Empire and Elites after the Muslim Conquest: The Transformation of Northern Mesopotamia.

• Author: Cobb, Paul M.
• Position: Reviews of Books - Book Review

Empire and Elites after the Muslim Conquest: The Transformation of Northern Mesopotamia. By CHASE F. ROBINSON. Cambridge Studies in Islamic Civilization. Cambridge: CAMBRIDGE UNIV. PRESS, 2000. Pp. xv + 206. $59.95.

Can we write honest post-conquest history? Can we acknowledge the limitations of our sources for the first Islamic century and still reconstruct anything of the period's history? That, in short, is the principal concern of this brief but bravura study. Happily, Robinson's answer is affirmative, though it is qualified with the admission that many questions about the conquest society under the Umayyads (ca. 640-750) will remain unanswerable. Robinson's strategy for pursuing these historiographical and historical problems is to take a provincial view of early Islamic history (the latest trend, apparently), and he has chosen the best possible vantage-point: the Jazira and the city of Mosul. These areas were important in their own right in the crystallization of Umayyad and indeed 'Abbasid rule in the north. And, all things considered, both the Syriac tradition and the Arabic tradition (above all in al-Azdi's local history of Mosul) have been kind to northern Iraq. As a result, Robinson's chosen vantage point has the added advantage of being oddly well represented historiographically.

Chapter one demonstrates that, if the sources cannot be used to tell us much about the seventh-century conquests per se, they can tell us a good deal about the concerns and anxieties of the late eighth and early ninth-century audiences for whom these sources were intended, and the "competitive and (sometimes) fractious milieu of local and imperial elites" that they inhabited (p. 1). Without any decent documentary sources of the conquest period, it would seem to be a fairly basic point that "conquest history [i.e., the chronicles, etc.] thus describes post-conquest history [p. 12]." But whereas others have made this point very forcefully before, Robinson actually goes on to do the history that he promises. The evidence that he adduces (treaty "documents" contained in chronicles, Christian accounts of the conquests, accounts of itineraries and chronology) all point to the social, legal, and administrative concerns of the early Muslim and Christian elites who were themselves attempting to forge a viable modus vivendi in the post-conquest Jazira. The result was the usual autonomy-for-subservience deal struck by most conquerors at most times, but the author...