# Syria: A Short History/10

LIFE UNDER THE UMAYYADS
The population of the Umayyad empire was divided into four social classes. At the top stood the ruling Moslems, headed by the caliphal family and the aristocracy of Arabian conquerors. Few Arabians were interested in agriculture, so the newcomers mostly congregated in cities. Lebanon was naturally avoided. The mountain does not seem to have received an influx of Arabians till the ninth and succeeding centuries. In other places with fertile soil and spring water, however, some doubtless did establish agricultural villages on easily defended sites. In Syria, as elsewhere, they remained a small minority; but Arabian tribal traits such as family solidarity, exaltation of individual prowess, hospitality and emphasis on the personal touch in all human relations spread to other peoples and are still manifest and highly prized throughout Syria.
The Arab concentration in cities was so marked that Arabic by Hisham's time had become the urban language. As the country folk came to these cities to sell their products or practise their crafts, they acquired the new tongue without necessarily forsaking the old one. The indigenous intellectuals also found it convenient to acquire Arabic in order to qualify for government posts.
Next below the Arabian Moslems stood the Neo-Moslems. These were native Syrians who, from conviction or calculation, had professed Islam and were thereby in theory, though not in practice, admitted to the full rights of Islamic citizenship. Such converts usually attached themselves as clients to some Arabian tribe and became members thereof. These neophytes formed a lower stratum of Moslem society, a status which they bitterly resented. Some of them expressed ​their dissatisfaction by espousing the dissident Shiite or the Kharijite cause, while others became fanatical exponents of militant orthodox Islam. Other converts were naturally the first members of the Moslem society to devote themselves to learned studies and the fine arts. They mediated their old traditions and culture to their new co-religionists. As they demonstrated their superiority in the intellectual field, they began to contest with them political leadership. And as they intermarried with them they diluted the Arabian stock and ultimately made the term Arab applicable to all Arabic-speaking Moslems regardless of ethnic origin.
Damascus and other cities may by the late Umayyad era have presented the aspect of Moslem towns, but the other places, more particularly the mountain regions, preserved their native features and ancient culture pattern. The number of country people who readily accepted the new faith must have been fewer than those who accepted the new language, mainly because the Umayyad caliphs, with the exception of the pious Umar II, did not favour conversion, especially from among owners of arable land. The total number of Moslems in Syria about 732 could not have exceeded 200,000 out of an estimated population of 3,500,000.
The third class consisted of members of tolerated sects which professed revealed religions—Christians, Jews and Sabians—with whom the Moslems had entered into a covenant relationship. The tolerated status was granted to Christians and Jews by Muhammad himself and was accorded to the Sabians (and the pseudo-Sabians of Harran) on the assumption that they were monotheists. It was later extended to the fire-worshipping Zoroastrians, the heathen Berbers and others. In Arabia proper, however, because of a statement ascribed to Muhammad, no non-Moslems were tolerated except the small Jewish community in Yemen. This recognition of tolerated sects was predicated on disarming their devotees and exacting tribute from them in return for Moslem protection. Not being members of the ​dominant religious community they held an inferior position socially and politically. In matters of civil and criminal judicial procedure they were left under their own spiritual heads unless a Moslem was involved. Moslem law was considered too sacred to be applicable to non-Moslems.
In Syria Christians and Jews were generally well treated until the reign of Umar II, the first caliph to impose humiliating restrictions on them. He issued regulations excluding Christians from public offices, forbidding their wearing turbans and requiring them to cut their forelocks, don distinctive clothes with girdles of leather, ride without saddles, erect no places of worship and pray in subdued voices. The penalty for a Moslem's killing of a Christian, he further decreed, was only a fine, and a Christian's testi- mony against a Moslem was not acceptable in court. It may be assumed that such legislation was enacted in response to popular demand. In administration, business and industry the Arabian Moslems, still predominantly illiterate, could offer no competition to the indigenous Christians. The Jews, who were fewer than Christians and often held meaner jobs, were evidently included under some of these restrictions and excluded from government posts.
At the bottom of the social ladder stood the slaves. Slavery, an ancient Semitic institution, was accepted by Islam but modified by legislation to ameliorate the condition of the slave. Canon law forbade a Moslem to enslave a co- religionist, but did not guarantee liberty to an alien slave on adopting Islam. In early Islam, slaves were recruited by purchase, kidnapping, raiding and from unransomed prisoners of war, including women and children. Soon the slave trade became brisk and lucrative in all Moslem lands. East and Central Africa supplied black slaves, Turkestan yellow ones, the Near East and south-eastern Europe white ones. The institution was self-perpetuating, as most children of slave mothers were also slaves. Only the children borne to her master by a slave concubine were considered free by ​right, but the liberation of a slave has always been looked upon as praiseworthy.
In the melting-pot process which resulted in the amal- gamation of Arabians and non-Arabians, slaves, no doubt, played a significant role. This was true of the royalty as well as the commonalty, for the mothers of the last three Umayyad caliphs were slaves. Yazid III was the son of al-Walid I and a captured Persian princess, but his brother Ibrahim was the son of an obscure concubine, perhaps a Greek. The mother of Ibrahim's successor, Marwan II, was a Kurdish slave. According to one report she was already pregnant with Marwan when his father acquired her, which would make the last Umayyad not an Umayyad at all.
As Syrians, Iraqis, Persians, Copts and Berbers joined the band-wagon of Islam and intermarried with Arabians, the gap between Arabians and non-Arabians was bridged. The follower of Muhammad, no matter what his original nationality might have been, would now adopt the Arabic tongue and pass for an Arab. The Arabians themselves brought no science, no art, no tradition of learning, no heritage of culture from the desert. The religious and linguistic elements were the only two novel cultural elements they introduced. In everything else they found themselves dependent upon their subjects > In Syria and the other con- quered lands they sat as pupils at the feet of the conquered. What Greece was to the Romans Syria was to the Arabians. When, therefore, we speak of Arab medicine or philosophy or mathematics, what we mean is the learning that was en- shrined in Arabic books written by men who were them- selves Syrians, Persians, Iraqis, Egyptians or Arabians — Christians, Jews or Moslems — and who drew their material from Greek, Aramaic, Persian and other sources.
Intellectual life in the Umayyad period was not on a high level. In fact the whole period was one of incubation. The frequency of its civil and foreign wars and the in- stability of its economic and social conditions militated ​against the possibility of high intellectual attainment. But in it the seeds were sown to come into full bloom in the Abbasid caliphate. The study of Arabic grammar was one of the first disciplines cultivated in this period. It was neces- sitated by the linguistic needs of Neo-Moslems eager to learn the Koran, hold government positions and push ahead with the conquering class. Arabic grammar went through a pro- cess of slow, long development and bears striking marks of the influence of Greek logic and Sanskrit linguistics.
The twin sciences of lexicography and philology arose as a result of the study of the Koran and the necessity of expounding it. The same is true of the most characteristically Moslem literary activity, the science of tradition (hadith). The Koran and tradition lay at the foundation of theology and jurisprudence, both based on Islamic law. Roman law too was adapted and applied to contractual transactions and state monopolies such as coinage, official seals and papyrus for documents. The Arabs followed the Byzantine precedent in considering it the state duty to protect its citizens against forgery, counterfeit, contraband and other abuses connected with these commodities, and in administering heavy punish- ments. But we know of no book on Roman law translated into Arabic.
The judges of the Umayyad period were usually ap- pointed by provincial governors from among scholars learned in the Koran and Islamic tradition. Their jurisdiction was limited to Moslem citizens ; non- Moslems were allowed auto- nomy under their own religious heads, especially in personal matters relating to marriage, divorce and inheritance. Be- sides judging cases these officials administered pious foun- dations (waqfs) and the property of imbeciles and orphans. History-writing developed from interest in Islamic tradi- tion, and hence was one of the earliest disciplines cultivated by Arab Moslems. The stimuli for historical research were provided by the interest of the believers in collecting old stories about Muhammad and his companions, the necessity ​of ascertaining the genealogical relationship of each Moslem Arab in order to determine the amount of state stipend to be received and the desire of the early caliphs to scan the proceedings of kings and rulers before them.
Public speaking in its varied forms attained in the Umayyad epoch heights unsurpassed in later times. It was employed for sermons, for military exhortations and for patriotic addresses. The fiery orations of al-Hajjaj are among the chief literary treasures of the period. Early official correspondence must have been brief, concise and to the point. It was not till the days of the last Umayyads that the flowery style was introduced. Its ornate, excessively polite phraseology betrays Persian patterns. Persian literary influence may also be detected in the many early wise sayings and proverbs.
The strenuous period of conquest and expansion had produced no poet in a nation that had a long tradition of poetry. But with the accession of the worldly Umayyads, poets throve. Satirical verse, love lyrics, odes in praise of wine, fulsome panegyrics, political rhymes, anthologies of pre-Islamic poetry and other productions were turned out in great quantities, but quality remained high. The close- ness of Umayyad poetry to Islam and to pre-Islamic poetry endowed it with purity of style, strength of expression and natural dignity that raised it to the position of a model for generations to come. Its techniques and motifs set the pattern and provided the mould into which the Arabic poet's individual feeling and composition has since been cast. His inability since then to dissociate himself from his literary heritage and create original masterpieces has been evident.
Arab science was based on the Greek and had its start with medicine. Moslem regard for medical science is echoed in a tradition ascribed to Muhammad: 'Science is twofold: that which relates to religion and that which relates to the body'. Medical treatises and other works were translated from Greek, Syriac and Coptic into Arabic, and segregation ​of persons afflicted with leprosy, blindness and other chronic diseases was instituted and special treatment provided. Umar II is said to have transferred the schools of medicine from Alexandria, where the Greek tradition flourished, to Antioch and Harran.
The Umayyad period also saw the beginnings of several movements of a religious and philosophical nature. Theo- logical speculation provoked by contacts with Christianity led to the rationalist Mutazilite school, while reaction against the harsh predestination of Islam motivated the Qadarite doctrine of free will. Muawiyah II and Yazid III subscribed to the Qadarite doctrine. Chief among the Christian pro- tagonists who induced these speculations was St. John of Damascus (675-about 749), a Syrian who wrote in Greek but no doubt spoke Aramaic at home and also knew Arabic. He was a boon companion of the court and a government councillor before retiring to a life of asceticism and devotion. Besides debating theology with Moslems, he wrote dialogues which emphasize the divinity of Christ and the freedom of human will. He defended the use of images and ritual and composed many hymns. As theologian, orator, apologist, polemicist and father of Byzantine art and music, St. John stands out as an ornament of the church under the caliphate.
Other movements which weakened the universal Moslem orthodoxy included the tolerant Murjiites, who suspended judgment of sinners and tended to justify the secularism of the Umayyad caliphs, and the intolerant Kharijites, who aimed at maintaining the primitive democratic principles of puritanical Islam. In pursuit of their aim the Kharijites caused rivers of blood to flow in the first three centuries of Islam. They opposed the prerogative conferred on the Quraysh that the caliph should be one of their number, forbade the cult of saints with its attendant local pilgrimages and prohibited Sufi fraternities.
More important than all these were the Shiites, partisans of Ali and his descendants. The orthodox Sunnite view ​considers the caliph the secular head of the Moslem com- munity, the leader of the believers and the protector of the faith, but bestows no spiritual authority on him. In opposi- tion to that the Shiite view confines the imamate to the family of Ah and makes the imam not only the sole legitimate head of the Moslem society but also the spiritual and religious leader whose authority is derived from a divine ordinance. Extremist Shiites went so far as to consider the imam the incarnation of the deity. Shiism germinated most success- fully in Iraq, but Syria and Lebanon still contain nearly a quarter million, fragmented into several minor sects and heterodoxies. Like a magnet Shiism attracted to itself all sorts of nonconformists and malcontents — economic, social, political and religious.
No sooner had the awe inspired by Islam worn off than male and female professional singers and musicians began to make their appearance. In the Umayyad era Mecca and, more particularly, Medina became a nursery of song and a conservatory of music. They attracted gifted artists from outside and supplied the Damascus court with an ever- increasing stream of talent. The second Umayyad caliph, Yazid I, himself a composer, introduced singing and musical instruments into the court. Other Umayyads — except the austere and puritanical Umar II — followed suit. So wide- spread was the cultivation of musical art under the Umayyads that it provided their rivals, the Abbasid party, with an effective argument in their propaganda aimed at under- mining the house of the 'ungodly usurpers'.
Moslem hostility towards representational art does not manifest itself in Umayyad times. The caliphs had Christian painters decorate their palaces with mural frescoes and mosaics which combine Nabataean, Syrian, Byzantine and Sasanid motifs. They depict royal enemies of the Arabs, hunting scenes, nude dancers, musicians and merrymakers. The fringes of the Syrian Desert, especially in its southern part, are strewn with remains of palaces and hunting lodges ​either erected by Umayyad architects on Byzantine and Persian patterns or restored by them. Some no doubt were originally Roman fortresses. Many caliphal residences evidently had walled gardens in which wild game was kept for hunting.
For fully half a century after the conquest of Syria Moslems worshipped in converted churches and erected no special mosques. In Damascus they divided not the church itself, as tradition states, but the sacred enclosure. All Damascene worshippers entered through the same gate ; the Christians turned left and the Moslems right. The principal mosques of Hamah, Horns and Aleppo were originally Christian places of worship. First among the mosques built in Syria was the Dome of the Rock in Jeru- salem, erected in 691 by Abd-al-Malik. His purpose may have been to divefTthe current of Syrian pilgrimage from Mecca, then in an anti-caliph's hands, and to outshine the Church of the Holy Sepulchre and Christian cathedrals of Syria. To this end Abd-al-Malik employed native archi- tects and artisans trained in the Byzantine school. The bronze doors, decorated with incrustation in silver — a dis- tinguished achievement of Byzantine artists — are among the oldest dated ones of their kind. Tiles and mosaics were lavishly used in the original structure and later in its renova- tion. East of this edifice stands an elegant small cupola called the Dome of the Chain, which served as a treasure house for the Rock.
Next in chronology and importance was the Umayyad Mosque of Damascus. It was not until 705 that al-Walid I seized the Cathedral of St. John the Baptist and converted it into this mosque, one of the sublimest places of worship in the world. Persian, Indian, Greek and Syrian craftsmen laboured for seven years to create its multicoloured mosaics and its murals of gold and precious stones. Rare marbles adorn its upper walls and ceiling. On its north side stands the oldest purely Moslem minaret in existence, while the two ​on the south side stand on earlier church towers. The indigenous Syrian type of minaret, a plain square structure, is clearly descended from the watch or church tower. The slender, tapering, round style, reminiscent of classical Roman columns, was a later adoption by the Turks, who introduced it into Syria as exemplified at Horns.
Al-Walid I, greatest among Umayyad builders, was also responsible for rebuilding the mosque of Medina, enlarging and beautifying that of Mecca and erecting in Syria a number of schools, hospitals and places of worship. In his reign, peaceful and opulent, whenever people in Damascus got together — according to Arab historians — fine build- ings formed the chief topic of conversation.
In the palaces and mosques left by the Umayyads the harmonization of Arabian, Persian, Syrian and Greek elements is accomplished and the resultant synthesis called Moslem art makes its debut. The Arabian element is end- less repetition of small units to which one could add or from which he could subtract without materially affecting the whole. The columns of the Cordova mosque illustrate the point. The motif suggests the monotony of the desert, the seemingly endless rows of trunks of date palms in an oasis or the legs of a caravan of camels. The Persians contributed delicacy, elegance, multicolour. In Umayyad Syria the ancient Semitic and the intruding Greek elements and motifs were reconciled and pressed into the permanent service of Islam.
Hisham's four successors were incompetent even if not dissolute and degenerate. Corruption was widespread. The eunuch system, inherited from Byzantium and Persia, was now assuming large proportions and facilitating the harem institution. Increased wealth brought in its wake a super- abundance of slaves, and both resulted in general indulgence in luxurious living. Nor was the moral turpitude limited to high classes. The vices of civilization, including wine, women and song, had evidently seized upon the sons of the ​desert and were now beginning to sap their vitality.
Disturbances in the provinces, dissatisfaction among the South Arabians, who formed the bulk of the Arab popula- tion of Syria and who had steadfastly supported the Umay- yad dynasty, and family feuds led 10 the murder of al-Walid II, the death of his cousin Yazid III and the abdication of Yazid's brother Ibrahim — all within the year 744. A distant cousin, Marwan II, was installed as caliph, but anarchy was on the march throughout the whole domain. An Umayyad claimant arose in Syria, a Kharijite one rebelled in Iraq and leaders in Khurasan refused to acknow- ledge the caliph's authority. Marwan moved his seat of government to Harran, where he could rely upon North Arabian support and deal more effectively with his two worst enemies — the Alids and the Abbasids.
To the Shiites the Umayyads were but ungodly usurpers who had perpetrated an unforgivable, unforgettable wrong against Ali and his descendants. As the focus of popular sympathy, their camp gradually became the rallying point of the dissatisfied, politically, socially and economically. The Iraqis nurtured a grudge against the Syrians for depriving them of the seat of the caliphate. Sunnite pietists joined the band of critics who charged the house of Umayyah with worldliness, secularism and indifference to koranic law. The Abbasids likewise took advantage of the general chaotic condition to press their own claim to the throne, based on the nearness of their kinship to Muhammad as compared with the Umayyads'.
Another factor that entered into the situation was the discontent felt by non-Arabian Moslems in general and Persian Moslems in particular because of the treatment accorded them by Arabian Moslems. Far from being granted the equality promised by Islam, these neophytes were actually reduced to inferior status, and sometimes were not even granted exemption from the capitation tax. The resentment reached its height in Persia, whose more ancient ​and venerable culture was acknowledged even by the Arabians. The soil of Khurasan in the north-east proved especially fertile for the germination of Shiite doctrine, but decisive leadership was furnished by the Abbasid claimant, abu-al-Abbas Abdullah, a master of propaganda.
Actual revolt began in Khurasan in 747 under the Abbasid agent abu-Muslim, a freedman of obscure origin. At the head of an army of South Arabians he seized Merv and other Persian cities while Marwan was kept busy by a rebellion in Syria and a Kharijite revolt in Iraq. Kufah fell in 749, and abu-al-Abbas was proclaimed caliph. A final decisive battle in January 750 was won by the Abbasids, and Marwan fled to Egypt. Of the towns of Syria, only Damascus put up the semblance of a fight. A few days of siege were enough to reduce the proud capital. Marwan was captured and killed, as were almost all survivors of the Umayyad house except a grandson of Hisham named Abd-al-Rahman.
After an odyssey of some five years, fraught with danger, Abd-al-Rahman reached Spain and established himself in 756 as the undisputed master of the peninsula. For capital he chose Cordova, which blossomed into the seat of a new kingdom and a brilliant culture. Abd-al-Rahman endeavoured to fashion his state after that of Damascus. He inaugurated an enlightened, beneficent regime, which on the whole conducted itself in the best tradition of its Damascene predecessors. Fourteen years before his arrival a Syrian army of twenty-seven thousand sent by Hisham had established itself in military fiefs throughout the principal districts of south-eastern Spain. Climatic and other physical similarities helped to make the newcomers feel at home. As the Syrians conquered the land, Syrian songs, poetry and art conquered the people of the land. From Spain and Portugal several of these cultural elements were later introduced into the New World. Arab geographers began to refer to Spain as a Syrian province, but meanwhile Syria itself had been reduced to an Abbasid province.