Imperium and Officium Working Papers (IOWP) Iran and Early Islam: An Introduction

Transcription

1 Imperium and Officium Working Papers (IOWP) Iran and Early Islam: An Introduction Version 01 July 2014 Lucian Reinfandt (University of Vienna, Department of Near Eastern Studies) Abstract: Introduction to a panel on Iran and Early Islam organised on the 7 th Melammu Symposion Mesopotamia in the Ancient World: Impact, Continuity, Parallels, Obergurgl/Tyrol, 4 8 November Lucian Reinfandt mailto:lucian.reinfandt@univie.ac.at

2 Lucian Reinfandt 1 Iran and Early Islam: An Introduction The thematic subject of Iran and Early Islamˮ is directing the focus on the Persian presence in the Islamic world. In other words, it deals with phenomena that have survived into the Muslim era, and how, and why, they formed an impact on the new, Islamic, civilisation to come. On a more systematic level, talking about Iran and Early Islamˮ means talking about cultural diffusion and the matters of continuity and change. Bringing the early Islamic perspective into the conference is for several reasons beneficial. On the one hand it is of interest where Near Eastern civilisations ended in or came to a fulfilment, as an Islamicist may be tempted to say. On the other hand it is not unlikely that certain aspects of Ancient Near Eastern civilisations can best be explained from an early Islamic point of view, i.e. in retrospect, because from this aftermath may be preserved sources unavailable for other, earlier periods. And, last but not least, for all those being occupied with the Islamic Near East, especially but not exclusively in its formative phase, the millennia of pre-islamic Near East are indispensable for an understanding of the own field of study. The Melammu meetings stand out not least because they recall those long and transcultural perspectives. It has become fashionable in recent years to look (again) for continuities between the Islamic and pre-islamic periods. 1 When it comes to Iran, the potential of this approach is perhaps best demonstrated by Ehsan Yarshaterʼs monumental article The Persian Presence in the Islamic Worldˮ from 1998, which, apart from the material it provides, is good overview on the state of the art and the different positions taken in the discussion. 2 A lot more has been written since that carries the expressions changeˮ and/or continuityˮ in the title, but the whole subject remains theoretically understudied, and Michael Moronyʼs book Iraq After the Muslim Conquestˮ from 1984 still seems to be the best examination of the subject. 3 A general problem that increasingly concerns contemporary research on the Near East is a restriction on the frameworks of the own disciplinary boundaries; this is indented to the disciplines' growing complexity and need for specialisation but makes blind for the fact that the lifeworlds of humans in Antiquity were more complex than the canons of modern academic disciplines may provide. 4 The view from the boxˮ is especially evident when dealing with ʻIran and Islamʼ. To what extent was the Muslim conquest of Iran a historical watershed? What were 1 A passionate plea for continuity is Crone 1987, 1-17 ( The state of the fieldˮ) who discusses the research tradition of 19 th century Ancient History and Oriental Studies. 2 Yarshater Morony Cf. the harsh criticism expressed by Maehler 2012, 452 with respect to research on papyrus documents from Ptolemaic Egypt that do not sufficiently take into account the multilingual social situation of the Ptolemaic society.

3 Iran and Early Islam 2 immediate, and what were eventual consequences of the Islamic conquest? Questions like these are a matter of professional perspective, if not bias. There were indeed long-term changes in Iran that had begun in the pre-islamic era but were caught up and institutionalised under Muslim rule. On the other hand, there were elements of Late Antique civilisation that either survived fairly untouched into Muslim societies or found at least an Islamic appearance. Those who stress the differences between Islamic and pre-islamic civilisations may do so because they underly narratives of disciplinary specialisation and emancipation, or bow down to nationalist or religious apologetics. Or they simply have failed to look enough at the period from about 300 until 600 AD, when the changes taking place in western Asia made the culture of this region look more and more ʻIslamicʼ ˮ. 5 One gets a sense of how much the assessment of continuity and change is bound to value judgments. In this regard, continuity may be understood as stability, while change becomes a synonym for (unwelcome) disruption. 6 But from a different point of view, change can be regarded as positive, namely in those cases when the change is caused not by the other but by the own side; one need only recall the European expansion and the rise of capitalism in the early modern era. Also different axes of time and space play a role: the spread of Islam to Iran in the 7 th century was conceived as a discontinuity by Iranian elites and as a break with the own pre-islamic past in a vertical and time-oriented perspective, while the Arab side must have understood it as a form of continuity in matters of a horizontal gain of territory. In return, the Iranian revival, or shuʿūbiyya movement, during the 9 th century meant a factual loss of territory for the Arabs but a continuity with the past for the Iranians. 7 It was Alexander Gerschenkron who has drawn the attention to the problem of value judgments when dividing history into periods. 8 Heterogenetic explanations that stress a ʻborrowingʼ from older cultures undermine Islamic originality, while orthogenetic explanations that maintain an internally self-generated Islamic civilisation minimise historical continuity. And it can be maintained with some certainty that a periodisation in any form whatsoever tends to minimize continuities. 9 Accordingly, some kind of compromise has dominated the field in the past decades, where monist and one-dimensional explanations of a Roman or Iranian or Arab or Christian of Jewish origin of Islam have been abandoned in favour of a more pluralist 5 Morony 1984, 3. 6 Cf. Morony 1984, 4: Continuity tends to be regarded as positive and to be identified with stabilityˮ, while change tends to be regarded as negative and to be identified with the disruption brought about unnaturallyˮ by external factorsˮ. 7 Cf. Enderwitz 1997 for the phenomenon of the shuʿūbiyya movement which was a response by non-arab Muslims (of not exclusively Iranian background) to the privileged social status of Arabs within the Muslim community. 8 Gerschenkron 1968, 11-39; cited in Morony 1984, 4. According to Gerschenkron, the relationship between Late Antiquity and the Islamic civilisation(s?) may be put in terms of continuity in the direction of changeˮ. 9 Morony 1984, 3. For the periodisation of early Islamic history cf. now the thematic volume Arabic Pasts: Histories and Historiographyˮ, edited by Konrad Hirschler and Sarah Savant, Der Islam 91, 1 (2014), especially the contributions by Hirschler/Bowen Savant 2014 and Donner 2014.

4 Lucian Reinfandt 3 approach. Accordingly, the formation of Islamic civilisation is now seen as a cultural synthesis of many traditions of diverse origin. 10 How did cultural interaction happen? The cultural synthesis approach has the disadvantage of treating the different components of cultures as monolithic wholes, and tends to neglect conflicting trends inside the components. Also the notion of ʻcultural osmosisʼ seems misleading, for why should people imitate their neighbours? According to the Weberian concept of Herrschaft, domination is based on the consent of the ruled. 11 The success of cultural diffusion is dependent on a benefit for the receiving side, while force from the giving side rarely leads to success. It is the Bourdieuian decision-making in a set of choices that is causative for the success or the failure of cultural interaction. 12 It is for this reason that research on Iranian elites after the Muslim conquest is important. How and why did the Iranian population convert to Islam and still keep, and even rebuild, a specific Iranian identity? Here the concept of cultural memory comes into play. An analysis of the early Islamic history of Iran that focusses on the role of pre-islamic memory and its modifications shows how the descendants of the Persian imperial, religious, and historiographical traditions became a fundamental part of the Islamic 'world'. An outstanding recent study of this process is Sarah Bowen Savant's The New Muslims of Post-Conquest Iran from 2013 which examines how Iranians developed a sense of Islam as an authentically Iranian religion. 13 Another key issue is material culture and archaeology. The frontier line between Byzantium and Sasanian Iran was an area for numerous facets of cultural symbiosis and continuities beyond day-to-day political events. The creation of an urban cultural centre in Mesopotamia that drew on neighbouring civilisations has been examined, on the basis of a combination of archaeological and textual evidence, by Isabel Toral-Niehoff in her recent book from The role of human interference in the natural environment of the region, on the other hand, is dealt with in Peter Verkinderen's upcoming book about the long-term artificial irrigation of southern Mesopotamia. 15 Likewise, the related subject of economic history has experienced a recent upswing; after Michael Morony's Economic Boundaries? Late Antiquity and Early Islam from 2004, studies on Abbasid tax revenue and tax policies have been published by Michele Campopiano, while a whole volume of the Journal of 10 With Marshall Hodgson one may call it a balance of ancient heritage against Islamic originality; cf. Hodgson 1974, Weber 1978, Bourdieu 1990, 74 who holds that there is a specific logic of strategies which groups use to produce and reproduce themselves, that is, to create and perpetuate their unity, and thus their existence as groups, which is the condition of the perpetuation of their position in the social space. 13 Bowen Savant Toral-Niehoff Verkinderen 2014.

5 Iran and Early Islam 4 Economic and Social History is devoted to the subject of factor markets in Mesopotamia. 16 The political history of Sasanian and early Islamic Iran, on the other hand, has been dealt with in overviews by Touraj Daryaee. 17 Of special importance and worth mentioning in this regard is the Encyclopaedia Iranica, which is published in book form and also freely accessible in the internet. 18 The contributions assembled in this section all address the key issues in one or the other way. Aleksandra Szalc in her chapter Semiramis and Alexander in the Diodorus Siculus' Account deals with the Alexander Romance that had a strong influence on Arabic literature. Her analysis shows that the transmission of some literary motives through the cultures can be taken as an indicator for cultural continuity. Tim Greenwood in his chapter Oversight, Influence and Mesopotamian Connections to Armenia Across the Sasanian and Early Islamic Periods discusses aspects of ethnography and the connections between religious organisations and the state in Sasanian and early Islamic Iran. It is noteworthy to say that religious diversity was handled differently in Late Antique societies: while the Byzantines outlawed religious diversity, the Sasanians achieved an accommodation towards the members of non-zoroastrian religious groups, which in fact foreshadowed the way Muslims dealt with their non-muslim subjects. 19 Lutz Berger in his chapter Empire-Building and State-Building between Late Antiquity and Early Islam addresses the administrative system of the early caliphal empire and the question of how social stability was achieved after the Muslim conquests. The role of local, non-muslim, non-arab elites in former Byzantine and Iranian lands and their participation in the Muslim administration is elucidated by him. This is extremely valuable comparative material to Jamsheed Choksyʼs monograph on the role of Zoroastrian elites in early Islamic Iran. 20 Bergerʼs contribution opens a gateway to looking back on the role of Babylonian elites in the Achaemenid empire, as has been done by Michael Jursa, 21 and compare their role to that of Zoroastrian dihqans in Iran or Christian pagarchs in Egypt under Muslim rule. A number of aspects are common to all chapters, such as the history of reception and the cultural memory as well as the nature (the ʻreliabilityʼ) of narrative sources (Szalc, Greenwood, Berger). Another one is the role of local elites in the fabrication of the past (Szalc), their networks (Greenwood), and their compliance with authorities (Greenwood and 16 Morony 2004; Campopiano 2011; 2012; Journal of the Social and Economic History of the Orient 57 (2014), including Rezakhani/Morony 2014 and Van Bavel/Campopiano/Dijkman Daryaee 2009; Ehsan Yarshater (ed.), Encyclopædia Iranica, 14 vols., London and New York 1982ff.; [accessed 17 May 2014]. Cf. also the review by Dickinson Morony 1984, Choksy Jursa 2007.

6 Lucian Reinfandt 5 Berger). The political stability of empires is addressed with reference to founders such as Alexander (Szalc), or to ruling dynasties such as the Sasanians (Greenwood) or the early caliphs (Berger). Another issue is the applicability of comparative approaches, such as the transmission of textual motives (Szalc), the intentions behind the texts (Greenwood), or the comparison of empires (Berger), whereas taking into regard the longue durée is indispensable for a proper understanding of short-term developments (Szalc, Greenwood, Berger). Religion is understood not from the perspective of doctrinal conflict, as is suggested by the nature of most narrative sources. Rather it is seen from the perspectives of centralising economic effects of the conversion to Christianity and Islam (Berger) and of the networking potential of religious affiliation (Greenwood) as well as of the ability of conflict resolution (Greenwood and Berger). 22 Coherence of papers is an important prerequisite for any panel but can be misleading in the case of Iran and Early Islamˮ. The object of study is simply too multilayered for that. Cutting out certain aspects and inviting relevant specialists seems systematic at first sight but brings little added value in the case at hand; research libraries are full of books of this kind that more or less reaffirm existing discourses but hardly leave the common frame. We have to get out of the box. It does not work without preconceptions and filtering, but preselection narrows down and simplifies the complexities of past reality. The stronger the profile of the conceptual framework is, the stronger is the tendency towards (unreasonable) restriction. Formulated to the extreme one could say: the humans of Antiquity were more interdisciplinary than modern scholars are. In archaeology, the decision is somewhere between the cautious restoration and the archaeological park; while the latter is spectacular but perhaps premature and at the expense of the true value of the site, the former is more complex and less tangible but more adequate for the object of study. In the case of the panel at hand with its complex thematic subject, a series of aphorisms may be more productive than long narratives can be. The following chapters are such kind of building blocks that encourage intellectual creativity and help to open up new perspectives on the relation of Iran and early Islam. 22 A fourth paper with the title Some Remarks Concerning Achaemenid Royal Titulature: Mesopotamian Influences in the Universalistic Titles of Darius Iˮ by Andreas Johandi and Vladimir Sazonov (Tartu) was not taken into this book but has productively contributed to the discussion during the conference. It addressed the subjects of cultural diffusion and translatio imperii with regard to the influences of Assyrian royal ideology on Achaemenid Iran. This is comparative evidence for the transition from Sasanian Iran to the caliphal empire and whether the Sasanian recollection of the Achaemenids is in any way comparable to the Abbasid recollection of the Sasanians.

7 Iran and Early Islam 6 References Bourdieu, Pierre, From Rules to Strategies, in: idem, In Other Words: Essays Towards a Reflexive Sociology, Stanford Bowen Savant, Sarah and Konrad Hirschler see Hirschler, Konrad and Sarah Bowen Savant Bowen Savant, Sarah, The New Muslims of Post-Conquest Iran: Tradition, Memory and Conversion, Cambridge 2013 (Cambridge Studies in Islamic Civilization). Campopiano, Michele, Land Tax ʿalā l-misāḥa and muqāsama: Legal Theory and the Balance of Social Forces in Early Medieval Iraq (6th-8th Centuries C.E.), Journal of the Social and Economic History of the Orient 54 (2011), Campopiano, Michele, State, Land Tax and Agriculture in Iraq from the Arab Conquest to the Crisis of the Abbasid Caliphate (Seventh-Tenth Centuries), Studia Islamica 107 (2012), Choksy, Jamsheed, Conflict and Cooperation: Zoroastrian Subalterns and Muslim Elites in Medieval Iranian Society, New York Crone, Patricia, Roman, Provincial and Islamic Law: The Origins of the Islamic Patronate, Cambridge et al (Cambridge Studies in Islamic Civilization). Daryaee, Touraj, Sasanian Persia: The Rise and Fall of an Empire, London and New York Daryaee, Touraj (ed.), The Oxford Handbook of Iranian History, Oxford and New York Dickinson, Eerik, Iran and Islam, Iranian Studies 31 (1998), Donner, Fred M., Periodization as a Tool of the Historian with Special Reference to Islamic History, Der Islam 91 (2014), Enderwitz, Susanne, Art. al-shuʿūbiyyaˮ, in: C.Edmund Bosworth et al. (ed.), The Encyclopaedia of Islam. New Edition, Leiden 1997, Gerschenkron, Alexander, Continuity in History, and Other Essays, Cambridge, Mass Hirschler, Konrad and Sarah Bowen Savant, Introduction What is in a Period? Arabic Historiography and Periodization, Der Islam 91 (2014), Hodgson, Marshall G.S., The Venture of Islam: Conscience and History in a World Civilization. Volume 1: The Classical Age of Islam, Chicago and London Jursa, Michael, The Transition of Babylonia from the Neo-Babylonian Empire to Achaemenid Rule, in: Harriet Crawford (ed.), Regime Change in the Ancient Near East and Egypt: From Sargon of Agade to Saddam Hussein, Oxford and New York 2007 (Proceedings of the British Academy 136), Maehler, Herwig, Die Zukunft der Griechischen Papyrologie, in: Paul Schubert (ed.), Actes du 26e congrès international de papyrologie, Genève 2012 (Recherches et Rencontres 30),

8 Lucian Reinfandt 7 Morony, Michael, Iraq After the Muslim Conquest, Princeton Morony, Michael, Economic Boundaries? Late Antiquity and Early Islam, Journal of the Economic and Social History of the Orient 47 (2004), Rezakhani, Khodadad and Michael G. Morony, Markets for Land, Labour and Capital in Late Antique Iraq, AD , Journal of the Economic and Social History of the Orient 57 (2014), Toral-Niehoff, Isabel, Al-Ḥīra. Eine arabische Kulturmetropole im spätantiken Kontext, Leiden 2014 (Islamic History and Civilization 104). Van Bavel, Bas, Michele Campopiano and Jessica Dijkman, Factor Markets in Early Islamic Iraq, c AD, Journal of the Economic and Social History of the Orient 57 (2014), Verkinderen, Peter, The Waterways of Iraq and Iran in the Early Islamic Period, London Weber, Max, Economy and Society, ed. G. Roth and C. Wittich, Berkeley et al Yarshater, Ehsan, The Persian Presence in the Islamic World, in: Hovannisian, Richard G. and Georges Sabagh (eds.), The Persian Presence in the Islamic World, Cambridge 1998 (Giorgio Levi Della Vida Conference 13),