Fields of Blood

by Karen Armstrong

  Many ahadith saw the wars as God’s way of spreading the faith. “I have been sent to the human race in its entirety,” the Prophet says; “I have been commanded to fight the people until they bear witness: ‘There is no god but Allah.’ ”55 Empire building works best when soldiers believe that they are benefiting humanity, so the conviction that they had a divine mission would cheer flagging spirits. There is also contempt for the “laggers” who “stayed at home”; these soldiers probably resented those Muslims who benefited from the conquests but did not share their hardships. Thus in some ahadith, Muhammad is made to condemn settled life: “I was sent as a mercy and a fighter, not as a merchant and a farmer; the worst people of this ummah are the merchants and the farmers, [who are] not among those who take religion [din] seriously.”56 Other reports emphasize the hardships of the warrior who lives daily with death and “has built a house and not lived in it, who has married a woman and not had intercourse with her.”57 These warriors were beginning to dismiss other forms of jihad, such as caring for the poor, and saw themselves as the only true jihadis. Some ahadith claim that fighting was the Sixth Pillar or “essential practice” of Islam, alongside the profession of faith (shehadah), almsgiving, prayer, the Ramadan fast, and the hajj. Some said that fighting was far more precious than praying all night beside the Kabah or fasting for many days.58 The ahadith gave fighting a spiritual dimension it had never had in the Quran. There is much emphasis on the soldier’s intentions: Was he fighting for God or simply for fame and glory?59 According to the Prophet, “The monasticism of Islam is the jihad.”60 The hardship of military life segregated soldiers from civilians, and as Christian monks lived separately from the laity, the garrison towns where Muslim fighters lived apart from their wives and observed the fasts and prayers assiduously were their monasteries.

  Because soldiers constantly faced the possibility of an untimely death, there was much speculation about the afterlife. There had been no detailed end-time scenario in the Quran, and paradise had been described only in vaguely poetic terms. But now some ahadith claimed that the wars of conquest heralded the Last Days61 and imagined Muhammad speaking as a doomsday prophet: “Behold! God has sent me with a sword, just before the Hour.”62 Muslim warriors are depicted as an elite vanguard fighting the battles of the end time.63 When the end came, all Muslims would have to abandon the ease of settled life and join the army, which would not only defeat Byzantium but complete the conquest of Central Asia, India, and Ethiopia. Some soldiers were dreaming of martyrdom, and the ahadith supplemented with Christian imagery the Quran’s brief remarks about the fate of those who die in battle.64 Like the Greek martus, the Arabic shahid meant “one who bears witness” to Islam by making the ultimate surrender. Ahadith list his heavenly rewards: he would not have to wait in the grave for the Last Judgment like everybody else, but would ascend immediately to a special place in paradise.

  In the sight of God the martyr has six [unique] qualities: He [God] forgives him at the first opportunity, and shows him his place in paradise; he is saved from the torment of the grave, he is safe from the great fright [of the Last Judgment], a crown of honor is placed upon his head—one ruby of which is better than the world and all that is in it—he is married to 72 of the houris [women of paradise], and he gains the right to intercede [with God] for 70 of his relatives.65

  As a reward for his hard life in the army, the martyr will drink wine, wear silk clothes, and bask in the sexual delights he had forsaken for the jihad. But other Muslims, who were not so wedded to the new military ideal, would insist that any untimely death was a martyrdrom: drowning, plague, fire, or accident also “bore witness” to human finitude, showing that there was no security in the human institutions in which people put their trust but only in the illimitable God.66

  It was probably inevitable that, as Muslims made their astonishing transition from a life of penury to world rule, there would be disagreements about leadership, the allocation of resources, and the morality of empire.67 In 656 Uthman was killed during a mutiny of soldiers backed by the Quran reciters, the guardians of Islamic tradition who were opposed to the growing centralization of power in the ummah. With the support of these malcontents, Ali, the Prophet’s cousin and son-in-law, became the fourth caliph; a devout man, he struggled with the logic of practical politics, and his rule was not accepted in Syria, where the opposition was led by Uthman’s kinsman Muawiyyah, governor of Damascus. The son of one of the Prophet’s most obdurate enemies, Muawiyyah was supported by the wealthy Meccan families and by the people of Syria, who appreciated his wise and able rule. The spectacle of the Prophet’s relatives and companions poised to attack one another was profoundly disturbing, and to prevent armed conflict, the two sides called for arbitration by neutral Muslims, who decided in favor of Muawiyyah. But an extremist group refused to accept this and were shocked by Ali’s initial submission. They believed that the ummah should be led by the most committed Muslim (in this case, Ali) rather than a power seeker like Muawiyyah. They now regarded both rulers as apostates, so these dissidents withdrew from the ummah, setting up their own camp with an independent commander. They would be known as kharaji, “those who go out.” After the failure of a second arbitration, Ali was murdered by a Kharajite in 661.

  The trauma of this civil war marked Islamic life forever. Henceforth rival parties would draw upon these tragic events as they struggled to make sense of their Islamic vocation. From time to time, Muslims who objected to the behavior of the reigning ruler would retreat from the ummah, as the Kharajites had done, and summon all “true Muslims” to join them in a struggle (jihad) for higher Islamic standards.68 The fate of Ali became for some a symbol of the structural injustice of mainstream political life, and these Muslims, who called themselves the shiah-i Ali (“Ali’s partisans”), developed a piety of principled protest, revering Ali’s male descendants as the true leaders of the ummah. But appalled by the murderous divisions that had torn the ummah apart, most Muslims decided that unity must be the first priority, even if that meant accommodating a degree of oppression and injustice. Instead of revering Ali’s descendants, they would follow the sunnah (“customary practice”) of the Prophet. As in Christianity and Judaism, radically different interpretations of the original revelation would make it impossible to speak of a pure, essentialist “Islam.”

  The Quran had given Muslims an historical mission: to create a just community in which all members, even the weakest and most vulnerable, would be treated with absolute respect. This would demand a constant struggle (jihad) with the egotism and self-interest that holds us back from the divine. Politics was therefore not a distraction from spirituality but what Christians would call a sacrament, the arena in which Muslims experienced God and that enabled the divine to function effectively in our world. Hence if state institutions did not measure up to the Quranic ideal, if their political leaders were cruel or exploitative and their community humiliated by foreign enemies, a Muslim could feel that his or her faith in life’s ultimate purpose was imperiled. For Muslims, the suffering, oppression, and exploitation that arose from the systemic violence of the state were moral issues of sacred import and could not be relegated to the profane realm.

  After Ali’s death, Muawiyyah moved his capital from Medina to Damascus and founded a hereditary dynasty. The Umayyads would create a regular agrarian empire, with a privileged aristocracy and an unequal distribution of wealth. Herein lay the Muslim dilemma. There was now general agreement that an absolute monarchy was far more satisfactory than a military oligarchy, where commanders inevitably competed aggressively for power—as Ali and Muawiyyah had done. The Umayyads’ Jewish, Christian, and Zoroastrian subjects agreed. They were weary of the chaos inflicted by the Roman-Persian wars and longed for the peace that only an autocratic empire seemed able to provide. Umayyads permitted some of the old Arab informality, but they understood the importance of the monarch’s state of exception. They modeled their court ceremonial on Persian practice, shrouded the cali
ph from public view in the mosque, and achieved a monopoly of state violence by ruling that only the caliph could summon Muslims to war.69

  But this adoption of the systemic violence condemned by the Quran was very disturbing to the more devout Muslims, and nearly all the institutions now regarded as critical to Islam emerged from anguished discussions that took place after the civil war. One was the Sunni/Shiah divide. Another was the discipline of jurisprudence (fiqh): jurists wanted to establish precise legal norms that would make the Quranic command to build a just society a real possibility rather than a pious dream. These debates also produced Islamic historiography: in order to find solutions in the present, Muslims looked back to the time of the Prophet and the first four caliphs (rashidun). Moreover, Muslim asceticism developed as a reaction against the growing luxury and worldliness of the aristocracy. Ascetics often wore the coarse woollen garments (tasawwuf) standard among the poor, as the Prophet had done, so would become known as Sufis. While the caliph and his administration struggled with the problems that beset any agrarian empire and tried to develop a powerful monarchy, these pious Muslims were adamantly opposed to any compromise with its structural inequity and oppression.

  One event above all others symbolized the tragic conflict between the inherent violence of the state and Muslim ideals. After Ali’s death, the Shii had pinned their hopes on Ali’s descendants. Hasan, Ali’s elder son, came to an agreement with Muawiyyah and retired from political life. But in 680, when Muawiyyah died, he passed the caliphate to his son Yazid. For the first time, a Muslim ruler had not been elected by his peers, and there were Shii demonstrations in Kufa in favor of Husain, Ali’s younger son. This uprising was ruthlessly quashed, but Husain had already set out from Medina to Kufa, accompanied by a small band of his followers and their wives and children, convinced that the spectacle of the Prophet’s family marching to end imperial injustice would remind the ummah of its Islamic priorities. But Yazid sent out the army, and they were massacred on the plain of Karbala, outside Kufa; Husain was the last to die, holding his infant son in his arms. All Muslims lament the murder of the Prophet’s grandson, but for the Shiah, Karbala epitomized the Muslim dilemma. How could Islamic justice be realistically implemented in a belligerent imperial state?

  Under the Umayyad caliph Abd al-Malik (r. 685–705), the wars of expansion gained new momentum, and the Middle East began to assume an Islamic face. The Dome of the Rock, built by Abd al-Malik in Jerusalem in 691, was as magnificent as any of Justinian’s buildings. Yet the Umayyad economy was in trouble: it was too reliant on plunder, and its investment in public buildings was not sustainable. Umar II (r. 717–20) tried to rectify this by cutting down on state expenditure, demobilizing surplus military units, and reducing the commanders’ allowances. He knew that the dhimmis resented the jizya tax, which they alone had to pay, and that many Muslims believed this arrangement violated Quranic egalitarianism. So even though it meant a drastic loss of income, Umar II became the first caliph to encourage the conversion of the dhimmis to Islam. He did not live long enough to see his reform through, however. Hisham I (724–43), his successor, launched new military offensives in Central Asia and North Africa, but when he tried to revive the economy by reimposing the jizya, there was a massive revolt of Berber converts in North Africa.

  Backed by disaffected Persian converts, a new dynasty, claiming descent from Muhammad’s uncle Abbas, challenged Umayyad rule, drawing heavily on Shii rhetoric. In August 749 they occupied Kufa and defeated the Umayyad caliph the following year. But as soon as they were in power, the Abbasids cast aside their Shii piety and set up an absolute monarchy on the Persian model, which was welcomed by the subject peoples but strayed wholly from Islamic principles by embracing imperial structural violence. Their first act was to massacre all the Umayyads, and a few years later Caliph Abu Jafar al-Mansur (754–75) murdered Shii leaders and moved his capital to the new city of Baghdad, just thirty-five miles south of Ctesiphon. The Abbasids were wholly oriented toward the East.70 In the West, the victory of the Frankish king Charles Martel over a Muslim raiding party at Poitiers in 732 is often seen as the decisive event that saved Europe from Islamic domination; in fact, Christendom was saved by the Abbasids’ total indifference to the West. Realizing that the empire could expand no further, they conducted foreign affairs with elaborate Persian diplomacy, and the soldier soon became an anomaly at court.

  By the reign of Harun al-Rashid (786–809), the transformation of the Islamic Empire from an Arab to a Persian monarchy was complete. The caliph was hailed as the “Shadow of God” on earth, and his Muslim subjects—who had once bowed only to God—prostrated themselves before him. The executioner stood constantly beside the ruler to show that he had the power of life and death. He left the routine tasks of government to his vizier; the caliph’s role was to be a judge of ultimate appeal, beyond the reach of factions and politicking. He had two significant tasks: to lead the Friday prayers and to lead the army into battle. The latter was a new departure because the Umayyads had never personally taken the field with the army, so Harun was the first autocratic ghazi-caliph.71

  The Abbasids had given up trying to conquer Constantinople, but every year Harun conducted a raid into Byzantine territory to demonstrate his commitment to the defense of Islam: the Byzantine emperor reciprocated with a token invasion of Islamdom. Court poets praised Harun for his zeal in “exerting himself beyond the exertion [jihad] of one who fears God.” They pointed out that Harun was a volunteer who put himself at risk in a task not required of him: “You could, if you liked, resort to some pleasant place, while others endured hardship instead of you.”72 Harun was deliberately evoking the golden age when every able-bodied man had been expected to ride into battle beside the Prophet. Despite its glorious facade, however, the empire was already in trouble, economically and militarily.73 The Abbasids’ professional army was expensive, and manpower always a problem. Yet it was imperative to defend the border against the Byzantines, so Harun reached out to committed civilians who, like himself, were ready to volunteer their services.

  Increasingly, Muslims who lived near the empire’s frontiers began to see “the border” as a symbol of Islamic integrity that had to be defended against a hostile world. Some of the ulema (“learned scholars”) had objected to the Umayyads’ monopoly of the jihad because it clashed with Quranic verses and hadith traditions that made jihad a duty for everybody.74 Hence, when the Umayyads had besieged Constantinople (717–18), ulema, hadith-collectors, ascetics, and Quran-reciters had assembled on the frontier to support the army with their prayers. Their motivation was pious, but perhaps they were also attracted by the intensity and excitement of the battlefield. Now following Harun’s lead, they gathered again in even greater numbers, not only on the Syrian-Byzantine border but also on the frontiers of Central Asia, North Africa, and Spain. Some of these scholars and ascetics took part in the fighting and in garrison duties, but most supplied spiritual support in the form of prayer, fasting, and study. “Volunteering” (tatawwa) would put down deep roots in Islam and resurface powerfully in our own day.

  During the eighth century, some of these “fighting scholars” started to develop a distinctively jihadi spirituality. Abu Ishaq al-Fazari (d. c. 802) believed he was imitating the Prophet in his life of study and warfare; Ibraham ibn Adham (d. 778), who engaged in extreme fasts and heroic night vigils on the frontier, maintained that there could be no more perfect form of Islam; and Abdullah ibn Mubarak (d. 797) agreed, arguing that the dedication of the early Muslim warriors had been the glue that bonded the early ummah. Jihadis did not need the state’s permission but could volunteer whether the authorities and professional soldiers liked it or not. However, these pious volunteers could not solve the empire’s manpower problem, so eventually Caliph al-Mutasim (r. 833–42) would create a personal army of Turkish slaves from the steppes, who placed the formidable fighting skills of the herdsmen at the service of Islam. Each mamluk (“slave”) was converted to Islam, but because
the Quran forbade the enslaving of Muslims, their sons were born free. This policy was fraught with contradictions, but the Mamluks became a privileged caste, and in the not-too-distant future, these Turks would rule the empire.

  The volunteers had created another variant of Islam and could claim that their way of life came closest to that of the Prophet who had spent years defending the ummah against its enemies. Yet their militant jihad never appealed to the wider ummah. In Mecca and Medina, where the frontier was a distant reality, almsgiving and solicitude for the poor were still seen as the most important form of jihad. Some ulema vigorously opposed the beliefs of the “fighting scholars,” arguing that a man who devoted his life to scholarship and prayed every day in the mosque was just as good a Muslim as a warrior.75 A new hadith reported that on his way home from the Battle of Badr, Muhammad had said to his companions: “We are returning from the Lesser Jihad [the battle] and returning to the Greater Jihad”—the more exacting and important effort to fight the baser passions and reform one’s own society.76

  During the Conquest Era, the ulema had begun to develop a distinctive body of Muslim law in the garrison towns. At that time the ummah had been a tiny minority; by the tenth century, 50 percent of the empire’s population was Muslim, and the code of the garrisons was no longer appropriate.77 The Abbasid aristocracy had its own Persian code known as the adab (“culture”), which was based on the literate artistry and courtly manners expected of the nobility and was obviously unsuitable for the masses.78 The caliphs therefore asked the ulema to develop the standardized system of Islamic law that would become the Shariah. Four schools of law (maddhab) emerged, all regarded as equally valid. Each school had its distinctive outlook but was based on the practice (sunnah) of the Prophet and the early ummah. Like the Talmud, which was a strong influence on these developments, the new jurisprudence (fiqh) aimed to bring the whole of life under the canopy of the sacred. There was therefore no attempt to impose a single “rule of faith.” Individuals were free to select their own maddhab and, as in Judaism, follow the rulings of the scholar of their choice.