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My Book: Part Two - The Golden Age of Baghdad |
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Sunday, 17 February 2008 |
Following this short paragraph is the second part of the introduction to My Book on Saddam Hussein. Today's piece from the introduction is a short essay on the birth and rise of Islam and the historical rift inside the new religion into two main sects, Shiites and Sunnis which started a conflict which has been raging ever since and whose reverberations are felt even now. But this conflict did not prevent the emergence of a new and another truly fascinating phase in man’s march into civilization which was centered in Baghdad, a phase which lasted almost five centuries of enlightenment and progress which ended very sadly in one of history’s most violent and deplorable events.
Introduction: Iraq in History
Part Two – The Golden Age of Baghdad
THERE are very few events more interesting and more dramatic in the history of Man than the rise and spread of Islam. In AD 622 the Prophet Muhammad was fighting for his life in Mecca with a small band of devoted followers. A century later the Muslims fired with the message he delivered and his own teaching had reached half the then known world. Islam and the teachings of the Prophet has performed a great miracle, they have weld band of peasants and predatory warriors and brigands in Arabia into a compact nation, which swept away ancient kingdoms and brought under one dominion an area nearly as large as that of the roman empire at the peak of its power.
ONE of the most remarkable aspects of the new religion was the simplicity of the message, there is one god, the same deity who had earlier revealed himself to Jesus and the other Jewish Prophets, god is all-powerful, he creates and sustains the world, he is marvelously and supremely good, and benevolent towards those who responded to his presence and power and obeyed his orders, expressed in worship alms giving and self purification. And that message came in Arabic, and the Islamic conquests spread the remarkable, virile, flexible and picturesque language through the new domains, what had been once the tongue of a group of Arabian tribesmen became the language of a powerful empire.
THE theological simplicity and legal specificity of the message carried a high degree of intrinsic persuasiveness and appealed very strongly and sat very easily upon the simple desert dwellers, also the astonishing successes of the early years of Islam convinced them that there was evidently a supernatural power which was guiding and guarding the believers so they came flocking into the new faith and within a very short time Islam has become the religion and was a most effective force in driving the faithful into very impressive successes.
DURING the days of the Prophet Muhammad the society functioned efficiently, fairly and extremely justly, the Prophet was in addition to his duties god’s messenger and through his own highly respected teachings [Hadith] the religious and secular leader of the society and his orders were obediently followed, they were regarded at as emanating from the creator himself. When he died there was a problem with the succession which threatened the very survival of the new faith but was solved very neatly and simply by selecting a “successor”. The successors to the prophet are known in Islam as the Caliphs, and the first four after Muhammad were chosen from amongst his closest companions and earliest converts. At the selection of the fourth caliph Ali who was one of the earliest Muslims, the son in law of the Prophet himself who has lived and learned in his house and who was regarded as a natural choice because of his wisdom, intelligence and strength of character but his choice was not universally accepted, it was challenged by the governor of Syria a man who belonged to one of Mecca’s most powerful and influential families the Muawiya.
ALI’S selection was challenged by Muawiya who was supported by the military garrison in Syria which was mainly Arab, on the basis that Islam is not a monarchy and that the Caliphate is not a hereditary institution, Ali’s military support came from Iraq but the two military garrisons refused to fight each other and the selection was not accepted by everyone as legitimate and the dispute went on without an end until Ali’s supporters became disgruntled and turned against him, he was ultimately assassinated near today’s Al Najaf and was buried there. Muawiya was then the only serious claimant to the caliphate after which he was able to establish the capital of the Muslim empire in Damascus in Syria from which city Caliphs from the Umayyad dynasty ruled until 750 AD. The struggle between Ali and Muawiya opened a very serious rift in Islam, its reverberations are felt even today, Islam was divided into Sunnis who adhered to the Quranic diktats and the Hadiths and those who supported Ali and became known as Shiites. This schism was translated into a very serious political rivalry between Syria and Iraq. The Umayyad rule in Syria was slowly weakening because of very serious internal and external problems and was finally toppled by another very prominent Mecca clan, the Abbasids in 750 AD.
THE victors moved their center of power to Iraq, the initial Abbasids success owed much to the support of Ali’s supporters, the Shi’a. But things were changing; the caliphs were gradually losing their religious roles to a group of pious religious radicals, [the Ulema] who became the expounders of the sacred law and the ones who applied it to particular cases. The caliph was more or less secluded in his palace assuming a role like that of an absolute monarch but they were able to remove a good deal of the discontent which had fomented the discontent which led to the failure of their predecessors. This balance between the religious-political forces which established itself during the first ten decades of the Abbasids rule which allowed the free mixing of people of different origins provoked a flowering of Islamic culture most notably around the caliph’s court in Baghdad. Baghdad was built by the second Caliph of the Abbasids dynasty, Al-Mansur in AD762 but recent Archaeological evidence shows that the site of Baghdad was occupied by various people long before the Arab conquest of Mesopotamia in AD 637. The city the al-Mansur built was called the round city because it was built within circular walls; it was also called Madinat-al-Salam [city of peace].
BAGHDAD became the center of an astonishing new phase in man’s march into civilization, there was a powerful economic upsurge accompanied by a relatively high level of peace and order, merchants and artisans ministered to the tastes of the wealthy at home and developed trade with most of the lands of Eurasia Muslim traders visited India and China. Christendom also entered the circle of Muslim trade mainly through Jewish intermediaries who were able to maintain connections on both sides of the religious frontier. The really glorious achievements were in philosophy science and medicine. In the beginning Arab science and philosophy derived directly from the Greeks with some mixture of Indian ideas, until near the end of the ninth century the main task of Arab scholarship was the appropriation of the Hellenistic heritage, official patronage greatly aided this effort, caliph al-Mamun [the son of the builder of Baghdad] established at Baghdad the famous “House of Wisdom” and organized the large scale of translation of Greek and Sanskrit writings into Arabic. This work continued until most of the extant treatises of the Greeks achievements in philosophy, science and medicine had been rendered into Arabic, the works of the earlier giants like Hippocrates, Aristotle, Galen and many others. By the ninth century savants began to produce work of an originality, which very often surpassed that of the earlier masters. But no were their accomplishments as astonishing as in the medical field. Ibn-Sina, al-Razi, Ibn-al-Haitham and scores of others left indelible influence on succeeding centuries, the works of some of these physicians were still taught in western universities until very recently.
ISLAMIC-Arabic philosophy, science and medicine reflected the light of the Hellenic sun when its day has passed and shone like a moon illuminating the darkest nights of European middle ages, but suddenly it was all over. All this light and glory was extinguished and destroyed in one of history’s most atrocious and cruel episodes at the hands of the Mongols. It was these murderers who under Hulago descended on Baghdad in February 1258 AD and went into a frenzied rampage of killing and destruction which lasted for a week by the end of which almost a million people including its best scholars, doctors, artists and scientists were dead, the literary and scientific treasures the accumulation of centuries were almost completely destroyed. The great library was burned with its hundreds of thousands of priceless books destroyed and thrown in the river turning the color of its water black.
NEVER was so magnificent epoch in human history so mercilessly and senselessly swiftly consumed with fire and quenched in blood
Dr. Najeeb Hanoudi
Saturday Feb. 16, 2008
Berkley, Michigan
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