Cities

The ‘Islamic city’ has been an important focus of historical discussion for at least a century; scholars have drawn attention to the importance of cities in Islamic society, the vast size of certain cities in the medieval Muslim world and the importance of merchants, not only as generators of wealth but as religious leaders, intellectuals and exemplars of good and worthy citizens. All this is in implied contrast with the societies of north-west Europe, in which, it is argued, elite power was based in the countryside and the rural estate and where cities were comparatively small and merchants regarded with suspicion and contempt by the upper reaches of both secular and religious hierarchies.

The built environment of the Islamic city also appears to have certain definable characteristics. The most obvious of these was the apparent absence of formal planning, the narrow winding streets, the closed-off residential quarters. The main arteries of such a Muslim city were narrow and sometimes stepped because they were not designed for wheeled vehicles. Medieval Muslim society almost disinvented the wheel: it was the pack animal and the human porter that shifted goods, not the cart. This meant that there was no need for wide, well-engineered streets of the sort that Roman towns had required. The closed residential quarters were a result of the Muslim concern with the privacy and sanctity of domestic family life, which had to be protected from prying eyes.

The Muslim invasions of Iran and Turkistan in the seventh century have been discussed several times in the modern literature (Gibb 1923; Bartold 1968; Daniel 1979; Kennedy 2007). The purpose of this chapter is to attempt to penetrate beyond the political narrative to examine the impact of the Muslim conquest on the topography and social structure of the city. It will consider the geography of Muslim occupation and settlement, the reactions of the local people to the invaders and the impact of the coming of Islam on the topography and built environment of the city.

The course of the military campaigns by which the Arabs achieved control over Bukhara and the rest of Soghdia is fairly well established. Although the Muslims had raided Transoxania from their base at Merv as early as the governorate of Salim b. Ziyad (681–3), they made no permanent conquests until the time of Qutayba b. Muslim (705–15). The exact chronology of the conquest is not clear and it seems as if Qutayba made a number of expeditions to the Bukhara oasis. In 710, he arrived and installed the young Tughshada as Bukhara Khudah, lord of Bukhara, the title held by the kings of the local dynasty. Each time the Muslim armies came to the city, the people made peace and agreed to accept Islamic rule but when the Arab troops left in the winter they reverted to their old ways.

Islam came face to face with Christianity from its beginnings. Christians and Jews were regarded as “People of the Book” because they had a revealed monotheistic religion. Even though they had corrupted this religion and turned away from the true path, they deserved a measure of respect and tolerance, unlike pagans with whom no coexistence was possible. Nevertheless, the new religion developed an ideology of confrontation with non-Muslims which almost inevitably led to conflict. The idea of holy war or jihād is developed in a number of suras of the Qur’ān but, as often in the Qur’ān, the message is not a simple and unequivocal one. The sacred text presents apparently conflicting advice to the faithful as to how they should confront the enemies of the new religion. There are a significant number of passages which advise nonviolent argument and preaching when dealing with the “People of the Book.” In contrast there are other passages in which the Muslims are exhorted to go and fight in the path of God, and those who do not are castigated for failing in their religious duties. These culminate in 9.5:

Traditionally, Muslim scholars have reconciled the apparent contradiction by arguing that the quasi-pacifist exhortations are early revelation, from the time when the Muslims were few and they had to avoid confrontation to survive, while the more militant passages date from later when the Muslims were in a more powerful position and could challenge their enemies openly.

The impact of the plague on the society of the sixth-century Roman Empire remains a subject of controversy. At the heart of the debate lies the question of the size and extent of the mortality. Was it such that it resulted in a significant and lasting demographic decline, or have we been overly impressed by the lurid accounts in the literary sources and imagined a crisis that never really existed? Was this a pandemic on the scale of the Black Death and subsequent visitations? Finding a check on the literary sources is very difficult. Clearly, there are few if any documentary sources to help us out. The only possible moderator for the written accounts would seem to be the archaeological evidence.

In recent years, a number of commentators have pointed out that the archaeological evidence suggests that the literary accounts of mass mortality are greatly exaggerated or, perhaps, that they related to only one small locality and that such evidence should not be extrapolated to include the entire Mediterranean world, or even just the territories under the control of the eastern Roman Empire. Jean Durliat, for example, accuses us of privileging the written accounts and disregarding archaeological material. Discussing the modern literature on the plague, he argues, “All of these studies have in common their privileging of literary sources, and among these, descriptions of the epidemic, whereas specialists in other kinds of documents accord it [the plague] only minor importance. It is from this insufficiently underscored contradiction that indecisive and divergent interpretations stem.”