The Founding of Kufa and Basra: Garrison Cities for a New Geography

Between the fourteenth and the seventeenth year after the Hijra, which in the Gregorian reckoning corresponds to the years 635 to 638, on both sides of the marshes of Mesopotamia lay two places that had borne no name in the world atlas of the jahiliyya. On the Euphrates, not far from the old plain of al-Qadisiyya, Kufa arose; on the Shatt al-ʿArab, there where the Tigris and the Euphrates mingled their waters before the Persian Gulf, Basra arose. Neither city existed in the twelfth year after the Hijra; when ʿUmar ibn al-Khattab ﵁ was martyred in the twenty-third year, both had their mosque, their seat of government, their marketplace, their tribal quarters, and their established communities.

Suyuti ﵀ sums up the founding of Kufa in five words. “In that year Saʿd ﵁ founded Kufa.” The year he means is the year sixteen after the Hijra. For Basra he gives a little more: in the fourteenth year, according to his pen, Basra was opened by force, together with the old harbor Ubullah. “In the year fourteen Damascus was opened, partly by treaty and partly by force, and Hims and Baalbek by treaty, and Basra and Ubullah by force.” In the same sentence in which he names the taking of Kufa, he adds: “And ʿUmar ﵁ instituted regular pay for the fighters, registers, and gave allowances according to priority.”

Three lines in his chronicle for an administrative decision that determined the geography of Iraq for the following centuries. We follow Suyuti ﵀ in his concision; we grant the reader only what is needed to understand the function of a garrison city in the early Islamic state.

The Problem of an Army After the Victory

When the Muslim armies took Madāʾin in the sixteenth year and the Sasanian dynasty lost its capital, ʿUmar ﵁ in Medina stood before an administrative problem that none of his predecessors had known. An army had taken the world capital of the Persian empire, and the question was what would become of that army.

In the broader tradition it is related that ʿUmar ﵁ wrote to his commanders that the fighters must not remain in Madāʾin. The palaces of Khosrau, the carpets of gold, the marble halls, the opulence that no Arab had ever seen, would weaken the fighters in faith and pry them loose from the simplicity that had made them who they were. “Seek a place that does not carry the marsh air of the Tigris and where the wind of the Arabian desert still comes.” So is his order summed up in the tradition. Suyuti ﵀ does not record this order explicitly in his ʿUmar section; we give it here only as context for his founding sentence.

The problem was not only spiritual but also administrative. An army that remains in a palace city mingles with the local population; it begins to trade, to marry, and to own land in a city it entered as occupier. Within one generation it becomes impossible to distinguish fighter from citizen, and whoever holds command holds command over a changed community. The Romans had solved this problem by quartering their legions in fixed camps, separated from the cities; the Sasanians had kept their garrisons in enclosed quarters; ʿUmar ﵁ chose a solution of his own: he founded new cities, separated from the palace cities, where the fighters and their families could live in a space designed by Islam.

Thus arose Kufa and Basra, not as conquests but as foundations, not as taken palaces but as raised camps that grew into cities. Islamic historiography calls them “amsar”, plural of “misr”, which means both “city” and “camp”. The Arabic word sums up the nature of these places: an established camp, an urbanized base.

Saʿd ﵁ on the Euphrates

Saʿd ibn Abi Waqqas ﵁, the commander of al-Qadisiyya and of the taking of Madāʾin, received the order to found Kufa. He was, in the sixteenth year, not only military commander in Iraq but also governor on behalf of the khalifah ﵁ over the region the Muslims had just taken. Suyuti ﵀ records simply that “Saʿd ﵁ founded Kufa”; the choice of the man and the choice of the place his pen passes over.

The place was chosen on the western bank of the Euphrates, not far from al-Hira, the old capital of the Lakhmid vassal state of the Sasanians. The ground was high enough to rise above the marsh area, the air was drier than in Madāʾin, and the wind came from the Arabian desert of Najd instead of from the marshes of the Tigris. What an Arab fighter was accustomed to from his upbringing in the Hijaz or Najd, he found in part again in the air and in the climate of Kufa.

The city was built up around a central point: the mosque. Saʿd ﵁ had the place of the mosque marked out, and around it the city quarters were laid out according to tribal bond. Each tribe received its own quarter, with its own street, its own well, its own market; the Quraysh, the Banu Tamim, the Banu Asad, the Banu Bakr ibn Waʾil, each had its place. The spatial ordering of Kufa reflected, in brick and in clay, the social ordering of the Arab tribes that Islam had united.

Suyuti ﵀ passes over these details of the spatial layout. We give them here only insofar as they explain Suyuti’s ﵀ remark about the “founding”. Kufa was not founded by one pen; it was raised from the ground by a whole community, under the hand of a commander and with the order of a khalifah ﵁.

The Pay Register

In the same sentence in which Suyuti ﵀ names the founding of Kufa, he adds something that at first sight does not belong to the founding of a city. “And ʿUmar ﵁ instituted regular pay for the fighters, registers, and gave allowances according to priority.” The pen joins the founding of the city and the institution of the pay register in one line, as though they were two sides of the same act.

Indeed they are. Whoever founds a garrison city must provide for the maintenance of its inhabitants. The fighters were no citizens with their own plot or their own trade; they were in the service of the ummah, and their maintenance came from the treasury, from the jizyah and the kharaj that flowed in from the conquered provinces. But without a register that treasury could not be justly divided.

The register that ʿUmar ﵁ instituted, the diwan, ordered the fighters and their families according to priority. Whoever had embraced Islam earlier received a higher allowance; whoever had come later, a lower one. The early Muhajirun ﵃ stood at the top, the Ansar ﵃ beside them, and the later converts below. Suyuti ﵀ names this “according to priority” and he passes over the detailed sums that were recorded in the broader tradition. What he does not pass over is the principle: whoever came earlier received more.

This principle was not uncontested. Some in the community argued that all Muslims were equal and that the pay must be divided equally; others, with ʿUmar ﵁ at their head, argued that the priority of faith, the sacrifices made in the early years, deserved a reverent place in the division. ʿUmar ﵁ chose the second principle, and he maintained it, according to Suyuti’s ﵀ pen, until his death.

In the next article, which treats the institution of the Hijri calendar, we shall see again how ʿUmar ﵁ in these months of the seventeenth year brought together various administrative decisions. The founding of Kufa, the pay register, the Hijri calendar; all three belong to the broader project of a community that forms its institutions at the moment when it becomes, from a community around a Messenger ﷺ in Medina, a state across three continents.

Basra on the Shatt al-ʿArab

Basra is, in Suyuti’s ﵀ pen, older than Kufa. In his year-fourteen sentence he names Basra together with Ubullah as the places that were opened “by force” in the fourteenth year after the Hijra. We saw in an earlier article, which treats the Iraqi campaign of Khalid ibn al-Walid ﵁ in the twelfth year under Abu Bakr ﵁, how Ubullah fell. What Suyuti ﵀ names here in his year-fourteen sentence is the renewed taking or the confirmation of the taking of that same region under ʿUmar ﵁.

But Basra as we know it, with its great mosque and its tribal quarters and its markets, did not arise from a battle. It arose from a founding in the same pattern as Kufa, in the same months of the fourteenth and the fifteenth year. ʿUtbah ibn Ghazwan ﵁, one of the earliest Muhajirun ﵃ and one of the first men to embrace Islam in Mecca, received from ʿUmar ﵁ the order to found a garrison city on the southern bank of the Shatt al-ʿArab.

Suyuti ﵀ does not name ʿUtbah ﵁ explicitly as founder of Basra in his ʿUmar section. We give his name here only because the broader tradition names him as the man who carried out the order. What Suyuti ﵀ does name is that Basra was opened by force in the year fourteen, and the fruit of that opening was the founding of a new city on the place that Ubullah supplemented as a harbor.

The location of Basra reflected the same considerations that had determined the location of Kufa: high enough to rise above the marshes, far enough from the Persian population centers to create a space of its own, close enough to the harbors and the trade routes to form a junction. But Basra had one advantage that Kufa lacked: access to the sea. By way of the Shatt al-ʿArab Basra could reach the Persian Gulf, and by way of the Gulf the Indian Ocean. What Kufa was for the eastern border of the caliphate on the Euphrates, Basra was for the southeastern border on the sea.

Basra became, within a generation, a center of Arabic learning of an extent that no Arab in the time of jahiliyya could have foreseen. The grammar of classical Arabic was systematized there, the first dictionaries were compiled there, and the first school of Qur’an recitation was formed there. Not one of these developments is foreseen by Suyuti ﵀ in his year-fourteen sentence. What he names is the taking; what he does not name but does make possible is what came forth from the taking.

The Design of a Garrison City

Both Kufa and Basra were designed according to a pattern that would be taken up in Islamic historiography as the template of the “misr”. The pattern had four elements.

In the middle lay the mosque, not at the edge, not as an annex, but at the heart. All streets led to the mosque, and the Friday prayer gathered the whole city in its center. The mosque was not only a place of prayer; it was the place of the Friday pulpit from which the governor addressed the community on behalf of the khalifah ﵁.

Beside the mosque stood the governor’s house, “dar al-imarah”. There the governor resided, received envoys, led the council assemblies, and dispensed justice. The combination of mosque and governor’s house in the center established that in the Islamic state the spiritual and the administrative authority were not separated but concentrated. The khatib of the Friday sermon was at the same time the governor or his representative, and the Friday prayer was at the same time a political assembly.

Around this center lay the tribal quarters: each tribe its place, each place its street and its well. The Arab tribal order was honored, not dismantled. What Islam had united in faith remained visible in the tribe in its social organization. But the tribe was no longer an independent political unit; it was a quarter in a city designed by the ummah, under a governor who ruled on behalf of the khalifah ﵁.

At the edge lay the market, “suq”. There trade was done, there the merchants from the surrounding provinces came in, there the fighters and the non-fighters crossed each other in daily exchange. The market was the gate of the city to the world; it belonged to the city but it was not its heart.

This design, in its four elements, is hidden in Suyuti’s ﵀ pen in the word “founding”. He passes over the pattern. We give it here only because it explains the function of a garrison city in the early Islamic state. What is named by his pen in five words was in reality a new form of urbanism that no preceding civilization had conceived in this shape.

The Role of the Garrison City in the State

For what did a garrison city serve. It served in the first place for the housing of the fighters and their families. An army on campaign cannot live permanently in tents; somewhere the women, the children, the sick veterans, and the youths who grow up into new fighters must have a fixed place, and Kufa and Basra offered that place.

It served in the second place for the administrative connection between Medina and the conquered provinces. The governor in Kufa or Basra received the orders of the khalifah ﵁ in Medina, remitted the jizyah and the kharaj to the treasury, and sent reports back. The city was, in this respect, a junction in a communication network that stretched over thousands of kilometers.

It served in the third place for the spiritual formation of the community. In the mosque of Kufa the older Sahaba ﵃ taught the younger generation. Ibn Masʿud ﵁, the scholar of Kufa, established there his school of Qur’an recitation and hadith transmission, and what a generation later would be called the “Kufan school” of Islamic learning found in this mosque its nourishing ground. What underwent a similar fate in Basra held for the Basran school: a line of its own in grammar, in law, in hadith.

It served in the fourth place for ethnic integration. Beside the Arab tribes there settled in Kufa and Basra ever more non-Arab converts, mawali, who came from Persia, from the marshes, from the old cities of Mesopotamia. The tribal quarters were supplemented with mawali quarters, the markets were mixed, and the marriages crossed the ethnic dividing lines. Within one generation the population of Basra and Kufa was no longer a pure Arab population; it was a blend in which the Arabic language and the Islamic manners formed the binding agent between different origins.

ʿUmar ﵁ in Medina could not, in the year fourteen or sixteen, foresee what his city-foundings would become in the generations that followed. What he did foresee was the immediate need: an army had to be housed, an administration had to be set up, a connection had to be made between Medina and the newly conquered provinces. Suyuti ﵀ sums up that foresight in his five words.

The Geography of Kufa and the Geography of Basra

Between Kufa and Basra lie, as the crow flies, about three hundred kilometers. But the geography between them is no flat geography; it is cut through by the marshes of Central Iraq, by the old bed of the Euphrates, and by the land of Maysan where the tribes lived that the Sasanians had held onto to the very last. The two cities lay at two ends of a wet line that cut through the heart of Iraq.

Kufa governed the west. From Kufa the roads to Syria, to the Hijaz, to Arabia were short. Whoever traveled from Damascus to Medina by the northern route passed close to Kufa; whoever drew from the Hijaz to Iraq came in at Kufa. The city lay at the crossroads of the Arabian desert trade routes and the Iraqi river trade routes.

Basra governed the south and the east. From Basra the roads to the Persian Gulf, to Khuzestan, to Fars, and ultimately to the eastern provinces of the caliphate were short. Whoever came from Iran came in at Basra; whoever traveled to Oman or to the Indian Ocean set out from Basra.

The two cities supplemented each other like two hands of the same community. The one reached toward the west, the other toward the east. Between them moved the jizyah and the kharaj from the Iraqi provinces, between them moved the fighters who were transferred from one front to the other, and between them moved the scholars who transmitted the hadith of Medina to the students of Iraq.

What the Founding Leaves Behind

Kufa would, a quarter century after its founding, become the seat of the caliphate under ʿAli ibn Abi Talib ﵁ in the thirty-fifth year after the Hijra. The khilafah of ʿAli ﵁ moved from Medina to Kufa, a move that became possible because Kufa, though younger than the holy city of the Messenger ﷺ, had an established community with a great mosque and a dar al-imarah that could receive a khalifah ﵁. Suyuti ﵀ treats all of this in his ʿAli section. Here we name it only to indicate how quickly the founding of Kufa under ʿUmar ﵁ expanded its function: from garrison city to seat of the caliphate within one generation.

Basra would undergo a similar expansion. Under the Umayyads it became the springboard center for the conquests of Khurasan, Sind, and the eastern provinces; under the Abbasids it became one of the largest trading cities of the inhabited universe, with a harbor that received ships from China, India, and the east coast of Africa. Not one of these developments is foreseen by Suyuti ﵀ in his year-fourteen sentence. What he names is the founding; what the founding brought forth lay beyond what his pen records at that place.

In the spiritual history of Islam the Kufan school, which had its root in the mosque of Kufa, belongs to the foundations of the Hanafi fiqh; and the Basran school belongs to the foundations of grammar and the science of hadith. Imam Abu Hanifah ﵀ would found his school of law in Kufa, and Hasan al-Basri ﵀ would found his school of self-examination and spiritual guidance in Basra. What was raised in the sixteenth year as a clay-and-brick camp carried in its womb the schools that would give the ummah its spiritual form in the centuries after ʿUmar ﵁.

The Consequences of the Pay Register

We return once more to the diwan that was instituted in the same months. The consequences of this register reached further than the simple division of allowances. Whoever stood in the register stood as a fighter of the ummah; whoever did not stand was a citizen or convert without pay. The register thereby became an instrument of administrative ordering: it determined who belonged to the fighting class and who did not.

Divided according to priority, the register rewarded early conversion with a higher allowance. The Muhajirun ﵃ of Badr stood at the top, the later Sahaba ﵃ below. This principle would lead to tension in the centuries that followed, because new generations of fighters, who had not experienced Badr but had fought the victory of Yarmuk or Qadisiyya, claimed a place of their own. Under the Umayyads the register would be reformed several times, and under the Abbasids it would disappear in its original form and make way for another kind of fiscal ordering. But the first form, which ʿUmar ﵁ instituted in these months, remained the template against which the reforms were weighed.

Suyuti ﵀ passes over this later history. We give it here only to show how one administrative stroke of the pen of ʿUmar ﵁ in the sixteenth year determined the structure of the military administration for centuries. What stands in five words of his chronicle was in reality the design of a whole class ordering within the Islamic state.

ʿUtbah ﵁ and the First Khutbah in Basra

In the broader tradition it is related that ʿUtbah ibn Ghazwan ﵁, upon his arrival on the Shatt al-ʿArab for the founding of Basra, addressed his men in a khutbah that does not have the fame of the khutbah of al-Jabiyah but is preserved in the same tenor. He addressed them on the time when they had possessed nothing, on the time when the Messenger ﷺ in Mecca had no more than his message, and on the future in which they would find in a new city a prosperity that could make them waver in their faith.

“I remember that in Mecca I was so poor that in hunger I ate a leaf from a tree and my lips swelled from it. Today we possess cities, palaces, and treasures. Fear that the ummah lose itself in its possessions, and seek the simplicity that made it a community.” Such is the import of his khutbah in the tradition. Suyuti ﵀ does not name this khutbah explicitly in his year-fourteen sentence; we give it here only because it stands in the same spirit as ʿUmar’s ﵁ khutbah of al-Jabiyah and because it was the first khutbah held in Basra, just as Saʿd’s ﵁ Jumʿah was the first in Madāʾin.

In both cities the Islamic community begins with a warning against wealth, and both khutbahs set the tone for the spiritual formation of the inhabitants of the new garrison cities. Whoever grew up in Kufa or Basra heard from his elders the stories about the first khutbah held in his city, and in those stories he learned that the founding of his city had not been a celebration of victory but an admonition to the victors.

Toward What Follows

In that same year sixteen in which Saʿd ﵁ founded Kufa and ʿUmar ﵁ instituted the pay register, the khalifah ﵁ took yet a third administrative decision. He instituted the Hijri calendar: a new reckoning of the years that began with the Hijra of the Messenger ﷺ from Mecca to Medina. What the founding of Kufa was for the geography of the Islamic state, the institution of the calendar was for its reckoning of time. Both acts belong to the same project: a community that forms its institutions at the moment when it becomes, from a community around a Messenger ﷺ, a state across three continents.

The next article follows Suyuti’s ﵀ pen to the institution of the Hijri calendar and to the council in which ʿAli ﵁ gave the decisive voice. What was said here in five words about the founding of a city receives there its parallel in one line about a dating.

Sources

• Jalal ad-Din as-Suyuti ﵀, Tarikh al-Khulafa (trans. Abdassamad Clarke, Ta-Ha Publishers, 3rd ed. 1995), pp. 134, 135.