gather revenues and pay their troops. As we shall see, this was a bit like the Western
European institution of the fief. It meant that even minor commanders could act as
local governors, tax-collectors, and military leaders. But there was a major difference
between this institution and the system of fiefs and vassals in the West: while vassals
were generally tied to one region and one lord, the troops under Islamic local
commanders were often foreigners and former slaves, unconnected to any particular
place and easily wooed by rival commanders.
CULTURAL UNITY, RELIGIOUS POLARIZATION
The emergence of local strongmen meant not the end of Arab court culture but a
multiplicity of courts, each attempting to out-do one another in brilliant artistic,
scientific, theological, and literary productions. Cairo, for example, founded by the
Fatimids, was already a huge urban complex by 1000. Imitating the Abbasids, the
Fatimid caliphs built mosques and palaces, fostered court ceremonials, and turned
Cairo into a center of intellectual life. One of the Fatimid caliphs, al-Hakim (r.996–
1021), founded the dar al-ilm, a sort of theological college plus public library.
Even more impressive was the Umayyad court at Córdoba, the wealthiest and
showiest city of the West. It boasted 70 public libraries in addition to the caliph’s
private library of perhaps 400,000 books. The Córdoban Great Mosque was a center
for scholars from the rest of the Islamic world (the caliphs paid their salaries), while
nearly 30 free schools were set up throughout the city.
Córdoba was noteworthy, not only because of the brilliance of its intellectual life,
but also because of the role women played in it. Elsewhere in the Islamic world there
were certainly a few unusual women associated with cultural and scholarly life. But
at Córdoba this was a general phenomenon: women were not only doctors, teachers,
and librarians but also worked as copyists for the many books so widely in demand.
Male scholars were, however, everywhere the norm. They moved easily from
court to court. Ibn Sina (980–1037), known to the West as Avicenna, began his
career serving the ruler at Bukhara in Central Asia, and then moved westward to
Gurganj, Rayy, and Hamadan before ending up for thirteen years at the court of
Isfahan in Iran. Sometimes in favor and sometimes decidedly not so (he was even
briefly imprisoned), he nevertheless managed to study and practice medicine and
write numerous books on the natural sciences and philosophy. His pioneering
systematization of Aristotle laid the foundations of future philosophical thought in the
field of logic: “There is a method by which one can discover the unknown from what
