The abna' al-dawla: the definition and legitimation of identity in response to the fourth fitna.

AuthorTurner, John P.

This article will reopen the question about the identity and provenance of the abna' aldawla. Who were they? When did they form as a collective and why? The standard view is that the abna' al-dawla were the backbone of the Abbasid dynasty, coming into existence with that regime after the revolution circa 132/750 and consisting of the original fighters from Khurasan and their descendants, who formed an elite social and political structure of supporters. This privileged status accorded them the moniker abna' al-dawla (sons/supporters of the dynasty).

Recent scholarship on premodern Islamic history typically allows modern conceptualizations of identity to determine the understanding of group dynamics and identity formation. However, these typically are not applicable to the third/ninth century. (1) The abna' al-dawla are particularly in need of reinterpretation. (2) Still, determining who they were presents a number of difficulties. The blanket term abna', as it is most often used, leaves little room, in its monolithic presentation as an ethnic or nationality based group, for the subtleties of social interaction. One must not forget that the abna' al-dawla as a political actor was made up of individuals with many other ties of identity. In the course of this article I will show that it was during the fourth fitna (195/810-198/813) that these individuals formed an identity for collective action. This is not based on ethnic or national affinity. Reading the sources closely reveals that they do not appear as a coherent group until that conflict, and they disappear shortly thereafter.

Scholars have taken a variety of terms as synonymous with abna' al-dawla that actually are not. When the military units were settled in Baghdad at its founding, they were grouped roughly by region of origin representing a great diversity of locales. (3) Garrisoning troops in this manner does not necessarily translate into settlement by ethnic or national identity, nor does it lead to the creation of these identities. (4) When hostilities broke out between al-Amin and al-Ma'mun, individuals rose to fight based on horizontal ties of loyalty, which focused vertically on the caliph and anti-caliph. These ties were not based on a shared sense of ethnicity or nationalism but rather on linkages of local commonality, meaning quarters, bonds of patronage, and perceptions of common interests. In the process of asserting a threat or in responding to it, the various players on the field were forced to seek justification for their places and roles. They were Khurasanians (al-Ma'mun's forces mostly from Khurasan) facing people whose familial roots were in Khurasan but who resided in Baghdad. (5) The defining connection for the abna' al-dawla was location in Baghdad. They were proud of having come from Khurasan and claimed some sense of "Khurasaniness," but their use of the term clearly excluded Tahir and the forces of al-Ma'mun. One side actively tried to dissociate itself from the other. (6) In this process of dissociation, the abna' al-dawla came to define themselves in opposition to the others, who happened to be the rabble of Baghdad and the followers of al-Ma'mun who was proclaiming a new da'wa. The latter were fighting for the new da'wa and were held together by their own special ties of loyalty and patronage. Al-Ma'mun's primary general, Tahir b. al-Husayn, exhorts his troops: "Oh friends of God and people of fidelity and gratitude, verily you are not such as those you see of the people of faithlessness and treason. They neglected what you preserved. They belittled what you esteemed. They were faithless to the oaths that you guarded ..." (7) At the same time elite members of Baghdad society sought justification for their place by asserting that they were the abna' al-dawla, sons of the first supporters of the original da'wa, tightly connected to the caliph and to the Abbasid house-hold. Within the Baghdad milieu, the vertical bonds of loyalty and assertion of ties to the Caliph and caliphal household brought disparate individuals into a larger body for collective action. The new da'wa of al-Ma'mun, the approach of his forces and the siege, caused the abna' al-dawla to coalesce in an assertion of their unique position. However, their interests and loyalties were too diffuse to form an effective, unified military body, especially once the unifying identifier and its utility had been removed. This political subscription to an identity by a group of military supporters of the Abbasid caliphate was defined by focusing on, and in terms of, "historical" loyalty to that caliphate and the caliphate's "historical" ties to them. The idiom in which they chose to express this allows for the description of a collective grouping but not of one that was as pervasive, cohesive, or as old as has been assumed.

PREVIOUS DEFINITIONS

In 1964, David Ayalon presented the paper "The Military Reforms of Caliph al-Mu'tasim," which even though it was not formally published until thirty years later, has set the tone for the field and its understanding of the abna' al-dawla and consequently of early Abbasid history. (8) Even though unpublished, it was passed around and took on an almost primary source-like status. Brilliant in its erudition, Ayalon's fundamental understanding of the group and its social dynamic is nevertheless flawed because of his assumptions about their national and ethnic identity which led to the notion that it was a coherent political actor from the beginning--an interpretation that has become the norm.

Ayalon's definition of the abna' as "the descendants of the Khurasanis who brought the 'Abbasids to the throne, and who included both Iranians and Arabs" forms a foundation for almost all studies of the early Abbasids. (9) He considers the abna' to have been an ethnically based coterie, which was then transplanted to Baghdad. This means that while the Arabs and the Iranians were "racially" distinct from each other, they felt, by virtue of their common origin in Khurasan, an ethnic unity. In the course of his article, Ayalon highlights the tribal struggles out of which Abu Muslim and his fighters emerged as victors. He then compares this with the army of al-Ma'mun, which he says was made up of "racial elements" that were definitely not Arab. (10) In 1990 Moshe Sharon refined this by adding that the original Abbasid army was much more diverse than Ayalon allows. The limiting factor was, according to Sharon, registration according to village and not by tribe. (11) For Ayalon the leadership cadre of the Abbasid revolution was made up of Arabs who had migrated to Khurasan. (12) However he also reads the abna' as having explicit ties to each other and to their home region of Khurasan based on their common "national" origin. (13) Amikam Elad goes one step further by stating that the Abbasid military was mostly made up of Arabs from the southern tribes who lived in Khurasan. Thus, they did not represent a resurgence of and takeover of the caliphate by Persians. He assumes the continuity and coherence of their identity as abna' al-dawla, but states that they were not Iranians. (14) Patricia Crone, in her review of Mohsen Zakeri's book, deals skillfully with his theory that the abna' were the descendants of the Sasanian horsemen of Khusraw I. She cuts to the heart of the matter by making the observation that "the Abna' of the 'Abbasids owed their name to their descent from the participants in the revolution" and that "there can have been no Abna' in this sense before the dawla took place." (15) Underlying each of these are basic assumptions that are rooted in Ayalon's article.

Returning to Ayalon's definition, he notes that they are described as being Baghdadi and quite proud of this, yet at the same time they highlighted their Khurasanian origins. Therefore the abna' felt strong, visceral connections to their home region and their "national brothers" living there. Ayalon posits the hypothesis that when Baghdad was built, the Khurasanian troops were all settled in it as an elite corps and their children and grandchildren enjoyed special status and treatment owing to their heritage as early advocates from Khurasan. (16) Their ethnic identity bound them together. For Ayalon, this identity was based on their shared Arab racial descent which had been turned into a pseudo-Iranian ethnicity that had deepened because of their common locality in Baghdad and their status as a military aristocracy, an Arabized ethnic group, racially Arab but culturally Khurasanian. Ayalon thus observes that even though they had this distinct connection with Khurasan and pride in this, they are described in the sources as being different from Khurasanians. (17) In addition, he interprets the abna' as clearly separate from the Arabs. (18) He and others are especially bound to the national character of this clique. Elton Daniel says "they had been able to forge and to maintain the revolutionary coalition by appealing to feelings of Khurasanian particularism and a vague form of shi'ism." (19) Crone remarks that "generally, the Abna' were the bodily, as opposed to institutional, descendants of the participants in the revolution" (20) and in a later work that "the sources regularly identified Iranians as Abna'." (21) However she does allow that the abna' were not wholly "Iranian" or "Arab" but that they were a mixture. (22) Jacob Lassner argues that there is a clear connection between "the abna' and Khurasan and, hence, a link between the abna' and the Turks" and that the abna' were the "second generation" of Abbasid revolutionaries. (23) Crone goes so far as to say "the Abna' had been designed as an imperial aristocracy." (24) More recently, she has contrasted them with "Tahir's 'ajam [who] were raw Iranians, people who had failed to transcend their local origins by participation in the high culture." (25) This all seems fairly straightforward but Ayalon makes three...

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