Sea of Faith

by Stephen O'Shea

  Only four years after founding Fustat, Amr was forced back to his Judean retreat in Beersheba. Caliph Umar had been murdered by a Persian slave, and the man chosen as his successor by a council of notables in Madina, Uthman ibn Affan, immediately showed he had no time for a putative rival in Egypt. Amr was dismissed, and a kinsman of the new caliph was named governor of the province. Indeed, kinsmen of Caliph Uthman soon began occupying almost all positions of authority in the young Arab empire. The windfall of conquest brought riches, and riches brought strife—the once lean and hungry Muslim umma had triumphed not only in Egypt, Syria, and Palestine but also in Iraq and the marches of Persia, and the tribute of the wealthy peoples of the Fertile Crescent stoked personal ambitions. However devout the Companions ruling the umma were, they were also not immune to jealousy and greed. Under the new caliph, one clan from among the Quraysh seemed intent on taking over the entire enterprise, a clan, moreover, that had been dilatory in its acceptance of the Prophet in the infancy of Islam. But many of the Companions from the other clans were still alive and possessed of clear memories. Old resentments resurfaced, a power struggle loomed. The road to Poitiers was still very long—now it would be anything but straight.

  Straight Street is the main thoroughfare in the historic heart of Damascus, the oldest continuously inhabited city on earth. Mentioned by name by none other than God himself in the New Testament, the street has witnessed the changing fortunes of many peoples, and after the Greeks came the turn of the Muslim Arabs. Against all expectations, ancient Damascus, not Madina or Mecca, would be the cynosure of Islam's triumphant journey around the Mediterranean.

  One can easily see why Damascus has seduced so many conquerors. The city stands in a well-watered valley at the edge of the sown and the sandy, a Fertile Crescent crossroads protected from the winds by a stupendous rock outcropping to its north, the Qasyun Hill. This awe-inspiring height, twelve hundred meters in altitude and now haunted by heavily hennaed bedouin women willing to read palms for a price, is a transcendent presence on the Damascene horizon. The view from atop Qasyun remained the same for forty centuries: far below stood a compact, walled city in the center of a vast, verdant oasis. Only in the last century has the prospect changed color to ashtray gray, the sprawl of tower blocks and satellite dishes having stifled most of the greenery. According to local tradition, the Prophet came to the lookout on Qasyun and decided not to visit Damascus after seeing the beautiful city stretched out below him. Muhammad explained to his perplexed friends that he would rather wait until after this life to enter Paradise.

  Others had no such otherwordly compunctions. Foremost among them was Muawiya, the Prophet's former secretary and, after the conquest of Syria, the Muslim governor of Damascus. He looked and—fatefully for Mediterranean history—liked what he saw. Muawiya ibn Abu Sufyan was of the Beni Umayya clan, the same grasping group of kinsmen to which the new caliph belonged. His full name betrays that he was the son of Abu Sufyan and Hind. Incredibly, the Qurayshi couple loudest in their ridicule of the Prophet, the two sterling exemplars of foot-dragging in the face of Islamic truth, begat the founder of the first great Muslim dynasty, the Umayyads. Muhammad's unfortunate uncle Hamza, whose lifeless body had been outraged by Hind, might well have spun in his grave when her son became supreme leader of the umma. Other martyrs for Islam from its early days might have done likewise, especially after Muawiya permanently sidelined Madina as a political center by establishing the caliphate in Damascus.

  Muawiya needed several eventful years to achieve his object, for other fronts would open up in the west. After the murder of Umar, Caliph Uthman authorized raids into the Cyrenaica, today's Libya. As the razzia became the norm, the open-throated war cry of the conquerors was heard as far along the coast as Byzantine "Africa"—or Arabic Ifriqiya (Tunisia). Amr Ibn al As was to play a role in these raids, for he had been hurriedly summoned out of his Beersheba retirement to deal with an emergency—a Byzantine fleet had appeared on the horizon and taken back Alexandria by surprise in 645. Under Amr's capable leadership, the situation was quickly restored, and the Greeks sailed away once again, this time permanently.

  Straight Street, Damascus, in the nineteenth century.

  Amr took this Byzantine reversal, and his renewed prestige, as an inducement to join in the raids to the west. The most lucrative involved south-central Ifriqiya, where Gregory, an ambitious Greek patrician opposed to the monothelite party in Constantinople, had seceded from the Byzantine Empire by declaring himself basileus. At Sufetula (Sbeitla, Tunisia) the Arab cavalry made short work of his delusions of grandeur, slaying Gregory, routing his army, commandeering his treasury, and carrying off his followers into slavery. Not all reached the auction block: legend has Gregory's beautiful daughter, Yamina, deliberately hurling herself headfirst from a camel, preferring death to life as a captive concubine.

  As his coreligionists probed the north African coast in these years, Muawiya left Damascus and crossed the Taurus Mountains to attack Anatolia, dutifully following in the footsteps of the Persians and so many other enemies of the Rumi before them. The news from Alexandria, however, gave him pause. Of all the invaders past and present to have made life miserable for the empire of the mare nostrum—Parthians, Vandals, Visigoths, Ostrogoths, Avars, Burgundians, Huns, Persians, Bulgars—few had bothered disputing its control of the sea itself. Muawiya rightly saw an object lesson in the retaking of Alexandria—until Islam possessed warships, he reasoned, it would always be vulnerable to Rumi mariners. This insight guaranteed his greatness.

  After winning the assent of his kinsman, Caliph Uthman, Muawiya set about manning the fleet that for the next millennium would contest control of the shipping lanes. The men of the desert would take to the sea. Amr Ibn al As, a landlubber to the last, argued against the idea by warning, "If a ship lies still, it rends the heart; if it moves it terrifies the imagination. Upon it a man's power ever diminishes and calamity increases. Those within it are like worms in a log, and if it rolls over they are drowned." The intrepid Muawiya, supported by the caliph, brushed aside all such reservations. The desert "ports" of Syria (Damascus, Horns, Hama, Aleppo), and the amsar "ports" of Egypt (Fustat), Iraq (Kufa, Basra), and Tunisia (Kairouan, founded 670), would henceforth be joined by the maritime ports of an Islamic Mediterranean empire. It was an inspired decision.

  The fleet was made ready with astonishing speed, no doubt thanks to the expertise of recently conquered seagoing peoples, whether Muslim or not—Yemenis, Syrian Greeks, and Copts. The Muslims probably engaged the services of their old commercial partners, the mariners of the Indian Ocean, in acquiring the navigational skills needed to match the Byzantines. These sailors from the subcontinent were not only versed in the intricacies of celestial navigation but would later discover the magnetic compass, an invention of incomparable utility in dashing across open water. By 649 Muawiya and his allies had weighed anchor, ready to begin the deadly game of island hopping that would characterize much of the encounter between Christian and Muslim on the inland sea. Crete was raided, and Cyprus fell. In 654 came the turn of Rhodes, an outpost of Graeco-Roman maritime supremacy since the earliest days of classical antiquity. Its famous colossal statue of the sun god Helios, toppled by an earthquake in 226 B.C.E. and thereafter left in rusted but respected disarray alongside the harbor, was sold by the unimpressed Muslim raiders as scrap metal to a Jewish merchant of Edessa (Urfa, Turkey). Nine hundred pack-camels were needed to haul it away.

  The ships of Muawiya continued their progression up the coast of Anatolia. After Rhodes came Kos, in the Dodecanese Islands of the Aegean, the stepping-stones to the Hellespont and beyond to Constantinople itself. The basileus, Constans II (a grandson of Heraclius and his first wife, Eudoxia), grew alarmed enough to sail out in 655 to crush the upstart maritime power. Unexpectedly, the upstarts crushed the Byzantines. Constans barely escaped the naval battle with his life, having to resort to switching clothes with a brave volunteer in order to slip away undetected. The Arabs had
proved invincible on land; they seemed unbeatable on the water as well. The entire Mediterranean appeared poised to go the way of the Fertile Crescent.

  Murder intervened. The following summer Caliph Uthman was dead, ignominiously cut down by fellow Muslims in Madina. The dar al Islam was thrown into chaos, the umma profoundly shocked. This was only the most visible sign of a larger unrest roiling the fledgling empire. The perpetrators had ridden to Madina from Fustat, where the grievances against the caliph's nepotistic rule had accumulated into open revolt. In Iraq too dissatisfaction had been growing—the non-Arabian converts to Islam, or mawali (clients), began demanding a share of the treasure and influence reserved for the Quraysh and their allied tribes in the amsars. The dissident grandees of Islam, who had voiced their disapproval of Uthman in the latter years of his caliphate, distanced themselves from the crime. Amr, as might be expected of so slippery a survivor, had been in Beersheba in that summer of 656, far from both Fustat and Madina. Aisha, the child-bride of the Prophet who had matured into a formidable widow, had been returning to Madina from a pilgrimage; when she learned the news, she quickly turned around and dashed back to Mecca. The most prominent dissident, however, had been present in Madina on the day of the murder—Ali ibn Abu Talib.

  Like the millstone of the Council of Chalcedon in the sinking of the Christian East, the rise and fall of Ali would be of utmost importance for Islam's future, and its repercussions in subsequent centuries would play a role in the fortunes of the faith around the world. In the wake of Uthman's murder, Ali assumed the caliphate. It was, to some in the umma, a distinction too long deferred. He was the closest male relative of the Prophet—Ali's father had been Abu Talib, the uncle who had raised Muhammad. When Muhammad's situation improved, he adopted Ali—his first cousin—as a son, then wed him to Fatima, the youngest daughter of the Prophet's union with Khadija. Ali was thus cousin, adopted son, and son-in-law of the founder of Islam, a Companion from the earliest days and a member of the Prophet's own Beni Hashim clan of the Quraysh. It is still argued whether he was the second or third convert to Islam. (The first was Khadija; then came either Abu Bekr or Ali.) A more qualified candidate to succeed Muhammad was scarcely imaginable.

  Had Ali been the first of the caliphs, his rise to prominence might not have been disputed. But the council of tribal elders who selected the caliph had passed over him on three occasions—in favor of Abu Bekr, Umar, and Uthman. And in the quarter-century since the Prophet's death, the fortunes of the umma had changed beyond recognition. Although the revived rivalries among the Quraysh were familiar, the brotherhood of believers faced the threatening novelty of thousands of mawali—non-Arabian converts—knocking at the door of spiritual and material legitimacy within Islam. More ominously for overall unity, prominent believers controlled centers of wealth and sophistication far superior to the settlements of the Hijaz. From the opulent oasis beneath Qasyun Hill, Muawiya demanded justice for the murdered caliph, his tribal kinsman. He proclaimed Ali illegitimate and himself caliph, thereby sparking a civil war.

  Ali acted with dispatch. He moved the seat of power from Madina, where his enemies were thick on the ground, to Kufa (modern Najaf), an amsar in Iraq. In 658 he vanquished an army of malcontents near Basra at the Battle of the Camel, so called because Aisha, the dissident widow of the Prophet, watched her side lose from atop her mount. A year later Ali's climactic confrontation with Muawiya at Siffin, near the Euphrates in Iraq, ended in a startlingly original fashion. Traditions hold that the commander of Muawiya's Syrian cavalry, the ubiquitous Amr Ibn al As, after being bested in several days of bloody combat, ordered his beleaguered riders to affix pages of the Quran to their spears. When Ali's soldiers, devout Muslims all, saw their opponents thus caparisoned, they dropped the tools of war. Out of the ensuing confusion, an agreement was reached: a committee of two would decide who should be caliph, Ali or Muawiya.

  Following months of negotiation, Muawiya's representative—Amr, once again—managed to get a decision that, although far from clear-cut, could be skewed in favor of the master of Damascus. Naturally Ali rejected the arbitration, but by then some of his own followers had rejected him. Known as the Kharijites (or "seceders"), these uncompromising purists were disgusted that Ali had agreed to arbitration in the first place. In 661 two of their number murdered Ali in Kufa. Muawiya had won by default. The son of Abu Sufyan and Hind became the caliph, thereby further embittering the "party of Ali" (ski'a Ali, hence shia), who looked on his sons Hasan and Huseyn as the natural successors to the supreme magistrature. The groundwork had been laid for an enduring disagreement that would transcend the merely dynastic, as the eventual elaboration of several schools of sacred Islamic law and the example of Muhammad's habitual behavior—sunnah—came to guide the conduct and beliefs of the vast majority of Muslims, the sunni.

  The Byzantines, as might be expected, were delighted by these Muslim woes. For the first time in decades the pressure had relented. Constans II, freed of the menace from Asia and clad once again in his imperial finery, decided to reverse the itinerary of his celebrated grandfather, Heraclius. Instead of sailing east, Constans went west across the Mediterranean, moving his capital from Constantinople to Sicily. His reasons were multiple: to escape the toxic air of monothelite intrigue on the Bosporus, to shore up his possessions in Italy, and to counter any attacks on Carthage and north Africa. A contemporary source also had him fleeing Constantinople to escape the ghost of his brother, whom he had blinded and killed two years earlier. Whatever his rationale, Constans set himself up in Syracuse, an important center of Magna Graecia (Greek-speaking Sicily and southern Italy) since the time of Pericles. There he held court, content to let the Muslims tear themselves apart and watchful for any threats to the legacy of Augustus, Justinian, and Heraclius. The east might be lost, but the west would hold.

  Murder intervened once again. On September 15, 668, as Constans was taking a bath, a slave brained him with a marble soap dish. We don't know why, though one historian playfully suggests the murderer may have been nostalgic for Constantinople. However base or noble the motive behind the killing, Constans' experiment with a new western Roman empire died with him. Carthage and its hinterland were pushed once again to the periphery of Byzantine concerns, with irreversible consequences for the future of north Africa. The court returned to the comforts of Constantinople, which, as events dictated, was a surpassingly good idea. In the years following Ali's assassination, Muawiya had consolidated his immense power as caliph and was ready to take up where he had left off. As a Muslim fleet picked off one after another of the Dodecanese islands and a Muslim army advanced through Anatolia, his goal became blindingly obvious: the splendors of Straight Street were not enough; Muawiya wanted a palace overlooking the Golden Horn. The new basileus, an adolescent son of Constans who took the throne as Constantine IV, was called on to defend the city bearing his name.

  In the spring of 674 an enormous fleet of war galleys crossed the Marmara and stationed itself in front of the sea walls of Constantinople. Catapults let fly. The greatest Arab expeditionary force seen thus far waited expectantly for a breach to be made in the famed fortifications of the capital of the Rumi. What it could not have expected was to become itself the target of a terrible new weapon—Greek fire. Some time before Muawiya's navy arrived, a Syrian Greek architect named Callinichus had shown Constantine's advisers his diabolical invention: an inflammable substance that could be propelled through metal tubes to splash, ablaze and inextinguishable, on solid and liquid alike. The merits of this rudimentary napalm were self-evident, and although the exact nature of its constituent ingredients will never be known for certain—the secret disappeared with the Byzantines—Muawiya's men were but the first of many unfortunates to be subjected to it. Greek fire was merciless; not only could it set a ship alight, but the surrounding sea could also be made a slick of flames, thereby preventing sailors from saving themselves by jumping overboard.

  In a testament to the determination of the attacke
rs, they remained four years besieging Constantinople, even though they had no protection against its incendiary terrors. No less disciplined were the defenders, who had at last managed to make a stand against the invincible Muslims. Muawiya conceded defeat in the fall of 678 and signed a truce with the Byzantines the following year—the first setback for the warriors of Islam since they had ridden out of the Hijaz. In describing this moment, one recent historian of the Byzantines sees Gibbon, then raises him one: "He [Constantine IV] had inspired his subjects with the morale to withstand five years of siege by a power hitherto considered irresistible, and in doing so had saved Western civilization. Had the Saracens captured Constantinople in the seventh century rather than the fifteenth, all Europe—and America—might be Muslim today."

  "The last of the Merovingians fell asleep in their ox-carts." A French historian's weary witticism about the lethargy of western Europe during this time of cataclysmic upheaval in the Mediterranean comes as a welcome contrast after the Gibbon-like flight of panic about the siege of Constantinople. The Merovingians, the royal house of the Franks during this first half-century of Muslim conquest, would have been almost entirely unaware of the great changes taking place elsewhere. The chroniclers of their activities, Fredegarius and his continuator, had heard of Yarmuk: in one cryptic passage the Byzantine defeat is attributed to a sudden die-off—52,000 Christian soldiers—in the middle of the night. Yet like Heraclius in Jerusalem in 630, who was perhaps apprised of a minor skirmish in the Jordanian desert against the Arabians, the Merovingians would have had no inkling that hazily distant events had any possible bearing on Gaul. It seems unlikely even today.