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42 results

Page 1 of 3

  • Slavery in the Conquest Period

  • Chase F. Robinson
  • Journal:
    International Journal of Middle East Studies / Volume 49 / Issue 1 / February 2017
    Published online by Cambridge University Press:
    20 January 2017, pp. 158-163
    Print publication:
    February 2017
    • Article
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  • Abu ʿUbayda (d. 825) was a mawlā (client) of Jewish descent who wrote prolifically about history, religion, and culture. As such, he exemplifies the well-known feature of early Islamic learning that is the Abbasid-era mawlā scholar. His grandfather was a freeborn convert, rather than the more common manumitted slave, and it happens that the grandfather's patron—his sponsor, as it were, for admission into Islamic society—was a slave trader named ʿUbayd Allah b. Maʿmar (d. ca. 665). And ʿUbayd Allah b. Maʿmar, on a conservative estimate, had purchased hundreds of slaves from ʿUmar b. al-Khattab, the caliph who, before his assassination by a slave, had presided over the explosive early phases of the Islamic conquests.

The New Cambridge History of Islam
  • Volume 1, The Formation of the Islamic World, Sixth to Eleventh Centuries
  • Edited by Chase F. Robinson
  • Published online:
    28 March 2011
    Print publication:
    04 November 2010
  • Volume One of The New Cambridge History of Islam, which surveys the political and cultural history of Islam from its Late Antique origins until the eleventh century, brings together contributions from leading scholars in the field. The book is divided into four parts. The first provides an overview of the physical and political geography of the Late Antique Middle East. The second charts the rise of Islam and the emergence of the Islamic political order under the Umayyad and the Abbasid caliphs of the seventh, eighth and ninth centuries, followed by the dissolution of the empire in the tenth and eleventh. 'Regionalism', the overlapping histories of the empire's provinces, is the focus of Part Three, while Part Four provides a cutting-edge discussion of the sources and controversies of early Islamic history, including a survey of numismatics, archaeology and material culture.

  • 15 - The Violence of the Abbasid Revolution

  • Edited by Yasir Suleiman, King's College, Cambridge
  • Book:
    Living Islamic History
    Published by:
    Edinburgh University Press
    Published online:
    12 September 2012
    Print publication:
    21 April 2010, pp 226-251

  • Summary

    ‘It was not to shed blood and act unjustly that we followed the Family of Muhammad‘’ – so proclaimed Sharik b. Shaykh when he rebelled against Abu Muslim in 133/750. Or at least that is what al-Tabari reports that he said, since here he follows the historiographic convention of ascribing motivation through the direct speech of the figure in question. Al-Ya‘qubi has a variant: ‘It was not to shed blood and act unjustly that we gave the oath of allegiance to the Family of the Prophet.’ Precisely what Sharik b. Shaykh actually said or thought, we shall never know; nor, for that matter, can we say much about his movement in Bukhara beyond that it apparently fizzled out quickly, despite what Narshakhi reports as some broad support. But whatever the precise depth and breadth of that support, we can be sure that others felt the same way. The blood-letting of the Abbasid Revolution had gone too far, and one set of tyrants had been replaced by another: in the eyes of Sharik and those like-minded, the principles for which the Hashimiyya had fought – just rule under a member of the Family of the Prophet, in accordance with God's Book – had been betrayed.

    The two ideas – blood and tyranny – are neatly combined in two lines of poetry, which were reportedly inscribed on a sword that had killed innocents in the wake of that Revolution:

    When the amir and his two retainers commit tyranny

    and the earthly judge exceeds all limits in decreeing (asrafa fil-qada’)

    Then woe, upon woe, upon woe

    from the Heavenly judge upon the earthly one.

  • The conquest of Khu¯zista¯n: a historiographical reassessment

  • CHASE F. ROBINSON
  • Journal:
    Bulletin of the School of Oriental and African Studies / Volume 67 / Issue 1 / February 2004
    Published online by Cambridge University Press:
    21 April 2004, pp. 14-39
    Print publication:
    February 2004

  • The ‘appendix’ to a mid- to late seventh-century East Syriac history includes a detailed account of the conquest of Khu¯zista¯n by Muslim armies between c. 635 and 642. This article translates this section of the ‘appendix’ (along with another dealing with the conquest of Egypt), subjects it to detailed analysis and criticism, and compares it with Arabic accounts of the conquest of Khu¯zista¯n that survive in the much later historical and legal traditions. The results of this exercise—using an early and local source to control the Islamic tradition—is in some measure mixed, but some striking agreement suggests that the transmission of conquest history in early Islam was not as discontinuous as has been previously argued.

  • 3 - From garrison to city: the birth of Mosul

  • Chase F. Robinson, University of Oxford
  • Book:
    Empire and Elites after the Muslim Conquest
    Published online:
    13 August 2009
    Print publication:
    21 December 2000, pp 63-89

  • Summary

    If the province of al-Jazīra was invented by the Marwānids, the city of Mosul emerged during the second half of the seventh century, its shallow roots lying in the late Sasanian period. And if the story of al-Jazīra is one of local autonomy within a Sufyānid sphere of influence, that of Mosul is the Marwānid appropriation of a Kufan preserve, the transformation of garrison to city, and the emergence of a city élite. Building, investment, patronage and politics became intertwined in the first decades of the eighth century, as the Marwānid family – outsiders here as much as the Turks were in Ayyubid and Mamluk Cairo – imposed a new social order on the city, building it, quite literally, from the ground up. Unlike the contested Jaziran steppe, early Marwānid Mosul seems to illustrate the maxim that ‘over the long run and at a distance, cities and states have proved indispensable to each other’; but later Marwānid Mosul suggests that already in the eighth century rulers needed the city more than the city needed rulers. Politics and building being so intimately linked, we can begin by describing the birth of the city.

    The origins of Mosul were initially described in Syriac for hagiographic purposes.

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