Society and Commonalities

Societies

In time, one of the most important linkages between government and religion became the madrasa. The madrasa was a type of seminary, which became one of the most common forms of higher education in the Islamic world. (Madrasas still exist, and are particularly common in areas that have limited access to education: Afghanistan is full of them). Institutions of higher learning were not unheard of in the Islamic world; the House of Wisdom in Baghdad (as mentioned in the lecture on the Abbasids) is one of the most famous. The madrasas began to appear in about the 11th century, although there is some historical dispute about the exact founding. Some madrasas were organized like traditional colleges, with faculty being paid for their services and students enrolling; others were far more casual, and were often attached to mosques. Areas of study in these educational centers varied, although there was always a religious component. However, the educated fell into a variety of groups; doctors, for example, did not fall into the same category as scribes, although on occasion their training was very similar. The similarity of training is one of the greatest examples of how the Muslim world fell behind the rest of the world; it was not until the 19th century that Muslim physicians began to receive training equivalent to doctors in the West. Poets and other artists, while singing the praises of the state (and occasionally of love), did not fall into the bureaucratic category either.

The other group that made its name in the Islamic world was those who lived by the sword. Rulers maintained armed forces, and much of the focus in the years of the Ottomans and others was on bringing groups under the control of the military. In the pre-Islamic Middle East, standing armies were non-existent; with the introduction of the concept of jihad, and the nearly constant warfare of the post-Muhammad era, professional soldiers became more and more common. Both the Umayyads and the Abbasids established standing armies, initially comprised predominantly of Arabs and eventually incorporating new converts. In some of the armies, slaves were used, but for the most part, the armies of the Islamic world were filled with willing recruits.

Those who did not serve with the pen or the sword often became merchants. Islam always viewed commerce with a favored eye (Muhammad had been a merchant, after all), and much of the Qu’ran and later writings discuss the positive aspects of commerce. While some merchants took advantage of their situations, many were seen as positive role models for the average Islamic man, and were often held up as models. However, the majority of those in society worked the land, either land they owned themselves or land that they rented (or simply worked) that was owned by someone else. Most of the land was held by large landholders, who were granted the lands from the caliphs; the exception to this was in the larger cities, where lands were held in smaller parcels as freeholding estates. After the conquest of the Ottomans, much of the landholding changed to a more feudal type system, although the Ottoman lords did not really have the same level of control over their lands that their Western counterparts benefited from; instead, these land owners lived away from their lands, collected taxes from the inhabitants, and had very little interaction otherwise. The lines between private land ownership and that “granted” by the state was significantly blurred and often times virtually impossible to define.

Societal Structure