Destiny Disrupted: A History of the World Through Islamic Eyes (27 page)

A curious footnote to the Mongol holocaust occurred in 653 AH (1256 CE), when Hulagu was passing through Persia. A Muslim jurist near Alamut complained to the Mongol khan that he had to wear armor under his clothes all the time for fear of the Assassins headquartered nearby. A short time later, two Fedayeen (suicidal Assassin agents) disguised as monks tried to kill Hulagu—and failed. They might as well have tried to pluck out the man’s beard. The cult that could kill
anyone
met the army that could kill
everyone.
Hulagu took time out from his westward drive to storm Alamut.
He then did to the Assassins what the Mongols had done and would do to many others: he destroyed them physically; he destroyed their stronghold; he destroyed their records, libraries, and papers—in that moment, the menace of the Assassins came to an end.
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After Hulagu had annihilated the Assassins, he marched on to Baghdad. There, he posted a threatening letter to the last Abassid khalifa, in which, according to the historian Rashid al-Din Fazlullah, he said, “The past is over. Destroy your ramparts, fill in your moats, turn the kingdom over to your son, and come to us. . . . If you do not heed our advice . . . get ready. When I lead my troops in wrath against Baghdad even if you hide in the sky or in the earth, I shall bring you down. I shall not leave one person alive in your realm, and I shall put your city and country to the to
rch. If you desire to have mercy on your ancient family’s heads, heed my advice.”

The Abbasid khalifate, however, had been showing signs of life recently, and an occasional khalifa had even bid for real power, at the head of actual troops. The khalifa in place at this moment was one of the cocky ones. In his pride, this khalifa wrote back to Hulagu: “Young man, you have just come of age and have expectations of living forever. You . . . think your command is absolute. . . . You come with strategy, troops, and lasso, but how are you going to capture a star? Does the prince not know that from the east to the west, from king to beggar, from old to young, all who
are God-fearing and God worshipping are servants of this court
and soldiers in my army? When I motion for all those who are dispersed to come together, I will deal first with Iran and then turn my attention to Turan, and I will put everything in its proper place.”
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The attack on Baghdad began on February 3, 1258. By February 20, Baghdad was not just conquered. It was pretty much gone. The Mongols had a proscription against shedding royal blood; it ran against their traditions; they just didn’t do that sort of thing. So they wrapped the khalifa and members of his family in carpets and kicked them to death. As for the citizens of Baghdad, Hulagu’s Mongols killed virtually every one of them. The only ambiguity about how many people the Mongols killed at Baghdad has to do with how many there were to kill. Muslim sources put the toll at eigh
t hundred thousand. Hulagu himself was more modest. In a letter to the king of France, he claimed he had killed only two hundred thousand. Whichever the case might be, the city itself was burned down, for Hulagu kept his promises. All the libraries and schools and hospitals, all of the city’s archives and records, all the artifacts of civilization enshrined there, all the testimonials to the great surge of Islamic civilization in its golden age, perished utterly.

Only one power managed to hold the line against the Mongols and that was Egypt. No one else ever dealt the Mongols a straight-up military defeat, not here, not anywhere.

Saladin’s descendants still ruled this region when the Mongol onslaught began, but by 1253 they were exhibiting the typical ailments of aging dynasties: pampered weaklings occupied the throne and predatory rivals circled round it. One day the king died, leaving no obvious heir. His wife Shajar al-Durr briefly took over as sultan, but then the mamluks, that corps of elite slave soldiers, got together and chose one of their own number to marry the sultan, whereupon he became the de facto sultan.

Hulagu was destroying Baghdad right about then. When he finished, he started south, following the well-traveled route of conquerors. But Egypt’s greatest mamluk general, Zahir Baybars, confronted Hulagu at Ayn Jalut, which means “Goliath’s spring.” In biblical times, according to legends, David had defeated Goliath at this spot. Now, in 1260 CE, Baybars was the new David and Hulagu the new Goliath.
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David won again. (Incidentally, the Muslims used a new type of weapon in this battle: the hand cannon, or as we now call it, the gun. This might have been the first battle in which guns were used to any significant effect.)

Back in Cairo, meanwhile, Shajar al-Durr and her husband somehow killed each other in the bath—the sordid details remain murky. Baybars, covered with glory from his victory at Ayn Jalut, came marching into the confusion and took control, founding the so-called Mamluk dynasty.

A mamluk, as I mentioned, was a slave, usually Turkish, brought to the palace as a young boy and trained in all the military arts. Quite often in the history of the middle world, a mamluk had overthrown his master and launched a dynasty of his own. The one that Baybars founded, however, was different.

It wasn’t a true “dynasty” because the principle of succession wasn’t from father to son. Instead, each time a sultan died, his inner circle of most powerful mamluks chose one of their own number to be the new sultan. In the meantime, new mamluks kept rising through the ranks on merit, ascending into the circle of most-powerful mamluks, a position from which any of them might become the
next
sultan. Egypt, therefore, was not ruled by a family, but by a military corporation constantly refreshing its ranks with new mamluks. It was a meritocracy, and the system worked. Under the
mamluks, Egypt became the leading nation in the Arab world, a status it has never really relinquished.

Although the Mongols conquered the Islamic world in a roaring flash, the Muslims ended up reconquering the Mongols, not by taking territories back through war, but by co-opting them through conversion. The first conversion occurred in 1257 CE, a khan named Berke. One of Hulagu’s successors, Tode Mongke, not only converted but declared himself a Sufi. After that the Mongol ruling house of Persia produced more rulers with Muslim names. In 1295, Mahmoud Ghazan inherited the Persian throne. He had been a Buddhist but converted to Shi’ite Islam, and his nobles soon converted as well; his descendan
ts went on to rule Persia as the Muslim Il-Khan dynasty.

After his conversion, Ghazan told his Mongol nobles to let up on the locals. “I am not protecting the Persian peasantry,” he assured them. “If it is expedient, then let me pillage them all—there is no one with
more power to do so than I. Let us rob them together! But—if you commit extortion against the peasants, take their oxen and seed, and cause their crops to be consumed—what will you do in the future? You must think, too, when you beat and torture their wives and children, that just as our wives and children are dear to our hearts, so are theirs to them. They are human beings, just as we are.”
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That doesn’t sound like something Hulagu or Chengez would have said. Ghazan’s words were one small sign that in the wake of the Mongol holocaust, Islam and civilization were going to come back to life after all.

 

 

T
HE MONGOL HOLOCAUST wasn’t like the Dark Ages of Europe. It didn’t set in slowly and lift gradually. It was a terrible but brief explosion, like the Black Death that swept Europe in the fourteenth century, or the World Wars that wracked the globe in the twentieth.

Princeton historian Bernard Lewis, among others, has taken this to mean that the Mongols weren’t really so bad. Yes, they destroyed whole cities, but look on the bright side: they left whole cities intact. Lewis has even said that “by modern standards,” the destruction wrought by the Mongols was “trivial.” His argument rests partly on the fact that within the Muslim world, Islamic civilization rapidly absorbed the Mongols. The ones who ended up in charge of Persia soon evolved into the benign Shi’ite Il-Khan dynasty. In converting to their subjects’ religion, the Mongols even brough
t a fresh breeze, a new spirit, a cluster of new ideas into the Islamic world.

This is all very true, but it’s a bit like saying the World Wars of the twentieth century were, in the final analysis, “trivial” because even though millions were killed, millions weren’t, and even though countries such as Russia, Germany, France, and Great Britain were devastated, they quickly rebuilt and look at them now.

Some admiration has even accrued to Genghis Khan and his immediate successors based on the fact that they conducted mass-murder as a canny battle strategy and not out of sheer cruelty, destroying some cities utterly in order to make other cities give in without a fight. Reading such analyses, one might almost suppose the Mongols did their best to avoid needless bloodshed!

It is true that the most famous Mongol conquerors from Genghis to Hulagu look almost good in comparison to their descendant Timur-i-lang (Tamerlane, to the west) who emerged from Central Asia at the end of the fourteenth century and went on a bloody rampage that claimed countless further lives. Timur represented a last burst of the horror that began with Chengez Khan, rather like one of those movie monsters that twitches its tail after it seems dead and with that one final twitch cuts a sickening swath of new destruction.

For Timur, bloodshed was not just a canny battle strategy. He seemed to relish it for its own sake. It was he (not Chengez) who took pleasure in piling up pyramids of severed heads outside the gates of cities he had plundered. It was he, too, who executed captives by dropping them, still living, into tall, windowless towers until he had filled the towers to the brim. Timur banged and slaughtered his way to Asia Minor and then banged and slaughtered his way back again to India, where he left so many corpses rotting on the roads to Delhi that he made the whole region uninhabitable fo
r months. His rampage was too horrific to go entirely unmentioned in any world history, but it doesn’t deserve long consideration because it was essentially meaningless: he came, he saw, he killed, and then he died and his vast empire crumbled at once and no one remembers much about him anymore except that he was scary.

So yes, as an embodiment of pure savagery, Chengez Khan looks good compared to his descendant Timur (at least Timur claimed Chengez as an ancestor, though the line of descent remains obscure). But the original Mongol conquests had greater impact: they altered the trajectory of history.

First of all, they sparked a crisis for Muslim theology, and some responses to that crisis had ramifications that we are still wrestling with today. The crisis was rooted in the fact that Muslim theologians and scholars, and indeed Muslims in general, had long felt that Islam’s military
success proved its revelations true. Well, if victory meant the revelations were true, what did defeat mean?

Muslims had never before experienced such sweeping defeats, not anywhere in the world, not even in their nightmares. The historian Ibn al-Athir called the Mongol onslaught “a tremendous disaster” the likes of which the world might never experience again “from now until its end.” Another major Muslim historian speculated that the coming of the Mongols portended the end of the world. According to yet another, the Mongol victories showed that God had abandoned Muslims.
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The Crusaders had at least been Christians, but the Mongols? They weren’t even “people of the book.” Their victories posed an agonizing puzzle for theologians and tested the faith of the masses in some pervasive way that many people probably felt but didn’t intellectualize. Especially in post-Crusader Mesopotamia, after the sack of Baghdad, where the Muslim community had suffered its most devastating setback, any thinking person who subscribed to the premise that universalizing the Muslim community was the purpose of history might well have asked, “What went wrong?”

The hardest-hitting response was delivered by the Syrian jurist Ibn Taymiyah. His family originated in Harran, a town near the intersection of present-day Syria, Iraq, and Turkey, right in the path of the Mongol invasion. They fled the wrath of Hulagu with nothing but their books, ending up in Damascus, where Ibn Taymiyah grew up. He studied the standard Islamic disciplines with unusual brilliance and earned, at an early age, the standing to issue
fatwas,
religious rulings.

Intense horrors tend to spawn extreme opinions, and Ibn Taymiyah was rooted in his times. No doubt the anxiety of his uprooted family gave him an emotional stake in puzzling out the meaning of the Mongol catastrophe, or perhaps his personality would have inclined him to the views he propounded no matter when or where he was born—who can tell? But in a Syria so recently crushed by the Mongols and still suffering the residue of the Crusades, Ibn Taymiyah at least found a ready audience for his thoughts. If he had never been born, the audience that embraced him might well have fo
und someone else to express those same ideas.