khans to house caravans and wholesalers. Once the spice trade declined in the 1600s, thanks to sea routes around Africa and the plantation economy in the West Indies, three products were especially profitable: silk, pearls and coffee. Silk cocoons and fiber from Iran provided the raw material for spinners and weavers in Syrian cities, and in Mount Lebanon and the mountains behind Lattaqia peasants began to grow their own cocoons. Heavy patterned silk cloth made in Syria was known as damask in Europe. Textile merchants in Aleppo made fortunes selling silk cloth to European traders in exchange for fine English woolens. Types of cloth, methods of weaving and embroidery have been recognized as heritage since the mid-twentieth century. Pearls from the Arabian Gulf region graced the gowns of Queen Elizabeth I of England and the clothing of other European nobility and are today recognized as national symbols in the Gulf. Coffee changed everybody’s life, rich and poor alike. Its use spread northward from Ethiopia and Yemen in the sixteenth century. As coffee consumption spread, coffee merchants in Cairo built multi-storied homes with the fortunes they amassed. Two Damascene entrepreneurs established the first coffeehouse in Istanbul and from there, coffee drinking spread to Europe and beyond. Coffeehouses in the Arab world ranged from tiny holes-in-the-wall to spacious pleasure gardens along riverbanks. Offering and accepting coffee signaled amity and hospitality and became a custom that smoothed social and commercial relations. The probate list of one merchant in Nablus in the eighteenth century lists 80 coffee cups.8 There

8 Doumani, 1995: 86. Arab Heritage and Arab History 13 were two main types of coffee, “Turkish” that leaves sediment in the cup and “Arabic” that is infused with cardamom and leaves no sediment. The former gave rise to the custom of telling fortunes by the pattern of sediment. Coffee houses were male spaces where Qurʾān readers, storytellers, musicians, puppeteers, poets, and games like chess and backgammon provided entertainment. Women drank coffee and told fortunes with their friends in public baths as they looked for brides for their brothers, sons, and nephews. Arguments about coffee’s legality raged amongst the ʿulamāʾ. Coffee’s detractors equated it with wine due to its mind-altering properties; Sufi devotees argued for its acceptance on the basis of its qualities as a stimulant, which allowed them to pray all night. Sultans and governors feared the sociability and talk that coffee-inspired, and they banned it and closed cafes from time to time using religion as a justification. Yet coffee drinking proved impervious to official or religious dictates, and coffee and the rituals of making and serving it could be considered a part of Arab heritage. Sufi practices gained respectability and popularity under Ottoman rule. The Ottomans revered Ibn ʿArabī (1165-1240) since they believed he had foretold their rise. Sultan Selim (r. 1512-1520) built a tomb to mark his grave in Damascus shortly after the conquest. ʿAbd al-Ghanī al-Nābulsī (1641-1731), one of the most famous Sufi thinkers of the seventeenth century, popularized Ibn `Arabi’s ideas. Al-Nābulsī’s intellectual range spanned the elite world of Islamic jurisprudence and the world of popular culture. He wrote a compendium of dreams, which assigned meanings to particular types of dreams and objects that appeared in dreams. Three centuries later Freud attempted to do the same thing. Al-Nabulsi was a controversial thinker amongst the ʿulamāʾ, but when he died at age 90 everyday activity in Damascus came to a halt and huge crowds gathered for his burial close to the mausoleum of Ibn `Arabī. The Arab world is famous for its cities’ age, architecture, and functionality. It is also famous for its deserts and the nomadic tribes that were able to make them productive. Camel herders were the nobility of the desert since camels allowed them the greatest degree of independence from urban-based governments. They regarded urban-based government with contempt: “it is a flabby serpent and has no venom.”9 The contempt was mutual. Nonetheless cities depended on nomads. Epidemics or natural disasters could and did wipe out half and more of an urban population at a time. Baghdad, in particular, was known as a “devourer” of people; in the

9 Batatu, 1978: 14. 14 Chapter One seventeenth century famine, flood, and plague hit at least five times at irregular intervals. Combined catastrophes in 1831 reduced its population from around 80,000 to around 27,000.10 Its population eventually recovered with the help of tribal immigrants. By the mid-nineteenth century, public health measures helped to stabilize its population. Cities were dependent on Bedouins in other ways too. All major Arab cities were located on long-distance trade routes: Aleppo and Damascus at the meeting point of the north-south hajj route and the east-west silk road; Baghdad on the Tigris connected the Arabian Gulf to the silk road and points north; Cairo on the Nile was at the crossroads of African, Red Sea and Mediterranean trade, and Tunis and Tripoli (Lebanon) were major entrepots between the land and sea trade that connected the Middle East, Africa, and Europe. Long distance trade depended on camels and the Bedouin who knew their way across the deserts. As Ibn Khaldūn noted:

When sedentary people mix with them [Bedouins] in the desert or associate with them on a journey, they depend on them. They [sedentary people] cannot do anything for themselves without them…even to the knowledge of the country, the directions, watering places, and crossroads.11

Bedouin bred and trained camels and horses. Arabian horses, known for their speed and elegance of form, were highly prized but needed too much fodder and water to be good pack animals. In cities their use was limited to urban rulers and elite military forces. In the deserts nomads prized them for their speed, needed for raiding, but the development of new forms of transport in the twentieth century reduced both camels and horses to the racing circuit. Bedouin used land differently from farmers, which created friction between them even though they were interdependent. Peasants stayed put to sow and reap; they developed their land by building irrigation systems and replenishing the soil. Nomadic herders needed huge tracts of land, called dīra, through which they could move their herds as the seasons changed. Tribes came together in the dry season at a perennial source of water; in the rainy season they dispersed to graze their herds on grass produced by limited rainfall. When herds passed by fields, crops and all the labor that went into planting and irrigation could be inadvertently destroyed. A British traveller in the Hawran in 1909 described village fields where “The Anezeh had come and gone, leaving not a trace of green

10 Ibid., 15. 11 Ibn Khaldun, 1974: 95. Arab Heritage and Arab History 15 in the fields, for the hungry camels had eaten every blade…down to the ground.”12 Thus different land usage created an in-built struggle between farmers and herders, and competition for agricultural products, especially wheat, pitted all three main sectors of the economy, urban, agricultural, and transhumant against each other despite their interdependence. By the end of the eighteenth century, the effects of the European “discovery” of the Americas mentioned at the beginning of this section could be felt. Spice and coffee plantations and slave labor in the Dutch, English, French, and Spanish overseas empires in Indonesia and the Americas destroyed the monopoly of production enjoyed by Ethiopia and Yemen and brought ruin to spice merchants in Aleppo and coffee merchants in Cairo and Damascus. Given Europe’s Atlantic empires, sailing technology and boat building advanced such that British and French ships controlled the Mediterranean, the Persian Gulf, and the Indian Ocean by the 1800s. In 1798, a French fleet bombarded Alexandria and marched up the Nile to Cairo. Writing in the historical form of a chronicle, al-Jabartī, one of the foremost ʿulamā in Cairo at the time, described the French conquerors. He had much to criticize about them— for example, he was horrified that they wore shoes inside—but he recognized their military discipline as far superior to that of local troops: “They follow the orders of their commander and faithfully obey their leader… They have signs and signals among themselves which they all obey to the letter.”13 Al-Jabartī’s chronicle is one of the greatest of a long line of Arab chronicles, the prevalent form of history writing in the Arab world until the late nineteenth century. The French occupation of Egypt, 1798-1801, was a three-year introduction to a future of European conquest and domination. The Industrial Revolution of the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries, and the political and economic upheaval that facilitated it, gave European powers a major advantage in their dealings throughout the world. While Istanbul and Cairo struggled to reform their armies along European lines, France began its conquest of Algeria in 1830, Britain occupied Aden in 1839, Tunisia became a French Protectorate in 1881, Britain occupied Egypt in 1882, Morocco became a French protectorate and Italy conquered Libya in 1912. On the Arabian Gulf, so-called Trucial States (which would become the present-day UAE) existed by virtue of agreements between local merchant families and Britain that established Britain’s right of access to their shores in return for payment and the promise of British protection

12 Lewis, 2000: 38. 13 al-Jabartī, 2004: 36. 16 Chapter One from rivals. Similar agreements between leading local families and Britain cut Qatar, Bahrain, and Kuwait adrift from the Ottoman Empire. No European power had dominated Oman since the Portuguese in the seventeenth century, although British and Saudi interests shaped its borders in the twentieth century. Saudi Arabia is the only Arab state not to have experienced a period of foreign domination, although there too British interests in Iraq, Jordan, Oman and the Gulf states limited its territories.

The great turn: 1850 to 1950 The Ottoman Empire is often described as being in decline from the seventeenth century on. But in the central portion of the Arab world Ottoman rule grew stronger and more efficient in its last 70 years thanks to new means of communication and transport. The first steamships appeared in Ottoman waters in the 1830s and telegraph lines crisscrossed Ottoman lands from the 1850s on. Ships with sails, newly engineered for speed and capacity, carried bulky cargos that could match steamships for speed, but steamships could maintain a regular schedule since they were much less dependent on weather and season. Railways built by European companies transported cotton in the Nile Valley by the 1840s and crossed the coastal mountains in geographic Syria in the 1890s. The last Ottoman railroad project was the Hijaz Railway from Damascus to Medina; completed in 1908 it was built largely by Ottoman engineers and workmen. It never reached Mecca because the Sharif of Mecca saw it as a threat to his autonomy, which it was. Speedier and more reliable communications allowed Istanbul to establish a greater and more uniform presence as the empire grew smaller owing to European conquests in the Balkans and across North Africa. The exception to this pattern of increased Ottoman centralization was Egypt. There Muḥammad ʿAlī, an Ottoman soldier from Albania, built his own army and established a hereditary governorship such that Cairo was virtually independent of Istanbul. He and his successors built state institutions as a corollary of their creation of an army built on a European model. They introduced conscription, which called for regular censuses, public health measures, education and a system of taxation that was more uniform and less abusive. His descendant, the Khedive Ismā`īl, came to an agreement with France to build the Suez Canal, completed in 1869. Egypt’s virtual independence from Istanbul, and the importance of the Suez Canal to British imperial communications made it an easier and a far more tempting territory for Britain to occupy in 1882. Formally still part