by Andrew Marr
Constantine with his co-emperor in the East, Licinius, went on to declare, at Milan in 313, an Edict of Toleration, ending persecutions; but even this did not refer to Christianity specifically, just to ‘cults’ in general. He seems to have believed in the general notion of one god, but to have kept his options open. When he finally turned on Licinius and the Eastern Empire in 324–5, and defeated him in battle – when again Constantine used Christian symbols – he indulged in an orgy of political killing. He murdered Licinius and his son, who was only ten and was also his own nephew. After dark rumours of an affair between his own illegitimate son Crispus – who had risen to the rank of consul – and his wife Fausta, both of them died too. There are arguments about precisely what happened, but all the original sources agree that Crispus died by poison and Fausta by being suffocated or boiled to death in her bath.
One historian argues that, in fact, Crispus killed himself, and that Fausta, pregnant by him, was trying to abort her unborn child in the scalding water;28 others insist these were political executions, cold for Crispus, hot for Fausta, ordered by Constantine. Either way, they are events more evocative of life in the Ch’in court than of the behaviour of a model Christian ruler. And when, in 330, Constantine fixed up a new capital for the reunited empire, away from Rome, he chose a small pagan city in Greece called Byzantium – and decorated it with statues of pagan gods.
Yet Constantine clearly valued the Church, and in particular the bishops, who throughout the eastern Mediterranean had become authority figures. They could be used to impose order in towns where the imperial bureaucracy was almost absent. And it was a ferocious and violent dispute inside the Church itself about the nature of Christ, setting bishops against bishops – the so-called Arian Heresy – that put Constantine at the centre of Church affairs. To resolve the argument and put an end to the disruption, in 325 he summoned the rival camps to a meeting, the Council of Nicaea, and enforced a compromise which resulted in the famous Nicene creed (‘We believe in one God . . . And in one Lord Jesus Christ, the Son of God . . . And in the Holy Spirit . . .’).
As emperor, Constantine saw himself as a bringer of order – if need be, to the Christian Church too, which should be as united and single as the empire. He began a huge programme of building, including a church on the presumed burial site of St Peter in Rome, and over the cave where Jesus was supposed to have been buried in Jerusalem. In return Eusebius, his biographer, told Constantine to his face in 336 that he had a semblance of ‘heavenly sovereignty’, and that his government conformed to the ‘Divine original’ and ‘the monarchy of God’. Constantine had received from Jesus not a message of humility and love, but of power; he was ‘the only Conqueror among the Emperors of all time to remain Irresistible and Unconquered’.29
It sounds remarkably like the kind of tribute that the pagan Julius Caesar, or Augustus, would have graciously accepted. Had Perpetua and the hundreds of others died for this? Perhaps it was the deal that Constantine always aimed for. The ‘unconquered sun god’, or Jesus Christ? It hardly mattered, so long as imperial authority and the unity of the empire were achieved. Constantine may have felt that he had solved the conundrum presented to the West by emperors and martyrs, by Christ and Paul and Caesar and Pompey; that he had achieved a final resolution of the competing tugs of spiritual yearning and earthly power.
Of course, he had not. Even as the numbers of Christians soared, now that it was safe, even advantageous, to convert, and as churches were being raised all around the Mediterranean, the Church itself was starting to behave like an earthly power. It would divide, fight within itself, require kings and emperors to go to battle, and persecute its enemies with Roman ferocity. And after all that, it would face an even greater peril – a new religion, also built on the stories of the Jews, which came thundering out of the desert at the point of a sword.
Religious Blitzkrieg
The image is remembered throughout the world, and it is unforgettable; tens of thousands of wild Bedouin warriors on their camels, erupting out of the empty wastes of the Arabian desert, scimitars flashing as they fall upon the unsuspecting prosperous towns of late Roman and Persian times. The victories thunder like trumpet blasts as proud cities collapse – Cairo, Alexandria, Jerusalem, Ctesiphon, Acre. Had the armies of Islam not failed to take Constantinople, despite its tremendous fortress walls, in 717, all Europe might have been studded with mosques and minarets rather than cathedrals and bell-towers. As it was, Muslim influence would break the Persians, change China; and, by cutting off Western Christianity from the more mystical Christian traditions of Asia, dramatically change the West too. That all this could be attributed to a middle-aged trader on the edge of the desert, hearing divine words in a cave, does indeed seem little short of miraculous.
Yet much about the story is inaccurate. To start with, old Arabia, whence Islam erupted, was emphatically not an empty wasteland. In prehistoric times, from around 8000 to 4000 BC, it had been lush and fertile, if the bones found there are anything to go by – rhinoceros, giraffe, wild pigs and crocodile – and a happy hunting ground for African tribes who left behind rock art. The dry period created the vast deserts of the north, the ‘empty quarter’ reaching into Syria, but around the coasts, particularly in the south, were fertile areas where complex civilizations had evolved long before Islamic times. In the east, in the area we know today as the Gulf states and Oman, then the country of Dilmun, good ports linked Mesopotamia and the Indus valley civilization with the Mediterranean, trading wool, copper and cereals.
Felix (happy, or fortunate) Arabia was known in the ancient world as a remarkably prosperous area, which later fell under the sway of the Assyrian, Babylonian and Persian empires. Alexander the Great was keen on seizing these Arab lands, lured by stories of their wealth and in particular the hugely valuable myrrh, frankincense and cinnamon they offered; he died too soon to benefit from them. In the south of the huge peninsula there had been a series of powerful kingdoms, some tracing their origins back to Noah’s son, Shem. Of these, thanks to the Bible, the best-known is Saba (as in the Queen of Sheba), itself conquered by the kingdom of Himyar. These realms may have been marginal to a Mediterranean-fixated view of history, but they were rich and long-lived. The Sabaeans lasted for around a thousand years; a Roman military force sent by Augustus could not defeat them. They had had to develop sophisticated systems of water management including large underground aqueducts, some of which still work. In addition, they had created a great dam, the Marib dam, to trap monsoon waters and allow the irrigation of their fields.
For centuries it worked well until under the Himyar kingdom, about 570, it collapsed, causing a mass migration from the south of the Arabian peninsula to the north. Before that, the Sabaeans’ trade in spices and oils was famous, and their agriculture was described as a ‘garden paradise’. The biblical tale of the Queen of Sheba (this, pre-Islam, was an area with a tradition of female rulers) travelling to Solomon with a great caravan of gold, spices and precious stones may be a folk memory of the great wealth of the area. Sheba’s biblical queen is supposed to have reigned around 950 BC, but hard information is negligible. There is, however, a vast ‘temple of the moon god’. Mahram Bilqis in present-day Yemen is ‘The Sacred Precinct of Bilqis’, an alternative name for the Queen of Sheba, and is some 12,000 square yards in size. Though only partially excavated, it has revealed a tantalizing fragment of fresco, an alabaster head of a woman and some beautiful limestone carvings, as well as monumental pillars and meticulous stonework. It was still being visited by pilgrims until around AD 600.
These powerful but fallen civilizations were crucial to the Arabia in which Muhammad grew up. The migrations caused by lack of water had produced seething, densely populated oasis towns, as well as the trading and fishing towns on the coastline where he would live and begin to preach. The urban, trading and farming Arabs of the coasts and the south were very different from the desert tribes who managed to survive by grazing camels, goats and sheep further no
rth. Their use of camels (evolved from the smaller camelids, which had migrated from prehistoric America into Asia) allowed them to move from oasis to oasis in ways no other people could. Both the Romans, in their Eastern Empire phase, and the Persians had found themselves forced to try to hem in the Arab raiders with buffer states, composed of Christian Arabs, who helped keep the peace. The Bedouin of the true desert were famous for their tight tribal ties, essential to their survival. Some of their war poetry bears a passing resemblance to passages of Homer.
There is little direct information about the life of Muhammad from his own time. Little seems to have been written down, and the scholar Tom Holland has argued recently that much was probably censored. Some two centuries on, collections of stories about him and sayings attributed to him were circulating – the Hadiths – but virtually nothing survives from the early 600s when the great events took place. Holland says:
Of written evidence composed before 800, the only traces we possess are either the barest shreds of shreds, or else the delusory shimmering of mirages . . . The voices of the Arab warriors who dismembered the ancient empires of Persia and Rome, and of their sons, and of their sons in turn – let alone of their daughters and granddaughters – have all been silenced, utterly and for ever. Neither letters nor speeches nor journals . . .30
There are fragmentary references to this Arab leader in Christian writing from around the Prophet’s time, and few doubt he really existed; but we must tread carefully.
So far as is known, therefore, in 622, after falling out with elders of his own tribe, the Quraysh, at Mecca, who objected to his claim to having received new messages from a single god, Muhammad led his followers on a trek north to the friendlier oasis town of Yathrib, later renamed Medina. There he continued to recite words he said God had dictated to him, initially while he was sitting alone in a cave; when written down, this speech direct from Allah would become the Koran. In Medina, apparently, Muhammad also began to deliver rules by which his followers should live. These included rules about the role of women, about honesty in trade (Muhammad had been a merchant), the correct attitude to war-making, and much else. It seems he retained much of traditional Arab tribal custom, perhaps in order to win over as many people as possible; if so, it was this very flexibility that produced the array of Muslim domestic and dress rules that are so controversial now. From Medina, at this stage friendly to Jews and Christians, those other people of the Book, Muhammad began to expand his influence up and down the caravan routes of the Arab world.
One of the secrets of the explosive spread of Islam is that, for the first time, Muhammad and his circle were able to yoke together the wealthier Arabs of the coastal areas and the Bedouin. There seems to have been a population explosion at around this time, and once the raiding, feuding Arab tribes of the desert had accepted the authority of the Prophet, there was little alternative but to send them out, towards the unbelievers. Across much of central Asia, where the speed of Islam’s advance seemed almost miraculous, the Arab armies – usefully for them – were entering sparsely populated territory. Any other course but expansion would perhaps have led to breakdown and civil war in Arabia itself.31 But this was not a case of a purely marginal, nomadic people suddenly transformed and then turning their attention to the civilized world; the people of Arabia had considered themselves cultured and important long before Islam.
The second misconception is that the Arabs fell upon a peaceable and united Christian world. The first waves of fighting merely spread Islam across the Arab world, and the most dramatic early victim was the Sassanid kingdom of Persia. The Sassanids, who had coexisted with the Romans for four hundred years, whose empire harboured Zoroastrians as well as various sects of Christians and Jews and who had been in close touch with China and India, had represented a golden age in Persian culture. But their endless wars with the Byzantines had exhausted them, and by the time the Arabs attacked in 632 they were poorly led by a boy-king and in severe economic decline. Syria and the ‘Holy Land’ were only just recovering from plague and war. They had suffered a catastrophic epidemic which had depopulated towns and villages and left fields untilled. The Byzantine Roman emperor Heraclius had just achieved a massive victory over the Sassanids, driving them out of Palestine and Syria after twenty years and restoring the ‘true cross’ to Jerusalem. He had then set about trying to impose Byzantine Christian orthodoxy on an area that had had strong rival traditions.
So when the armies of Islam arrived, they attacked lands still struggling to recover from disease and war, and with nothing of the self-confidence of the Christian Roman world or of the Persian one of just a few decades earlier. And though the armies of the Prophet would use camels, their horses were more important in battle; they fought with conventional straight swords, often imported from India, not with scimitars.
Does this explain the shocking military success of early Islam? No: these are only some useful corrections to the most simplistic version of what happened. Even then, it remains an astonishing story. Within a single generation after Muhammad’s death, the Arabs had destroyed the Sassanid empire; taken the whole of the North African coast including the ancient civilization of Egypt; seized Palestine, Syria and what is now Turkey, and come almost to the gates of Constantinople itself. The dates tell the story better than words can: in 637, Syria is gone; in 638, Jerusalem falls; in 639, Mesopotamia and in 642 Egypt; at the same time raids and then invasions assault Cyprus and Carthage. In the east, the Arabs take Kabul in 664 and northern India around 710. By then they have crossed into Spain, ended the Christian Visigothic kingdom there. In 732 they touch the limit of the possible, reaching into central France, before they turn back. After this, the Mediterranean regions, the Middle East and Europe can never be united as the Romans had hoped. It can never be a Western version of China, because it will always be divided by religion.
This would, no doubt, have disappointed the Prophet, who believed his message was for all people of all races and previous faiths. Few ideas have had as much physical impact. The simple, austere creed of submission by all to One God and to the teachings of his Prophet drove these astonishing conquests. It was not a question of superior military technology or new tactics, nor access to special wealth or manpower. The ‘hordes’ of Muslim conquerors were modest in size compared with the established armies of the late classical age. Here was monotheism stripped of its Jewish particularism and its Christian humility, armed from the first against unbelievers. It gave invasion and expansion a religious meaning. It was an empire, this time, of individual believers, not the imposition of the beliefs of an emperor. It was a mass movement, not a landmass, directed by religious leaders and generals but driven by a new sense of belonging.
Hazy as he may seem to historians, Muhammad must have been a great leader. As with most religious pioneers, it is now hard to envisage how he was originally seen, but he is one of the best examples of the difference a single man can make. The change he imposed on the world easily outstrips the impact of Alexander or Julius Caesar – it is rivalled so far only by Zheng, China’s First Emperor, and by St Paul. As a religious figure, Jesus has claimed more support – perhaps around a third of the world’s believers today as against a fifth to a quarter who are Muslim. At the time when the people of Asia and North Africa were being converted to Islam, Christian missionaries were pushing north into today’s Germany, France and Britain. But as we have seen, Christianity was the work of many leaders. And Jesus was preaching to Jews, not Rome or the West.
Like Christianity, Islam would suffer splits and would be compromised by having to deal with the earthly problems of power and politics. It would take on different shades in different conquered areas; like Christianity, it would have its eras of intellectual advance and of sleepy decay. It began proudly declaring itself open to all people equally, and indeed the first voice to call Muslims to prayer was that of a black former slave, Bilal. Yet soon Islam would be a slave-owning and slave-trading society too. Proclaiming itself simple
and united, it would split into warring factions, at first centring on who had the better claim to inherit leadership. The majority Sunni Muslims supported Abu Bakr, one of Muhammad’s close companions and his wife’s father; while Shias supported the claim of Ali, his cousin and son-in-law. Even today, the two traditions of Islam are not particularly fond of each other, as we know.
The change Islam brought to the world provides a fitting conclusion to this section. From the rise of Rome and the unification of the Chinese states, the great conundrum had been about how earthly power and new, mass religions would be able to coexist. The imperial powers, better organized than ever before, and over larger areas, had nothing to offer beyond force and security. All suffered the humdrum erosions caused by leadership crises, changes in climate, economic downturns and lost battles. No leaders, not even Caesar or Augustus, had been able to transform themselves into the focus for a successful religious movement. For most of the masses, loyalty and adherence were a practical, not an emotional, matter.
Instead, the new ethical and spiritual ideas that gave people something they felt they needed had all come from the margins: from the quarrelsome provincial Jews, the northern Indian idealists who followed the Buddha, the Christians at the edges of the Roman empire, the Arab people of the southern desert. Some rulers simply tried to repress any inconvenient religious movement; this became a habit in China, as we have seen. Others, such as Constantine, tried for full-scale takeover.
But only Islam determined that earthly power and religious belief ought to become, in effect, the same thing. The sword was strong – an old thought. The word was strong – a newer thought. But for a century of dramatic collapse and change, the word, armed with the sword, proved unstoppable.