Sea of Faith

by Stephen O'Shea

  Very little is even faintly bucolic or artful about this place, the junction of Syria, Jordan, and Israel. The smaller rivers of the region are wadis, bone-dry creeks given to the occasional flash flood. If the caprices of the wadis have long bedeviled cultivation—the local ones, Ruqqad, Allan, and Harir, have now been thoughtfully dammed—the gorges in their lower reaches have disheartened even the goatherd. The plateau is one of hardscrabble farms and cinder-block villages and kibbutzes, the occasional spinney of eucalyptus combining with great black boulder barriers to lend some order to the prospect. In unexpected spots, solitary hills rise to well over a hundred meters in elevation, giant, isolated thimbles of vegetation in this patchwork of stony field and sudden gulley.

  The canyon of the Yarmuk, Syria's border with Jordan, closes off the southernmost sector of the old battlefield with finality. To flee the unruly yet cultivated plateau of the Golan is to rush headlong to the brink of a steep slope. The drop to the canyon floor is two hundred meters. The Yarmuk seems then a fittingly dramatic stage for a momentous event, something beyond the ordinary warring that a watercourse inspires in the peoples of a parched land. And the river, which winds dozens of inhospitable, cliff-lined kilometers westward before meeting the Jordan just south of the Sea of Galilee, did indeed witness an epochal occurrence, an instant of bloody encounter that would profoundly alter the civilization of the Mediterranean.

  For all its importance past and present, no monument or statue commemorates the fateful battle at its site. Near Nawa, a Syrian town within artillery range of the Golan Heights, two hills are recognizable landmarks from the Battle of Yarmuk. The northernmost, Tal al Jabila, almost certainly overlooked the staging ground of the Byzantine army. South of Nawa, another lone prominence is known locally as the Hill of the Gathering, an allusion, it is thought, to the massing of the Muslim forces in the spring of 636. Yet however telltale these features, present-day visitors come here for reasons that predate that victorious year for the Companions of the Prophet.

  The death trap for the Byzantines: the Yarmuk River valley, looking west.

  One afternoon in November 2003, east of the two hills, a lipstick-red tour bus with Lebanese plates raced through the dusty village of Sheikh Saad on its way to a shrine just out of town. The vehicle came to a halt, then disgorged several dozen young women who walked up a small rise in the plain to enter a low, whitewashed building of indeterminate age. Inside was a small sanctuary, built around a bier draped in silken green flags. The women, their flamboyant makeup at odds with their demure headscarves, fingered the flags reverently, then caressed their faces. Smiles were exchanged, pictures taken, cell phone calls made. This was Dar Ayyub, the burial place of Job, the biblical figure famed for being lucklessly piled on by destiny. His reputation for patience seemed to be the drawing card for these marriageable girls, the exploits of their ancestors at Yarmuk forgotten amid nervous giggling about future mates. Their imam, a handsome young fellow attempting to look sterner than his charges, eventually glanced at his watch and signaled that the visit was over.

  Their bus pulled away, perhaps to go to nearby Nawa, where Noah's son Shem rests similarly in peace. As the sound of its engine grew ever fainter and the silence of the scrubby plain took over, the interplay of past and present on this landscape was inescapable. The road they were traveling traced the route of the old Roman thoroughfare that linked Damascus and Jerusalem, and although certainties are elusive in dealing with distant events, the world-changing cavalry charge of Yarmuk likely took place here, in front of the biblical gravesite patronized by these thoroughly modern Muslims. If so, Dar Ayyub is also the tomb of the Christian East. A historian from the early twentieth century, expressing the "Orientalist" sentiments decried in its latter half, gave a valediction to antiquity in considering the process made possible by what happened in these fields: "after ten centuries, at one stroke of the Arab scimitar, everything collapsed overnight: Greek language and thought, western patterns of living, everything went up in smoke. On this territory, a thousand years of history were as if they had never been. They had not been sufficient for the west to put down the slightest roots in this oriental soil. The Greek language and social customs had been no more than a layer, a poorly fitting mask. All the Greek cities which had been founded and grown up, from the banks of the Nile to the Hindu Kush, any real or apparent implantation of Greek art and philosophy, all of it had gone with the wind." That passage smacks of hyperbole—a nice Greek word—but the importance of Yarmuk cannot be gainsaid.

  The road leading to the clash at Yarmuk had passed through a turbulent time of chaos, plague, tyranny, famine, and war. In the years surrounding the death of Emperor Justinian in 565, apocalyptic horsemen had been cantering at will around the Mediterranean. Much of Italy had slipped from the grasp of the Byzantines, victim to the vigorous Germanic barbarians known as the Longo-bardi (Longbeards), or Lombards, who had begun their migration southward from the forested fastnesses of eastern and central Europe. Spain was claimed by the Visigoths, Provence by the Burgundians. A ferocious Turkic tribe known as the Avars had crossed the Danube to wreak havoc in the Byzantine Balkans. When not losing provinces, the Greeks lost people: the buboes of pestilence carried off as much as half the population of Constantinople.

  Grief came from all quarters, even from the center. In the early seventh century an illiterate Thracian sergeant usurped the purple and, as Emperor Phocas, proved that outrageous cruelty and paranoia were not confined to such reviled old Romans as Caligula and Nero. Blinding an adversary, or even someone suspected of being an acquaintance of an opponent, became commonplace under Phocas, as did the use of the rack to wring confessions from innocent and guilty alike. To worsen matters, his reign saw the long-dreaded threat from the east materialize. The Persians, under King Chosroes II, a onetime friend of the emperor who had been decapitated to make way for Phocas, shattered the fragile peace between the two empires. Ruler of a proud and belligerent federation centered on what is now Iraq and Iran, the Sassanid dynasty of Persia saw its chance in the commotions on its western borders. As Phocas blinded and beheaded enemies real and imagined in Constantinople and sowed discord between Christians and Jews in the Middle East through indiscriminate persecution, the armies of Chosroes attacked the outlying provinces of the Christian imperium. Upper Mesopotamia, then Armenia, then Syria, Palestine, and Egypt—the raids of conquest and plunder met little opposition from the garrisons demoralized by the cruel ineptitudes of Phocas and his cronies. Clearly, the crisis cried out for new leadership.

  It came from Heraclius, the son of the Byzantine governor of Carthage. The North African city, the once-mighty capital subdued in the days when the phrase "mare nostrum" was first uttered, had become a provincial outpost of the imperial metropole. In the first decade of the seventh century, Carthage endured the depredations of Phocas and dutifully continued to serve as a granary of the empire. Under Heraclius, the grain ships of Carthage changed into a fleet of revolt. In the year 609 the handsome thirty-five-year-old aristocrat set sail on the Mediterranean, passing through the Aegean to the city of Thessalonica. He wintered and summered there, gathering troops and allies and communicating with plotters in the capital, before finally heading off in the autumn of 610 for the Hellespont. In October his ships crossed the Sea of Marmara and dropped anchor in the Golden Horn, the inlet that meets the Bosporus and the Marmara at the thumb-shaped promontory occupied by the great city of Constantinople. The outcome of the uprising was never in doubt. Emperor Phocas, bereft of allies and beset by enemies, was stripped of his splendid robes and bundled down to the harbor, where his visitor from Carthage, enjoying the threadbare spectacle, is said to have sneered, "Is it thus, O wretch, that you have governed the state?" To which Phocas replied, "No doubt you will govern it better." The repartee was not appreciated: Phocas was instantly executed, his body skinned and cut up into several manageable pieces to be roasted in an oven before a crowd of raucous ill-wishers. Later in this eventful day of October 5,
610, Heraclius was crowned emperor and then promptly wed a Byzantine princess, Eudoxia. With the passing of time, Heraclius and all of his successors would insist on being called basileus, the Greek title of kingship that replaced the old Latin honorific imperator.

  Heraclius had taken control of an empire in tatters. So large was the task of overhauling it that more than a decade would pass before he took to the field in force against the enemy. As a good soldier, he divided the old mare nostrum into a multitude of protofeudal military districts that doubled as units of civic administration. This reorganization, each district being known as a theme, would serve the Byzantines well for the coming centuries of conflict, for the soldiery settled in these lands received an inalienable land grant in exchange for compulsory service in the army should the occasion arise. As basileus, however, afflicted with the Byzantine knack for Christological hairsplitting, Heraclius meddled in matters religious, persecuting those he deemed heretics and, at one moment, enacting an edict that outlawed Judaism. Moreover, his private life was public scandal: on the death of Eudoxia from what is believed to have been epilepsy, Heraclius officialized an outrageous liaison by wedding his beautiful niece, Martina. The royal couple's succession of sickly and sometimes misshapen offspring in the years to follow was viewed, quite understandably, as divine retribution.

  For all his outsize flaws, Heraclius nonetheless managed to set his empire aright and gird it for battle. In particular, he was successful in compelling the wealthy Orthodox churchmen of Constantinople to bankroll the army establishment he was rebuilding. It was past time for the Byzantine basileus to take on the shahanshah, the Persian king of kings, who ruled in despotic splendor from Ctesiphon in Mesopotamia.

  The epic stories of Darius and Xerxes, whose armies Athenian hoplites and sailors had defeated at the dawn of the classical era in the landmark battles of Marathon and Salamis, have overshadowed this later Greek-Persian rivalry in the twilight of antiquity. The Sassanids, already a dynasty four centuries old in Heraclius' time, had fought the old Romans in their day and were now intent on taking on the Greek Christian soldiers commanded from Constantinople. The buffer zones of the Syrian desert and the mountains of Anatolia had been breached constantly by both sides, in an age-old struggle between east and west for control of the Fertile Crescent. Endowed with a civilization as glorious as that of the Byzantines, the Sassanids saw themselves, not as epigones of the great Persians of a thousand years previous, but as the superiors to all other peoples of their own day. One Sassanid wrote of this self-evident truth:

  [Iran] is the navel [of the world], because our land lies in the midst of other lands and our people are the most noble and illustrious of beings. The horsemanship of the Turk, the intellect of India, and the craftsmanship and art of Greece; God has endowed our people with all these, more richly than they are found in other nations separately. He has withheld from them the ceremonies of religion and the serving of kings which He gave to us. And He made our appearance and our colouring and our hair according to a just mean, without blackness prevailing or yellowness or ruddiness; and the hair of our beards and heads neither too curly like the Negro's, nor quite straight like the Turk's.

  The tone of self-regard mounted in official correspondence. In letters from the Persian king to the Greek basileus, the salutation alone gives an idea of what might be called, charitably, their relationship: "Noblest of the Gods, King and Master of the whole Earth, Son of the great Hormisdas, CHOSROES, to Heraclius his vile and insensate slave." The goading might have been tolerable to the basileus, had not Chosroes, through his great general Shahrbaraz, sacked the great cities of the Byzantine east—Antioch, Aleppo, Damascus, Alexandria. At Jerusalem, Shahrbaraz torched the Church of the Holy Sepulchre and made off with some of Christianity's holiest relics, including the True Cross, which landed in the royal treasury at Ctesiphon. The Persian insult had gone beyond the personal, the political, and the economic—the god of Constantinople had been defamed.

  Accordingly, in 622 Heraclius gathered together a great force and crossed the Bosporus to take the battle to the very heart of the Persian empire. He was the first emperor of the Byzantines or Romans to lead an army in person in more than two centuries. The occasion was hailed as momentous, especially after Heraclius handily won a battle in Anatolia and then, to avenge Jerusalem, destroyed a complex in Ganzak, an Iranian fire-temple sacred to the faith of Zoroaster, whose teachings formed the basis of the Persian religion. Success followed success for Heraclius in a long and bloody campaign. For Byzantines of the time, the year 622 might thus have marked an auspicious new beginning: victory in the field and for their faith provided by a great basileus.

  If they entertained such thoughts, they could not have been more mistaken. Few instances of historical irony are as pitiless as that attendant on the timing of Heraclius' offensive to rescue and reinvigorate the Byzantine Empire. The same year, 622, witnessed the birth of a far graver threat to the Greeks, one that would relegate their great conflict with the Persians to the status of a mere warm-up. The force born at that moment would blindside the Sassanids, wiping them from the slate of history in less than two decades, and provide the Byzantines with an ideological adversary for more than eight centuries. In September of that year, in the Arabian peninsula, a few dozen acolytes of an obscure visionary named Muhammad Ibn Abdallah slipped out of the hills surrounding Mecca and made their way northward to Yathrib, the oasis town now known to us as Madina. It was the time of the hijra, or emigration, the Year One of the Muslim calendar.

  Nothing presaged the succession of events that would eventually give rise to a religion that today numbers more than a billion adherents worldwide. At the dawn of the seventh century, according to most of the traditions (hadith) relating Muhammad's life and deeds, the man who would be the Prophet was outwardly ordinary, his material situation unenviable. His early life seemed unlikely to foster a destiny of any distinction, much less one that would change the world. Even when his vocation manifested itself in middle age, the better part of a decade passed before he would influence anyone outside his immediate circle of family and friends. His journey from the outermost margin to the uppermost summit of history has few parallels. Muhammad's closest peer in seismic piety is Jesus of Nazareth, but the latter's life, or at least the mortal portion of it that everyone can concede as having occurred, ended in the ignominy of crucifixion as a criminal. Not so Muhammad. His message was widely accepted by the end of his life; the Quran, the first book to be written in Arabic, was compiled within a generation or two of his death in 632. Jesus died alone, executed by a provincial governor. Muhammad, in his final days, knew himself to be a success, the patriarch of a large and loving clan, the master of much of Arabia.

  Even a cursory biography of the man astounds. An orphaned poor cousin of the Quraysh tribe of Mecca, born in 570 or thereabouts, he had been raised in boyhood by a benevolent uncle. As a youth, Muhammad first eked out a living in the employ of his more successful relatives. At the time Mecca was an important trading center and pilgrimage site. Its precious well, Zamzam, stood near the middle of the haram, a sacred precinct in which bloodshed was forbidden. The oasis settlement was controlled by several families belonging to the Quraysh. Muhammad's branch of that clan, the Beni Hashim (whence Hashemite), had among its members several guardians of the haram—a source of some revenue—but only a few prominent men such as his uncle engaged in the caravan trade. Meccan merchants organized the spice, crafts, and slave caravans that received Indian and African goods and captives in the port of Yemen and hauled them up the torrid Red Sea coast—the sea itself was infested with pirates—and on to the rich Byzantine entrepots in Palestine and Syria.

  Muhammad's luck changed when he was charged with accompanying a caravan partly financed by Khadija, a wealthy widow of Mecca. Although any assertion about his life fairly begs to be hedged for want of a consensual narrative, by the time he took charge of Khadija's business Muhammad is believed to have traveled throughout the Byzanti
ne Near East and visited such important centers as Damascus and Jerusalem. The Prophet's first biographer, Muhammad Ibn Ishaq, claimed his subject had an important encounter in the provincial city of Bosra, in southern Syria near the Yarmuk River. There, according to Ibn Ishaq, Muhammad the merchant was recognized as a putative prophet by a Christian mystic.

  Eventually Muhammad wed Khadija, who, although more than a decade his senior, would bear him four daughters. It was a marriage fertile in other ways as well, for the newly comfortable Muhammad had the time and leisure to find his calling. Years of meditation followed and, it has been hazarded, conversation with the monotheists of the region—in pre-Islamic times Jewish and Christian tribes were present among the pagan majority of the Hijaz, as well as many seekers of monotheistic truth outside the two older traditions.

  The heretofore unremarkable spiritual itinerary of the merchant took a dramatic turn in the year 610, when the angel Gabriel paid him a visit and said, as recorded in a sura, or rhymed chapter, of the Quran: "Recite: in the name of thy Lord who created, created man of a blood-clot. Recite: and thy Lord is the most bountiful, who taught by the pen, taught man what he knew not." Henceforth Muhammad would be visited by an angelic emissary for the rest of his life, causing him to utter the words of God (Allah) during episodic trances that were as spiritually ecstatic as they were physically painful. Not to belabor the workings of coincidence, but the year of that first, momentous revelation was the same one in which Heraclius went sailing to Byzantium.