Judaism

The religion of the people of Israel played a critical role in the religious matrix of late antiquity. Jews constituted a significant minority of the population in many Mediterranean towns, and Judaism had an impact on the religious lives of many non-Jews as well. It was out of Judaism that Christianity first arose, and at least partly through a bitter dispute with its mother faith that the new religion defined itself. As we shall see, the relationship between Judaism and Islam was just as close. Nor were the older pagan traditions immune from the influence of the first of the major monotheistic faiths. Nonetheless, reconstructing the history of Judaism in the Near East in the centuries before and after the rise of Islam is difficult, given the nature of the surviving historical record; much of the story has to be pieced together from sources hostile to the Jews and their faith.

The God of Israel was known throughout the Near Eastern and Mediterranean worlds, thanks to the widespread dispersal of his worshipers. In part their dispersion resulted from the successive deportations of Jews from Palestine, under the Assyrians and Babylonians and, in the wake of the Bar Kochba rebellion in the second century CE, the Romans. By the rise of Islam, for example, the Jewish community of Babylonia was well over one thousand years old.

The murder of cAli in 661 and the establishment of the caliphate of his rival Mucawiya, cousin of cUthman and Arab governor of Syria, is generally taken to mark the advent of the Umayyad dynasty, the first Islamic state built explicitly on the claims of one family (the Banu Umayya) to the right to rule. Mucawiya was succeeded in 680 by his son, Yazid, and then by members of collateral branches of the Umayyad family. In fact, however, the political situation was more complex, and its complexity reflects and is central to the process through which Islam emerged. The third caliph cUthman had appointed many members of his own clan to important administrative posts, provoking considerable opposition among Muslims who resented the favors granted to the family, particularly as many members of the Banu Umayya had been late and reluctant converts to Islam. cUthman's policy may have extended to efforts to ensure that he was succeeded as caliph by one of his sons. If that is the case, then the dynastic policies of the Umayyads could be regarded as having commenced earlier than the reign of Mucawiya, with the regime of cAli constituting a mere interregnum. On the other hand, no Umayyad “state” was firmly established and widely recognized for some time.

This book constitutes an attempt to describe and understand the slow emergence of a distinctively Islamic tradition over the centuries which followed the death of that tradition's founder, Muhammad ibn cAbdallah, in 632 CE. It is not a narrative history, although its analytical approach is (I hope) historical. I have cast the central questions as those of religious identity and authority. The question of what it means to be a Muslim requires, I believe, a dynamic answer. Had the question been posed to Muhammad, his answer (if indeed he would have understood the question) would have been quite different than that of a jurist in Baghdad in the ninth century, or of a Sufi mystic in Cairo in the fifteenth. From a historical perspective, no answer is better than any other, and none has any value except against the background of the larger historical factors that produced it. In the multicultural Near East, those factors have always included faith traditions other than Islam, and so I have tried throughout to give some account of the complex ties which, from the very first, have bound Muslim identities to those of Jews, Christians, and others.

The target audience for this book is quite broad, and therefore the target is, paradoxically, perhaps more difficult to strike squarely than with, say, a scholarly monograph of the usual sort, or a conventional introduction to “Islam”.

With the full development of sectarian movements within the Islamic umma, the stage was set for the crystallization of a specifically Sunni Muslim identity, which took shape largely in response to the threat of sectarian fragmentation. Khariji Islam survived in peripheral areas of the Islamic world, but in the central Near East in this period posed little threat. It did play some role in the revolt of African slaves (the “Zanj”) in southern Iraq in the late ninth century. This rebellion was driven by the appalling conditions in which slaves worked harvesting natron in the region's extensive and virtually impenetrable marshes, but it also relied heavily on its charismatic instigator, an enigmatic figure named Muhammad ibn cAli. The Khariji slogan la hukma illa lillah, “judgment is God's alone,” appeared on Muhammad's banners and coins which were minted in his name. But Muhammad was an opportunist, drawing on support wherever he could find it – at one point he claimed cAlid descent, and unsuccessfully sought an alliance with the Ismacili leader Hamdan Qarmat, whose name survived in that of the Qarmatians. As a result, the ideological orientation of the Zanj rebellion is somewhat confused. From hindsight, perhaps the most important aspect of the Zanj revolt was simply its timing, in the late ninth century, at just the moment that an active Ismacili movement appeared, the Imams most widely recognized by the Shica were disappearing, and the fragmentation of effective political authority called into question the precise significance of the cAbbasid caliphate.

It is conventional to speak of a “Sunni revival” in the eleventh and twelfth centuries. According to this view, militantly Sunni regimes such as that of the Saljuqs responded to the challenge of the “Shici century,” that period between the mid-tenth and mid-eleventh centuries when much of the central Muslim world was dominated by Shici regimes (the Fatimids, the Buyids) of varying stripes, by vigorously re-asserting – reviving – Sunni identity and claims to dominance. Like many grand historical themes, this one is perhaps a bit too neat and simple. On a political level, for example, the Saljuq seizure of power in Baghdad was not a restoration of a pre-Buyid political patterns. It is true that the Buyid amirs, whom the Saljuqs replaced, were Shicis, but their power had been in decline for some time previously. Moreover, relations between them and the cAbbasid caliphs, still the symbol of Sunni legitimacy, were often cordial; indeed, as the Saljuq armies approached Baghdad in 1055, the caliph intervened with the Saljuq leader, Toghril Beg, seeking protection for the Buyid amir al-Malik al-Rahim. Relations between the Saljuq leader and the cAbbasid caliph were hardly warm at the outset: Toghril Beg had been in Baghdad for thirteen months before he met the caliph.

If the notion of a Sunni “revival” is in some ways misleading, there were nonetheless extremely important developments at work that shaped the character that Sunni Islam would carry into the modern period.

Religious knowledge (cilm) was perhaps the central cultural lynchpin of the Islamic tradition and of the social patterns in which that tradition was experienced in the Middle Period. This knowledge was embedded in the rich and inter-related body of texts – principally the Koran, collections of hadith, legal treatises and textbooks, and commentaries on them – which formed the substantive basis for the training of those scholars who were known as the ulama. Our principal concern here, however, is less with the intellectual parameters of this cilm than with the social uses to which it was put, and with the way in which these uses helped to define Muslim identities and the nature of the ulama's authority.

For the ulama, it was the active process of transmitting religious knowledge that was critical. As we have seen, the ulama were in fact socially quite diverse, and the only thing that marked them as a distinctive group was their command of these highly valued texts, and their control of access to them. In part this was simply a matter of education, that is, of transmitting to students a familiarity with essential texts which was necessary to the proper discharge of the responsibilities they might incur upon appointment to a range of offices – for example, that of the qadi, or that of professor (mudarris) in the myriad religious institutions which sprang up in medieval Islamic cities.

Virtually all accounts of the rise of an Islamic state and then empire in the seventh century stress its extraordinary character, the suddenness of the appearance on the scene of the Muslim Arabs and the wholly unexpected nature of their success – what Marshall Hodgson referred to as “a breach in cultural continuity unparalleled among the great civilizations.” Explanatory models for the Muslim success – at least those which do not focus upon the Arabs themselves, on the demographic, economic, or religious factors propelling them forward – tend to look for causes in the chaotic developments in the Near East in the late sixth and early seventh centuries. In this, of course, there lies the danger of an easy retrospective teleology, of the assumption that the Near Eastern civilizations experienced on the eve of the Muslim conquests a crisis which weakened them fatally, and so rendered those conquests (or something like them) virtually inevitable. The cautious historian should eschew such a dramatic viewpoint, tempting as it may be. On the other hand, conditions in the Near East in the early seventh century were indeed highly charged and unstable. From a broader perspective, they demonstrate, not the inevitability of the Muslim conquests, but the degree to which those events marked a stage in a longer-term process by which the Arabs were drawn into the cultural orbit of the Fertile Crescent and surrounding territories and, in their Muslim guise, contributed to its evolution.

Previous chapters have described coastal landforms and discussed morphodynamic frameworks for interpreting the pattern of adjustments for different coastal types. The range of adjustments is complex and individual coasts change at varying rates and in varying directions. The level of uncertainty about what will happen in the future increases as the time scale increases. Although coastal landforms and the natural processes of erosion and deposition that shape them are the focus of this book, this natural pattern of adjustment is increasingly influenced directly and indirectly by human activities. Many coasts have been substantially modified by local structural and ecological changes brought about intentionally or unintentionally by humans. The impact of human activities can be felt beyond the local scale. Climate change as a result of the enhanced greenhouse effect and the associated threat of accelerated sea-level rise imply human impact on a global scale at an unprecedented rate. These impacts are added to natural pattens of change.

No coast is now likely to be beyond the influence of humans who have become a force ‘as powerful as many natural forces of change, stronger than some and sometimes as mindless as any’ (Meyer, 1996, p. 2).

This chapter is concerned with coral reefs and associated carbonate environments on tropical and subtropical coasts. Reefs are dynamic geomorphological systems demonstrating a complex interplay between physical and biological processes. They form solid limestone, simultaneously producing, breaking down and redistributing sediments of different sizes to construct a range of landforms. As a result of their ability to build rigid, wave-resistant structures, corals modify the environment in which they live, as expressed by Darwin in the quotation above. Reefs contain a variety of interacting subsystems operating over a broader range of time scales than generally seen on rocky coasts, comprising construction, destruction and various responses to extreme perturbations, such as storms.

Deltas and estuaries are dynamic systems associated with the mouths of rivers. Deltas are accumulations of river-derived sediment whereas estuaries are the tide-influenced lower parts of rivers and their valleys. The distinction between them is sometimes difficult to discern, and it is useful to consider a continuum of deltaic–estuarine landforms. Deltaic–estuarine morphology is influenced by geological setting and topography, and landforms are shaped by hydrodynamic processes. Riverine and coastal sediments are affected by both alluvial and marine influences, together with minor local processes, such as direct input of colluvium from hillslopes, cliff retreat, wind redistribution of sediment, and chemical and biological action.

River discharge and the rate of delivery of sediment to the ocean or embayment vary in relation to catchment size, lithology and climate (Milliman, 2001). The rivers that drain from the continental area of southern and eastern Asia, with highly tectonic hinterlands and prominent monsoon climates, for instance, deliver large volumes of sediment to the oceans (Milliman and Meade, 1983). However, steep, tectonically active island catchments, such as those throughout the Indonesian island arc, also contribute disproportionately large sediment volumes to the ocean (Milliman and Syvitski, 1992).

This book outlines the way that coasts operate. It is written for students of coastal geomorphology, coastal environments, and coastal geology, and for all those with an interest in coastal landforms or who seek insights into the way the coast behaves. It brings together studies of process operation and studies of coastal evolution concerned with longer-term landform development, into morphodynamic models. Coastal morphodynamics involves the mutual co-adjustment of process and form. It provides a framework from which to generalise across space and time scales. The book introduces these concepts and outlines geological setting, materials and coastal processes. Although there are physical principles which govern the response of sediment to forcing factors such as wave energy, the complexity of non-linear interactions means that it is generally difficult to scale up to explain behaviour over time scales that are relevant to human societies.

The book is based heavily on my own research experiences in Australia, Britain, the United States, New Zealand and on many islands in the West Indies, Pacific and Indian Oceans. It also draws extensively on the scientific literature and pays particular tribute in terms of historical perspective to those coastal scientists who have built the foundations of what we know. I hope that it instils something of the sense of wonder that I feel about the coast, and offers new perspectives on how the coast is shaped.

Coasts are often highly scenic and contain abundant natural resources. The majority of the world's population lives close to the sea. As many as 3 billion people (50% of the global total) live within 60 km of the shoreline. The development of urbanised societies was associated with deltaic plains in semiarid areas, and the first cities appeared shortly after the geomorphological evolution of these plains (Stanley and Warne, 1993a). The coast plays an important role in global transportation, and is the destination of many of the world's tourists.

The shoreline is where the land meets the sea, and it is continually changing. Coastal scientists, and the casual ‘wanderer by the shore’, have attempted to understand the shoreline in relation to the processes that shape it, and interrelationships with the adjacent shallow marine and terrestrial hinterland environments. Explaining the geomorphological changes that are occurring on the coast is becoming increasingly important in order to manage coastal resources in a sustainable way.

This book examines the coast as a dynamic geomorphological system. Geomorphology is the study of landforms, and coastal geomorphology is concerned primarily with explaining the many different types of coastal landforms, and understanding the factors that shape them.