Ibn Jubayr in Ayyubid lands

In Granada, Ibn Jubayr worked as a secretary. In 1183, he took a journey to Mecca and departed the post. His journey's narrative is a valuable historical source. Egypt under the Ayyubids was one of the places he visited. The fact that ibn Jubayr was once an Almohad court officer adds to his interest. Ibn Jubayr dreamed of (The Almohads) conquering Ayyubid territory in spite of the praise: 

[28th of March-25th of April, 1183]

THE first day of the month was a Sunday and the day after our arrival in Alexandria. The day of our landing, one of the first things we saw was the coming on board of the agents of the Sultan to record all that had been brought in the ship. All the Muslims in it were brought forward one by one, and their names and descriptions, together with the names of their countries, recorded. Each was questioned as to what mer-chandise or money he had, that he might pay zakat, without any enquiry as to what portion of it had been in their possession for a complete year and what had not. Most of them were on their way to discharge a religious duty and had nothing but the (bare) provisions for the journey. But they were com-pelled to pay the zakat without being questioned as to what had been possessed by them for the complete year and what had not.

Ahmad ibn Hassan of our number was called down to be questioned as to the news of the west [i.e. from Spain and North Africa] and as to the ship's cargo. Under watch he was in turn conducted first to the Sultan, then to the Qadi, then to the officials of the Customs, and then to a group of the Sultan's suite, and after being questioned concerning every-thing, and his statements recorded, he was released.

The Muslims were then ordered to take their belongings, and what remained of their provisions, to the shore, where there were attendants responsible for them and for carrying to the Customs all that they had brought ashore. There they were called one by one, and the possessions of each were pro-duced. The Customs was packed to choking. All their goods, great and small, were searched and confusedly thrown together, while hands were thrust into their waistbands in search of what might be within. The owners were then put to oath whether they had aught else not discovered. During all this, because of the confusion of hands and the excessive throng, many posses-sions disappeared. After this scene of abasement and shame, for which we pray God to recompense us amply, they [the pil-grims] were allowed to go.

There is no doubt that this is one of the matters concealed from the great Sultan known as Salah al-Din [Saladin]. If he heard of it, from what is related of his justice and leanings to pity, he would end it. But God is sufficient to the Faithful in this unhappy case, and (in the life to come) they will pay the zakat with the happiest heart. In the lands of this man [Saladin], we found nothing bad that merits mention save this affair, which was provoked by the officials of the Customs. Let it be absolutely certain and beyond doubt established that there is no Islam save in the Maghrib lands. There they follow the clear path that has no separation and the like, such as there are in these eastern lands of sects and heretical groups and schisms, save those of them whom Great and Glorious God has preserved from this. There is no justice, right, or religion in His sight except with the Almohades - may God render them powerful. They are the last just imams of this time, all the other Kings of the day follow another path, taking tithes from the Muslim merchants as if they were of the community of the dhimmah, seizing their goods by every trick and pretext, and following a course of oppression the like of which, oh my God, has never been heard of. All of them, that is, except this just Sultan, Saladin, whom we have mentioned for his con-duct and virtues. If he but had a helper in the cause of righteous-ness **** of what I desire. May Great and Glorious God mend the affairs of the Muslims with His beneficent attention and kind works.

A singular circumstance that we observed in the matter of the propagation of the Mu'min Almohade faith and the spread-ing of its word in these lands, and the inclination of its people to their dominance, is that most, indeed all their peoples, hint at it covertly and even quite plainly. They relate this to certain omens which fell to the notice of some of them and gave warn-ing of coming events which they saw in the result to be true. Amongst the omens leading to this is the following. Between the mosque of ibn Tulum and Cairo are two old and closely-built towers. On one is a statue facing the west, while on the other there had been a statue looking to the east. They used to relate that if one of them should fall, it would give warning of conquest by the people in whose direction it faced over the lands of Egypt, and others besides. By a strange conjuncture, the falling of the statue facing the east was followed by the victory of the Ghuzz [the Seljuk Turks under Saladin] over the 'Ubaydin [Fatimid] power and their conquest of the terri-tories of Misr and other lands. They now expect the fall of the statue facing west and the fulfilment of their hopes of being governed by the people of the west [the Almohade rulers of Spain]. Please God it may be so. There remains nothing but the happy prospect of an Almohade conquest of these lands, and attentively they watch for it one auspicious morning, being certain of it, and expecting it as they expect the (last) hour, the fulfilment of the promise of which no one feels doubt.

In this regard, we learnt in Alexandria and Misr and other places, both directly and by hearsay, of a strange circumstance which indicated that this dear event is truly decreed by God and that the claims concerning it are true. For it was told us that some jurisprudents and leaders of these countries have pre-pared an embellished discourse to be delivered before our lord the Prince of the Faithful - may God exalt his state - and that he expects that day as he expects the Day of Resurrection and composedly awaits it with the patience which is (proper to) our faith. May Great and Glorious God unfold His word and exalt His claim. As He wishes, so He disposes.

A Christian convert from the house of Mihran

A Syriac work from the early 7th century (?) describes the life of a Christian convert from the Parthian house of Mihran. The distribution of members of the Mihran family around the Shahrazur region is an intriguing feature in the text. Gushnazdad was born in what is now the province of Krmashan. As was to be expected, the father had to travel far from home. What the following geographers in the Arabic literature came to call 'the Mountains' complemented the late Sassanid spread of the house. The earliest Arabic sources that explicitly linked the house of Mihran and the Kurd label were probably more in-depth than the conventional narrative that assumed they were discussing nomads. 

Article review and definitions: When did the Middle East become Muslim?

I do not agree with everything in Thomas Carlson's article, but it raises several important points that deserve attention before I begin writing my own blog posts on this subject. This article, like the previous ones, is intended as background reading for what follows; my future posts will assume that readers are familiar with these foundational articles and points. A short summary of the main points of the article:

1. As scholarship has developed, many academics have increasingly pushed the date of majority conversion further forward, suggesting a much slower process of Islamization than earlier models assumed.

2. There is no reliable demographic data for the premodern Middle East, a point whose significance is often underestimated. Our ability to reconstruct religious populations is therefore extremely limited, and many confident claims about conversion rates rest on evidence that is indirect, fragmentary, or heavily biased toward certain groups. 

The article

What, then, will I argue in my future blog posts, and where do I stand on this question? My position is that the most plausible interpretation of the available evidence points toward placing the emergence of majority-Muslim populations in most Muslim regions in the early modern period. 

Throughout my future blog posts, I will use terms such as "belief in bare minimum Islam" and "self-representation as Muslim" when discussing this subject. It is important, however, to define these terms as precisely as possible.

By "belief in bare minimum Islam," I mean adherence to what can be considered essential elements of traditional Islamic belief, particularly regarding Islamic eschatology and the nature of prophethood. A counterexample would be a community that believed in concepts fundamentally incompatible with these doctrines, such as the transmigration of souls. The role of prophethood and the finality of prophethood are central elements of traditional Islam; therefore, groups that rejected these ideas outright, or believed that other figures had essentially the same access to the unseen as the Prophet Muhammad, would not meet this minimum threshold. Other examples, though not limited to these, would include beliefs in divine incarnation or the denial of Hell and Paradise as real places. These examples should clarify what I mean by "bare minimum belief in Islam."

A confusion is to assume that the mere presence of Islamic influence implies adherence to the bare minimum of Islamic beliefs. This does not follow. The continued existence of syncretic religious communities into the modern age demonstrates that Islamic influence alone is not sufficient to classify a population as Muslim. Many such groups incorporated Islamic beliefs, practices, terminology, or figures into their religious traditions while rejecting core Islamic doctrines, refusing to identify as Muslims, and likewise not being recognized as Muslims by modern communities that self-identify as Muslim. The presence of Islamic influence, therefore, should not be mistaken for evidence of Muslim identity or bare minimum beliefs.

Another related issue I will explore is the question of Muslim self-representation. I do not believe that many populations described as Muslim in our sources would necessarily have identified themselves as such. If we had a time machine and could ask these communities how they understood and described their own religious identity, I suspect that many groups classified as "Muslim" by external observers would not have used that label for themselves. This point will be developed further in future posts.

The Myth of early Muslim majority lands: the slow conversion rate to Islam

What proportion of the population was Muslim in different historical periods, and what did the process of conversion look like across the various regions of the Islamicate world? A common answer is to invoke Bulliet's conversion curve, which has become both influential and widely misunderstood. For decades, the curve has often been treated as an estimate of the proportion of Muslims within the total population. That, however, is not what Bulliet's model was designed to measure. Nevertheless, when many scholars and lay readers speak of the "gradual conversion to Islam," they often have Bulliet's chronology or something very similar in mind. Yet there is little compelling evidence that conversion proceeded at anything like that pace, while a body of considerations suggests that the process was considerably slower. 

Even while this particular explication focuses on Muslim Spain, the critique may be applied to other countries and subjects that many people believe they know the solution to based on the premodern writers' useless historical records that were never grounded in fieldwork. The only thing that is clear is that in these regions, misconceptions such as the one regarding the rate of conversion would be completely untrue. People did not convert to Islam "that fast", it took much longer than a few centuries for many regions. The same holds true for comparable "population as a whole" estimations on numerous other subjects. The same analysis might be given, for instance, to the claims regarding the semi-nomad vs. settled villager divide in Kurdish history, if the argument is valid (which it is) in the case of claims of mass conversion and the deceptive character of historical sources. 

Here is a brief summary of the main points from the paper that I believe are valuable for setting the stage for my own future blogposts on this subject. I highly recommend reading the paper in full for anyone interested in this topic:

1. Muslim authors are well known for their tendency to underrepresent or omit non-Muslim communities in their writings, which creates significant challenges when attempting to reconstruct the religious composition of past societies.

2. Arabization, whether reflected in increased interest in learning Arabic or the adoption of Arabic names does not necessarily indicate conversion to Islam. Arabic became the dominant language of administration and elite culture throughout many Islamicate polities, meaning that conquered populations often adopted Arabic linguistic and cultural practices without necessarily becoming Muslim.

3. The written evidence available on this subject is inherently limited, since we possess very little information about the lived experiences and religious identities of ordinary people, particularly rural populations who constituted the majority of society. The surviving sources disproportionately reflect elites and literate groups rather than the broader population.

Source: https://www.tandfonline.com/doi/abs/10.1080/09503110.2012.655582

A kurdish shepherd

A 19th-century drawing of a Kurdish shepherd from Dwight's travel book:

A Kurd, a Persian and a Spaniard in Dante's first circle of hell

In Dante's first circle of hell, commonly known as limbo, specific individuals are showered with adoration. Despite their non-Christian backgrounds, they were given a location where they would not be subjected to physical pain. 

Dante's inferno (14th-century): 

"Let us descend into the sightless world,"
began the poet (his face was deathly pale): "I will go first, and you will follow me."
And I, aware of his changed color, said:
"But how can I go on if you are frightened? You are my constant strength when I lose heart."
And he to me: "The anguish of the souls that are down here paints my face with pity-which you have wrongly taken to be fear.
Let us go, the long road urges us."
He entered then, leading the way for me down to the first circle of the abyss.
Down there, to judge only by what I heard, there were no wails but just the sounds of sighs rising and trembling through the timeless air,
the sounds of sighs of untormented grief burdening these groups, diverse and teeming, made up of men and women and of infants.
Then the good master said, "You do not ask what sort of souls are these you see around you. Now you should know before we go on farther,
they have not sinned. But their great worth alone was not enough, for they did not know Baptism, which is the gateway to the faith you follow,
and if they came before the birth of Christ, they did not worship God the way one should; I myself am a member of this group.
For this defect, and for no other guilt, we here are lost. In this alone we suffer: cut off from hope, we live on in desire."
The words I heard weighed heavy on my heart; to think that souls as virtuous as these were suspended in that limbo, and forever!
"Tell me, my teacher, tell me, O my master," I began (wishing to have confirmed by him the teachings of unerring Christian doctrine),
"did any ever leave here, through his merit or with another's help, and go to bliss?" And he, who understood my hidden question,
answered: "I was a novice in this place when I saw a mighty lord descend to us who wore the sign of victory as his crown.
He took from us the shade of our first parent, of Abel, his good son, of Noah, too, and of obedient Moses, who made the laws;
Abram, the Patriarch, David the King, Israel with his father and his children, with Rachel, whom he worked so hard to win;
and many more he chose for blessedness; and you should know, before these souls were taken, no human soul had ever reached salvation."
We did not stop our journey while he spoke, but continued on our way along the woods-I say the woods, for souls were thick as trees.
We had not gone too far from where I woke when I made out a fire up ahead, a hemisphere of light that lit the dark.
We were still at some distance from that place, but close enough for me vaguely to see that honorable souls possessed that spot.
"O glory of the sciences and arts, who are these souls enjoying special honor, dwelling apart from all the others here?"
And he to me: "The honored name they bear that still resounds above in your own world wins Heaven's favor for them in this place."
And as he spoke I heard a voice announce: "Now let us honor our illustrious poet, his shade that left is now returned to us."
And when the voice was silent and all was quiet I saw four mighty shades approaching us, their faces showing neither joy nor sorrow.
Then my good master started to explain: "Observe the one who comes with sword in hand, leading the three as if he were their master.
It is the shade of Homer, sovereign poet, and coming second, Horace, the satirist; Ovid is the third, and last comes Lucan.
Since they all share one name with me, the name you heard resounding in that single voice, they honor me and do well doing so."
So I saw gathered there the noble school of the master singer of sublimest verse, who soars above all others like the eagle.
And after they had talked awhile together, they turned and with a gesture welcomed me, and at that sign I saw my master smile.
Greater honor still they deigned to grant me: they welcomed me as one of their own group, so that I numbered sixth among such minds.
We walked together toward the shining light, discussing things that here are best kept silent, as there they were most fitting for discussion.
We reached the boundaries of a splendid castle that seven times was circled by high walls defended by a sweetly flowing stream.
We walked right over it as on hard ground; through seven gates I passed with those wise spirits, and then we reached a meadow fresh in bloom.
There people were whose eyes were calm and grave, whose bearing told of great authority; seldom they spoke and always quietly.
Then moving to one side we reached a place spread out and luminous, higher than before, allowing us to view all who were there.
And right before us on the lustrous green the mighty shades were pointed out to me (my heart felt glory when I looked at them).
There was Electra standing with a group, among whom I saw Hector and Aeneas, and Caesar, falcon-eyed and fully armed.
I saw Camilla and Penthesilea; across the way I saw the Latian King, with Lavinia, his daughter, by his side.
I saw the Brutus who drove out the Tarquin; Lucretia, Julia, Marcia, and Cornelia; off, by himself, I noticed Saladin,
and when I raised my eyes a little higher I saw the master sage of those who know, sitting with his philosophic family.
All gaze at him, all pay their homage to him; and there I saw both Socrates and Plato, each closer to his side than any other;
Democritus, who said the world was chance, Diogenes, Thales, Anaxagoras, Empedocles, Zeno, and Heraclitus;
I saw the one who classified our herbs: Dioscorides I mean. And I saw Orpheus, Tully, Linus, Seneca the moralist,
Euclid the geometer, and Ptolemy, Hippocrates, Galen, Avicenna, and Averroës, who made the Commentary.

While much can be said of Dante's Inferno and his choice of characters, I believe a valuable aspect to consider is the concept of "universal appeal". The text reveals persons who were complimented by someone who was from a wholly different culture. How and why does this happen? I believe a large part of the explanation is if a personality is truly worth to be remembered for anything interesting, their legacy and prestige will be known beyond the cult-like structures of their own tribe. They'll be able to break through the barriers of identities and competing opinions. It's always a red flag when someone is only recognized and praised by one's own tribe. 

Further reading: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/First_circle_of_hell

The Kurdish literati of the Zengid realm

 There were a number of high-ranking Kurdish military leaders under the Zengids, although their position in military affairs was not as prominent as that of the Turkic commanders. To identify the greatest Kurdish concentration in the Zengid realm, one must look to the men of the pen. The passage below comes from Ibn al Athir. The paragraph is interesting and consistent with information found in other sources on the Zengid realm. During the Seljuq and later on Zengid periods, there was no significant replacement among the men of the pen. These conquerers had to rely on the locals for ABC.

The talented men would be well compensated for their services. The award would often include property, money, institution(s) to run, and the ability to appoint family and friends to positions of leadership. Ibn al Athir singles out Kamal al Din, the Kurdish top judge, in the text. His "group" consisted primarily of his sons and fellow Kurds. Syria was the only exception to such a strong representation of Kurds among the "Zengid literati". The massive domination of Kurds in that sphere in Syria came with the Ayyubids.

Ibn al Athir (13th-century): 

The diwan [court of administration] of Zengi matches the diwans of the Seljuq sultans due to its sophistication, efficiency, number of staff and wealth. When a person comes to his court, he does not feel a foreigner. If he were a soldier joining his service, the Zengid soldiers would welcome him and accommodate all his needs due to the wealth of the diwan. If he was a civilian, who came for a certain task, he would be met by officials who would look into his request as if he were among his own family. If that comer were a scholar, he would be directed to the tents of chief qadi, al-Shahrazuri who, with his sons and his group, look after the judicial system of the lands. They would graciously welcome him and make him feel like one of them.

The reason for all his successes was that Zengi used to hire only highly talented and skilful men, who were willing to work limitlessly. In return, he rewarded all of them generously, so they offered their best. He never changed one of his high advisors or assistants from the time he governed Mosul until he was killed, unless there was a mistake committed and a change was due. All his commanders were in his service most of his career, unless they were killed in battle. This is why they sacrificed themselves for him.