The Muslim Empire held the Middle East from the time of the Prophet Muhammad until the Ottoman period. As wonderful as that may sound, the truth was far from it—the period was marked by upheavals, changes of rule, and control over subjects that was not always so tight, at least not all the time. Not all rulers and subjects were Arabs; from the tenth century there were also Turkish subjects, but for our purposes we can say that most were certainly Muslims.
At the head of the empire stood the caliph, the successor to the Prophet Muhammad, and he led the empire in conquests that were delayed by struggles in which his family, the family of the caliphs, was in conflict with other families. As is customary in such conflicts, problems arose—the kind that emerge in the politics of power and rule: intrigues, honor, families, murders, and struggles for the caliph’s throne.
The Prophet, supposedly, regarded the “Rightly Guided” caliphs—al-Khulafa al-Rashidun—as his successors, in accordance with the best of Sunni tradition. From Abu Bakr to Ali ibn Abi Talib this was more or less the case. But politics, as we said, is like a wheel: one day you are on top and the next day you are at the bottom—and so the Umayyads rose to the head of the empire. They sat in Damascus and did not take Persian culture seriously; unlike Arabic, it was not considered by them to be anything special. The Abbasids, for their part, claimed to be closer to Muhammad and did not like this arrangement, so they killed the members of the Umayyad family and took the caliphate for themselves. They also said that Damascus was no longer fashionable and that Baghdad in Iraq was more suitable. Apparently they were right, because between the Euphrates and the Tigris, whoever sits in Baghdad is somewhat more in the thick of things.
I first encountered Harun al-Rashid in an old diary I came across at David’s home, the cousin of my grandfather, whom I was privileged to love and respect. I also had the privilege of sitting down and translating, over a period of a year and a half, the diary written by his father, from Turkish into Hebrew. In that diary, the writer, a native of Salmas, went from one trouble to another until he reached Bashkale, where the troubles did not end, but where he met the local mufti, who, according to rumor, was descended from the family of that same Harun al-Rashid.
We encounter Harun again in our story—as the leader of the golden age of the Abbasid dynasty, between 786 and 809 CE. But Harun is not the main point. Before him, the second Abbasid caliph was Abu Ja’far al-Mansur, who ruled from 754 to 775 CE.
Abu Ja’far, hereafter “al-Mansur,” was the brother of the first caliph. In order to consolidate his rule, al-Mansur thought it wise to eliminate the competition, and so he began by killing Abu Muslim, one of the military leaders who had fought to overthrow the Umayyads. He was not ashamed to kill members of the Abbas family either, because he was, by nature, a meticulous and thorough man. The Shiites did not like al-Mansur, who they had hoped would give the imams greater weight in government after the Umayyads disappeared. Not only did he disappoint them, he also acted actively to suppress them, which pleased me but did not make him particularly popular in their eyes. He opened the doors of the empire to all subjects, who until then had paid a poll tax as second-class citizens, and worked to build a splendid caliphal palace in Baghdad and the cultural center that became the foundation of the Islamic Golden Age, brought to its height under our friend Harun al-Rashid, from the Abbasid perspective.
Why does all this interest us? More precisely, why does it interest you?
Among the few objects I found in the possession of a close family, there was a small and mysterious gold coin, attached at family events with a pin to the lapel of one of the family’s honored members, whom I hold dear. The coin was relatively well preserved, and on it, in dense, connected letters, in the manner of Arabic script trying to impress its reader, appeared the name of Abu Ja’far, known, as mentioned, as al-Mansur. After all its ordeals, the Jewish family had been unable to bring much property from the Urmia basin—neither pictures, nor gold, nor much of anything else—which drew my attention to this small, ancient item that they had managed to keep. Once I deciphered the inscription and found the origin of the coin, I think that even the family in the area of Lakes Urmia and Van had not known this information.
Here is a picture of the coin, for anyone who read and held on until the end of the story.
