At its height in the ninth century AD, the ʿAbbāsid caliphate covered an extensive realm that stretched across the African and Asian continents, from the western reaches of Carthage on the Mediterranean to the Indus River Valley in the east, spanning prime regions over which the Greeks, Romans, Persians, and Turks had gone to war during the previous thousand years. This empire had come into existence as a result of of conquests that began under the early Islamic caliphate centered in Medina and its successor dynasty of the Umayyads (AD 661–750). But it was with the ʿAbbāsids that the process of social and cultural symbiosis and economic integration began to take root in this new state, giving shape to a new society characterized by the cohesive powers of a common language and currency and a unifying religio-political center.

The ʿAbbāsids, partly due to their rise as a religious millennial movement, were more conscious of their universal pretensions to power than their predecessors had been. The new caliphs, kinsmen to the Prophet through the line of his uncle al-ʿAbbās, held messianic titles that pointed to their spiritual gifts as imāms and underlined their distinct historical role in guiding the mission of government. Titles such as al-Manṣūr, al-Mahdī, al-Hādī, and al-Rashīd were variant expressions of their claims to a divine right to rule, as well as to their charismatic power, and this message was given poetic expression in the shape and denition that the ʿAbbāsids gave to their new capital.

Like Hārūn al-Rashīd, the caliph al-Maʾmūn has been a familiar, popular figure in the modern period. Whereas the name of al-Rashīd has been associated with romance and mystery and decidedly placed in a mythical milieu, however, al-Maʾmūn's has been associated with learning and rational pursuits, and descriptions of his reign have generally echoed with a far more realistic ring. Al-Maʾmūn's name never escapes mention at the start of any study of medieval Islamic science and philosophy. For it was he who first commissioned the translation of the ancient classics, the works of Euclid, Ptolemy, Aristotle, Plato, and Hippocrates, and who founded the academy known as Bayt al-Ḥikma (house of wisdom), where scholars pored over inquiries ranging from medical study to measuring the circumference of the earth. ʿAbbāsid patronage of scientific efforts not only created a central institution housing the great works of various fields, but also turned the ʿAbbāsid court into a magnet for scholars who had previously worked in isolation.

The list of those indebted to al-Maʾmūn's patronage is long and varied. It includes such luminaries as the Bakhtīshūʿ family, trusted physicians of the caliph; the Banū Mūsā b. Shākir, expert mathematicians and engineers; Isḥāq b. Yūsuf al-Kindī, the renowned philosopher of the day; Ḥunayn b. Isḥāq, the leading figure in the translation movement; al-ʿAbbās b.SaʿĪd al-JawharĪ who managed the astronomical observatory in Baghdad; and even astrologers, such as ʿUmar b. al-Farkhān Abū Ḥafṣ al-ṬabarĪ and ʿAbdallāh b. Sahl b. Nawbakht, who advised the caliph of fortuitous moments for sensitive decisions.

The succession transition

On one of his many excursions, Hārūn al-Rashīd one day, it is said, decided to take his children on a hunting venture into the countryside. Eager to observe their ingenuity and skill, he gave each suffcient weapons and sent them on independent trails to fetch something on their own. At the end of the day, after everyone had returned from their hunting, the caliph expressed his interest in examining the accomplishments of his sons. As he began the review, he must have found some catches suffciently impressive before it became clear that members of his entourage were scrambling to hide something from him. At the end of the line, the little one, Muḥammad (the future al-Muʿtaṣim), it seemed, had only managed that day to come back with an owl. Since the owl conjured up images of ill-omen, the servants were afraid to reveal it to the caliph, lest the latter vent his anger on the child and/or on those around, and thereby end the entire sojourn on a sour note. Inevitably, however, Muʿtaṣim's turn came up and, after some inquiry, and considerable trepidation, the servants relented and revealed the hefty arrow-pierced bird. A few moments of silence then passed before the caliph suddenly, and to everyone's surprise, brightly congratulated his son on his achievement, then turned to those around, laughed, and solemnly prophesied: “Verily, he shall succeed to the caliphate, and he shall find his supporters to be a people whose visages look like the face of this owl. He shall rebuild an ancient site, and settle it with these people.”

In the accounts of the early ʿAbbāsid caliphs, al-Amīn stands out as the epitome of political incompetence and reckless behavior. A man deficient in political wisdom, most at home in extended sessions of drinking and revelry, and with a flair for unpredictable eccentricities, he personifies a type of rulership opposite to ʿAbbāsid religious pretensions and the Persian ideal of monarchal behavior. Illustrations of al-Amīn's curious behavior abound in the chronicles. Jahshiyārī, for example, describes how al-Amīn, after neglecting provincial affairs for a year, one day decided to study the provincial reports. As he indulged in a meal, al-Amīn, we are told, commenced listening to these reports and intermittently issued his decrees. Then when all the business of state was put in order, he ordered that all these provincial documents be placed in the center of the assembly, called for his wine goblet, settled down to drink, and then ordered someone to set the pile of official documents ablaze while he broke into laughter to the amazement of his vizir, al-Faḍl b. al-Rabīʿ. Masʿūdī corroborates this frivolity with another anecdote that describes how, at the height of the siege of Baghdad, the caliph was seen to be mostly preoccupied with finding a goldfish that had escaped from a basin in his court to a channel leading to the river, and turned the palace upside down to find it. And Ṭabarī, too, who always seems to have something that agrees with every other chronicler, has his own stories to tell about the caliph.

How disagreement between the brothers first developed and then evolved into political and military conflict is a question that remains shrouded with mystery. Did al-Amīn commit the first transgression by removing his brother from the succession and replacing him with his own son, Mūsā al-Nāṭiq bi'l- Ḥaqq? Or was it al-Maʾmūn who overreacted to al-Amīn's initial move to nominate Mūsā as second successor by dropping al-Amīn's name from the coinage struck in the east, which in turn led al-Amīn to turn decidedly hostile and to drop his brother from the line of succession altogether? Or was it a third scenario, overwhelmingly favored by the medieval sources, in which the dispute over succession was built on an earlier disagreement that surfaced right after al-Rashīd's death, when al-Amīn sought to assert his central authority over the eastern provinces?

In the document containing the covenant of succession, the Mecca Protocol, we are told that Hārūn al-Rashīd designated al-Maʾmūn as autonomous ruler over the eastern provinces stretching from Rayy to Khurāsān. All the financial, military, and administrative affairs in the region were to fall solely under the jurisdiction of al-Maʾmūn, while al-Amīn was to rule the westerly parts of the empire, refraining entirely from asserting any measure of sovereignty over the east. The document strictly forbade any violation of the territorial division, and outlined severe penalties against either party seeking to meddle in the other's zone.

Few figures in world history have left as durable an impression on modern society as the caliph Hārūn al-Rashīd. Whereas the names of famous figures are usually associated with a specific achievement, era, or event, Hārūn's name is familiar enough without reference to either a chronological frame or an actual physical setting. His reign, as one publisher in the Victorian age wrote in trying to promote a biography of the caliph, “belongs to all time and no time,” an era idealized in later imagination to symbolize an age of fabulous prosperity, a resplendent court, and an Islamic empire whose realm stretched as far as the caliph desired. The name of the caliph has been so synonymous with the concept of a golden age of medieval Islamic civilization that his biographies have generally provided occasions for describing the origin of Islam, the spread of the Arab conquests under the Umayyads, and the sophistication of cultural life in Damascus and Baghdad, as well as in Cordoba.

Trying to sketch the line between myth and fact in the portrait of the caliph has long been a shadowy exercise, and generations of the caliph's admirers have generally, and probably intentionally, been content to let the ambiguity remain.

The preceding chapters illustrate in different ways a central point of this study, namely that the historical accounts of the early ʿAbbāsid caliphs were originally intended to be read not for facts, but for their allusive power. Their descriptions of the lives of caliphs may seem realistic, but the narrators intended their anecdotes to form a frame for social, political, and religious commentary. We have examined how the historical records of the caliphs have an orderly literary structure. Although the information about the caliphs is scattered in diverse sources, such as Ṭabarī, Yaʿqūbī, and Masʿūdī, one can discern linkages in theme, style, and narrative motif across these texts, suggesting the existence of a unified atmosphere of narrative composition at some point before these chronicles were written down. Repetition of certain events and statements in the chronicles has generally been seen as an indicator of their fictiveness. The present study has argued, however, that it is not repetition per se that provides proof of a rhetorical embellishment of the text, but the existence of a dialogue among various layers of narratives that are centered on specific historical problems and upon actors who have a clearly defined set of characteristics and roles. From a basic event of historical interaction, such as the case of al-AmĪn and al-Maʾmūn, narrators extended the dialogue to encompass other aspects of the lives of the characters, developing in the process a whole new universe of interaction between these characters and among other historical personages, whose eras revolved around key religious, political, or moral crises, whether they were previous caliphs, Sasanian rulers, or prophets.