46. Gold Coin of Abd al-Malik (Syria, AD 696-7)

Islam! And the dream of a world Caliphate.
Following up on his week of introducing Buddhism, Hinduism, Zoroastrianism, Christianity, and Miscellaneous Local Divinities, MacGregor gives us a week about the interactions of Power and Faith around the time of Mohammed, AD 600 or so. The two coins he looks at in this podcast tell several important stories: first, the career of Abd al-Malik, the 9th Caliph, the first such ruler of the Islamic world to extend his empire over a large region; second, Islam’s shift away from representations of people in their art; and third, the still-extant dream of an all-Islamic empire. This latter dream, though some apparently believe in it strongly, seems unlikely to me at this point, given what we’ve learned about the separation of church and state, and given the long history of an institution like the papacy being constantly under threat, having to defend itself all the time. On the other hand, who knows what Internet 2.0 will bring? Islam is a very seductive religion, it’s straightforward and logical, and if it can be a force for world-unification in a positive way in the years to come, then I say, bring on the pan-world Islamic Caliphate.

Significant for the world of art, of course, is the move you see in these two coins, from representing the ruler as a big, central, and powerful human, to showing only text. In this case, it’s an old Arabic script with a familiar line from the Qu’ran about “There is no god but Allah, and Mohammed is his prophet,” one of the five pillars of the faith (I believe). Just as the Jews never depicted their god, making the Jesus on the St. Mary Mosaic a bit unusual, so the Moslems never depict Allah, Mohammed, or any creature with a soul...and so Islamic art quickly became focused on vegetative shapes, and the world’s most glorious calligraphy. And so, literacy rose in a big way, because everyone needed to interact with the word of god that is the book, none of this “I’m the priest so only I am allowed to read the sacred text” you got in the west, and shortly after Abd al-Malik, in the 700s, say, when the Caliphate had moved from Damascus (where these coins were minted) to Baghdad, you had one of the best-educated, most advanced (ugh—that word!) civilizations in all history. I’ve always thought it was a shame they didn’t have much of a tradition of drama...but I can trade it for their medicine, astronomy, algebra, etc.