The influence of pre-Islamic Persian civilisation and the shift away from the mainland of the Muslim civilisational core, asbiyya, is the central theme today. My basic contention is that when Arab-Muslim polity started expanding its geographical contours it needed some tested and tried blueprint of an administrative system to establish stable control beyond the confines of a tribal network. The administrative structure was borrowed from Byzantine empire but politically the Muslim rulers relied mostly on autochthonous traditions and conventions.

Thus, it was an integration of two systems. Accountability could still be sustained as the integral core of the system by welcoming dissent. But subsequent conquest of Persia and the subjugation of the Sassanids added yet another strand to the newly forged political dyad.

Had it remained an Arabo-Byzantine dyad, there could be a possibility of powerful synthesis infusing vigor and maturity in the Arab-Muslim civilisation. Such a synthesis would have helped Muslims to evolve their own institutions for transition of power. Additionally, they would have escaped the tradition of dynastic rule, which proved to be an anathema in the Muslim world and came to be defined by autocratic rule. The Persian civilisation prior to Islam had a history spanning over several centuries. Its status of a former superpower helped it transform the essential character of the Muslim politics despite being subdued militarily.

Its most important impact on the Arab-Muslims was the introduction of mulukiat (monarchy) which replaced khilafat and became the abiding feature of Muslim politics. The monarchy brought the idea of the divine right of kings (king as the shadow of God on earth) which displaced the accountability of the one at the helm of the affairs that had characterised the institution of khilafat.

Absolutism, rather than egalitarianism then made steady progress and eventually became an established practice among Muslims. Persian kings in the remote past had claimed to be the progeny of the Sun-god, so that opposing them amounted to opposing god. Therefore, dissention towards the king was deemed an act of treason punishable by death. That tradition not only lasted until recently, but also spread out horizontally. Seljuks, Ottomans and Indian kings embraced this concept of king’s infallibility whole-heartedly and saw to it that their subjects practiced it as an article of their faith.

The concept reached its culmination in Slave King, Ghias ud Din Balban, who ruled India from 1266 to 1287. He was of Ilberi Turkish descent but his admiration for Persian kings and their royal traditions knew no bounds. He was convinced that the glory of kings was possible only by following the Persian traditions and very carefully followed those traditions in his personal and public life.

He named his grandsons after Persian kings and introduced Persian etiquettes in his court. While expressing his firm belief in the divine right of kings, Balban enunciated with full vehemence that a king was the representative of God on the earth and kingship was a divine institution. He pointed out to the nobles that he wore the crown not through their consent but by the mercy of God.

Akhwan ul Safa and their exponents were decimated and rationality was scuttled. Physical power still existed but without intellectual content.

He told his son Bughra Khan that “kingship is the embodiment of despotism”. He believed that “king’s super­human awe and status should ensure his subjects’ obedience.” That probably was the reason he introduced the practice of sajda, requiring people to kneel and touch the ground with their forehead in salutation to the king.

Most if not all of these traditions persisted throughout the dynastic rule in Muslim empires. The socio-political reform that the Prophet of Islam (peace be upon him) had brought about was not sustained by prominent members of his ummah. Thus, the Persian legacy which had already exhausted its creative content crept into Muslim civilisation and snapped its dynamism that had sprung from the deserts of Hejaz.

The shift of the Muslim capital to Damascus placed the burgeoning Muslim civilisation in the middle of two declining empires: Persian and Byzantine, discounting the Arabian asbiyya which provided the dynamism in the cultural realm. That is what Allama Iqbal underscored in his poetry as well as in his famous lectures.

The emerging polity under the visionary leadership had had great creative potential to unfold an evolutionary process. That evolutionary process was prevented when Muslims suffered a civilisational backlash from Persia at the expense of the new weltanschauung with Hejaz as its epistemic core. Dynastic rule and autocratic governance thus replaced the egalitarian values that Islam promised. Differences of class became stark and the Muslim empire became yet another polity with expansionist designs.

Umayids and Abbasid had hardly a motive other than grinding their own political axe(s). The establishment of Bait al Hikmat under Abbasids was an exception that allowed confluences of various knowledge systems. To many, it was the glorious period of Muslim history. Sadly, it ended in intellectual stasis.

Akhwan ul Safa and their exponents were decimated and rationality was scuttled. Physical power still existed but without significant intellectual content. My contention is that in expanding the Muslim empires were losing their elan vitale (in the Bergsonian sense). These two developments were far too significant to be overlooked by students of history.

(Concluded)

The writer is Professor in the faculty of Liberal Arts at the Beaconhouse National University, Lahore