Fields of Blood

by Karen Armstrong

  The debates about the nature of Christ had been an attempt to build a holistic view of reality, one with no impregnable division between the physical and the spiritual realms or the divine and the human. In human society too, the emperor Justinian (r. 527–65) believed, there should be a symphonia of church and state, a harmony and concord based on the incarnation of the Logos in the man Jesus.105 Just as the two natures—human and divine—were found in a single person, there could be no separation of church and empire; together they formed the Kingdom of God, which would soon spread to the entire world. But there was, of course, a massive difference between Jesus’s kingdom and the Byzantine state.

  As the barbarians crept ever closer to the walls of Constantinople, Justinian became even more zealous to restore the divine unity by vigorously enforcing the supremacy of “the emperor’s church.” His attempts to suppress the Monophysite party permanently alienated the people of Palestine, Syria, and Egypt. He declared that Judaism was no longer religio licita: Jews were now debarred from public office, and the use of Hebrew was prohibited in the synagogue. In 528 Justinian gave all pagans three months to be baptized, and the following year he closed the Academy in Athens that had been founded by Plato. In every province from Morocco to the Euphrates, he commissioned churches, built after the style of Constantinople, to symbolize the unity of the empire. Instead of providing a challenging alternative to imperial violence, the tradition that had begun in part as a protest against the systemic oppression of empire had become the tool of Rome’s aggressive coercion.

  In 540 Khosrow I of Persia began to transform his ailing kingdom into the economic giant of the region in a reform based on a classic definition of the agrarian state:

  The monarchy depends on the army, the army on money; money comes from the land tax; the land tax comes from agriculture. Agriculture depends on justice; justice on the integrity of officials, and integrity and reliability on the ever-watchfulness of the king.106

  Khosrow devised a more efficient method of tax collection and invested heavily in the irrigation of Mesopotamia, which previous Persian kings had neglected. With the proceeds he was able to create a professional army to replace the traditional aristocratic levies. War with Christian Rome was now inevitable, since both powers aspired to dominate the region. Khosrow employed Arab tribesmen to police his southern border, and the Byzantines reciprocated by hiring the Banu Ghassan, even though they had converted to Monophysite Christianity, to patrol the frontier from their winter camp near Damascus.

  In Khosrow’s Persia there was zero tolerance for rebellion but no religious discrimination: on the eve of a revolt, the king warned that he would “kill every man who persists in insubordination against me—be he a good Zoroastrian, a Jew, or a Christian.”107 Like most traditional agrarian rulers, the Persian kings had no interest in imposing their faith on their subjects; even Darius’s imperial version of Zoroastrianism had been strictly confined to the aristocracy. Their subjects worshipped as they chose, living in communities of Christians, Jews, and pagans, governed by their own laws and customs, and ruled by religious officials who were agents of the state—an arrangement that determined the social organization of Middle Eastern society for over a millennium. After Khosrow’s death, there was a civil war in Persia, and the Byzantine emperor Maurice intervened to put the young Khosrow II (r. 591–628) on the throne. Alienated from the Persian nobility, Khosrow II surrounded himself with Christians, but the splendors of his court set the tone for Middle Eastern monarchy for centuries to come. He continued his father’s reforms, making Mesopotamia a vibrant, rich, and creative region. The Jewish community at Ctesiphon (near modern Baghdad) became the intellectual and spiritual capital of world Jewry, and Nisibis, dedicated to the study of Christian scripture, another great intellectual center.108 While Byzantine horizons were shrinking, Persians were broadening their outlook.

  When his ally Maurice was assassinated in a coup in 610, Khosrow seized the opportunity to conduct massive raids for slaves and booty in Byzantium. And when Heraclius, governor of Roman North Africa, gained the imperial throne in another coup, Khosrow embarked on a huge offensive, conquering Antioch (613), large areas of Syria and Palestine (614), and Egypt (619); in 626 the Persian army even besieged Constantinople. But in an extraordinary riposte, Heraclius and his small disciplined army defeated the Persian forces in Asia Minor and invaded the Iranian Plateau, attacking the unprotected estates of the Zoroastrian nobility and destroying their shrines before he was forced to withdraw. Utterly discredited, Khosrow was assassinated by his ministers in 628. Heraclius’s campaign had been more overtly religious than any previous war of Christian Rome. Indeed, so intertwined were church and empire by now that Christianity itself had seemed under attack during the siege of Constantinople. When the city was saved, the victory was attributed to Mary, mother of God, whose icon had been paraded to deter the enemy from the city walls.

  During the Persian wars a monk finally brought the Christological disputes to an end. Maximus (580–662) insisted that these issues could not be settled simply by a theological formulation: “deification” was rooted in the experience of the Eucharist, contemplation, and the practice of charity. It was these communal rites and disciplines that taught Christians to see that it was impossible to think “God” without thinking “man.” If human beings emptied their minds of the jealousy and animosity that ruin their relations with one another, they could, even in this life, become divine: “The whole human being could become God, deified by the grace of God become man—whole man, soul and body, by nature and becoming whole God, soul and body by grace.”109 Every single person, therefore, had sacred value. Our love of God was inseparable from our love of one another.110 Indeed, Jesus had taught that the iron test of our love of God was that we love our enemies:

  Why did he command this? To free you from hatred, anger and resentment, and to make you worthy of the supreme gift of perfect love. And you cannot attain such love if you do not imitate God and love all men equally. For God loves all men equally and wishes them to “to be saved and to come to the knowledge of the truth.”111

  Unlike the tyrant-bishops who vied for the emperor’s backing, Maximus became a victim, not a perpetrator, of imperial violence. Having fled to North Africa during the Persian wars, in 661 he was forcibly brought to Constantinople, where he was imprisoned, condemned as a heretic, and mutilated; he died shortly afterward in exile. But he was vindicated at the third Council of Constantinople in 680 and would become known as the father of Byzantine theology.

  The doctrine of deification celebrates the transfiguration of the entire human being in the here and now, not merely in a future state, and this has indeed been the living experience of individual Christians. But this spiritual triumph hardly resembles the “realized eschatology” promoted by emperors and tyrant bishops. After Constantine’s conversion, they had convinced themselves that the empire was the Kingdom of God and a second manifestation of Christ. Not even the catastrophe of the Second Council of Ephesus or the military vulnerability of their empire could shake their belief that Rome would become intrinsically Christian and win the world for Christ. In other traditions people had tried to create a challenging alternative to the systemic violence of the state, but right up to the fall of Constantinople to the Turks in 1453, Byzantines continued to believe that the Pax Romana was compatible with the Pax Christiana. The enthusiasm with which they had greeted imperial patronage was never accompanied by a sustained critique of the role and nature of the state, or its ineluctable violence and oppression.112

  By the early seventh century, both Persia and Byzantium had been ruined by their wars for imperial dominance. Syria, already weakened by a devastating plague, had become an impoverished region, and Persia had succumbed to anarchy, its frontier fatally compromised. Yet while Persians and Byzantines eyed each other nervously, real danger emerged elsewhere. Both empires had forgotten their Arab clients and failed to notice that the Arabian Peninsula had experienced a commerc
ial revolution. Arabs had been watching the wars between the great powers very closely and knew that both empires were fatally weakened; they were about to undergo an astonishing spiritual and political awakening.

  7

  The Muslim Dilemma

  In 610, the year that saw the outbreak of the Persian-Byzantine war, a merchant from Mecca in the Arabian Hejaz experienced a dramatic revelation during the sacred month of Ramadan. For some years, Muhammad ibn Abdullah had made an annual retreat on Mount Hira, just outside the city.1 There he fasted, performed spiritual exercises, and gave alms to the poor while he meditated deeply on the problems of his people, the tribe of Quraysh. Only a few generations earlier, their ancestors had been living a desperate life in the intractable deserts of northern Arabia. Now they were rich beyond their wildest dreams, and since farming was virtually impossible in this arid land, their wealth had been entirely created by commerce. For centuries the local nomads (badawin) had scratched out a meagre living by herding sheep and breeding horses and camels, but during the sixth century, they had invented a saddle that enabled camels to carry heavier loads than before. As a result, merchants from India, East Africa, Yemen, and Bahrain began to take their caravans through the Arabian steppes to Byzantium and Syria, using the Bedouin to guide them from one watering hole to another. Mecca had become a station for these caravans, and the Quraysh started their own trade missions to Syria and Yemen, while the Bedouin exchanged goods in an annual circuit of regular suqs (“markets”) around Arabia.2

  Mecca’s prosperity also depended on its status as a pilgrimage center. At the end of the suq season, Arabs came from all over Mecca during the month of Hajj to perform the ancient rituals around the Kabah, the ancient cube-shaped shrine in the heart of the city. Cult and commerce were inseparable: the climax of the hajj was the tawaf, the seven circumambulations around the Kabah that mirrored the suq circuit, giving the Arabs’ mercantile activities a spiritual dimension. Yet despite its extraordinary success, Mecca was in the grip of a social and moral crisis. The old tribal spirit had succumbed to the ethos of an infant market economy and families now vied with one another for wealth and prestige. Instead of sharing their goods, as had been essential for the tribe’s survival in the desert, families were building private fortunes, and this emerging commercial aristocracy ignored the plight of the poorer Qurayshis and seized the inheritances of orphans and widows. The rich were delighted with their new security, but those who fell behind felt lost and disoriented.

  Poets exalted Bedouin life, but in reality it was a grim, relentless struggle in which too many people competed for too few resources. Perpetually on the brink of starvation, tribes fought endless battles for pastureland, water, and grazing. The ghazu, or “acquisition raid,” was essential to the Bedouin economy. In times of scarcity tribesmen would invade their neighbors’ territory and carry off camels, cattle, food, or slaves, taking care to avoid killing anybody, since this would lead to a vendetta. Like most pastoralists, they saw nothing reprehensible in raiding. The ghazu was a kind of national sport, conducted with skill and panache according to clearly defined rules, which the Bedouin would have thoroughly enjoyed. It was a brutal yet simple way of redistributing wealth in a region where there was simply not enough to go round.

  Although the tribesmen had little interest in the supernatural, they gave meaning to their lives with a code of virtue and honor. They called it muruwah, a term that is difficult to translate: it encompasses courage, patience, and endurance. Muruwah had a violent core. Tribesmen had to avenge any wrong done to the group, protect its weaker members, and defy its enemies. Each member had to be ready to leap to the defense of his kinsmen if the tribe’s honor was impugned. But above all, he had to share his resources. Tribal life on the steppes would be impossible if individuals hoarded their wealth while others went hungry; nobody would help you in a lean period if you had been miserly in your good days. But by the sixth century, the limitations of muruwah were becoming tragically apparent, as the Bedouin got caught up in an escalating cycle of intertribal warfare. They began to regard those outside their kin group as worthless and expendable and felt no moral anguish about killing in defense of the tribe, right or wrong.3 Even their ideal of courage was now essentially combative, since it lay not in self-defense but in the preemptive strike. Muslims traditionally call the pre-Islamic period jahiliyyah, which is usually translated as “the time of ignorance.” But the primary meaning of the root JHL is “irascibility”—an acute sensitivity to honor and prestige, excessive arrogance, and, above all, a chronic tendency to violence and retaliation.4

  Muhammad had become intensely aware of both the oppression and injustice in Mecca and the martial danger of jahiliyyah. Mecca had to be a place where merchants from any tribe could gather freely to do business without fear of attack, so in the interests of commerce, the Quraysh had abjured warfare, maintaining a position of aloof neutrality. With consummate skill and diplomacy, they had established the “sanctuary” (haram), a twenty-mile zone around the Kabah where all violence was forbidden.5 Yet it would take more than that to subdue the jahili spirit. Meccan grandees were still chauvinistic, touchy, and liable to explosions of ungovernable fury. When Muhammad, the pious merchant, began to preach to his fellow Meccans in 612, he was well aware of the precariousness of this volatile society. Gathering a small community of followers, many from the weaker, disadvantaged clans, his message was based on the Quran (“Recitation”), a new revelation for the people of Arabia. The ideas of the civilized peoples of the ancient world had traveled down the trade routes and had been avidly discussed among the Arabs. Their own local lore had it that they themselves were descended from Ishmael, Abraham’s eldest son,6 and many believed that their high god Allah, whose name simply meant “God,” was identical with the god of the Jews and Christians. But the Arabs had no concept of an exclusive revelation or of their own special election. The Quran was to them simply the latest in the unfolding revelation of Allah to the descendants of Abraham, a “reminder” of what everybody knew already.7 Indeed, in one remarkable passage of what would become the written Quran, Allah made it clear that he made no distinction between the revelations of any of the prophets.8

  The bedrock message of the Quran was not a new abstruse doctrine, such as had riven Byzantium, but simply a “reminder” of what constituted a just society that challenged the structural violence emerging in Mecca: that it was wrong to build a private fortune but good to share your wealth with the poor and vulnerable, who must be treated with equity and respect. The Muslims formed an ummah, a “community” that provided an alternative to the greed and systemic injustice of Meccan capitalism. Eventually the religion of Muhammad’s followers would be called islam, because it demanded that individuals “surrender” their whole being to Allah; a muslim was simply a man or woman who had made that surrender. At first, though, the new faith was called tazakka, which can be roughly translated as “refinement.”9 Instead of hoarding their wealth and ignoring the plight of the poor, Muslims were exhorted to take responsibility for one another and feed the destitute, even when they were hungry themselves.10 They traded the irascibility of jahiliyyah for the traditional Arab virtue of hilm—forbearance, patience, and mercy.11 By caring for the vulnerable, freeing slaves, and performing small acts of kindness on a daily, even hourly basis, they believed that they would gradually acquire a responsible, compassionate spirit and purge themselves of selfishness. Unlike the tribesmen, who retaliated violently at the slightest provocation, Muslims must not strike back but leave revenge to Allah,12 consistently treating all others with gentleness and courtesy.13 Socially, the surrender of islam would be realized by learning to live in a community: believers would discover their deep bond with other human beings, whom they would strive to treat as they would wish to be treated themselves. “Not one of you can be a believer,” Muhammad is reported to have said, “unless he desires for his neighbor what he desires for himself.”

  At first the Meccan establishment took l
ittle notice of the ummah, but when Muhammad began to emphasize the monotheism of his message, they became alarmed, for commercial rather than theological reasons. An outright rejection of the local deities would be bad for business and alienate the tribes who kept their totems around the Kabah and came specifically to visit them during the hajj. A serious rift now developed: Muslims were attacked; the ummah, still only a small segment of the Quraysh, was economically and socially ostracized; and Muhammad’s life was in jeopardy. When Arabs from Yathrib, an agrarian colony some 250 miles to the north, invited the ummah to settle with them, it seemed the only solution. In 622, therefore, some seventy Muslim families left their homes for the oasis that would become known as al-Madinat, or Medina, the City of the Prophet.