‘DISLOYAL AND CRUEL SEA’ THAT DEFINED THE ISLAMIC WORLD
The history of Muslim sailors in the Mediterranean has traditionally focused on conquest. But a new book relates untold tales of commerce, culture and exploration,
The study of the medieval Mediterranean toils under two long shadows. The first is ancient: the great seventh-century caliph Umar Ibn al-Khattab, by many measures the most powerful chieftain of Islam in his day, famously pronounced about the Mediterranean: “How could I allow my soldiers to sail on this disloyal and cruel sea?” – a quick remark that has led many a western historian to disregard or dismiss Islam’s role in shaping the region from the seventh to the 13th centuries. The second shadow is more recent: the great scholar Fernand Braudel, author of the bestselling and hugely influential 1949 French book The Mediterranean and the Mediterranean World in the Age of Philippe II, which shaped historical thinking for decades.
As history professor Christophe Picard writes at the beginning of the 2015 French language edition of Sea of
the Caliphs: “Indeed, when [Braudel] opened his classic study of the Mediterranean by declaring, ‘I have loved the Mediterranean with a passion,’ he was not thinking of a Christian and Muslim sea but rather of that of the Latin merchants responsible for capitalism’s first stirring.”
This perception of the medieval Mediterranean as the sole province of the West, the geographical inheritor of the “Mare Nostrum” that was such an integral part of the ancient Roman world, has deep roots – and not just in the western historiographical tradition.
Medieval Muslim records regularly referred to the albahr al-Rumi, the sea of the Romans, and those same records often downplayed the importance of seafaring activity, in favour of emphasising the conquest-narrative of faith, the warfare waged by the caliphs of the age for the purpose of enlarging the Dar al-Islam.
As Picard admits (here in the fine and polished new English-language translation by Nicholas Elliott for Harvard University Press), “The texts written by the first generation of Muslim men of letters were the fruit of a civilisation that was not seeking to turn the Mediterranean Sea into a new Mare Nostrum but rather intended to cross it” to spread their faith on the European continent.
But the fascinating story Picard tells in these pages involves far more than a mere watery road used by warriors of the caliph in order to reach their next land battle; many of the stories here invoke the adventures of Sinbad the Sailor on the Indian Ocean rather than the humdrum accounts of troop-transport.
This is in large part a result of the sources we have; historians would love to get their hands on troop-transport manifests, but instead they tend to have more artistic constructs from the venerable genre of the rihla or travel journal – works by such literary figures as 10th-century Egyptian al-Muhallabi, author of the travel book Al-Kitab al-’Azizi, or 11th-century Persian traveller Nasir Khusraw, works that omit the mundane work-a-day details of extending an empire into hostile realms. Throughout Sea of the Caliphs, Picard does an excellent job of sifting such material for all that it can yield about the extensive Muslim presence in the medieval Mediterranean.
That extensive presence, starting with the Umayyad and Abbasid caliphates in the eighth and ninth centuries, which stretched from the shores of the Indian Ocean almost to the shores of the Black Sea, encompassed Aleppo, Damascus and Jerusalem, and sent sailing vessels far into the Eastern Mediterranean at roughly the same time that other emirates in Spain and Northern Africa were doing likewise. Muslim dockyards, architecture and port bazaars sprang up in Tunis, Tripoli, Palermo and Alexandria, vying with the growing mercantile networks of cities like Genoa, Pisa and Venice.
Picard brings his narrative through the heyday of the Umayyad caliphate and the Fatimids, bringing the story down to the Berbers, the last caliphate to compete with the Latin powers who were coming to dominate the Mediterranean. He fleshes that narrative out with a wide range of sources, but they are both the problem and the solution; the sailors of the caliphate weren’t merely merchants or explorers – they were also forerunners of jihad, which was necessarily a territorial rather than a maritime preoccupation.
Since the court historians, poets and intellectuals employed by the caliphs were expected to stress the military and spiritual aspects of conquest, that left the chronicling of all the rest of it – commerce, building, cultural exchange, etc – in the hands of Christian writers, who naturally viewed the successive waves of caliphate ships as pirates, raiders and thieves.
“Chroniclers focused on the sites of jihad, chosen by the caliphs or those who headed razzias [raids] in their name – his sons, often the heir to the throne, or the generals who represented him – at the expense of other fronts,” writes Picard. “This distorted view excluded practically any information about most contact zones with the Christians and most of the players in this frontier war unless it was reported by the Muslims’ adversaries.”
Wherever they could, accounts of Muslim seafaring in the medieval Mediterranean began to widen in focus; Arab geographers in the Ifriqiya region of North Africa (in today’s western Libya and eastern Algeria), for instance, make increasing references to shipping, navigation and the administration of ports and dockyards. As Picard puts it, these things came to be seen as “activities widely encouraged by the caliphal initiative”.
Such sources, combined with the scattered records of other medieval merchants, begin to fill in the details of what must have been an intensely complicated picture, one that could simultaneously encompass both Umayyad emissaries conducting a “charm offensive” on imperial Christian courts and caliphs sending their “all-powerful” squadrons of warships to threaten ports.
Picard leaves his readers with that complicated picture, a tantalisingly different vision of the medieval Mediterranean than typically appears in broader narrative histories of the region. Caliph Umar’s rhetorical question aside, Muslim soldiers did indeed sail on that disloyal and cruel sea – and they had plenty of company.
Chroniclers focused on the sites of jihad, chosen by the caliphs or those who headed raids in their name... at the expense of other fronts CHRISTOPHE PICARD Sea of the Caliphs