Basra

Basra was laid out in the 630s as a garrison for the armies moving into Iran, with tribal quarters around a mosque and a governor's residence. Within two generations it was one of the places where Islam worked out what it thought, because a garrison city drew people from everywhere and gave them no inherited local authority to defer to.

Hasan al-Basri, who died in 728, is the figure everyone in the following centuries wanted to claim. He preached self examination, fear of God and detachment from the wealth pouring into the city, and later Sufi orders put him at the head of their chains of transmission. He also took a position on the question that divided early Muslim thought, whether human acts are created by God or by the actor, and the sayings attributed to him hold people answerable for what they do rather than assigning their sins to divine decree.

Traditional accounts derive the Mutazila from a dispute in his circle, in which a student is said to have withdrawn over the status of a Muslim who commits a grave sin, taking an intermediate position between believer and unbeliever, and to have been named a withdrawer for it. Modern scholarship treats that origin story with caution, since it is preserved by later writers with an interest in the outcome. What is not in doubt is that Basra produced the school, with its insistence on divine unity and justice, its denial that the attributes of God are separate things, its argument that the Quran is created rather than eternal, and its confidence that reason can establish moral truth.

Rabia al-Adawiyya of Basra, who died late in the eighth century, is the best known woman in the early history of Muslim piety. She is remembered as a freed slave who lived poor and unmarried, refused offers of marriage in order to keep her attention where she wanted it, and taught that God should be loved for himself. The saying most often attached to her asks that if she worships from fear of hell she be burned in it, and if from hope of paradise she be shut out of it, but that if she worships God for his own sake he not withhold his face from her.

Almost everything told about her comes from collections made two or three centuries later, above all by Attar, and the earliest layers are thin. She is therefore a real historical person around whom a large devotional literature accumulated, and the atlas records both facts rather than treating the stories as biography.

Basra also shaped a strand of Islam that survives with a distinct legal and theological identity. After the Kharijites broke with Ali over arbitration, their more moderate wing settled in the city and organised quietly under scholars who avoided armed rebellion. From that circle missionaries were sent out as bearers of knowledge, and the communities they founded became the Ibadi populations of Oman, of the Mzab in Algeria, of Djerba and of Zanzibar, which persist today with their own imamate tradition and their own body of law.