Politics

Published: 2002

After defeating the Umayyads, the Abbasids transformed the Umayyads’ Arab empire into a multinational Muslim empire. They moved the empire’s capital from Syria to Iraq and built a new capital, Baghdad. Over the next five centuries, they influenced many of the main events of Islamic history.

In the early period of Abbasid rule, al-Mansur, the dynasty’s second caliph, continued reorganizing the empire’s administration along the lines laid down by his Umayyad predecessor, Abd al-Malik. For example, much of the Abbasid administration was left in the hands of well-educated Persian civil servants, many of whom came from families that had traditionally served the Sassanid kings. The important office of wazir or vizier, chief counselor, may well have developed from Sassanid models.

The vizier was more than an advisor; when the Caliph was weak, a capable vizier became the empire’s most powerful man. Creating the vizier’s office was only one of the innovations the Abbasids brought to statecraft.
Another was the Umayyad postal system, which developed into an efficient intelligence service; postmasters in outlying provinces were the eyes and ears of the government, and they filed regular reports with the central government on everything from the state of the harvest to the doings of dissident sects.

Under the Abbasids, too, a whole literature was created to train the clerical classes that had come into being. Since government business was now transacted in Arabic, manuals of correct usage were written to instruct non-Arabic speakers who had found government employment. A vast literature also covered the correct deportment of princes, along with anthologies of witty sayings and anecdotes to enliven one’s epistolary style.

In some ways, the Abbasids were more fortunate than the Umayyads. For example, when al-Mansur died in 775 after a twenty-year reign, his son, al-Mahdi, inherited a full treasury and an empire more devoted to trade than war.

Indeed, the Abbasids’ trade developments are among the achievements too often overlooked.
Because Islamic rule unified much of the Eastern world and abolished many boundaries, trade became freer, safer, and more extensive than it had been since the time of Alexander the Great. Muslim traders, consequently, established trading posts as far away as India, the Philippines, Malaya, the East Indies, and China.

From the 8th to the 11th centuries, this trade focused largely on finding and importing basic necessities—grain, metals, and wood. To obtain them, Muslims also had to export, often using imports from one region as exports to another: pearls from the Gulf, livestock from the Arabian Peninsula (particularly Arabian horses and camels), and one of the chief products, cloth. Muslims also traded medicines, an offshoot of Abbasid advances in medical science, along with paper and sugar.

This expansion of commercial activity also led to other developments. One was banking and exchange, so sophisticated that a letter of credit issued in Baghdad could be honored in Samarkand in Central Asia or Kairouan in North Africa.

Trade demands also spurred craft development. For example, Baghdad’s large urban population came craftsmen of every conceivable sort: metalworkers, leatherworkers, bookbinders, papermakers, jewelers, weavers, druggists, bakers, and many more. As they grew in economic importance, these craftsmen eventually organized into mutual-benefit societies similar to later Western guilds and offered many social services: lodging travelers and engaging in pious works such as caring for orphans and endowing schools. As commerce grew, the Abbasids also developed a system in which a Muhtasib, an inspector, ensured proper weights and measures were used and that dishonest practices were avoided.