When Baghdad Ruled the Muslim World

I remember the first time I read the Age of Faith, when I first cracked it open and looked inside the front cover. As with most of Will Durant's books the inside cover was filled with a giant map showing the area of interest for that particular volume. This map was for something called "The Baghdad Caliphate, circa AD 750".

I had never heard of such a thing. The city of Baghdad I knew, of course, from my limited knowledge, as the site of the gulf wars against Iraq. What I didn't know was that Baghdad represented, during much of the late first millennium, and well into the second, the height of culture and learning anywhere in the world.

By the 8th Century AD Islam had spread throughout much of Mesopotamia. The Caliph, the head of the Islamic religion and state following the death of Muhammad, had most recently resided in Syria under the leadership of the Umayyad dynasty. Differences within the Islamic world at the time, however, led to dissent and the eventual overthrow of the Umayyads by members of the Abbas family, establishing the Abbasid dynasty centered in the new city of Baghdad (circa AD 750).

The Abassids became great patrons of the arts, culture, science, literature and learning:

"For patronage of intellectuals was one of the ways in which the rich and powerful in court circles established their social prestige. The patronage of scholars was part of the exercise of elite power and the caliphs led the way. There were hierarchies of knowledge. In the non-religious sciences, it is clear that knowledge of literature, of poetry and its background, carried the most prestige and the highest rewards. But there were also patrons who were genuinely interested in science and who were prepared to support it with their fortunes. Like the Italy of the Italian Renaissance, the intellectual world of ninth-century Baghdad was a world where private patrons funded intellectual life and, to an extent, competed against each other for intellectual prestige. This may account for something of the variety and originality of the scholarly life that was one of the great achievements of the Abbasid period."

This quote is from a book called When Baghdad Ruled the Muslim World by Hugh Kennedy (p. 260), which I completed just yesterday. I certainly learned a lot of history from the book. I have never been able to retain the order of the leadership of the various caliphates - I now know it was the Umayyads of Syria first, followed by the Abbasids of Iraq and Persia, then the Fatimids of Egypt.

Unfortunately I was expecting a lot more detail on the cultural aspects of the Baghdad caliphate. Instead the book was a detailed study of the topmost echelon of the caliphate and its leadership over its roughly 200 year prominence. And although the Abbasids started out with the best of intentions, those original intentions eventually became lost in a sea of politicking, backstabbing, coups, overthrows, treachery, torture and the usual mayhem of dynastic rule.

Still, I enjoyed the book, and again it helped to fill in some wide-open knowledge gaps in my historical knowledge.