Abbasid Decline and the Spread of Islamic Civilization to South and
Southeast Asia

Chapter 7

Chapter Summary

By the mid 9th century the Abbasids were losing control over their vast Muslim empire.

Distance hampered efforts to move armies and control local administrators.

Most subjects also retained local loyalties.

Shi'i dissenters were particularly troublesome, while slave and peasant risings weakened the empire.

Mongol invasions in the 13th century ended the very weakened state.

Despite the political decline, Islamic civilization reached new cultural heights, and Islam expanded widely in the Afro-Asian world through conquest and peaceful conversion.

The Islamic Heartlands in the Middle Abbasid Era

The Abbasid Empire disintegrated between the 9th and 13th centuries.

Peasant revolts and slavery increased.

Despite the artistic and intellectual creativity of the age, the position of women eroded.

The Islamic Heartlands in the Late Abbasid Era

Signs of decline were present during the reign of Caliph al-Mahdi (775-785).

He failed to reconcile moderate Shi'i to Abbasid rule.

Al-Mahdi abandoned the frugal ways of his predecessor and surrounded his court with luxury.

He failed to establish a succession system resolving disputes among his many sons, leaving a lasting problem to future rulers.

Imperial Extravagance

One son, Harun al-Rashid, became one of the most famous Abbasid caliphs.

The luxury and intrigues of his court were immortalized in The Thousand and

One Nights.

The young ruler became dependent on Persian advisors, a trend followed during later reigns as rulers became pawns in factional court struggles.

Succession Disputes

Al-Rashid's death led to the first of many civil wars over the succession.

The sons of the winner, al-Ma'mun, built personal retainer armies, some including Turkic nomads, to safeguard their futures.

The armies became power centers, removing and selecting caliphs.

Their uncontrolled excesses developed into a general focus for societal unrest.

Imperial Breakdown

The continual civil violence drained the imperial treasury.

Caliphs increased the strain by constructing costly new imperial centers.

Peasants had imposing tax burdens, often collected by farmers which forced the taxes upon them.

Agrarian Disorder

Agricultural villages were abandoned and irrigation works fell into disrepair.

Bandits and vagabonds were everywhere.

They participated in peasant rebellions often instigated by dissident religious groups.

The Declining Position of Women

The freedom and influence possessed during the 1st centuries of Islam severely declined. Male-dominated Abbasid society imagined that women possessed incurable lust, and therefore men needed to be segregated from all but the women of their family.

The harem and the veil symbolized subjugation to males.

The seclusion of elite women, wives and concubines, continued, and the practice of veiling spread to all.

Family and Society

Abbasid wealth generated large demand for concubines and male slaves.

Most came from non-Muslim neighboring lands.

Nomadic Incursions

By the mid-10th century breakaway former provinces began to challenge Abbasid rule.

The Buyids of Persia captured Baghdad in 945.

The caliphs henceforth became powerless puppets controlled by sultans, the actual rulers.

The Seljuk Turks defeated the Buyids in 1055 and ruled the remnants of the Abbasid empire for two centuries.

The Eclipse of Caliphal Power

The Seljuks were staunch Sunnis who purged the Shi’i.

For a time Seljuk military power restored the diminished caliphate.

Egyptians and Byzantines were defeated, the latter success opening Anatolia, the nucleus of the later Ottoman Empire, to settlement by Turkic nomads.

The Impact of the Christian Crusades

West European Christian knights in 1096 invaded Muslim territory to capture the biblical Holy Land.

They established small, rival kingdoms that were not a threat to the more powerful surrounding Muslim leaders.

Most were recaptured near the close of the 12^th century by Muslims reunited under Saladin.

The last fell in 1291.

The Christian Crusades

The Crusades had an important impact upon the Christian world through intensifying the existing European borrowing of the more sophisticated technology, architecture, medicine, mathematics, science, and general culture of Muslim civilization.

Europeans recovered much Greek learning lost after the fall of Rome.

Italian merchants remained in Islamic centers after the Crusader defeat and were far more important carriers of Islamic advanced knowledge than the Christian warriors.

Muslim peoples were little interested in aspects of European civilization.

An Age Of Learning

The political and social turmoil of late Abbasid times did not prevent Muslim thinkers and craftsmen, in states from Spain to Persia, from producing one of the great ages of human creativity.

Rapid urban growth and its associated prosperity persisted until late in the Abbasid era.

Artistic Refinement

Employment opportunities for skilled individuals remained abundant.

Merchants amassed large fortunes through supplying urban needs and from long-distance trade to India, Southeast Asia, China, North Africa, and Europe.

Artists and artisans created mosques, palaces, tapestries, rugs, bronzes, and ceramics.

The Full Flowering of Persian Literature

Persian replaced Arabic as the primary written language of the Abbasid court.

Arabic was the language of religion, law, and the natural sciences.

Persian became the language of "high culture," used for literary expression, administration, and scholarship.

The development of a beautiful calligraphy made literature a visual art form.

Persian Literature

Perhaps the greatest work was Firdawsi's epic poem, Shah-Nama, a history of Persia from creation to Islamic conquest.

Other writers, as the great poet Sa’di and Omar Khayyam in the Rubiyat, blended mystical and commonplace themes in their work.

Achievements in the Sciences

Muslim society for several centuries surpassed all others in scientific and technological discoveries.

In mathematics thinkers made major corrections in the theories learned from the ancient Greeks.

In chemistry they created the objective experiment.

Al-Razi classified all material substances into three categories: animal, vegetable, mineral.

Al-Biruni calculated the exact specific weight of 18 major minerals.

The Sciences

Sophisticated, improved, astronomical instruments, like the astrolabe, were used for mapping the heavens.

Much of the Muslim achievement had practical application.

In medicine improved hospitals and formal courses of studies accompanied important experimental work.

Traders and craftsmen introduced machines and techniques originating in China for paper making, silk weaving, and ceramic firing.

Scholars made some of the world's best maps.

Religious
Trends

The conflicting social and political trends showed in divergent patterns of religious development.

Sufis developed vibrant mysticism, but ulama (religious scholars) became more conservative and suspicious of non-Muslim influences and scientific thought.

They were suspicious of Greek rationalism and insisted that the Quran was the all-embracing source of knowledge.

The great theologian al-Ghazali struggled to fuse Greek and Quranic traditions, but often was opposed by orthodox scholars.

The New Impetus for Expansion

The Sufis created the most innovative religious movement.

They reacted against the arid teachings of the ulama and sought personal union with Allah through asceticism, meditation, songs, dancing, or drugs.

Many Sufis gained reputations as healers and miracle workers; others made the movement a central factor in the continuing expansion of Islam.

New Waves of Nomadic Invasions and the End of the Caliphate

In the early 13th century central Asian nomadic invaders, the Mongols, threatened Islamic lands.

Chinggis Khan destroyed the Turkic-Persian kingdoms east of Baghdad.

His grandson, Hulegu, continued the assault.

The last Abbasid ruler was killed when Baghdad fell in 1258.

The once great Abbasid capital became an unimportant backwater in the Muslim world.

The Coming of Islam to South Asia

Muslim invasions from the 7th century added to the complexity of Indian civilization.

Previous nomadic invaders usually had blended over time into India’s sophisticated civilization.

Muslims, possessors of an equally sophisticated, but very different, culture, were a new factor.

Islam in South Asia

The open, tolerant, and inclusive Hindu religion, based in a social system dominated by castes, Islam was doctrinaire, monotheistic, evangelical, and egalitarian.

In the earlier period of contact, conflict predominated, but as time passed, although tensions persisted, peaceful commercial and religious exchange occurred in a society where Muslim rulers governed Hindu subjects.

North India on the Eve of the Muslim Invasions

North India remained politically divided between rival dynasties after the 5th century fall of the Gupta until Harsha in the 7th century created a stable successor empire in the central and eastern Ganges plain.

Although he ruled an area larger than any contemporary European realm, Harsha failed to unite India’s subcontinent.

Harsha's reign was a time of peace and prosperity.

the Muslim Invasions

He built roads, rest houses, and hospitals; he endowed temples and Buddhist monasteries.

Urban areas, as the capital at Kanuji, flourished and artistic creativity revived.

Harsha, a Hindu, was tolerant of all faiths and strongly attracted to Buddhism.

Political Divisions

Harsha's empire collapsed with his death in 646.

Hindu culture continued to flourish, but political divisions left north India open to Muslim invasions beginning in 711.

The Umayyad general Muhammad ibn Qasim conquered and annexed Sind, and , despite quarrels among succeeding Muslim dynasties, the occupation endured.

The First Muslim Invasions

Many Indians, treated as "people of the book," welcomed the new rulers because they offered religious tolerance and lighter taxes.

Most indigenous officials retained their positions, while brahmin castes were respected.

Few Arabs resided in cities or garrison towns, and minimal conversion efforts did not change existing religious beliefs.

Indian Influences on Islamic Civilization

Although Islam's impact in India was minimal, Islamic civilization was enriched by Indian culture.

Indian achievements in science, mathematics, medicine, music, and astronomy passed to the Arabs.

Indian numerals were accepted, later to pass to Europe as "Arabic" numerals.

Colonies of Arabs settled along India's coasts, adopted local customs, and provided staging points for later Islamic expansion to island and mainland Southeast India.

From Booty to Empire

After the initial Muslim conquests, internal divisions weakened Muslim rule and allowed limited Hindu reconquest.

In the 10th century a Turkish dynasty gained power in Afghanistan.

Its third ruler, Mahmud of Ghazni, began two centuries of incursions into northern India.

In the 12th century the Persian Muhammad of Ghur created an extensive state in the Indus valley and north-central India.

The Second Wave of Muslim Invasions

Later campaigns extended it along the plains of the Ganges to Bengal.

A lieutenant to Muhammad, Qutb-ud-Din Aibak, later formed a new state, with its capital at Delhi on the Ganges plain.

The succeeding dynasties, the sultans of Delhi, were military states.

Their authority was limited by factional strife and dependence upon Hindu subordinates.

They ruled much of north-central India for the next 300 years.

Patterns of Conversion

Although Muslims came as conquerors, interaction with Indians early was dominated by peaceful exchanges.

The main carriers of Islam were traders and Sufi mystics, the latter drawing followers because of similarities to Indian holy men.

Their mosques and schools became centers of regional political power providing protection to local populations.

Conversion Patterns

Low and outcast Hindus were welcomed.

Buddhists were the most numerous converts.

Buddhist spiritual decline had debased its practices and turned interest to the vigorous new religion of Islam.

Others converted to escape taxes or through intermarriage.

Muslim migrants fleeing 13th and 14th century Mongol incursions also increased the Islamic community.

Patterns of Accommodation

In most regions Islam initially had little impact on the general Hindu community.

High-caste Hindus did not accept the invaders as their equals.

Although serving as administrators or soldiers, they remained socially aloof, living in separate quarters and not intermarrying.

Accommodation

Hindus thought the Muslims, as earlier invaders, would be absorbed by Hindu society.

Muslim communities did adopt many Indian ways.

They accepted Hindu social hierarchies, foods, and attitudes toward women.

Islamic Challenge

Muslims, despite Indian influences, held to the tenets of Islam.

The Hindu response, open to all individuals and castes led to an increased emphasis on devotional cults of gods and goddesses (bhakti).

The cults, open to men, women, and all castes, stressed the importance of strong emotional bonds to the gods.

Mira Bai, a low-caste woman, and Kabir, a Muslim weaver, composed songs and poems in regional languages accessible to common people.

Hindu Revival

Reaching a state of ecstatic unity brought removal of all past sins and rendered caste distinctions meaningless.

Shiva, Vishnu, and the goddess Kali were the most worshipped gods.

The movement helped, especially among low-caste groups, to stem conversion to Islam.

Stand-off

Similarities in style and message between Sufis and bhaktic devotees led to attempts to bridge the gaps between Islam and Hinduism.

The Muslim Presence in India at the End of the Sultanate Period

By the close of the sultanate period there were two distinct religious communities.

The great majority of the population remained Hindu.

The Spread of Islam to Southeast Asia

Southeast Asia had been a middle ground where the Chinese part of the Eurasian trading complex met the Indian Ocean zone.

By the 7th and 8th centuries southeast Asian sailors and ships were active in the trade.

Spread of Islam

When Muslims, from the 8th century, gained control of Indian commerce, Islamic culture reached Southeast Asia.

The 13th century collapse of the trading empire of Shrivijaya, ruled by devout Buddhists and located on the Straits of Malacca and northern Sumatra, made possible large-scale, peaceful, Muslim entry.

Trading Contacts and Conversion

Peaceful contacts and voluntary conversion were more important to the spread of Islam than conquest and force.

Trading contacts prepared the way for conversion, with the process carried forward by Sufis.

The first conversions occurred in small northern Sumatran ports.

On the mainland the key to the spread of Islam was the city of Malacca, the smaller successor to Shrivijaya.

From Malacca Islam went to Malaya, Sumatra, and the state of Demak on Java's north coast.

Malacca

Islam and Java

Islam spread into Java and moved on to the Celebes and Mindanao in the Philippines.

Coastal cities were the most receptive to Islam.

Their conversion linked them to a Muslim system connected to the principal Indian Ocean ports.

Buddhist dynasties were present in many regions, but since Buddhist conversions were limited to the elite, the mass of the population was open to the massage of Sufis.

The island of Bali and mainland Southeast Asia, where Buddhism had gained popular support, remained impervious to Islam.

Sufi Mystics

The mystical quality of Islam in Southeast Asia was due to Sufi strivings.

They often were tolerant of the indigenous peoples’ Buddhist and Hindu beliefs.

Converts retained pre-Islamic practices, especially for regulating social interaction.

The Nature of Southeast Asian Islam

Islamic law ruled legal transactions.

Women held a stronger familial and societal position than they had in the Middle East or India.

They dominated local markets, while in some regions matrilineal descent persisted.

Many pre-Muslim beliefs were incorporated into Islamic ceremonies.

Conversion and Accommodation in the Spread of World Religions

Great civilizations and world religions have been closely associated throughout world history.

World religions, belief structures that flourish in many differing cultures, have to possess a spiritual core rich enough to appeal to potential converts.

They have to possess core beliefs that allow new members to maintain a sense of common identity, but also must be flexible enough to allow retention of important parts of their local culture.

The capacity for accommodation allowed Islam, and later Christianity, to spread successfully into many differing communities.

The Legacy of the Abbasid Age

Despite the political instability of the Abbasids, Islam's central position in global history was solidified.

The expanding Muslim world linked ancient civilizations through conquest and commercial networks.

Islam was the civilizer of nomadic peoples in Asia and Africa.

Its cultural contributions diffused widely from great cities and universities. .

Conclusion

There were tendencies that placed Muslims at a disadvantage in relation to rival civilizations, particularly to their European rivals.

Political divisions caused weaknesses in many regions.

Most importantly, the increasing rigidity of the Ulama caused Muslims to become less receptive to outside influences at a time when the European world transformed its culture and power.

Abbasid Decline and the Spread of Islamic Civilization to South and
Southeast Asia

The End


	By the mid 9th century the Abbasids were losing control over their vast Muslim empire.
	Distance hampered efforts to move armies and control local administrators.
	Most subjects also retained local loyalties.
	Shi'i dissenters were particularly troublesome, while slave and peasant risings weakened the empire.
	Mongol invasions in the 13th century ended the very weakened state.
	Despite the political decline, Islamic civilization reached new cultural heights, and Islam expanded widely in the Afro-Asian world through conquest and peaceful conversion.


	The Abbasid Empire disintegrated between the 9th and 13th centuries.
	Peasant revolts and slavery increased.
	Despite the artistic and intellectual creativity of the age, the position of women eroded.


	Signs of decline were present during the reign of Caliph al-Mahdi (775-785).
	He failed to reconcile moderate Shi'i to Abbasid rule.
	Al-Mahdi abandoned the frugal ways of his predecessor and surrounded his court with luxury.
	He failed to establish a succession system resolving disputes among his many sons, leaving a lasting problem to future rulers.


	One son, Harun al-Rashid, became one of the most famous Abbasid caliphs.
	The luxury and intrigues of his court were immortalized in The Thousand and
	One Nights.
	The young ruler became dependent on Persian advisors, a trend followed during later reigns as rulers became pawns in factional court struggles.


	Al-Rashid's death led to the first of many civil wars over the succession.
	The sons of the winner, al-Ma'mun, built personal retainer armies, some including Turkic nomads, to safeguard their futures.
	The armies became power centers, removing and selecting caliphs.
	Their uncontrolled excesses developed into a general focus for societal unrest.


	The continual civil violence drained the imperial treasury.
	Caliphs increased the strain by constructing costly new imperial centers.
	Peasants had imposing tax burdens, often collected by farmers which forced the taxes upon them.


	Agricultural villages were abandoned and irrigation works fell into disrepair.
	Bandits and vagabonds were everywhere.
	They participated in peasant rebellions often instigated by dissident religious groups.


	The freedom and influence possessed during the 1st centuries of Islam severely declined. Male-dominated Abbasid society imagined that women possessed incurable lust, and therefore men needed to be segregated from all but the women of their family.
	The harem and the veil symbolized subjugation to males.
	The seclusion of elite women, wives and concubines, continued, and the practice of veiling spread to all.


	Abbasid wealth generated large demand for concubines and male slaves.
	Most came from non-Muslim neighboring lands.


	By the mid-10th century breakaway former provinces began to challenge Abbasid rule.
	The Buyids of Persia captured Baghdad in 945.
	The caliphs henceforth became powerless puppets controlled by sultans, the actual rulers.
	The Seljuk Turks defeated the Buyids in 1055 and ruled the remnants of the Abbasid empire for two centuries.


	The Seljuks were staunch Sunnis who purged the Shi’i.
	For a time Seljuk military power restored the diminished caliphate.
	Egyptians and Byzantines were defeated, the latter success opening Anatolia, the nucleus of the later Ottoman Empire, to settlement by Turkic nomads.


	West European Christian knights in 1096 invaded Muslim territory to capture the biblical Holy Land.
	They established small, rival kingdoms that were not a threat to the more powerful surrounding Muslim leaders.
	Most were recaptured near the close of the 12^th century by Muslims reunited under Saladin.
	The last fell in 1291.


	The Crusades had an important impact upon the Christian world through intensifying the existing European borrowing of the more sophisticated technology, architecture, medicine, mathematics, science, and general culture of Muslim civilization.
	Europeans recovered much Greek learning lost after the fall of Rome.
	Italian merchants remained in Islamic centers after the Crusader defeat and were far more important carriers of Islamic advanced knowledge than the Christian warriors.
	Muslim peoples were little interested in aspects of European civilization.


	The political and social turmoil of late Abbasid times did not prevent Muslim thinkers and craftsmen, in states from Spain to Persia, from producing one of the great ages of human creativity.
	Rapid urban growth and its associated prosperity persisted until late in the Abbasid era.


	Employment opportunities for skilled individuals remained abundant.
	Merchants amassed large fortunes through supplying urban needs and from long-distance trade to India, Southeast Asia, China, North Africa, and Europe.
	Artists and artisans created mosques, palaces, tapestries, rugs, bronzes, and ceramics.


	Persian replaced Arabic as the primary written language of the Abbasid court.
	Arabic was the language of religion, law, and the natural sciences.
	Persian became the language of "high culture," used for literary expression, administration, and scholarship.
	The development of a beautiful calligraphy made literature a visual art form.


	Perhaps the greatest work was Firdawsi's epic poem, Shah-Nama, a history of Persia from creation to Islamic conquest.
	Other writers, as the great poet Sa’di and Omar Khayyam in the Rubiyat, blended mystical and commonplace themes in their work.


	Muslim society for several centuries surpassed all others in scientific and technological discoveries.
	In mathematics thinkers made major corrections in the theories learned from the ancient Greeks.
	In chemistry they created the objective experiment.
	Al-Razi classified all material substances into three categories: animal, vegetable, mineral.
	Al-Biruni calculated the exact specific weight of 18 major minerals.


	Sophisticated, improved, astronomical instruments, like the astrolabe, were used for mapping the heavens.
	Much of the Muslim achievement had practical application.
	In medicine improved hospitals and formal courses of studies accompanied important experimental work.
	Traders and craftsmen introduced machines and techniques originating in China for paper making, silk weaving, and ceramic firing.
	Scholars made some of the world's best maps.


	The conflicting social and political trends showed in divergent patterns of religious development.
	Sufis developed vibrant mysticism, but ulama (religious scholars) became more conservative and suspicious of non-Muslim influences and scientific thought.
	They were suspicious of Greek rationalism and insisted that the Quran was the all-embracing source of knowledge.
	The great theologian al-Ghazali struggled to fuse Greek and Quranic traditions, but often was opposed by orthodox scholars.


	The Sufis created the most innovative religious movement.
	They reacted against the arid teachings of the ulama and sought personal union with Allah through asceticism, meditation, songs, dancing, or drugs.
	Many Sufis gained reputations as healers and miracle workers; others made the movement a central factor in the continuing expansion of Islam.


	In the early 13th century central Asian nomadic invaders, the Mongols, threatened Islamic lands.
	Chinggis Khan destroyed the Turkic-Persian kingdoms east of Baghdad.
	His grandson, Hulegu, continued the assault.
	The last Abbasid ruler was killed when Baghdad fell in 1258.
	The once great Abbasid capital became an unimportant backwater in the Muslim world.


	Muslim invasions from the 7th century added to the complexity of Indian civilization.
	Previous nomadic invaders usually had blended over time into India’s sophisticated civilization.
	Muslims, possessors of an equally sophisticated, but very different, culture, were a new factor.


	The open, tolerant, and inclusive Hindu religion, based in a social system dominated by castes, Islam was doctrinaire, monotheistic, evangelical, and egalitarian.
	In the earlier period of contact, conflict predominated, but as time passed, although tensions persisted, peaceful commercial and religious exchange occurred in a society where Muslim rulers governed Hindu subjects.


	North India remained politically divided between rival dynasties after the 5th century fall of the Gupta until Harsha in the 7th century created a stable successor empire in the central and eastern Ganges plain.
	Although he ruled an area larger than any contemporary European realm, Harsha failed to unite India’s subcontinent.
	Harsha's reign was a time of peace and prosperity.


	He built roads, rest houses, and hospitals; he endowed temples and Buddhist monasteries.
	Urban areas, as the capital at Kanuji, flourished and artistic creativity revived.
	Harsha, a Hindu, was tolerant of all faiths and strongly attracted to Buddhism.


	Harsha's empire collapsed with his death in 646.
	Hindu culture continued to flourish, but political divisions left north India open to Muslim invasions beginning in 711.
	The Umayyad general Muhammad ibn Qasim conquered and annexed Sind, and , despite quarrels among succeeding Muslim dynasties, the occupation endured.


	Many Indians, treated as "people of the book," welcomed the new rulers because they offered religious tolerance and lighter taxes.
	Most indigenous officials retained their positions, while brahmin castes were respected.
	Few Arabs resided in cities or garrison towns, and minimal conversion efforts did not change existing religious beliefs.


	Although Islam's impact in India was minimal, Islamic civilization was enriched by Indian culture.
	Indian achievements in science, mathematics, medicine, music, and astronomy passed to the Arabs.
	Indian numerals were accepted, later to pass to Europe as "Arabic" numerals.
	Colonies of Arabs settled along India's coasts, adopted local customs, and provided staging points for later Islamic expansion to island and mainland Southeast India.


	After the initial Muslim conquests, internal divisions weakened Muslim rule and allowed limited Hindu reconquest.
	In the 10th century a Turkish dynasty gained power in Afghanistan.
	Its third ruler, Mahmud of Ghazni, began two centuries of incursions into northern India.
	In the 12th century the Persian Muhammad of Ghur created an extensive state in the Indus valley and north-central India.