The Shaping of the Arabs by Joel Carmichael

Author:Joel Carmichael [Carmichael, Joel]
Language: eng
Format: epub
ISBN: 9781138192256
Barnesnoble:
Publisher: Taylor & Francis
Published: 2016-04-04T00:00:00+00:00

VI

THE EMPIRE CRUMBLES: THE TURKS COME IN: THE LONG STAGNATION

THE Abbasid dynasty was to have a very long life—some five hunred years, from the eclipse of the Umayyads in the middle of the eighth century until the Mongols’ destruction of Baghdad in the middle of the thirteenth century. From a technical point of view it lasted still longer, since the glamour of the Abbasid caliphate sustained a long line of mock-caliphs under the protection of the Mamluks in Egypt for another three centuries, until the Ottoman Turks conquered Egypt in the beginning of the sixteenth century.

Yet even while the Abbasid caliphs were still ruling in their own name, their power had become a shadow. Their authentic sovereignty had vanished by the middle of the tenth century, with the transfer of all real power in Baghdad first to a Persian dynasty, then to one of the countless Turkish dynasties that had by then infiltrated Islam to such an extent that the Arabs, eclipsed initially by the Persians through the rise of the Abbasids, were now obliterated as a self-conscious grouping beneath the political and social weight of these Turkish newcomers.

In one dynasty or another the Turks were to become the overlords of the Islamic realm. This is not meant to imply any unity, which was not established until the rise of the Ottoman Empire. It simply indicates that whatever the political currents and crosscurrents in Islam, the effective political leadership was in the hands of another non-Arab people.

The bypassing of the Arab element in Islamic society, signalized most dramatically by the flowering of the largely Persianized Abbasid regime, became absolute with the emergence of the Turks. For centuries, as I have indicated, the very word “Arab,” after it shrank back upon the Arabic-speaking nomads of the various wildernesses encompassed by Islam, was to have no political and scarcely any cultural significance.

The explanation is doubtless to be sought in the heterogeneity of the areas that had come under the Arab Muslims in the beginning and had become “Arabized” without becoming “Arabs.”

The Arabs upon their eruption throughout the Fertile Crescent had not encountered a unified, vigorous nation but merely denationalized and subjugated populations without arms. Moreover, the state structures were completely debilitated, which made it possible for small numbers of mounted tribesmen to pulverize them.

The Arabs’ decline and retreat from the great state they had been the chief architects of seems to have been due to many causes, though of course certainty is elusive. Despite their initial warlike qualities, they may have been inherently more disposed to civil pursuits such as literature, art, science, and religion than toward the army and the state, which were to become the speciality of their Persian and Turkish successors; or they may, in the classic phrase, have been corrupted by a life of pleasure seeking.

The former Arabs, that is, the descendants of Arabs, altogether diluted by the blood of the subject populations they had conquered, were themselves absorbed in the large, still-denationalized subjugated population of the Middle

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