AL-Mawrid Journal

This research paper aims to study the postal institution in Arab-Islamic civilization in science and practice. It is an important institution with bright stations in the history of Arab-Islamic civilization Therefore, we will study a number of important issues, relying on maps and important historical documentary sources. In the first issue, we will focus on the history of the emergence of postal services in the Islamic State, and the features of successive postal systems. In the second issue, we will discuss the various roles and functions that the Postal Corporation performed, as it had a pioneering role in the geographical expansion of the Islamic State, its political stability, and its social peace. A special office was dedicated to this institution ts roots extended to the Byzantine and Persian civilizations, and it quickly developed from the Diwan of the Seal to the Diwan of Correspondence and the Diwan of Post, and it became an essential component of the prosperity of the Islamic state. Its collapse was also linked to the collapse of the post office.
In a third stage, we review the various types of postal network technologies used in that era and developed according to the development of the state’s need to deliver news with new and more rapid technology. We mention among them: horse mail, winged mail, skylight mail, girdled mail, and others. In our study of this topic, we relied on the descriptive and analytical approach, making use of historical sources and references directly related to the topic of the study.

Since its inception at the beginning of the nascent Islamic civilization, the khans have formed a landmark for a fundamental civilizational idea that represents, in addition to the idea of being a place to house travelers and their goods, an advanced commercial and civilizational center to be the nucleus of trade, cultural and civilizational exchange, and at the same time the nucleus of what was later known as hotels and their civilized, commercial, tourism and cultural impact on the life of countries.
As we address in this research the khans of the emergence and formation and importance in the era since the rise of the emerging Islamic state, until the fall of the Abbasid state represented by the fall of its capital Baghdad in 656 AH 1258 AD, we address one of the most important features of this civilization and its features, which influenced the civilizations of other peoples, and talked about by most travelers, writers, researchers, scientists, and various personalities of historians from its people or those who came to it or visited it for the purpose of tourism, documentation and research.

The word “hotel” has many meanings and connotations, perhaps the most famous and widely used of which is that it means “khan” in the language of the people of the Levant, or “khan al-sabil”, meaning the khan located on the roads leading to cities, and used in transporting trade. Then the meaning of “hotel” developed into an institution with Arab origins, which spread in Europe and the world in general, and became a political, economic, legal and cultural phenomenon, because it is a meeting place for traders and tourists from different parts of the world. It is a political phenomenon, because it leads to strengthening political ties between countries, brownfields and societies, through mutual travel and caring for expatriates from countries of the world when the existing ties between them are friendly and peaceful, based on mutual respect in caring for the interests of those countries, in addition to being an economic phenomenon based on the exchange of goods and commercial goods for the mutual benefits between expatriates, through various trade routes; to deliver their goods and products and sell or exchange them for other goods and commodities that their societies need, as it is a legal phenomenon that regulates and arranges relations according to rules and laws to regulate the affairs of traders and tourists coming between countries and societies of the world, as they settle in hotels inside cities, and in inns on the transportation routes between them, and what results from that in terms of organizing the travel of expatriates, registering them, protecting them, caring for their interests, monitoring their movements, and organizing the matters of their reception and departure from the country.
Hotels are a cultural phenomenon due to the exchange of dialects, values, customs, traditions, and all other aspects and means of mutual culture between nations and peoples, through trade and tourism that are similar to each other in the corners of the world, and through the different stages of history. Cultural influences are transmitted over time, in addition to the many civilizational influences of values, traditions, customs, fashions, languages, dialects, and fashions, and what is related to the vocabulary of buying, selling, and commercial exchange, and the simple vocabulary of understanding that merchants and tourists need when they move and roam in the cities and countries they visit, given the great importance of this understanding in meeting their necessary needs in the market and on the internal roads of the cities they reach; to see their monuments and cultural landmarks, their markets and their goods. Hotels have spread in coastal cities, in addition to cities located on the external trade routes within one country, and on the desert roads outside the country, which were characterized by the prosperity of trade and the movement of merchants and workers in the commercial center, in their going and returning between the countries with which they trade.

Jaber bin Hayyan, who was known in Europe as Geber, emerged in the profession known as (chemistry) and other scientists excelled with his many experiments in his laboratory until he reached results that dazzled others and recognized that he was the owner of the experimental doctrine in chemistry with his innovations that amazed professors of European universities in the Middle Ages and what followed and relied on them in teaching them in their scientific institutes. He is Abu Musa Jabir bin Hayyan bin Abdullah Al-Kufi Al-Azdi, known as Sufi, and his father was a pharmacist, and he was born in Tus. He was a student of Imam Ja'far al-Sadiq, who lived in the era of Caliph Harun al-Rashid.
Jaber's chemistry was concerned with the study of metals of different types and the possibility of converting them into precious metals. He is also interested in using experiments required by scientific research, with attention to specific weight. Jaber's writings resulted in a number of conclusions, most notably the following:
1. Jaber bin Hayyan is one of the founders of the experimental method in chemistry, and his approach is to start studying his predecessors and correct the shortcomings or errors.
2. Jaber's experiment was associated with a beginning and an end, at first it was manifested in presenting the problem and formulating it accurately, then designing the scientific apparatus and observing the result. The end is to study the result and compare it with the other results, and then to realize the correct reasoning for it.
3. The hypothesis is transformed into a scientific law that relies on its correctness in prediction. Several chemical terms used by Jaber have been transferred to European languages

This research aims to show what Arab Muslim geographers and philosophers have presented in the field of studying the environment and climate according to the geographical perspective in their times and eras, by dividing the regions of the earth into seven regions and studying the geographical and environmental dimensions of each of these regions and what it each one includes cities, geographical sites, rivers and a moderate or extreme climate in the heat and cold, and the impact of all this on their morals, customs, colors, moods, doctrinal attitudes, and so on. The researcher referred to the main sources in these two fields (geographical and philosophical) and benefited from them in presenting this research.

Ethics is a set of morals, values, or rules that are considered right among those in a particular profession. The word ethics means: “A document that defines the ethical and professional behavioral standards required to be followed by members of a professional association.” It is defined as a statement of ideal standards for a profession adopted by a professional group or institution to guide its members to assume their professional responsibilities.”
Every profession has general ethics and morals determined by its own laws and regulations, so that observance of these laws preserves the profession and its honor. Legal responsibility differs from moral responsibility in that the former is a law, but moral responsibility is broader and more comprehensive than the scope of the law because it relates to the rules and ethics that a person practices that regulate work and the relationship between those in the profession and those who deal with them, with the relationship of a person with his Creator, himself, and others. Every profession has its own, so professionals organize themselves into organizations and unions that regulate their work and establish ethics and etiquette for their professional behavior.

This study is concerned with revealing a page of the history of Arabic that is almost folded and that the hand of modern research has not yet reached to the extent that would reveal its authentic features. Its subject has two interconnected sides that encompass each other. The first: a rare witness from the path of the relationship of taking and receiving between the sheikhs and the students in the first Arabic lessons circles, and the other: the issue of the temporal controls for the induction of the language and its documentation and the argument with its witnesses from the ancient scholars of Arabic and what was narrated from their doctrine in restricting the ages of narration and taking the limits of the relationship of this issue with the witness of the first party of the subject of the study.

The research assumed that in classical Arab culture there are books that are more correct to be called "books of nations", because their subject is the nation and its orbit is to answer the question: What guarantees the survival of a nation and keep it strong, cohesive and resistant to the enemy? These books arise in a historical context in which threats to the nation appear, such as the dictatorship of the ruler and his injustice and the hostility and hatred it spreads in the hearts of the flock. Also intellectual, sectarian, and ethnic divisions, which may benefit from the ruler's lapses and people's enmity towards him, causing the nation to be torn apart. These books are created by intellectuals who have direct contact with the Sultan, and who are close to internal and external conflicts, its far and near impact in endangering the entity of the nation and disappearing, they included books as a warning to the ruler of danger, and as a lesson. But the warning and the lesson are the Elykorian tale, which is what the book Kalila and Dimna was built on, as it is a set of tales on the tongue of animals, ostensibly entertainment, and its interior is sermon and warning, and its whole orbit is the nation and protecting it from danger, and providing what saves it from it.

When the Rightly Guided Caliphate state was established, and after it the Umayyad state and the Abbasid state, the area of the state expanded, and it became states in Asia, Africa, and Europe. These states had governors and workers, and they were far from the official center of the state represented by the capital and the caliph. Communication was necessary between the parties of the state and its center, so it appeared. In the center and the states there were collections of letters. Before that, the collections of the Arab state were Arabized from the Persian, Roman, and Coptic languages to the Arabic language. According to the Arabization, specialized writers appeared to work in collections, including the Diwan of Letters, in whose field writers competed and excelled in writing letters. These letters were presented to the caliphs. And the governors were to express their opinion regarding the matter contained in them, so they would comment on those letters with what should be taken regarding what was stated in those letters, and this comment, which is known today as a margin or footnote, is the signature, and the signature is at the bottom of the piece of paper or on its back, and here it appears to us. A new literature is the literature of signatures. This literature is linked to the existence of the literature of letters and complements it. There is no literature of signatures without the literature of letters. So what is the literature of signatures?

A century ago, specifically on September 21, 1922 AD, the historian Suleiman Al-Sayegh (born in Mosul on September 18, 1886 - and died in Baghdad on the same day of his birth in 1961 AD) inaugurated Sending a series of letters to the linguist Anastas Marie Al-Karmeli (born in Baghdad on August 5, 1866 - who died there on January 7, 1947 AD(.He wrote him nine letters, sometimes separated in time, until December 28, 1931 AD, which witnessed the last letter from him, which Al-Karmali carefully preserved in documenting, just as it preserved thousands of others belonging to an important type of living literature that has not yet taken its proper place in our culture, by which I mean literature. Messages.
In the following pages, I will review these nine letters addressed from Al-Sayegh to Al-Karmeli since the surprises of the last century after its two-decade history, written origins and contents, trying to place them in their historical-geographical and cultural frameworks, and a general definition of some of its signs and elements of its signs that may require clarification so that the texts of the messages are not burdened with more margins than they should be, presenting in my presentation the features of the common connections between the two figures, and identifying them through other comparisons, and revealing a different side of their interaction with their cultural environment in Iraq and the Arab world, including documents, some of which are unpublished, and by returning to writings published in the press of that time. Then I include the texts of the letters, commenting on them with footnotes that unravel the remaining ambiguities, clarify their mysteries, and identify the unknown geographical locations and people unknown to the contemporary reader.

Islamic world lost its position among the greatest civilizations after living its golden era in the middle ages, leaving the scientific revolution behind in Western Europe in the seventeenth century, the industrial revolution of the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries. In addition, at the same era, a political and economic system was born in Europe represented by the democratic capitalist market, with a tendency to adopt it almost everywhere. In the first section, this study reviews the characteristics of this decline and in the second section sheds light on the explanatory theories of it, ranging from the geographical factors and institutional factors through economic and demographic analyses.