A History of the Islamic World, 600-1800

Empire, Dynastic Formations, and Heterogeneities in Pre-Modern Islamic West-Asia

Jo Van Steenbergen

• Publisher: Routledge
• Year: 2020
• ISBN:
  9781000093070
• Edition: 1
• Topic: History
• Subtopic: World History
• Index: History

A History of the Islamic World, 600 – 1800 supplies a fresh and unique survey of the formation of the Islamic world and the key developments that characterize this broad region's history from late antiquity up to the beginning of the modern era.

Containing two chronological parts and fourteen chapters, this impressive overview explains how different tides in Islamic history washed ashore diverse sets of leadership groups, multiple practices of power and authority, and dynamic imperial and dynastic discourses in a theocratic age. A text that transcends many of today's popular stereotypes of the premodern Islamic past, the volume takes a holistically and theoretically informed approach for understanding, interpreting, and teaching premodern history of Islamic West-Asia. Jo Van Steenbergen identifies the Asian connectedness of the sociocultural landscapes between the Nile in the southwest to the Bosporus in the northwest, and the Oxus (Amu Darya) and Jaxartes (Syr Darya) in the northeast to the Indus in the southeast. This abundantly illustrated book also offers maps and dynastic tables, enabling students to gain an informed understanding of this broad region of the world.

This book is an essential text for undergraduate classes on Islamic History, Medieval and Early Modern History, Middle East Studies, and Religious History.

Wave 1
7th–10th centuries

Late Antiquity and Arabo-Islamic imperial formation

Since a number of decades, historical research on the period from the 7th to the 10th centuries has increasingly accepted the fact that it is particularly enriching and meaningful to view the history of the Islamic world, and thus also of Islamic West-Asia, as a full-fledged partner, rather than an outsider or stranger, in the longstanding regional and trans-regional history of this period. This has to do with the fact that there is a growing understanding that this is not only the period of the European Early Middle Ages, but perhaps even more the era of Afro-Eurasian Late Antiquity.

Indeed, the emergence of Islam coincided with an era that experienced a gradual transition from a historical period dominated, in the global West, by the hegemony of the Roman Empire (Classical Antiquity) to a period commonly known as the Middle Ages in Europe and a large part of the Mediterranean. This period, which runs from the beginning of the 4th to about—in this book at least¹—the 10th century, is first of all characterized by a gradual accommodation of that classical or antique legacy to changing historical circumstances in Europe, the Mediterranean, and West-Asia, without completely letting go of that legacy. Therefore, this period has been coined in historical scholarship since especially the 1970s as Late Antiquity. More than of any other historical period, it can be said that in Late Antiquity a set of political, cultural, and social modes of organization developed that have been playing a lasting role throughout world history, both for the direct heirs of the antique empires, as well as for the new players on the scene of history. The dominant and defining form in which the three monotheistic religions—Judaism, Christianity, and Islam—then slowly started to appear, is on a global scale without doubt one of the most striking legacies of this period.

As in Antiquity, in Late Antiquity we are still dealing with an important hegemony of trans-regional empires over Europe, the Mediterranean, and West-Asia. All of these empires—whether they were Roman, Persian, or Arabo-Islamic—had a number of characteristics in common that are distinctive to Late Antiquity: they were all somehow connected to Classical Antiquity; they claimed a theocratic and monotheistic destiny of universalism—a foreordained future of exclusive world domination—as well as highly individualized charismatic origins and achievements—from the deeds of Ardashir and Constantine to those of Muhammad and Charlemagne; they could pride themselves on a relatively efficient patrimonial-bureaucratic state apparatus that paired these ideological claims with effective military and fiscal action; and as a consequence of these claims and actions, they were destined to clash with one another at regular intervals.

As the centuries progressed, such claims, actions, and conflicts proved to be self-destructive or at least increasingly difficult to manage and control. From the 9th century onwards at latest, it became progressively clear that the last of these expansive organizations was losing much of its integrative and centripetal capacities, and the Late Antique period of the great monotheist empires would eventually come to an end. After emerging from the Arabian tribal expansions across Afro-Eurasia in the 7th century and transforming into the enormously vast and powerful empires of the Umayyads and the Abbasids, the late antique Islamic empire was forced to make ever more room for a multitude of new historical realities in the course of the 9th and 10th centuries. The complex Late Antique history of this process of the emergence, formation, and transformation of a particular Islamic empire and of the construction, in interaction with that process, of novel imperial and Islamic discourses of power and belonging—or identities—is central to the next seven chapters.

The first four chapters reconstruct the formative period (7th–8th centuries), first from a chronological perspective of different and changing late antique leaderships, and subsequently laying out the changing conditions of leadership in terms of their territorial and organizational transformations. Chapter 1 summarizes both the historical evolution of the two empires that initially dominated Late Antique West-Asia and the contemporaneous organization of leaderships on the Arabian Peninsula. Chapter 2 continues this by looking at how Arabic-Islamic history picked up this Late Antique thread. It moves chronologically from the two phases that are traditionally associated with Muhammad’s life as a prophetic leader in Arabia to a general reconstruction of the defining issues that are generally believed to have determined leadership over his community of followers and supporters after his death. Chapter 3 delves deeper into the history and claims to power and authority of Arabian patriarchal leadership in Syria between the mid-7th and mid-8th centuries. The wider picture of the enormous expansion of the reach of Arabian leadership networks in the Late Antique east and west and of its patrimonial transformation into an Islamic Late Antique imperial formation is discussed in Chapter 4.

Chapters 5 to 7 follow up from these transformations by reconstructing the highly complex processes of integration and disintegration that different elites, claims, and infrastructures of Islamic Late Antique imperial power went through in the so-called ‘classical’ period of the 8th to 10th centuries. Chapter 5 surveys the three central and fundamentally different episodes in the leadership configuration of the Abbasid caliphal dynasty: in the middle and late 8th century, the first decades of the 9th century, and in the middle and late 9th century. The wider contexts of the formation and transformation of the Abbasid caliphate’s patrimonial-bureaucratic apparatus between the 8th and 10th centuries are considered in detail in Chapter 6, looking in particular at the enormous impacts of the diverse chains of Abbasid authority and agency that emanated from the Abbasid center in Iraq and that interacted in mutually formative ways with different urban elites and imperial agents alike. Chapter 7 finally complements chapters 5 and 6 by exchanging their centering focus on imperial leaderships and elites in Abbasid Iraq for a much wider consideration of the enormous complexity of the Abbasid as well as the post-Abbasid trans-regional imperial order in the 9th- to mid-11th-centuries.

Note

1 For this chronology of Late Antiquity, this book follows especially Fowden, Before and After Muḥammad.

1
West-Asia in Late Antiquity

Roman, Persian, and Arabian leaderships (6th–7th centuries)

Introduction: between jahiliyya and Late Antiquity

This chapter lays out the general outlines of the West-Asian world in which in the early 7th century an Islamic history started to make something of an appearance. In particular, it discusses various defining components of that world which are a prerequisite for any understanding of the movement that crystallized around the Arabian figure Muhammad. These include both the historical evolution of the two empires that dominated Late Antique West-Asia initially and a sketch of the contemporaneous situation on the Arabian Peninsula. The next chapter will then discuss the way in which Arabic-Islamic history picked up this Late Antique thread.

Traditionally, Islamic history has been rather simply regarded as an outsider in a human history that tends to be equated with a particular trajectory that leads to, and explains, Christian Europe. The Arabian and Islamic turn of the 7th and subsequent centuries required then an explanation as something completely new and different from what one was used to, as a deviation even from a historical destiny that—with due assistance of Arabic-Islamic channels of transmission—would have only fully resumed its historical role from the late Middle Ages and Early Modern times onwards. Not just within this pervasive tradition of Eurocentric historical narratives, but also within the Islamic historiographic tradition itself, a lot of value has always been attached to the awarding of an entirely distinctive character to the history of Islamic origins. For the latter tradition, the aim was of course not to present this history as an exception, but rather to interpret it as the fulfilment of the miracle of God’s special intervention in an otherwise doomed Late Antique or Early Medieval wasteland, which was identified in this spirit as the jahiliyya, the time of ignorance. In more popular histories of early Islamic history, many traces of both teleological perspectives tend to remain present, in conscious and unconscious ways. In the historical research of the last decades, however, an entirely different approach takes precedence, in which early Islamic history is regarded as a full and defining component of Late Antiquity. In this chapter and the next ones, it will be made clear why this has proven to be an especially enriching and significant re-examination in contemporary understandings of early Islamic history.

1 The Roman Empire on the eve of the Arabian expansion

In the early 4th century, Constantine the Great (r. 272–337), who managed to reunite the divided Roman Empire by concerted military action, was the first Roman emperor to recognize Christianity—until then heavily persecuted—and award it a publicly accepted status in his empire. Constantine is also remembered for accomplishing all this from a new capital

Map 1 West-Asia in Late Antiquity

that was strategically situated on the Bosporus, a clear indication for the shifting of the geographical center of gravity of the Empire to the east. This city, until then known as Byzantium, was aptly renamed Constantinople (‘the City of Constantine’). It is in particular from the historical processes that originated here, and that culminated in the late 4th century in the proclamation of Christianity as the religion of the empire and in the final division of the imperial territories in a western and eastern part, that the so-called Byzantine Empire developed. This empire, with Constantinople as its capital, continued to exist in varying formats until the 15th century. Even though distinctly Christian, Greek, and organized around Constantinople, and despite the fact that in today’s scholarship and common parlance it is almost always identified as the Byzantine Empire, its subjects (and most others, including their Arabian and Islamic contemporaries) continued to refer to the empire as the direct heir of Rome and they continued to call themselves, therefore, ‘Romans’ and their empire the Roman Empire. Under the leadership of a long and varied list of emperors, this Greek-Roman Christian Empire had a very eventful history. One important period in that long history—running from an absolute peak of imperial power and prosperity in the first half of the 6th century to an extreme low in the first decades of the 7th century—deserves more attention here.

Figure 1.1 Istanbul/Constantinople: the former Roman basilica Hagia Sophia and the Ottoman mosque Ayasofya

Source: By Walter Mittelholzer—This image is from the collection of the ETH-Bibliothek and has been published on Wikimedia Commons as part of a cooperation with Wikimedia CH. Public Domain, https://commons.wikimedia.org/w/index.php?curid=50861064

More than any other emperor, Justinian I (r. 527–565) was a crucial figure in the geographical, political, military, and cultural organization of what modern historiography would dub the early Byzantine Empire. For the last time in history, he succeeded in turning the Mediterranean into an inner sea of the empire, with territorial expansions in South Europe and North Africa and on the Iberian Peninsula. At the same time, he provided for an efficiently centralized patrimonial-bureaucratic organization of this vast empire, including through a codification of Roman law and the installation of imperial governors where cities and regions had previously enjoyed a high degree of autonomy. Eventually, such a policy of centralization and integration around the legitimate authority of the emperor expressed itself in the organization of religion as well, when all non-Christian religions were barred from the empire, and when deviations from the Christian doctrine as coded under the auspices of the emperor—the orthodoxy—were resolutely and definitively rejected.

The latter would prove to be of great importance to the history of West-Asia. While the urban centers of Syria and Egypt, such as Antioch or Alexandria, traditionally were fully embedded into the cultural landscape of the empire—through the continued dominance of Greek and of antique traditions among those cities’ elites—the local population of the smaller towns, villages, and rural areas had always continued to identify themselves above all with their own languages and cultural backgrounds. This relative cultural dichotomy between urban and rural environments, between the consciously ‘Roman’ elites and various other social elites and groups in Egypt and Syria, expressed itself particularly, and increasingly, in religious terms. As early as during the course of the 5th century, a theological dispute had grown between the eastern churches of Egypt and Syria (and Iraq) on the one hand and the central religious authorities under the so-called Caesaropapist leadership of the emperor on the other hand. This dispute, that would cause a permanent split between the two, had everything to do with an opposite view on the nature of Christ, which has been traced back to the dichotomy between a more humanistic and an absolutistic image of God. The eastern churches mainly subscribed to this last view, according to which Christ has only one, divine nature. The emperor and clergy, on the other hand, established in the Council of Chalcedon of 451 that the opposite position, which states that Christ has both a divine an...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Half Title
• Title Page
• Copyright Page
• Contents
• List of maps
• List of dynastic tables
• List of illustrations
• Acknowledgements
• Introduction: Islamic West-Asia, Late Antique imperial and ‘medieval’-early modern dynastic formations, and a new history of the Islamic world
• Wave 1 7th–10th centuries: Late Antiquity and Arabo-Islamic imperial formation
• Wave 2 11th–18th centuries: middle period, early modernity, and Turkish, Mongol, Turko-Mongol, and Turkmen dynastic formations
• Selected readings (general)
• Glossary
• Index