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The Arab and Mongol Periods (641 – 1500) In the early seventh century, the Arab peoples lived in the desert space between the Sassanian and Byzantine Empires, divided into a large number of independent, quarrelling tribes and kingdoms.

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The more northern groups were more organized, and were Christian. The Ghassanids were allied with the Byzantines, while the Lakhmids were more or less under the control of the Sassanians. Mohammed, born about 570, was a Quraysh, who controlled the pilgrim city of Mecca. He was a trader, and therefore travelled widely, receiving an eclectic education through conversations and storytelling in the caravansaries. About 610 he began to have visions of the angel Gabriel, and in 613 began to preach the beginnings of a religion intended to be a restoration of the original Abrahamic faith of the area. (Mecca’s main pilgrim site was and is the Kabaa, a shrine said to have been built by Abraham on the site of the house of Hagar and Ishmael, which he built for them when they were exiled after the birth of Isaac.) His teaching upset the locals, so in 622 he fled, and was invited to Medina as a conciliator to help resolve some local conflicts. His visions continued and he gathered more followers, until in 630 he returned to Mecca in force, and the inhabitants converted to the new faith, Islam. Islam spread rapidly through the remaining tribes, with most of them converting by Mohammed’s death in 632. Mohammed’s successor (Caliph) was Abu Bakr, who continued the spreading of Islam, including by armed incursions, and succeeded in defeating a Byzantine army at Gaza. Emboldened by this success, his army conquered western Mesopotamia in 633, and rapidly advanced into Syria, reaching Damascus in 634. Abu Bakr died during the siege, which was continued by his successor as Caliph, Umar.

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Umar continued the expansion, taking Damascus, Egypt, Armenia and the Sassanid Empire, which fell in 641. Umar was assassinated in 644. He was succeeded by Uthman, who conquered the eastern and northern residuals of the Sassanian Empire. He, in turn, was assassinated in 656, and was succeeded by Ali, Mohammed’s son-in-law. Ali was assassinated in 661, and was succeeded by his son, Hasan. This succession was disputed, Hasan was assassinated the same year, and the empire passed to the Umayyads.

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Back to Persia Once the conquest of the Sassanian Empire was completed, the Arabs ruled with a fairly light hand. They tended to settle in camps on the edges of cultivation, and did not excessively expropriate the existing landholders. The Sassanian system of administration facilitated this, as the local minor gentry could simply remit their tax collections to different overlords. The Arabs were also tolerant of the existing religions. Mohammed had mandated respect for “People of the Book,” so long as they paid tribute (the jizya) and after a while the Zoroastrians were brought under the same category. No forced conversions. In fact, the Umayyads strongly favoured Arabs over converts from other races, reducing the incentive to convert, and also converts no longer had to pay the jizya, so that conversions reduced revenue. However, people did start to convert, partly for business reasons, and after all Islam was not that much different from Zoroastrianism. But it was several centuries before Islam became nearly universal in the old Persian Empire. The Umayyads also sent embassies to Tang China, via their governors in Khorasan, if not directly.

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The Abbasid Caliphate In the early part of the 8th Century, revolts broke out among some disaffected Arabs, non-Arab, especially Persian, converts, and people upset with what they considered the Umayyads’ questionable moral character and poor administration. The revolt centred on descendants of Mohammed’s uncle Abbas, who were thought to be more legitimate than the Umayyads, who were a different tribe in Mecca, and not directly related to the Prophet. In 750, Abu al-'Abbas as-Saffah defeated the Umayyad army at the battle of the Zab (Zab River in northern Iraq, in the neighbourhood of present-day Mosul), and took over the Caliphate. Immediately after this, he sent his army to meet Tang Chinese expansion in Transoxania, defeating the Chinese army at the Battle of Talas. It is said that captured Chinese artisans later enabled a paper factory in Baghdad.

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The Umayyads survived as rulers of al-Andalus (Spain), which was never under the Abbasid Caliphate. Abu al-Abbas was succeeded by al-Mansour in 754, who moved the capital of the Caliphate from Damascus to a new city, Baghdad, near the old Ctesiphon, and opened the government to non-Arabs. There was soon an extensive Persian-speaking bureaucracy. In 756 al-Mansur sent an army of 4000 men to assist the Tang in the An Shi Rebellion, so the Battle of Talas seems not to have caused permanent damage to relations. One of the consequences of the Rebellion was China’s loss of control over the western regions.

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Harun al-Rashid (786 – 809) began what is called the Islamic golden age by taking up the Sassanian project of gathering the world’s knowledge and translating it into Arabic, in the Library of Wisdom in Baghdad. (Harun al-Rashid is the Caliph featured in the Thousand and one Nights.) The work was continued and expanded under Harun’s son al-Ma’mun (813 – 833). Even though the Abbasid political power eventually declined, the centre of learning at Baghdad continued until the Mongol conquest in 1258. Not only did the scholars preserve much literature from Greek, Roman and Syriac sources, the project being the vehicle by which knowledge of Aristotle and others was passed to Medieval Europe, they developed much original work in mathematics, science, medicine, jurisprudence and theology.

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Avicenna (980 –1037) produced treatises and works that summarized the vast amount of medical knowledge that Abbasid scientists had developed, and was very influential through his encyclopedias, The Canon of Medicine and The Book of Healing. Ibn al-Haytham (c. 965 – c. 1040) developed an early scientific method in his Book of Optics (1021). Al-Khwarizmi (c. 780 – c. 850) is credited with the invention of algebra, and was also responsible for introducing the Arabic numerals and Hindu-Arabic numeral system beyond the Indian subcontinent. There was also a great flowering of poetry in Persian, combining Persian and Arabic styles and themes. One of the most famous poets is Ferdowsi (940-1020 CE) whose epic poem Shahnameh (Book of Kings) is a partly mythical and partly historical account of the Persians from the beginning to the Arab conquest. It is even today considered the Persian national epic in all the Persian-speaking countries. And of course, Omar Khayyam (1048 – 1131), the philosopher, mathematician, astronomer and poet, lived in the Khorashan region and in Isfahan.

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The Abbasids introduced a layer of officials, called viziers, something like the Persian satraps, to govern the empire. These viziers had considerable autonomy, and as the office evolved into a hereditary one, they began to break away. This became a problem by the end of the reign of Harun al-Rashid, and during the 9th Century, the Empire broke up, although most of the regions recognized the nominal overlordship of the Abbasid Caliphs as supreme in religious matters. A further complication was the increasing use of Turkic slaves from Central Asia in the armies of the Abbasids and the regional kingdoms. These Turks, thoroughly Persianised, took over the eastern part of the empire as the Ghaznavid dynasty in the late 10th Century. Then there were the Turks themselves. In 1040, the Seljuk clan broke away from the bulk of the Turkish people living between the Aral and Caspian seas, conquered Khorashan and then the heart of the Abbasid realm, as far as Baghdad. The Seljuks had converted to Islam, and respected the Abbasid Caliph. By the end of the Century, they had conquered all the Asiatic parts of the Abbasid Empire, as well as Byzantine Anatolia. The Seljuk Empire had included Palestine, but shortly before the First Crusade, the Arabic Fatamids of Egypt had recaptured it, hence the Crusade in the late 11th Century was against the Saracen rather than the Seljuks.

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Sufism Sufism is a mystical religious practice of mainstream Islam which was prominent in the Abbasid Caliphate, and continues to be prominent in many Muslim territories. Its origins are not clearly recorded, but it is supposed to go back to the Prophet and his son-in-law, the Caliph Ali. Its tradition was oral until its doctrines were formalized under the Abbasids. One of the leading scholars of this formalisation movement was the Persian al Ghazali (1058 – 1111), who argued argued that Sufism originated from the Qur'an and thus was compatible with mainstream Islamic thought, and did not in any way contradict Islamic Law—being instead necessary to its complete fulfillment. Sufism has been a significant factor in the spread of Islam in Africa, Anatolia, Central Asia, South Asia, and Persia. (Sufism is the dominant worship practice in Sudan, for example.) Sufi influences were prominent in Persian poetry and scholarship of the period presently under consideration. The following dynasty was hostile to Sufism, and the present-day Ayatollahs of Iran have repressed Sufi practices, even though about 5% of the population is Sufi. The Sunni Salafists and Wahabis also reject Sufism, considering it heretical. Sufi worship augments the standard Muslim prayers with a form of meditation involving repetition of a prayer and a stylised movement. Each of the several schools of Sufism has its own prescribed meditation. One of the most famous is the Mevlevi Order of the Ottoman Empire, founded by the Persian poet Rumi.

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Jean Baptiste Vanmour Early 18th Century

Whirling Dervishes The Sufi are peaceful, but not pacifists. The Mahdi in Sudan was Sufi. The Mevlevi fielded a battalion of 800 dervishes in 1914, who fought at the end of the Palestine campaign. And, as we will see, the Safavids of the 16th Century were pretty warlike.

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The Yazidi The Abbasid period in Persia was a time of religious ferment. One of the religions formed during this period was the Yazidi, presently a mostly Kurdish-speaking people rooted in northern Iraq. They were formerly widespread in the Ottoman Empire. The origin of Yazidism is now usually seen by scholars as a complex process of syncretism, whereby the belief system and practices of a local faith had a profound influence on the religiosity of adherents of the 'Adawiyya Sufi order living in the Yezidi mountains, and caused it to deviate from Islamic norms relatively soon after the death of its founder, Shaykh 'Adī ibn Musafir, who is said to be of Umayyad descent. He settled in the valley of Laliş (some 50 kilometres north-east of Mosul) in the early 12th century. Yazidism is not an offshoot of another religion, but shows influence from the many religions of the Middle East. Core Yazidi cosmology has a pre-Zoroastrian Iranian origin, but Yazidism also includes elements of ancient nature-worship, as well as influences from Christianity, Gnosticism, Zoroastrianism, Islam and Judaism.

Wikipedia

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Khorashan

Khorashan, the region including northeastern Iran, most of Afghanistan, and parts of Turkmenistan, Uzbekistan and Tajikistan, was the centre of the rebellion that brought the Abbasids to power, and was also the first region to break away from the Abbisid Caliphate, from about 821. It was a major cultural centre, as well as being a major participant in the Silk Road trade. It also had extensive irrigated agriculture. Its largest city, Merv, was second only to Baghdad in the Empire. At the time of the Mongol invasions, the area was part of the Persianised Turkish Khwarazmian Empire, which had begun in 1077.

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Mongol Invasion The 13th and 14th Centuries were disastrous for the Persians, and many of the other peoples of Asia. In the early 13th Century, Genghis Khan unified the “People of the Felt Tents,” the nomadic tribes of Central Asia north of China and Khorashan. The story is that in about 1218, he sent an embassy to the Sultan of the Khwarazmian Empire to open diplomatic and trade relations. The embassy was refused a meeting by the Governor of the border town of Otrar, in present-day Kazakhstan. Instead, he, with the approval of the Sultan, executed the 450 members of the embassy and seized their goods. Naturally, this insult upset Genghis Khan, so he sent an army of around 200,000 men to the Khwarazmian Empire to demand an apology. The apology being refused, the army proceeded to utterly destroy the Empire, massacring the entire population of cities which did not immediately surrender, including about a million people in Merv.

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After a hiatus involving the death of Genghis Khan in 1225, further Mongol conquests in Persia and China, and the accession of Genghis Khan’s grandson Mongke, Baghdad was taken in 1258, the city destroyed along with most of the Library of Wisdom, and much of the population massacred.

A 14th-century Persian depiction of the February 1258

sack of Baghdad. Part of the damage done was the destruction of the irrigation works that had sustained agriculture in the area for millennia. The region was too depopulated to repair the infrastructure, and there was never the will or organization to properly rebuild.

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Persian painting (14th century) of Hülegü's army besieging

a city. Note use of the siege engine

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But the Mongols had to administer their empire, and, as had the Arabs before them, after about 1300 recruited Persian bureaucrats and artisans. In many areas (excluding Khorashan) Persian intellectual life, including poetry, continued much as before. Indeed, the most famous Persian poets lived at or after this time: (Rumi 1207-1275, Iraqi 1213 – 1289, Saadi 1210 – 1292, and Hafez 1325-1390). The Mongol capital was at Tabriz, in Azerbaijan. Mongol control of almost the entire Silk Road greatly facilitated trade. Marco Polo travelled the Road during this period.

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Timur (Tamerlane) Just as Persia was beginning to recover from the Mongols, a new invader appeared. Timur was a Muslim Turk married to an heiress of the Mongol Khanate, who followed in Genghis Khan’s footsteps. From his base in Samarkand, his armies conquered most of Central and Western Asia, spreading death and destruction in much the same way as had the Mongols, from about 1380 to 1405. Some estimates have him killing 17 million people, about 5% of the world’s population (comparable to the Spanish Flu epidemic after World War I). In his massacres he spared artisans, who were deported to Samarkand to embellish his capital. His successors lost control of Persia in 1467, to the White Sheep Turks, based in Anatolia. Their empire fell in 1501 to the Safavids, the subject of the next Chapter. Both the Timurids and the White Sheep Turks relied almost exclusively on Persian administrators, and Persian was the language of all literate and urban people. So the Persian culture survived the two centuries of devastation and upheaval.

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Architecture

Minaret of the Mosque of Abu Dulaf in Samarra

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Al-Ukhaidir Fortress Iraq

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The Samanid mausoleum at Bukhara is one of the oldest.

Its dome-on-cube form had a long afterlife in Islamic funerary architecture.

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Samarkand. Sher Dor Medressa

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Art

Iraq, Abbasid dynasty, 9th c. Bowl. earthenware, painted

in-glaze. 5.7 x 20.8 x 20.8 cm. (Freer Gallery)

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Stucco Decoration Samarra

Fragments of an Abbasid Qurʼān, probably written in the

ninth century C.E.