A History of Agriculture in India v2.c53.s5: The Caliphate
A History of Agriculture in India v2.c53.s5
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The Caliphate
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Abu Bakr succeeded Muhammad as his Caliph in A.D. 632. He was followed by Omar (A.D. 634-644), whose general, Khalid, defeated the army of Heraclius in A.D. 636 upon the banks of the Yarmak, a tributary of the Jordan. Damascus was taken in A.D. 635. In A.D. 641, the Persian army was defeated at Nahavend by Caliph Omar, and Iran, Mesopotamia and Central Asia passed into Muslim hands. Alexandria was sacked in A.D. 642. Syria, Iran and Egypt were conquered by the Arab Army, all in a period of twenty-five years. Thus the Arabs controlled the trade routes from China, India and Africa. Under Walid I (A.D. 705-714), northern Africa and Spain were conquered.
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In A.D. 749, Abdus Abbas became the first Abbasid Caliph with his capital at Baghdad. The Abbasids were Shias, the followers of Ali, son-in-law of the Prophet. They were more liberal in outlook than their predecessors, the Omayyads. In A.D. 757 the Caliph Al-Mansur founded a new capital at Baghdad on the Tigris. Under Haroun-al-Rashid (A.D. 786-809), a contemporary of Charlemagne, Baghdad became a great trading and literary centre. It attracted Greek, Nestorian Christian and Jewish scholars and philosophers from all over. The Caliph sent scholars to different parts of the Eastern Roman Empire to collect and purchase all the available works of Greek philosophers. It was thus that the works of Aristotle, Plato, Hippocrates, Galen, Euclid, Appolonius, Ptolemy and others became available to them, and they got them translated into Arabic. To the translations they appended erudite commentaries. Thus arose a great Arabic culture, liberal in spirit, which absorbed the best elements of the Persian and Egyptian cultures, and the science of the Greeks and the Hindus. Through Baghdad, the Hindu medical, astronomical and mathematical theories found their way to mediaeval Europe. Caliph Al Mamun (A.D. 813-833) obtained copies of scientific manuscripts from India, which were sometimes collated to establish a sound text. Didactic fables of India, e.g. the Panchatantra, adopted the guise of Kalila and Damna, and later on became popular in Europe as Aesop's fables.
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Unlike the Romans, the followers of Islam regarded trade and labour as honourable professions. The Caliphs of Baghdad were also part-time traders, and they purchased their personal goods with the proceeds of their manual labour. They organized the Moslem industrial workers, such as weavers, goldsmiths and blacksmiths, in guilds, and supervised and patronized them. Trade involves travel, visiting distant lands and observing their people as well as their soil, rocks, minerals, fauna and flora. It makes a person observant, and encourages him to think in abstract. From the eighth to eleventh centuries, the entire trade of India and China, on the one hand, and of Europe, on the other, was with the Arabs. The extent of the Arab empire in the ninth century is shown in Fig. 1. An enormous number
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Map of the Arab Empire in the IX Century A.D.
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FIG. 1. The Arab Empire was at its maximum extent in the 9th century A.D.
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of Arab coins, dating from the end of the seventh to the beginning of the eleventh century, which have been found in Russia, Finland, Sweden and Norway, indicate the extent of Islamic trade in northern Europe. This trade with the countries of the East and the West became a great source of wealth to the Arabs. With this wealth, they raised armies which enabled them to extend their conquests. Its most beneficent effect was the rise of a leisured class which occupied itself with studies and pursuit of knowledge.
Linked texts (1)
- Pañcatantra — Viṣṇuśarman, Sanskrit