The barid (the state relay post)

The barid of the caliphate was a network of stations on the main roads where mounts and riders were changed, so that the state's letters and the news of the provinces reached the caliph in days rather than weeks. The sources quote Abu Hilal al-Askari's book al-Awa'il that the first to set up the barid in Islam was Mu'awiya ibn Abi Sufyan ¹, and that once the caliphate was settled for him he summoned Persian dihqans and men from the Byzantine administration, who set it up for him ². It was a system the Persians and Byzantines had known before; Mu'awiya carried it over to the new state and organised it there. Abd al-Malik ibn Marwan then perfected it, and it lasted some seven centuries after them.

The barid is a relay system. Stations stand along the road at known distances, each with rested animals and men. A rider carries the letter to the next station, where another takes it on a fresh mount, and so on until it arrives. The TDV encyclopedia says that in the Abbasid period the stations were two to four farsakhs apart, about 12 to 24 kilometres ³.

The barid was not for the public but for the state. It carried the caliph's orders to his governors and brought him the news of the provinces. Under Harun al-Rashid only the caliph or the master of intelligence (sahib al-khabar) could send it ⁴. This is why the bureau of the post became the caliph's eye on the edges of his realm.

Al-Qalqashandi, quoting al-Ta'rif, says the barid was known to the Persian kings (the Akasira) and the Byzantine emperors before Islam ⁵. The TDV encyclopedia says the Sasanians, the Byzantines and the pre-Islamic Arabs all had a post. Among the proposed origins of the word are the Latin veredus, a post horse, and the Persian burida-dum, "cut tail", because post animals had their tails docked as a mark ³.

In the Prophet ﷺ's time envoys carried letters to kings and tribes, and a hadith in Abu Dawud has him say: "I do not break treaties and I do not detain envoys (burud)." Under Umar ibn al-Khattab the news of Yarmuk came by courier, and post houses were built on the road near Kufa ³. None of this was yet an organised network of state stations.

After the death of Ali ibn Abi Talib and the handover by al-Hasan ibn Ali, the caliphate was settled for Mu'awiya at Damascus. Al-Qalqashandi, quoting al-Askari, relates that once the matter was settled for him he set up the barid so that the news of his lands would reach him quickly from every side. He had men brought from the Persian dihqans and the Byzantine administration, told them what he wanted, and they set up the barid for him ². Al-Suyuti, in Tarikh al-Khulafa, also quoting al-Askari, says: "Mu'awiya was the first to set up the barid in Islam" ¹.

The TDV encyclopedia says Mu'awiya was the first caliph to establish an organised post on the Iranian and Byzantine model, that he spent four million dirhams on it, and that besides carrying letters he gave it the task of gathering intelligence on governors and provinces ³.

Then came Abd al-Malik ibn Marwan, who, once free of his rivals, perfected the barid, as al-Qalqashandi quotes al-Askari. He is reported to have told his gatekeeper Ibn al-Dughaydigha that four were never to be kept from his door, among them the barid: whenever it came, by night or by day, it was not to be held back, for holding the post for an hour might spoil a people's work of a year; the same words are also reported from Ziyad ². The TDV encyclopedia says that under him the master of the post reported straight to the caliph, and that Qabisa ibn Dhu'ayb was the leading Umayyad master of the post ³.

Mu'awiya did not invent the idea of the barid, which the Persians and Byzantines had before him, nor did he build it with his own hands: Persian dihqans and men from the Byzantine bureaux set it up for him ². His part was to order it, pay for it and make it a system for a state that reached from Khurasan to the Maghrib, and he was the first to do so in Islam, as al-Qalqashandi and al-Suyuti quote from Abu Hilal al-Askari ^{5 1}.

Mu'awiya ibn Abi Sufyan was a Companion, with an entry in Ibn Hajar's al-Isaba ⁶.

The road is divided into stages, and at each stage stands a station (sikka) with the post animals. In the Abbasid period the stations kept mules ⁴, and the Zangid state kept courier riders (najjabs) on picked camels for its news ⁷. The rider reaches the station, leaves his tired mount and takes another, or hands the letter to a new rider, so the letter hardly stops.

The TDV encyclopedia says the post rider carried a silver token with the basmala and the caliph's name on one side and a verse of the Qur'an on the other, so that he would be known as the state's messenger and the stations would serve him. Besides animals, carrier pigeons (pigeon post) and fire signals were used in some periods ³.

In this way the barid was a road for orders from the caliph to the provinces and for news from the provinces to him, and from this came the intelligence role the TDV encyclopedia describes ³.

The barid spread with the state itself, along the roads from Damascus to Iraq, Khurasan and Egypt. Al-Qalqashandi says that al-Walid ibn Abd al-Malik had gilded mosaic carried by the barid from Constantinople to Damascus to clad the walls of its Great Mosque and the mosques of Mecca, Medina and Jerusalem ².

The TDV encyclopedia says the barid continued in al-Andalus and under the Tulunids, Samanids and Ghaznavids, and that Alp Arslan abolished it and Nizam al-Mulk restored it ³. The picture on this page is a modern map of the barid stations of Yemen in about the ninth century as Ibn Khurradadhbih describes them; it shows the network of the Abbasid period, not Mu'awiya's first organisation ⁸.

• The post of the Persian kings: al-Qalqashandi says the Persian kings had the barid, and Mu'awiya used their dihqans to set it up ⁵.
• The post of the Byzantine emperors: the Byzantine emperors had it too, and Mu'awiya used men from their administration ².
• The Prophet's envoys and the post houses of Umar's time: envoys carrying letters, and post houses on the Kufa road ³.

• Abd al-Malik's perfected post: he perfected the barid after Mu'awiya and let the post through to him without a gatekeeper ².
• The Abbasid bureau of the post: the barid lapsed at the end of the Umayyad state, when the link between Khurasan and Iraq was cut, and stayed idle under Marwan ibn Muhammad, al-Saffah and al-Mansur, until al-Mahdi set up a post between himself and the camp of his son Harun on his campaign against Byzantium ². Yahya ibn Khalid al-Barmaki then restored it for Harun al-Rashid as it had been under the Umayyads ⁴. The TDV encyclopedia says it reached 930 stations at a cost of eight million dirhams ³.
• The Mamluk post: the Buyids cut the barid, and under the Seljuks there were only messengers ⁴. The Zangids, the Ayyubids and the first Mamluks used camel couriers, until al-Zahir Baybars ruled Egypt, Syria and Aleppo up to the Euphrates. His chancery secretary Sharaf al-Din Abd al-Wahhab, the uncle of Ibn Fadl Allah al-Umari, put before him how the barid had worked under the caliphs; Baybars ordered it, and the secretary set it up. It lasted until Timur took Damascus in 804 AH, after which it fell apart in Syria and then in Egypt ⁷. The TDV encyclopedia says the post covered the road between Cairo and Damascus in about four days ³.
• The Ottoman menzil system and the modern post: the Ottomans ran a relay of stages (menzil) with couriers called ulak and tatar, and the modern post was adopted under Mahmud II ³.

News gained a fixed road whose stages were known, and the distance between the capital and the provinces shrank. The master of the post in each province wrote to the caliph about what went on there, so governors knew that their doings would reach the capital ³. The barid sometimes carried things the caliph wanted, as it carried mosaic for al-Walid ², and the TDV encyclopedia says that fresh fruit was brought to al-Ma'mun by post from Kabul ³.

The barid made it possible to rule a vast state from one centre: orders arrived quickly, and news of a revolt or an invasion arrived before it grew. Al-Qalqashandi ties the cutting of the post between Khurasan and Iraq to the unravelling of the Umayyad state ², and says the Buyids cut it when they took power over the caliphate so that the caliph would not learn of their movements ⁴. Baybars's chancery secretary called the barid "the wing of Islam" ⁷. When it ended after Timur's invasion, the post rider rode his own horse at a traveller's slow pace, and news was slow in both directions ⁷.

The sources read agree that the Persians and Byzantines had the barid before Islam, and differ over who first set it up in Islam:

• Abu Hilal al-Askari, as quoted by al-Qalqashandi and al-Suyuti, says the first was Mu'awiya ^{5 1}.
• Al-Qalqashandi records a second report that the first was Abd al-Malik ibn Marwan, once he was free of his rivals, then quotes al-Askari that Abd al-Malik perfected it ².
• The TDV encyclopedia makes Mu'awiya the first caliph to organise it on the Persian and Byzantine model and Abd al-Malik the one who perfected it ³.

The two reports meet in what al-Qalqashandi quotes from al-Askari: Mu'awiya set it up first and Abd al-Malik perfected it. This is why the barid is recorded here as the improvement of an earlier system, not an invention from nothing.

The old relay post is gone, but its name lives on: Arabic still calls the letter service al-barid. Its history is kept in Subh al-A'sha and other chancery manuals ⁹.

No standing remain can be tied to Mu'awiya's own barid. The stations survive in the geographers' books, as in the map of the Yemeni stations on this page, drawn in modern times from Ibn Khurradadhbih's description ⁸.

The sources keep stories that show what the barid meant to the caliphs. One is Abd al-Malik's order that the post never be kept waiting ². Another is the story of al-Ma'mun on his campaign in Byzantine lands: he sat by the river al-Bardhun in summer, drank from it, found it sweet, and asked what would go best with such water. He was told fresh azad dates, and before they had finished speaking the post mules arrived carrying gifts that included fresh azad dates. He ate of them, and before he rose from his seat the fever that killed him took hold ⁴. Anything more a source confirms will be added.

About fourteen hundred years ago, the caliph Mu'awiya wanted news from faraway lands to reach him fast.

So he set up stations along the roads with rested animals. A rider raced with a letter to the next station, where a fresh rider on a fresh animal took it on, and so on until it arrived. This was the barid, and the Arabic word for post still comes from it ².

• Al-Qalqashandi, Subh al-A'sha fi sina'at al-insha, vol. 14, pp. 367–370 (the origin and history of the barid). ⁹
• Al-Suyuti, Tarikh al-Khulafa, Dar al-Minhaj, p. 332. ¹
• Ibn Hajar al-Asqalani, al-Isaba fi tamyiz al-sahaba, p. 1431 (Mu'awiya ibn Abi Sufyan, no. 8366). ⁶
• İbrahim Harekât, "BERÎD", TDV Encyclopedia of Islam, vol. 5, pp. 498–501. ³
• Wikimedia Commons, map of the barid stations of Yemen, 2014. ⁸