Sea of Faith

by Stephen O'Shea

  The most impressive of these ruins sits on the prow of a green escarpment exposed to the west wind blowing off the mountains. It overlooks the last stage of the Silk Route that stretched from China to Antioch. Along the spine of the ridge, olive trees and Aleppo pines cast shade on a path that once was a proud avenue known as the Via Sacra. Nowadays it ends in a great tan jumble of acanthus-carved capitals and half-collapsed archways. These are the remnants of four vast basilicas, arranged in cruciform fashion around a hall open to the sky. In the center of this roofless enclosure stands the base of a large stone column, the nub of a pillar that used to rise twenty meters in height. Atop this column was once a wooden platform, where for thirty-six uninterrupted years a fifth-century mystic named Simeon Stylites lived out a strange life of ostentatious self-mortification, attracting throngs of pious onlookers from throughout Byzantine Syria.

  The magnificent rubble of the St. Simeon complex gives an idea of the wealth of Christian Syria and the eccentricities of its otherworldly concerns. In the shadow of Simeon's pillar, the Christological quarrels that mined the Byzantine East from within no longer seem so outlandish. The pilgrimage site, once a rival to Jerusalem in the numbers of the faithful it drew, survived the shock of Yarmuk but would not get around the long-term consequences of the battle. St. Simeon entered into a slow decline; earthquake and neglect would eventually reduce it to ruin. Even a temporary Byzantine reoccupation of the province in the tenth century would not halt the process of dechristianization. By the year 900, according to most estimates, Islam was the religion of the majority in Syria; by the year 1000 St. Simeon had taken on the appearance it has today: a valedictory in stone overlooking an empty borderland. The saint himself, a hermit besieged by admirers, might find the deserted setting more to his liking now.

  If Yarmuk signaled the beginning of the end of Christian hegemony in the Mediterranean, it also marked the start of something new. On Palm Sunday 638 Caliph Umar bin al-Khattab entered Jerusalem, going through the same streets that had witnessed Heraclius' procession a mere eight years earlier. Whether Umar rode an ass or a snow-white camel into the city—this is disputed—Jerusalem's patriarch, Sophronius, showed the caliph the deference due an overlord. Umar had decreed that Jews and Christians would henceforth pay the punitive jizya, or poll tax, in exchange for the right to worship freely, if discreetly. The two Peoples of the Book were now dhimmi—protected second-class citizens whose life and livelihood depended on the sufferance of Muslim authority. The Quran enjoined the faithful to broad-mindedness:

  The basilica complex of St. Simeon Stylites. The nub of his pillar can be seen in the center of the ruins.

  Dispute not with the People of the Book save in the fairer manner, except for those of them that do wrong; and say, "We believe in what has been sent down to us, and what has been sent down to you; our God and your God is One, and to Him we have surrendered."

  Patriarch Sophronius offered to usher Caliph Umar into the Church of the Holy Sepulchre. Although Isa (Jesus) was important to his faith, Umar declined. Should a call to prayer occur while he was touring the site, he told Sophronius, as a good Muslim he would be obliged to prostrate himself within the church—and his followers would then insist on turning the sanctuary into a mosque. Surely the patriarch wouldn't want that, would he?

  Mount Moriah was a different matter. Umar would have known that this rocky height of Jerusalem—whose many names include Mount Sion, the Temple Mount, and the Navel of the Universe—was the place where Ibrahim (Abraham), the first monotheist and ergo the first Muslim, had tried to sacrifice his son; where Suleyman (Solomon) had built his temple; and where Muhammad had risen to heaven and returned to earth on his night ride to meet the prophets of the past. It was thus a hallowed spot, surpassed only by Mecca and Madina. Indeed, in the two years immediately following the hijra, the Prophet and his Companions had prayed in the direction of Jerusalem, not toward henotheistic Mecca. As the second of Muhammad's successors, Caliph Umar stood upon this holy place and surveyed the surrounding countryside. These lands were now part of the dar al Islam, the abode of Islam and, thus, peace. The Rumi still held sway in the dar al harb, the abode of war.

  What remained of the Byzantine armies retreated over the Taurus Mountains, to the safety of rugged Anatolia, the Asia Minor of the ancients. Heraclius quit Antioch a broken man, the empire he had saved from the Persians torn apart by a thunderclap from the desert. In the churches of his venerable cities and in the basilicas of St. Simeon, a question was being asked: was the victory of this new heresy a punishment visited upon the Byzantines by the Almighty? The homecoming of the basileus suggested the affirmative. On reaching the Asian shore of the Bosporus, Heraclius refused to board the imperial tender to take him to Constantinople on the European side. He had somehow developed a morbid fear of water. This hydrophobia held up his entry into the city for weeks, until a pontoon bridge was thrown across the Bosporus, replete with view-blocking horsemen and potted palms that allowed the stricken basileus to ride across the strait without once glimpsing it.

  Heraclius died in 641, leaving Martina to intrigue with sons and lovers over the succession. Umar died, assassinated, in 644, the first of three successive caliphs to meet the same fate. The nascent abode of peace would plunge into civil war. As for Khalid, he died in obscure circumstances, having been cashiered by Umar shortly after Yarmuk—the caliph may not have wanted his commander's fame putting him in the shade. In Horns, the city of many of Khalid's exploits, an enormous mosque is dedicated to him, rebuilt in grand style by the Ottomans in the early twentieth century. Khalid's bier stands in a corner beside the entrance, bathed in fluorescent green light. A sign in the prayer court reads, in Arabic and in English, "Don't beg, it's not dignified."

  CHAPTER TWO

  POITIERS 732

  A century of Arab conquest; collision in Constantinople, North Africa, Spain, and Gaul

  Some passages of writing overshadow the events they describe. In tracing the extraordinary century following the great clash at Yarmuk, no one has composed a more memorable flight of prose than that penned by Edward Gibbon about the Battle of Poitiers, at which Charles Martel and his Franks dealt a blow to the Muslims. Gibbon, an Enlightenment Herodotus, speculated on what might have transpired if the battle had gone the other way. His was the what-if scenario that haunted the western mind for generations:

  A victorious line of march had been prolonged above a thousand miles from the rock of Gibraltar to the banks of the Loire; the repetition of an equal space would have carrried the Saracens to the confines of Poland and the highlands of Scotland; the Rhine is not more impassable than the Nile or Euphrates, and the Arabian fleet might have sailed without a naval combat into the mouth of the Thames. Perhaps the interpretation of the Koran would now be taught in the schools of Oxford, and her pulpits might demonstrate to a circumcised people the sanctity and truth of the revelation of Mohammed.

  Mischievous and masterful all at once, Gibbon's conjecture about what might have been if the Muslims had emerged victorious at Poitiers contributed to the idea that Christendom was somehow saved in 732. The Englishman was not the only one to promote that idea among Enlightenment luminaries. The French, on whose soil the battle took place, have a long literature about the importance of Poitiers. The snide genius of Voltaire, while mocking his countrymen's exaggerations about the battle, felt compelled to concede in his Essai sur les moeurs: "Without Charles Martel . . . France was a Mohammedan province." Later artists agreed, in a more flamboyant manner: nineteenth-century tableaux of swarthy Moors being felled in the presence of underdressed Amazons still adorn many town halls in France. In our main source for the battle, the Chronicle of j54, a new word—europenses—appeared in describing Martel's men, a lexical invention seized upon by those who see Poitiers as Europe's baptismal font. Even if the revisionism of modern histories has chipped away at the importance of the clash—some see it as just a razzia gone wrong—for many westerners Poitiers remains a touchstone, as pi
votal a moment as Caesar crossing the Rubicon or Copernicus surveying the heavens. The Muslim defeat at Poitiers neatly closed a period of one hundred years starting at the death of Muhammad, a century of conquest and expansion that refashioned the Mediterranean world forever. In this view, Poitiers becomes less a high-water mark than a buoy bobbing in an eddy of change.

  At the Church of St. Hilaire le Grand in Poitiers, recalling that the giddy century of Arab conquest touched this place—the Muslims sacked the church in the autumn of 732—requires a strenuous effort of the imagination, so thoroughly are the sanctuary and its surroundings imbued with timeless Christianity. St. Hilaire is no ghostly St. Simeon, alone in a landscape of swaying cypress and sun-bleached rubble. The pale Romanesque structure—the current building dates from 1049—stands serenely in a quiet corner of the old city, its weathered stone shaded by a stately yew. Recently on a gray summer Sunday a handful of parishioners listened to their cure celebrate mass in a dank nave that suggested nothing more than a rainy, uninterrupted Latin past.

  Moving out from the old church to the town and its surroundings does not dispel the incongruity of connecting this place to the doings of the Companions of the Prophet. Poitiers, although south of the Loire, is a mere three hundred kilometers from Paris—and a world away from the Mediterranean. Perched on a hill overlooking the river Clain, it is a lovely town of spires and convents, their cool slate roofs having little in common with the warm terra cotta of the south. Its hinterland—the Poitou—is slide show France, all brooks and copses and gentle green slopes suggestive of peasant pleasures behind swollen hayricks and before snug village hearths. That this was rich territory worth a fight is obvious, and the two other great battles of Poitiers attest to its desirability. In 507 Clovis, the first Christian king of the Franks, defeated the Visigoths at Vouille, just to the east of the city. (He was guided, apparently, by a miraculous light that appeared above the tomb of St. Hilaire.) In 1356 the English and French faced off during the Hundred Years War; undaunted by defeat at Crecy a decade earlier, the flower of French chivalry galloped to even greater catastrophe, this time just south of town. These protagonists fit the Poitou picture: red-faced ax-men hacking away at each other in the foliage; estranged Channel cousins colliding in the shadow of castles both claimed as their own.

  But the Arabs, the acolytes of a desert visionary, in this setting of waving grains and wayside chapels? It surprises to this day that they got this far, so fast. In all descriptions of the distant past, an ever-deepening abyss of time must be crossed; only at Poitiers, however, do we also confront a chasm of space. Gibbon, in his speculative tour de force, underscored the length of the Muslim victory march from Gibraltar, yet the wild century-long race to this leafy corner of France began not at that great rock, the Mediterranean's westernmost guardian, but clear across the sea, on an impossibly faraway shore. From Yarmuk to Poitiers, the progress of Islam beggared belief.

  The century of conquest after Yarmuk began in the richest province of the ancient world. Egypt was an eye-popping prize, a font of food and lucre that would dazzle any invader, let alone a warrior from the barren Hijaz of the Arabian peninsula. The Muslims may not have known that in the year 610—the year of Muhammad's first revelation—the treasury of the Orthodox patriarch of Alexandria had contained an astounding eight thousand pounds of gold, but the peripatetic merchants among them would have seen for themselves the cornucopia of the Gift of the Nile (Egypt gave Constantinople seven million bushels of grain as its annual tax levy) and been aware of the province's millennia-old trade with the emerald and gold mines upstream. Even without the prompting of God, the Quraysh knew what they were after.

  The man chosen to lead the attack on Egypt was Amr Ibn al As, author of Islam's first victory against the Byzantines, at the oasis of Dathin near Gaza in 634. Since the heady days of Ajnadayn and Yarmuk, the middle-aged Amr had settled down, carving out a large estate for himself in Beersheba, once the home of Abraham and his quarrelsome kin. Abraham's children were once again to come to blows, as Amr led an expeditionary force of four thousand horsemen from his Judean property out into the wilderness of the Negev. It was a puny army, given the immensity of its target, but rarely had the greatest territory of the Byzantine Christian imperium been so primed for defeat.

  On crossing the Sinai in December 639, Amr and his Muslims found the inhabitants of Egypt in a feckless mood, fed up with the extortions of Constantinople and torn by the usual intramural religious feuding. The vast majority of local Christians—whose name, Copt, is a variant of the word Egypt—had rejected the decision made in 451 at the Council of Chalcedon. There, in the fateful pronouncement that would cleave eastern Christianity into several factions, orthodoxy had declared that Jesus possessed two natures, one human and one divine. The Copts, unimpressed by Greek and Roman pretensions to speak for Christianity, remained militantly monophysite in outlook (i.e., Jesus was solely divine) and reviled the Orthodox or "Chalcedonian" Christianity of their rulers as heartily as they did their tax-gatherers.

  In a six-year-long occupation of Egypt in the 620s, the Persians had shrewdly courted the Coptic leadership at the expense of the Greek elite, but the victory of Heraclius over Chosroes led to the reinstatement of the old, hated pecking order and, predictably, a return of persecution. As a sop to Copt sensibility, Greek churchmen concocted a compromise position in the ongoing Christological quarrels, called monothelitism (signifying that Jesus had but one will), but that bit of doctrinal legerdemain met with skepticism in Egypt and elsewhere. Patriarch Sophronius of Jerusalem played a role in discrediting the flimsy olive branch of monothelitism; no doubt his satisfaction at dashing Christian unity was soured when he later found himself playing tour guide around the holy city to a conquering Muslim caliph.

  Amr waded smartly through the morass of Christian bad feeling in Egypt. By July 640 he had fought his way inland to the gates of Babylon, the garrison town just downstream from the old Pharaonic capital of Memphis. This major stronghold—not to be confused with the ancient Babylon of Mesopotamia—managed to withstand the Arab siege throughout the fall and winter, even though its commanders and Coptic populace were subject to the divisive leadership of a certain Cyrus, the Orthodox patriarch and thus Constantinople's man in Egypt. It is unclear whether Cyrus tried to negotiate the surrender of Babylon for his own gain, or if he merely destroyed the city's will to fight. Heraclius, enfeebled but enraged, recalled Cyrus to the capital and dismissed him. The basileus, however, died almost immediately afterward, and by mid-641 Cyrus was headed back to Egypt, at the behest of the widowed Martina, who wanted peace above all else so that she could conduct the necessary court intrigues to retain power. This was not to be: by year's end, Martina and her son, Heraclonas, had been exiled to Rhodes, the former with her tongue cut out, the latter with his nose slit open. The wealthiest province of the empire was being attacked while the capital was in an uproar.

  Babylon fell to Amr Ibn al As on April 9, 641. He then turned his attention to the metropolis founded by Alexander the Great, the brightest beacon of Hellenism on the Mediterranean. Alexandria, however grand its past, would not last long in its present state. As succession struggles paralyzed the imperial court in Constantinople and, consequently, the fleet it commanded, unpleasant memories were rekindled in Alexandria with the return of Cyrus, who, among other achievements, had once had the brother of the city's monophysite bishop tied up in a sack and thrown into the sea. He was patently not the person to inspire its citizens to die heroically on the ramparts. Amr, as smooth a diplomat as he was accomplished a horseman, entered into lengthy negotiations with the despised Cyrus. The surrender of the capital of Egypt, a city of some 600,000 people, became foreordained.

  In September 642 the Greeks sailed away, and Amr and his army rode unopposed through the gates and took possession of the city. Later anti-Muslim writings have Amr's men then sacking the famed Library of Alexandria, in a sort of bedouin know-nothing frenzy, but that tale has been debunked by impar
tial scholarship: the holdings of the library had been dispersed or destroyed during internal Christian disputes long before the arrival of the Arabs. More to the point is the commentary of a Copt writing only a generation or so after the events: "Everyone knows that the defeat of the Greeks and the conquest of Egypt by the Muslims was in punishment for the tyranny of Emperor Heraclius and the wrong he inflicted on [Egyptians] through the patriarch Cyrus." Sterner still is another monophysite history, written after several centuries under Muslim rule: "The God of vengeance,. . . having observed the malice of the Greeks, who cruelly pillaged our churches and monasteries wherever they had dominion and condemned us mercilessly, brought the sons of Ishmael from the south to deliver us."

  Amr undertook to leave the Christians to their own resentments, as long as they paid their taxes. According to one tradition, he wrote to Caliph Umar of the great wealth that would no longer take ship in Alexandria for Constantinople: "I will send to Madina a camel train so long that the first camel will reach you before the last one has left me." That caravan's point of departure was to be a new city, Fustat, built between Graeco-Roman Babylon and Pharaonic Memphis, at the spot where the Nile branches out into a delta. As with the newly founded cities of Basra and Kufa in Iraq, the plan was to have an enclosed Arab-Muslim settlement, called an amsar, at the meeting of arable land and the desert. The Muslim warriors and immigrants, their dwelling-places in the amsar organized by tribe, would live off the labors of the locals, who were neither persecuted for their beliefs nor encouraged to convert to Islam. (If they did convert, they were exempted from taxation, thereby inconveniently reducing the kitty to be shared out among the umma.) The organized thievery of the Byzantines was thus replaced by another, more benign system.