The Caliph's Splendor
Islam and the West in the Golden Age of Baghdad
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- نقد و بررسی
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نقد و بررسی
April 16, 2012
Popular historian Bobrick (The Fated Sky: Astrology in History) breathlessly recounts the ornate pageantry of the Islamic caliphate, from its meteoric rise as an empire on three continents, with magnificent cities that were centers of scientific and artistic achievement, through the debauchery and licentiousness that characterized Harun al-Rashid’s late-eighth-century Baghdad. While ostensibly about the diplomatic and military drama encircling the caliphate, the Byzantine Empire, and Charlemagne’s kingdom (al-Rashid sent Charlemagne a white elephant, which the king took as his beloved pet), the book is much more preoccupied with the standard Orientalist tropes of sex and violence. Drawing equally from sober, scholarly works and the fanciful accounts of fabulists reporting or inventing rumors from the caliph’s court, Bobrick has every scene bathed in a postcoital purple haze of opium, wine, and the bloody mist of thousands of beheadings. Each evening, we are told, seven slave girls spent hours sitting on “pierced chairs with incense wafting up from below... thereby made abundantly fragrant, and so readied for Harun’s embrace,” a much needed nightly respite from his busy days of assassinating his rivals, dismembering their bodies, and having them “hung on Baghdad’s three pontoon bridges for all to see.” 16 pages of color photos, 2 maps. Agent: Russell Galen, Scovil, Galen, and Ghosh.
June 1, 2012
A nonscholarly depiction of the cultured, cosmopolitan world of the early Abbasid caliphate. Bobrick (Master of War: The Life of General George H. Thomas, 2009, etc.) gives a fresh overview of the turbulent state of the Middle East and Europe during the 8th century, just as Islam was consolidating power under the Abbasid caliphate of Abu Jafar Abdullah al-Mansur, who founded the new capital at Baghdad in 766. His grandson Harun al-Rashid acceded to the caliphate at age 23 in 786, becoming King of Kings, creating a diverse, hierarchical theocracy with many military and administrative trappings held over from the Persian kings. His enlightened rule was fancifully portrayed in the much later Thousand and One Nights, a legendary source Bobrick refers to constantly. At the same time that Harun was establishing Islam's Golden Age with Baghdad as its jewel, Constantinople as the Christian capital of the East Roman Empire was feeling embattled from within, while Western Europe was overrun by the Lombards and Saxons, and was soon to be violently quelled by Charlemagne. The kingdoms of the Franks and the Abbasids opposed the Byzantines and Umayyads of Spain, and thus had communicated by diplomatic envoy, though inconclusively, as if only to prove to the Muslims that their caliph was of greater wealth and significance. The author helpfully compares the reigns of Charlemagne as the source of Carolingian Renaissance and Harun as instigator of Islam's Golden Age, though the overall sprawl here, also encompassing Al-Andalus, Empress Irene's Constantinople and "Iron Charles' " Aachen, rather overwhelms this modest effort. A valiant, if superficial, attempt at rendering in readable format this significant period in Muslim history.
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March 15, 2012
Award-winning historian Bobrick tends to focus on American history but has ranged from Ivan the Terrible to the English Bible. Here he goes forth to examine the late 700s caliphate of Harun al-Rashid, when Islam spread from the Iberian Peninsula to China and Harun's capital, Baghdad, glowed at the world's center.
Copyright 2012 Library Journal, LLC Used with permission.
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