By Sasha Alex Lessin, Ph.D. (Anthropology, UCLA)
The Abbasids, descended from Mohammad’s uncle al-Abbas, won the Islamic Caliphate. They shifted the Muslim Caliphate’s center of power eastward toward their capital in Iraq and Persia (Iran).
The Abbasids, like all the Muslim rulers since, claim to follow the precepts and direct orders of a so-called god, “ALLAH.”*
The Abbasid military, with soldiers from Khorasan and beyond, practiced diplomacy and ruled from Baghdad. The Abbasid elite produced original books, as well as documents and translations, featuring calculations, trade agreements, court rituals, and arguments. They conquered rivals, taxed their subjects, and struggled with internal factions and palace murders. The Abbasids encouraged scholarship, craft production, road building, and urban life, which supported merchants, scribes, artisans, farmers, translators, and pilgrims.
Abbasids embodied the Muslim obsession with status and domination. Rulers pursued command, revenue, prestige, and dynastic survival while ordinary people built markets, neighborhoods, guild networks, caravan links, irrigation systems, schools, and circles of devotion and kept cooperative life going beneath the palace struggles for power and authority.
750 CE: ABU MUSLIM’S REVOLT OVERTHREW UMAYYAD AUTHORITY
The Abbasids came to power through revolt. Their movement grew in Khorasan, the eastern zone where Arabs, Persians, and other frontier peoples lived, married, traded, and fought together.
Abu Muslim led the uprising that broke Umayyad control.
Abbasid forces defeated the Umayyads at the Zab River in 750.
The new dynasty then claimed the caliphate in the name of the Prophet’s family line through al-Abbas.
This change of rulers did not end the hierarchy. It changed who stood at the top. Many supporters had wanted broader participation and relief from the privileges of the Arab elite. Instead, the Abbasids built a new dynasty and tightened command.
Spiritual Life: At the ruling level, legitimacy flowed through descent, public piety, sermon, court ritual, and claims of right guidance. Among common people, religion lived in prayer, fasting, shrine memory, local teachers, mourning rituals, and community bonds that cut across ethnic lines.
The Abbasid elite’s obsession with domination told them, Raise the banner, seize the capital, claim the bloodline, own the empire. The elite suppressed the natural compassion of the Empire’s frontier people, who habitually cooperated in local community partnerships.
Abbasid black banners rose over a frontier city in Khorasan; mixed ranks of Arab, Persian, and Central Asian fighters stood together.
750–754 CE (reign), ABU AL-ABBAS AL-SAFFAH FOUNDED AND RULED FROM BAGHDAD
Caliph al-Mansur consolidated Abbasid rule. He killed rivals, crushed the Alid revolt, and founded Baghdad in 762 on the Tigris. The city became the seat of the Empire and the great symbol of the Abbasid order. Its placement linked Iraq, western Iran, trade routes, river traffic, and older imperial administrative habits.
Baghdad did not rise by accident. Calif Abu Al-Abbas Al-Saffah chose the site, gathered labor, directed construction, and used urban form to express rule. Palace, mosque, barracks, treasury, roads, and markets all served the machinery of command.
The Caliphal Court linked rulership with sacred order, Friday prayer, legal patronage, and public ceremony. In the streets, piety gathered in mosques, study circles, homes, workshops, markets, and acts of charity.
The Abbasid elite, embodying the Domination ethos of Anunnaki-run polities, resonated with them. Put the ruler at the center; make the world obey him, though commoners in Baghdad, among themselves, believed Baghdad lived through its builders, sellers, carriers, cooks, teachers, and water workers. They quipped, Nobles call Baghdad ‘City of Peace’. The guards at the gate call it the ‘City of Papers’.
ABBASID CALIPHS RULED THROUGH CLERKS
The Abbasid caliphs spoke the language of Islam, but much of their governance drew on Sassanian Persian precedent. They relied on scribes, viziers, tax officials, record-keepers, land administrators, and ceremonial protocol with deep roots in the Iranian world. Persian and Central Asian bureaucrats helped shape the Empire’s daily function.
The Barmakids embodied this fusion. Their family rose high in court service, guided administration, and connected the Caliphate to older eastern traditions of governance and learned culture. Court power, however, devoured its own servants. Harun al-Rashid later struck them down when he judged their power to be too great.
Elite circles mixed legal scholarship, theology, court patronage, and ceremonial piety. Below them, many communities tied religion to neighborhood life, trade ethics, teaching lineages, and practical morality. Within the Abbasid polity, the voice of domination that the Muslim elite expressed was, Take the empire, then take its filing system. But for commoners, the verdict was, The Caliph thunders, the Vizier writes, but the clerk decides.
BAGHDAD BECAME A CITY OF BOOKS, NUMBERS, AND TRANSLATORS
Under the Abbasids, especially in the great urban centers, scholars translated works from Greek, Middle Persian, and Sanskrit into Arabic. The House of Wisdom, or Bayt al-Hikmah, became the emblem of that effort. Scholars studied medicine, astronomy, logic, mathematics, language, and philosophy. Al-Kindi, al-Khwarizmi, and Hunayn ibn Ishaq stood among the best-known figures of this world.
Paper production expanded and transformed administration and book culture. Scribes copied texts faster, merchants moved books farther, scholars argued with larger bodies of knowledge, and cities filled with manuscripts. At the elite level, theology and philosophy entered formal debate. At the popular level, people sought wisdom through recitation, prayer, ethical teaching, storytelling, and devotional circles. Knowledge served both prestige and longing.
The rulers’ obsession with domination led them to the formula: We control the archives with which we shape the minds of our subjects. We must count every route, tax every load, own every gate.
But students, among themselves, embodied the partnership ethos anyhow; they whispered, Books survive because our chain of teachers, copyists, patrons, and readers preserves the wisdom the books hold. Merchants, however, confided, Scholars study the stars, but we study whether the bread weight shrank again.“Trade grows when strangers honor weight, measure, promise, and rest. The empire praises conquest, but the caravan pays the bills.
TRADE, CRAFT, AND DAILY COOPERATION HELD THE CALIPHATE TOGETHER
The Abbasid world sat across major trade routes linking the Mediterranean, Iraq, Iran, Central Asia, India, and beyond. Merchants carried silk, spices, ivory, gemstones, paper, metal goods, and horses. Officials supported commerce with roads, inns, wells, bridges, and caravan infrastructure. Potters, weavers, metalworkers, sailors, camel drivers, brokers, and market inspectors all formed the living body of the economy. This was the cooperative layer of the Empire. The court and the army took credit, but traders, farmers, artisans, laborers, and transport workers made the system function. Merchants funded mosques, schools, wells, and charitable kitchens. Piety moved through almsgiving, trust, fair dealing, neighborhood support, burial obligations, and hospitality.
WOMEN, MOTHERS, WIVES, CONCUBINES, AND COURT FIGURES SHAPED POWER
Formal office usually remained in male hands, but women at court shaped succession, diplomacy, policy, spending, and justice. Al-Khayzuran showed this clearly. She rose from slavery to become the wife of al-Mahdi and the mother of Harun al-Rashid. She advised on rules, met envoys, used wealth for public works, and exerted force inside palace politics.
Her power did not erase limits on women’s public standing, but it did show that power often moved through household, kinship, intimacy, and access rather than title alone. Elite women funded religious and civic works and took part in learned culture through patronage and conversation. Ordinary women carried prayer, mourning, kin care, food preparation, market exchange, healing knowledge, and oral teaching through the household and neighborhood.
CALIPHS SOUGHT CONTROL THROUGH ARMY REFORM
Abbasid power depended on armed force, and the composition of that force changed over time. Khorasanis, Daylamis, Arab troops, African troops, and other formations served the state. Siege warfare, cavalry, and frontier raiding played central roles. Then caliphs, especially al-Mu‘tasim, expanded their use of Turkish slave soldiers, trained as elite cavalry and mounted archers. This move gave the caliph a corps tied to him by purchase, training, and reward. It also planted the seed of military dominance over the throne. The founding of Samarra for the Turkish military elite marked a new stage. Commanders gained land, influence, and leverage. Soon, the men who guarded the ruler could make and unmake him. Rulers wrapped war in religious legitimacy, frontier duty, and Sunni order. Ordinary soldiers mixed belief with pay, loyalty, survival, comradeship, and ambition.
CIVIL WAR, BREAKAWAY DYNASTIES & MONGOLS BROKE THE POLITICAL CORE
After Harun al-Rashid, a succession struggle tore the Abbasid Dynasty apart. Al-Amin and al-Ma’mun fought a civil war that brought siege and destruction to Baghdad. Al-Ma’mun pursued doctrinal enforcement through the Mihna, an inquisition that punished dissenting scholars. Later caliphs lost power to military factions, governors, and regional dynasties.
The Tulunids, Saffarids, Samanids, Buyids, Fatimids, and Seljuks all cut into Abbasid power or controlled the caliph outright. By the time the Mongols under Hulagu reached Baghdad in 1258, the Abbasid caliphate still held symbolic force, but its political body had weakened. The Mongol sack shattered Baghdad’s ruling center and ended Abbasid power there.
THE ABBASID PATTERN IN THE IRAN SERIES
In the Iran series, the Abbasids mattered because they carried the center of imperial Islam into lands shaped by Persian memory, Persian administrators, Persian urban culture, and Iranian frontier military traditions. They built Baghdad, expanded translation, spread paper, drew talent from many peoples, and made the caliphate a machine of books, accounts, roads, and law.
They also repeated the old pattern of domination. The throne consumed rivals, crushed dissent, taxed labor, fought for succession, and relied on armed clients whose loyalty shifted with pay and opportunity.
Underneath that struggle, ordinary people sustained the world. Farmers, mothers, translators, merchants, potters, students, judges, caravan guides, copyists, and craftsmen kept life moving. The rulers chased control. The people built continuity.
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- Scholars identify Allah with either Anunnaki Prince NANNAR, who was Lord of the Arabian Peninsula and has subsequently become King of Nibiru or, at times, Anunnaki Prince MARDUK, who claims that all “gods” are merely aspects of himself. Marduk pits his various human-run nations against each other so they never (he hopes) turn against him, his Hybrid Anunnaki/Homo erectus administrators, and their priests. I find it unlikely that “Allah” is Nannar, whom the Anunnaki regard as the ruler of the Arabian Peninsula. Nannar, unlike the god of Islam, was a man of peace. He advocated trade rather than war. He exalted women rather than relegate them to semi-slavery as Islamic Sharia Law does. Nannar was a devoted husband to his wife Ninlil and maintained a retreat with her on the moon. Anu, the Nibiran King, abdicated after choosing Nannar as his successor. Nannar pledged the Anunnaki leadership who had run the Nibiran Goldmining Expedition on Earth to return here and depose Marduk, Earth’s covert ruler, and prepare Earth for an era of peace.
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