Studies on the Civilization o£ Islam Studies on the Civilization of Islam By Hamilton A. R. Gibb Edited by Stanford J. Shaw and William R. Polk Princeton University Press Princeton, New Jersey Published by Princeton University Press, 41 William Street, Princeton, New Jersey 08540 In the United Kingdom: Princeton University Press, Guildford, Surrey Copyright © 1962 by Hamilton A. R. Gibb All rights reserved First Princeton Paperback printing, 1982 LCC 81-47987 ISBN 0-691-05354-5 ISBN 0-691-00786-1 pbk. Published by arrangement with Beacon Press Printed in the United States of America by Princeton University Press, Princeton, NewJersey Editors' Note The following articles have been drawn from a wide variety of publications over a span of nearly four decades. As a result, the reader will note differences of style, treatment and utilization of sources. In an endeavor to achieve consistency, the editors have unified systems of transliteration somewhat; to achieve readabili­ ty for the non-Arabist, they have simplified the transliteration; to retain the special character of the volume, they have left all the notes contemporaneous with the articles to which they refer. The transliteration system involved here does not indicate some differences between Arabic letters, as for example between the hard and soft d. Those wishing to check the Arabic original are referred to the following original journal article sources: 1. "An Interpretation of Islamic History." Journal of World History, 1, no. 1 (Paris, 1953), 39-62. 2. "The Evolution of Government in Early Islam." Studia Is- Iamicaj IV (Paris, 1955), 1-17. 3. "Arab-Byzantine Relations under the Umayyad Caliphate." Dumbarton Oaks Papers, no. 12 (Cambridge, Mass., 1958), 219-233. 4. "The Social Significance of the Shuubiya." Studia Orientalia Ioanni Pedersen dicata (Copenhagen, 1953), 105-114. 5. "The Armies of Saladin." Cahiers d'Histoire egypteenne, serie 3, fasc. 4 (Cairo, 1951), 304-320. 6. "The Achievement of Saladin." Bulletin of the John Rylands Library, 35, no. 1 (Manchester, 1952), 44-60. "Tarikh." (Arabic and Persian Historiography.) Encyclo­ paedia of Islam, Supplement (Leiden, 1938), 233-245. vi Editors' Note 8. "Some Considerations on the Sunni Theory of the Cali­ phate." Archives d'Histoire du Droit oriental, tome III (Wetteren-Paris, 1939), 401-410. 9. "Al-Mawardi's Theory of the Khilafah." Islamic Culture, XI, no. 3 (Hyderabad, 1937), 291-302. 10. "The Islamic Background of Ibn Khaldun's Political Theo­ ry." Bulletin of the School of Oriental Studies, VII, pt. 1 (London, 1933), 23-31. 11. "The Structure of Religious Thought in Islam." The Mus­ lim World, 38 (Hartford, Conn., 1948), 17-28, 113-123, 185- 197, 280-291. 12. "Khawatir fil-Adab al-Arabi" (Reflections on Arabic Litera­ ture). I. The Beginnings of Prose Composition. Al-Adab wal-Fann, 1, no. 2 (London, 1943), 2-18. II. The Develop­ ment of Literary Style. Ibid., 3, no. 1 (London, 1945), 2-12. 13. "Studies in Contemporary Arabic Literature." I. The Nine­ teenth Century. Bulletin of the School of Oriental Studies, IV, pt. 4 (London, 1928), 745-760. II. Manfaluti and the "New Style." Ibid., V, pt. 2 (London, 1929), 311-322. III. Egyptian Modernists. Ibid., V, pt. 3 (London, 1929), 445-466. IV. The Egyptian Novel. Ibid., VII, pt. 1 (London, 1933), 1-22. 14. "The Reaction in the Middle East against Western Culture." Translated from "La Reaction contre la Culture occidentale dans la Proche Orient" Cahiers de I'Orient contemporain, year 8, fasc. 23 (Paris, 1951), 1-10. 15. Problems of Modern Middle Eastern History. Report on Current Research, Spring 1956, Middle East Institute (Washington, D.C., 1956), pp. 1-7. We should like to express our grateful thanks to the editors and publishers of these journals and books for their kind permis­ sion to reprint these articles. We also wish to thank Dr. Shaikh Inayatullah, Professor Editors' Note vii Emeritus at the University of the Panjab, Lahore, Pakistan, for his contribution to the bibliography of Professor Gibb's publica­ tions, and Miss Brenda Sens for her assistance with the index. S. J. S. Cambridge, Massachusetts W. R. P. November 1961 ABBREVIATIONS used in footnotes and bibliographies BEO Bulletin d'etudes orientates BGA Bibl. Geographorum Arabicorum BSOS Bulletin of the School of Oriental Studies BSOAS Bulletin of the School of Oriental and African Studies GJ Geographical Journal IA International Affairs IC Islamic Culture JAOS Journal of the American Oriental Society JCAS Journal of the Central Asian Society JNES Journal of Near Eastern Studies JRAS Journal of the Royal Asiatic Society JRCAS Journal of the Royal Central Asian Society JTS Journal of Theological Studies MEJ Middle East Journal MSOS Mitteilungen des Seminars fur orientalische Sprachen MW Muslim World RAAD Revue de I'Academie Arabe de Damas REI Revue des etudes islamiques RMM Revue du monde musulman RSO Rivista degli studi orientali SI Studia Islamica Wl Welt des Islams WZKM Wiener Zeitschrift fiir die Kunde des Morgenlandes ZDMG Zeitschrift der Deutschen morgenlandischen Gesellsehaft Preface One of my prized possessions is a copy of a reissued volume of essays by Dr. Taha Husain, inscribed by the author "To H. A. R. Gibb, who restored life to this book." This collection of articles should similarly be inscribed "To William R. Polk and Stanford J. Shaw." Its contents are largely their selection; it is they who persuaded me into a kind of honorary patronage of the reprint and who have undertaken all the material tasks involved in its preparation. Apart from some assistance in minor details, my responsibility scarcely goes beyond the writing of this Preface. Even this, it may be said, was imposed not by the editors but by the publishers, who felt that the American public (by which, I suspect, is meant the hypothetical American reviewer) would want to know in what way the diverse articles could be so related as to form a coherent body of writing. The answer is not difficult. In so far as they possess any unity at all, it has been imposed on them by a slowly maturing conviction that literature and history, both being expressions of a living society, cannot be studied in isolation from one another without distortion of the underlying reality. The majority of the articles selected for reprinting in this volume are surveys on broader or narrower lines. They are open, consequently, to the criticism that generalizations on such a scale may distort or even falsify to some extent the complexity of the actual data. There has been a tendency (entirely justified in it­ self) in pursuing sociological analysis into the medieval Islamic world to stress the degree of variety concealed beneath the out­ ward uniformities. It is true that a civilization spread in medieval conditions of communication over so vast an area necessarily in­ cluded many "little societies" with their own traditions, social customs and intellectual attitudes. Yet the most convinced de­ fenders of the "little societies" must admit, however reluctantly, that the steady pressure of the ideas, practices and values of the X Preface "Great Society" gradually ate into them so that they survived, if at all, only as communities with locally recognized "usages" within the multicolored and tolerant complex of Islamic society. On any general view there is no alternative to taking the development and advance of Islam in its community aspect as the warp of Middle Eastern history and literature. Perhaps it may be necessary to assure the reader that behind each generalization there lies a considerable body of detailed study of the original sources, of which the article on "The Armies of Saladin" in this volume may serve as a specimen. The four essays grouped under the title of "The Structure of Religious Thought in Islam" therefore, as a broad sociological analysis of Islam, may serve in some measure as a basis for the other essays on history and literature. The history of the political institutions of the Middle East, however, is characterized by an increasingly wide divergence from Islamic norms and an increas­ ing difficulty of accommodation between them. The stages in this development are studied in a series of essays, beginning with "The Evolution of Government in Early Islam," continuing with "The Social Significance of the Shuubiya," and the essays on al-Mawardi and "Constitutional Organization." Nevertheless, if the political institutions trace a discordant pattern upon the warp of Islamic society, emphasizing the failure of the Islamic civilization to achieve the unity and coherence that it sought as its ideal, the continuing vitality of that ideal is illustrated in the essays on Saladin and "Some Considerations on the Sunni Theory of the Caliphate." In contrast to the articles on medieval history and literature, the four studies in contemporary Arabic literature illustrate one strand in the complex bundle of new ideas and forms introduced into the Arab world at the turn of the nineteenth and twentieth centuries. Written around 1930, they reflect something of the optimism and assurance of that period. The broader survey con­ tained in "The Reaction against Western Culture in the Near East," written some twenty years later, may serve in some measure as an index of the rapidity of changing moods and phases in modern Arab society. All the essays have been reprinted as they originally ap- Preface xi peared, except for the correction of printing errors. A careful reader may detect contradictions or inconsistencies here and there; it would indeed be strange if in an output spread over more than thirty years no shift had occurred in points of view or bases of judgment. But even where the author would express himself some­ what differently if he were writing today, it has seemed super­ fluous to burden the text with meticulous footnotes advertising the fact.