Everyday Life & Society in the Abbasid Caliphate

History is usually a story of great men who were larger than life. These usually include monarchs, rebels, scholars, princes, etc. However, a vast, vast majority of the people who lived in any given time and place experienced it from the perspective of a commoner. For most people in any given empire, it doesn't matter much who the monarch at the top is. Their daily lives were controlled by society and social norms. Much of it is influenced by the ruling class. So, today we're gonna talk about what life and society in the Abbasid Caliphate were like around its peak from 750CE to around 950CE. This video is brought to you by, well, you guys. Thanks to my patrons for supporting the channel and making these videos possible. Al Muqaddimah is funded only by Patreon and as you can see, the videos take a long time to research, edit and produce. And it's only because of my patrons that I am able to put this kind of time into these videos and keep them free from any kind of paywall. So, if you want to pledge a dollar or more to support the channel, you can head over to my Patreon. Link is in the description. You can also become a member right here on YouTube. There's some cool stuff that comes with it. Back to the video. This video is in collaboration with the channel Eastern Roman History who has made a video about the relations between the Abbasid Caliphate and their illustrious neighbour, the Eastern Roman or Byzantine Empire to the north. Be sure to check out that video after this one. The link is in the description. Before we talk about the lives of Muslims, we need to talk about how they became Muslims. And yes, we'll mostly only be talking about Muslim men because our sources mostly only talk about Muslim men. The daily lives of Muslim women and non-Muslim folks are largely absent from Islamic sources. My theory is that women didn't exist yet, they were only invented in the 18th century. So, Islam began in Arabia with mostly settled people who were merchants or farmers. Around the end of the Prophet's life, many tribes from all over the Arabian Peninsula joined his movement, leading to many nomadic Bedouins joining. These Bedouins made up a major portion of the military that expanded the Rashidun Caliphate into the Middle East after the death of the Prophet. When they broke and conquered large portions of the Byzantine and Sassanid Empires, Muslims came to live within their former territory alongside Persian Zoroastrians and Syrian and Egyptian Christians. Initially, these largely Arab Muslims lived in separate garrison cities like Kufa, Basra, Fustat and Kairouan in Iraq, Egypt and Tunisia respectively. However, Islam began to disperse into the conquered peoples and here we'll talk about one of only two certainties in life, taxes. So, in the first century of Islam, the conquest was bringing Muslims a lot of captured booty. There was also a lot of loot. Taxes were imposed on the dhimmi population. Dhimmi means protected person and was used to refer to non-Muslims living in the Caliphate's borders. They paid higher taxes and were hence given some protections. Their taxes depended on how they were conquered. If they were conquered in a long, drawn-out siege, they were taxed higher but if they had capitulated easily, without resistance, the taxes were lower. These taxes were used to pay the soldiers and their descendants. To avoid high taxation, people started to convert to Islam. Non-Arabs were converting to Islam in large numbers and it led to a decrease in revenue for the Caliphate. So, non-Arab Muslims were given the status of second-class citizens who had to become clients or mawali of an Arab tribe and still had to pay higher taxes than Arab Muslims. This led to a lot of resentment as you'd expect. However, bringing these former Greek and Persian speakers into the fold of Islam had a huge impact on the Islamic world as well as Islam itself. It was probably around the year 1000CE or so that many places in the Middle East came to have a majority of Muslims. It was these non-Arab Muslims who supported the rise of the Abbasid Caliphate in 750CE. Specifically, it was Persians who still carried memories of their pre-Islamic past and their A little too much sometimes if you ask me. As a result, a lot of Abbasid society was a mix of Arabian and Persian cultures. Among the many subtle indicators of this mixture, there were also some not-so-subtle ones like the celebration of pre-Islamic annual traditions such as the Nowruz among the Persians and the Shaman Nassim among the Egyptians. Both of these are celebrations of the arrival of spring. Whenever someone tried to restrict the Nowruz, people got really angry. Iranians love Nowruz almost as much as telling people how Islam was forced upon them and destroyed their great civilization and whatever and blah blah blah. Speaking of Islam, it was one of the biggest parts of everyday life. Islamic traditions pretty much dictated many of the events of the day and the year. Muslims are supposed to pray five times a day and those times are marked with a call to prayer. The business day was set to the rhythm of these five times. Businesses opened around dawn shortly after the first prayer and closed around the fourth prayer in the evening before sunset. The most important annual events were the two Eids, Eid al-Fitr and Eid al-Adha. Along with them, during Abbasid times, people began to celebrate the day of the birth of the Prophet Muhammad. Muslims who can afford to do so are required to perform pilgrimage to Mecca at least once in their lives. The pilgrimage season was a huge event for the Abbasid Caliphate. Roads and routes were examined and maintained to make sure that they were good enough for the pilgrims. Since people came to Mecca from all over the Islamic world, it was a great center for trade. People often brought over goods that would be sold to cover some of the expenses of the pilgrimage. We'll talk about trade more later on. Islamic society was supposed to be built on the principles of law and justice. So, even early on, courts were established with judges called Qadis to resolve disputes among the public. They were supposed to consult the Quran and the traditions of Prophet Muhammad called the Hadith and the Sunnah. However, since there were many, many cases that didn't have direct examples in the traditions of the Prophet, jurists had to come up with ways to resolve these as the Prophet would have. This resulted in the establishment of a huge law canon called the Sharia which today has many branches. Within cities, different branches of the Sharia were usually implemented by the Qadis while in the countryside, local traditions reigned supreme. Speaking of the law, Islam bans alcohol consumption outright but despite that, alcohol consumption seems to be quite common in a bastard society. Not only among non-Muslims but also among Muslims. We know that ruling elites drank quite a bit of it. Shops and markets that sold alcohol, though, seem to have been the exclusive domain of non-Muslims. Only non-Muslims sold alcohol, mostly wine made from grapes or dates to both Muslims and non-Muslims. It seems that there were laws against Muslims consuming alcohol as well but they were hardly ever enforced except during political rivalries. In short, you could drink alcohol in private but not in public. The Abbasid Caliphate had a remarkable amount of social mobility. You could be born in the worst of conditions and still rise up to very close to the top. If you were born at the bottom, there were a couple of ways that you could rise up. The most common ones were being a scholar, a poet or a secretary. It is within these posts that we see the most diversity. Military ranks could also help but depending on the time period, the highest echelons of the military were dominated by one ethnic group or another. The importance of poetry and poets cannot be exaggerated in Abbasid society. Both the Arab and Persian societies have a lot of veneration for poetry. So much so that a couplet is called a baith in Arabic and Farsi, literally meaning house. So anyone who had any amount of money wanted to patronize a poet to compose poetry glorifying him and his family. From caliphs to provincial governors and even bureaucrats had poets on their payroll. It was also a form of popular entertainment. Good poets were highly sought after. Not only poets but poetesses were also hired. Women of the high society had their own social gatherings where female poets would recite their poetry. Female singers were also sought after. People had their daughters trained as singers so they would catch the ear of a member of the elites. Somewhat surprisingly, one of the most famous schools for that was in Medina, the holy city of Islam. That's because it was a holy place and had a nicer climate than Mecca so rich people retired there and needed entertainment. That's where female singers came in. The third Abbasid caliph, Al-Mahdi had a wife or concubine who had previously been a singer. Her daughter, Ulayya bint Al-Mahdi was herself an accomplished poetess along with being a princess. Other than that, a sort of hidden bureaucracy was made up of black eunuchs who, since they were eunuchs, enjoyed access to the harem which no men outside the royal family had. As a result, they played an integral role in court intrigue. Black eunuchs seemed to have been so powerful that Caliph Al-Mu'tadid punished a group of people for calling one of his eunuchs a slave, even though they were technically slaves. The lowest rank of society was made up of beggars, thieves, homeless folks and, of course, prostitutes. Prostitution was a fairly desegregated industry compared to other industries in the Abbasid caliphate. We know that both male and female prostitution was quite common. Together, this rank of society was known as the Banu Sassan, literally meaning the children of Sassan. A later, maybe apocryphal explanation for this term is that the Banu Sassan were literally members of the old Persian elites of the Sassanid Empire before the rise of Islam. They had since fallen out of wealth and into poverty. However, that explanation is not necessarily accurate. Many members of older Persian elites were accepted into Islamic establishment, so I really can't say where the term comes from. Some of the people at the margins of society ended up becoming storytellers, where they'd attract people by telling stories in city squares. It seems that it was quite common for these storytellers to discuss stories of the companions of the prophet, primarily the first caliph Abu Bakr and the fourth caliph Ali. This, as you might expect, could rile up Shia-Sunni rivalry and lead to situations of civil unrest. Public order was maintained through an organized police force called the Shurtas with a head known as Sahib al-Shurta. This was not necessarily a separate department as it is today. Instead, it often fell under the military's oversight. Another oversight office was that of the Muhtazib. The office of the Muhtazib is an extension of the Islamic idea of every Muslim, quote, commanding what is good and forbidding what is not. It can be imagined as a sort of morality police but with an office like that, we would expect it to regulate the purchase and consumption of alcohol by Muslims but that doesn't seem to be the case. So, in practice, the Muhtazib was mostly responsible for keeping order in public areas, such as markets and mosques. They were in charge of keeping the market clear so people could go in and out freely. Oftentimes, the merchants would put their wares well outside their storefronts and take over the entire street. I mention this because it's still a problem in the Middle East as well as in my own home country. In fact, the marketplace in most of the Islamic world doesn't look that different from the markets in the Abbasid Caliphate. Other than the lack of government oversight, not much has changed. The office of the Muhtazib was also responsible for making sure that transactions were taking place in a legitimate manner, for example, by verifying coinage material and weights. The 12th century author, Al-Shazari, who wrote quite a bit after the decline of the Abbasids, mentions that the Muhtazib was even responsible for making sure the scales used by the merchants are clean and without any corruption, also to ensure that the items are being priced fairly. Interestingly, according to Al-Shazari, one of the responsibilities of the Muhtazib was to make the physicians who operated public clinics take the Hippocratic Oath as well as making sure they were not preparing poisons for anyone or telling women about medicine that helps with abortion. So, I guess there was a bit of moral policing there. The Islamic world constituted a huge market from India to Spain. This was a rather open market, not unlike the European economic area today. To ensure trade was possible between residents of all these various empires, there were many institutions that were kept up by the Caliph. One such instrument of trade was an agent known as the Serafi, whose job was to ensure that coins coming from outside the Caliphate were legitimate and to establish an exchange rate for them. Additionally, you could carry a bag of coins and have your own city's recognized officials stamp on it with its value and you could transact with it in any other city. Among other tools of trade were Saq and Suftaja. Saq is almost exactly like a cheque. In fact, it's possible that the modern term cheque actually comes from Saq. You could give someone a Saq in exchange for goods. Okay, that sounds dirty, it's not that kind of Saq. Anyhow, it was a piece of paper that guaranteed that you could withdraw money from a bank. A Suftaja was a similar thing but it applied over long distances. Speaking of trade over long distances, before the rise of Islam, wheeled transport seems to have disappeared from the Middle East. People travelled and transported goods on the back of a donkey, a mule or a camel. During Islamic times, this remained the norm. Since these animals didn't need paved roads to move about, an extensive road network like the one developed by the Romans never materialized in the Islamic world till modern times. That's not to say that the Caliph didn't develop any long-distance trade infrastructure. Bridges, inns and rest houses or funduk as they were called were paid great attention to make sure that people were able to travel with the least amount of inconvenience. Speaking of infrastructure, the Abbasid Caliphate, even early on, seems to have put a focus on public hospitals called Bimaristan. The first of these could've been built by Harun al-Rashid in the 800s but there's some evidence to suggest that when the city of Baghdad was built in 762, there was consideration for hospitals there as well. By the year 1000, there were around 5 public hospitals in Baghdad. Other major cities had them as well. These public hospitals were considered charitable and teaching institutions and were funded by rich patrons such as princes and emirs. Muslim scholars of the time expanded on Greek medical practices and established a huge canon of works on treating different parts of the body. Along with this, folk treatments were used as well. There were also public baths in major cities, which were used by both men and women. Some baths were used by men and women on alternate days while some were reserved for men or women. One of the duties of the muhtasib was to ensure that nothing nasty was going on in the baths. During Abbasid Caliph al-Muqtadi's reign, apparently, it was quite common for people to enter and exit a bathhouse naked, which the muhtasib was instructed to stop people from doing. I really hope they didn't have to tackle them. Islamic theology puts a lot of emphasis on learning to read and write and so, in the Abbasid Caliphate, there was a lot of emphasis on education. Not only Islamic education but also other subjects like the sciences and arts. There was and continues to be rigorous debate about educating girls but from what we can tell, a remarkable number of girls were educated in the Abbasid Caliphate. The institution was called a madrasah which had rooms for teaching as well as apartments for teachers and students. Many of these madrasahs even gave diplomas called ijazah which basically meant that the teacher deemed his student knowledgeable enough to teach a particular subject. Pre-Islamic Arabian society wasn't as patriarchal as later Islamic society was. There were matriarchal tribes existing around Arabia as well. However, it's mostly the case that when nomads settle down in cities, women tend to lose some status. In Arab society, kin was everything and so, a child's parentage had to be solid and without doubt. Various things exist within Islam as well to ensure that. For example, after divorce, a woman must wait three months before she can remarry to make sure she's not pregnant. This led to gender segregation as well where women tend to stay in rather private parts of the house where non-related men aren't allowed. Not to mention, women have to wear some kind of veil or covering when out in public. However, the nature of this covering is debated and changed with time and place and I'm not gonna go into that. These rules were, in practice, only for wealthy households. In fact, the veil was considered a symbol of wealth and elite status. Peasant women tended to work next to men to make a living and enjoyed considerable freedom as compared to richer women. Although, what freedoms truly exist in poverty aren't really my place to define. Along with up to five wives, men of means tended to have female slaves and or concubines. Like slaves in other parts of the world, they didn't have much of a status but if a child was born to a concubine, then her status improved quite a bit. Many caliphs were born to concubines instead of wives, from the Abbasids to the Ottomans. In Islam, children tend to have the legal status of their father and so the legal status of the mother is of no consequence. Slave women were also used for domestic work and going out to run errands for the household. There's some poetry even where a free woman is lamenting about how her slaves have more freedom of movement than she does. Aristocratic women had perhaps the most restriction on movement. One of Harun al-Rashid's sisters was so beloved by her father, Caliph al-Mahdi, that he allowed her to go out in public but she had to dress like a man to do so. But in general, rich women could just throw parties and have female guests over. There were also patrons of poets, scholars and other charitable institutions. While we talked about life in the cities and somewhat in the countryside, we haven't discussed one vital region of the Abbasid Caliphate, the frontiers. To tell you what life was like for the Abbasid citizens living on the northern border, here's Daniel from Eastern Roman History. But what was the experience of life like on the frontier for the Arabs during the Abbasid Caliphate and their stubborn neighbour, the Eastern Roman Empire? Hello and welcome. I am Eastern Roman History and this is my part of our collaboration with al-Muqaddimah, The Abbasid Caliphate and the Eastern Roman Empire shared a border with each other for several centuries. Understandably, life on the borderlands proved quite different for families living there than those living in Baghdad or Constantinople. During the 8th and 9th centuries, the tourist mountains provided a natural barrier between the Eastern Roman Empire and the Caliphate. Towns in northern Syria, Armenia, Cilicia and Anatolia were frequently raided by armies from both empires. To mitigate damage caused by punitive raids and major offences alike, both empires developed well-organised and sophisticated military systems. Byzantine provinces, called Thebes, were subdivided into Termae and, under the Emperor Theophilus, small commands called Kleisourai were established to guard mountain passes. Local forces subsisted on their farms and were paid annually in gold coinage called nomismata by the government in Constantinople. Thematic defences were centred around fortresses and fortified towns. One such example would be Koron, the headquarters of the Kleisoura of Cappadocia. The Termae were further subdivided into Bandon. Each Bandon consisted of 200 soldiers and their families with there typically being 150 infantrymen and 50 cavalrymen in each. Thus, if a small raiding party attacked, a Bandon could march out to meet them. If the opposing enemy was much larger than a Bandon, a Termae could assemble to deal with the invaders. If it was a serious threat, the entire Thebe, or multiple Thebes, could be assembled to oppose a foreign attack. In the Islamic Caliphate, the Arabs were settled in strategically important cities such as Tarsus in Cilicia and were supported by associated towns around them. To populate these regions, the Caliphs employed an unusual tactic for the Caliphate, resettlement. Thousands of minority populations from places such as Khurasan, India, Mesopotamia and elsewhere were moved to the Byzantine frontier and formed a permanent garrison for these border settlements, which were heavily militarised. In the 10th century, two thirds of the population of Tarsus were single men with military duties. The other third actually had families. Many of the garrisons of these fortified settlements were granted salaries as well as a house of their own in exchange for military service. Successful raids against the Byzantines would yield loot, slaves and symbolic Islamic glory for having fought the infidel and fulfilling jihad. A successful raid by the Eastern Romans against the Arabs would yield similar results. These former subjects of the Caliphate have become Roman citizens and are a great example of how renegades from the Caliphate could make a new life for themselves there. And now, back to al-Muqaddimah. Thank you Daniel. Be sure to check out Eastern Roman History's video on Byzantine-Abbasid relations. See you next time. Don't forget to subscribe and press the bell icon. On the screen right now, you can see the names and tiers of the patrons. You can join them by pledging a dollar or more to support the channel. Thank you for watching.