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42 results

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  • Slavery in the Conquest Period

  • Chase F. Robinson
  • Journal:
    International Journal of Middle East Studies / Volume 49 / Issue 1 / February 2017
    Published online by Cambridge University Press:
    20 January 2017, pp. 158-163
    Print publication:
    February 2017
    • Article
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  • Abu ʿUbayda (d. 825) was a mawlā (client) of Jewish descent who wrote prolifically about history, religion, and culture. As such, he exemplifies the well-known feature of early Islamic learning that is the Abbasid-era mawlā scholar. His grandfather was a freeborn convert, rather than the more common manumitted slave, and it happens that the grandfather's patron—his sponsor, as it were, for admission into Islamic society—was a slave trader named ʿUbayd Allah b. Maʿmar (d. ca. 665). And ʿUbayd Allah b. Maʿmar, on a conservative estimate, had purchased hundreds of slaves from ʿUmar b. al-Khattab, the caliph who, before his assassination by a slave, had presided over the explosive early phases of the Islamic conquests.

The New Cambridge History of Islam
  • Volume 1, The Formation of the Islamic World, Sixth to Eleventh Centuries
  • Edited by Chase F. Robinson
  • Published online:
    28 March 2011
    Print publication:
    04 November 2010
  • Volume One of The New Cambridge History of Islam, which surveys the political and cultural history of Islam from its Late Antique origins until the eleventh century, brings together contributions from leading scholars in the field. The book is divided into four parts. The first provides an overview of the physical and political geography of the Late Antique Middle East. The second charts the rise of Islam and the emergence of the Islamic political order under the Umayyad and the Abbasid caliphs of the seventh, eighth and ninth centuries, followed by the dissolution of the empire in the tenth and eleventh. 'Regionalism', the overlapping histories of the empire's provinces, is the focus of Part Three, while Part Four provides a cutting-edge discussion of the sources and controversies of early Islamic history, including a survey of numismatics, archaeology and material culture.

  • 15 - The Violence of the Abbasid Revolution

  • Edited by Yasir Suleiman, King's College, Cambridge
  • Book:
    Living Islamic History
    Published by:
    Edinburgh University Press
    Published online:
    12 September 2012
    Print publication:
    21 April 2010, pp 226-251

  • Summary

    ‘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:

    When the amir and his two retainers commit tyranny

    and the earthly judge exceeds all limits in decreeing (asrafa fil-qada’)

    Then woe, upon woe, upon woe

    from the Heavenly judge upon the earthly one.

Empire and Elites after the Muslim Conquest
  • The Transformation of Northern Mesopotamia
  • Chase F. Robinson
  • Published online:
    13 August 2009
    Print publication:
    21 December 2000
  • The study of early Islamic historical tradition has flourished with the emergence of an innovative scholarship no longer dependent on more traditional narratival approaches. Chase Robinson's book, first published in 2000, takes full account of the research available and interweaves history and historiography to interpret the political, social and economic transformations in the Mesopotamian region after the Islamic conquests. Using Arabic and Syriac sources to elaborate his argument, the author focuses on the Muslim and Christian élites, demonstrating that the immediate effects of the conquests were in fact modest ones. Significant social change took place only at the end of the seventh century with the imposition of Marwanid rule. Even then, the author argues, social power was diffused in the hands of local élites. This is a sophisticated study in a burgeoning field in Islamic studies.

  • The conquest of Khu¯zista¯n: a historiographical reassessment

  • CHASE F. ROBINSON
  • Journal:
    Bulletin of the School of Oriental and African Studies / Volume 67 / Issue 1 / February 2004
    Published online by Cambridge University Press:
    21 April 2004, pp. 14-39
    Print publication:
    February 2004

  • The ‘appendix’ to a mid- to late seventh-century East Syriac history includes a detailed account of the conquest of Khu¯zista¯n by Muslim armies between c. 635 and 642. This article translates this section of the ‘appendix’ (along with another dealing with the conquest of Egypt), subjects it to detailed analysis and criticism, and compares it with Arabic accounts of the conquest of Khu¯zista¯n that survive in the much later historical and legal traditions. The results of this exercise—using an early and local source to control the Islamic tradition—is in some measure mixed, but some striking agreement suggests that the transmission of conquest history in early Islam was not as discontinuous as has been previously argued.

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