The rule of empires : those who built them, those who endured them, and why they always fall (14 page)

campaign’s divine authorization provided an ideal legitimizing ideology for the blatant self-interest of secular empire building.

Islam therefore came to underpin an imperial order that extracted

labor and tribute from non-Muslims. As in the Roman Empire, the

true wealth of the caliphate lay in these subjects, but the Muslims

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Spain 69

found it harder than the Romans to defi ne subjecthood conclusively.

As “peoples of the book” (
dhimmi
) sharing Islam’s sacred texts and

traditions, Christians and Jews were entitled to comparatively fair

treatment under Muslim rule.
Dhimmi
retained the right to practice

their faith, but they paid a special tax and suffered institutionalized

social and political discrimination. Pagans were not entitled to any

protection and theoretically could be enslaved by Muslim conquerors. Consequently, there were powerful incentives for non-Muslims

to embrace Islam, and in the medieval era the act of conversion was

simple and straightforward. Those wishing to become Muslims simply had to make a profession of faith by declaring, “There is no God

but God and Muhammad is his prophet.”3 Islamic law obligated Muslim rulers to welcome these converts into the community of believers. Conversion therefore blurred the essential line between citizen

and subject that was central to empire.

Divinely sanctioned imperial expansion thus had built-in contradictions. Proselytizing religion provided a moral excuse for empire

building, but it also blunted the extractive power of imperial rule.

More seriously, the subject majority threatened to hijack the imperial enterprise as they became Muslims in ever larger numbers. The

Roman aristocrats who opposed Claudius’s plans to admit romanized

Gauls to the Senate had similar concerns, but in the short term, at

least, there were only a handful of Gallic senators. Early Islam aimed

to encompass the entire world and was too egalitarian to defi ne the

boundaries of subjecthood and legitimize permanent imperial privilege. Later Christian missionaries did a better job of making evangelism compatible with imperial rule by reducing converts to junior

believers, but the early Arab empire builders were not so nuanced.

They therefore struggled to keep mass conversions from overwhelming and absorbing them.

The Arabs’ sudden acquisition of an enormous multiethnic empire

further complicated their conception of themselves as Arabs. The

peoples of the Arabian Peninsula in the caliphate era shared a common language and culture, and they identifi ed themselves as members of distinctive entities, which they called “tribes,” subdivided into

smaller clans. These were akin to the tribes of the Old Testament,

and collectively the Arabs claimed descent from the prophet Abraham through his son Ishmael. The tribes of northern Arabia claimed

70 THE RULE OF EMPIRES

descent directly from Ishmael, while southerners reckoned their lineage through Noah. Arab tribal identities theoretically sprang from a

strongly shared belief in a common paternal ancestor, but in fact they

were almost never fi xed or rigid. As in preconquest Britain, tribes

in pre-Islamic Arabia split and re-formed. Arab commanders further

reordered clans and subclans to create largely artifi cial tribal regiments (
ajnad
) during the expansionist wars of the early Islamic era.4

These tribal identities formed the basis of citizenship under the

caliphate, but they were porous and malleable. Cultural assimilation

and rewritten tribal genealogies allowed the subject peoples of the

caliphate to become Arabs in good standing. Upon conversion most

became junior clients (
mawali
) of Arab tribal patrons, but over time

the new converts aspired to redefi ne what it meant to be an Arab and

a Muslim as they took on the tribal identities of their sponsors. In

doing so they challenged the Arab elite’s claim to preeminence in the

caliphate. Imperial exploitation required rigid social boundaries, and,

contrary to the tenets of Islam, the Arab empire builders hypocritically had to treat the
mawali
as subjects to rule them effectively.5

While the imperialization of the caliphate facilitated extraction, it

threatened Muhammad’s idealized vision of a just and egalitarian society of believers. Just as Pliny regretted the cultural adulteration resulting from Rome’s conquest of Greece, many of the original Muslims

worried that their victories undermined the virtuous and representative character of the original Islamic state. Yet empire was seductive,

and apart from a single caliph, they never seriously considered giving

up territory or recalling the conquering Muslim armies. Enticed by

the prodigious spoils of imperial rule, victorious Arab caliphs and generals turned the caliphate into a grand Islamic empire.

The Umayyad Caliphate sprang from this expansion of Islam as a

faith and as a political institution. Although pastoral nomadic “tribes”

were the center of Arab society and politics in the pre-Islamic era, it

is a mistake to classify Islam as a desert religion. It originated in the

commercial cities of Mecca and Medina, which lay astride long-distance trade routes running through Arabia and the Red Sea. Muhammad ibn Abdullah belonged to a prominent merchant clan that was

part of the ruling Quraysh tribe of Mecca, an entrepôt whose religious shrines made it a destination for pagan pilgrims. Mecca’s status

as a pre-Islamic religious sanctuary encouraged trade, which meant

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that the city’s elites were not receptive to Muhammad’s vision that

the archangel Gabriel had told him he was to serve as God’s messenger in preaching the central message of monotheism.

Receiving this fi rst revelation in a.d. 610, Muhammad became

the last of a line of prophets stretching back to Adam. Islam thereby

continued and expanded the Judeo-Christian traditions of the Bible.

As with the prophets who came before him, Muhammad felt a divine

compulsion to teach that there was only a single God. In attacking

pagan idol worship he provoked the Meccan establishment, who

forced him to fl ee to the neighboring city of Medina with a small band

of converts in 622. Two years later, Muhammad was strong enough to

force the Quraysh and the rest of the Meccan aristocracy to embrace

the new faith. Islam’s Arabian origins gave it a distinctly Arab character, but Muhammad’s deemphasis of tribal identities made it a powerful universalistic force that encouraged non-Arabs to join the Muslim

community of believers (
umma
).

Unlike Jesus Christ, whom Muslims recognize as a prophet,

Muhammad combined religious and political authority. After convincing the Meccans to submit and winning over most pastoral Arabs,

he turned his attention to the settled Middle East. The Byzantine and

Sassanid empires, which were distracted by protracted warfare, internal religious controversy, and natural disasters, were clearly vulnerable. The Muslim leader was in the process of laying the groundwork

for a larger Muslim polity when he died in 632.

Muhammad’s death created a crisis among the
umma
because he

had said very little about long-term political authority and made

no mention of a caliphate, much less an empire. Muslims revered

him as the last of the prophets, and his successors never replicated

his authority or infl uence. Nevertheless, the fi rst four caliphs, who

were among his original followers, had a strong measure of legitimacy. They are known in Islamic history as the
rashidun
, “rightly

guided ones.”

Abu Bakr, Muhammad’s friend and fi rst convert, succeeded him

as the political leader of the
umma
. Ruling for only two years until

his death in 634, he came to power on the acclamation of the Muslim

community. As the fi rst caliph, he stopped rebellious Arab tribes from

putting forth their own prophets after Muhammad’s death. The following three
rashidun
caliphs undertook the conquest of the Middle

72 THE RULE OF EMPIRES

East over the next two decades. Their forces captured Damascus in

635, defeated the Sassanid Empire in 637, and took Egypt from the

Byzantines by 656. Further east, they added Khurasan (a prosperous

region covering contemporary eastern Iran and western Afghanistan)

to the caliphate. The evolving Islamic legal code (the
shari’a
) reserved

one-fi fth of the conquering armies’ plunder of these settled regions

for God and charity, with the commanders dividing the rest among

themselves and their troops.

These successful campaigns kept the Arab soldiers occupied and

provided a lucrative incentive for them to respect caliphal authority. Led by Qurayshi generals who had once opposed Muhammad,

the conquering Arab armies were relatively small tribally organized

forces that often were trailed by families and fl ocks. After their victories they essentially became colonists living apart from their new

subjects. As with their Roman predecessors, the victorious Arabs did

not enjoy a technological military advantage over their enemies.

Instead, mobility and moral certainty allowed them to defeat much

larger but less motivated Byzantine and Sassanid professional armies.

The Muslims gained few converts during the initial conquest, but the

Byzantines’ and Sassanids’ peasant subjects gave them little trouble,

for they had few ties to their former imperial masters.

Truly impressive in its scope, the Umayyad Caliphate eventually

stretched from Spain to China and encompassed more territory than

the Roman or Chinese empires. Yet this vast empire never rivaled

Rome in the imaginations of western empire builders. Where Roman

expansion brought civilization and culture, later European observers

saw Muslim imperialism as intrinsically hostile to the grand GrecoRoman and Christian heritage of the Mediterranean. The British

historian Edward Gibbon credited the Franks with saving western

Christendom by stopping the Muslim advance at Poitiers in a.d. 732.

[An] Arabian fl eet might have sailed without a naval combat into the

mouth of the Thames. Perhaps the interpretation of the Koran would

now be taught in the schools of Oxford, and her pulpits might demonstrate to a circumcised people the sanctity and truth of the revelation of Mahomet.6

These chauvinistic biases regained their potency after the terrorist

attacks of September 2001, and some neoconservatives argued that

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Spain 73

modern Islamicists take the expansionist Umayyad Caliphate as an

inspirational model for an “Islamic imperial dream of world domination.”7 This is anachronistic, for the Umayyads never thought in such

terms. While al-Qaeda and Usama bin Laden have spoken of reclaiming Al-Andalus, they have no more chance of reviving the Umayyad

Caliphate than Mussolini’s Fascist Italy did of re-creating the Roman

Empire.

Moreover, the original Muslims were entirely unprepared for the

complexities of imperial rule. They were fortunate that earlier powers

had already done much of the work of imperial subjugation for them.

Initially, Arab generals simply kept Byzantine and Sassanid systems

of taxation, land tenure, and governance in place. They also went to

great lengths to maintain a sharp boundary between their soldier settlers and their new subjects. Worried that contact with more sophisticated urban populations would be corrupting, the second
rashidun

caliph, Umar, banned Muslim colonists from living in conquered cities. Instead the Arabs established fortifi ed military camps (
misr
) to

keep watch on major urban centers. These colonial settlements eventually grew into major cities such as Basra and Kufa in Iraq, Fustat in

Egypt, and Qayrawan in Tunisia.

While appropriating preexisting imperial systems to administer newly conquered lands was easy enough, the rapid expansion of

the
dar al-Islam
in territory, converts, and wealth strained the early

caliphate. The Quran, which collected the original Muslims’ written

recollections of Muhammad’s revelations, made no specifi c mention

of a caliph. Lacking clear guidance from Islamic law, the early community of believers struggled to adapt their simple and egalitarian

political system to imperial rule. Muslims believed that the
umma

had to remain united, but compromises that brought Abu Bakr and

Umar to power gave way to factional disputes in 656 between Meccan

elites, who were latecomers to Islam, and Muhammad’s original circle

of friends and converts.

The resulting civil war, which led to the deaths of the third and

fourth caliphs, brought Mu’awiya, the provincial governor of Syria

and founder of the Umayyad dynasty, to power in 661. A kinsman

and appointee of the third caliph, Uthman, Mu’awiya was the son

of a Meccan aristocrat who had led the opposition to Muhammad

before becoming a convert. Ending the practice of choosing caliphs

74 THE RULE OF EMPIRES

by acclamation, he turned the caliphate into a hereditary empire.

Although some sources praised him for his self-control and patronage of humble clients, there was a strong anti-Umayyad bias in

Islamic historiography that painted him as a usurper. The followers of the fourth caliph, Ali, who was Muhammad’s kinsman and