Fields of Blood (36 page)

The trauma of this civil war marked Islamic life forever. Henceforth rival parties would draw upon these tragic events as they struggled to make sense of their Islamic vocation. From time to time, Muslims who objected to the behavior of the reigning ruler would retreat from the ummah, as the
Kharajites had done, and summon all “true Muslims” to join them in a struggle (
jihad
) for higher Islamic standards.
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The fate of Ali became for some a symbol of the structural injustice of mainstream political life, and these Muslims, who called themselves the
shiah-i Ali
(“Ali’s partisans”), developed a piety of principled protest, revering Ali’s male descendants as the true leaders of the ummah. But appalled by the murderous divisions that had torn the ummah apart, most Muslims decided that unity must be the first priority, even if that meant accommodating a degree of oppression and injustice. Instead of revering Ali’s descendants, they would follow the
sunnah
(“customary practice”) of the Prophet. As in
Christianity and
Judaism, radically different interpretations of the original revelation would make it impossible to speak of a pure, essentialist “Islam.”

The
Quran had given Muslims an historical mission: to create a just community in which all members, even the weakest and most vulnerable, would be treated with absolute respect. This would demand a constant struggle (
jihad
) with the egotism and self-interest that holds us back from the divine. Politics was therefore not a distraction from spirituality but what Christians would call a sacrament, the arena in which Muslims experienced God and that enabled the divine to function effectively in our world. Hence if state institutions did not measure up to the Quranic ideal, if their political leaders were cruel or exploitative and their community humiliated by foreign enemies, a Muslim could feel that his or her faith in life’s ultimate purpose was imperiled. For Muslims, the suffering, oppression, and exploitation that arose from the systemic violence of the state were moral issues of sacred import and could not be relegated to the profane realm.

After Ali’s death, Muawiyyah moved his capital from
Medina to Damascus and founded a hereditary dynasty. The
Umayyads would create a regular agrarian empire, with a privileged
aristocracy and an unequal distribution of wealth. Herein lay the Muslim dilemma. There was now general agreement that an
absolute monarchy was far more satisfactory than a military oligarchy, where commanders inevitably competed aggressively for power—as Ali and Muawiyyah had done. The Umayyads’ Jewi
sh, Christian, and
Zoroastrian subjects agreed. They were weary of the chaos inflicted by the Roman-Persian wars and longed for the peace that only an autocratic empire seemed able to provide. Umayyads permitted some of the old
Arab informality, but they understood the importance of the monarch’s state of exception. They modeled their court ceremonial on Persian practice, shrouded the caliph from public view in the mosque, and achieved a monopoly of state violence by ruling that only the caliph could summon Muslims to war.
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But this adoption of the systemic violence condemned by the
Quran was very disturbing to the more devout Muslims, and nearly all the institutions now regarded as critical to
Islam emerged from anguished discussions that took place after the civil war. One was the
Sunni/Shiah divide. Another was the discipline of jurisprudence (
fiqh
): jurists wanted to establish precise legal norms that would make the Quranic command to build a just society a real possibility rather than a pious dream. These debates also produced Islamic historiography: in order to find solutions in the present, Muslims looked back to the time of the Prophet and the first four caliphs (
rashidun
). Moreover, Muslim
asceticism developed as a reaction against the growing luxury and worldliness of the aristocracy. Ascetics often wore the coarse woollen garments (
tasawwuf
) standard among the poor, as the Prophet had done, so would become known as
Sufis. While the caliph and his administration struggled with the problems that beset any agrarian empire and tried to develop a powerful monarchy, these pious Muslims were adamantly opposed to any compromise with its structural inequity and oppression.

One event above all others symbolized the tragic conflict between the inherent violence of the state and Muslim ideals. After Ali’s death, the Shii had pinned their hopes on Ali’s descendants. Hasan, Ali’s elder son, came to an agreement with Muawiyyah and retired from political life. But in 680, when Muawiyyah died, he passed the caliphate to his son
Yazid. For the first time, a Muslim ruler had not been elected by his
peers, and there were
Shii demonstrations in
Kufa in favor of
Husain, Ali’s younger son. This uprising was ruthlessly quashed, but Husain had already set out from
Medina to Kufa, accompanied by a small band of his followers and their wives and children, convinced that the spectacle of the Prophet’s family marching to end imperial injustice would remind the ummah of its
Islamic priorities. But Yazid sent out the army, and they were massacred on the plain of
Karbala, outside Kufa; Husain was the last to die, holding his infant son in his arms. All Muslims lament the murder of the Prophet’s grandson, but for the Shiah, Karbala epitomized the Muslim dilemma. How could Islamic justice be realistically implemented in a belligerent imperial state?

Under the Umayyad caliph
Abd al-Malik (r. 685–705), the wars of expansion gained new momentum, and the
Middle East began to assume an Islamic face. The Dome of the Rock, built by Abd al-Malik in
Jerusalem in 691, was as magnificent as any of
Justinian’s buildings. Yet the Umayyad economy was in trouble: it was too reliant on plunder, and its investment in public buildings was not sustainable.
Umar II (r. 717–20) tried to rectify this by cutting down on state expenditure, demobilizing surplus military units, and reducing the commanders’ allowances. He knew that the dhimmis resented the jizya tax, which they alone had to pay, and that many Muslims believed this arrangement violated
Quranic
egalitarianism. So even though it meant a drastic loss of income, Umar II became the first caliph to encourage the conversion of the dhimmis to Islam. He did not live long enough to see his reform through, however.
Hisham I (724–43), his successor, launched new military offensives in Central Asia and
North Africa, but when he tried to revive the economy by reimposing the jizya, there was a massive revolt of
Berber converts in North Africa.

Backed by disaffected
Persian converts, a new dynasty, claiming descent from Muhammad’s uncle Abbas, challenged Umayyad rule, drawing heavily on Shii rhetoric. In August 749 they occupied Kufa and defeated the Umayyad caliph the following year. But as soon as they were in power, the
Abbasids cast aside their Shii piety and set up an
absolute monarchy on the Persian model, which was welcomed by the subject peoples but strayed wholly from Islamic principles by embracing imperial structural violence. Their first act was to massacre all the Umayyads, and a few years later Caliph Abu Jafar al-Mansur (754–75) murdered Shii leaders and moved his capital to the new city of
Baghdad, just thirty-five
miles south of Ctesiphon. The Abbasids were wholly oriented toward the East.
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In the West, the victory of the
Frankish king
Charles Martel over a
Muslim raiding party at
Poitiers in 732 is often seen as the decisive event that saved Europe from Islamic domination; in fact, Christendom was saved by the Abbasids’ total indifference to the West. Realizing that the empire could expand no further, they conducted foreign affairs with elaborate Persian diplomacy, and the soldier soon became an anomaly at court.

By the reign of Harun
al-Rashid (786–809), the transformation of the Islamic Empire from an
Arab to a Persian monarchy was complete. The caliph was hailed as the “Shadow of God” on earth, and his Muslim subjects—who had once bowed only to God—prostrated themselves before him. The executioner stood constantly beside the ruler to show that he had the power of life and death. He left the routine tasks of government to his vizier; the caliph’s role was to be a judge of ultimate appeal, beyond the reach of factions and politicking. He had two significant tasks: to lead the Friday prayers and to lead the army into battle. The latter was a new departure because the Umayyads had never personally taken the field with the army, so Harun was the first autocratic ghazi-caliph.
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The Abbasids had given up trying to conquer
Constantinople, but every year Harun conducted a raid into Byzantine territory to demonstrate his commitment to the defense of Islam: the Byzantine emperor reciprocated with a token invasion of Islamdom. Court poets praised Harun for his zeal in “exerting himself beyond the exertion [
jihad
] of one who fears God.” They pointed out that Harun was a volunteer who put himself at risk in a task not required of him: “You could, if you liked, resort to some pleasant place, while others endured hardship instead of you.”
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Harun was deliberately evoking the golden age when every able-bodied man had been expected to ride into battle beside the Prophet. Despite its glorious facade, however, the empire was already in trouble, economically and militarily.
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The Abbasids’ professional army was expensive, and manpower always a problem. Yet it was imperative to defend the border against the Byzantines, so Harun reached out to committed civilians who, like himself, were ready to volunteer their services.

Increasingly, Muslims who lived near the empire’s frontiers began to see “the border” as a symbol of Islamic integrity that had to be defended against a hostile world. Some of the
ulema
(“learned scholars”) had
objected to the Umayyads’ monopoly of the jihad because it clashed with
Quranic verses and hadith traditions that made jihad a duty for everybody.
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Hence, when the Umayyads had besieged Constantinople (717–18), ulema, hadith-collectors, ascetics, and Quran-reciters had assembled on the frontier to support the army with their prayers. Their motivation was pious, but perhaps they were also attracted by the intensity and excitement of the battlefield. Now following Harun’s lead, they gathered again in even greater numbers, not only on the
Syrian-Byzantine border but also on the frontiers of Central Asia,
North Africa, and
Spain. Some of these scholars and ascetics took part in the fighting and in garrison duties, but most supplied spiritual support in the form of prayer, fasting, and study. “Volunteering” (
tatawwa
) would put down deep roots in Islam and resurface powerfully in our own day.

During the eighth century, some of these “fighting scholars” started to develop a distinctively jihadi spirituality.
Abu Ishaq al-Fazari (d. c. 802) believed he was
imitating the Prophet in his life of study and warfare; Ibraham
ibn Adham (d. 778), who engaged in extreme fasts and heroic night vigils on the frontier, maintained that there could be no more perfect form of Islam; and Abdullah ibn Mubarak (d. 797) agreed, arguing that the dedication of the early Muslim warriors had been the glue that bonded the early ummah. Jihadis did not need the state’s permission but could volunteer whether the authorities and professional soldiers liked it or not. However, these pious volunteers could not solve the
empire’s manpower problem, so eventually Caliph
al-Mutasim (r. 833–42) would create a personal army of Turkish slaves from the steppes, who placed the formidable fighting skills of the
herdsmen at the service of Islam. Each
mamluk
(“slave”) was converted to Islam, but because the Quran forbade the enslaving of Muslims, their sons were born free. This policy was fraught with contradictions, but the
Mamluks became a privileged caste, and in the not-too-distant future, these
Turks would rule the empire.

The volunteers had created another variant of Islam and could claim that their way of life came closest to that of the Prophet who had spent years defending the ummah against its enemies. Yet their militant jihad never appealed to the wider ummah. In
Mecca and
Medina, where the frontier was a distant reality, almsgiving and solicitude for the poor were still seen as the most important form of jihad. Some ulema vigorously opposed the beliefs of the “fighting scholars,” arguing that a man who devoted his life to scholarship and prayed every day in the mosque was
just as good a Muslim as a warrior.
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A new hadith reported that on his way home from the
Battle of Badr, Muhammad had said to his companions: “We are returning from the Lesser Jihad [the battle] and returning to the
Greater Jihad”—the more exacting and important effort to fight the baser passions and reform one’s own society.
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