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Week6 Writing Assignments

Provide comprehensive responses to each assignment below. Please number your assignments accordingly. Make sure to adhere to minimum counts, and use your own words–do not quote verbatim from the textbook or any other source.

Please copy and paste into the text box or use a single attachment for both assignments (10 points each):

1. From Chapter Ten, use a minimum of 200 words to address the following:

· Discuss some of the economic, social, legal protections, and cultural changes that Islam brought into women’s lives.

· How did this relate to the position of women before the spread of Islam?

· What remains controversial, for some, about women’s position in Islam?

· What was Muhammad’s opinion about women?

· What controversies about veiling arose in Islam?

2. From Chapter Eleven, use a minimum of 200 words to address the following:

· Discuss the ways the Mongol empires encouraged cultural diffusion across Eurasia.

· What were the positive and negative consequences of this cultural diffusion?

Writing Assignments Rubric

Criteria

Ratings

Pts

This criterion is linked to a Learning Outcome
Completeness

16.0 to >14.0 pts

Proficient
Question(s) completely answered; adequate detail provided to support assertions; factually correct.

14.0 to >12.0 pts

Competent
Question(s) partially addressed; and/or inadequate detail provided to support assertions; and/or not fully correct.

12.0 to >0 pts

Novice
Answer provides insufficient responses and detail; or unrelated issues discussed and/or multiple factual errors.

16.0 pts

This criterion is linked to a Learning Outcome
Word Count Requirement

4.0 to >2.0 pts

Proficient
Answer greater than 200 words in length (not including the questions, citations, and salutations).

2.0 to >1.0 pts

Competent
Answer less than 200 words in length (not including the questions, citations, and salutations).

1.0 to >0 pts

Novice
Answer minimal and/or at less than 100 words in length (not including the questions, citations, and salutations).

4.0 pts

Total Points: 20.0

10-2 early Islamic States and empires

What were the major achievements of the Islamic states and empires?

Islamic expansion allowed powerful states to rule millions of Muslims and non-Muslims, aided by unique concepts of government and law. For over half a millennium Arabic-speaking Muslims governed a large segment of the Eastern Hemisphere. Great states and empires dominated the Middle East, and Islamic states on the fringe of Christian Europe passed on knowledge. Peoples and ideas spread widely, fostering a dynamic mix of Arab, Persian, Indian, and Greek cultures. But Islam also divided into rival sects, cre-ating enduring tensions that influenced Middle Eastern politics for many centuries.

10-2a Islamic Government and LawSince Muslims viewed government and religion as the same, Islamic states tended to punish Muslims who violated religious prohibitions. Combining political and religious power produced a theocracy headed by a caliph governing several societies or more commonly a sultan, a Muslim ruler of only one country or state. Such far-reaching power was easily misused, but respected reli-gious scholars’ moral authority could sometimes check political abuses. The Islamic legal code, or shari’a(shah-REE-ah)(“the way to the watering hole”), regulated social and economic as well as religious life. For devout Muslims, Shari’a is the ideal realization of divine justice, a higher law that reflects God’s will. Shari’a is thus more than a legal code; it is viewed as a blueprint for life, provid-ing a comprehensive guide to issues such as divorce, inheritance, debts, and morality. But there have been a wide range of views about what Shari’a required in practice. It also evolved over time. Based chiefly on the Quran and the Hadith, augmented by Islamic legal scholarship, the Shari’a was also rooted in Arab, Persian, and Byzantine cultural traditions and customs. But conflicts over Quranic interpretation and application fostered several competing interpretative traditions that differed slightly in emphasis on such tools as reasoning and scriptural authority. Some Islamic jurists have interpreted the Shari’a as moderate, tolerant, forgiving, and rationalist; others as austere, rigid, and harsh, to be interpreted literally with strict punishments for violation of moral codes.Religious scholars such as judges, preachers, and prayer lead-ers elaborated the Shari’a and sustained Islamic culture, provid-ing a cohesion and stability that was independent of the rise and fall of rulers. Muslims valued education based on studying with renowned religious and legal scholars, and by the tenth century they had created religious boarding schools, known as madrasas(muh-DRAH-suhz), that were headed by religious scholars. Today thousands of these schools flour-ish all over the Muslim world.

10-2b Early Imperial Caliphates: Unity and StrifeBeginning with the Rashidun, imperial caliphates attempted to maintain unity but also faced challenges. After 661 Islamic political power shifted outside of Arabia with two successive imperial dynasties, the Umayyad (oo-MY-ad) and the Abbasid (ah-BASS-id), both installed by members of Muhammad’s Quraysh tribe as power shifted away from Arabia. While Mecca and Medina remained spiri-tual hubs, reinforced by annual pilgrimages, new cities emerged as major political and economic centers.Political conflict increased with growth. The early conquests enriched Medina and Mecca merchant clans, but criticism of the new materialism eventually prompted a full revolt against the Rashidun leadership. Dissidents murdered the unpopular third caliph, Uthman (ooth-MAHN), installing Ali (ah-LEE)(ca. 600–661), Muhammad’s son-in-law, as the fourth caliph. Although well qualified, pious, and generous, Ali proved weak, and moving the capital from Medina to Kufah (KOO-fa) in Iraq provoked challenges to his leadership. The opposition to Ali, rallied by Muhammad’s widow, A’isha, resulted in civil war and Ali’s murder. Ali’s death ended the Rashidun era, but the divisions generated a permanent split in the Islamic world. Centuries later, many Muslims viewed the Rashidun period as a golden age of simple government and righteous cause, with some calling for a new caliphate to rule the Muslim world.The Umayyad dynasty (661–750) seized power and moved the caliphate to Damascus (duh-MAS-kuhs) in Syria. Men with no direct connection to, or descent from, the Prophet now led the Islamic empire, and large bureaucratic states with remote leaders who passed on their rule to their sons defined Arab politics. Umayyad caliphs extended the Islamic empire deep into Byzantine territory. However, rulers soon faced unrest because, although encouraging Islamic institutions and customs while calling themselves deputies of God, they ignored Islamic morality. The Umayyad leaders’ legendary drinking, womaniz-ing, and lax religious devotion generated civil war and division, which eventually led to their downfall. Umayyad opponents emphasized Muhammad’s role as God’s prophet, clearly set-ting Islam apart from rival monotheistic religions. Among the challengers, the Prophet’s only remaining male heir, his grand-son Husayn (hoo-SANE), attracted support from those who believed the caliph must be Muhammad’s direct descendant. However, Husayn’s rebellion in 680 failed, and he was killed in the Battle of Karbala (KAHR-buh-LAH), a city in Iraq, becoming, along with his murdered father Ali, a martyr against the Umayyads.

10-2cThe Sunni–Shi’a SplitAfter Ali’s death, Islam began to split into two main branches due to disagreements over the umma’s nature and the full meaning of Muhammad’s reve-lations. The main branch, sunni(SOO-nee)(“The Trodden Path”), accepted the Prophet’s practices and the historical suc-cession of caliphs. In their view, governments must guarantee political independence and religious integrity. Today about 85 percent of all Muslims, including most in North Africa, Turkey, the Balkans, South and Southeast Asia, and China, as well as the majority of Arabs, are Sunni. Sunni embraces diverse opinions and practices, adhering to one of four main schools of Islamic law and a broad view of who qualifies for political power.The other main branch began in a dispute over leadership. The shi’a(SHEE-uh)(“Partisans” of Ali) revered Muhammad’s family and recognized only leaders descended from Muhammad through his son-in-law, Ali, to them the Prophet’s rightful suc-cessor. Karbala and nearby Najaf (NAH-jaf ), where respectively Husayn and Ali are buried, became holy Shi’ite pilgrimage cen-ters. Shi’ites provided an alternative to Sunni Islam but divided into three rival schools based on which leader after Ali should be followed. The main Shi’ite populations live today in Iran, Iraq, Lebanon, and the Persian Gulf states. Smaller minorities are scattered across Central Asia, western India, and Pakistan.The two branches of Islam share many commonalities but, as with often-feuding Roman Catholic, Protestant, and Orthodox churches in Europe, Sunni–Shi’a differences run deep. Like Catholics, ultra-Orthodox Jews, and Hindu sects but unlike Sunnis, many Shi’ites followed strong religious leaders they con-sidered divinely inspired. Like Catholics and Protestants in some Western countries, Sunnis and Shi’ites sometimes fought each other. Sunni majorities sometimes persecuted Shi’ite minori-ties, producing a Shi’ite martyrdom complex and dissent against Sunni rulers. Over the centuries Shi’ite-governed states also often ruled uneasily over Sunni majorities.10-2d arabian nights: The abbasid CaliphateThe Ummayads were replaced by the Abbasid Caliphate (750–1258), which enjoyed great power and fostered a dynamic society, surviving for half a millennium, embodying the unity of the Islamic umma, and establishing a pattern for later Muslim rulers. The Abbasids, who were Sunni Quraysh descended from Muhammad’s uncle, Abbas, attracted support from both Sunnis and Shi’ites to defeat the Umayyad army. The lone Umayyad survivor fled to Spain and there established a state that flourished for three centuries. Abbasid forces expanded the empire eastward and maintained pressure against Byzantium in the west. By 800 the Abbasid Empire ruled some thirty million people and was one of the most successful states in the world (see Map 10.2).Moving the capital to Baghdad, where the Tigris and Euphrates Rivers come closest together in Iraq, placed the Abbasid government alongside major trade routes and fer-tile irrigated fields. Residents called their city “the navel of the nations,” the center of the world. Boasting joint-stock companies and banks, Baghdad became one of the world’s greatest hubs, its bazaars filled with goods from as far away as China, Scandinavia, and East Africa. Living in a city famed for its diverse food cultures, the wealthy had access to delicacies such as spices from across Asia, sugar from India, and citrus from China. Gourmets even competed in elite cook-offs, an “Iron Chef ” of the ninth century. To publicly demonstrate their piety and generosity, the Abbasids employed thousands to build palaces, schools, hospitals, and mosques. Some Baghdad citizens, however, openly flouted Islamic prohibitions against hedonistic behavior, and Baghdad generally reflected Islamic society’s cosmopolitan flavor. In the 1160s a visit-ing rabbi from Muslim-ruled Spain, Benjamin of Tudela, wrote of the ethnically diverse city and its large Jewish community:This great Abbasid [caliph] is extremely friendly towards the Jews, many of his off icers being of that nation. Baghdad contains about one thousand Jews, who enjoy peace, comfort, and much honor. Many of the Jews are good scholars and very rich. The city contains 28 Jewish synagogues.9Islam flourished by receiving and absorbing culture from all over the Eastern Hemisphere. For example, Persian influ-ence on the Abbasid system was strong, and many Persians occupied high government positions. The Abbasids acquired knowledge from faraway lands, such as papermaking technol-ogy from Chinese captured in the Battle of Talas of 751; by 800 Baghdad had its first paper mill. Papermaking allowed for wider distribution of the Quran, helping to spread Islam.The height of Abbasid Baghdad conjures up the images of affluence and romance reported in The Arabian Nights, stories that later influenced European writers, artists, and composers and are still popular in the world today. For example, the nineteenth-century Russian composer Nikolai Rimsky-Korsakov’s (RIM-skee KAWR-suh-kawf ) famous Scheherazade Symphony evokes Abbasid Baghdad’s atmosphere. The original Arabian Nights stories, augmented over several centuries, incorpo-rated Persian, Egyptian, Indian, and other traditions and encom-passed many subjects and moods, among them fantasy, comedy, piety, sex, tragedy, brutality, sentimentality, and obscenity. Some scholars perceive feminist values reflected in the proactive female characters. Some misleading images of old Baghdad, based loosely on the great literary work, come from fanciful children’s books and films such as “Ali Baba and the Seven Thieves” and “Aladdin and the Magic Lamp” featuring flying carpets and genies in magic lamps, which in the original stories appeared mostly in dreams. Life under the most famous Abbasid caliph, Harun al-Rashid (hah-ROON al-rah-SHEED) (786–809), lacked flying carpets and magic lanterns, but it did include a large harem of wives, con-cubines, and slave girls numbering perhaps two thousand. These royal harems suggested a secluded world of luxury, idleness, and endless plotting for royal favor. Like some other Abbasid rulers, Harun reputedly drank heavily and pursued the temptations of the flesh.Adopting some customs from the conquered gradually transformed Arabs from desert herders and traders into imperial rulers. The Abbasids often ruled through traditional leaders, such as Egypt’s Coptic Church patriarchs. In Iraq they resolved disputes among Nestorian Christians just as the Sassanian gov-ernors had done. Like the Sassanians, the caliphs patronized a state religion, now shifted from Zoroastrianism to Islam, and lavishly supported arts and crafts. They also appointed Muslim judges and built mosques.Urban growth followed conquests. The caliphates’ admin-istrative centers drew in surrounding people seeking work. Hence, Baghdad rapidly swelled to perhaps a million people by 900, becoming the world’s largest city at the time. Like the Sassanians, the caliphs divided cities into wards marked by eth-nic and occupational groups, governing them through their own leaders.

10-2e abbasid Decline and the End of the arab EmpireLike all empires, the Abbasids eventually faced mounting prob-lems, gradually losing their grip on power by the tenth century. As Turkish soldiers guarding the caliphs became more powerful and disaffected Shi’ites fomented bloody revolts, the caliphate became a mere figurehead and parts of the empire broke away. Anti-Abbasid Shi’ites claiming descent from Fatima, Muhammad’s daughter, established the Cairo-based Fatimid (FAT-uh-mid)Caliphate in Egypt and North Africa, after which Cairo became Baghdad’s rival as an intellectual and economic center. The university founded in Cairo by the Fatimids in 970, Al-Azhar, became the most influential in the Islamic world and remains the unrivaled center of Islamic higher learning. European visitors to Fatimid Cairo were astonished by a city with a substantial middle class, general tolerance towards Christians and Jews, and luxurious clothes, magnificent silks, and elegant textiles manufactured in local workshops for export to Europe, where they became immensely popular with the upper classes. Shi’ites also ruled various smaller states in which most of the pop-ulation remained Sunni or non-Muslim yet generally enjoyed religious freedom. Finally, the wealth of the Abbasid realm attracted the Mongols, Central Asian nomads who in the thirteenth century built a great regional empire stretching from East Asia to eastern Europe (see Chapter 11). In 1258 Mongol armies sacked and destroyed Baghdad and exe-cuted the last Abbasid caliph, shattering the symbolic unity of the Muslim world. Now Persians, Berbers, Kurds, Turks, and Mongols challenged Arab dominance.Despite these setbacks, politi-cal weakness and declining cultural dynamism only become evident in the Islamic world in the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries. Yet, although few later Muslim rulers could match the power of the early Abbasids, Islam accelerated its diffusion to new peoples, and between 1258 and 1550 the terri-torial size of the Islamic world doubled. Scholars, saints, and mystics assumed leadership throughout this world, 10-2e abbasid Decline and the End of the arab EmpireLike all empires, the Abbasids eventually faced mounting prob-lems, gradually losing their grip on power by the tenth century. As Turkish soldiers guarding the caliphs became more powerful and disaffected Shi’ites fomented bloody revolts, the caliphate became a mere figurehead and parts of the empire broke away. Anti-Abbasid Shi’ites claiming descent from Fatima, Muhammad’s daughter, established the Cairo-based Fatimid (FAT-uh-mid)Caliphate in Egypt and North Africa, after which Cairo became Baghdad’s rival as an intellectual and economic center. The university founded in Cairo by the Fatimids in 970, Al-Azhar, became the most influential in the Islamic world and remains the unrivaled center of Islamic higher learning. European visitors to Fatimid Cairo were astonished by a city with a substantial middle class, general tolerance towards Christians and Jews, and luxurious clothes, magnificent silks, and elegant textiles manufactured in local workshops for export to Europe, where they became immensely popular with the upper classes. Shi’ites also ruled various smaller states in which most of the pop-ulation remained Sunni or non-Muslim yet generally enjoyed religious freedom. Finally, the wealth of the Abbasid realm attracted the Mongols, Central Asian nomads who in the thirteenth century built a great regional empire stretching from East Asia to eastern Europe (see Chapter 11). In 1258 Mongol armies sacked and destroyed Baghdad and exe-cuted the last Abbasid caliph, shattering the symbolic unity of the Muslim world. Now Persians, Berbers, Kurds, Turks, and Mongols challenged Arab dominance.Despite these setbacks, politi-cal weakness and declining cultural dynamism only become evident in the Islamic world in the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries. Yet, although few later Muslim rulers could match the power of the early Abbasids, Islam accelerated its diffusion to new peoples, and between 1258 and 1550 the terri-torial size of the Islamic world doubled. Scholars, saints, and mystics assumed leadership throughout this world, establishing legal structures, dogmas, social forms, standards of piety, aesthetic sensibilities, styles of scholarship, and schools of philosophy that helped define the vital core of Islamic culture.

10-2fCultural Mixing in Muslim Sicily and SpainIslamic culture also flourished in Sicily and Spain, where it fos-tered a cosmopolitan mixed society characterized by prosperity and shared scientific knowledge. Between 825 and 900 Muslim forces conquered Sicily, the largest Mediterranean island, thus tying it closer to the Arab-dominated maritime trade system. Muslim rulers repaired long-decayed Roman irrigation works, vastly increasing agricultural production. Many Arabs, Berbers, Africans, Greeks, Jews, Persians, and Slavs gravitated to the island, mixing with local peoples. The Muslim capital, Palermo, was larger than any other European city except Constantinople. But Muslim political divisions left the island open to grad-ual Christian reconquest. Between 1061 and 1091 Normans, descendants of Vikings who had settled in France, replaced a Muslim government with their own, and by 1200 Christian German rulers had established a Sicilian state. The persecution of Muslims and Jews gradually brought to an end the dynamic fusion of Islamic and Christian traditions.A more enduring Muslim society emerged in what became known as Moorish Spain, as Umayyad forces conquered much of Iberia between 711 and 720. Their capital, Cordoba (KAWR-duh-buh), became Europe’s largest city by 1000, home to half a million people. For several centuries a famed center of culture and learning, Umayyad-ruled Spain drew scholars and thinkers from all over Europe and the Islamic world. Cordoba’s library held 400,000 volumes, when Christian Europe’s libraries owned only several hundred. Many historians have described a spirit of tolerance that generated a productive relation-ship between diverse peoples and traditions, with Christian, Muslim, and Jewish thinkers working together to share and advance knowledge. An Arab poet called Cordoba the garden of the fruits of ideas. Here intellectuals discussed ancient Greek thought and the latest astronomical discoveries and translated books from and into Arabic. This cosmopolitan intellectual cul-ture passed on to Europe much of the Classical Greco-Roman heritage, Islamic and Indian science and mathematics, and some Chinese technology, such as papermaking. Europe also received Arab vocal and instrumental music, important in Islamic cer-emonies, pleasure, and worship. Arab folk songs and musical instruments, such as the guitar and lute, diffused northward, influencing the courtly love songs of European troubadours and, later, Western popular music.But some historians doubt that Umayyad Spain was as enlightened, tolerant, and advanced as often assumed since there was curiosity, generosity, and creative spirit but also violence, cruelty, and greed. Whatever the case, the “golden age” came to an end by 1000 as civil wars and factionalism fostered decline, and the Umayyad government fragmented into smaller, often warring states. Intolerant Muslim Berber invaders from Morocco conquered some regions, persecut-ing non-Muslims and any Muslims not sharing their rigid interpretation of Islam. Many Spaniards, remaining loyal to Catholicism, provided a support base for reconquest efforts, and military force gradually brought northern Spain under Christian control. In 1085 Christian knights conquered Cordoba, the center of Islamic power. Constant Christian military pressure gradually pushed Muslim rule into south-ern Spain, and by 1252 Christian princes controlled much of Spain and Portugal. Finally, in 1492, Christians took the last Muslim stronghold at Granada (gruh-NAHD-uh). At the sultan’s formal surrender of the magnificent Alhambra palace in Granada to the Catholic monarchs Ferdinand II of Aragon and Isabel I of Spain, the new rulers were accompanied by the Catholic cardinal of Spain and a retinue of courtiers and noble-men that, by some accounts, included an Italian merchant and sailor, Christopher Columbus. All the Christian royalty and knights wore Moorish dress perhaps in a gesture of respect, but it could also be seen as hostile, a symbol of Christians claim-ing the Moors’ power and possessions. The new Christian rul-ers, just as militant and intolerant as the Muslim government they replaced, forced Muslims and Jews to either convert to Christianity or face expulsion. Many converted but thousands fled, usually to Muslim countries in North Africa (especially Morocco) or to the Ottoman Empire (especially Anatolia). Capitalizing on the events of 1492 Spain became one of the most powerful European countries in the sixteenth and sev-enteenth centuries and a pioneer in maritime exploration but also a closed, suspicious society with a sole religion and lan-guage, repressing intellectual diversity and eliminating cultural difference.

10-3Cultural hallmarks of Islam: theology, Society, and Learning

What were the major concerns of Muslim thinkers and writers?

Islamic expansion launched a thousand-year era, from the seventh to the seventeenth century, that brought many Afro-Eurasian peoples into closer contact with one another. Muslims synthesized elements from varied traditions, including Arab, Greek, Persian, and Indian, producing a durable hybrid cul-ture rooted in theology, social patterns, literature, art, science, and learning. Several distinct strands of thought and behavior combined to produce a distinctive social system and a renowned cultural heritage. Islamic scholars contributed major scientific achievements and historical studies to the world.

10-3aTheology, Sufism, and Religious PracticeDebates over theological questions led to divergent interpreta-tions of the Quran and diverse views about the great questions of life and death, reflecting the mixing of intellectual tradi-tions and cultures. Some Muslim thinkers emphasized reason and free will, while others believed that Allah preordained everything. Some influential thinkers mastered several fields of knowledge. Abu Yusuf al-Kindi (a-BOO YOU-suhf al-KIN-dee) (ca. 800–ca. 870), an Iraqi Arab, praised the search for truth and popularized Greek ideas. Although stressing logic and mathematics, he also published work on science, music, medicine, and psychology. The philosopher and medical scholar Abu Ali al-Husain Ibn Sina (a-BOO AH-lee al-who-SANE IB-unh SEE-nah) (980–1037), known in the West as Avicenna (av-uh-SEN-uh), was a native of Bukhara (boo-CAR-ruh), a Silk Road city in Central Asia, who mostly worked in Persia. He believed that everyone could exercise free will but that the highest goal was communion with God. Ibn Sina’s influence on Western Christian and Jewish as well as Muslim philosophy was immense. Indeed, he may have been second only to Aristotle as an inspiration for thirteenth-century European philosophy. Central Asia-born polymath Abu Nasr Muhammad al-Farabi (872–951), who worked mostly in Baghdad, made impor-tant contributions to both Aristotelian and Platonic thought, helping to preserve Greek philosophy for our modern age. Influenced by Plato’s The Republic, al-Farabi published a book, The Virtuous City, in which he envisioned a city based on justice that seeks its citizens’ happiness, guided by enlightened philos-ophers. Afghanistan-born Abu Hamid al-Ghazali (AH-boo HAM-id al-guh-ZAL-ee)(1058–1111), a Baghdad teacher, used Aristotelian logic to justify Islamic beliefs and to try to bridge the divisions between ratio-nalists and traditionalists, mystics and the orthodox. This rationalistic approach lost support among Sunnis from the fourteenth century onward.Among both Sunnis and Shi’ites a mystical approach and practice called sufism(SOO-fiz-uhm)gained many followers. Sufism empha-sized personal spiritual experience rather than nitpicking theol-ogy, stressing the superiority of the heart over the mind and the search for communion with God. Most were peaceful and many opposed war and violence. Much as the Quran sanctioned mysticism—“Wherever ye turn there is the face of God”10—a famous Persian Sufi poet, Baba Kuhi, saw God in everything: “In the market, in the cloister—only God I saw; In the valley and on the mountain—only God I saw. Him I have seen beside me oft in tribulation; in favor and in fortune—only God I saw.”11Many Sufis exchanged information with Christian, Hindu, and Jewish mystics, willingly synthesized Islam with other ideas, and considered their practices useful even for non-Muslims. Sufis were instrumental in spreading Islam to South Asia, Indonesia, and West Africa, all regions where Sufism remains strong today. But Sufism constituted a supplement rather than a challenge to conventional Islam.Sufis congregated in orders led by masters who taught pre-scribed techniques. One of the most famous Sufi orders, Turkey’s whirling dervishes(DUHR-vish-iz), practiced special exercises and methods, including trance dancing, to achieve a state of divine ecstasy. Several Sufi orders gained renown as being peace-loving and tolerant of different views and customs. As followers credited some Sufi masters with magical powers, their tombs became pilgrimage destinations. Sufis also produced most Islamic poetry. Millions revere the Persian Sufi poet Hafez (hah-FEZ)(1326–1389), who loved both God and the grape: “Here we are with our wine and the ascetics with their piety. Let us see which one the beloved [God] will take.”12 However, Sufism has remained controversial. While tolerating religious flexibility won Sufis converts, many non-Sufis condemned the suspension of Islamic biases against wine, drugs, dancing, and music in worship. In recent decades Islamic militants and fundamentalists, viewing Sufis as sinful heretics, polytheists, and not real Muslims, have attacked, flogged, and even executed Sufis and dynamited their shrines in countries like Pakistan, Iraq, Saudi Arabia, and Syria.Spreading into diverse cultures, Islam developed sev-eral patterns of practice. Adaptationists willingly adjusted to changing conditions, providing the base for reform and modernizing movements. Conservatives, mistrusting innova-tion, strove to preserve established beliefs and customs, such as the rigid gender division. The most dogmatic conservatives argued that Muhammad’s divine revelations set a permanent, unchangeable authority for judging existing conditions. Finally, some stressed personal aspects of the faith. These diverse pat-terns all have large followings among both Sunnis and Shi’ites, fostering political and social conflict in Muslim societies.

10-3bSocial Life and Gender RelationsAs Islamic culture expanded and matured, the social structure became more complex and marked by clear ethnic, tribal, class, occupational, religious, and gender divisions, especially in the Middle East. Arabs generally enjoyed a higher social status than Turks, Berbers, Africans, and others. Those claiming descent from Muhammad and his Hashemite clan held an especially honored status in Islamic societies. Many Arabs were also members of tribes. Because the first Muslims were merchants, Islam attracted people in the commercial sector, who could spiritu-ally sanction their quest for wealth by financing pilgrimages to Mecca and helping the poor through almsgiving. However, Christian and Jewish minorities did not always have the same rights as Muslims. Because they paid higher taxes and as nonbe-lievers could not own weapons, they were exempt from military duty, and they enjoyed some legal protections. These communi-ties were generally allowed to follow their own laws, customs, and beliefs and maintain their own religious institutions.Slavery was common. Slaves served as bureaucrats and soldiers, business and factory workers, household servants and concubines, musicians, and plantation laborers. One Abbasid caliph kept eleven thousand slaves in his palace. Islamic law encouraged treating slaves with consideration, and many were eventually freed. Many slaves were war captives and children purchased from poor families or from European states like Byzantium and Venice. For over a dozen centuries, especially after 1200, an Arab-dominated slave trade brought perhaps a total of 10 to 15 million African slaves to the Middle East across the Sahara or up the East African coast. African slave soldiers were common in Egypt, Persia, Iraq, Oman (oh-MAHN) in eastern Arabia, Yemen, and South Asia.Families anchored the social system, arranging marriages to cement social or business ties between two families. Although Shari’a law allowed men up to four wives at a time, this privi-lege remained largely restricted to the rich and powerful. Many poor men, unable to afford the large bridal gifts expected, never married at all. While divorce was theoretically easy for men, marriage contracts sometimes specified a large gift to the wife upon divorce. Parents expected children to obey and respect them, even after they became adults. Family gatherings, usually segregated by gender, often involved poetry recitations, musi-cal performances, or Quran readings. Islamic law harshly pun-ished homosexuality, but in practice such relationships were not uncommon, with same-sex love often reflected in poetry and literature, especially in Muslim Spain. The accepting attitudes of at least some Arabs, Persians, and Turks toward homosexual romantic relationships often shocked European visitors.For centuries both Western and Islamic observers have debated women’s status and roles in Islamic society and still do today. Hence, the philosopher Ibn Rushd (IB-uhn RUSHED)(1126–1198), known in the West as Averroes (uh-VER-uh-WEEZ), attacked restrictions on women as an economic burden, arguing that “the ability of women is not known, because they are merely used for procreation [and] child-rearing.”13 But his views may have had more influence on Western thinkers than in the Muslim world. Although the Quran recognized certain women’s rights, prohibited female infanticide, and limited the number of wives men could have to four (but only if they could support them all), it also accorded women less standing in courts of law and only half the inheritance of men. While some Muslims criticized restrictions on women in law and social custom such as modest dress as institutionalizing their social inferiority, other Muslim men and women contended that they liberate women from inse-curity and male harassment. Scholars also disagreed over whether customs such as veiling and seclusion were based on Quranic mandates or patriarchal, pre-Islamic Arab, Middle Eastern, and Byzantine customs. Some Muslim communities in the Middle East, and many outside the region, never adopted these practices.Women played diverse roles. During Abbasid times some elite women, while excluded from public life, enjoyed consider-able power behind the scenes. For instance, Khayzuran, noted for her compassion and generosity, rose from a simple Yemenite slave girl to become the great love and wife of the Caliph Mahdi, dominating his harem and investing in land reclama-tion and charitable works. On his death, she helped smooth the transition to the rulership of her son, Harun al-Rashid. Some exceptional women circumvented restrictions. Umm Hani (also known as Mariam) in fifteenth-century Cairo studied law and religion with famous teachers, wrote poetry, owned a large tex-tile workshop, and became a renowned teacher and scholar of the Hadith. She also had seven children by two husbands and made thirteen pilgrimages to Mecca. In the lower classes, while formal education for girls remained limited, women monopo-lized occupations such as spinning and weaving and worked in the fields or some domestic industries beside men. And among some Muslims, particularly sub-Saharan Africans and Southeast Asians, women often enjoyed relative independence, dressing as they liked, socializing outside the home, and earning money. Turks and Mongols were more liberal on gender issues than Arabs and Persians. Hence, gender relations varied considerably.

10-3cPen and Brush: Writing and the Visual artsAlthough Islamic societies became identified with literacy and literature, the Arabic alphabet originated in southern Arabia long before Muhammad’s time. Islam enhanced the script by empha-sizing literacy, the Quran stating: “Read, and thy Lord is most generous, Who taught with the pen, Taught man what he knew not.”14 Muslims adopted the Arab poetic tradition but modified romantic ideas into praise not for a lover but for the Prophet and Allah. Thanks to the spread of literacy, an enormous number of books were published in the first three centuries of Islam.One of the greatest Abbasid writers was the Persian astron-omer and mathematician Omar Khayyam (OH-MAHR key-YAHM). In his famous poem Rubaiyat(ROO-bee-AHT), he noted life’s fleeting nature: “One thing is certain, that Life flies; and the rest is Lies; the flower that once has blown forever dies.” This led him to regret never knowing the purpose of existence:

The most famous Sufi poet, the thirteenth-century Afghanistan-born Persian Jalal al-Din Rumi (ja-LAL al-DIN ROO-mee), blended liberal Sufi spirituality with humor in writ-ings about love, desire, and the human condition. Often dancing while reciting his poems, Rumi was optimistic, joyful, and ecu-menical, stating: “I am neither Christian, nor Jew, nor Zoroastrian, nor Muslim.”16 Promoting tolerance, Rumi argued that all reli-gions pursued oneness with God. While flirting with heretical boundaries, irking local sultans and dour jurists, he also remained a devout Muslim. Every year Rumi celebration festivals are held in Konya, the cosmopolitan Turkish city and Sufi center where he lived. Over seven hundred years after his death, after his poems were translated into English (perhaps underplaying the Islamic elements), Rumi became a best-selling poet in the United States, attracting fans from many walks of life from pop stars to yoga masters.The study of history and social sciences, especially geog-raphy, owes much to Muslim writing. With the expansion of Islam and Arab traders around Afro-Eurasia, some Muslims traveled to distant lands, and educated Muslims enjoyed reading these travelers’ accounts of other countries. Modern historians are indebted to travelers such as the Moroccan jurist Ibn Battuta (IB-uhn ba-TOO-tuh) for knowledge about sub-Saharan Africa, South Asia, and Southeast Asia from the ninth to the fifteenth centuries (see Meet the People: Ibn Battuta, a Muslim Traveler). Geographers and cartographers such as Al-Idrisi (al-AH-dree-see) from Muslim Spain also produced atlases, globes, and maps.The well-traveled North African Ibn Khaldun (1332–1406) was the first known scholar anywhere to ponder patterns and structure in history, creating theoretical models to explain the world and find universal elements. His monumental work, Muqaddimah (“Introduction”), connected the rise of states with a growing solidarity between leaders and their followers. His recognition of the role of “group feeling” (what today we call ethnic identity) and religion was pathbreaking. In studying other cultures, he advocated “critical examination” and in the process made the case for including the social sciences and humanities in education:Know the rules of statecraft, the nature of existing things, and the difference between nations, regions and tribes in regard to way of life, qualities of character, customs, sects, schools of thought, and so on. [The historian] must distinguish the similarities and differences between the present and the past.17While a remarkable intellectual of diverse interests and many talents—among others, politician, historian, jurist, theologian, and psychologist—Ibn Khaldun was also a man of his time, a devout Muslim and Sufi mystic, who believed in the supernatu-ral and preferred nomads to city-dwellers. Hence he was able to put the Arab expansion into the broader flow of regional history while also explaining how people in the Muslim world of his day saw things.Visual arts flourished. Since Arabic is written in a flow-ing style, calligraphy(kuh-LIG-ruh-fee), the artful writing of words, became an admired art form offering both a message and decoration. Some Muslims condemned artistic representations of natural beings, including humans, as forbidden since they might constitute idolatry (idol worship), and hence they are absent from many Islamic societies. But Islamic Persia, India, and Central Asia fostered painting, especially landscapes but also sometimes people. Muslims also produced world-class architecture, includ-ing lavishly decorated buildings such as India’s Taj Mahal. Some architecture, such as mosques with domes and towers, reflected Byzantine church influence. Then as now, Muslims produced carpets and fabrics valued in many non-Muslim societies.10-3dScience, Technology, and LearningWhile many creative thinkers emerged, Muslims also borrowed, assimilated, and diffused Greek and South Asian knowledge and were familiar with some Chinese technologies. Hence, cer-tain Classical and Hellenistic Greek traditions of philosophy and science nearly forgotten in Europe survived in the Middle East. Muslim thinkers synthesized learning from other societ-ies with their own insights, fostering advances in science and medicine. For example, Nestorian Christians taught Greek sciences under Abbasid sponsorship. Abbasid caliphs opened the House of Wisdom in Baghdad, a research institute with schools, observatories, and a huge library, staffed by scholars who translated Greek, Syrian, Sanskrit, and Persian books on philosophy, medicine, astronomy, and mathematics into Arabic. Aristotle’s writings were particularly influential. In the tenth and eleventh centuries the Shi’ite Fatimids built the House of Knowledge in Cairo with a massive library holding two mil-lion books, many on scientific subjects. Other scientific cen-ters arose, from Spain and Morocco to Samarkand in Central Asia. Muslims also opened some of the earliest universities in Europe, first in Salerno in Muslim-ruled Sicily in 841, then in the Moorish Spain cities of Toledo, Seville, and Granada. Many students came from Christian Europe to study and graduate in these schools. The academic robes worn by university graduates in most Western countries today are based on the Arab/Muslim robes of the universities in Moorish Spain.Arab and Persian scholars actively assimilated the imported knowledge. As the influential eleventh-century Uzbekistan-born scientist, traveler, and acute observer of other cultures and the world Al-Biruni (al-bih-ROO-nee) wrote: “The sciences were transmitted into the Arabic language from different parts of the world; by it [the sciences] were embellished and penetrated the hearts of men, while the beauties of [Arabic] flowed in their veins and arteries.”18 Al-Biruni published at least one hundred and forty-six known studies in the fields of philosophy, mathe-matics, astronomy, history, and ethnography (especially a pioneer-ing study of India’s history, science, religion, literature, and customs). The diversity of ideas produced an open-minded search for truth apparent in Ibn Khaldun, Ibn Sina, al-Kindi, and Ibn Rushd. For instance, the philosopher al-Kindi wrote that Muslims should acknowledge truth from whatever source it came because nothing was more important than truth itself. Ibn Rushd (Averroes), who lived in Cordoba, influenced Christian thinkers by his writings on Aristotle and by asserting the role of reason. The Persian Shi’ite Nasir al-Din Tusi (1201–1274), an astrono-mer, architect, biologist, mathematician, physician, and philoso-pher, put forward a basic theory of evolution of species six hundred years before the British scientist Charles Darwin came up with his theories. He also translated the works of Euclid, Archimedes, Ptolemy, and other Classical Greek scientists. In the eleventh cen-tury, Christian Europe became aware of the Muslim synthesis of Greek, Indian, and Persian knowledge from libraries in Spain. But religious conservatives increasingly criticized philosophy as anti-God; Averroes was banished from Cordoba in 1195 for his views.Muslims also advanced medicine. Although influenced by Greek ideas, medical specialists did not accept ancient wisdom uncritically, instead developing an empirical tradition. Baghdad hospitals were the world’s most advanced. Muslim surgeons, using opium for anesthesia, extracted teeth and replaced them with false teeth made from animal bones. They also removed kid-ney stones and did colostomies. Islamic medical books translated into Latin in the twelfth century became Europe’s major medi-cal texts for the next five centuries. Two medical scientists, Abu Bakr al-Razi (a-boo BAH-car al-RAH-zee) (ca. 865–ca. 932) and Ibn Sina (Avicenna), compared Greek ideas with their own research. Al-Razi, a Persian, directed several hospitals and wrote more than fifty clinical studies as well as general medical works including the Comprehensive Book, an eighteen-volume medi-cal encyclopedia used in Europe into the 1400s. Al-Razi also studied what we would today call sociological and psychological aspects of medicine; a century later Ibn Sina stressed psychoso-matic medicine, treated depression, and pioneered the study of vision and eye disease, performing complicated eye operations. His medical encyclopedia provided about half of the medical curriculum in medieval European universities. Muslims also pioneered many of the apparatus, techniques, and language of chemistry later adopted in the West.Arab and Indian mathematics made possible the later Scientific Revolution in Europe. In Baghdad the Persian Zoroastrian al-Khwarizmi (al-KWAHR-uhz-mee) (ca. 780–ca. 850) developed the mathematical procedures he called algebra, building on Greek and Indian foundations. Omar Khayyam, the Persian poet at Baghdad’s House of Wisdom, and Nasir al-Din Tusi helped develop trigonometry. From Indian math books Muslims adopted a revolutionary system of num-bers, today known as Arabic numerals because Europe acquired them from Muslim Spain. They were not only more convenient but also used a dot (eventually a zero) to indicate an empty column. Advances in mathematics and physics made possible improvements in water clocks, water wheels, and other irriga-tion apparatuses that spread well beyond the Islamic world.Muslim astronomers combined Greek, Persian, and Indian knowledge of the stars and planets with their own observa-tions. Applying mathematics to optics, they constructed a primi-tive telescope. One astronomer reportedly built an elaborate 18Quoted in Bernard Lewis, The Arabs in History (New York: Harper and Row, 1960), 131. planetarium that reproduced the movement of the stars, and a remarkable observatory built at Samarkand in Central Asia in 1420 produced charts for hundreds of stars. Some astronomers noted the eccentric behavior of the planet Venus, challenging the widespread notion of an Earth-centered universe. Indeed, many Muslim astronomers accepted a round Earth. Calculating the size of Earth, Al-Biruni even postulated large unknown landmasses west of Eurasia. An unknown but well-informed scholar in eleventh-century Cairo produced an extraordinary illustrated book that guided the reader on a journey from the outermost cosmos and planets to Earth and its lands, islands, features, and inhabitants, a masterpiece of interdisciplinary learning that was only rediscovered in 2000.Between the eighth and thirteenth centuries, Islamic soci-eties also made agricultural innovations, expanding production in a “green revolution.” Improved diets and health spurred dra-matic population growth. When Arab conquests opened the door to India, the Middle Eastern peoples obtained South Asian crops such as cotton, hard wheat, rice, and sugar cane; fruits such as the coconut palm, banana, sour orange, lemon, lime, mango, and watermelon; and vegetables such as spinach, artichokes, and eggplant. These imports from wetter lands encouraged better irrigation, including the use of enormous water wheels to supply water. The spread of agricultural prod-ucts was one of the Islamic peoples’ major contributions to world history. Most of these crops filtered westward to Spain, where they thrived, and cotton became a major crop in West Africa. While many crops reached Christian Europe from Spain and Sicily, they were adopted only slowly, since Europe at that time had a lower population density and limited irrigation technol-ogy. Just as tea drinkers today can thank the ancient Chinese for domesticating their favorite beverage, coffee lovers owe their morning cup to the Yemenite Arabs and Ethiopians who first cultivated it as a crop, and the Muslim merchants who between the thirteenth and seventeenth centuries spread it around the Middle East, where it became a passion of Sufi mystics, and then on to Europe and Africa. Coffee houses became a popular feature of cities in many Muslim and non-Muslim lands, but were also often condemned by religious authorities as sinful and seditious.

10-4Globalized Islam and Middle eastern political Change

Why do historians speak of Islam as a hemispheric culture?

Between the eighth and seventeenth centu-ries, Islam, the product of a once parochial Arab culture, expanded out of its Arabian heartland to become the dominant religion across a broad expanse of Africa and Eurasia, with Muslim minorities emerging in places as far afield as China and the Balkans. This expansion created Dar al-islam (the “Abode of Islam”), the Islamic world stretching from Morocco to Indonesia and the Philippines, joined by both a common faith and trade. Islam-fostered networks reached from the Atlantic eastward to the Pacific, spreading Arab words, names, social attitudes, cul-tural values, and the Arabic script to diverse peoples. Eventually several powerful military states emerged that ruled over large pop-ulations of Muslims and non-Muslims. The Islamic world also faced severe challenges—expanding Turks, Christian crusaders, Mongol conquerors, and horrific pandemics—setting the stage for new political forces in the fifteenth and sixteenth centuries. Yet, the Islamic tradition was resistant, overcoming factionalism and political decay to remain creative well past the 1400s.

10-4aThe Global Shape of Dar al-IslamMore than half of the world’s nearly two billion Muslims today live outside the Middle East, the majority in South and Southeast Asia, with Arabs significantly outnumbered by non-Arab believers. After the Abbasid Caliphate’s demise, Arab political power diminished, but Islam grew rapidly in both Africa and South Asia (see Chapters 12–13). Dozens of pros-perous Muslim trading cities, from Tangier in Northwest Africa to Samarkand in Central Asia to Melaka in Malaya, offered goods from distant countries. Beginning in the thirteenth century, Muslims constructed a hemisphere-spanning system based on economic exchange and a shared understanding of the world and the cosmos, linked by informal networks of

Between 1218 and 1221 they fought their way through lands inhabited mostly by Turkic-speaking Muslims, destroying sev-eral great Silk Road cities. The Mongol attack destroyed states, created instability, and unwittingly laid the foundation for a hemisphere-wide pandemic causing much devastation and death.Mongol atrocities became legendary, although perhaps, some historians suggest, at times exaggerated by both sides. For exam-ple, to paralyze Muslim societies with fear and to prevent opposi-tion, the Mongols killed 700,000 mostly unarmed residents in the Persian city of Merv. Fear usually worked to quell resistance. An Arab chronicler wrote of Mongol invaders that “in the countries that have not yet been overrun by them, everyone spends the night afraid that they may appear there too.”21 After Genghis Khan’s death in 1227, the Mongols turned to conquering China, Russia, and eastern Europe but also put pressure on the Caucasus and Anatolia. In 1243 they defeated the remnants of the Seljuk Turks.In 1256 a grandson of Genghis Khan, Hulegu (hoo-LAY-goo) (1217–1275), led new attacks with more lasting conse-quences for the Middle East. In Iraq in 1258, Hulegu’s army, faced with fierce resistance, pillaged Baghdad, burning schools, librar-ies, mosques, and palaces, killing perhaps a million people, and executing all the Abbasids, a fateful turning point for Arab society that ended the prosperity and intellectual glory once represented by the now-gutted city. Hulegu’s forces pushed on west, occupying Damascus and destroying the great trading city of Aleppo (uh-LEP-oh). In the past few years Aleppo was again destroyed dur-ing the fighting of the Syrian civil war. The pastoralist Mongols also disrupted agriculture, returning some farms to pasture and dispersing the peasants. In some places farming never recovered.But the Islamic tradition proved resilient. When Hulegu’s armies invaded Egypt in 1260, they were defeated at the battle of Ayn Jalut by the Mamluks (MAM-looks), ex-slave soldiers of Turkish origin who had taken power there. Hulegu’s Mongols stayed in Iraq and Persia, calling themselves the Il-Khanid (il-KHAN-id) dynasty, assimilating Persian culture, and eventu-ally adopting Islam. Descendants of Mongol invaders in Russia, known as Tartars, also became Muslim. The Il-Khanids practiced religious toleration and encouraged monumental architecture, learning, and literary renaissance and scholars wrote pathbreak-ing world histories telling us much about the Mongol empire.By building a large empire across Eurasia, the Mongols fostered overland trade and travel, but they also provided a path for deadly diseases to spread. Like Europe and China, the Islamic world was deeply affected by the terrible fourteenth-century pandemic known in the West as the Black Death, a catastrophic disease, probably bubonic plague, that killed quickly and spread rapidly. Initially carried into the Black Sea region from eastern Asia by fleas infesting rats that stowed away on Silk Road caravans or trading ships, the pandemic hit the Middle East repeatedly over a century, reducing Egypt and Syria’s population by two-thirds. Ibn Khaldun wrote that “cities and towns were laid waste, roads and way signs were obliterated, settlements and mansions became empty. The entire inhabited world changed.”22 Ibn Khaldun felt he might be living at his-tory’s end. But by the 1400s the Middle East had stabilized and regained some economic and cultural dynamism.

10-4dThe Rise of Muslim Military StatesIn the thirteenth and fourteenth centuries, several powerful Muslim military states arose, including the Mamluks in Egypt, the Timurids in Central Asia, and the Ottoman Turks in Anatolia. Gunpowder, a Chinese invention that moved along the Silk Road during Mongol times, forever changed warfare and also impacted politics. After 1350 firearm possession gave some states and groups advantages over rivals and led to stronger, more bureaucratic states.The Mamluks ruled Egypt and Syria from 1250 to 1517, making Egypt the richest Middle Eastern state. After expanding into Arabia and capturing Mecca and Medina, they controlled and taxed the flow of Muslim pilgrims. They also enjoyed an active trade with Genoa and Venice, the major Italian trading cities that supplied Asian goods to Europe. Venetian merchants established trading posts around Mamluk lands, exchanging timber, metals, and gold for spices, dyes, and Indian textiles. Eventually, how-ever, Mamluk corruption and increasing taxes prompted seafar-ing European merchants to seek a maritime route to the East, the fabled lands of China, Japan, Southeast Asia, and India that produced so many desirable commodities. In 1516–1517 another Turkish group, the Ottomans, defeated the Mamluks and absorbed their lands into the growing Ottoman Empire (see Map 10.4).In Central Asia, Tamerlane (TAM-uhr-lane) (1336–1405), a ruthless Muslim prince of Turkish and Mongol ancestry who was crippled by an arrow wound as a young man but hoped to emulate Genghis Khan, made the Timurid state the domi-nant power for over a century. From his capital, Samarkand, Tamerlane’s army rampaged through the Caucasus, southern Russia, Persia, Iraq, and Syria, killing thousands and destroying cities and farms. He then wreaked havoc in northern India (see Chapter 13). Only Tamerlane’s death in 1405 halted his forces from invading China and Ottoman Turkey. Although Tamerlane protected merchants and Sufi mystics, his heritage largely con-sisted of smoking ruins and pyramids of human heads. However, his successors built mosques and patronized scholars, and later his grandson established a great empire in India in the early 1500s.The Ottoman (AHT-uh-muhn) Turks established the most powerful and enduring military state. The Ottomans originated as a small Anatolian kingdom led by a chief named Osman (ohs-MAHN) (Ottoman means “followers of Osman”). Osman was influenced by Sufis dedicated to destroying Byzantium, which was reeling from temporary crusader occupation of Constantinople and weakening influence in Anatolia. Capitalizing on this vacuum, by 1300 the Ottomans had raided and then annexed remaining Byzantine strongholds in Anatolia. Using gunpowder weapons, they ultimately conquered much of the Byzantine Empire, creat-ing a dynamic state in western Eurasia and a link between Middle Eastern Islam and European Christianity. Once great Byzantium increasingly became a shell surrounding Constantinople.Soon the Ottomans moved into the Balkans, where they defeated Serbia, the strongest Christian power in southeastern Europe. The Ottomans favored Muslims in taxes, and many Albanian and Serb-speaking Christians adopted Islam, some for economic reasons, creating a division in the Balkans between Catholic, Orthodox, and Muslim peoples that complicates politics even today in the nations of the former Yugoslavia. At the Battle of Nicopolis (nuh-KAHP-uh-luhs) in 1396, the Ottomans defeated a Hungarian-led force drawn from throughout Europe to oppose Ottoman expansion. In 1453 Sultan Mehmed (MEH-met) the Conqueror (1432–1481) finally took Constantinople and con-verted the city into the Ottoman capital, which was eventually renamed Istanbul. Turkish historians today vigorously debate Mehmed. Some see him as the embodiment of Muslim piety whereas others describe him as a thoroughly secular ruler who knew Greek and Latin and was interested in European culture.The Ottoman Empire was now the major regional power and Istanbul a major trade hub, attracting a multiethnic, multire-ligious population. Patronizing the arts, Mehmed the Conqueror invited famous Italian artists and architects to work in his cos-mopolitan capital, by 1500 Europe’s largest city. Ottoman sul-tans used subject peoples’ administrative and military skills and promoted talented men regardless of background. Moreover, through the millet (“nationality”) system, leaders of religious and ethnic minorities were allowed to administer their own communities. Hence, the Greek patriarch had authority over all Orthodox Christians in Ottoman territory, while Christians and Jews generally practiced their religions freely. The millet system allowed Turks to divide and hence rule diverse peoples.A dynamic and militarily powerful Ottoman state contin-ued to expand, by 1500 solidifying control over Greece and the Balkans (see Map 10.4). In the 1500s, Ottoman rule extended over much of western Asia as far east as Persia and North Africa from Egypt to Algeria. In the 1500s the Ottomans also played an ambitious naval role in the Indian Ocean for several decades, expanding trade and confronting Portuguese expan-sion while establishing an alliance with the Indonesian Muslim state of Acheh on Sumatra. Soon the empire would reach even greater heights under Sultan Suleiman the Magnificent (r. 1520–1566). But Ottoman, and Islamic, expansion in west-ern Eurasia finally came to an end when the Ottomans were defeated while attempting to take Hungary in 1699. However, the Ottoman Empire continued until 1923.10-4eIslamic Contributions to World historyBy linking peoples of varied cultures, ideas, religions, and lan-guages, Arab expansion fostered intellectual and artistic creativity, while the Islamic faith and culture profoundly influenced South Asian, African, and European societies. For example, the gradual Islamic conquest of much of South Asia posed an alternative to Hinduism. As Islamic influence and Arab merchants traveled south across the Sahara and along the East African coast, various African societies also adopted Islam and some Islamic customs and technologies. From the ninth through eleventh centuries, Arabs in Sicily and Spain passed on to Europe some of the advanced science, mathematics, and technology of the Middle East, India, and China. In many respects, Muslims linked the Classical Greeks and Indians with late medieval Europeans, whose universities now studied Greco-Roman and Islamic learning. Eventually this exchange of knowledge helped spark a scientific and technological revolution in Europe as well as a questioning of the entrenched Christian church, ultimately leading to more diverse ideas within Western societies. But the exchange was not one way, as Muslims also benefited from European medicine, science, and art.The mixture of Arab, Persian, Turkish, Byzantine, Christian, Jewish, African, Indonesian, and Indian influences created a hemispheric-wide Islamic world that connected culturally and politically diverse societies sharing a common faith and, often, values. While most Iraqis, Syrians, Egyptians, and North Africans adopted the Arabic language and called themselves Arabs, Persians and Turks maintained their own spoken languages but now wrote using Arabic script. Indeed, for many centuries Persian remained a language of government and the elite, from the Seljuk Turkish empire to various Muslim states in South and Central Asia.Non-Muslims played key roles, especially in commerce. From the eighth through eleventh centuries Jews were the key middlemen between Christian Europe and the Muslim world. Hence, Jews from southern France traded in Spain, North Africa, and the eastern Mediterranean, many becoming fluent in Arabic. After the eleventh century Jews lost ground as intermediaries to Italians in the west and Armenian Christians in the east.

By the fourteenth century Islam’s center of gravity was shifting from Arab societies to Turkey, but Arab, Persian, and Turkish courts continued to attract some of the world’s leading scientists and artists and remained at the cutting edge of medical advances and military technology. Muslim scholars were proud of their expansive horizons. For example, the Egyptian Jalal al-Din al-Suyuti (juh-LALL al-din al-sue-YOU-tee) (1445–1505) boasted that he and his books had traveled as far as West Africa and India. Yet, after the last Muslim kingdom in Spain fell in 1492, he believed the Muslim world needed intellectual and social renewal. Although the Ottoman Turks were rising, al-Suyuti could not know that, after 1500, Muslim states would also have a resur-gence in Persia and South Asia, nor that various Europeans, benefiting from the encounter with Islam, would become serious rivals to Muslim power and challenge the intercon-nected Islamic world.everal powerful Islamic states, including the Ottoman Empire, enjoyed political and economic influence in the six-teenth and seventeenth centuries. But, with the occasional exception of Ottoman Turkey, technological innovation, sci-entific inquiry, and the questioning of accepted religious and cultural ideas fell off in the Middle East. Most madrasas, while training Muslim clerics and providing spiritual guidance, had narrow, theology-based curriculums that deemphasized secular learning. These trends diminished the humanist, tolerant tradi-tion of Islamic scholarship represented by Baghdad’s House of Wisdom and the schools in Muslim Spain. Over the next three centuries, Middle Eastern peoples who had boasted innovative and cosmopolitan traditions for a millennium gradually lost military and economic power while Europeans surged. Today Islam is a growing faith and Muslim societies play a key role in world politics and the world economy, sometimes generating tense relations with each other or with Western nations.

Chapter SummaryThe rise of Islam in Arabia during the seventh century changed world history, forging a community of believers around a set of monotheistic ideas. Muhammad’s message proved so popular that, within a few decades, Muslim Arabs had conquered a large empire and spread Islam to many Arab and non-Arab peoples. Islam offered distinctive religious, political, and social ideas, such as pilgrimage, annual fasting, a legal code, and an emphasis on social justice, but it also was influenced by Christian, Jewish, Persian, and other traditions. Islamic societies flourished under powerful theocratic governments, such as the Umayyad and Abbasid Caliphates, while Islamic writers and scientists assimi-lated and developed knowledge from many societies. Muslim thinkers preserved Classical Greek learning while pioneering new ideas in astronomy, mathematics, the physical sciences, and agriculture. Arab links also contributed knowledge to medieval Europe, spurring the scientific and technological rise of the West.The Islamic world became a cosmopolitan network of peoples linked by trade and religious scholars. While the Abbasid collapse brought some political fragmentation, Islam still expanded, over-coming several challenges in the millennium after Muhammad. By 1500 the Ottoman Turks controlled a vast empire. Stretching from western Africa and southwestern Europe eastward to Southeast Asia and western China, Islam became a hemispheric culture, even extending its influences into non-Islamic regions. After 1500, however, the Islamic Middle East began to fade as a political power and a center for intellectual inquiry.

11- 3Mongol Conquest, Chinese resurgence, and eurasian Connections

How did China change during the Yuan and Ming dynasties?

From the thirteenth through the nineteenth centuries the Chinese way of life maintained great continuity. Three ruling houses held power between the Song downfall and the imperial system’s demise in the twentieth century, an almost unprecedented record of political stability, perhaps matched only by the ancient Egyptian kingdoms. Disorder occurred chiefly during years of dynastic decline and replacement. Two of the three dynasties were conquest dynasties imposed by non-Chinese nomadic peoples riding in on horseback. The two dynasties that held power between the thirteenth and seventeenth centuries were the Yuan (yu-wenn), established by invading Mongols, and the Ming, which marked a return to Chinese rule.11- 3 aThe mongol Empire and the Conquest of ChinaFor several millennia Chinese feared what they considered “barbarian” Central Asians who killed, looted, and took cap-tives. The strongest rulers controlled these peoples by conquest or divide-and-rule diplomacy. Enduring Central Asian influence on China’s political life resulted from the close proximity of the arid grasslands north and west of China, suit-able only for mobile herding, to China’s lush farmlands, with contrasting environments producing very different societies. Central Asia’s pastoral economy and few resources necessitated seasonal migration and chronic poverty for the tough, self-reliant herders. When China was weak, the Great Wall proved no major barrier to peoples envious of, and anxious to share in, China’s relative afflu-ence. In the thirteenth century China’s worst nightmare occurred when a confederation of warlike peoples, the Mongols, conquered all of China.Before invading China the Mongols conquered much of Eurasia, including parts of eastern Europe and western Asia. Traditionally divided into feuding tribes, the Mongols became united under the ruthless but brilliant Temuchin (ca. 1167–1227), who defeated or co-opted his rivals and then changed his name to Genghis Khan (GENG-iz KAHN) (“Universal Emperor”). Of humble origins, he had simple motives: “A man’s greatest pleasure is to defeat his enemies, . . . drive them before him, . . . take from them that which they possessed, . . . see those whom they cherished in tears, . . . to ride their horses, . . . hold their wives and daughters in his arms.”14 Skilled horse soldiers, more agile than their foes, Mongols proved formidable opponents. Their well-organized fighting units possessed powerful bows lethal at six hundred feet, disc-shaped stirrups giving the rider maneuver-ability, and the world’s most advanced siege weaponry, including catapults. China’s strength made it one of the last Mongol con-quests. Genghis Khan conquered parts of northern China in 1215, and the rest of China fell fifty years after Genghis’s death under his grandson, Khubilai Khan (koo-bluh KAHN) (r. 1260–1294), who created a new dynasty, the Yuan (1279–1368). China then became part of a great hemispheric, contiguous land empire, the largest in world history ever seen before or since and a mixing of many different societies, stretching from eastern Europe and the Black Sea to Korea (see Map 11.2).The Mongols imposed a distinctive government and fostered new cultural forms. Khubilai Khan proved a rather enlightened ruler, less cruel and more pragmatic than most Mongol leaders elsewhere in Eurasia. He patronized Buddhism, built granaries for food storage, operated an efficient postal sys-tem, and improved the transportation network. But Chinese his-torians condemned Khubilai Khan for Mongol sins generally, pleasure is to defeat his enemies, . . . drive them before him, . . . take from them that which they possessed, . . . see those whom they cherished in tears, . . . to ride their horses, . . . hold their wives and daughters in his arms.”14 Skilled horse soldiers, more agile than their foes, Mongols proved formidable opponents. Their well-organized fighting units possessed powerful bows lethal at six hundred feet, disc-shaped stirrups giving the rider maneuver-ability, and the world’s most advanced siege weaponry, including catapults. China’s strength made it one of the last Mongol con-quests. Genghis Khan conquered parts of northern China in 1215, and the rest of China fell fifty years after Genghis’s death under his grandson, Khubilai Khan (koo-bluh KAHN) (r. 1260–1294), who created a new dynasty, the Yuan (1279–1368). China then became part of a great hemispheric, contiguous land empire, the largest in world history ever seen before or since and a mixing of many different societies, stretching from eastern Europe and the Black Sea to Korea (see Map 11.2).The Mongols imposed a distinctive government and fostered new cultural forms. Khubilai Khan proved a rather enlightened ruler, less cruel and more pragmatic than most Mongol leaders elsewhere in Eurasia. He patronized Buddhism, built granaries for food storage, operated an efficient postal sys-tem, and improved the transportation network. But Chinese his-torians condemned Khubilai Khan for Mongol sins generally, such as maintaining Mongol cultural identity and actively resist-ing assimilation into Chinese society. Later Chinese viewed the Yuan as China’s darkest hour, an intolerable rule by aliens who refused to be absorbed. Khubilai Khan moved the capital to Beijing (“Northern Capital”), a provincial city close to the Great Wall and alongside major highways leading north and west. Except for brief periods since, Beijing has remained China’s capi-tal, eclipsing more ancient cities like Chang’an and Hangzhou. Reflecting his nomadic heritage, Khubilai preferred sleeping in tents, including one erected in the imperial palace gardens.The Mongols mistrusted intellectuals but were toler-ant in religion, inviting missionaries from all over Eurasia to come to the court for religious debates, including Christians of various sects (including Catholics). Khubilai Khan’s mother was a Nestorian Christian of Turkish ancestry, but, like many Mongols, he adopted Tibetan Buddhism. Governing a religiously diverse society, Khubilai Khan wanted to avoid con-flict. However, although a few women in the ruling family had some power, Mongols had even more rigid gender expectations and marriage practices than the Chinese, expecting widows to remain chaste and dutifully serve their parents-in-law. Chinese men now demanded that women remain at home and empha-size feminine behavior, including the growing fashion of tightly bound feet.

11- 3 b mongol China and Eurasian networksThe Mongols reopened China’s doors to the world and protected the overland Silk Road, reviving the exchange of goods, ideas, and technologies between East and West. Chinese inventions like gunpowder, printing, the blast furnace for cast iron, silk-making machinery, paper money, and playing cards moved westward. The active maritime trade continued. Many foreigners came to Mongol China by land and sea. Although Khubilai Khan sought Chinese support by modeling his government along Chinese lines and performing Confucian rites, most scholars and bureaucrats refused cooperation. Mongols were forced to rely administratively on foreigners coming to serve in what was effectively an interna-tional civil service, including many Muslims from Central Asia, western Asia, and North Africa. For example, a Persian engi-neer guided the building of Khubilai’s capital, Khanbaliq (now Beijing), and the first governor of Yunnan in southwest China came from the Silk Road city of Bukhara in Central Asia.A few Europeans also found their way to “fabled Cathay,” as they called China. One was the Italian merchant Marco Polo (ca. 1254–1324). Polo initially traveled to China with his father and uncle seeking trade goods but spent seventeen years there, mostly in government service. Eventually Polo returned to Italy and told of the wonders he had encountered or heard about to unbelieving Europeans who knew little about the world east of Palestine. Most dismissed Polo’s account as full of lies, but it was widely read and influential in Europe, and historians confirm its general accuracy. A keen observer, he recorded Chinese resentment toward the Mongols, who once slaughtered a city’s entire population for the killing of one drunk Mongol soldier. Polo wrote of China’s great cities, such as Beijing and Hangzhou (see Discover Historical Voices). Standing along the shores of beautiful West Lake in Hangzhou, he wrote that “the city is beyond dispute the finest and noblest in the world in point of grandeur and beauty as well as in its abundant delights. The natives of this city are of peaceful character, thoroughly honest and truthful and accustomed to dainty living.”15 The city boasted parks, a fire department, garbage collection, a pollution-control agency, and paved streets—all things nonexistent in Polo’s much smaller Venice, a major European city. Indeed, China was far more developed in many fields than the rest of Eurasia, probably enjoying the world’s highest standard of liv-ing. Polo noted, for example, that the Chinese, unlike Europeans, had for a thousand years burned black stones (coal) for heat. According to his account of Hangzhou: “The streets connected with the market-squares are numerous, and in some of them are many cold baths, attended by [people] of both sexes. All [resi-dents] are in the daily practice of washing their persons, and especially before their meals.”16 This information about regular baths probably astonished medieval Europeans, who seldom if ever bathed.Mongol control had enormous consequences for Central Asia, the Middle East, and Europe, and the Mongols dominated regions such as Russia and Turkestan for a long time. But Mongol rule in China, lasting only a century, did not leave a deep imprint. Most Chinese hated the Mongols, whose leadership deteriorated after Khubilai Khan’s death. Furthermore, after years of luxuri-ous living in sophisticated China, Mongols lost their fighting toughness, desiring luxury more than sacrifice. As Mongols in Central Asia and Persia adopted the cultures and religions of the conquered, Mongol unity fragmented and power strug-gles grew rampant. Adding to these troubles, the Yellow River flooded severely, bringing famine, and a terrible plague (prob-ably bubonic) outbreak raged. Historians still debate whether the pandemic, which killed many millions of Chinese, traveled west along the Silk Road to cause the terrible Black Death that greatly reduced the population of the Middle East and Europe in the fourteenth century (see Chapters 10 and 14). Some recent stud-ies suggest that the Black Death plague originated in Turkestan. Soon rebellions broke out all over China. Eventually a Chinese commoner established a new dynasty, the Ming, and Mongol military forces returned to Central Asia. Today Mongols vener-ate Genghis Khan as their greatest leader, building memorials and even a theme park to honor the conqueror. And Chinese are still wary of the Mongols, generating sometimes hostile relations between China and Mongolia ever since then.

Confucian social system. Ming leaders believed profit was evil, and mercantile interests inevitably conflicted with political ones. A later Ming scholar wrote that “one in a hundred [Chinese] is rich, while nine out of ten are impoverished. The poor cannot stand up to the rich. The lord of silver rules heaven and the god of copper cash reigns over the earth.”18 Hence, many mandarins despised merchants and opposed foreign trade. But some merchants, seeking respect and status, emulated the Confucian scholars by, for example, collecting art, engaging in philanthropy, and educating their sons.Military factors also influenced the turn inward. With Mongols regrouping in Central Asia and memories of oppres-sive Mongol rule still fresh, the Ming shifted resources to defend the northern borders and the pirate-infested Pacific coast, rebuilding and extending the Great Wall. The Great Wall sections near Beijing, enjoyed by millions of tourists every year, mostly reflect work done by the Ming. In addition, military operations along the northern border and an ill-fated invasion of Vietnam generated a fiscal crisis that weakened the government.Finally, the catastrophe of Mongol rule made the Chinese more ethnocentric and antiforeign. Always land-based, self-centered, and self-sufficient, the Chinese now believed they needed little from outside. China remained powerful, produc-tive, and mostly prosperous, enjoying generally high living standards, well into the eighteenth century, when profits from overseas colonies and the Industrial Revolution tipped the bal-ance in favor of northwest Europe. By the later Ming, China had entered a period of relative isolation that was ended only by the forceful intrusion of a newly developed Europe in the early 1800s.

11- 4 bChoson and the Yi DynastyWhen the Mongols conquered the peninsula, the Koreans resisted. The Mongols responded by devastating the land, car-rying off hundreds of thousands of captives, and imposing heavy taxes. Yet, during the Mongol era closer links to trade networks brought to Korea more Chinese and western Asian learning and technology. In 1392 a new Korean dynasty, the Yi (yee), whose state was known as Choson (cho-suhn), meaning “Fresh Dawn,” replaced Mongol rule and lasted five hundred and eighteen years, until 1910 (see Map 11.4).

Chapter summary The Intermediate Era was in many respects a golden age for much of East Asia. The Tang and Song dynasties represented perhaps the high point of Chinese history and culture. While the Tang enjoyed great external power, the Song featured dramatic commercial growth. The Chinese continued to develop distinc-tive forms of literature, visual arts, philosophy, and government, as well as new technologies and scientific understandings. The Mongol conquest and brief period of rule weakened China’s dynamism but extended overland trade routes that linked China even more closely to the outside world and promoted the spread of Chinese science and technology to western Eurasia. During the Ming, China briefly reasserted its transregional power and Chapter summaryThe Intermediate Era was in many respects a golden age for much of East Asia. The Tang and Song dynasties represented perhaps the high point of Chinese history and culture. While the Tang enjoyed great external power, the Song featured dramatic commercial growth. The Chinese continued to develop distinc-tive forms of literature, visual arts, philosophy, and government, as well as new technologies and scientific understandings. The Mongol conquest and brief period of rule weakened China’s dynamism but extended overland trade routes that linked China even more closely to the outside world and promoted the spread of Chinese science and technology to western Eurasia. During the Ming, China briefly reasserted its transregional power and maintained an advanced technology. But, in part because of the experience of Mongol rule, Ming China also increasingly turned inward, becoming less involved in world affairs.The Koreans and Japanese synthesized Chinese learning, writing, Confucianism, and Buddhism with their own native tra-ditions to produce highly distinctive societies. Significant change occurred in Japan as it moved from the aristocratic court culture of Heian to a warrior-dominated culture based on large landown-ing families and their military retainers, or samurai. By the end of the 1400s the East Asian societies remained strong but faced new challenges when Europeans began to expand their power in the world.