The partisans of cAli were not terribly successful at persuading the Muslim community to acknowledge the authority of their Imams. After the troubled caliphate of cAli himself, none of his descendants or close collateral relations, i.e., those whom the various proto-Shici groups recognized as the rightful leader of the community and instrument of God's will, secured the broad allegiance of the umma. Still, the late eighth and ninth centuries were fruitful ones for Shicism, as it was then that it acquired a more precise sectarian identity.

The success of the cAbbasids resulted in the proto-Shicis defining their expectations more sharply. The subversive movement had its roots in proto-Shicism, as it drew on the widespread but unfocused support for “the chosen one from the family of Muhammad.” But the chosen one turned out not to be a direct descendant of the Prophet, and eventually the cAbbasids had to deal with the disappointment of those who expected something more, or at least something different. By 762, the cAbbasids had the embarrassment of defending themselves against a revolt in the Hijaz, led by Muhammad ibn cAbdallah, al-Nafs al-Zakiyya (“the Pure Soul”), the great-grandson of Muhammad's grandson son al-Hasan, who rejected the cAbbasids explicitly on the grounds that they had usurped a position and power which rightfully belonged to a descendant of the Prophet.

Surveys of Islam frequently present the history of Sufism in the Middle Period as a process of reconciliation between the mystical and juristic sides of Islam, the one shedding the more extreme and outlandish forms in which its practitioners (such as al-Hallaj) had expressed their mystical insights, the other reconciling itself to the claims of the mystics to a special experience of the divine. The jurist and theologian Abu Hamid al-Ghazali – who famously renounced his position as teacher of jurisprudence in the Nizamiyya madrasa, wandered through the Near East for several years subjecting himself to Sufi discipline, and finally composed a book which aimed, as its title suggested, at “the revivification of the religious sciences” – al-Ghazali is generally named as the pivotal figure in this drama. There is something to this argument, and in so far as it is true, the rapprochement of juristic and mystical Islam was characteristic of the Middle Period. But there is a countervailing side to this story. At best, this viewpoint constitutes an oversimplification, in part because it is in fact difficult to specify what precisely the term “Sufism” (most often a translation of the Arabic tasawwuf) indicates. Phenomena which are conventionally labeled “Sufi,” either by medieval observers or contemporary historians, are extraordinarily diverse, and as a religious movement Sufism often pulled medieval Islam in opposite directions.

In the medieval Islamic Near East, did “popular religion” constitute a distinctive phenomenon susceptible to analysis as such? Certainly “religion” was quite “popular,” in at least two socially significant senses: first, that religious structures and patterns such as those we have been investigating contributed decisively to shaping the social identities of the population; and second, that religious concerns permeated daily life and religious hopes provided the first line of defense against crisis. No doubt, individuals sincerely turned to God for help in times of trouble, but of greater interest were the public manifestations of pious expectations which reflect a society in which religion constituted the central organizational principle. In a typical entry, for example, the chronicler al-Dhahabi described the reaction of the population of Damascus to the approach of the Ilkhanid ruler Ghazan in 1299. While the Mamluks, the ruling elite, prepared (ineffectually, as it turned out) for war, the Muslims of the city, led by the qadis and leading ulama, made a public procession, at the head of which strode a shaykh carrying a copy of al-Bukhari's collection of Prophetic hadith – and in a fit of ecumenism, they were joined by the Jews carrying the Torah and the Christians with the Gospels, invoking the mercy of the Almighty.

Of course non-Muslims constituted the vast majority of the inhabitants of those lands ruled or fought over by the early caliphs. Popular stereotypes about Islam spreading by the sword, and older scholarly assumptions that most of the inhabitants of the Near East converted fairly quickly to the new faith in order to escape the onerous personal and agricultural taxes levied on non-Muslims, both radically misrepresent the complex situation faced by Jews, Christians, Zoroastrians and others in the century or two following the initial Arab conquests. In fact, what came to be known as the dhimmi communities, those monotheists who lived under a pact of protection (dhimma) with the Muslim state, survived and in many cases thrived for many generations. Eventually, of course, most regions did emerge with Muslim majorities, but the process of conversion took some time, and was uneven, the actual pace varying according to local circumstance and the specific character of relations between the particular faiths and the Muslim polity.

At the beginning, relations between the Arab conquerors and the inhabitants of the lands they occupied were, if not entirely amiable, likely free of the pervasive tension which sometimes characterized them in later centuries. In a famous passage, the ninth-century historian al-Baladhuri records the people of the Syrian city of Hims, both Christians and Jews, proclaiming their preference for Muslim rather than Byzantine rule, begging the Arab soldiers to stay when the emperor Heraclius threatened to retake the city, and, upon the defeat of the Roman army, welcoming the Muslims back from battle with music and dance.

Despite the importance of the preceding centuries, the medieval period was a creative one for Islam. Political theory and structure provide an instructive example. Most discussions of Islamic political thought begin with and focus on the office of the caliph. It is easy to see why this should be the case, given the struggles over leadership within the early Islamic community. But the result is often to measure later developments against standards of legitimacy based on events and decisions of that early period. And so, for instance, when viewed from this perspective, the extinction of the cAbbasid caliphate in Baghdad by the Mongols in the mid-thirteenth century appears to mark the end of a normative institution and phase of Islamic history. In fact, however, far from marking an end, the Mongol invasions provided an opportunity for solidifying and extending the social, political, and religious developments of the previous two centuries.

For all of their differences, the Islamic societies of the Middle Period shared certain common patterns – for example, that of political dominance by alien, mostly Turkish or Mongol military elites, or the social and institutional forms in which religious learning was transmitted from one generation to the next. More-over, those patterns had long-term effects that stretched down to the modern period.

The term “Islam,” like any other historical abstraction of comparable scope, indicates a phenomenon of great complexity and constantly evolving dimensions. This should go without saying; unfortunately, given how easily and naturally we fall back on the simple term to describe the complex organism, it bears repeating. Islam was not fully formed at the death of the Prophet Muhammad in 632, nor a few years later when it burst out of its Arabian homeland, nor even many decades later when it was clear that the rule of those who called themselves “Muslims” was permanent. The story of the emergence during the seventh and eighth centuries of particularly Islamic identities and patterns of religious authority can be read as a continuation of that of the focusing of religious identities which characterized the late antique Near East. The questions posed by the unexpected appearance on the scene of enthusiastic monotheists from the Arabian desert forced adherents of the older faiths to articulate more precisely those contours which defined them against their rivals. But it is also true that Islam itself only took shape through a process of dialogue with the other faith traditions. Indeed, it is misleading to speak of the “appearance” or “rise” of Islam, if those words convey a sense of unproblematic apparition as sudden as that of the Arab warriors before the bewildered Byzantine or Sasanian armies.

The millenium or so before the rise of Islam in the early seventh century CE was a period of enormously rich social and cultural development in the lands that form the subject of this book. So much is probably true of any thousand-year interval of human history, but this particular epoch was of special importance in that it saw the crystallization of the religious traditions which have survived into the modern era, and which formed the backdrop to the emergence of the new religion which traces its origins to the preaching of Muhammad in western Arabia.

Marshall Hodgson, in his monumental history of The Venture of Islam, identified the period between 800 and 200 BCE, which the German philosopher Karl Jaspers had referred to as the “Axial Age,” as decisive in creating the world out of which Islam eventually emerged. Throughout the Eurasian landmass, the Axial Age saw the coalescence of a number of distinct cultures, regionally-based but linked by both trading networks and a common core of principles: the Graeco-Roman or Mediterranean, the Indian, the Chinese. This was an era of leading religious figures and of the production of foundational religious texts in all of these regions: the teaching of Lao-Tzu, Buddha, the Greek philosophers, the Hebrew prophets, and the compilation of the Upanishads in India.

To the south of the Fertile Crescent stretches the peninsula which takes its name from the Arabs who inhabit it. Arabia was the setting for the career of the Prophet Muhammad as recounted in the Muslim sources, and so makes a special claim upon the attention of those interested in the subsequent unfolding of Near Eastern history. From the beginning, however, we should bear two caveats in mind. First, the connection between Arabia and its people and their culture, on the one hand, and Islam on the other, is problematic. The religious tradition which we now identify as “Islam” may have begun in an Arabian context, and certainly that context remained central to the later development of the religion for any number of reasons – for example, the fact that the Koran is in Arabic, the language of the inhabitants of the peninsula, or the importance which Muslims later accorded to the behavior of the Prophet and his companions in determining what constitutes a “proper” Islamic life. But is it useful to think of Islam as principally a product of Arabia, as the Islamic tradition does? Certainly the demographic and cultural center of gravity in the Islamic world quickly moved beyond the Arabian peninsula. Even if the Arabian crucible is important, what exactly does that mean? To what extent, for example, was Arabia in the sixth and seventh centuries integrated into the larger cultural and religious patterns of the rest of the Near East? Arabia may be where Islam began, but the cultures and traditions of other areas, most notably the more populated regions of the Near East from Egypt to Iran, arguably played a more critical role in the subsequent delimitation of Islamic identity.

The mystical tradition which came to be known as Sufism has always had a problematic relationship with certain elements within the Islamic religious community. On the one hand, those identified as Sufis' have often come into conflict with both political authorities and some ulama, particularly the jurists, both on doctrinal grounds and because of the Sufis' embrace of practices which most jurists abhor. On the other hand, the Sufis' themselves have traced, with sincere conviction, the intellectual descent of their principles and ideas back to the very earliest Muslims, including most importantly cAli ibn Abi Talib and the Prophet Muhammad himself. That claim is certainly a pious fiction, but the Koran does contain a number of verses which can legitimately be read as expressing support for certain principles, such as asceticism, which came to be hallmarks of the Sufitradition. In any case, by the Middle Period of Islamic history Sufism had made its presence felt throughout the Muslim world, capturing in one form or another the allegiance of virtually the whole of the Islamic establishment, including representatives of the strictest juristic traditions.

Like Islam itself, Sufism took a considerable time to develop. The roots of what came to be known as Sufism can be traced back to ascetic and pietistic circles within the umma in its first two centuries.

The religious and cultural tradition of Islam came to be identified as the legacy of Muhammad the son of cAbdallah. Muhammad, as depicted in the Muslim narrative of Islamic origins, was an inhabitant of the western Arabian town of Mecca. According to those sources, in the early decades of the seventh century Muhammad embarked upon a prophetic career, preaching faith in the single God and articulating to his followers God's revelations to him. Having provoked the wrath of the leaders of the pagan society in which he lived, Muhammad and his small band of followers fled to the oasis of Yathrib some 200 miles north of Mecca in the year 622, an event known to the Muslim tradition as the hijra and which marks the beginning of the Muslim calendar. In Yathrib, also known as Medina (from madinat al-nabi, “the city of the prophet”), Muhammad first established a Muslim umma or “community.” Over the final decade of his life, Muhammad continued to receive revelations which after his death in 632 were collected into the Koran as we now know it, and gradually brought the inhabitants of virtually the whole of the Arabian peninsula to embrace Islam and to acknowledge the political supremacy of his umma.

The Muslim tradition thus clearly situates the origins of the faith in an Arabian context.

Islamic law, both as a general ideal and as a body of concrete guidelines for social behavior, functioned as a powerful “glue” in the Islamic societies of the medieval Near East. The importance of the law was a product of a number of the developments which we have been tracing – for example, the evolution of Islam in a world of multiple faith traditions and through a sometimes tense, sometimes creative dialogue with them, since law was understood to be something which attached to the individual, not from social rank or place of habitation, but through his or her membership in one religious community or another. Even more important was the emergence of the ulama as the principal locus of Muslim religious authority. The political fragmentation of the umma may actually have fostered a fixation on the sharica as a focal point of Muslim identity, since the cosmopolitan ulama constituted the most immediate and visible reminder of the persistently compelling ideal of Muslim unity.

Even so, the changed circumstances of the Middle Period saw significant developments in the social experience of Islamic law. By the beginning of the Middle Period, after several centuries of development, the Sunni madhahib were fairly well established – the four which have survived into modern times (the Shafici, Hanafi, Hanbali, and Maliki), as well as a number of others which petered out at various times.

As we have stressed, the Umayyad caliphs have been treated somewhat unfairly by later Muslim tradition. They were dismissed by some Muslims as impious usurpers, and by the middle of the eighth century, there is evidence of deep-seated dissatisfaction with their rule. The fault lines were many and overlapping. Non-Arab converts, still limited in number but constituting an increasingly large component of Muslim society and the army, resented the social inferiority which they experienced. Some of the dissatisfaction was now effectively local or regional, as Iraqi Arabs, or those settled in more remote provinces, chafed at domination by the Syrian soldiers who had formed the core of Umayyad support. Competition among the Arab elite reached critical proportions, too, as factions identified as one tribal grouping or another contended for power and access to the wealth of the state. In particular, violence between the broad tribal alliances of Qays and Yemen reached endemic proportions, and finally consumed the Umayyad state itself, precipitating the murder of the caliph al-Walid II by a group of Yemenis, and a movement of bloody vengeance on behalf of Qays led by the last Umayyad caliph, Marwan II.

Above all, the middle of the eighth century was a period of turmoil in the realm of ideas, values, and expectations, as the inhabitants of the Near East witnessed and participated in a process, inflamed by millenarian dreams, of disruptive struggle over the ordering of their political and religious worlds.

From the perspective of the non-Muslim communities of the Near East, the three centuries which followed the cAbbasid revolution were decisive in two respects. In the first place, it was in this period that the non-Muslims were reduced to minority status in most areas. In the second, with the fuller articulation of Islamic law, the conventions and procedures which would govern relations between the non-Muslim communities and the Islamic state, and which would institutionalize the political and social inferiority of the former, took on a normative shape. Viewed from such a perspective, it is difficult to characterize the period as anything other than one of overall decline. That perspective and that characterization, however, can obscure a more complex reality. In the first place, non-Muslims experienced life under Muslim regimes in different ways: the Jewish experience, for example, was not exactly the same as the Zoroastrian, despite certain common patterns. Moreover, the dhimmi communities were hardly moribund, and in many instances responded vigorously to the challenges posed to them by the new dominant Muslim culture.

The Islamic societies of the Near East in this period were deeply multicultural, and so there were plenty of opportunities for significant contact and exchange across the sectarian divide. The Islamic world-view, in which Islam was simply one (albeit the final and most perfect) of many distinct faith traditions, perhaps inherently raised the question of what a conversation with those other traditions would produce.

Judaism

The religion of the people of Israel played a critical role in the religious matrix of late antiquity. Jews constituted a significant minority of the population in many Mediterranean towns, and Judaism had an impact on the religious lives of many non-Jews as well. It was out of Judaism that Christianity first arose, and at least partly through a bitter dispute with its mother faith that the new religion defined itself. As we shall see, the relationship between Judaism and Islam was just as close. Nor were the older pagan traditions immune from the influence of the first of the major monotheistic faiths. Nonetheless, reconstructing the history of Judaism in the Near East in the centuries before and after the rise of Islam is difficult, given the nature of the surviving historical record; much of the story has to be pieced together from sources hostile to the Jews and their faith.

The God of Israel was known throughout the Near Eastern and Mediterranean worlds, thanks to the widespread dispersal of his worshipers. In part their dispersion resulted from the successive deportations of Jews from Palestine, under the Assyrians and Babylonians and, in the wake of the Bar Kochba rebellion in the second century CE, the Romans. By the rise of Islam, for example, the Jewish community of Babylonia was well over one thousand years old.