All his life, Saladin had a particular affection for Damascus. It was there that he spent much of his youth and embarked on his political career under the guidance of his father, his uncle and his master Nur al-Din. It was in that city that he liked to live between military campaigns and finally it was there that he died in 589/1193. As Baha’ al-Din Ibn Shaddad said of him, ‘He loved this city and preferred residence there over all other places’ (Ibn Shaddad 1964: 241, 2001: 237). The Syrian capital in its turn wished to pay tribute to Saladin and to celebrate the decisive role he played in the history of the city, by erecting an imposing statue of the sultan below the walls of the citadel (Hillenbrand 1999: 595-600). Today, his mausoleum, situated to the north of the Umayyad Mosque, still attracts very large numbers of visitors.

The buildings constructed by Saladin in Damascus reflect the principal directions of his political thinking. In the military sphere he strengthened the city's defences with the reconstruction of one of the towers of the citadel in 574/1178 and, in Safar 589/February 1193, he restored the western gate in the ramparts known as Bab al-Jabiya. He also reopened an earlier gate situated to the south of the citadel, renaming it the Gate of Victory (Bab al-Nasr). In the religious sphere the sultan had work done on the Umayyad Mosque where the Dome of the Eagle over the central nave was restored, the marble cladding of some of the pillars was entirely renewed and the Shafi‘ite zawiya inside the mosque was endowed with new waqfs.

In a long and distinguished career, Carole Hillenbrand has become best known as an Islamic historian of the Seljuks and the Crusades. For her work on the latter she won in 2005 the prestigious King Faisal Prize for Islamic Studies, the first non-Muslim to be honoured in this way. However, Carole's scholarly interests go far beyond history in the technical sense to include Sufism and Islamic thought. Carole has published in all these areas, out of conviction that the best scholarship on Islamic history and Islamic studies should view Islam not just as a religion but also as a civilisation. This is precisely how Carole has approached her teaching at Edinburgh – where I had the pleasure of working with her for over 16 years – to generations of undergraduate students as well as in her supervision of scores of postgraduates. Carole has always believed that serious teaching and research cannot but be language-based. This explains her proficiency in so many languages and her insistence on teaching the first-year Arabic course at the university for over twenty years.

The contributions in this volume reflect Carole's scholarly interests. While history, naturally, predominates, Islamic culture and Islamic studies are present in force. Some of the essays deal with the problematic nature of the sources of Islamic history; others deal with aspects of Islamic thought and culture of interest to scholars of Sunni and Shi‘ite Islam.

The Shi‘a appeared on the historical stage in the formative period of Islam with their own distinct identity and ideas on religious authority and leadership revolving around the sanctity of the Prophet Muhammad's family or the ahl al-bayt. Soon after the tragedy of Karbala’ where al-Husayn b. ‘Ali, the Shi‘i imam and the Prophet's grandson, and his small band of companions were massacred by an Umayyad army in 61/680, the Shi‘a themselves split into different groups, each one recognising a different line of ‘Alids, descendants of ‘Ali b. Abi Talib (d. 40/661), the Prophet's cousin, son-in-law and the first Shi‘i imam, or other members of the then broadly defined ahl al-bayt, as their spiritual leaders or imams.

Subsequently, Shi‘ism evolved in terms of two main branches, designated as the Kaysaniyya and the Imamiyya, each comprised of a number of sects and splinter groups. However, both of these Shi‘i branches represented minority positions within the Islamic community compared to groups later collectively designated as Sunnis. The Kaysanis, representing the politically active wing of Shi‘ism, were gradually absorbed into the Abbasid movement that succeeded in supplanting the Umayyads and installing the Abbasids to the caliphate in 132/750. It was in the aftermath of the establishment of Abbasid rule that the moderate Imami branch of Shi‘ism, the common heritage of the Twelver (Ithna‘ashari) and Ismaili Shi‘is, acquired its prominence during the imamate of Ja‘far al-Sadiq, while yet another politically active Shi‘i tradition found expression in Zaydi Shi‘ism.

Procession and Return, Exile and Return

Down the ages diverse thinkers and scholars, from the Neoplatonist Plotinus (AD 204/5–70) to the Victorian Jesuit poet Gerard Manley Hopkins (1844–89), have identified a flow of procession and return, working, as it were, like a kind of natural law within the universe (McGinn 2007: 46–70.). Bernard McGinn, in a succinct recapitulation, put it like this:

In a masterly exposition McGinn shows how ‘pagan Neoplatonic thinkers brought the paradigm of emanation and reversion to a new level of sophistication by their analysis of the three stages of reality’ (ibid.: 47) and how the fundamental ‘triadic paradigm’ at the heart of Neoplatonism could have become ‘Christianized’ in terms of Christian Trinitarian theology (ibid.: 47). The articulation, however, was within a framework which acknowledged the inadequacy of human words confronted by an ineffable mystery (McGinn 2007: 49).

The basic Plotinian triad of The One, Intellect and Soul (Plotinus 1966–88: passim), and the various triads which developed from it, thus ‘spoke’ to a nascent mediaeval Christian theology and could be used to intellectual effect.

The title I have chosen is intentionally precise and imprecise, as a brief comparison with the titles of some recent treatments of this subject will reveal. Take, for example, the title of Wladyslaw Duczko's recent book (2004), Viking Rus; or the title of chapter 9 of Pavel Dolukhanov's The Early Slavs: ‘The Vikings and the Rus’, with its sub-headings, ‘The Vikings in Europe’, ‘The Scandinavians and the Slavs’ and ‘The Beginnings of Russian Statehood’ (1996: 173–7, T77–93 and 193–7 respectively). My title's precision is both instructive in that it rules out of consideration the other terms found in the Arabic sources for Norsemen, that is, Majus (Zoroastrians) and Warank (Varangians), and deceptive, as my avoidance of the definite article indicates – I want to avoid the universalising of these groups which the definite article imposes – to say nothing of its imprecision in my avoidance of a distinction between Scandinavians, Vikings or Varangians.

I want to suggest the possibility that in the Arabic written sources from the ninth to eleventh centuries, we might find evidence of (1) Vikings (broadly conceived), (2) of Rus, (3) of Viking Rus and/or (4) Rus Vikings. I also want to highlight the hegemony, in discussions of these and other ethnonyms, of an astonishing nominalism, an index of what Dolukhanov (1996: 6) has referred to as the ‘cultural-ethnic paradigm’. My title also acknowledges that written sources are highly unreliable and deceptive.

‘It was not to shed blood and act unjustly that we followed the Family of Muhammad‘’ – so proclaimed Sharik b. Shaykh when he rebelled against Abu Muslim in 133/750. Or at least that is what al-Tabari reports that he said, since here he follows the historiographic convention of ascribing motivation through the direct speech of the figure in question. Al-Ya‘qubi has a variant: ‘It was not to shed blood and act unjustly that we gave the oath of allegiance to the Family of the Prophet.’ Precisely what Sharik b. Shaykh actually said or thought, we shall never know; nor, for that matter, can we say much about his movement in Bukhara beyond that it apparently fizzled out quickly, despite what Narshakhi reports as some broad support. But whatever the precise depth and breadth of that support, we can be sure that others felt the same way. The blood-letting of the Abbasid Revolution had gone too far, and one set of tyrants had been replaced by another: in the eyes of Sharik and those like-minded, the principles for which the Hashimiyya had fought – just rule under a member of the Family of the Prophet, in accordance with God's Book – had been betrayed.

The two ideas – blood and tyranny – are neatly combined in two lines of poetry, which were reportedly inscribed on a sword that had killed innocents in the wake of that Revolution:

The Muslim invasions of Iran and Turkistan in the seventh century have been discussed several times in the modern literature (Gibb 1923; Bartold 1968; Daniel 1979; Kennedy 2007). The purpose of this chapter is to attempt to penetrate beyond the political narrative to examine the impact of the Muslim conquest on the topography and social structure of the city. It will consider the geography of Muslim occupation and settlement, the reactions of the local people to the invaders and the impact of the coming of Islam on the topography and built environment of the city.

The course of the military campaigns by which the Arabs achieved control over Bukhara and the rest of Soghdia is fairly well established. Although the Muslims had raided Transoxania from their base at Merv as early as the governorate of Salim b. Ziyad (681–3), they made no permanent conquests until the time of Qutayba b. Muslim (705–15). The exact chronology of the conquest is not clear and it seems as if Qutayba made a number of expeditions to the Bukhara oasis. In 710, he arrived and installed the young Tughshada as Bukhara Khudah, lord of Bukhara, the title held by the kings of the local dynasty. Each time the Muslim armies came to the city, the people made peace and agreed to accept Islamic rule but when the Arab troops left in the winter they reverted to their old ways.

A manuscript now entitled Tarikh-i Chingiz Khan may be found in the Saint Petersburg University Library, no. OP. 950 (B). It was catalogued by A. T. Tagirdjanov (1962: 116–18), who correctly identified the work and the disorder of its contents and established the proper sequence of the text, which unfortunately has several lacunae and ends abruptly in mid-sentence. The fragment, on folios 9–88, is bound together with two other texts, to which it has no relation, either in terms of subject matter, calligraphy or paper, in a small volume of 133 folios. The page size of the Tarikh is 230 × 160 mm and the text block is 176 × 100 mm, within a margin ruled in blue, black and gold. The manuscript is in poor condition, being not only well worn and soiled by age, but having suffered water damage that has affected the bottom line of text on each page; possibly a victim of the flood of 1924. Furthermore, it has undergone the indignity of being used as a drawing pad for a childish hand, in which various doodles can be found at different points in the text, apart from the fly-leaves, especially on the first page (fol. 9r.) and beside the paintings (see esp. fols 39r., 45r.).

Unfortunately, being defective at the end, the copy is undated, and it might be attributed, in its present state, to more than one phase of production, as will be discussed below.

The Problem

Forty years after Hodgson wrote these words, Islamic studies scholars still use the term Sunni often (1) to mean whatever is not Shi‘i (or worse, whatever is not ‘Alid); and (2) to mean something like ‘orthodoxy’, that is, ‘mainstream’ Islam.

Other forms of Islam are hyphenated Islams – Shi‘i-Islam, Sufi-Islam, and so on. Aside from the unscholarly taking sides that this usage represents, using Sunnism as a default term for Islam, and Islam to mean Sunnism, not only hides the diversity of Islam but it obscures the fact that Sunnism too has a history that does not merely coincide with the history of ‘Islam’. Sunnism is a religious movement and, as such, it has a history within more general Islamic religious history.

Most Islamic mirrors for princes rest not on projected Utopias but on examples from the past. They draw upon a fund of wisdom attributed to ancient Greek and Persian as well as Muslim sages, and for all their differences of format, their guiding precepts are often expressed in ‘strikingly similar terms’. Yet, as Louise Marlow concludes, in the most recent and wide-ranging survey of Islamic advice literature:

Relevance to specific circumstances applies regardless of the language of composition of a piece of advice literature and of the linguistic politics surrounding it, which are not always easy to interpret. Thus Arabic was the Islamic language which first received the freight of ancient wisdom from the peoples conquered in the first/seventh century, and this freight passed back to, and was shared with, Persian, when the latter re-emerged as a language of high culture in the fourth/ tenth century.

The anti-Sufi polemic that marked Iran's spiritual discourse during the seventeenth century was no mere esoteric discussion. While visible during the century following the 1501 establishment of Twelver Shi‘ism by the Safavid dynasty as the realm's official faith, beginning in the seventeenth century attacks on Sufism and, increasingly, on such alleged Sufi practices as singing (ghina), were a marked feature of the religious landscape. Indeed, scholars who arrived in Iran beginning in the middle years of the second Safavid century faced a well-developed anti-Sufi discourse that had already erupted out of the mosque/madrasa, as it were, into the street. Shaykh ‘Ali b. Muhammad, al-‘Amili (d. 1691–2) and Muhammad Tahir (d. 1687), both of whom arrived in Iran from the Arab West during the reign of Shah Safi (reg. 1629–42), became active participants in the anti-Sufi campaign, charging Sufi elements, past and – especially – present with the most extreme, heretical beliefs and practices (see Newman 1999a, 1999b, 2006).

By contrast, Muhammad b. al-Hasan, al-Hurr al-‘Amili (d. 1693), who arrived in Iran in the early 1660s and is best-known as compiler of the multi-volume hadith collection Wasa ’il al-shi ‘a, avoided open identification with the worst excesses of the anti-Sufi discourse. Al-Hurr's interest in the hadith, his commencement of Wasa‘il in these same years and his decision to settle in Khurasan, far from the Safavid capital of Esfahan – the apparent home of the worst excesses of the anti-Sufi campaign – further encouraged, and were encouraged by, the manner in which he chose to participate in the anti-Sufi polemic.

In spite of its importance and interest the detailed examination and comparison of texts is not at present valued highly by academic review bodies and policy makers. It is a particular pleasure to submit a chapter belonging to this unfashionable category in honour of Carole Hillenbrand who is not only a friend of long standing but also a scholar in whose work, beginning with the doctoral thesis based on the History of Mayyafariqin, close and careful attention is given to textual matters. It is a revised version of a talk delivered under her chairmanship at a panel of the Conference of the International Society of Iranian Studies held in London at the School of Oriental and African Studies in August 2006.

Since the later nineteenth century scholars had appreciated that the Saljuqnama of Zahir al-Din Nishapuri was the main Persian source of the information on the Seljuqs of Iran that was available to later Persian chroniclers. For a long time the work was only known from references in later histories. As it happens, a manuscript of the original had entered the library of the Royal Asiatic Society early in the nineteenth century and, though not identified as such, had been described as a history of the Seljuqs in a catalogue published in 1854, but, for reasons that need not be told here, it eluded rediscovery until recently. In preparing an edition, I found that evidence from a number of later histories which exploited the Saljuqnama not only helped to establish that it was the original work of Nishapuri but also made it possible to check and correct readings of the manuscript.

This chapter considers the origin of some concepts key to Shi‘ite beliefs and subsequently important in the intellectual life of Shi‘ite Muslims. It briefly recounts the political-religious division that arose after the killing of ‘Ali b. Abi Talib, when ‘Abdullah b. Saba’ alleged that ‘Ali would return to life to destroy his enemies. Due to the killing of al-Husayn, the Kufan Iraqi notables, who called themselves ‘al-Tawwabun’ (the Penitents), began to secretly organise a movement against the Umayyads. It was after the reverse of the Tawwabun in Ramadan 65/May 685, when al-Mukhtar b. Abi ‘Ubayd al-Thaqafi led a revolt against the enemies of the Prophet's family (ahl al-bayt).

Though al-Mukhtar was defeated, his legacy lives on in three central important Shi‘ite doctrines. Firstly, he espoused the idea of Mahdism, which implies the concept of occultation (ghayba) and return (raj‘a) of the last Imam. Secondly, he propagated the doctrine of the change in God's will or command (bada‘). Thirdly, he supported belief in the inner meaning of sacred texts (batin). In effect, al-Mukhtar moved towards a more interpretative (ta wil), less literal, reading of the central Islamic text, the Qur'an. Accordingly, proto-Shi‘ite leaders introduced many new doctrinal terms to reinterpret previous ideas and to confirm their own beliefs and practices which differed from those of the majority of Muslims. It should be noted that the Shi‘ites themselves did not introduce all these key terms; heresiographers and subsequent observers applied some of them to try to elucidate Shi‘ite beliefs and their origins.

Nationalist Poetry: a Methodological Dilemma

Over the past three to four decades the study of the nation and nationalism has become the preserve of the historian, the political scientist and the sociologist. Witness the dominance of historical, political and sociological perspectives in the two popular Oxford readers on the topic by John Hutchinson and Anthony D. Smith: Nationalism (1994) and Ethnicity (1996). In constructing general theories about the historical rise and course of nationalism scholars from these backgrounds have focused on the political and socio-economic processes at work in nation formation and state building. References to culture in this work acknowledge the role of language and literary production in nation formation; attention to these areas has been allied in recent years to the burgeoning interest in the social semiotics of the nation, including its symbols and rituals, sports and tourism, cuisine and dress, museums and architecture, landscape and cartography, art and music, and ono-mastics and commemoration. The coupling of literary production with the nation in the West has, however, been predominantly associated with prose literature, particularly the novel which, following Anderson (1991) is considered the major literary genre in nation formation. In contrast, the role of poetry in the development of the nation has been assigned to the margins of nationalism as a field of enquiry, in spite of the fact that poetry in some socio-cultural contexts has played the leading role in cultural nationalism, as in pan-Arab nationalism.