StudySpace: Worlds Together, Worlds Apart, 2 e.

From a small village, Baghdad grew rapidly into “the navel of the world” when the Muslim caliph al-Mansur established it as the capital of the new Abbasid dynasty. The rise of Islam provides a powerful example of how the religion and the empire entwined to create the foundations of the world’s modern social geography.

Religions, Empires, and Agricultural Revolutions

In contrast to Christianity or Chinese Buddhism, for which empires served as the main vehicle of expansion, it was Islam itself that led to the creation of empires. Sweeping aside their predecessors, Muslim leaders formed their own imperial system to defend and spread the new faith. At the same time, the Islamic world experienced a robust agricultural revolution, for which Islam itself may have been a crucial factor. Only with Muslim conquests in northern India was the west fully opened to the crop revolution in South Asia (which had its origins in Southeast Asia). A revolution in cultigens swept through the Muslim world, and agricultural output increased. Cities grew, and the countryside became more densely populated. China also experienced an agricultural surge which opened new, arable lands in China’s south. These new crops required tropical or semitropical environments, which left Europe outside of this agricultural revolution. The ascent of Islam out of Arabia unified the territories between the two other universalizing faiths—Buddhism and Christianity— and brought the world together in unprecedented ways. And Islam laid the foundations for a new set of divisions that would drive worlds apart as a politicized Islam created internal and external sources of conflict.

The Origins and the Spread of Islam

By the end of the sixth century, the Arabian peninsula was feeling the influence of long-distance trade, religious disputes, and imperial politics.

A VISION, A TEXT

Born in the modest merchant town of Mecca around 570 CE, Muhammad experienced a series of revelations which emphasized the oneness of God. Following Muhammad’s death, these revelations and sayings were compiled into the Quran and accepted as the very word of God by Muhammad’s followers. The Quranprovided one text, one set of lessons, and one god to be conveyed to other cultures. Muhammad believed that he was the last in a line of prophets that linked the Jewish, Christian, and Islamic traditions.

THE MOVE TO MEDINA

Persecuted in Mecca, Muhammad and his followers fled to Yathrib (later renamed Medina), a flight which formed a new type of community: the umma. The community of the faithful, the umma, was to supplant loyalty to family and clan with loyalty to Muhammad and the one true Prophet of God. From Medina Muhammad’s followers broadcast the new faith to Arabia and beyond.

CONQUEST, 632–661

After Muhammad died in 632 CE, his first four successors, known as the “rightly guided caliphs,” sustained the growing movement as they became political rulers over the Islamic people. Galvanizing Islam to imperial political authority gave it an expansive spiritual force. The caliphs sent Arab-Muslim armies into Syria and Iraq, and soon they controlled these regions as well as Egypt. The Sasanian Empire was crushed, and the Byzantine Empire retrenched, abandoning much of its former imperial lands.

AN EMPIRE OF ARABS, 661–750

When the last of the four caliphs was assassinated, a Meccan clan called the Umayyads seized authority and transferred the capital to Damascus. By this time, the “Five Pillars of Islam” had crystallized as the core practices and beliefs of every Muslim. In addition to declaring belief in one God and the role of Muhammad as God’s messenger, the pillars included ritual prayer, fasting, alms-giving, and pilgrimage. The new faith did not call on adherents to abandon all of their former ways of life, but called on them to adhere to the new faith. The simplicity of these core doctrines attracted early converts, but Islam made many demands on its faithful through its legal system, the sharia. As Islam moved out of Arabia, it sacrificed ethnic purity for geographic expansion. While Islam spread, it also became more diverse, although Islamic leadership remained in the hands of Arab-speakers.

THE ABBASID REVOLUTION

As the Islamic movement spread beyond Arabia, disgruntlement grew at discrimination aimed against non-Arab Muslims. The Abbasi family led a movement which overthrew the Umayyads and moved the political center of Islam to Baghdad. Arab influence remained important to the faith, but no longer had exclusive political dominance. The Abbasids moved aggressively to open Islam to Persian peoples and encouraged the Islamic world to embrace Greek and Hellenistic learning, Indian science, and Chinese innovations.

Rallying Points: The Caliphate The Abbasid rulers retained the political institution of the caliphate, although authority over religious doctrine had by now passed to special religious scholars called ulama. Under the Abbasid caliphs, Byzantine and Persian influences affected the political practices and expectations, especially the Persian stress upon the absolute authority of the ruler. Imperial Islam mingled the absolute authority of the rulers with decentralized rule through envoys in the provinces, and as the empire grew, decentralization grew more pronounced. The political result was a multicentered Islamic world with a weakened Abbasid caliphate at its center.

Rallying Points: The Army As the Islamic empire expanded, the Abbasids shifted from Arab troops to recruiting military forces from the peripheries of the empire, Turkishspeaking communities in Central Asia and Berbers and black Africans in the West. By the ninth and tenth centuries, these groups had begun to wield decisive political authority. The Islamic empire became more and more multicultural while integrating diverse peoples into a single community of believers.

Rallying Points: Islamic Law and Theology Islamic Law, known as the sharia, took shape in the Abbasid period. Sharia law covers all aspects of practical as well as spiritual life. Initially, because the Quran did not address legal questions, local judges exercised their own judgment where the Quran was silent. The most influential early legal scholar, al-Shafi’i, insisted that Muhammad’s laws in the Quran with the addition of his sayings in the hadith (sayings of Muhammad written down later) provided all the legal advice that Islamic judges needed. Following al-Shafi’i’s approach, the ulama— Muslim scholars—became the central lawmakers in Islam, for only they could interpret the Quran. A sharp division emerged between the secular realm and the religious sphere in Islam.

Rallying Points: Gender in Early Islam Pre-Islamic Arabia was slow to adopt patriarchy, but the status of women was diminishing as Islam emerged. As Islam spread through Southwest Asia and North Africa, the new faith accommodated itself to the already-established patriarchy. Men could take multiple wives and concubines and divorce freely; women could not. The Quran offered women some protections. Wives had to be treated with respect, and women could inherit property. The legal system reinforced patriarchy but gave magistrates the power to define male honor and proper behavior.

THE BLOSSOMING OF ABBASID CULTURE

The arts flourished during the Abbasid period. Arabic spread as a language of the arts and scholarship, and Arabic scholars preserved and extended Greek and Roman thought. Islamic scholars also circulated the scientific breakthroughs in China and elsewhere throughout the Islamic world and beyond. They also pioneered work in arithmetic, geometry, and algebra and expanded the frontiers of plane and spherical trigonometry.

ISLAM IN A WIDER WORLD

As Islam spread, it gave rise to a series of dazzling dynasties which displayed high levels of artistry and learning, but Islam could no longer hold believers spread over vast distances under a single regime. Spain Under Abd al-Rahman III, the Muslim kingdom in Spain brought peace and stability to Iberia and facilitated amicable relations among Muslims, Christians, and Jews. Abd al-Rahman and his successor, al-Hakim II, built magnificent urban spaces, such as the Great Mosque of Córdoba.

A Central Asian Galaxy of Talent In Central Asia, the Abbasid rulers in Baghdad surrounded themselves with learned men. The Barmaki family from Central Asia who served as high-level administrators under the Abbasids patronized the arts of their native region and encouraged scholars to move to Baghdad. In Baghdad, the House of Knowledge was established as a translation center at which many famous scholars worked, such as al-Khwarizmi, who prepared the first book on algebra. As the Abbasid dynasty declined, scholars tended to find local patrons, such as Ibn Sima, whose work became the standard medical text in Southwest Asia and Europe for centuries.

Islam in Sub-Saharan Africa As the use of camels opened sub-Saharan Africa to trade across the Sahara Desert after the third century CE, Islam followed the trade routes into West Africa. A lively trade developed, and the wealth produced facilitated the creation of centralized kingdoms, most notably Ghana. Seafaring Muslim traders carried Islam into East Africa, and by the tenth century, the East African coast featured a mixed African-Arab culture.

OPPOSITION WITHIN ISLAM, SHIISM, AND THE RISE OF THE FATIMIDS

From the outset, Islam’s dramatic rise generated tensions, especially once Muhammad died and conflict arose over his successor(s). The Kharijite faction argued that only individuals of impeccable religious credentials should succeed the Prophet. While the Kharijite faction died out, a more enduring split emerged. The defenders of the Umayyad and Abbasid authority, called the Sunnis, were challenged by dissidents who believed that Muhammad’s son-in-law Ali, who had married Muhammad’s daughter and was one of the four original caliphs, was the rightful heir as well as his descendants (imams). These dissenters were called Shiites. Shiism appealed to groups the Umayyad and Abbasid dynasties had excluded from power, particularly in parts of Iran, lower Iraq, and the Berber hinterlands of North Africa. The Shiites seized power in Egypt in the tenth century, establishing the Fatimid regime. Refusing to recognize the legitimacy of the Abbasid caliphs, the Fatimids claimed authority to speak for the Islamic world. By 1000 CE, Islam dominated the middle regions of the Afro-Eurasian landmass. Its expansive force had finally subsided, leaving Western Europe and China outside the Islamic domain.

The Tang State

With the rise of Islam, China now had a powerful political and cultural system with whom it shared borders; people, ideas, and commodities moved quickly across those borders. In China, however, religion did not play a role in shaping the empire as it had in the Islamic world. The Tang dynasty promoted a cosmopolitan culture that absorbed many new cultural elements rising from afar and exported ideas further east to Korea and Japan. Yet these lands never became “little Chinas” as they adapted Chinese practices and values to their own political and social conditions.

CHINESE TERRITORIAL EXPANSION UNDER THE SUI AND TANG DYNASTIES

In the late sixth century CE, the Sui dynasty emerged from the growing fatigue that had resulted from some 300 years of constant conflict among small states. The Sui leaders, however, pursued territorial expansions and overextended their resources. When the Yellow River switched course and popular revolts broke out, the Sui general Li Yuan seized the throne for himself and established the Tang dynasty in 618. He expanded the bureaucracy and tightened imperial control over governors.

THE ARMY AND IMPERIAL CAMPAIGNING

The Tang state established a professionally trained military of aristocratic cavalry, who fought in the north against the nomadic peoples, and peasant soldiers, who were garrisoned in the south and also provided labor for public works projects. The Tang also integrated the nomadic Uighur peoples into the military, allowing westward expansion of the empire. As Islam moved into Central Asia, the Tang dynasty was already there. At its peak, the Tang dynasty ruled an empire larger and more populous than the Han dynasty or the whole of the Islamic world. By 750, the map of Eurasia from east to west was connected by bordering empires. After 751, the Tang dynasty began to retreat in the face of challenges from the west and the south, and the empire fell in 907.

ORGANIZING AN EMPIRE

The Tang empire lasted nearly 300 years. While drawing on Han practices, the Tang introduced the imperial examination system and learned to accommodate new religious institutions and agents within the empire. Confucian Administrators Day-to-day control of the Tang Empire depended on an efficient and loyal civil service—one held together in a religiously pluralistic land. The Tang called upon Confucian teaching to create a unifying political culture. Entrance into the ruling elite required knowledge of the Confucian classics and the subsequent commentaries on them as well as the intricacies of classical Chinese. Confucianism provided a set of common characteristics for the elite families, and a written civil service examination system made knowledge of these characteristics the only route to power. Qualifying examinations required knowledge of the classics and highly developed literary skills. Those who passed these exams underwent further trials to evaluate their character. The pool of examination graduates were judged on their deportment, eloquence, skills in calligraphy and mathematics, and legal knowledge. An empire-wide hierarchy of select state schools was developed to prepare young men for the civil service examination.

China’s First Female Emperor Women played influential roles in the Tang court. The Empress Wu gained influence as first a concubine and then wife of Emperor Gaozong. When the emperor died, she became administrator of the court. She ruthlessly preserved her position, having herself named the regent of her youngest son, and soon thereafter seized power in her own right as Empress Wu (r. 684–705). Her rule proved competent and benign, and she elevated Buddhism over Daoism as the favored state religion and sought to elevate the status of women. She eventually gave up the throne in favor of her third son. Despite the efforts of Empress Wu, women remained excluded from careers in the civil service, as were the children of merchants and those too poor to afford a classical education. The rise of common families from the south into the political hierarchy, however, successfully forced the existing aristocratic families to compete for political offices. The system also impressed upon the poor the value of education as an avenue for entering the ruling elite. Although few succeeded in the examinations, literacy spread among the poor. Eunuchs Tang emperors relied on castrated males from the lower classes to guard the royal family, especially the harem. These eunuchs became fully integrated into the empire’s institutions and wielded considerable power. The Chief Eunuch controlled the military, and the eunuch bureaucracy mediated between the emperor and the provincial governors. As their career patterns paralleled the civil service, their literacy rates and classical training improved. By 838, however, the eunuchs had become an unruly political force.

AN ECONOMIC REVOLUTION

The Tang dynasty enjoyed remarkable economic achievements. The Tang continued canal-building projects begun by the Sui, which aided communication and transport to all parts of the empire. The construction of granaries ensured storage for rice until it could be transported from south to north, so the south grew in wealth and population. When the Silk Road was threatened by rebellions in northwest China, a “silk road by sea” blossomed. The capital at Chang’an became the richest and likely largest city in the world with a million or so residents. Chinese industry flourished, especially in the Yangzi delta. Chinese luxuries dominated the domestic and international trading networks.

DEALING WITH WORLD RELIGIONS

Confucian ideology was secular and tolerated broad religious diversity. The Growth of Buddhism Buddhism thrived under Tang rule. Once officially accepted, the Tang endowed Buddhist monasteries and patronized Buddhist art and scholarship. Anti-Buddhist Campaigns As the Tang dynasty began to decline in the mid-eighth century, the tremendous growth that Buddhism had experienced led Confucian and Daoist leaders to attack Buddhism because it was at variance with Chinese traditions and was the foreign doctrine of a barbarian people. Secular rulers became concerned that religious loyalties would undermine political ones, and Confucian scholaradministrators accused Buddhism of conspiring to destroy the state, the family, and the body. In the 840s, open persecution of Buddhism was launched by the state, and the Tang government brought the Buddhist monastic communities under the control of the state. The ideologies of Confucianism and Daoism triumphed over the universalistic ethos of Buddhism.

THE FALL OF THE TANG DYNASTY

In the ninth century, peasant revolts appeared as China’s economic conditions worsened. These revolts eventually undermined the Tang, and China fragmented into as many as ten regional states.

Early Korea and Japan

Chinese culture, colored by Buddhism, reached out to Korea and Japan.

EARLY KOREA

Three kingdoms formed in Korea by the fourth century CE: Koguryo, Paekche, and Silla. In 668 CE, Silla gained control over the entire peninsula, establishing a unified government modeled on the Tang imperial state. In Korea, however, the hereditary aristocracy remained dominant in official posts. When Silla’s power declined, the northern-based Koryo kingdom tenuously reunified the country and constructed a cultural identity through an unprecedented bureaucratic system aimed at replacing the tribal system, including a civil service examination designed to select the most capable officials to govern at court.

EARLY JAPAN

In the middle of the third century CE, a warlike group from northeast Asia known as the “Tomb Culture” imposed their military and social power on southern Japan. They emphasized the power of female shamans, who became de facto rulers by combining their religions and political power. The complex aristocratic culture that developed under the leaders of the Tomb Culture became the basis of the emerging Yamato state.

The Yamato Emperor and the Origins of Japanese Sacred Identity In Japan, the Yamato scribes created a sacred past in which divine and human realms coalesced in the imperial state. The Yamato clan increasingly was worshipped by all Japanese as other ancestral deities were subordinated to the Yamato deities. The imperial line justified its existence by embracing a tradition that sacralized the Japanese state and society using Buddhism and Shinto.

Prince Shotoku and the Taika Political Reforms The Soga kinship group looked to one of the early leaders of the Yamato state, Prince Shotoku, as the source of innovation. Shotoku sought to reform government along Chinese lines and adopted the Chinese toleration of religious pluralism. He promoted the growth of Confucianism and Buddhism. In 645, the Nakatomi kinship groups overthrew the Soga and enacted the Taika Reform edicts, which were based on Confucian principles of government. The ruler now was recognized as an exalted “emperor” who ruled by the Mandate of Heaven. The Chinese civil service exam was still rejected for fear of destabilizing aristocratic power.

Mahayana Buddhism and the Sanctity of the Japanese State Without rejecting imperial support for native Shinto traditions, political rulers in Japan permitted and encouraged religious influences to flow into the island. Native religions, especially Shinto, formalized their credos in response to the spiritual diversity. Japanese rulers continued to receive explicit worship as a divine force in their own right.

The Christian West, 600–1000 CE

While Europe seemed to be a warrior-dominated society from 600 to 1000 CE, innovations were underway that were led by the Roman Catholic Church.

CHARLEMAGNE’S FLEDGLING EMPIRE

Charlemagne ruled an empire of few cities that was economically underdeveloped. Compared to the other empires of the world, his army was small in number and the population of his territory unimpressive. Europe vigorously engaged in trade, primarily trade related to warfare. The Franks sold captives taken in warfare to the peoples inhabiting the Mediterranean region.

A CHRISTIANITY FOR THE NORTH

Charlemagne’s empire was a polity of borderlands based on an expansionist and proselytizing Christianity. Christianity was pulled into a new world profoundly different from the Mediterranean model. Western Christianity bridged hitherto opposed groups into a single “catholic” church. Augustine of Hippo emphasized the idea that the “City of God” was represented by the Catholic Church, which was for all times and peoples. The northern Europeans prepared manuscripts of the Latin scriptures with the use of capitalization and correct punctuation, thus making the scriptures more accessible to people with far less knowledge of Latin. Monasticism in Europe also strengthened western Christianity by offering to warriors the reassurances of holy men and women that they would intercede on behalf of the warriors to ensure their salvation. The monastic life was seen as emphasizing the otherworldliness of the monks and nuns. By the year 800, few regions of northern Europe were without great monasteries. Northern Europeans also looked uniquely to the Bishop of Rome as the leader of the Christian Church. The papacy rose to prominence as western Europeans united to support a single symbolic center of the Christian Church. Charlemagne, recognizing the symbolic power of the papacy, had himself declared emperor of the west by Pope Leo III.

THE AGE OF THE VIKINGS, 800–1000 CE

The Vikings sought to loot the Franks and replace them as the dominant warrior class. The Vikings’ ships had great advantages—they could travel up rivers, be carried overland, or under sail could tackle the open water of the North Atlantic. Vikings plundered monasteries and colonized Iceland, Greenland, and North America. While the Vikings withdrew from their furthest reaches across the Atlantic, they also penetrated into eastern Europe and created avenues of commerce that linked Scandinavia and the Baltic directly to Constantinople and Baghdad.

THE SURVIVAL OF THE CHRISTIAN EMPIRE OF THE EAST

The Eastern Roman Empire in Constantinople faced constant warfare against the Islamic empire of Baghdad. Highly skilled military leadership and innovative technology helped the Eastern Romans fight the Muslims to a draw, despite the far larger resources on which Baghdad could draw. As Charlemagne’s empire collapsed in the tenth century, large areas of eastern Europe adopted the Orthodox Christian tradition of Constantinople. By 1000 CE, two Christianities existed. Western Catholics believed that their church was destined to expand everywhere, while Eastern Romans were less euphoric but more tenacious. Their differences were not yet doctrinal but were differences of heritage and customs.

Conclusion

Between 600 and 1000 CE, Eurasian and North African societies witnessed a radical reordering of their political and cultural maps that encouraged movement across cultural boundaries. Yet at the same time a new set of political and cultural boundaries was emerging, most importantly those involving universal religion. China responded to universal religion by establishing Confucianism as primary within the Chinese political and moral system. States responded to universalizing religion in many different ways, but all the universalizing religions affiliated themselves with empires. If this was an age of expanding universalizing religions and aspects of growing common cultures, especially among the learned who aligned themselves with state power, there was also enormous debate and dissent within each religion over its basic principles. As the first millennium CE drew to a close, religion brought people together in unprecedented ways but was also a means to drive them apart.

 

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