REVIEW: Amira K. Bennison’s ‘The Great Caliphs: The Golden Age of the Abbasid Empire’
Contributed by Chandler Barton, graduate student
Amira Bennison’s The Great Caliphs does wonders to shatter the stereotypes and assertions of an ever-increasing Islamophobic revisionist agenda that claims the ancient Islamic world was one of unceasing expansion and war against the infidel, massacre, decadence, and chaos. Even the fairer treatments by objective historians have tended to juxtapose the Islamic caliphates as in some form or fashion diametrically opposed to the West and Western culture. Instead, Bennison’s book shows that these assumptions are ill-founded and often without basis, and that the Islamic caliphate was, in fact, a melting pot and conglomeration of faiths, ethnicities, religions, and governing systems; in essence, one of the largest, truly diverse political entities to ever exist.
Bennison takes the reader through a survey of the early Islamic world, the historical roots of the caliphate, the various religious and dynastic disputes that led to the fracturing of the community into competing sects and polities, and even the architectural legacy of the Muslim world which, like many things making up the fabric of the caliphate, comprised a mixture of Arab, Persian, Byzantine, and Indian flavors. The rest of the book examines how the origins of Islam and the caliphate shaped the diverse landscape of the Umayyad and Abbasid world, culminating with the conquest of Baghdad and the end of the Abbasid empire in 1258 by the Mongols.
Where The Great Caliphs really shines is the readability of the text and source material. Rather than trot in convoluted, arcane academic prose, Bennison focuses on presenting her ideas and information in a manner that is accessible to scholar and layperson alike, making the book a great introduction for those interested in early Islamic history and studies. Readers would also appreciate the author’s diligence in collecting and supplying her own photographs for the book.
The attention paid to the different stratum of Islamic society in the Abbasid era offers valuable insight into the socio-economic conditions in the caliphate—an entire chapter “Princes and Beggars” is devoted to this enterprise—showing that for most of the caliphate’s existence, life for the commoner was largely indistinguishable from that of their subjection to their former Byzantine or Persian overlords, and even in some respects—particularly in way of taxation and religious tolerance—was better off. Bennison’s exposition of the religious demographics in the Umayyad and Abbasid eras also paints a far different picture than that of the stereotypical Muslim hordes expanding under the banner of conversion-by-the-sword; instead, as the author shows, for a large part of its early existence, Islam was a minority religion in its own empire, even at times discouraging conversion all together. The dhimmi system is examined in a new light as an apparatus that afforded legal protection to the “people of the book,” something notably absent in a largely religiously intolerant medieval Europe. The co-existence and even encouragement of religious diversity of Muslims, Jews, Christians, and Zoroastrians both influenced and shaped the incredible diversity of the caliphal era rightfully described as “The Golden Age of Islam.”
Bennison relies on a variety of strong primary and secondary sources to construct an early snapshot of Islamic history, but to consider the book limited to the Abbasids or their contemporaries is an injustice. The founding era of Islam set precedent for nearly 1500 years of Muslim rule in the Middle East, passed along and inherited by the later Islamic empires of the Safavids, Mughals, and Ottomans, each adapting the culturally rich and diverse model of the Abbasid caliphate to their own empires. This is not to say that Bennison argues for a “clean” or “perfect” Islamic world beyond the inevitabilities of internal dispute, conflict, or persecution—it would be a fallacy to claim that such a state ever existed in the first place—but The Great Caliphs does help bring some balance to our historical understanding of the classical Islamic world against the orientalist depiction of a barbaric, backward, and intolerant wasteland of fanaticism and mystery.
