Syria: A Short History/13
UNDER FATIMIDS AND SELJUKS
The Fatimid dynasty was the last of the medieval caliphates
and the only major Shiite caliphate. Its name reflects the
alleged descent of its founder and his successors from Ali
and Fatimah, the daughter of Muhammad. We have already
noted its establishment in Tunisia in 909 and the conquest
of Egypt and much of Syria from the Ikhshidids in 969.
For the next few years Syria was rent with warfare, not only
between the Hamdanids in the north and the Fatimids in
the south, but also involving the Carmathians, the Turks
and the Byzantines. Damascus was occupied by Car-
mathians with Abbasid encouragement, and later by a
Turkish general who used it as a base for a series of raids
on the whole country. It was natural for the Turks and
Carmathians to combine against their common foe.
In 977 the Fatimid caliph al-Aziz (975-996) took the field in person and inflicted a crushing defeat on the allied forces outside al-Ramlah. Al-Aziz extended his domain in Syria, especially along the coast, but failed to reduce Aleppo, mainly because of intervention by the Byzantines, who had just lost it to Sayf-al-Dawlah and were eager to take advantage of any opportunity to restore their authority in Syria. After this set-back al-Aziz devoted the rest of his reign, in so far as Syria was concerned, to consolidating his power in the south and central parts and imposing his suzerainty on the weakening Hamdanids in the north.
Under his rule there flourished in Fatimid Palestine one of the most original and capable of geographers, al-Maqdisi (946-about 1000). Born in Jerusalem (whence his name) under the Ikhshidids, he started at the age of twenty travels that took him through all Moslem lands except Spain, India and Sijistan. In 985 he embodied the information he thus gathered in a book based solidly on his personal observation and experience. Thanks to it and to the works of other geographers who began to flourish in this age, our know- ledge of the economic and social conditions of tenth-century Syria reaches a height never before attained. No Latin or Greek geographer left us material comparable to this Arabic material in quality and quantity. Al-Maqdisi surveys trade, agriculture, industry and general education. He refers, among many other things, to iron ores in the 'mountains of Beirut 5 , the abundant trees and hermits in Lebanon, the sugar and glassware products of Tyre, the cheese and cotton goods of Jerusalem and the cereals and honey of Amman. He characterizes Syria as a c blessed region, the home of cheap prices, fruits and righteous people'.
On the whole al-Maqdisi and his contemporaries depict a people with an adequate standard of living and a satisfying, useful way of life, judged by the standards of the authors. Christians and Jews do not seem to have been worse off under the Hamdanids and early Fatimids than under the Abbasids. Most of the scribes and the physicians were still Christians. The Byzantines had been confined to Antioch ; the Carmathians still irrupted occasionally but were not quite the menace they had been; the Turks had been checked for the time being. Steady immigration of bedouins from the Syrian Desert made the countryside turbulent, as they at last reached Lebanon and occupied the mountain slopes and the hidden valleys. But even for the heavily garrisoned cities this calm was brief and deceptive; times of trouble lay ahead.
Al-Aziz was succeeded by his son al-Hakim (996-1021), a blue-eyed boy of eleven whose behaviour was so freakish and irrational that he was deified in his lifetime by some and accused of psychopathic abnormalities by others and by later historians. In the second year of his reign a sailor from Tyre named Allaqah had the effrontery to declare his city independent and to strike money in his own name. For a time he defied the Egyptian army and with the aid of a Byzantine flotilla stood against the Egyptian fleet. But at last he had to surrender his besieged city and suffer flaying and crucifixion. His skin was filled with hay and exhibited in Cairo.
Al-Hakim revived the humiliating disabilities imposed by Umar II and al-Mutawakkil on Christians and Jews, who fared well under the other Fatimids. Although his mother and his vizir were Christians, al-Hakim reactivated earlier regulations requiring distinguishing garments and in 1009 added that when Christians were in public baths they should display a five-pound cross dangling from their necks, and Jews an equally weighty frame of wood with jingling bells. In the same year he demolished several Christian churches, including that of the Holy Sepulchre in Jerusalem. By way of implementing the koranic prohibition against wine, he ordered all grapevines uprooted. He invited those members of the tolerated sects who were unwilling to abide by his regulations to profess Islam or else emigrate to the Byzantine empire. Apparently in his time, almost four centuries after Muhammad, the Christians in Egypt and Syria were still folly as numerous as the Moslems.
Other edicts of al-Hakim show strange contradictions. He built an academy in Cairo only to destroy it with its professors three years later. He legislated against sexual immorality and went so far as to prohibit the appearance of women in the Cairo streets. He issued edicts against banquets and music and included certain dishes and chess playing. Like several other descendants of Ali, he was considered divine by extreme admirers. The first to offer him public divine veneration was a Persian called al-Darazi (the tailor), from whom the Druze sect took its name. Basic in the Druze system is the doctrine of the incarnation of the deity in human form, the last and most important manifestation being al-Hakim. Finding no response for this new creed among Egyptians, al-Darazi migrated to a district at the foot of Mount Hermon in Lebanon, where the hardy freedom-loving mountaineers, evidently already impregnated with ultra-Shiite ideas, were ready to give him a hearing. Here he fell in battle in 1019 and was succeeded by his rival Hamzah ibn-Ali, also a Persian.
When al-Hakim was assassinated two years later, prob- ably as a result of a conspiracy by his own household, Hamzah denied his death and proclaimed that he had gone into a state of temporary occultation, whence his triumphal return should be expected. Al-Muqtana, Hamzah's right hand in the propagation of the new cult, at first addressed epistles to potential converts from Constantinople to India, with particular attention to Christians, but later enunciated a new policy, that during the 'absence' of al-Hakim no part of the religion should be divulged or promulgated — a policy doubtless dictated by the desire for safety on the part of a small heterodox minority struggling for existence. Since then 'the door has been closed'; no one could be allowed entrance or exit. The hidden imam idea had been elaborately worked out, prior to the rise of Druzism, by a number of ultra-Shiite groups.
Hamzah on behalf of al-Hakim absolved his followers of the cardinal obligations of Islam, including fasting and pilgrimage, and substituted precepts enjoining veracity of speech, mutual aid among the brethren in faith, renuncia- tion of all forms of false belief and absolute submission to the divine will. The last precept, involving the concept of predestination, has continued to be a potent factor in Druzism, as in orthodox Islam. Another feature of this cult is the belief in the transmigration of souls. The idea came originally to Islam from India and received an incre- ment of Platonic elements. The operation of the second precept, enjoining mutual aid, has made of the Druzes an unusually compact self-conscious community presenting more the aspects of a religious fraternal order than those of a sect, and that despite the fact that the community itself is divided into two distinctly marked classes: the initiate and the uninitiate. The sacred writings, all hand-written, are accessible to the initiated few only and the meeting-places are secluded rooms on hills outside the villages, where Thursday evening sessions are held.
As they tried to gain a permanent footing in southern Lebanon, the Druzes found themselves in conflict with an already established Islamic heterodoxy, the Nusayriyah, whose followers were subsequently driven into northern Syria, their present habitat. The Druzes later spread into other rural districts, but were unable to thrive in any city. Some of them, as a result of Qaysite- Yemenite blood feuds, migrated in the early eighteenth century into Hawran in Syria. The influx was augmented by malcontents from Lebanon in the nineteenth century. In Hawran they now number about ninety thousand as against eighty thousand in Lebanon. Throughout their entire history they have shown remarkable vigour and exercised in Lebanese and Syrian national affairs influence quite disproportionate to their number.
The Nusayriyah were an Ismailite sect founded in the late ninth century. Not much is known about this religion, which is secretive in character, hierarchical in organization and esoteric in doctrine. Its sacred writings have not been exposed to the same extent as those of the Druzes, many of which came to light as a result of communal wars in the nineteenth century. Finding itself a small heterodoxy amidst a hostile majority, the cult chose to go underground. Like other extreme Shiites, the Nusayris deify Ali and are there- fore sometimes referred to as Alawites, a name which became current after the French organized the mandated region centring on Latakia into a separate state under that name. The cult represents an imposition of extreme Shiite ideas on a pagan Syrian base. Its adepts must have passed directly from paganism to Ismailism with certain superficially Chris- tian features, such as observation of Christmas and Easter. They have a three-class hierarchy of initiates, while the rest of the community constitutes the uninitiated mass. Unlike the Druzes, they admit no women into the initiated group. Their meetings are held at night in secluded places, giving rise to the usual charges brought against groups who practise their religion in secret. Today some three hundred thousand Nusayris, mostly peasants, occupy the mountainous region of northern and central Syria and are scattered as far as Turkish Cilicia.
The successors of al-Hakim, more interested in luxurious living than in state administration, were unable to maintain order at home or sovereignty abroad. In 1023 the chief of the Kilab bedouins, Salih ibn-Mirdas, wrested Aleppo from Fatimid control. The Mirdasid line held Aleppo, with varying fortunes, until 1079. They allied themselves with other Arab tribes: the Tayyi, who set al-Ramlah on fire in 1024, an d tri e Kalb, who blockaded Damascus in 1025. Brigandage, highway robbery and lawlessness throve in the countryside, but Aleppo and other commercial cities pro- spered and their rulers grew fat on customs duties levied on merchandise.
The spirit of the age, with its political anarchy, social decay, intellectual pessimism and religious scepticism, was reflected in the poetry of al-Maarri (973-1057), of Maarrat al-Numan in northern Syria. Although blind he secured some education at Aleppo and twice visited Baghdad, where he probably came in contact with Hindus who converted him to vegetarianism. The remaining years of his life he lived as a bachelor in his native town, subsisting on the meagre proceeds earned by his lectures. Unlike the poets of his day al-Maarri did not devote his talent to eulogizing princes and potentates with a view to receiving remunera- tion; the ode he composed in his early career extolling Sayf-al-Dawlah was evidently never presented to the prince. His later works embody his pessimistic, sceptical philosophy of life and his rational approach to its problems. In one epistle he peopled limbo with reputed heretics and free- thinkers enjoying themselves and discussing textual criticism. It was this treatise that had a stimulative effect on Dante's Divine Comedy. In another book he tried to imitate the Koran, a sacrilege in Moslem eyes. The philosophy ad- vocated in this work is basically Epicurean. Al-Maarri was one of the few Arabic poets who rose above limitations of time and place to the realm of universal humanity.
Though the Fatimids had had difficulty in maintaining their precarious hold on Syria, first against Turks and Carmathians, then against Hamdanids and Byzantines, and later against Mirdasids and other bedouin assailants, their most formidable adversary did not appear on Syrian territory until 1070, by which time Fatimid rule had virtually col- lapsed because of rebellion in Egypt (1060). Sunnite Turkish Seljuks had pushed south from Turkestan to the region of Bukhara, embraced Islam there and continued their victorious drive until in 1055 their leader Tughril had forced the powerless Abbasid caliph to accept him as master instead of the Shiite Persian Buwayhids. Tughril assumed the title sultan, becoming the first Moslem ruler whose coins bear this title.
Under TughriPs nephew and successor Alp Arslan (1063- 1072), the Seljuk empire was extended westward into Syria and Asia Minor. In 1070 Alp advanced against the Mirdasids in northern Syria and occupied Aleppo, leaving the Mirdasid governor as his vassal. The Turkoman general Atsiz pushed into Palestine and captured al-Ramlah, Jerusalem and other towns as far south as Ascalon, whose Fatimid garrison held out. In the following year Alp won a decisive victory over the Byzantines at Manzikert, north of Lake Van, and took the emperor himself prisoner. All Asia Minor then lay open to the Turks. Hordes of them rushed into Anatolia and northern Syria. Turkish generals penetrated as far as the Hellespont. With one stroke the traditional frontier separating Islam from Christendom was pushed four hundred miles west. For the first time Turks gained a foothold in that land—a foothold that was never lost.
Fragmentation of the vast sultanate soon followed. Asia Minor (Rum) was held by a cousin of Alp, Sulayman, who in 1077 established himself in Nicaea, not far from Constantinople. In 1084 the capital shifted south-east to Konya (Iconium). In the same year Antioch was recovered for Islam from the Byzantines by the Seljuks. Syria was in anarchy among Arabs, Seljuks, Turkomans and Fatimids until in 1075 Atsiz occupied Damascus. He exasperated its people by his exactions for two years before Alp Arslan's son Tutush took the city and killed him. At Malikshah's death (1079) Tutush became virtually independent. He took Antioch from the Byzantines (1084) and captured Aleppo (1094), but fell in battle in 1095. His holdings were split between his sons Ridwan at Aleppo and Duqaq at Damascus. The two amirs were soon involved in a family war, and a couple of years later Duqaq was forced to recognize the overlordship of his brother. In 1098 a brother-in-law of Tutush who held Jerusalem as fief surrendered it to the Fatimids.
Thus in 1097, when the Crusaders arrived in Syria after fighting their way across Seljuk Anatolia, they found Antioch under a Seljuk amir named Yaghi-Siyan, Aleppo under Ridwan and Damascus under Duqaq. The Fatimids held only a few ports—Acre, Tyre, Sidon, Ascalon—and were about to retake Jerusalem.