Arabian Medieval Life
From The Arabs; A Short History by Philip K. Hitti, 1914.
From: 700 C.E. To: 1200 C.E.
Location: Saudi Arabia
Note: This article has been excerpted from a larger work in the public domain and shared here due to its historical value. It may contain outdated ideas and language that do not reflect TOTA’s opinions and beliefs.
From The Arabs; A Short History by Philip K. Hitti, 1914.
The Life of the People
Arab historians had their interest too much centred in the caliphs’ affairs, in the tangled and bloody but to them all-important story of the rise and fall of dynasties and pretenders, and in the triumphs and mishaps of generals, vizirs and the politically eminent of the day to leave us any adequate picture of the social and economic life of the common people. But from sporadic, incidental passages in their works, from literary sources and indeed from the facts of ordinary life in the little-changing Moslem Orient of today, it is possible to reconstruct an outline of that picture.
The woman of the ninth century enjoyed the same considerable measure of liberty as her sister in earlier years; but toward the end of the tenth century the system of strict seclusion and absolute segregation of the sexes had become general. Not only do we read of women in the high circles of the early Abbasid period achieving distinction and exercising influence in state affairs, but of Arab maidens going to war and commanding troops, composing poetry and competing with men in literary pursuits or enlivening society with their wit, musical talent and vocal accomplishments.
In the period of decline, characterized by excessive concubinage, laxity of sex morality and indulgence in luxury, the position of woman sank to the low level we find in the Arabian Nights. There woman is represented as the personification of cunning and intrigue and as the repository of all base sentiments and unworthy thoughts.
Marriage has been regarded almost universally in Islam as a positive duty, the neglect of which is subject to severe reproach, and the gift of children, especially if sons, a boon from God. A wife’s first duty consisted in the service of her husband, the care of the children and the management of household affairs; and spare time would be occupied with spinning and weaving.
Judging by the erotic expressions of the poets of the age, the early Arabian ideals of feminine beauty seem not to have undergone much change. The woman’s stature should be like the bamboo among plants, her face as round as the full moon, her hair darker than the night, her cheeks white and rosy with a mole not unlike a drop of ambergris upon a plate of alabaster, her eyes intensely black and large like those of a wild deer, her eyelids drowsy or languid, her mouth small with teeth like pearls set in coral, her bosom pomegranate-like, her hips wide and her fingers tapering, the tips dyed with vermilion henna (from Arabic hinna).
The fashionable headdress for women was evidently a dome-shaped cap, round the bottom of which was a circlet that could be adorned with jewels. Among other objects of feminine adornment were anklets and bracelets. Men’s clothing has varied but little since those days and the ancient style is still followed by the older generation in Lebanon and Syria. The common headgear was the black high-peaked hat, made of felt or wool. The wardrobe was completed by wide trousers of Persian origin, shirt, vest and jacket with outer mantle, the jubbah. This Arabic word has worked its way from Spanish, where we find it for the first time in a late tenth-century dictionary, into the rest of the Romance languages and thence into English and the other Germanic languages as well as the Slavonic. In English it has left an interesting survival in “gibbet”, meaning “gallows”.
The most conspicuous piece of furniture in the home now came to be the diwan, a sofa extending along three sides of the room. Raised seats in the form of chairs were introduced under the earlier dynasty, but cushions laid on small square mattresses—a word derived from Arabic matrah—on the floor where one could comfortably squat remained popular. Hand-woven carpets covered the floor.
Food was served on large round trays of brass set on a low table in front of the diwan or the floor cushions. In the homes of the well-to-do the trays were of silver and the table of wood inlaid with ebony, mother-of-pearl or tortoise-shell—not unlike those still manufactured in Damascus.
Those same people who had once enjoyed scorpions, beetles and weasels as a luxury, who thought rice a venomous food and used flattened bread for writing material, by this time had their gastronomic tastes whetted for the delicacies of the civilized world, including such Persian dishes as the greatly desired stew and the rich sweets. Their chickens were now fed on shelled nuts, almonds and milk. In summer, houses were cooled by ice.
Non-alcoholic drinks in the form of sherbet, consisting of water sweetened with sugar and flavoured with extracts of violets, bananas, roses or mulberries, were served. Coffee did not attain vogue until the fifteenth century, and tobacco was unknown before the discovery of the New World.
A ninth- to tenth-century author has left us a work intended to give an exposition of the sentiments and manners of a man of culture, a gentleman, in that period. He is one in possession of polite behaviour, manly honour and elegant manners, who abstains from joking, holds fellowship with the right comrades, has high standards of veracity, is scrupulous in the fulfilment of his promises, keeps a secret, wears unsoiled and unpatched clothes, and at the table takes small mouthfuls, converses or laughs but little, chews his food slowly, does not lick his fingers, avoids garlic and onions and refrains from using the toothpick in toilet rooms, baths, public meetings and on the streets.
Alcoholic drinks were often indulged in both in company and in private. Judging by the countless stories of revelry in such works as the Aghani and the Arabian Nights, and by the numerous songs and poems in praise of wine, prohibition, one of the distinctive features of the Moslem religion, prohibited no more than did the eighteenth amendment to the Constitution of the United States. Even caliphs, vizirs, princes and judges paid no heed to the religious injunction. Khamr, made of dates, was the favourite beverage.
Convivial parties featuring “the daughter of the vine” and song were not uncommon. At these drinking bouts the hosts and guests perfumed their beards with civet or rose-water and wore special garments of bright colours. The room was made fragrant by ambergris or aloes-wood burning in a censer. The songstresses who participated in such gatherings were mostly slaves of loose character, as illustrated by many stories; they constituted the gravest menace to the morals of the youth of the age. The laity had access to wine in the Christian monasteries and the special bars conducted mainly by Jews. Christians and Jews were the “bootleggers” of the time.
“Cleanliness is a part of faith”—so runs a Prophetic tradition that is still on every lip in Moslem lands. Arabia had no baths that we hear of before Muhammad. He himself is represented as prejudiced against them and as having permitted men to enter them for purposes of cleanliness only, each wearing a cloth. In the time we are studying, however, public baths had become popular not only for ceremonial ablutions and for their salutary effects, but also as resorts of amusement and mere luxury. Women were allowed their use on specially reserved days.
At the beginning of the tenth century Baghdad boasted some 27,000 public baths, and in other times even 60,000, all of which—like most figures in Arabic sources—seem highly exaggerated. A Moorish traveller who visited Baghdad in 1327 found in each of the thirteen quarters composing its west side two or three baths of the most elaborate kind, each supplied with hot and cold running water.
Then, as now, the bath-house comprised several chambers with mosaic pavements and marble-lined inner walls clustering round a large central chamber. This innermost chamber, crowned by a dome studded with small round glazed apertures for the admission of light, was heated by steam rising from a central jet of water in the middle of a basin. The outer rooms were used for lounging and for enjoying drinks and refreshments.
Sports, like the fine arts, have throughout history been characteristic more of Indo-European than of Semitic civilization. Engaging in them involves physical exertion for its own sake, a rather absurd idea to the son of Arabia with his poetical temperament and his well-founded respect for the heat of the daylight hours.
In the list of outdoor sports, however, were archery, polo, ball and mallets (a sort of croquet or hockey), fencing, javelin-throwing, horse-racing, and above all hunting. Among the qualifications of a prospective boon companion writers list ability in archery, hunting, playing ball and chess—in all of which the companion may equal his royal master with no fear of affronting him. Among the caliphs particularly fond of polo was al-Mutasim, whose Turkish general once refused to play against him because he did not want to be against the commander of the believers even in a game. Interesting references are also made to a ball game in which a broad piece of wood was used. Could this be tennis in its rudimentary form? The word “tennis”, generally supposed to have come from the French verb tenez, meaning “take heed”, is probably from Tinnis, the Arabic name of an Egyptian city in the Delta noted in the Middle Ages for its linen fabrics, which may have been used for making tennis balls.
The number of early Arabic books dealing with hunting, trapping and falconry testify to the keen interest in these sports. Falconry and hawking were introduced into Arabia from Persia, as the Arabic vocabulary relating to these sports indicates. They became particularly favoured in the later period of the caliphate and in that of the Crusades. Hunting with the falcon or sparrow-hawk is still practised in Persia, Iraq and Syria in practically the same manner as described in the Arabian Nights. Incidentally, the first thing a Moslem hunter must do after seizing his prey is to cut its throat; otherwise its flesh would be unlawful.
At the head of the social register stood the caliph and his family, the government officials and the satellites of these groups. In this last class we may include the soldiers and bodyguards, the favoured friends and boon companions, as well as the “clients” and servants.
The servants were almost all slaves recruited from non-Moslem peoples and captured by force, taken prisoner in time of war or purchased in time of peace. Some were negroes, others were Turks, and still others were white. The white slaves were mainly Greeks and Slavs, Armenians and Berbers. Some were eunuchs attached to the service of the harem, others, termed ghilman, who might also be eunuchs, were the recipients of special favours from their masters, wore rich and attractive uniforms and often beautified and perfumed their bodies in effeminate fashion.
We read of ghilman in the reign of al-Rashid; but it was evidently the caliph al-Amin who, following Persian precedent, established in the Arabic world the ghilman institution for the practice of unnatural sexual relations. A judge of whom there is record used four hundred such youths. Poets did not disdain to give public expression to their perverted passions and to address amorous pieces of their compositions to “beardless young boys”.
The maidens among slaves were also used as singers, dancers and concubines, and some of them exerted appreciable influence over their caliph masters. Such was “she of the mole”, whom al-Rashid had bought for 70,000 dirhams and in a fit of jealousy bestowed on one of his male servants. In order to win him from another singing-girl to whom he became attached, al-Rashid’s wife Zubaydah presented her husband with ten maidens, two of whom became the mothers of caliphs.
The legendary story of Tawaddud, the beautiful and talented slave girl in The Thousand and One Nights, whom al-Rashid was willing to purchase for 100,000 dinars after she had passed with flying colours a searching test before his savants in medicine, law, astronomy, philosophy, music and mathematics—to say nothing of rhetoric, grammar, poetry, history and the Koran— illustrates how highly cultured some of these maids must have been.
Al-Amin’s contribution consisted in organizing a corps of female pages, the members of which bobbed their hair, dressed like boys and wore silk turbans. The innovation soon became popular with both the higher and the lower classes of society. An eye-witness reports that when on a Palm Sunday he called on al-Mamun he found in his presence twenty Greek maidens, all bedecked and adorned, dancing with gold crosses on their necks and olive branches and palm leaves in their hands. The distribution of 3,000 dinars among the dancers brought the affair to a grand finale.
Al-Mutawakkil, according to a report, had 4,000 concubines, all of whom (we are asked to believe) shared his nuptial bed. It was customary for governors and generals to send presents, including girls received or exacted from among their subjects, to the caliph or vizir; failure to do so was interpreted as a sign of rebellion.
The commonalty was composed of an upper class bordering on the aristocracy and comprised litterateurs, learned men, artists, merchants, craftsmen and professionals; and of a lower class forming the majority of the nation and made up of farmers, herdsmen and country folk who represented the native population and now enjoyed the status of dhimmis.
The wide extent of the empire and the high level which civilization attained necessitated extensive international trade. The early merchants were Christians, Jews and Zoroastrians, but they were later largely superseded by Moslems and Arabs, who did not disdain trade as they did agriculture. Such ports as Baghdad, Basrah, Siraf, Cairo and Alexandria soon developed into centres of active land and maritime commerce.
Eastward, Moslem traders ventured as far as China. This trade was based on silk, the earliest of China’s magnificent gifts to the West, and usually followed what has been styled “the great silk way” going through Samarqand and Chinese Turkistan, a region less traversed today by civilized man than almost any other part of the habitable world. Goods were generally transported by relays; few caravans went the whole distance. Sea traders carried Islam into the islands which in 1949 formed the United States of Indonesia.
Westward, Moslem merchants reached Morocco and Spain. A thousand years before de Lesseps an Arab caliph, Harun, entertained the idea of digging a canal through the Isthmus of Suez. Arab Mediterranean trade, however, never rose to great prominence. The Black Sea was likewise inhospitable to it, though in the tenth century brisk land trade took place with the peoples of the Volga regions to the north. But the Caspian Sea, because of its proximity to the Persian centres and the prosperous cities of Samarqand and Bukhara with their hinterland, was the scene of active commercial intercourse. Moslem merchants carried with them dates, sugar, cotton and woollen fabrics, steel tools and glassware; they imported, among other commodities, spices, camphor and silk from farther Asia, and ivory, ebony and negro slaves from Africa.
An idea of the fortunes amassed by the Rothschilds and Rockefellers of the age may be gained from the case of the Baghdad jeweller ibn-al-Jassas, who remained wealthy after a caliph had confiscated 16,000,000 dinars of his property, and became the first of a family of distinguished jewel merchants. Certain Basrah merchants whose ships, carried goods to distant parts of the world had an annual income of more than a million dirhams each. An uneducated miller of Basrah and Baghdad could afford to distribute a hundred dinars as daily alms among the poor. In Siraf, the home of the average merchant cost over 10,000 dinars, some over 30,000 dinars; and many maritime traders were worth 4,000,000 dinars each. A dinar was the equivalent of about $2.40.
No commercial activity could have reached such dimensions had it not rested on extensive home industry and agriculture. Hand industry flourished in various parts of the empire. In Western Asia it centred chiefly in the manufacture of rugs, tapestry, silk, cotton, and woollen fabrics, satin, brocade, sofas (from suffah) and cushion covers, as well as other articles of furniture and kitchen utensils. The many looms of Persia and Iraq turned out carpets and textiles maintained at a high standard by distinctive marks. One caliph’s mother had a rug specially ordered for her at a cost of 130,000,000 dirhams; it bore figures of all sorts of birds in gold, with rubies and other precious stones for eyes.
A quarter in Baghdad named after Attab, an Umayyad prince who was its most distinguished resident, gave its name to a striped fabric, attabi, first manufactured there in the twelfth century. The fabric was imitated by the Arabs in Spain and under the trade name tabi became popular in France, Italy and other lands of Europe. The term survives in “tabby”, applied to streaked or marked cats. Kufah produced the silk and partly silk kerchiefs for the head that are still worn under the name kufiyah.
In ancient Susiana were a number of factories famous for the embroidery of damask (a fabric originally made in Damascus) figured with gold, and for curtains made of spun silk. Their camel-and goat-hair fabrics, as well as their spun-silk cloaks, were widely known. Shiraz yielded striped woollen-cloaks, also gauzes and brocades. Under the name of “taffeta” European ladies of the Middle Ages bought in their native shops the Persian silken cloth taftah.
The glass of Sidon, Tyre and other Syrian towns, a survival of the ancient Phoenician industry which next to the Egyptian was the oldest glass industry in history, was proverbial for its clarity and thinness. As a result of the Crusades, Syrian glass became the forerunner of the stained glass in the cathedrals of Europe. Glass and metal vases of Syrian workmanship were in great demand as articles of utility and luxury.
Worthy of special note is the manufacture of writing-paper, introduced in the middle of the eighth century into Samarqand from China. The paper of Samarqand, which, as we have noted, was captured by the Moslems in 704, was considered matchless. Before the close of that century Baghdad saw its first paper mill. Gradually other mills for making paper followed: Egypt had its factory about 900 or earlier, Morocco about 1100, Spain about 1150; and various kinds of paper, white and coloured, were produced. From Moslem Spain and from Italy, in the twelfth and thirteenth centuries, the manufacture of paper, as we shall see later, finally worked its way into Christian Europe, where, with the later discovery of printing from movable type, 1450-1455, it made possible the measure of popular education which Europe and America now enjoy.
Agriculture received great impetus under the early Abbasids because their capital itself lay in a most favoured spot, an alluvial plain; because they realized that farming was the chief source of the state income and because the tilling of the land was almost wholly in the hands of the native inhabitants, whose status was somewhat improved under the new regime. Deserted farms and ruined villages in different parts of the empire were gradually rehabilitated. The lower region of the Tigris-Euphrates valley, the richest, with the exception of Egypt, in the whole empire and the traditional site of the garden of Eden, was the object of special attention on the part of the central government.
Canals from the Euphrates formed a “veritable network”. Arab geographers speak of caliphs “digging” or “opening” “rivers”, when in most cases the process involved was one of redigging or reopening canals that had existed since Babylonian days. In Iraq as well as Egypt the task consisted mainly in keeping the ancient systems in order. Even before the first World War, when the Ottoman government commissioned Sir William Willcocks to study the irrigation problem of Iraq, his report stressed the necessity of clearing the old watercourses rather than of constructing new ones. It should be noted, however, that the face of this great alluvial plain has greatly changed since Abbasid days and that both the Tigris and the Euphrates have considerably shifted their courses.
Most of the fruit trees and vegetables grown at present in Western Asia were known at this time, with the exception of mangoes, potatoes, tomatoes and similar plants introduced in recent times from the New World and distant European colonies. The orange tree, allied to the citron and lemon, had its native habitat in northern India or Malay, whence it spread into Western Asia, the adjoining lands of the Mediterranean basin and eventually through the Arabs in Spain into Europe. The sugar-cane plantations of south-western Persia, with their noted refineries, were about this time followed by similar ones on the Syrian coast, from which place the Crusaders later introduced the cane and the sugar into Europe. Thus did this sweet commodity, probably of Bengalese origin, which has since become an indispensable ingredient in the daily food of civilized man, work its way westward.
The agricultural class, who constituted the bulk of the population of the empire and its chief source of revenue, were the original inhabitants of the land, now reduced to the position of dhimmis—those with whom a compact for religious tolerance had been made. The Arab considered it below his dignity to engage in agricultural pursuits. Originally “Scripturaries”—Christians, Jews and Sabians—the dhimmis had their status widened to include certain other sects. In country places and on their farms these dhimmis clung to their ancient cultural patterns and preserved their native languages. The compact was observed well, on the whole, although there were periods of religious persecution.
In cities Christians and Jews held important financial, clerical and professional positions. This of course led to jealousy on the part of the Moslem populace and found expression in official enactments, but most of this discriminating legislation remained “ink on paper” and was not consistently enforced.
The pious Umayyad Caliph Umar II ordered Christians and Jews to don distinctive dress, and he excluded them from public offices. Harun al-Rashid was evidently the first to re-enact some of the old measures. The caliph al-Mutawakkil in 850 and 854 decreed that Christians and Jews should affix wooden images of devils to their houses, level their graves even with the ground, wear outer garments of honey colour, i.e. yellow, put two honey-coloured patches on the clothes of their slaves, one sewn on the back and the other on the front, and ride only on mules and asses, with wooden saddles marked by two pomegranate-like balls on the cantle. It was on account of this distinctive dress that the dhimmi acquired the epithet “spotted”.
One other grave disability under which the dhimmis laboured was a ruling of the Moslem jurists of the period that the testimony of a Christian or a Jew could not be accepted against a Moslem; for the Jews and Christians had once corrupted the text of their scripture, as the Koran charges, and therefore could no more be trusted. But in spite of these restrictions the Christians under the caliphs enjoyed a large measure of toleration. We even read of Christian vizirs in the latter half of the ninth century, and such Christian high officials received the usual marks of honour for we find record of certain Moslems objecting to kissing their hands. One of the most remarkable features of Christianity under the caliphs was its possession of enough vitality to make it an aggressive church, sending its missionaries as far as India and China.
As one of the “protected” peoples the Jews fared on the whole even better than the Christians, and that in spite of several unfavourable references in the Koran. Under several caliphs we read of more than one Jew assuming responsible state positions. In Baghdad itself the Jews maintained a good-sized colony which continued to flourish until the fall of the city. Benjamin of Tudela, a rabbi who visited the colony in 1170, found it in possession of ten rabbinical schools and twenty-three synagogues; the principal one, adorned with variegated marble, was richly ornamented with gold and silver. Benjamin tells in glowing terms the high esteem in which the chief rabbi was held as a descendant of David and head of the community of all Jews owing allegiance to the Baghdad caliphate. On his way to an audience with the caliph he appeared dressed in embroidered silk, wore a white turban gleaming with gems and was accompanied by a retinue of horsemen. Ahead of him marched a herald calling out: “Make way before our lord the son of David:”
This is the panorama of the life of the people of the caliphate and their relationships to one another. We are now in the third stage of the Arab conquest. The first, as we have seen, was military and political—the march of Arab arms. The second was religious, beginning with the first century of Abbasid rule. During this period the bulk of the population of the empire was converted to Islam. The third stage was linguistic: the victory of the Arabic tongue over the native languages of the subjugated peoples. This was the slowest and the one in which the conquered presented the greatest resistance. Apparently men are more ready to give up their political and even religious loyalties than their linguistic ones.
Arabic as the language of learning won its day before Arabic as the vernacular. In the preceding chapter we saw how fresh streams of thought from Greek culture, Persia and India resulted in the beginnings of a new culture in the 800’s in Baghdad. Now, Arabic has triumphed as the vehicle of Arab civilization. This ushers in Islam’s intellectual golden age.
Hitti, Philip K. The Arabs; A Short History. MacMillan & Co, 1914.
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