The Great Caliphs: The Golden Age of the lhringAbbasid Empire By AMIRA K. BENNISON

Abstract

This is an attractive and stimulating examination of society and culture under the ʿAbbasids, hence ostensibly covering the period 750–1258 but in fact going back to the origins of Islam in the lands of the Near East and round the Mediterranean shores. The author’s basic premise is that the empire founded by the ʿAbbasids’ predecessors, the Umayyads, who ruled from Syria, was, from the religious aspect, based on a development from Abrahamic monotheism, hence far from wholly alien to preceding faiths like Judaism or to certain manifestations of the very diverse spectrum of the varieties of Eastern Christianity. This had its counterpart in an intellectual and cultural continuity with such civilizations of the Mediterranean shores as Greece, Rome and Byzantium. Hence when the ʿAbbasids moved the caliphal seat eastwards to Iraq, finally settling on Baghdad as their capital, this certainly involved an increased economic and social contact with the Iranian world to its east, but the caliphate’s religious and cultural orientation remained nevertheless firmly rooted in the Near East and the Mediterranean basin. The author would probably agree with Gaston Wiet that the Umayyad empire was to some extent ‘néo-byzantin’ but not his antithesis, that the ʿAbbasid one was ‘néo-sassanide’; this seems to be essentially a sound judgement, even though a case can be made for contributory Persian, and even distant Indian, influences in such spheres as polite literature, court ceremonial and some administrative practices.