The Abassids: Baghdad

A History of the Arab Peoples: Albert Hourani, c. 1991.

The caliphate of Baghdad.

Began with Abu'l-'Abbas (749 - 754.

Their power lay less in the eastern Mediterranean countries, of in Hijaz, which was an extension of "them" than in the former Sasanian territories: souther Iraq adn the oases and plateaux of Iran, Khurasan and the land stretching beyond it into central Asia. Foreshadowing?

It was more difficult for the caliph to rule the Maghrib, but also less important.

Concentration of power and new capital: Baghdad.

Baghdad: a new city. Somewhat free of pressures from Kufa (to the south) and Basra (to the north).

In the early reigns of the Abassids a new office emerged: wazir -- the advisor to the caliph. 

Canonical system of taxation emerged under the Abassids, linked as far as possible to Muslim norms.

Internecine fighting in the ninth century. This was the time that the Abassids first start using Turks as mercenaries. Baghdad needed to keep the Khurasan soldiers out of Baghdad; they had become hostile to the caliph.

Caliph al-Mu'tasim (833-842) had to move his capital to Samarra, further north of the Tigris, to keep the Khurasan soldiers out of his city.

Capital at Samarra lasted for about 50 years.

In Samarra, Turkish soldiers came to dominate caliph's activities.

Abbasids pushed sunna, the Prophet's usual behavior.

But Abbasids had to deal with Ali's descendants: the Shi'is.

The second chapter ends with this:

After a period of persecution, the attempt to impose a single interpretation of the faith by the power of the ruler was ended, almost never to be resumed. The belief in a unity which includes differences of legal opinion, and in the importance of the Qur'an and the practice (sunna) of the Prophet as the bases (sic) of it, gradually created a mode of thought which came to be known generally as Sunnism, as distinct from Shi'ism.

The break, then, between Sunnis and Shiites, seems to have occurred in the late 800s.