God's Armies

by Malcolm Lambert

  Arab valour and cavalry skills now turned against the faded and exhausted power of Iran ruled by the Sassanians, an ancient warrior aristocracy rigidly based on descent. It was remote from its gentry class and still more from the Aramaeans, the farmers who brought to them the fruits of their work from the fertile lands between the Tigris and Euphrates and who were not well treated by the aristocracy. In consequence the Sassanians had few loyal followers who would defend them and their state. The state religion was Zoroastrianism, based on country temples and served by a state-supported priesthood, who did not seek popular support. There were many Christians and Jews. In battle the aristocracy practised a cautious defensive tactic, relying on fortifications and palisades, and were unable to match the Arab cavalry.

  Khalid continued the existing policy of subduing all Arab tribes and, receiving help from a local dissident leader, made terms with Christians (mainly Nestorians) at the small city of Hira on the Euphrates obtaining tribute. After Khalid went on to attack Homs, a new attack was staged under Umar’s direction, but unfortunately under an inferior leader from Taif and by weaker troops taken from the Helpers of Medina. At the battle of the Bridge in 634, overawed by the elephants in the Persian army, they suffered a major defeat. Umar responded by assembling another army, making Abi Waqqas, a fiery early Companion from the Quraysh, its general. In 636 he went on to inflict a major defeat on the Persians at Qadisiyya, lying on the edge of the desert lands and at the beginning of fruitful agricultural territory. (This is the starting-point in modern times for pilgrims travelling from Iraq along the desert road to Mecca.) Qadisiyya’s fame echoes in all subsequent Iraqi popular history, to which Saddam Hussein bore witness when he issued ‘Qadisiyya bonds’ to finance his war against Iran. The Persians had overwhelming numerical superiority, but Umar’s forces prevailed against them because of their cavalry skills and archery.

  The victory made so strong an impression that other leading Persians in the lands beyond Qadisiyya, thinking they would escape death, offered the Arab troops means of crossing the web of waterways in the Fertile Crescent. Unexpected help to the Arab cause both in Syria and in Iran came from devastating visitations of the plague. This principally affected those who lived in the cities where the rats, whose fleas spread the disease, were congregated. It was not devoid of effect on Islam, as Umar had to replace some of his governors in Syria, but on the whole the plague favoured the Muslim attackers. Then the drive continued into Khuzistan, taking the legendary city of Susa with its tomb of Daniel and finally, after the death of Umar, reached the Zagros mountains.

  The Fall of Jerusalem, 638

  The defeat at Yarmuk in 636 was a great turning point: it sealed the fate of Jerusalem. Disorder and disruption had cut off the routes whereby provisions had traditionally reached the city and, as pathetic remnants of the defeated Byzantine army made their way back to Anatolia, it was clear that there would never again be a reliable field army to defend the city against enemy attacks.

  Sophronius, the patriarch of Jerusalem, scholarly, eloquent, devoted to the city to which he had addressed Greek poems, ruled on behalf of the Byzantine emperor. He exhorted the garrison and prayed, hoping against hope that somehow an intervention might take place to rescue his city, but he was aware that the defenders’ numbers were being reduced and that his people were hungry. Moreover, the Western Church of the Dark Ages was preoccupied with its own problems of Germanic barbarians. No help could be expected from them.

  Those who now besieged Jerusalem were in fact desert cavalrymen, ill equipped for such warfare, and Jerusalem had good walls; nevertheless there was a steady attrition of the garrison as a result of missiles thrown by the enemy and from losses which followed sorties made to disrupt the besiegers. In the spring of 638 Sophronius made his decision and conveyed his wish to surrender to the highest authority in Islam, Umar the caliph, and his wish was met. Sophronius asked for respect of the rights of Christians and Jews, which was granted.

  Stories of the surrender were various and laden with symbolism, contrasting the simplicity and poverty of the Muslims with the wealth of Sophronius, a churchman from a tradition which believed in honouring God through beautiful and expensive objects. Umar was the authentic example of the austerity which the Prophet had sought, and imposed ferocious discipline on his followers. He travelled with a whip, which he was ready to use, and it was known that when he found his own son drunk he subjected him to eighty lashes, which killed him. Umar had only two garments – one for the winter and one for the summer – and was accustomed to sleeping on the desert floor in his worn clothing; he may have thrown a white cloth over himself in honour of the pilgrimage. In one tradition Sophronius wore his bejewelled vestments; in another he wore black in mourning.

  Together, patriarch and caliph entered the city. Sophronius escorted Umar to the Church of the Holy Sepulchre and invited him to pray with him there, to which the caliph responded by pointing out that, if he chose to accept, his successors would treat it as an invitation to make it a mosque. Instead Umar unrolled his prayer mat and responded to the muezzin outside the Sepulchre, on a site where indeed a mosque was later built. Then he passed on to be shown the Temple Mount, the giant rectangular platform dug into the bedrock for the Temple created by Herod the Great and destroyed by the Romans. Massive blocks and rubble remained, as the extraordinary structure was too substantial to be totally eliminated. When the Emperor Constantine had made Christianity the religion of the Empire, the Christians left the rubble on the site, recalling the words of Jesus in the thirteenth chapter of St Mark’s Gospel, prophesying the fate awaiting Jerusalem: ‘Not one stone will be left upon another; every one will be thrown down.’ It was a form of triumphalism, announcing the victory of Christianity over both Judaism and Roman paganism.

  In the classic story of the Muslim capture of the city, Umar, seeing the ruinous remains of the Temple Mount, exclaimed against the desecration, scooped up some debris in the hem of his clothing and threw it into the Kidron valley. It was a compelling symbolic gesture, followed by his cavalrymen using all manner of containers, clothing, baskets, shields and pots to clear the surface.

  Eventually the Temple Mount was fully cleared, exposing what they believed to be the site of the sacrifice which Abraham in Jewish tradition was ready to make of his son Isaac at Mount Moriah. This site, early Muslims believed, lay at the end of the Temple Mount and carried a footprint on the bare rock, said by many Muslims to be that of Muhammad. The area was subsequently roofed over and celebrated by the great shrine of the Dome of the Rock. When clearance was finally made, it became the Haram al-Sharif, the Noble Sanctuary of the Muslims.

  The last act of the caliph was to decree the building of a mosque at the southern end of the Mount, at the opposite end from Abraham’s abortive sacrifice. It was called the al-Aqsa mosque, the Farthest Mosque, since it was the most westerly place of worship known to the Arabs. We know from the Christian visitor Arculf some three decades later, that it was a very simply improvised structure with planks and beams over ruins; but he said it could hold three thousand people.

  The Temple Mount had great significance for the Muslims because it was the setting for the Night Journey of the Prophet, described in sura 17 of the Quran:

  Glory to God

  Who did take his servant

  For a journey by Night

  From the Sacred Mosque

  To the Farthest Mosque

  Whose precincts We did

  Bless – in order that We

  Might show him some

  Of our Signs: for he

  Is the One who heareth

  And seeth (all things).‡

  The Sacred Mosque was the mosque at Mecca, surrounding the Kaba. It was held that, while Muhammad was meditating there, he was conducted, in a vision, by the Archangel Gabriel to Jerusalem where he conferred with Adam and Abraham and all the prophets – Jesus, Joseph and Moses – before being taken up on Buraq, the winged steed with a woman’s face, to enter the highe
r heaven.

  Another wave of conquest captured Egypt and did so in an extraordinarily short time. Amr ibn al-As, already successful at Dathin and a participant at the battle of Yarmuk, went on from taking Gaza to attack Egypt, with the blessing of Umar but very much on his own initiative and with a much smaller army than the Byzantines. By tradition Umar had second thoughts and wrote to Amr telling him to draw back if he had not already passed the frontier: guessing what would be in the letter, Amr avoided opening it till he had passed el-Arish, on the coastal road. Reinforced by additional troops under another early Muslim hero, Zubayr ibn al-Awam, he seized Alexandria. Resistance had been weakened as a result of the maltreatment of the Coptic Church by the bullying Byzantine patriarch Cyrus, who originated from the Caucasus and knew nothing of Egypt. Cyrus was intent on forcing Heraclius’s favoured doctrine of Monothelitism down the throats of the Monophysite Copts, who formed a majority in the country, and on doing so by brute force, using imprisonment and torture. But Egypt had also been affected by plague, which had diminished its population: probably there were insufficient troops to guard the great walls of Alexandria.

  From his move past el-Arish in late December 639 to an agreed surrender late in 641 and a final settlement in 642, Amr captured the bread-basket of the Byzantine Empire in just over two years. Umar, however, had the last word, as he required Amr and his supporters to create a garrison town at Fustat, which became the nucleus of old Cairo. Umar feared Muslims might be overwhelmed by the much greater numbers of non-Muslims or be seduced from Muslim belief by the Greek heritage in Alexandria. Tolerant terms were made for Christians, allowing freedom of worship, and the Copts rejoiced at being free from tyranny. Benjamin, the Coptic patriarch, whose brother had been tortured and killed under Cyrus, lived peacefully to a great age and was treated with honour by Amr.

  Umar, who proved to be the most dynamic and, indeed, terrifying of all the early caliphs, built on Abu Bakr’s achievement. Both were deploying disciplined armies, as desert warriors responded to jihad as individuals and therefore composed armies that were not tribal. Nor were they moving with wives and families in mass migration. Their traditional valour and fighting skill were being harnessed by a leadership from towns rather than the desert. Umar continued recruitment, boldly deployed large armies where needed, and made one other decision of prime importance when he insisted on rewarding successful warriors with pensions rather than land. His diwan system gave pensions on graduated scales according to the time when the recipients converted to Islam. It prevented Muslims from taking the land and creating appanages.

  In succession, Syrian cities fell to Muslim troops as the inhabitants were aware that there would be no more landward support after Yarmuk; coastal settlements such as Tripoli and Caesarea retained a measure of independence longer, being supplied by Byzantine sea power, but succumbed in the end. The rigidities of Umar’s outlook led to a somewhat artificial preference for the Emigrants over the Helpers. He would recognise talent where he found it, but gave preference in command to those who joined the Prophet earliest, and this inevitably caused irritation amongst the Helpers. He is reported later in life to have recognised the greater wisdom of his predecessor Abu Bakr, based on long business experience, in selecting men by virtue of their character rather than origin.

  Umar was a dour misogynist and tradition assigns to him a baleful role in the institution of the niqab. In desert conditions natural functions had to be carried out in the open, outside settlements; this was potentially embarrassing to women, and total covering of face and body would preserve their anonymity. Nonetheless an intervention by Umar in the Prophet’s lifetime seems to have reached beyond the demands of privacy in special circumstances to a demand for the covering of face and body outside the home at all times. Unprompted, the Prophet himself might well have remained much less rigorous: he loved women and children and was in private life a genial host, but the appearance of Umar always cast a chill on his noisy, cheerful family gatherings. Muhammad regulated family life, ending female infanticide, raising woman’s status from that of a chattel available to several men in volatile relationships in pre-Islamic desert society, and demanding consideration of the individual woman’s interests and property rights.

  Umar’s utter lack of any wish for personal power and enrichment, his devotion to the memory of the Prophet and his teaching, his accessibility and his untiring energy in planning and directing affairs and sending off armies served the new power in the Near East immeasurably. He was the greatest master of conquests. To the north of Arabia the former Byzantine power cracked and dissolved under his attacks. Until his death, Umar maintained his iron control and looked to solve the future security problems represented by the disparity between the overall numbers of Muslim conquerors – perhaps no more than 50,000 in all – and the much greater number of non-Muslims that inhabited the conquered lands. Muslim leaders were welcoming to rival troops who surrendered and were happy to use them in their armies. Still, the disparity between the numbers was overwhelming and Umar set about mitigating its dangers by a policy of establishing garrison towns and sending out scouts to choose suitable sites. Gathered together, Muslim troops and their dependants could support each other and provide strongpoints from which to ride out and suppress rebellions. Such a strongpoint should have good communications to Medina, be well watered and have sufficient agriculture but should also lie on the edge of desert territory, where the core of Muslim armies with their camels were at home. Kufa, on the banks of the Euphrates close to Hira, fitted these requirements and was formally laid out with roads and adequate space, but with the proviso that no house should have more than three apartments and none should be too high. Umar’s austerity, his military sense and his desire for equality among believers shine out from these arrangements. A similar decision was made when the former Sassanian capital at Ctesiphon was found to be unhealthy and Muslims transferred to a garrison town created at Basra. It was the last major achievement of Umar. He was as good as his word and lived with great simplicity in Medina without guards and gatekeepers, attending the mosque, shopping, talking informally. One day in 644 a Persian slave approached him with a grievance; receiving an answer he found unsatisfactory, he stabbed Umar in the mosque the next day and then killed himself.

  Caliph Uthman (644–56)

  As Umar lay dying, he gave a committee of six of the earliest Companions, including Ali, the right to decide who should succeed him. Over three days they deliberated in the mosque at Medina. One of the group being away, the remaining five came to their decision under a chairman, who renounced his own chances of succession. At a critical moment he put a question to the others, asking if the successful candidate would accept the decisions of the two previous caliphs, Abu Bakr and Umar. Abu Bakr, though eclectic in outlook, was Companion first and foremost, while Umar also kept a strong preference for Companions over Helpers. It was, Ali’s supporters felt, a loaded question, for Ali, with his sense for the equality and simplicity of Islam, would not have been willing to accept a predominance of Quraysh, early Companions though they were. He would have wished to balance them with more of the Helpers who had been converts at Medina. So he stood aside and the choice fell on the oldest man present, the 70 year old Uthman of the clan of the Umayya, a senior branch of the Quraysh. He was a wealthy businessman of the highest talent, an early convert who had put his money at Muhammad’s disposal for a multitude of tasks: buttressing the Prophet’s position in Medina, digging wells, aiding the poor, building – but not fighting. He was never going to be acceptable to veteran warriors of the years of expansion.

  Nevertheless, under his rule conquests continued and he listened to pleas for his generals to neutralise Cyprus and to build a Muslim navy. He made Jeddah a port to serve Mecca. Under his rule Cyprus was finally conquered outright in 653, and at the battle of the Masts in 655 Uthman’s men defeated the Byzantine navy. He showed practical engineering skills, widening the area of the Meccan centre of worship and creating embankment
s in Medina to stop flooding. He ordered an agreed version of the Quran to be compiled, to eliminate all conflicts between texts. It was another aspect of the drive for centralisation. Reciters of the Quran grumbled, but Ali himself praised Uthman’s work without stint.

  What went wrong? Uthman was surely one of the great caliphs, yet his reign ended in catastrophe. Tradition has it that troubles began with the loss of the Prophet’s signet ring in 651 as, with his habitual attention to detail, Uthman leaned over to point at a fault in stonework to workmen deepening a well in Medina: the signet ring fell from his finger into the depths, never to be recovered. And while it is true that his first six years were successful, the remaining six were not. He was determined to build a financial system to hold together the new massive Islamic Empire, overturning the loose, informal arrangements of Umar’s day and the late caliph’s insistence on austerity and equality in wealth. Without Umar understanding what was happening, state lands of the Sassanians had been taken and their wealth quietly enjoyed by the early fighters settled in Kufa: this was unsatisfactory to Uthman, who believed that surpluses should be forwarded to Medina and used for the whole Islamic community under a general accounting system, with lists being kept of those who were entitled to the diwan. Tax administrators were given a role independent of provisional governors, and a new post was created – that of supervisor of markets – which became routine in Muslim towns. A key position was given to a young cousin, Marwan.

  In Egypt, Amr the conqueror, it seems, had not forwarded revenues to Medina but used them to reward the conquerors who had fought and suffered with him. Uthman acted briskly and dismissed Amr, replacing him with an appointment of his own, Abdullah ibn Abi Sarh, with the duty of forwarding revenues to Medina. When the Greeks of Alexandria rose in revolt and were aided by a Byzantine naval force, Uthman reappointed Amr to fight them off, which he did, damaging Alexandria to make sure there could be no repeat attack. Uthman then showed his steel by leaving Amr as governor-general in Fustat but insisting that his man should be in charge of finance. Amr’s protests were disregarded, and he was again removed from office, making him an enemy. Uthman arranged for Abi Sarh to lead troops into North Africa in the hope that military prestige would ease his unpopularity, a move that culminated in victory over a Byzantine army at Sbeitla. That was all very well, but centralisation continued to create indignation, and a crisis arose in 656.