Mumun was the ultimate patron of adab, refined and urbane literature. The author al-Tahiri celebrated food and sex in his books Adultery and its Enjoyment, Stories about Slave Boys and, bracingly, Masturbation. Writers could even celebrate female sexual pleasure in a way that sounds very modern. Al-Jahiz (the Bug-Eyed), born in Basra and descended from an enslaved zanj African, won al-Mamun’s patronage with essays on the Quran, translations of Aristotle and worthy polemics but preferred to write about the superiority of black men over white (a subject close to his heart). His Pleasures of Girls and Boys Compared was a compendium of interviews with both sexes about sexual pleasure.*
Al-Mamun hired Jahiz as tutor to his sons, but they were frightened by the writer’s bulging eyes.*
As ruler and imam, sympathetic to the Shia approach and suspicious of literal-minded following of the Hadith, al-Mamun insisted that the Quran was created from God’s word, not literally written by God, and forced his scholars to agree. Jihad was a duty, security a necessity: in 830, al-Mamun, along with his much younger brother al-Mutasim, attacked the Romans. Al-Mutasim persuaded the caliph to buy Turkish slaves – ghilman, tough horse archers with Asiatic faces. In 836, as caliph, al-Mutasim moved from Baghdad to a new capital at Samara where he hoped to be protected by his Turkic praetorians. Instead they took over. In 861, the ghilman murdered a caliph. Discontent among enslaved zanj on the sugar-cane plantations and irrigation works of southern Iraq exploded in 869 into a rebellion of Marsh Arabs and free and enslaved Africans that lasted for fourteen years. It led to the fall of Basra, and the slaughter of all its inhabitants; in 879 the rebels even came close to Baghdad. Some 500,000 people, even a million, were killed in the mayhem, which discouraged Arab rulers in the future from using African slave labour. The revolt fatally weakened the caliphate, just as its Spanish rival was thriving.
THE BLACKBIRD OF CORDOBA
The grandson of the Falcon, Abd al-Rahman II, personified the new ideal of Andalusian machismo and cultured adab, writing poetry and promoting new fashions while fighting Charlemagne’s son Charles the Pious, one of the three who inherited the empire.
While Charlemagne’s heirs – known after his Latin name Carolus as the Carolingians – fought each other, Abd al-Rahman II held court in Cordoba, which now outstripped Baghdad in its sophistication, a culture personified by a person of colour who called himself the Blackbird and was patronized by the amir. Ziryab, child of zanj sold to Baghdad, was a connoisseur of civilized living who was invited to Cordoba by a Jewish musician. Ziryab not only introduced Persian and Iraqi cuisine, poetry and wit to al-Andalus but also developed the guitar when he added strings to his oud, and founded a music school for girls as well as boys. He invented the concept of the meal that started with soup or salad, moved on to savouries and finished with sweets, served on different plates; fostered the idea of different fashions for the seasons; devised early versions of toothpaste and deodorant (litharge, a lead monoxide compound) and a new hairstyle, a Mohican mullet, with bangs at the front, long at the back and short at the sides, favoured by zanj in Baghdad.
Yet the amir, not just an aficionado of fashionistas and singing girls, was constantly fighting northern Christians and internal challengers, aided by his enslaved corps of ghilman, and a vizier, Nasr, a Christian nobleman captured and castrated by the Muslims. When the amir fell ill, the eunuch tried to fix the succession by bribing a doctor to finish him off with poison. The doctor’s wife informed the amir, who waited until Nasr brought his ‘medicine’ then made him drink it himself.
Then in 844 the era of refined adab was interrupted by a terrifying visitation: a fleet of fifty-four longships appeared out of nowhere bearing a race of shaggy axe-wielding pagans who attacked Seville while another fleet stormed al-Ushbana (Lisbon) and Cadiz. The Vikings had arrived.
* Ali reprimanded her but spared her – and she lived on in Medina for forty years.
