Fields of Blood

by Karen Armstrong

  This hijrah (“migration”) from Mecca was an extraordinary step. In Arabia, where the tribe was the most sacred value, to abandon one’s kinsfolk and accept the permanent protection of strangers was tantamount to blasphemy. The very word hijrah suggests painful severance: HJR has been translated as “he cut himself off from friendly or loving communication … he ceased … to associate with them.”14 Henceforth Meccan Muslims would be called the Muhajirun (“Emigrants”), this traumatic dislocation becoming central to their identity. In taking in these foreigners, with whom they had no blood relationship, the Arabs of Medina who had converted to Islam, the Ansar (“Helpers”), had also embarked on an audacious experiment. Medina was not a unified city but a series of fortified hamlets, each occupied by a different tribal group. There were two large Arab tribes—the Aws and the Khasraj—and twenty Jewish tribes, and they all fought one another constantly.15 Muhammad, as a neutral outsider, became an arbitrator and crafted an agreement that united Helpers and Emigrants in a supertribe—“one community to the exclusion of all men”—that would fight all enemies as one.16 This is how Medina became a primitive “state” and how it found, almost immediately, that despite the ideology of hilm, it had no option but to engage in warfare.

  The Emigrants were a drain on the community’s resources. They were merchants and bankers, but there was little opportunity for trade in Medina; they had no experience of farming, and in any case there was no available land. It was essential to find an independent source of income, and the ghazu, the accepted way of making ends meet in times of scarcity, was the obvious solution. In 624, therefore, Muhammad began to dispatch raiding parties to attack the Meccan caravans, a step that was controversial only in that the Muslims attacked their own tribe. But because the Quraysh had abjured warfare long ago, the Emigrants were inexperienced ghazis, and their first raids failed. When they finally got the hang of it, the raiders broke two Arabian cardinal rules by accidentally killing a Meccan merchant and fighting during one of the Sacred Months, when violence was prohibited throughout the peninsula.17 Muslims could now expect reprisals from Mecca. Three months later Muhammad himself led a ghazu to attack the most important Meccan caravan of the year. When they heard about it, the Quraysh immediately sent their army to defend it, but in a pitched battle at the well of Badr, the Muslims achieved a stunning victory. The Quraysh responded the following year by attacking Medina and defeating the Muslims at the Battle of Uhud, but in 627, when they attacked Medina again, the Muslims trounced the Quraysh at the Battle of the Trench, so called because Muhammad dug a defensive ditch around the settlement.

  The ummah also had internal troubles. Three of Medina’s Jewish tribes—the Qaynuqa, Nadir, and Qurayzah—were determined to destroy Muhammad, because he had undermined their political ascendency in the oasis. They had sizable armies and preexisting alliances with Mecca so they were a security risk. When the Qaynuqa and Nadir staged revolts and threatened to assassinate him, Muhammad expelled them from Medina. But the Nadir had joined the nearby Jewish settlement of Khaybar and drummed up support for Mecca among the local Bedouin. So after the Battle of the Trench, when the Qurayzah had put the entire settlement at risk by plotting with Mecca during the siege, Muhammad showed no mercy. In accordance with Arab custom, the seven hundred men of the tribe were slaughtered and the women and children sold as slaves. The other seventeen Jewish tribes remained in Medina, and the Quran continued to instruct Muslims to behave respectfully to “the people of the book” (ahl al-kitab) and stress what they all held in common.18 Even though the Muslims sentenced the tribesmen of Qurayzah for political rather than religious reasons, this atrocity marked the lowest point in the Prophet’s career. From then on, he intensified his diplomatic efforts to build relationships with the Bedouin, who had been impressed by his military success, and established a powerful confederacy. Bedouin allies did not have to convert to Islam but swore merely to fight the ummah’s enemies: Muhammad must be one of the few leaders in history to build an empire largely by negotiation.19

  In March 628, during the month of the hajj, Muhammad announced, to everybody’s astonishment, that he intended to make the pilgrimage to Mecca, which, since pilgrims were forbidden to carry weapons, meant riding unarmed into enemy territory.20 About a thousand Muslims volunteered to accompany him. The Quraysh dispatched their cavalry to attack the pilgrims, but their Bedouin allies guided them by a back route into the sanctuary of Mecca, where all violence was forbidden. Muhammad then ordered the pilgrims to sit beside the Well of Hudaybiyyah and wait for the Quraysh to negotiate. He knew that he had put them in an extremely difficult position: if the guardians of the Kabah killed pilgrims on sacred ground, they would lose all credibility in the region. Yet when the Qurayshi envoy arrived, Muhammad agreed to conditions that seemed to throw away every advantage the ummah had gained during the war. His fellow pilgrims were so horrified that they almost mutinied, yet the Quran would praise the truce of Hudaybiyyah as a “manifest victory.” While the Meccans had behaved with typical jahili belligerence when they tried to slaughter the unarmed pilgrims, God had sent down the “spirit of peace” (sakina) upon the Muslims.21 Muhammad’s first biographer declared that this nonviolent victory was the turning point for the young movement: during the next two years “double or more than double as many entered Islam as ever before,”22 and in 630 Mecca voluntarily opened its gates to the Muslim army.

  Our main source for Muhammad’s life is the Quran, the collection of revelations that came to the Prophet during the twenty-three years of his mission. The official text was standardized under Uthman, the third caliph, some twenty years after Muhammad’s death. But it had originally been transmitted orally, recited aloud, and learned by heart; as a result, during and after the Prophet’s life, the text remained fluid, and people would have remembered and dwelled on different parts they had heard. The Quran is not a coherent revelation: it came to Muhammad piecemeal in response to particular events, so as in any scripture, there were inconsistencies—not least about warfare. Jihad (“struggle”) is not one of the Quran’s main themes: in fact, the word and its derivatives occur only forty-one times, and only ten of these refer unambiguously to warfare. The “surrender” of islam requires a constant jihad against our inherent selfishness; this sometimes involves fighting (qital), but bearing trials courageously and giving to the poor in times of personal hardship was also described as jihad.23

  There is no univocal or systematic Quranic teaching about military violence.24 Sometimes God demands patience and restraint rather than fighting;25 sometimes he gives permission for defensive warfare and condemns aggression; but at other times he calls for offensive warfare within certain limits;26 and occasionally these restrictions are lifted.27 In some passages, Muslims are told to live at peace with the people of the book;28 in others, they are required to subdue them.29 These contradictory instructions occur throughout the Quran, and Muslims developed two exegetical strategies to rationalize them. The first linked each verse of the Quran with a historical event in Muhammad’s life and used this context to establish a general principle. Yet because the extant text does not place the revelations in chronological order, the early scholars found it difficult to determine these asbab al-nuzal (“occasions of revelations”). The second strategy was to abrogate verses: scholars argued that while the ummah was still struggling for survival, God could only give Muslims temporary solutions to their difficulties, but once Islam was victorious, he could issue permanent commands. Thus the later revelations—some of which call for unrestrained warfare—were God’s definitive words and rescinded the earlier, more lenient directives.30

  Scholars who favored abrogation argued that when Muslims were still a vulnerable minority in Mecca, God told them to avoid fighting and confrontation.31 However, after the hijrah, when they had achieved a degree of power, God gave them permission to fight—but only in self-defense.32 As they grew stronger, some of these restrictions were lifted,33 and finally, when the Prophet returned in triumph to
Mecca, Muslims were told to wage war against non-Muslims wherever and whenever they could.34 God had therefore been preparing Muslims gradually for their global conquests, tempering his instructions to their circumstances. Modern researchers have noted, though, that the early exegetes did not always agree about which revelation should be attached to which particular “occasion” or which verse abrogated which. The American scholar Reuven Firestone has suggested that the conflicting verses instead expressed the views of different groups within the ummah during the Prophet’s life and after.35

  It would not be surprising if there were disagreements and factions in the early ummah. Like the Christians, Muslims would interpret their revelation in radically divergent ways and, like any other faith, Islam developed in response to changing circumstances. The Quran seems aware that some Muslims would not be happy to hear that God had encouraged fighting: “Fighting has been ordained for you, though it is hateful to you.”36 Once the ummah had started to engage in warfare, it seems that one group, which was strong enough to warrant extensive rebuttal, consistently refused to take part:

  Believers, why, when it is said to you, “Go and fight in God’s cause,” do you feel weighed down to the ground? Do you prefer this world to the world to come? How small is the enjoyment of this world compared with the life to come! If you do not go out and fight, God will punish you severely and put others in your place.37

  The Quran calls these people “laggers” and “liars,” and Muhammad was reproved for allowing them to “stay at home” during campaigns.38 They are accused of apathy and cowardice and are equated with the kufar, the enemies of Islam.39 Yet this group could point to the many verses in the Quran that instruct Muslims not to retaliate but to “forgive and forbear,” responding to aggression with mercy, patience, and courtesy.40 At other times, the Quran looks forward confidently to a final reconciliation: “Let there be no argument between us and you—God will gather us together and to Him we shall return.”41 The impressive consistency of this irenic theme throughout the Quran, Firestone believes, must reflect a strong tendency that survived in the ummah for some time—perhaps until the ninth century.42

  Ultimately, however, the more militant groups prevailed, possibly because by the ninth century, long after the Prophet’s death, the more aggressive verses reflected reality, since by this time Muslims had established an empire that could be maintained only by military force. A favorite text of those involved in the wars of conquest was the “Sword Verse,” which they regarded as God’s last word on the subject—though even here the endorsement of total warfare segues immediately into a demand for peace and leniency:

  When the forbidden months are over wherever you encounter the idolaters, kill them, seize them, besiege them, wait for them at every look-out post; but if they repent, maintain the prayer, and pay the prescribed alms let them go on their way, for God is most merciful and forgiving.43

  There is thus a constant juxtaposition of ruthlessness and mercy in the Quran: believers are repeatedly commanded to fight “until there is no more sedition and religion becomes God’s,” but they are at once told that the moment the enemy sues for peace, there must be no further hostilities.44

  Muhammad’s confederacy broke up after his death in 632, and his “successor” (khalifa), Abu Bakr, fought the defecting tribes to prevent Arabia from sliding back into chronic warfare. As we have seen elsewhere, the only way to stop such infighting was to establish a strong hegemonic power that could enforce the peace. Within two years, Abu Bakr succeeded in restoring the Pax Islamica, and after his death in 634, Umar ibn al-Khattab (r. 634–44), the second caliph, believed that peace could be preserved only by an outwardly directed offensive. These campaigns were not religiously inspired: there is nothing in the Quran to suggest that Muslims must fight to conquer the world. Umar’s campaigns were driven almost entirely by the precarious economy of Arabia. There could be no question of establishing a conventional agrarian empire in Arabia, because there was so little land suitable for cultivation. The Quraysh’s modest market economy clearly could not sustain the entire peninsula, and the Quran forbade members of the Islamic confederacy to fight one another. How, then, could a tribe feed itself in times of scarcity? The ghazu, the acquisition raid against neighboring tribes, had been the only way to redistribute the meager resources of Arabia, but this was now off-limits. Umar’s solution was to raid the rich settled lands beyond the Arabian Peninsula, which, as the Arabs knew well, were in disarray after the Persian-Byzantine wars.

  Under Umar’s leadership, the Arabs burst out of the peninsula, initially in small local raids but later in larger expeditions. As they expected, they met little opposition. The armies of both the great powers had been decimated, and the subject peoples were disaffected. Jews and Monophysite Christians were sick of harassment from Constantinople, and the Persians were still reeling from the political upheaval that had followed Khosrow II’s assassination. Within a remarkably short period, the Arabs forced the Roman army to retreat from Syria (636) and crushed the depleted Persian army (637). In 641 they conquered Egypt, and though they had to fight some fifteen years to pacify the whole of Iran, they were eventually victorious in 652. Only Byzantium, now a rump state shorn of its southern provinces, held out. Thus, twenty years after the Battle of Badr, the Muslims found themselves masters of Mesopotamia, Syria, Palestine, and Egypt. When they finally subdued Iran, they fulfilled the dream that had eluded both the Persians and Byzantines and re-created Cyrus’s empire.45

  It is hard to explain their success. The Arabs were accomplished raiders but had little experience of protracted warfare and had no superior weapons or technology.46 In fact, like the Prophet, in the early years of the conquest period, they gained more territory by diplomacy than by fighting: Damascus and Alexandria both surrendered because they were offered generous terms.47 The Arabs had no experience of state building and just adopted Persian and Byzantine systems of land tenure, taxation, and government. There was no attempt to impose Islam on the subject peoples. The people of the book—Jews, Christians, and Zoroastrians—became dhimmis (“protected subjects”). Critics of Islam often denounce this arrangement as evidence of Islamic intolerance, but Umar had simply adapted Khosrow I’s Persian system: Islam would be the religion of the Arab conquerors—just as Zoroastrianism had been the exclusive faith of the Persian aristocracy—and the dhimmis would manage their own affairs as they had in Iran and pay the jizya, a poll tax, in return for military protection. After centuries of forcible attempts by the Christian Roman Empire to impose religious consensus, the traditional agrarian system reasserted itself, and many of the dhimmis found this Muslim polity a relief.

  When Umar conquered Jerusalem from the Byzantines in 638, he immediately signed a charter to ensure that the Christian shrines were undisturbed and cleared the site of the Jewish temple, which had been left in ruins since its destruction in 70 and was used as the city’s garbage dump. Henceforth this holy site would be called the Haram al-Sharif, the “Most Noble Sanctuary,” and become the third-holiest place in the Muslim world, after Mecca and Medina. Umar also invited Jews, who had been forbidden permanent residence in Judea since the Bar Kokhba revolt, to return to the City of the Prophet Daud (David).48 In the eleventh century, a Jerusalem rabbi still recalled with gratitude the mercy God had shown his people when he allowed the “Kingdom of Ishmael” to conquer Palestine.49 “They did not inquire about the profession of faith,” wrote the twelfth-century historian Michael the Syrian, “nor did they persecute anybody because of his profession, as did the Greeks, a heretical and wicked nation.”50

  The Muslim conquerors tried at first to resist the systemic oppression and violence of empire. Umar did not allow his officers to displace the local peoples or establish estates in the rich land of Mesopotamia. Instead, Muslim soldiers lived in new “garrison towns” (amsar, singular: misr) built in strategic locations: Kufah in Iraq, Basra in Syria, Qum in Iran, and Fustat in Egypt; Damascus was the only old city to become a misr. Umar
believed that the ummah, still in its infancy, could retain its integrity only by living apart from the more sophisticated cultures. The Muslims’ ability to establish and maintain a stable, centralized empire was even more surprising than their military success. Both the Persians and the Byzantines imagined that after their initial victories, the Arabs would simply ask to settle in the empires they had conquered. This, after all, was what the barbarians had done in the western provinces, and they now ruled according to Roman law and spoke Latin dialects.51 Yet when their wars of expansion finally ceased in 750, the Muslims ruled an empire extending from the Himalayas to the Pyrenees, the largest the world had yet seen, and most of the conquered peoples would convert to Islam and speak Arabic.52 This extraordinary achievement seemed to endorse the message of the Quran, which taught that a society founded on the Quranic principles of justice would always prosper.

  Later generations would idealize the Conquest Era, but it was a difficult time. The failure to defeat Constantinople was a bitter blow. By the time Uthman, the Prophet’s son-in-law, became the third caliph (r. 644–56), Muslim troops had become mutinous and discontented. The distances were now so vast that campaigning was exhausting, and they were taking less plunder. Far from home, living perpetually in strange surroundings, soldiers had no stable family life.53 This disquiet is reflected in the hadith (plural: ahadith) literature, in which the classical doctrine of jihad began to take shape.54 The ahadith (“reports”) recorded sayings and stories of the Prophet not included in the Quran. Now that he was no longer with them, people wanted to know how Muhammad had behaved and what he had thought about such subjects as warfare. These traditions were collected and anthologized during the eighth and ninth centuries and became so numerous that criteria were needed to distinguish authentic reports from the obviously spurious. Few of the ahadith date back to the Prophet himself, but even the more dubious ones throw light on attitudes in the early ummah as Muslims reflected on their astounding success.