Arab Influence in Tunisia

At the start of the 7th century A.D., in the Mediterranean region and thereabouts, there were a few big, bureaucratic states, and a bunch of tribal groups, some nomadic.

The bureaucratic states were the Romans, operating out of Constantinople (Istanbul today, and we call them Byzantines), and Persia, run at that time by the Sasanid dynasty. There were “barbarian” kingdoms of various kinds in Europe and North Africa: Vandals in Africa, Visigoths in Spain, Lombards in Italy, Ostrogoths in Central Europe, and so forth.

For most of the 7th century, Carthage was held by the Byzantines, who had taken it from the Vandals in the previous century. Outside of Carthage, in what is now Tunisia, were Berbers, with tribal political arrangements.

Arabia wasn’t nothing at the time. It had the major land route out of Africa. There was money. But politically, it was small potatoes (they didn’t have potatoes then, all the potatoes were in South America). The Byzantines kind of ignored it. The Persians put a bit more energy into Arabia, being closer to it. They meddled and invaded from time to time.

Nobody paid much attention when Muhammad’s Muslims united the peninsula.

There is a story that Muhammad wrote to the Byzantine Emperor Heraclius in which he invited him to become a Muslim. There was no response. Perhaps the letter did not arrive, or perhaps it got stuck on some desk in the bureaucracy. It came from Arabia, after all. In the Byzantine context, who cared?

Muhammad died, and his successors, when they were not fighting about who would be top dog, they called that person “caliph,” decided to go out into the outside world to spread the religion. They had matchless fervor and had great success. In a few decades they expanded as far as Afghanistan in the east, and Spain in the west.

Muhammad was illiterate. Most of his people were. The Arab governments were tribal. There were high status families that negotiated with each other. Muhammad’s family, because of his doings, became the top of the influence pyramid in Arabia.

When the Arabs conquered Byzantine territories, and the entire Persian Empire, they encountered government bureaucracies running things. If the Arabs had been barbarians, they might have just killed a lot of people and took a lot of stuff. But what they did instead was to tell the bureaucrats to keep coming to work, the revenues were now going here rather than there, we’ll make changes as necessary.

That was not a smooth process of course. The Arabs were still tending to think in terms of family loyalty, so there were intrigues and power wars all the time. But for all that the Arabs established a way of doing things that created a coherent Islamic culture whose participants recognize that they are all part of one cultural thing.

In pre-Islamic Arabia they weren’t using “coins,” or really anything like them. It was a barter market. There are stories of silver lumps shaped like date pits, but I’ve never seen them. They would have used Byzantine gold and Persian silver, if they used anything at all.

When they went out conquering they found these coinage economies, and they saw no reason not to continue, it was so convenient. So, we have the Arab-Byzantine copper and gold coins for the former Byzantine territories, and the Arab-Sasanian silver coins for Persia.

There is a constant theme in Islamic culture that one should refine and advance religion. One of the caliphs, ‘Abd Al-Malik, after a series of preliminary steps, decreed an all-Arabic coinage reform. There was gold, silver, and copper, with Arabic religious legends starting in 696 A.D.

A convenient year for us, in our discussion of Tunisian coins. The Arabs had set up shop in Tunisia the year before.

The thing about Islamic coins is you must be able to read them to figure out what they are. You can cheat a little, maybe, with stylistic elements. I mean, you can pretty much look at an Umayyad dirham and an Abbasid dirham and tell that what you’re looking at is one or the other. But to go further you must be able to find and read at least the date and mint.

In later years, and at certain mints, that can be problematic. Al Abbasiyyah, for example. Or Ifriqiyyah, for that matter.

Take that Aghlabid coin in the picture accompanying this article. I can clearly see the “five” of the Hijri year 195. But the mint, immediately before it, around the edge, to me doesn’t really look like Ifriqiyah, which is what the vendor said it was, or Al-Abbasiyyah either.

There is the possibility that the same mint staff, possibly just one person, might have accompanied the Amir to summer and winter quarters and set up the same operation at both places. The mint “machinery” could probably fit on the back of a single donkey. The same die cutter would make the same kind of inferior dies at both places to make the same kind of inferior coins.

They also inherited from both the Romans and the Persians, the concept that the coinage was a leadership prerogative. The emperor, or the Caliph, was supposed to be the source of authority, and all the money had to come from him. It was “his” money. He was just graciously letting you use it.

When the Umayyads had their Islamic coinage reform they took the position that all their power came from God, so they put references to God on their coins and left their names off.

A hundred and some years later, when local Amirs started putting their names on coins, the Caliph’s names started appearing as well. It was all still supposed to come from God, but the people started announcing their personal authority. Coins were the newspapers of the day. They were the government thing you were most likely to encounter, and probably the only government thing you were glad to see.

There were four Caliphs (the Arabic is two words translating as “Leader of the Faithful”) of Muhammad’s family. A few of them were bad leaders. Factional wars began, the winner was an outsider. He founded the Umayyad Dynasty of caliphs.

The Umayyads continued the expansionist policy. A general of theirs arrived in Tunisia at the close of the 7th century, setting up a camp which grew to be the city of Kairouan, a couple of days by horse to the south of Carthage.

They had developed the habit of leaving commercial and bureaucratic infrastructure intact while they got their own Islamic superstructure established.

More and more business started getting done in Kairouan. Tunis, not far from Carthage, became the staging area for the Arabs when they were ready to start their siege. When they took it, they pretty much destroyed it. Tunis became the big city in the north.

A rebellion turned into a revolution, and another family, the Abbasids, related to Muhammad’s family, came to power. The Umayyads decamped to Spain, where they continued to call themselves Caliphs. So now there were two Caliphs in Islam, each claiming to be the only one.

There is essentially one Caliph whose name is known to Westerners who otherwise know nothing of Islam. That is Harun Al-Rashid, the one who gifted an elephant to Charlemagne.

Among the many things Harun did was to grant hereditary rights to the governor of Ifriqiyyah, as North Africa east of Egypt was called. That line was the Aghlabid Amirs.

We should talk about the coins. There was a mint set up in or near Kairouan by the Umayyad governors, and a few copper fals coins and silver dirhams were struck with name of the province: Ifriqiyyah. There were gold coins too, but gold coins did not carry the mint name at that time. Umayyad coins of Ifriqiyyah are generally rare.

Abbasid coins followed the same general plan. There were several Abbasid governors sent from Baghdad before the advent of the Aghlabids, with a few years of occupation by Berbers and other outsiders. The coins were standard Abbasid types in gold, silver, and copper.

When I was young I would hang out at the ANS library in New York. I’d take coins I’d gotten from the junk boxes of the midtown coin shops that I couldn’t identify. One day I showed an Abbasid dirham to George Miles. I could read some Kufic coin Arabic if it was clear enough, but that one wasn’t. Dr. Miles said “Oh, this is that terrible mint in Tunisia, Al-Abbasiyyah. Their die work was awful.” A few dates of Abbasid dirhams from Al-Abbasiyyah mint are common.

I encountered several websites that state that the first of the Aghlabid Amirs “founded” Al-Abbasiyyah in 801 A.D. But in Steve Album’s book, “Checklist of Islamic Coins,” Abbasid dirhams are mentioned some forty years before the advent of the Aghlabids. I’ve seen those coins myself. That’s a discrepancy.

I asked Steve. This is what he told me: Obviously Al-Abbasiyyah existed before the first Aghlabid built his palace there. But exactly where the coins were struck is not exactly known today. Same with the Ifriqiyyah coins. Most people assume that the Ifriqiyyahs were struck in Kairouan, and Al-Abbasiyyah was a suburb of that city. Nothing definitive, except the coins themselves.

Abbasid coins were struck at both Al-Abbasiyyah and Ifriqiyyah (Kairouan) intermittently until 800 A.D., after which the Aghlabid coinage began.

The first of the Aghlabad Amirs built a palace in Al-Abbasiyyah. The mint in Kairouan was closed, then opened, then closed again.

The Aghlabids mined gold in the south and did a lot of business in slavery. They used the money to attack Sicily, which they eventually conquered, setting the stage for a couple of centuries of Arab rule there. They attacked other islands as well. They took Malta but failed to acquire Sardinia. They attacked various points in southern Italy, and even threatened Rome a couple of times, but were eventually kicked out of the Italian mainland.

The Aghlabids rode high for a while, then faltered. There was an attack from Egypt in the 9th century A.D., followed by a difficult Berber revolt. Then, from the ashes of the Berber defeat, arose one of those purificatory religious movements that have been a periodic feature of Islamic history. In that case it was the Ismaili sect of Shia Muslims. They became the Fatimids, who eventually conquered Egypt as Shia Caliphs. So then, for a while, there were three Caliphs in the World of Islam, each claiming to be the only one.