Year: 2018
Type: book-chapter
Abstract: The countryside is in the first place the locus of agriculture.Since taxation of agricultural lands amounted for the lion's share of the early Islamic empire's income, and its city-based culture was largely dependent on food (and other products) produced in the countryside, it was imperative for the empire to try and keep the countryside under control.This paper will focus on a rather small region in southern Iraq, the area between the Persian Gulf and the great marshland called al-Baṭāʾiḥ.The epicenter of this region was the city of Basra, which was founded by the invading Muslims as a base for their expeditions into southern Iraq and beyond.They established their camp on the edge of the desert plateau, ca.20 km west of the presentday Shaṭṭ al-ʿArab (which was called the "One-eyed Tigris,"Dijla al-ʿAwrāʾ, at the time), and this encampment soon grew to become a miṣr, a garrison city, and one of the main metropoles of the early Islamic empire.Rural areas are heavily underrepresented in early Islamic non-documentary sources, and documentary sources from the early Islamic period are available in great quantities only for Egypt.For Iraq, close to no documentary source material has survived.However, what Iraq lacks in documentary sources is partly made up for by the extraordinary amount of attention the legal literature spends on the status of the land of the Sawād and related questions.The region of Basra in particular forms an interesting case study for the relation between the empire and the countryside because we are blessed with, in addition to the legal sources, three independent narrative sources from the Abbasid period that give us an unusually detailed insight into the exploitation of countryside of this region: Ibn Sarābiyūn's (d. after 333/945) description of the canals on both banks of the Dijla al-ʿAwrāʾ; al-Balādhurī's (d.279/892) list of land grants and estates in the same region, focused on the Umayyad and early Abbasid period; and al-Ṭabarī's (d.310/923) account of the Zanj rebellion (255-270/870-883) that was centred in exactly the same region.The level of detail in these three sources is to my knowledge unrivaled in the narrative sources for any rural area Peter Verkinderen -9789004386549
Source: BRILL eBooks
Author: Peter Verkinderen
Language: English
Domain: Life Sciences
Open Access status: hybrid
OpenAlex ID: W2952160713