CHAPTER 19
The Abbasids: Distant Masters
750–969
CALIPH SAFFAH: THE SLAUGHTERER
Abu al-Abbas declared himself caliph and invited the Umayyads to a banquet to declare his peaceful intentions. In the midst of the feast, the waiters drew out clubs and swords and butchered the entire family, tossing the bodies into the lamb stew. The Slaughterer himself died soon afterwards but his brother Mansur, the Victorious, systematically murdered the Alid family and then liquidated the overmighty Abu Muslim too. His perfumier, Jamra, later told how Mansur kept the keys of a secret storeroom which was to be opened only on his death. There his son later found a vaulted chamber filled with the bodies, each meticulously labelled, of the family of Ali from old men to infants, whom Mansur had killed, all preserved in the hot dry air.
Wiry with brown, weather-beaten skin and saffron-dyed hair, Mansur was the real father of the Abbasid dynasty that ruled for many centuries, but his power-base was to the east: he moved his capital to his new Round City, Baghdad.
Soon after seizing power, Mansur visited Jerusalem. There he repaired the damaged Aqsa, but paid for this work by melting the gold and silver doors of the Dome of the Rock given by Abd al-Malik. Mansur’s successors no longer bothered to visit. Just as the city diminished in the Islamic world,a a Western emperor revived the Christian fascination with Jerusalem.7
THE
EMPEROR AND THE CALIPH:
CHARLEMAGNE AND HAROUN AL-RASHID
On Christmas Day 800, Charles the Great, known as Charlemagne, the King of the Franks, who ruled most of modern France, Germany and Italy, was crowned emperor of the Romans by the pope in Rome. This ceremony marked the new confidence of the popes and their Western Latin-based Christianity that would become Catholicism—and their growing differences with the Greek-speaking Orthodox of Constantinople. Charlemagne was a merciless warrior-king hacking his way to ever-greater power, yet he was also fascinated with history, and as devout as he was ambitious: he saw himself as the heir to the missions of Constantine and Justinian to become the universal holy Roman emperor, and as a latter-day King David—and both these aspirations led to the Holy City. So earlier on the same Christmas Day, it was said that a delegation sent by the Patriarch of Jerusalem had presented him with the keys of the Holy Sepulchre. Rome and Jerusalem in one day was no mean feat.
This was not a bid for possession because the patriarch had the blessing of Jerusalem’s ruler, Caliph Haroun al-Rashid whose reign, recounted in the Thousand and One Nights, was the apogee of the Abbasid empire. Charlemagne and the caliph had been exchanging envoys for three years: Haroun was probably keen to play off the Franks against his enemies in Constantinople and Jerusalem’s Christians needed Charlemagne’s help.
The caliph sent Charlemagne an elephant and an astrolabe water clock, a sophisticated device that showed off Islamic superiority—and alarmed some of the primitive Christians as a contraption of diabolical sorcery. The two emperors did not sign a formal treaty, but Christian property in Jerusalem was listed and protected, while Charlemagne paid the entire poll tax for the city’s Christians—850 dinars. In return Haroun allowed him to create a Christian quarter around the Holy Sepulchre, with a convent, library and pilgrims’ hostel, staffed by 150 monks and seventeen nuns. “The Christians and pagans,” noted one pilgrim, “have this kind of peace between them.” This generosity generated the story that Charlemagne had covertly visited Jerusalem, making him the heir of Heraclius, and playing into the mystical legend of the Last Emperor whose reign would herald the End Days. This was widely believed, particularly in the age of the Crusades, but Charlemagne never did visit Jerusalem.8
When Haroun died, the civil war between his sons was won by Maamun. The new caliph was an enthusiastic student of science, founding the famous literary-scientific academy, the House of Wisdom, commissioning a world map and ordering his sages to calculate the circumference of the globe.b In 831, arriving in Syria to organize a campaign against Constantinople, Maamun probably visited Jerusalem, where he built new gates on the Temple Mount, but he erased Abd al-Malik’s name in the Dome to emphasize the superiority of the Abbasids and had it replaced with his own. He did not just take his name, he also purloined his gold from the Dome which remained a grey lead colour for over a thousand years. It got its gold back in the 1960s—but Abd al-Malik never got his name back and Maamun’s remains there to this day.9
This sleight of hand did not alter the slippage of Abbasid power. Just two years later, a peasant rebel leader was welcomed in Jerusalem by all three religions until, in 841, he pillaged the city, at which most of the inhabitants fled. The Sepulchre was saved only by a bribe from the patriarch. But the Arab caliphs had lost their grip. In 877, Ahmed ibn Tulun, the son of a Turkish slave who had become ruler of Egypt under the nominal aegis of the caliph, retook Jerusalem.10
KAFUR: THE SCENTED EUNUCH
Ibn Tulun was one of the Turks who gradually replaced the Arabs as the power in the Islamic empire. Maamun’s successor Mustasim had started to recruit slave boys—they were known as ghulam, pageboy—from among the newly Muslim Turkish horse-archers of Central Asia. These warriors of Asiatic appearance became first the praetorian guard, then the strongmen of the caliphate.
After Ibn Tulun’s son and heir was assassinated by his eunuchs,11 a Turkish strongman Muhammad ibn Tughj, known by the Central Asian title of prince—al-Ikhshid—came to rule Egypt and Jerusalem. The political instability intensified religious competition. In 935, an annexe to the Holy Sepulchre was forcibly converted into a mosque. Three years later, Muslims attacked Christians celebrating Palm Sunday, looting and damaging the Church. The Jews were now split between the traditional Rabbanites, led by the scholar-judges known as the gaons, who lived by the Talmud, the oral traditions, and the Karaites, a new sect who rejected any law except the Torah (hence their name means the “readers”) and believed in a return to Zion.c These Turkish rulers favoured the Karaites, and just to complicate matters there was also a new community of Khazarsd with their own synagogue in the Jewish Quarter. When the Ikhshid died in 946, aged sixty-four, he was buried in Jerusalem and his power passed to a negro eunuch whose soubriquet derived from his taste for perfume and makeup.
Abul-Misk Kafur, who was to rule Egypt, Palestine and Syria for over twenty years, was an Ethiopian slave bought as a child by the Ikhshid. Deformed, obese and malodorous, he splashed on so much white camphor and black musk that his master renamed him after them. His rise began when some exotic animals arrived for the Ikhshid. All the other servants rushed to admire them, but the African boy never took his eyes off his master, awaiting the slightest command. The Ikhshid appointed him tutor to his sons, then commander of the armies that conquered Palestine and Syria, and finally regent with the title of the Master. Once in power, the eunuch cultivated Islamic piety, restoring the walls of the Temple Mount, while patronizing the arts. However, to the north, the Byzantines had been reinvigorated by a succession of outstanding soldier-emperors who raided southwards towards Syria, threatening to take Jerusalem, which set off anti-Christian riots. In 966, Kafur’s governor started to squeeze the Christians, demanding ever-greater payments from Patriarch John, who appealed to Kafur. But when John was caught corresponding with Constantinople, the governor, supported by the Jews (who hated Byzantines), attacked the Sepulchre and burned the patriarch at the stake.
In Cairo, the fragrant eunuch was now ailing. After the death of the last of the Ikhshids, Kafur ascended the throne in his own right. The first Muslim king to be born a slave—or for that matter to be a eunuch—employed a Jewish minister who would become the mastermind of an Islamic revolution and of a new empire over Jerusalem.12
a Jerusalem’s importance lessened as Mecca’s grew: if Jerusalem had perhaps at one point approached Mecca and Medina as part of the haj—“You shall only set out for the three mosques Mecca, Medina, and al-Aqsa,” declared one of the hadith of al-Khidri—now under the Abbasids, Jerusalem was reduced to a ziyara, a pious visit.
b The Abbasids, particularly Maamun, regularly requested copies of Greek classics from the Byzantines, securing for posterity Plato, Aristotle, Hippocrates, Galen, Euclid and Ptolemy of Alexandria. The Arabs developed an entire new vocabulary of science that entered the English language: alcohol, alembic, alchemy, algebra, almanac, are just some of the words thus borrowed. Al-Nadim’s famous Index shows that they also produced 6,000 new books. Paper was now replacing parchment scrolls: in one of history’s decisive battles, the Abbasids had defeated an invasion by the Chinese Tang emperors, ensuring the Middle East would be Islamic not Chinese and also capturing the secrets of Chinese paper-makers.
c The Jewish communities of the world were ruled by the two hereditary gaons of the Jerusalem Academy and the Babylonian/Iraqi Academy, whose seat was in Baghdad. The Karaites spread throughout the Jewish world, building up large communities from the Crimea to Lithuania that survived up to the Holocaust, when most of them were annihilated. This led to one of the strangest anomalies of the Nazi repression: in the Crimea, some Karaites were of Turkic rather than Semitic origin, so the Nazis actually ordered the protection of this Jewish sect.
d The Khazars—shamanist Turkic nomads, ruling the steppes from the Black Sea to Central Asia—formed the last Jewish state before the creation of Israel. In about 805, their kings converted to Judaism, taking names such as Manasseh and Aaron. When the Jerusalemite writer Muqaddasi passed through Khazaria he laconically observed, “Sheep, honey and Jews exist [there] in large quantities.” By the 960s, this Jewish empire was in decline. However, writers from Arthur Koestler to the recent Shlomo Sand have claimed that much of European Jewry are actually descended from these Turkic tribesmen. If true, this would undermine Zionism. But modern genetics refutes the theory: the two latest surveys suggest that modern Jews, both Sephardic and Ashkenazi, are around 70 percent descended from Middle Eastern genes of 3,000 years ago and around 30 percent from European stock.