by Peter Watson
To fully appreciate the first Christian art today we need to make an imaginative leap. Inevitably seen by smoky candlelight, its flickering, iridescent golds and purples and shiny jewels provided magical, mysterious, unchanging majesty and splendour in an uncertain and hostile world. Byzantine basilicas were richly coloured theatres where the point of the drama was that it never changed. ‘That the Byzantines regarded these images as true likenesses gave their basilicas an intense, sacred aura that we can only guess at today.’67 These hard-won ideas adopted at the end of the iconoclast controversy, in 843, would remain unaltered for centuries. Not until the great age of cathedral building would change be allowed.
Few would argue with the proposition that Christian art is one of the leading glories of human achievement. All the more remarkable, therefore, that it was sparked at a time when other areas of intellectual activity were in decline. The very forces that produced Ravenna, San Lorenzo in Milan, or the monastery of St Catherine in Mount Sinai, had a dark side, to put alongside the light and colour with which they illuminated the world. The iconoclast controversy reminds us that cruelty and destruction and stupidity are as much the legacy of religious prejudice as are the finer things. That certain works of Cicero should survive only in one copy, and that the under-layer of a palimpsest, emphasises how fragile civilisation is.
12
Falsafah and al-Jabr in Baghdad and Toledo
To Chapter 12 Notes and References
‘Wisdom,’ according to an ancient Egyptian proverb, ‘has alighted on three things: the brain of the Franks, the hands of the Chinese, and the tongue of the Arabs.’ Together with archery and horsemanship, eloquence completed the three basic attributes of ‘the perfect man’ in the Arabia of the Bedouins.1
These Bedouins, the indigenous people of the Arabian peninsula, were hardly civilised. The word Arab, or Ereb in the Old Testament, means nomad, a way of life which, as we have seen, prevents the collection of many belongings and obviates the need for any kind of public architecture where art can flourish. It was the camel which made the deserts habitable but this animal wasn’t domesticated until around 1100 BC, so the Bedouins are unlikely to be much older. Being permanently on the move limits the size of tribes, to about six hundred maximum, and in the peninsula ghazw, or razzia in English, a variety of brigandage ‘was virtually a national institution’.2 In the words of one poet, ‘Our business is to make raids on the enemy, on our neighbour and on our own brother, in case we find none to raid but a brother.’3
This did not make for a settled civilisation but, as that remark implies, the one cultural area where the early Arabs distinguished themselves was in poetry. Even today the rhythm and rhyme–the very music–of words produces in Arabs what they call ‘lawful magic’ (sihr halal). ‘The beauty of a man,’ says another proverb, ‘lies in the eloquence of his tongue.’4 The oldest written poetry dates from the sixth century in the form of the qasidah, or ode. But by then it must already have existed as an oral tradition for many generations because there was in place a set of fixed conventions. In form the ode could be up to a hundred lines long and might have a single rhyme threading through the entire work. There was a stereotyped beginning, in which the poet would invariably give an evocative description of an exotic destination he had visited. There was a small number of favourite themes, including a long camel journey, an equally narrow mix of metaphors, allusions and sayings, and the poet would conclude by reflecting ‘on the limits of humanity in the face of an all-powerful world’. The odes were essentially narrative works rather than dramas or essays and what counted, for Arabs, was their delivery–it has even been argued that the steady rhythms of the qasidah are intended to echo the swaying of the camel as it moves across the desert. True or not, taken together these poems comprised the diwan of the Arabs, the ‘register’ of their collective experience.5 Poets and poetry had high prestige in the ancient Arab world.
The most famous ancient odes were the so-called ‘Seven Mu’allaqat’, or ‘suspended’ poems. These poems are still revered throughout the Arab world because, according to legend, they were awarded the annual prize at the poetry competition at the brilliant fair of Ukaz. This was a market town, near Mecca, which held an annual fair during the season when razzia was forbidden. Part of the fair included a literary congress where poets from all over the Arab world gathered to deliver their verses in a public contest. Following their victory at Ukaz, the Seven Mu’allaqat were written down in golden letters on linen sheets, and then suspended from the walls of the Ka’bah, the sacred stone at Mecca. They have been translated into English as The Seven Golden Odes.6
In keeping with their nomadic lifestyle, the Bedouins were not notably religious. Their early deities consisted of springs (oases) and rocks. There was a red stone deity in Ghaiman, a white stone at al-Abalat, a black stone at Najran and, the most famous, a cube-shaped meteorite at Mecca. This was the Ka’bah.7 Since they were a pastoral people, the Bedouin also worshipped several lunar deities but there was, in addition, Hubal, a rare idol in human form, which some people think was imported from Babylon. However, the main god at Mecca was al-ilah, allah, the god. This name at least, written as hlh, was very old, going back to the fifth century BC, and appears to have originated in Syria. The name Mecca comes from Makuraba, meaning sanctuary, and implies that it was a religious centre from the earliest times. Certainly, Ptolemy assumed as much when he mentioned it in his Geography, written around AD 150–160.
Muslims now refer to this period, the era before Islam, as the Jahiliyya, ‘the time of ignorance’, when there was no attempt to bring together all the disparate myths and legends scattered across Arabia. And it was, perhaps, this very unco-ordinated nature of their early beliefs that helped give Islam, when it did appear, such an immediate appeal. According to tradition, Muhammad was born around AD 570, in Mecca, into a family who were part of the tribe of Quraysh. Mecca was itself in the middle of change at the time. In theory it formed a link in the trade routes between Rome and the East (the great caravan routes ended at the port of Yemen). But in practice, for the Romans ‘Province Arabia’ was the land of the Nabateans, who lived further north, with their capital at Petra (now in Jordan). So, like Syria, Arabia was a border province with an uncertain status. Traders were as likely to travel east via the Silk Route through central Asia, meaning prosperity in the peninsula was far from assured. On top of this there was repeated catastrophe when, three times between 450 and 570, the great dam at Ma’rib burst, destroying vast tracts of fertile land. Arab legends tell of serious economic decline in the sixth century.8
One other factor is important in understanding the emergence of Islam: there was by then a ring of monotheism encircling Arabia. In addition to developments in the north, there had long been a community of Jews in the Yemen, and Abyssinia had by now been converted to Christianity. The Red Sea was narrow and much-crossed and early, pre-Islamic pottery shows many Christian influences. Mecca itself was at a crossroads, where the north–south route to the Yemeni ports crossed the east–west route from the Red Sea to Iraq. Two huge caravans, one in summer, one in winter, set out from Mecca each year. This is another way by which ideas would have travelled.
Very little is known about Muhammad, despite the fact that writing, biography and scholarship were all well-developed by the sixth and seventh centuries. The first biography we know about was written in 767, well after the prophet’s death, and even that is known only through a later edition, compiled in 833. As for non-Arab sources, the first mention of Muhammad by a Byzantine historian comes in the ninth century only, when he is referred to by Theophanes. We do have a physical description. He was neither tall nor short, and he was not fat. He had long, curly, black hair and a fair skin, dark black eyes with long lashes, broad shoulders, with strong arms and legs. He had a large mouth and beautiful teeth but he was not in any other way physically remarkable. What we also know is that, according to tradition, Muhammad’s father died when he was six, after which he was brough
t up by his grandfather, then by his uncle. A number of traditions have it that Muhammad’s relatives were the custodians of certain relics attached in some way to the Ka’bah, so the family may have had a particular pre-Islamic religious prestige. At twelve, he was taken by his uncle to Syria where he met a Christian monk, named Bahira according to the legend. At twenty-five, Muhammad married his employer, Khadijah, ‘a wealthy and high-minded widow, fifteen years his senior’.9 He helped run her business in the caravan trade for a time but it was the leisure afforded by his marriage that allowed Muhammad to spend time in a small cave just outside Mecca, called Hira.
He was in this cave one day in 610 when, suddenly, he heard a voice which ordered him to ‘Recite!’ At first he was unsure what to do and the voice repeated itself twice before he plucked up courage and replied ‘What shall I recite?’ At this the voice answered: ‘Recite in the name of the Lord who created all things, who created man from clots of blood. Recite, for thy Lord is the most generous, who taught by the pen, who taught man what he did not know.’ The night of that day later came to be known as ‘The Night of Power’. There were later episodes, both in the cave and at home in Mecca, when Muhammad was so disturbed that he asked his wife to cover him with blankets. To begin with there were several voices but later there was only one, that of the archangel Jibril or Gabriel. Muhammad recorded all the instructions he received–some were written on palm leaves, some on stones, some he just memorised. Later, as we shall see, they were collected into a book, the Qur’an.10
In some ways, the message Muhammad received was not new. It overlapped with Zoroastrian, Hebrew and Christian ideas. God is one and there is no other. There is a Judgement Day with eternal paradise for those who faithfully follow His instructions and worship Him, and there is everlasting punishment in hell for those who go against His will.
Even as a boy, Muhammad had been known in his family and among his friends as ‘al-Amin’, the faithful, and so he may always have commanded a certain amount of religious respect. His first converts were his family and friends and then, as with Christianity, among slaves and the poorer classes. This brought him his first opposition, from the wealthier families, and he was forced to seek refuge on the other side of the Red Sea, in Ethiopia. There his visions continued, the most famous being the so-called isra, the nocturnal journey in which Muhammad was transported first to Jerusalem, and then to heaven, where he saw the face of God. This tradition is the basis for Jerusalem being the third holiest site in Islam, after Mecca and Madina.
The second crucial stage in Muhammad’s career, after the voices in the cave, began in 621. In that year, while he was still in exile across the Red Sea, he was approached by some emissaries from a small town about 200 miles north of Mecca, called Yathrib. He had met some of these emissaries at the annual fair in Ukaz, they had been impressed by him, and now asked him if he would arbitrate in the town’s disputes. In return, they said, they would offer protection for him and his followers. Muhammad agreed but he didn’t hurry matters. About sixty families were sent on ahead, to test the waters, and he himself followed the next year. This migration, the Hijra in Arabic, is regarded by the faithful as the decisive moment in Islam and later, when the Muslim calendar was established, it started from the year in which the Hijra took place. The centre of the new religion was now transferred to Yathrib, referred to by the faithful as al-Madina: the City.11
In Madina the picture we have of Muhammad is mixed. On the one hand he became both a religious and a political and military leader. On the other, he was an ordinary citizen, who mended his own clothes and lived in an unpretentious clay house, surrounded (eventually) by twelve wives and lots of children, many of whom died. He continued to develop his ideas, gradually diverging from Judaism and Christianity. In Madina he substituted Friday for the Sabbath, instituted the adhan, the call to prayer from the minaret, fixed Ramadan as a month of fasting, and changed the qiblah, the direction to be faced when praying, from Jerusalem to Mecca. He also authorised the holy pilgrimage to al-Ka’bah in order to kiss the black stone. This was provocative because at that time al-Madina and Mecca were rival towns and in fact the third stage of Islam arose when, after a war of eight years, Muhammad’s 300 troops secured victory over an army more than three times the size and captured the city. In the process, 360 idols were allegedly destroyed and Islam substituted. The area around the Ka’bah was declared sacred. Originally only polytheists (i.e., pagans) were forbidden from approaching the Ka’bah but gradually it was applied to all non-Muslims. According to Philip Hitti, in his History of the Arabs, first published in 1937, ‘no more than fifteen Christian-born Europeans have thus far succeeded in seeing the two Holy Cities and escaping with their lives’.12 This injunction of a sacred area around the Ka’bah is of course strongly reminiscent of that which applied to non-Jews approaching the inner sanctum of the Temple in Jerusalem (see above, page163).
The fact that Muhammad was a political leader as well as a religious figure was very important for Islam. He made laws, dispensed justice, imposed taxes, waged war and formed alliances. His aim in all this was the restoration of true monotheism which he felt had been corrupted or distorted elsewhere. ‘He was God’s final revelation and at his death (according to tradition on 8 June 632) the revelation of God’s purpose for humankind had been completed: after Muhammad there would be no more prophets and no further revelations.’13
As a set of ideas, Islam is closer to Judaism than to Christianity. In the Middle Ages, however, it was so similar to both monotheisms that, to begin with, many Christians thought it was merely a heretical Christian sect rather than a completely new faith.14 Dante, in The Divine Comedy, places Muhammad in one of the lower levels of hell, together with the ‘sowers of scandals and schism’.15 As with Judaism, in Islam God’s unity is the supreme reality. He has ninety-nine ‘excellent names’, which is why the full Muslim rosary has ninety-nine beads. Islam is also closer to Judaism than Christianity in that its God is more a god of might and majesty than a god of love. This fits with Islam’s concept of religion as a ‘submission’, or a ‘surrender’ to the will of God. What appears to have particularly impressed Muhammad is Abraham’s willingness to sacrifice his son in the supreme test set by Yahweh. Abraham’s submission, or aslama in Arabic, provided the word for the new religion.
After the idea of God as a unity, and submission, the next-most important idea in Islam is that Muhammad was the true messenger of God ‘whose only miracle was the Qur’an’.16 This solitary miracle reflects the essentially simple nature of the new faith–it had no theological complexities, like the Resurrection, the Trinity or Transubstantiation. There were no sacraments and there was no priestly hierarchy, at least not to begin with. The solitary miracle implied that the Qur’an was the word of God and therefore ‘uncreated’. By far the worst sin, and in fact the only unpardonable one, was shirk, identifying other gods with Allah.
Islam also identifies five ‘pillars’, by which the faith is pursued. The first pillar is profession of the faith, the second is prayer. The devout Muslim must pray five times a day and turn towards Mecca.17 However, the Friday noon prayer is the only public observance in Islam and is obligatory for all males.18 The third pillar is zakah, a tithe to help the poor and to provide funds to build mosques. According to Pliny, pre-Islamic Arabs had to pay a tax to their gods before they were allowed to sell spices at market, so it may be that Muhammad adopted this ancient idea. The fourth pillar is fasting from dawn till sunset during the month of Ramadan. Fasting was well known among Jews and Christians but there is no evidence of its use in pre-Islamic Arabia. The final pillar is the pilgrimage (haj or hazz)–once in a lifetime the faithful, of both sexes and if they can afford it, must visit Mecca at a holy time of the year. This idea may also have originated with ancient solar cults, which would congregate at the Ka’bah after annual fairs.
From the outside, then, there is a sizeable overlap between Islam and Judaism and Christianity, not to mention ancient pagan prac
tices. One idea that differs from these other faiths is jihad, the holy war, espoused by certain small sects as the controversial sixth pillar. The Qur’an does specify that one of the duties of Islam is to keep pushing back the geographical boundaries that separate the dar al-Islam, the land of Islam, from the dar al-harb, ‘the war territory’, but the extent to which this is to be achieved by war, and how ‘war’ is to be understood, is far from clear.
In 633, the year after Muhammad died, Abu Bakr, the first caliph, observed that the Qur’anic memorisers, the huffaz, were dying out. Fearing what this might mean, he began to collect the palm leaves, stones, bones and parchment on which (according to tradition) the scattered verses of the ‘book’ were written. This took some time and it was left to his successor, Umar, together with Zayd ibn-Thabit, who had been secretary to the Prophet, actually to put the verses together, though it was yet another man, the third caliph, Uthman (644–656), who organised their final form. This edition, known as the Uthmani, existed in three copies, at Damascus, al-Basrah and al-Kufah, and became the authorised version, in use to the present day. That is the traditional view. Modern scholars suspect, however, that there was no involvement of Abu Bakr. Instead, they think Uthman found various copies all over the Arab world, with divergent readings. He canonised the Medina version and ordered all others destroyed. On this view, the text of the Qur’an was finalised by two viziers only in 933. More than three hundred years therefore elapsed before the authorised version of the Qur’an was settled, much longer than for the Christian Bible after the Crucifixion.