Portents of Infection

Did Avicenna invent quarantine in the 11th century?

In the wake of the coronavirus crisis, numerous claims have been making the rounds of cyberspace to the effect that during the Middle Ages, Muslims had an almost modern understanding of infectious disease and the steps that should be taken to combat it. In particular, it is claimed that Islam implemented quarantine centuries before the practice became common in Europe during the Black Death.

In my previous installment, I discussed what Muslim scripture had to say on the subject of disease and quarantine, and how it was interpreted by the theologians of the time. The bottom line was that although there are passages about not entering or leaving areas where plague has broken out, they are more about patiently submitting to the Will of Allah, than about trying to divert His Will by taking steps to combat the disease.

But in addition to its theologians, the medieval Muslim world was known for its scientists. They were certainly ahead of the curve in many areas, including medicine, and in this installment I’m going to take a look at the state of the art of medical science, circa 1000 AD. I’m going to focus in particular on the king of all medieval Muslim physicians, Avicenna. Born in 980 in what’s now Uzbekistan, Avicenna was a Renaissance Man hundreds of years before the Renaissance, with accomplishments in mathematics, astronomy, chemistry, and poetry. He even served in government when a satisfied patient, the Emir of Hamadan, made him his vizier (prime minister).

But it’s for his medical works that Avicenna is best known. His Canon of Medicine was the textbook on the subject, both in the Muslim world and in Christendom, up until the 1600s. Some claim that he invented quarantine and even that he came up with the forty day isolation period, which later became common in Europe and gave the practice its name (quaranta is Italian for forty).

I thought it was suspicious that all the claims about Avicenna and quarantine came from secondary sources—no actual quotations—so I did some research and found no place in the Canon of Medicine or Avicenna’s other works where he recommends the practice. The earliest references I could find come from around 1500, when reformers like Ilyas bin Abram al-Yahudi, a Jewish convert to Islam, attempted to persuade a reluctant Ottoman Court to adopt state-of-the-art medical practices. In her excellent 2012 book, Plague, Quarantines and Geopolitics in the Ottoman Empire, Birsen Bulmus speculates that, “Perhaps Al-Yahudi sought to cover his own personal arguments – like his warning ‘not go in crowded districts’ – with earlier renowned authorities so that his recommendations would be accepted within literary Islamic traditions.”¹ In any case, al-Yahudi’s arguments fell on deaf ears—quarantine would not be established in the Ottoman Empire until 1838, and even then, only after considerable debate.

Indeed, it would have been strange for Avicenna to champion quarantine, given the understanding of health and disease that prevailed in his time. Despite the hype one hears about the great accomplishments of medieval Muslim physicians, it is, frankly, a mixed bag. They made great strides in diagnosing disease and assembling massive catalogs of symptoms. For example, A Treatise on Smallpox and Measles by Muhammad ibn Zakariyya ar-Razi (854-925), known in the west as Rhazes, is the oldest book we know of to distinguish between the two diseases (For an amusing story about Rhazes’s foray into psychology, see here). But when it came to understanding disease, and treating it, things were considerably more hit or miss.

The obstacle was that the germ theory of disease didn’t exist. The conceptual framework of medicine had not progressed since the time of the Ancient Greeks. The prevailing theory was Galen’s notion of the four humors—blood, phlegm, green bile, and black bile—and their corresponding properties of hot/cold and wet/dry. Under this theory, illness was the result of the humors getting out of balance, and the cure was to eat foods with opposite properties of temperature and moisture in order to compensate. Green bile, for instance, was thought to be hot and dry and therefore an excess of it caused fevers. Thus, to cure fever, the green bile needed to be balanced with something cool and moist. Although we do find some powerful drugs in the Muslim pharmacopeias—in a recent post about a tenth century cookbook, I included a recipe for opium-based cough drops—treatments were mostly food-based and bordered on quackery. In the case of fever, gourds and pomegranates were thought to be especially effective.

As for what causes the humors to fall out of balance in the first place, there were various theories.

Take smallpox, for example. Since Bubonic Plague was taking a rest—the aftershocks of the Plague of Justinian had died out around the end of the Umayyad Caliphate (750) and the Black Death of the 1300s was still centuries away—smallpox was probably the most dangerous disease with which the physicians of the Islamic Golden Age had experience.

Absolutely everyone got it, usually during childhood. Either they survived or they didn’t—the death rate was about 25%. If they survived, they never got it again.

Based on these observations, physicians concluded smallpox was just a normal part of growing up. Both Rhazes and Avicenna described it as a process of rot or fermentation in the blood. According to The Canon of Medicine,

Its symptomatic cause is the natural fermenting [or boiling] of the blood to shake out the remaining menstrual nourishment that was mixed in it from the time of pregnancy…like what nature does in squeezing the grape until it becomes a drink resembling its essence [i.e., wine].2

Still, this didn’t explain epidemics, why smallpox would break out in large numbers in certain times and places. Along those lines, Avicenna did have some rudimentary notion about contagion. One paragraph in The Canon of Medicine lists diseases that can be spread from person to person, and the manner in which they’re spread:

And among the diseases, some are contagious, like leprosy, scabies, smallpox, infectious fever, and festering wounds, especially where the houses are cramped, or likewise if the neighboring houses are downwind. Also conjunctivitis, especially from gazing into the eyes of someone else, and toothache from imagining biting into something acidic. Also pannus and leprosy.3

However, this was not so much due to the transmission of germs from person-to-person—Avicenna knew nothing of the variola virus—as it did with the presence of bad air, or miasmas, in certain places. Hence the significance of whether a house was closely confined or downwind from an infected house.

Sometimes the reason is that winds carry bad vapors from distant places that have stagnant water in them, or wounded bodies from battles, or those who died from fevers and weren’t buried or burned. And sometimes the reason is proximity to a neighboring place. And sometimes corruption is shown to be hidden in the ground for reasons not understood in detail. Then the water and the air are prepared and the fevers occur.4

Avicenna fills page after page describing how winds, seasons, temperature, humidity, and even the heavens affect the quality of the air. For example,

If we see the south wind increase, and days of turbid air, and then after that it becomes clear for a week, and then a cold night occurs that extends into a hot, hazy, cloudy day, then an epidemic might come that causes infectious fevers and smallpox and their like. And likewise if there was a cool summer and the atmosphere was heavy with soot. And comets, fires, and meteors in the fall are portents of infection as well.5

"As for improving the air," Avicenna writes,

...it is the goal to dry the air. Make the air good and prevent the rottenness from entering and crude matter from returning with ambergris, camphor, musk, and a measure of candy, storax, sandarac, asafetida, clove resin, mastic, terebinth resin, laudanum, honey, saffron, cypress, juniper, moss, bay leaf, sedge, 'adhkhar, savin, waja, shababk, bitter almonds, and so forth. And take these components in vinegar and asafetida and sprinkle the house...perfume with incense: sandalwood, camphor, pomegranate peel, myrtle, apples, quince, teak, tamarisk, and ribas. The perfuming must be repeated.6

This use of perfumes and incenses to fumigate the bad air was common practice. The historian as-Suyuti (d. 1505) tells of an incident during the "Plague of the Notables" (716-717), when a merchant appeared before the prince Ayyub, son of the Caliph Suleiman. The desperate courtiers grabbed the merchant's supply of musk right out of his hands. It didn't work though. When the merchant returned a week and a half later, Ayyub and all his household were dead and the palace boarded up.⁷

Clearly these three theories—maturation of the blood, person-to-person transmission, and miasmas—are not entirely consistent with each other, despite all appearing in the same book, and sometimes on the same page. The miasma theory is the one to which Avicenna dedicates the most space, and also the one which one hears the most about in the works of other authors. It is, of course, entirely at odds with the idea of quarantine.

If disease is the product of a foul and pestilent congregation of vapors that have accumulated in some place, then rather than hunkering down where you are, the logical thing to do is escape to some more wholesome locale. The chronicles of the Umayyad period are rife with accounts of rulers fleeing their palaces during outbreaks of Bubonic Plague. Finding higher ground was especially popular, since it was believed that the miasmas had an affinity for hollows and valleys. In the example I gave in my previous post, in which the Caliph Omar relocated his troops during the Plague of Amwas, their destination was the higher elevations of Hauran, in what's now southern Syria.⁸

Despite the vaunted reputation of medieval Muslim physicians in general, and Avicenna in particular, there is not only no evidence that they invented quarantine, but the idea wouldn't even make sense to them, given their basic ideas about medicine. Some of which were downright laughable. Obviously comets have nothing to do with smallpox, and even though conjunctivitis is highly contagious, spreading it requires some form of contact; you don’t get it merely by gazing into the eyes of someone who has it.

Still, we shouldn’t laugh too hard. Their painstaking classification of disease and symptoms laid the foundation for what was to come. The pioneers of modern medicine stood on the shoulders of giants, and Rhazes and Avicenna were giants indeed.

Michael Isenberg drinks bourbon and writes novels. His latest book, The Thread of Reason, is a murder mystery that takes place in Baghdad in the year 1092, and tells the story of the conflict between science and shari’ah in medieval Islam. It is available on Amazon.com Please follow Mike on Facebook and Twitter. Subscribe to Islam: the Good, the Bad, and the Everyday Photo credit(s): Ether Monument, Boston Public Gardens from Wikimedia Commons

¹Bulmus, Birsen, Plague, Quarantines and Geopolitics in the Ottoman Empire, Edinburgh: Edinburgh University Press (2012), p. 44.
²Avicenna, Qanun fi al-Tibb (Canon of Medicine), Book IV, Beirut: Muʻassasat ʻIzz al-Dīn (1987), Chapter 3, Section 67. All translations from The Canon of Medicine are mine.
³Avicenna, Qanun fi al-Tibb (Canon of Medicine), Book I, Beirut: Dar al-Kotob al-Ilmiyah (1999), Chapter 2, Section 8.
⁴Avicenna, Book IV, op. cit., Chapter 3, Section 65.
⁵Ibid, Chapter 3, Section 66.
⁶Ibid.
⁷See Michael W. Dols seminal article, "Plague in Early Islamic History," Journal of the American Oriental Society, Vol. 94, No. 3 (Jul. - Sep., 1974), p.379.
⁸Dols, op. cit., pp. 376-380.

Sultan v. Caliph

A Medieval Smackdown.
by Michael Isenberg.

More of the real-life history behind The Thread of Reason.
CONTAINS SPOILERS.

The Muslim world of the 11th century—when my novel The Thread of Reason takes place—was a divided world.

On the one side were the moderates: they patronized the sciences, treated Jews and Christians with tolerance, and were willing to wink at wine drinking and other occasional breaches of Muslim law, the shari’ah.

On the other side were the hardliners; they were skeptical of the sciences, attempted to persecute Jews and Christians, and sought strict enforcement of the shari’ah.

In the political realm, this conflict was mirrored by the conflict between caliph and sultan.

The caliph—from the Arabic calapha, meaning to follow or succeed—was the successor to Muhammad. Ruling from his palace in Baghdad, the caliph was (since 750 AD), a member of the Abbasid Dynasty, descended from Muhammad’s Uncle Abbas. The caliph was the supreme authority in the Muslim world, the “Commander of the Faithful”. The sultan was merely his strong right arm, carrying out his policies and enforcing the shari'ah.

At least that was the theory.

In practice, the sultan had the army, and was therefore the real power.

During the latter half of the eleventh century, the sultans were Turks, members of the Seljuq Dynasty. Their propaganda presented them as the defenders of the caliph and of orthodox Islam. And yet, in many ways, they weren’t very good Muslims. They drank wine and wore silk, both prohibited in the shari’ah. As I’ve written previously, they had Jewish officials working for them, and when one of these officials came into conflict with a Muslim, and the caliph's government attempted to retaliate by decreeing strict enforcement of the restrictions on Jews and Christians that are in the shari'ah, the sultan Malik-shah and his vizier (prime minister), Nizam al-Mulk, stood by their own man, took the Jews’ side, and made the caliph back off from the hated decree. Indeed, Malik-shah and Nizam al-Mulk were in constant conflict with the caliphs, whom they tried to control by ensuring the caliph’s vizier was one of their own guys. At the time The Thread of Reason takes place, this office was filled by one of Nizam al-Mulk's own sons-in-law. For all these reasons, scholars have recently come to refer to the notion that the sultans were the defenders of orthodoxy as “The Great Seljuq Myth.”

It was inevitable that such a conflict would come to a head. By the fall of 1092, Malik-shah was determined to have it out with the caliph.

Malik-shah

Nizam al-Mulk apparently opposed the plan, and blamed it on Shiite troublemakers who had infiltrated the government. According to Nizam al-Mulk’s guide to government, The Book of Politics,

The most damaging and odious enemies to the religion of Muhammad are also the worst enemies of the Master of the World [i.e., the sultan]. These people who, today, have power in the government, and who make propaganda for the Shiite creed, belonging to this sect: they carry out their affairs in secret, they employ violence, they indulge in proselytism, and they talk the Master of the World into the idea of annihilating the Abbasid dynasty. If I wanted to lift the lid that covers this pot, what evils would come out! [1]

Despite the opposition of his vizier, Malik-shah was determined to proceed. In October of that year, he traveled from his capital in Isfahan up to Baghdad, his third such visit. Along the way, Nizam al-Mulk was brutally assassinated, as I described in my previous post, “The Murder that Started it All.”

Free from the overbearing influence of his vizier, the sultan continued on to Baghdad. The historian ibn Khallikhan (d. 1282), tells us what happened next:

We shall here relate a singular circumstance: When [Malik-shah] entered Baghdad for the third time, the caliph had two sons, one of whom was [subsequently] the imam al-Mustazhir billah; the other, who bore the name of Abu 'l-Fadl Jaafar, was the son of the sultan's daughter. The caliph had solemnly designated as his successor the first named of these two, because he was the elder, but the sultan insisted that he should revoke the nomination, declare Abu 'l-Fadl heir to the caliphate, put him in possession of Baghdad and then remove himself to Basra. The caliph felt the greatest repugnance to execute what had been required of him; he used every effort to change the sultan's determination and, finding all his remonstrances fruitless, he asked and obtained a delay of ten days in order to make the necessary preparations for his departure. It is related that, during these days, he kept a rigourous fast and, when he did take food, he sat upon ashes and invoqued the assistance of the Almighty God against the sultan. That period of time had not yet elapsed when the sultan fell ill and died, and the caliph was thus delivered from his trouble. [2]

The death of the sultan Malik-shah, and the resulting deliverance of the caliph, was a victory for the forces of shari'ah over the forces of moderation, one from which the Muslim world would never recover. In another paragraph, ibn Khallikan fills in the details about the sultan's death, so convenient for the caliph:

He entered [Baghdad] for the third time in the beginning of the month of Shawwal, 485 (Nov.A. D. 1092), and set off immediately on a hunting party, in the direction of the Dujail. Having then killed an antelope and eaten of its flesh, he was taken ill and had to be bled; but, as enough of blood was not drawn from him, he returned to Baghdad very unwell and none of his officers were admitted into his presence. He entered the city on the 15th of Shawwal, 485 (18th Nov. A. D. 1092), and died the next day. He was born on the 9th of the first Jumada, 447 (6th August, A. D. 1055). Some say that his death was caused by a poisoned tooth-pick. His funeral was conducted in the most private manner; no prayer was said over the grave, no sittings of condolence were held, no hair was cut off the tails of horses, though such a thing was customary in the case of persons such as he. One would have thought he had been snatched away bodily from the world. His corpse was borne to Ispahan and interred in the great college appropriated to the Shafites and Hanefites. [3]

Even in an age where accidental death was common, it defies imagination that the death of Malik-shah, coming so closely on the heels of the assassination of Nizam al-Mulk, and right after he had told the caliph to get out of town, would be due to eating a bad antelope. For what I think really happened, see The Thread of Reason.

Michael Isenberg drinks bourbon and writes novels. His latest book, The Thread of Reason, is a murder mystery that takes place in Baghdad in the year 1092, and tells the story of the conflict between science and shari’ah in medieval Islam. It is available on Amazon.com Please follow Mike on Facebook and Twitter. Subscribe to Islam: the Good, the Bad, and the Everyday Photo credit(s): Wikipedia (Public Domain)

[1] Nizam al-Mulk (1018-1092), Siasset Namèh ou Traité de Gouvernement (The Book of Politics or Treatise on Government), Angers: Imprimerie Orientale de A. Burdin et Cie, (1893), trans. Charles Schefer, 243. The translation from the French is mine.
[2] Khallikan, Shams al-Dīn Abū Al-ʿAbbās Aḥmad Ibn Muḥammad ibn (1211-1282), Ibn Khallikan’s Biographical Dictionary [Wafayāt al-aʿyān wa-anbāʾ abnāʾ az-zamān (Deaths of Eminent Men and History of the Sons of the Epoch)], Vol. III, Paris: Oriental Translation Fund of Great Britain and Ireland (1868), B. MacGuckin de Slane, tr., p. 445.
[3] Ibid, pp. 444-445.

And Serve it with Mustard, God Willing

The Joy of Cooking—Tenth Century Style.

We may live without poetry, music, and art;
We may live without conscience, and live without heart;
We may live without friends; we may live without books;
But civilized man cannot live without cooks.
He may live without books,—what is knowledge but grieving?
He may live without hope,—what is hope but deceiving?
He may live without love,—what is passion but pining?
But where is the man that can live without dining?

          ― Edward Robert Bulwer-Lytton, The Dinner Hour

One of the things that struck me during my research into the medieval Muslim world is the many ways in which that society, though separated from ours by a thousand years, is nonetheless familiar. And one of the most significant areas of similarity is food. Food was not merely a means of subsistence in the apartments, houses, and palaces of tenth century Islam. It was cuisine. An art form where as much craftsmanship went into the presentation as into the spices. There were multi-course feasts, food fads, take-out meals, celebrity chefs, utensils given as wedding gifts, advice about diet and health, guides to table manners—and cookbooks.

One such cookbook that has come down to us went by the rather ponderous title The Book of Cookery: Preparing Salubrious Foods and Delectable Dishes Extracted from Medical Books and Told by Proficient Cooks and the Wise, written by one Abu Muhammad al-Muzaffar ibn Nasr al-Warraq. It was translated into English by Nawal Nasrallah, and published in 2007 as Annals of the Caliphs’ Kitchens.

The Book of Cookery is a veritable encyclopedia of food, comparable to the comprehensive kitchen bibles like The Joy of Cooking or the Better Homes and Gardens Cookbook that we all relied on before the Internet came along, and some of us still do. In addition to recipes, there are stories and poems—all about food of course. In God’s Banquet: Food in Classical Arabic Literature, Geert van Gelder calls the poems “the equivalent of the luscious color photographs of modern cookery-books.” The book therefore gives us an invaluable slice of life in the medieval Muslim world, which I'd like to share with you. It's a slice not to be found in the historical chronicles, which, to paraphrase Jean-Henri Fabre, are too busy recording the names of all the royal bastards to bother with a recipe for wheat.

There are plenty recipes for wheat to be found in the Book of Cookery. Harissa, a porridge of grains and shredded meat was a particular favorite (and obviously something different than the North African chili paste we associate with the term today). But porridge is just the beginning. There are stews, roasts, omelets, puddings, kebabs, sausages, trail mixes, sweet syrups for beverages, tapas-like small plates to enjoy with wine, desserts very much like modern baklava, and meat-filled pastries of the sort that every culture on the planet thinks makes its own cuisine unique and special (and which was also called harissa in some places).

The book begins with a complete guide to food and health, based on the ancient Greek theory of the four humors: blood, phlegm, green bile, and black bile. According to this theory, illness was the result of the humors getting out of balance, and the cure was to eat foods with opposite properties of temperature and moisture in order to compensate. Green bile, for instance, was thought to be hot and dry and therefore an excess of it caused fevers. Thus, to cure fever, it needed to be balanced by foods that were cool and moist. Gourds and pomegranates feature prominently.

Still, not all the cures are quite so, well, medieval. I'm sure this recipe for homemade cough drops was every bit as effective as Robitussin AC (the one with codeine in it):

Take 5 mithqals sugar-candy, 5 mithqals excellent-quality frankincense, 1 mithqal opium. Pound the ingredients separately. Knead them into paste by adding some cold water to them. Set mixture aside for a short while then form it into small balls, the size of the stone of the fruit of the medlar-tree each. Put one piece under the tongue once a day.

The final chapters contain a lengthy guide to table etiquette. Contrary to what you may have seen from stereotyped Arabs in mid-twentieth century movies, belching at the table was not considered good manners.

Virtually nothing is known about al-Warraq himself, but we nevertheless have a few clues as to how The Book of Cookery came about. In Arabic, “warraq” means paper. Thus, he would have been in the publishing business. He wrote in the book’s preface, “You asked of me, may God bestow longevity upon you, to write a book on dishes cooked for kings, caliphs, lords, and dignitaries, and here it is, may God bestow longevity upon you, an illustrious and fine collection.” Clearly some anonymous person, who was particularly interested in the cuisine of the royal palaces, had commissioned this work. From there we can speculate as to why. Just like us, the people of the tenth century were fascinated by the lifestyles of the rich and famous. The nouveau riche and the upper middle classes not only wanted to know what their rulers ate—they wanted to be able to duplicate the dishes in their own kitchens (more about that later).

Indeed the rulers took dining seriously. The translator explains that mastering a few dishes was an essential part of the courtier’s art, and a few rulers held cooking contests or were even cooks themselves. Harun ar-Rashid was perhaps the most famous of the caliphs, thanks to the accounts in the The Thousand and One Nights of his nocturnal, incognito prowls about Baghdad. I’ve written previously about his fondness for drinking parties. Apparently he was equally fond of food; he used to beat the cooks if meals weren't to his satisfaction. But his half-brother, Ibrahim, was the real gourmet in the family—an accomplished chef in his own right, and author of a widely read cookbook. It was smart, too. In an era when the brothers of the caliph often spent their lives chained up, because of the threat they posed as potential claimants the throne, a brother who had no apparent interests other than gracious living (Ibrahim's other passions were poetry and music) would be viewed as no threat at all. Al-Warraq apparently had access to his cookbook; some of the recipes and poems are included in The Book of Cookery.

Ibrahim figures in a story that illustrates both how lavish the royal table could be, as well as the rewards that were showered on the top chefs. He had a slave named Bid’a, who “was an exceptionally skillful cook and was the most-gifted expert in making cold dishes and desserts. She was the best, ever.”

During the reign of al-Amin, son of Harun ar-Rashid (so Ibrahim’s nephew), the caliph, hearing what an excellent cook Bid’a was, asked Ibrahim to have her make him some sikbaj—beef stewed in vinegar with eggplant, carrots, and onion, and seasoned with salt, cilantro, coriander, and saffron. And although that may sound like a rather homespun meal to serve in a palace, it’s clear from the recipe—which is included in The Book of Cookery—that it is much fancier than it sounds. In addition to chunks of beef and kid, there are thirteen whole chickens, an entire lamb, and as many quails and sparrows as fit in the pot. The recipe gives very detailed instructions for the presentation:

Take the deepest, largest, and widest bowl available. Put in it pieces of bread cut like triangles and ladle enough broth onto the bread to saturate it. Now take out the kneeling lamb and place it in the middle of the bowl, as it is—kneeling. Place the chickens and chicks all around it. Arrange the beef chunks into sections around them, and use the kid meat portions as dividers between beef sections. Take out the innards, cut them into triangles, and spread them on top of the meat. [Before you do this,] spread the eggplant, onion, and carrots on the meat, interspersed with portions of the pullets, sparrows and small birds. Decorate the dish with slices of rolled sandwiches, thin meat patties, [four different kinds of sausages], and pieces of cheese. Arrange these as dividers between sections. Whatever empty spaces you see in the dish, fill them in with some nice-looking green herb. Scatter chopped parsley and rue all over the dish, and serve it with mustard, God willing.

The finished dish, we are told,

looked like a flower orchard embellished and ornamented with all kinds of adornments, like an illustrious bride or a decorated sword. When the dish was presented, al-Amin was with the exclusive company of Ibrahim, Ishaq al-Mawsili [a famous singer], and just one of his attendants—he was his favorite. Al-Amin was all admiration when he looked at it and its aromas hit his nose. When he tasted it, he found it quite delicious and started sampling all the varieties that were in it. He then said, “Uncle, this dish contains thirty kinds of food, which makes any other dishes unnecessary.”

All that food for four people. I imagine there must have been some leftovers.

In any case, al-Amin was so delighted that he showered his uncle with gifts: “three cases of top quality perfumes, three boats that belonged to [Harun ar-]Rashid, and three bags of money.” Sadly Bid’a, who had done all the work after all, was not quite so well rewarded in that slaveholding society. Still, she was not forgotten. The caliph gave her a necklace that was worth 30,000 silver dirhems. To put that in perspective, it would take a skilled craftsman about fifteen years to earn that much.

A spectacular meal, to be sure. And yet, the cuisine of the caliphs’ kitchens wasn’t that far removed from the food that graced the tables of the middle classes. They ate sikbaj as well. But, as the following anecdote shows, they were definitely interested in how it was done in the palaces. And, as you’ll see, they discovered one important difference:

It is told that a group of men used to get together for a game of chess until midday. For the rest of the day they would socialize at the house of whoever was the host at the time. It happened once that one of the sultan’s chefs stopped by and was invited to join the group, which he did. From then on he started coming on the days when he was free of duty. Once, the chess-group host asked him to prepare for them a meal similar to what he usually did for the sultan and his choice fell on sikbaj. The sultan’s chef asked the host, “Who is your cook?” The host said his boy servant does the cooking and called for him. The chef asked the servant, “How do you cook sikbaj?” So the boy described the procedure to him and the chef said, “Go and bring me the pot you use in cooking the dish.” The boy did, and the chef asked him to wash it with clay [i.e. smear the pot with clay and then rinse it off with water], which he did repeatedly. Each time he washed the pot, the chef would sniff at it and demand the boy to wash it one more time. He then told him to wash it with parsley, which he did. The chef sniffed at it again and said, “Yes, it is clean now, go and cook sikbaj in it the way you usually do every day.” Having said that, the chef resumed his chess game. The host was under the impression the chef would at some point add his own spices to the dish but he never budged. When the table was spread and sikbaj was served, they all marveled at its beauty and excellent aroma. It was noticeably different from what they had been served before and they were curious to know the reason. The chef said, “Do you think that dishes cooked in the sultan’s kitchen are any different from the familiar ones? The ingredients used there are none other than vinegar, greens, meat, eggplant, gourd, saffron, and the like. Indeed, meticulous cleanliness of the ingredients and the pots is all that it takes.”

Michael Isenberg drinks bourbon and writes novels. His latest book, The Thread of Reason, is a murder mystery that takes place in Baghdad in the year 1092, and tells the story of the conflict between science and shari’ah in medieval Islam. It is available on Amazon.com Please follow Mike on Facebook and Twitter. Subscribe to Islam: the Good, the Bad, and the Everyday Photo credit(s): The Feast Podcast

Without a Friend

by Michael Isenberg.

CONTAINS SPOILERS FOR THE THREAD OF REASON.

In my novel The Thread of Reason, I describe an altercation in a Baghdad marketplace between a Jewish official and a rug seller. The incident is a true story, and it offers us a view into the highest level politics among the Muslims of the time, and the lot of Jews and Christians living among them.

The imbroglio came amid deep-seated political tension between the caliph and his vizier (prime minister) Abu Shuja on the one hand, and the sultan and his vizier Nizam al-Mulk, on the other. Technically, the caliph is head of the Muslim religion, the “Commander of the Faithful,” and the sultan is merely his servant. But as we see in this account by the historian ibn al-Athir (1160-1233), the incident in the market not only led to dire consequences, but revealed where the true power lay:

In Rabi’ I of this year [Apr 23 to May 22 1091], the vizier Abu Shuja was dismissed from the post of caliph’s vizier. His dismissal came in this manner. A Jew in Baghdad, called Abu Sa’d ibn Samha, acted as the steward of the sultan and Nizam al-Mulk. A man selling carpets met him and gave him a blow which knocked the turban from his head. The man was seized, carried off to the Diwan [ministry] and questioned as to the reason for his action. He replied, “He treated me as inferior to himself.” Gohara’in [the sultan's governor in Baghdad], accompanied by Ibn Samha the Jew, went to the Sultan’s camp to complain, and both were unanimous in their complaints against the vizier Abu Shuja. After they had gone, the caliph’s warrant was issued [Apr 7 or 12, 1091], that the Dhimmis should be compelled to wear their distinctive dress, to wear what the Commander of the Faithful Umar ibn al-Khattab (God be pleased with him) had stipulated for them. They fled to various hide-aways. Some converted to Islam, among them Abu S’ad al-Ala’ ibn al-Hasan ibn Wahb ibn Musilaya, the secretary, and his nephew, Abu Nasr Hibat Allah ibn al-Hasan ibn Ali, the chief intelligence officer, who both made their conversion at the hands of the caliph. It was also reported to the sultan and Nizam al-Mulk that the vizier was frustrating their purposes and disparaging their achievements, so much so that, when news of the sultan’s conquest of Samarqand came, he said, “This is nothing to send victory communiques about, as though he had conquered the [Christian] Byzantine lands. Is not all he has done to march against true believing Muslims, allowing them to be subjected to treatment that is unacceptable for polytheists?” When Gohara’in and ibn Samha came to the camp and complained of the vizier to the sultan and Nizam al-Mulk, telling them of all that he was saying about them and of his frustrating their purposes, they sent to the caliph asking that he be dismissed, and it was done. He was ordered to confine himself to his residence. He was dismissed on a Thursday, and when the order was given he recited: He took the office without an enemy, He gave it up without a friend. On the following day, a Friday [10 Ramadan/24 October—note that this conflicts with the April/May date given previously], he left his house on foot to go to the mosque. A vast crowd (of his supporters) gathered around him, and he was order to stay at home.

In addition to the visibility it gives us into the politics of the sultan and the caliph—and the attempts by the sultan to control the caliph by controlling his vizier—the incident illustrates the precarious position occupied by dhimmis—Jews and Christians—living in the medieval Muslim world. They could reach quite high stations in society—as ibn Samha had. But, as the passage shows, this fostered resentment in ordinary Muslims, and further the Jews and Christians were subject to “what the Commander of the Faithful Umar ibn al-Khattab had stipulated for them” centuries before, often called the “Ordinance of Omar.” The requirement to wear “distinctive dress”—typically a red or yellow cord worn on the shoulder by Jews and a special belt and a cross around the neck for Christians—was just the tip of the iceberg. Jews and Christians could not build their homes or houses of worship higher than the Muslim buildings. They were prohibited from riding horses, and they could ride a donkey only if they used a wooden saddle. They were required to make way for a Muslim if they were to meet him on the road, and were banned from ringing church bells or otherwise making noise during their religious ceremonies.

Further, they were subject to the jizyah—an annual head tax of three to five gold dinars, not a huge sum, but out of reach of the poorest members of society. According to the law, the jizyah had to be paid in person and the official collecting it was supposed to hit the dhimmi below the ear; it wasn’t enough that the dhimmi was required to pay extra taxes—he had to be humiliated while he did so.

Paying the Jizyah

Although the jizyah was collected throughout this period, it is clear from the passage that other provisions of the Ordinance of Omar weren’t enforced prior to the incident in the marketplace. But the passage also shows that Jews and Christians lived under the threat of them being reimposed at any time—and that it was burdensome enough to drive some prominent Jews and Christians to turn their backs on the faiths of their ancestors.

With all the rigmarole over Abu Shuja, ibn Samha kind of gets lost in the shuffle. Nevertheless, a near-contemporary historian does give us a couple subsequent mentions of him, including one final one: in his chronicle for the year 485 AH (1092-1093 AD), the year after the altercation in the marketplace, 'Abd ar-Rahman ibn al-Jawzi gives us a single sentence:

And in Shawwal, Ibn Samha the Jew was killed.

Shawwal 485 was the month after Nizam al-Mulk was brutally assassinated, and the same month ِthe sultan died under suspicious circumstances. That ibn Samha should have been killed at just that time can't be a coincidence. As for what I think happened to him, see The Thread of Reason.

Michael Isenberg drinks bourbon and writes novels. His latest book, The Thread of Reason, is a murder mystery that takes place in Baghdad in the year 1092, and tells the story of the conflict between science and shari’ah in medieval Islam. It is available on Amazon.com Please follow Mike on Facebook and Twitter. Subscribe to Islam: the Good, the Bad, and the Everyday

A Thousand Years of Aptitude

Lost Enlightenment: Central Asia’s Golden Age by S. Frederick Starr.
Book Review by Michael Isenberg.

The title of S. Frederick Starr’s 2013 book, Lost Enlightenment: Central Asia’s Golden Age incorporates two controversial ideas: first, that Central Asia ever had a Golden Age, and second, that it was lost. Granted, these are controversial with two distinct group of people. More about that in a moment.

In his sprawling tour de force, Starr, the founding chairman of John Hopkins’s Central Asia-Caucasus Institute and Silk Road Studies Program, covers some thousand years of the history of Central Asia, a region roughly corresponding to modern Afghanistan, Turkmenistan, Uzbekistan, Kyrgyzstan, and eastern Iran (Khorasan). Starr argues that for the first five hundred years or so, starting with the time of the Muslim conquests (although the roots go back further), the region experienced a cultural flowering that led the world in astronomy, medicine, philosophy, poetry, architecture, craftsmanship, and a host of other fields. But around the year 1100, the Muslim world turned its back on the sciences, and Central Asia went into a long decline.

My Right-of-Center friends find controversy in the claim that there ever was a Golden Age in Central Asia or any other part of the Muslim world (For a discussion of whether there was a Golden Age in Muslim Spain, see my series Did the Islamic Golden Age in Spain really happen? A Debate). On this point, Starr presents abundant evidence that they’re wrong. We meet a colorful cast of thinkers, writers, builders, and experimenters. They were far too numerous to do justice to here, but a few names stand out, Renaissance men centuries before the European Renaissance.

Of course, first and foremost is my personal favorite, Omar Khayyam (1048-1131)—astronomer, mathematician, poet, scholar of shari'ah, and lover of wine. But since I’ve already written a few words about him elsewhere, I’ll use this space to talk about some of the other lamps of the Central Asian Enlightenment instead.

Muhammad ar-Razi (854-925), for example, known in the West as Rhazes. A dedicated physician, his influence extended far beyond the Muslim world—his book on measles and smallpox (he was the first ever to distinguish the two) saw forty European editions from 1475 to 1866. I previously shared an amusing story about his ingenious but risky cure for an emir’s arthritis.

Rhazes also indulged in some theological speculations, and my Right-of-Center friends will find some vindication in the fact that he wasn’t a very good Muslim in this department. The Quran, in a number of places (e.g. 11:13, 17:88), challenges anyone who is skeptical that it is really the word of Allah to write a book like it. Rhazes went on a tirade about that. “By God, what you say astonishes us! You are talking about a work which recounts ancient myths, and which at the same time is full of contradictions and does not contain any useful information or explanations. Then you say: ‘Produce something like it?’”

Then there was Abu Rayhan Biruni (973-1050), who during a less than stellar career as a diplomat managed to become the leading astronomer of his time. He invented specific gravity, wrote an encyclopedia of India, and calculated the circumference of the earth to within eleven miles of the modern value. Given its size, and that only two-fifths of it had been accounted for, he didn’t believe that all the rest could be ocean. He hypothesized that there must be another continent somewhere in the Western Hemisphere. Granted, Starr probably went too far in subtitling that discussion “Biruni Discovers America.”

At a time when most scientists believed that the earth was the immovable center of the universe, Biruni made considerable strides in developing a theory of a sun-centered solar system with a rotating earth. On that point, he engaged in a heated and occasionally insulting correspondence with the granddaddy of the Central Asian Enlightenment, Abu Ali ibn Sina (980-1037), better known in the West as Avicenna.

Avicenna spent his days as a physician and a government official, and his nights writing books and drinking wine (another not very good Muslim). His encyclopedic Canon of Medicine was the handbook of the physician’s art in both Europe and Asia for centuries. But his life wasn’t all bureaucracy and scholarship. He had declined the invitation of the thuggish Sultan Mahmud of Ghazna to join his court, and therefore had to spend some years on the lam, during which he had many narrow escapes.

While he kept his distance from Mahmud, Avicenna did accept the patronage of numerous other rulers. Indeed, all of these monster minds benefited from the generosity of sultans and viziers, who built glittering courts where they collected intellectuals and craftsmen the way squirrels collect nuts. They provided the instruments and books needed—some of their libraries stretched into the tens of thousands of volumes. Perhaps more important, they provided the company of like-minded people, to supply the back and forth that’s so crucial to scientific discovery.

If the Right is dubious that there was ever a Central Asian Enlightenment, the Left is dubious that it was ever “lost.” Indeed, some critics—Sonja Brentjes, for example, from the Max Planck Institute for the History of Sciences—drag out the tired old accusation that the claim is racist. Well, history is what it is, and it's not racist to establish the truth about it. Nevertheless, it is definitely much harder to establish the absence of something than its presence. Which is what Starr sets out to do in the last hundred pages or so of Lost Enlightenment.

The turning point, he argues (as have many others, including me), was the publication of The Incoherence of the Philosophers by the religious hardliner Abu Hamid Ghazali around 1095. In it, Ghazali argued that scientists and philosophers were at best useless—they couldn’t prove the great truths of the Muslim religion—and at worst heretical, deserving of execution. But then, how could it be otherwise? The whole scientific enterprise was based on the earlier ideas of Greeks and Indians—unbelievers in Islam.

Ghazali’s book was hugely influential. After it came out, kings still built glittering courts and stocked them with craftsmen, poets, and scholars of shari’ah (Muslim law). The buildings were more spectacular than ever. “No art surpasses architecture in its appeal to dictators.” But philosophers and scientists were noticeably absent. And when they did appear—the astronomers Nasir ad-Din Tusi and Ulugh Beg, for example—it just wasn’t the same. “Something important has been lost.” Starr hypothesizes it was the Greek and Indian ideas, the grains of sand that produced the pearls of culture, now anathema, thanks to Ghazali. Whatever the reason, the spark was gone. The Muslim world had so little interest in spreading new ideas that the first book printed by a Muslim using movable type would not be published until 300 years after Gutenberg.

I did have one criticism of Lost Enlightenment. I noticed several errors in Starr’s discussion of the Seljuq period (1037-1153)—the period with which I’m most familiar because of my own writing. They were minor in nature—names and dates that were incorrect—and never detracted from the main points. But still.

To his credit, in addition to laying out his arguments that the Central Asian Enlightenment became lost after flourishing for so many centuries, and the reasons that happened, Starr systematically addresses the arguments against his hypothesis. But in the end, he admits it’s not worth spending too much time on. “We feel little need to discover the cause of a nonagenarian’s death.” We can learn far more that it useful for own times by discovering how it lasted so long.

Michael Isenberg drinks bourbon and writes novels. His latest book, The Thread of Reason, is a murder mystery that takes place in Baghdad in the year 1092, and tells the story of the conflict between science and shari’ah in medieval Islam. Starring Omar Khayyam and Abu Hamid Ghazali, it is available on Amazon.com Please follow Mike on Facebook and Twitter. Photo credit(s): Princeton University Press

The Source of Incalculable Danger in Respect of Hereafter

Did Muslims drink wine in the Middle Ages?
Part III—The Islamists Strike Back.
by Michael Isenberg.

As I wrote in Parts I and II of this series on Islam and drinking, readers of my historical murder mystery, The Thread of Reason are often surprised at how much wine the Muslim characters in the book guzzle down. “Isn’t alcohol forbidden is Islam?” they ask.

In no uncertain terms. But despite the ban, plenty of drinking went on. We know that from the historical chronicles of the time, which tells us of some wild parties in the royal palaces. Perhaps even more significantly, we know that from literature like the Maqamat of Qasim Hariri and The Thousand and One Nights, often a better source on daily life than the histories. The histories give us portraits of sultans and caliphs, and idealized portraits at that. The storybooks tell us about the lives of ordinary people.

Although drinking was widespread, there were plenty of orthodox Muslims, True Believers, who were unhappy about the situation. And they struck back. In 1092, when my book takes place, their undisputed leader was Abu Hamid Ghazali, head of the school of shari’ah (Muslim law) in Baghdad known as the Nizamiyya. Three years later, he suffered a nervous breakdown, left the Nizamiyya and wandered around Syria, Palestine, Egypt, and Arabia as a pilgrim and student of mysticism. When he returned to his native land of Persia, ten years later, he seems to have become a bit of crank. He spent a great deal of time writing books and letters of helpful advice to the rulers of the land, some solicited, some not. He was especially big on nagging them to repent their sins. And high on his list of sins requiring repentance was drinking.

Drinking comes up, for example, in Ghazali’s Book of Counsel for Kings (Nassihat al-Muluk), which was written at the request of the Sultan Sanjar, son of the great Malk-shah. In it, Ghazali condemns “continual backgammon-playing, chess-playing, wine-drinking, ball games and hunting,” as they “do not befit the king because they distract.”

A letter to one Mu’in al-Mulk was even more explicit. I haven’t found out anything about this individual elsewhere, but the title ending in “al-Mulk” indicates that he was a vizier—prime minister to a ruler. “May Mu’inul Mulk be warned against what one of his friends has told me these days,” Ghazali wrote.

The things reported to me against him are the source of incalculable danger in respect of Hereafter. So far as he is concerned, I have become extremely worried… You amuse yourself with drinking wine that blinds your eyes and heart to your duties towards your people and an understanding of the laws of human nature. I advise you to renounce drinking wine, even if it is so hard for you to sever your ties with the cruel and corrupt Government officials, for when personal sin is associated with cruelty, it is beyond human power to get them separated from each other, particularly in one’s old age drinking wine is one of the worst crimes… I sincerely hope you would despise wine and make up your mind to hate it for the rest of your days. (Letters of al-Ghazzali [Fada'il al-anam], Abdul Qayyum, tr., 1992)

I’m not sure how much influence Ghazali had on the vizier Mu’in al-Mulk or the sultan Sanjar (albeit I can’t help noticing that in this picture of Sanjar, from a 14th century illuminated manuscript, he's holding what appears to be a wine goblet).

But there is no doubt that Ghazali’s influence on succeeding generations, both on the subject of drinking and in many other areas, was immense. In the century that followed, the Muslim world saw a crackdown on the enforcement of shari’ah, as a new generation of rulers came to power who not only didn’t drink themselves, but were determined that there would be no drinking in their domains.

For example, the chronicle of ibn al-Athir tell us that a year into the reign of the caliph an-Nasir, who ascended to the throne in 1180, “there was much sinful behavior in Baghdad. The palace chamberlain set up a group to pour away intoxicating drinks and to arrest loose women.” (The Chronicle of Ibn al-Athir for the Crusading Period from al-Kamil fi’l-ta’rikh, D.S. Richards, tr., 2006-2008).

An-Nasir got along very badly with Saladin, the sultan known to us in the west as the gentlemen who treated his enemy Richard the Lion-Hearted so chivalrously. But Saladin was also a dyed-in-the-wool jihadist and there was one thing at least that he and an-Nasir agreed on. Two years after an-Nasir’s crackdown on alcohol in Baghdad, Saladin’s government issued a diploma appointing a market official, called a muhtasib, in Aleppo. The diploma enjoined the muhtasib to enforce regulations on weights and measures and hygiene, prohibit usury, evict magicians and fortune tellers, prevent nudity in the public baths, and “as regards intoxicating beverages, let him seek them out and spill them on the ground, and let him apply the legal punishment to anyone who has drunk of them, as soon as the guilty party has regained his sobriety.” (Anne-Marie Edde, Saladin, 2011) The legal punishment was eighty lashes with a palm switch.

Not coincidentally, both an-Nasir and Saladin had right hand men who were students of students of students of Ghazali. Clearly Ghazali and the hardliners got their way in the end.

In the final installment of this series, I will take a look at a sometime friend of Ghazali, Omar Khayyam. In his collection of poems known as the Rubaiyat, there are numerous verses about wine, which begs a question that has been a source of debate among historians and biographers since he drew his final breath: did Omar drink it himself.

Michael Isenberg drinks bourbon and writes novels. His latest book, The Thread of Reason, is a murder mystery that takes place in Baghdad in the year 1092, and tells the story of the conflict between science and shari’ah in medieval Islam. It is available on Amazon.com Photo credit(s): Public domain

A well-loved tax collector

Tales of Medieval Islam.
By Michael Isenberg.

In my medieval Muslim murder mystery, The Thread of Reason, I recount the violent death of one “ben El the tax collector,” a protégé of the sultan’s vizier (i.e. prime minister) Nizam al-Mulk. “Despite his unfortunate choice of profession,” one of the characters tells us, “and despite being Jewish, he was well-loved in Basra.”

Ben El was a real-life figure, known to the history books as ibn Allah. Here’s an account of his demise from a medieval source, ibn al-Athir (1160-1233). The episode has some bearing on the debate between my left- and right-of-center friends as to how Jews were treated in medieval Islam. It shows that despite being second class citizens, they could nevertheless rise to prominent positions in the Islamic world and that when they came into conflict with Muslims, sometimes even the most highly-placed Muslim officials would take their side. With the possible exception of the sultan himself, there was none higher than Nizam al-Mulk:

Sultan Malikshah arrived in Khuzistan this year [1079-80] to go hunting. With him was Khumartegin and Gohara’in. They were both working to secure the death of Ibn Allah the Jew, the tax farmer of Basra, who was under the protection of Nizam al-Mulk and that was the reason why they were hostile to the Jew. The sultan ordered him drowned and this was done. For three days Nizam al-Mulk withdrew from public appearance and locked his door. Later he was advised to appear at the ceremonial parade, which he did. He gave a great feast for the sultan, during which he presented him with many things, but he criticized him for what he had done. The sultan made his excuses. The position of the Jew had grown so great that when his wife died everyone in Basra, except the cadi, walked behind her bier. He had lived in great style and vast wealth. From The Annals of the Seljuq Turks: Selections from al-Kamil fi’l-Tarikh of ‘Izz al-Din Ibn al-Athir, London: RoutledgeCurzon (2002), D.S.Richards, tr.

According to the text, Khumartegin and Gohara’in were motivated more by court politics than by any overarching hatred for Jews. About ten years after the death of ibn Allah, Gohara'in was involved in another incident involving a Jewish official which confirms that. But the later incident also shows that the Chosen People did have plenty of enemies in Islamic circles, despite their wealth and prominence (or more likely, because of it). I’ll recount that episode in a future post.

Michael Isenberg drinks bourbon and writes novels. His latest book, The Thread of Reason, is a murder mystery that takes place in Baghdad in the year 1092, and tells the story of the conflict between science and shari’ah in medieval Islam. It is available on Amazon.com

Conan the Barbarian and The Thread of Reason

Tales of Medieval Islam.
By Michael Isenberg.

“The power of ideas—Allah’s ideas—was all I ever needed.”

Thus spake the Sheikh of the Mountain, the leader of the medieval Assassin cult in real life, and one of the principal villains in my novel The Thread of Reason. In the book, the sheikh captures and imprisons the hero, Omar Khayyam, along with Omar’s assistant, Muhammad Baghdadi. At a confrontation in the sheikh’s study, Omar was characteristically skeptical about the sheikh’s grandiose claims of his power—basically it was the scene from every James Bond movie where 007 confronts the bad guy bent on world domination. But unlike Omar, Baghdadi was intrigued. He wanted to know how the sheikh commanded such unwavering loyalty from his Assassins, who were all too eager to die for their master on a suicide mission. In response, the sheikh offered Baghdadi a demonstration. “Let me prove how powerful an idea can be,” he said. “When it comes from Allah.”

He rose from his cushion and gestured for Baghdadi to follow him to the window. Putting one arm around Baghdadi’s shoulders, he pointed out to the courtyard, where dozens of men were working by torchlight. “Every one of my Assassins is completely dedicated to our cause,” [he] said. “Pick one of them out—any one—and I’ll show you how much.” Still at the table, Omar was absorbed in extracting the pit from a date when suddenly he jerked his head upward. He had just remembered something: a story from the history books. It gave him a bad feeling about where this was going. He scrambled to get to his feet and join the others at the window. Baghdadi had made his selection. “That one,” he said. He pointed to a young man stripped to the waist who was hustling across the courtyard at a good clip despite the two baskets of bricks hanging from a pole across his shoulders. “You there,” the Sheikh of the Mountain shouted. The porter dropped his burden and prostrated himself in the dust. “What is your bidding, O Sheikh of the Mountain?” he shouted back. “I want you to climb the ramparts and—” “Stop this right now,” Omar said firmly… “Why do you say stop? You don’t even know what I’m going to tell him.” “You mean you’re not planning to order him to jump off the castle wall?” “Now you spoiled the surprise.”

If the scene seems familiar, it’s probably because you saw something similar in the 1982 sword and sorcery flick Conan the Barbarian. In explaining how he made the transition from warlord to cult leader, the villain Thulsa Doom (James Earl Jones) tells Conan (Arnold Schwarzenegger), “There was a time, boy, when I searched for steel, when steel meant more to me than gold or jewels.”

“The riddle...of steel,” Conan replies.

“Yes! You know what it is, don't you, boy? Shall I tell you? It's the least I can do. Steel isn't strong, boy, flesh is stronger! Look around you. There, on the rocks.” He beckons to one of his followers standing above them on a ridge. “A beautiful girl. Come to me, my child...” The girl calmly steps off the edge of the cliff and plummets to her death.

“That is strength, boy!” says Thulsa. “That is power! What is steel compared to the hand that wields it?”

But lest you think the Sheikh of the Mountain plagiarized Thulsa Doom, it was in fact the other way around. The story has been associated with the Assassin cult ever since the Crusaders returned to Europe with tales of their adventures. Bernard Lewis, in The Assassins: a Radical Sect in Islam, relates “a somewhat questionable story” of one of the later Assassin leaders:

Count Henry of Champagne, returning from Armenia in 1198, was entertained in his castle by the Old Man, who ordered a number of his henchmen to leap to their deaths from the ramparts for the edification of his guest, and then hospitably offered to provide others for his requirements: and if there was any man who had done him an injury, he should let him know, and he would have him killed. (From the “continuation” of William of Tyre’s History of Deeds Done Beyond the Sea.)

But even in 1198, the story was already old. An earlier version occurred during the Qarmatian Rebellion. The Qarmatians were one of the strangest sects in the history of Islam. They were communists. A dissident Shiite offshoot, dedicated to the brotherhood of mankind, they threw off the authority of the caliphs and established their own egalitarian utopia in the early 900s, with their capital at Lahsa, near Bahrain. Naser-e Khosraw, who visited the Qarmatians around the year 1050, described what he found:

They neither pray nor fast, but they do believe in Mohammad and his mission…They take no tax from the peasantry, and whenever anyone is stricken by poverty or contracts a debt they take care of his needs until the debtor’s affairs should be cleared up. And if anyone is in debt to another, the creditor cannot claim more than the amount of the debt. Any stranger to the city who possesses a craft by which to earn his livelihood is given enough money to buy the tools of his trade and establish himself. If anyone’s property or implements suffer loss and the owner is unable to undertake necessary repairs, they appoint their own slaves to make the repairs and charge the owner nothing. The rulers have several gristmills in Lahsa where the citizenry can have their meal ground into flour for free, and the maintenance of the buildings and the wages of the miller are paid by the rulers. [From Naser-e Khosraw, Book of Travels (Safarnama), W. M Thackston, Jr., tr. (1986)]

You may wonder how a communist state can afford to be so generous and survive, let alone prosper for 150 years, when every other experiment in communism that litters the pages of history collapsed under the weight of its own poverty. The answer is buried in the passage above: slavery. “At the time I was there,” Khosraw writes, “they had thirty thousand Zanzibar and Abyssinian slaves working in the fields and gardens.”

The Qarmatians supplemented the stolen product of their slaves' labor with plunder from neighboring communities. In 930, for example, under the command of Abu Tahir Suleiman Janabi, they sacked Mecca, killed several pilgrims in the holy precincts of the Kaaba, stole the sacred Black Stone that was kept there, and brought it back to their capital. According to Khosraw, “They said that the stone was a ‘human magnet’ that attracted people, not knowing that it was the nobility and magnificence of Mohammad that drew people [to Mecca].” After Janabi’s death his successors returned it for a ransom. At some point during its theft and captivity it got shattered—to this day a silver frame is used to hold the pieces together.

The raid on Mecca was not the Qarmatians’ only attack on Muslim cities. Two years earlier, Abu Tahir Suleiman Janabi and his men had marched on Baghdad, capital of the Commander of the Faithful, the Caliph al-Muqtadir. Edward Gibbon, in The Decline and Fall of the Roman Empire, tells us what happened next:

Baghdad was filled with consternation; and the caliph trembled behind the veils of his palace. In a daring inroad beyond the Tigris, Abu Tahir advanced to the gates of the capital with no more than five hundred horse. By the special order of Muqtadir the bridges had been broken down, and the person or head of the rebels was expected every hour by the commander of the faithful. His lieutenant, from a motive of fear or pity, apprised Abu Tahir of his danger, and recommended speedy escape. “Your master,” said the intrepid Qarmatian to the messenger, “is at the head of thirty thousand soldiers: three such men as these are wanting in his host:” at the same instant, turning to three of his companions, he commanded the first to plunge a dagger into his breast, the second to leap into the Tigris, and the third to cast himself headlong from down a precipice. They obeyed without a murmur. “Relate,” continued the imam, “what you have seen: before the evening your general shall be chained among my dogs.” [Spelling updated for consistency with modern use]

Abu Tahir Suleiman Janabi's boastful prediction was not to be. The Qarmatians were driven away from Baghdad and al-Muqtadir, despite a turbulent reign, remained unchained.

I put the “Riddle of Steel” scene in The Thread of Reason because I wanted to make a serious point about the power of ideas and because the book is about the Assassins and the scene is a timed-honored part of Assassin lore. But I couldn't resist poking fun a little at how often it has appeared, not only in Conan the Barbarian and The Thread of Reason, but in many other works as well (1964’s The Long Ships and 2005’s The Keeper: The Legend of Omar Khayyam come to mind). And so, when the Sheikh of the Mountain accuses Omar of ruining his surprise, I have Omar reply, “When Suleiman Janabi performed that demonstration—a century and a half ago—it was a surprise. Now it’s just a cliché.”

As for whether the porter actually jumps, you’ll just have to read the book.

Michael Isenberg drinks bourbon and writes novels. His latest book, The Thread of Reason, is a murder mystery that takes place in Baghdad in the year 1092, and tells the story of the conflict between science and shari’ah in medieval Islam. It is available on Amazon.com Photo credit(s): You Tube, Crystalinks

Tales of Medieval Islam: A Psychological Cure

In my new novel, The Thread of Reason, there’s a scene where the hero, Omar Khayyam, and his assistant, Muhammad Baghdadi, are discussing the case of a young man who had been jilted by his bride-to-be. “For weeks he moped around,” the former fiancé tells them. “He didn’t leave the house at all, except to go to mosque, which he started doing every day. He hardly ate anything, just picked at his food. At night I’d hear him knocking around the apartment, unable to sleep.”

“Clearly a case of melancholia,” Baghdadi said. “Too much black bile produced by excessive heat in the liver. You should have served him a steady diet of cooling foods, like celery.” Omar rolled his eyes. “After we get done with Aristotle,” he said, “I’m going to start you on a steady diet of Avicenna. There are other ways to restore the humors than food. His psychological treatments were quite ingenious—especially where young men in love were concerned.”

Avicenna (980–1037), or Abu Ali ibn Sina as he’s known in the Muslim world, was a real-life figure, the epitome of a Renaissance man, centuries before the Renaissance. Arguably the most prominent philosopher in Islam, he was also a physician, poet, naturalist, vizier to the Emir of Hamadan, and occasional fugitive. His Canon of Medicine was the handbook for doctors for centuries, both in the Muslim world and in Europe. As for his psychological treatments for young men in love, here’s an account of one of them by Nizami Arudi:

Some time elapsed thus, until an illness befell one of the relatives of Qabus ibn Washmgir, who was the King of Gurgan. The physicians set themselves to treat him, striving and exerting themselves to the utmost, but the disease was not cured. Now Qabus was greatly concerned about this, till one of his servants said to him, “Into such-and-such a caravanserai a young man hath entered who is a great physician, and whose efforts are singularly blessed, so that several persons have been cured at his hands.” So Qabus bade them seek him out and bring him to the patient, that he might treat him, seeing that the effort of one may be more blessed than that of another. So they sought out Abu Ali and brought him to the patient, whom he beheld to be a youth of comely countenance, whereon the hair had scarcely begun to shew itself, and of symmetrical proportions, but now laid low. He sat down, felt his pulse, asked to see his urine, inspected it, and said, “I want a man who knows all the houses and districts of Gurgan.” So they brought one, saying, “Here you are”; and Abu Ali placed his hand on the patients pulse, and bade the other mention the names of the different districts of Gurgan. So the man began, and continued to name the districts until he reached one at the mention of which the patient’s pulse gave a strange flutter. Then Abu Ali said, “Now give the streets in this quarter.” The man gave them, until he arrived at the name of a street whereat that strange flutter recurred. Then Abu Ali said, “We need someone who knows all the houses in this street.” They brought such a one, who proceeded to give out the houses till he reached a house the mention of which the patient’s pulse gave some flutter. “Now,” said Abu Ali, “I want someone who knows the names of all the household and can repeat them.” They brought such a one, and he began to repeat them until he reached a name at the mention of which that same flutter was apparent. Then said Abu Ali, “It is finished.” Thereupon he turned to the confidential advisers of Qabus, and said, “This lad is in love with such-and-such a girl, so-and-so by name, in such-and-such a house, in such-and-such a street, in such-and-such a quarter: union with that girl is his remedy, and the sight of her his cure.” The patient, who was listening, and heard all that Abu Ali said, hid his face in shame beneath the bed-clothes. When they made enquiries, it was even as Abu Ali had said. Then they reported this matter to Qabus, who was mightily amazed thereat and said, “Bring him before me.” So Abu Ali ibn Sina was brought before Qabus… Then Qabus came down from his throne, advanced several paces to meet Abu Ali, embraced him, sat beside him on a cushion before the throne, [and] heaped favours upon him... “O most glorious, eminent and excellent one,” said he, “both the lover and the beloved are the children of my sisters, and are cousins to one another. Choose, then, an auspicious moment that I may unite them in marriage.” So Master Abu Ali chose a fortunate hour, and in it the marriage-knot was tied, and lover and beloved were united, and that handsome young prince was delivered from an ailment which had brought him to death’s door.

Michael Isenberg drinks bourbon and writes novels. His latest book, The Thread of Reason, is a murder mystery that takes place in Baghdad in the year 1092, and tells the story of the conflict between science and shari’ah in medieval Islam. It is available on Amazon.com

The quotation from Nizami come from Chahar Maqala (The Four Discourses), Edward G. Browne, tr., Mirza Muhammad, ed., London:Luzac & Co., 1921, Anecdote XXXVI, pp. 88-89.

Photo credit: Subtilties of Truth, 1271

Did the Golden Age of Muslim Spain really happen? A Debate.

Part III—Who’s right?

From 711 to 1492, Muslim conquerors ruled parts of Spain, which they called al-Andalus.

As with everything about Islam, what sort of rulers they were is a matter of controversy.

In Part I of this series I reviewed The Ornament of the World: How Muslims, Jews, and Christians Created a Culture of Tolerance in Medieval Spain by the late Yale University professor María Rose Menocal. According to her, Muslim Spain was “the chapter of Europe’s culture when Jews, Christians, and Muslims lived side by side and, despite their intractable differences and enduring hostilities, nourished a complex culture of tolerance.” She paints a Spain where caliphs like Abd ar-Rahman III built spectacular palaces and populated them with scholars and poets. Jews like Samuel ibn Nagrillah rose to lead armies and rule at the side of kings. Christian youth were so eager to assimilate into this shimmering culture that old fogeys like Alvarus of Cordoba complained Arabic was all the rage among them. Kids today. They completely neglect Latin. Philosophers like Averroes and social scientists like ibn Khaldun pushed the boundaries of scholarship. And absolutely everyone was a poet, churning out ingenious new forms of verse to celebrate the charms of their lady loves, forms that would go on to lay the foundation for Christian Europe’s troubadour culture.

Part II covered The Myth of the Andalusian Paradise: Muslims, Christians, and Jews under Islamic Rule in Medieval Spain by Darío Fernández-Morera of Northwestern University, and that book paints a very different portrait. The conquest of the peninsula was bloody. Captured women were sold into slavery, to be raped in the harem. The shari’a imposed severe restrictions on non-Muslims. In Cordoba, between 850 and 860, some four dozen Christians were murdered for the “crime” of declaring the divinity of Christ. And anti-Jewish riots killed many, including Samuel ibn Nagrillah’s son Joseph.

Interestingly, Menocal and Fernández-Morera don’t disagree about facts. Their differences are over interpretation.

Menocal acknowledges episodes of intolerance like the anti-Jewish riots and the Martyrs of Cordoba. But she dismisses them. “It would be foolish,” she writes, “to suggest that this was a world devoid of all manner of intolerance and darkness. What age, no matter how golden, is?”

Similarly, Fernández-Morera acknowledges the spectacular courts of the caliphs existed. But he dismisses them. They weren’t typical of the life of the common people.

Thus, the two authors mirror each other in their confirmation bias: both are quick to grasp the smallest factoid that supports their hypotheses. But inconvenient bits of data that contradict them are dismissed as the sort of thing that can happen in any society. Of no importance whatsoever.

So who’s right?

In my humble opinion, both. Fernández-Morera was right that Muslim Spain was far from a paradise. And yet Menocal was right that its remarkable achievements really did make it the Ornament of the World.

The glittering courts, with their vast libraries and spectacular gardens, really weren’t typical of the life of the average Andalusian—but they still glittered.

The women who enflamed the romantic ardor of poets really were sex slaves—but the verses they inspired were no less heartfelt or influential.

Averroes really was exiled by his fellow Muslims, and ibn Khaldun ignored—but their accomplishments in philosophy and social science were no less remarkable.

Non-Muslims really were second class citizens under the shari’a—but many of them nevertheless rose to the stratosphere of Muslim society.

Jews really were persecuted because they were so successful—but they were successful.

Muslims really did murder Christians who insisted on broadcasting their faith—but to the chagrin of Alvarus of Cordoba, the pageant of Islamic culture enticed legions of others to assimilate.

In short, Muslim Spain was a case study in Dr. Zuhdi Jasser’s “Two Islams” hypothesis, which he explained in his book A Battle for the Soul of Islam. There’s the Islam he grew up with, which taught him that “Christians and Jews were my brothers and sisters, ‘People of the Book.’” And there’s political Islam or Islamism, which he first encountered during his college years. That pernicious doctrine preaches that “Islam comes before all else, and everything should be done to make this religion the dominant one in the world and for laws to based not on secular agreement but purely on shariah.”

Just as both of these two Islams exist today, so they existed side-by-side in Muslim Spain. To insist it was all one or all the other, besides being far less interesting, is to cling to only half a truth.

 

Michael Isenberg writes about the Muslim world, medieval and modern. His forthcoming novel, The Thread of Reason, is a murder mystery that takes place in Baghdad in the year 1092 and will be the first in a series that depicts how the Muslim world committed cultural suicide during the Middle Ages.

Photo Credit: Michael Isenberg