In the Shadow of the Sword: The Birth of Islam and the Rise of the Global Arab Empire

by Tom Holland

  Nothing, then, could have been more offensive to Jews and Christians alike than the hosting of a festival at such a spot—and sure enough, both had made repeated efforts to redeem it from the polluted attentions of the pagans. As far back as the time of Jesus, a Jewish king had raised a large wall around both tree and well, with the aim of staking out the very place—the maqom—where Abraham “had stood before the Lord.”63 Some three hundred years later, Constantine had gone one better by ordering a church to be constructed directly over the oak. As well he might have done: for Christians were agreed that the three strangers entertained by Abraham could only have been the Trinity, and that Mamre, as a result, had always been a place of “pristine sanctity, devoted to the worship of our Saviour.”64 Certainly, in the stern judgement of Constantine, all pagan claims to the site were the merest falsehood and blasphemy. Stripped of all its obscene accumulation of idols and bloodstained altars, the oak stood revealed as what it had been way back in the time of Abraham: a thoroughly Christian tree.

  The pagans, however, oblivious to this transcendent truth, had persisted in visiting Mamre. More than a century after Constantine had attempted to ban their summer festival, they were still flocking to the sacred oak, where they would sacrifice cockerels, pour wine and throw cakes into Abraham’s well, and ostentatiously abstain from sex. Such behaviour, at a time when paganism elsewhere in the Holy Land was being harried and bullied into extinction, required a deal of nerve. Nor was it greatly surprising that most of the festival-goers came from beyond the borders of Palestine. Indeed that they belonged to a people widely scorned across the Near East as “the most superstitious and ignorant in the world,”65 and whose contempt for monarchs and their laws had long been notorious.

  The Arabs, tribesmen who haunted the interminable wastes that stretched south of the Fertile Crescent, could boast a record of barbarism more venerable than the empires of either Persia or Rome. “Dwelling as they do in the distant desert, they know neither overseers nor officials”: a state of affairs so mind-bogglingly unnatural that even a king of Mesopotamia, back in the distant days when Solomon’s temple still stood in Jerusalem, had thought to make a note of it.66 A thousand years on, opinions had barely improved. The Arabs appeared as reluctant as ever to put down roots. They were despised not merely as pagans, but as pagans who lived in tents. To an aristocrat in his palace, as to a peasant in his field, the inveterate shiftlessness of such nomads was both a menace and an affront. That the Arabs, in their disdain for the norms of civilisation, were possessed of an almost timeless quality of ferocity, like that of the deserts where they lurked, was widely taken for granted. Less than human, they were something more than beasts. In battle, it was not unknown for them to drink their victims’ blood, while even in their love-making, so it was darkly rumoured, “they were quite explosively violent—women as well as men.”67 Nervous travellers venturing beyond the limits of cities and farms viewed the half-naked Arabs on their horses or camels as a menace no less deadly than the most ferocious desert predator: “For, like rapacious kites, which have only to catch sight of prey from on high to swoop down upon it with outstretched talons, they make off with whatever they can seize.”68

  An insult that would no doubt have delighted the Arabs themselves. To be as free and as feared as a bird of prey was, in many ways, everything they most desired. What other peoples condemned as shiftlessness, they prized as liberty. “I journeyed with a brown whip, its handle bare of its original thonging, with its lash hanging from its loop”:69 to ride like this, alone with the horizon infinite all around, was to know oneself, with a rare and vaunting conviction, the utter opposite of a slave. Wherever Arabs gathered, whether in the shade of an embroidered tent or around a fire beneath the stars, they were sure to sing the praises of wine, slim-waisted women, and warriors who acknowledged no master. The nomads of the desert might have been despised—but they were also feared. When the Persians charged Dahag, the demon king, with having been one of their number, and the Romans condemned them for their slaving and kidnapping as agents of the Devil, the Arabs were being paid a form of tribute. Better a bandit than a dependant, after all. Who were the subjects of the Shahanshah or of Caesar to presume otherwise?

  In truth, though, the Arabs were not quite the lone wolves of their victims’ paranoia. Their realm was an unremittingly harsh one, and no man could possibly survive amid the sand, salt flats and wind-weathered lava beds without others to watch out for him. Even to the hardiest and haughtiest warrior, family was everything. “We follow the ways of our forefathers, those who kindled wars and were faithful to the ties of kinship.”70 This resounding brag expressed the very essence of an Arab’s identity. Extended networks of relatives blurred seamlessly into tribe. All men who could claim descent, however implausibly, from a single imam—a founding father—were to be reckoned his sons. Bound by a single inheritance of custom and achievement, of Sunna, warriors who might otherwise have torn each other to shreds were enabled to unite without loss of face, and turn on all those neighbouring bands of rivals who might have done the same. The great joy of an Arab’s life, even more than the pillaging of caravans or the slaughtering of camels in honour of some ivory-skinned beauty, was to feud violently with another tribe. Much was bound to derive from it: honour, excitement, maybe even a well or two. That there was an essential pointlessness to such contests, an unvarying and remorseless quality much like that of the desert itself, did not in any way lessen the enjoyment of those who indulged in them. The great deeds performed by a tribe’s ancestors, rehearsed as they were in glowing, if suspiciously interchangeable, verses by its poets, offered its warriors both backdrop and inspiration. Memories of ancient battles, if gilded with sufficient imagination, might serve to dignify even the most squalid scuffle. As a result, among the Arabs, past and present were barely distinguishable. While it might be possible for one particularly recent and stirring episode to serve the tribe who commemorated it as a line drawn in the otherwise interminable sands of time, all it needed was for some new victory to be won, some new livestock or women to be seized, and the line would promptly be erased and quite forgotten. Certainly, the lore that every tribe lovingly preserved about itself was concerned with nothing so tedious as chronology. It was known quite simply as ayyam—“days.”

  Yet in truth, even in the remotest stretches of the desert, the Arabs were never wholly immune to the tug of great events in the world beyond. The ebb and flow of great power politics had even, on occasion, come to alter their entire way of living. Time was, for instance, when Arab merchants had been famously sweet-smelling: for frankincense, an aromatic spice that had once been burned in near-industrial quantities on pagan altars, was cultivated exclusively in Himyar, on the southernmost tip of their peninsula. Back in the age of Solomon, the queen of this incense-growing land—Sheba, as it had then been known—had visited the great king in Jerusalem, trailing perfumed clouds of glory in her wake; while more recently, among the Romans, its inhabitants had been famed as the happiest and most prosperous of men. All that, however, had changed with the toppling of the pagan gods. Christ demanded no incense. The trade between Rome and the frankincense growers of Himyar had duly withered. The Arabs, no longer renowned for their perfumes, became notorious instead for their reek of leather and camel shit. Caravans might still toil across the desert, but those who rode alongside them now tended to play the demeaning and insecure role of middle men. That it was worth the while of camels freighted with all the luxuries of India—pepper, gemstones and castrated pageboys—to plod their way across the sands towards Palestine and Syria owed everything to the whims of distant emperors, to the calculations of bureaucrats. A treaty renegotiated here, a customs post closed down there, and everything would abruptly change. Merchants, camel-drivers, bandits: all might find themselves ruined overnight.

  Prey as they were to such insecurity, there had always been some Arab tribes eager to set their fortunes on a firmer footing. Some, like the Nabataeans, a people who occupi
ed the southern fringes of Palestine, had exploited their position between the trade routes of the desert and the Mediterranean to create a fabulously wealthy commercial hub, centred on their pink-hued capital of Petra. Others, looking to take a short cut to power, had aimed to infiltrate the cities of other peoples and then to seize their commanding heights: a policy of playing cuckoo in the nest that explained why the kings of Edessa had been of Arab descent. Nevertheless, the independence of such states, menaced as it was by the domineering shadow of Rome, had always been a rickety thing. As early as AD 106, the kingdom of Nabataea had been gobbled up entire, and reconstituted as the province of Arabia—and although Edessa held out against formal assimilation into the empire for a further 150 years, it had never been left in any doubt as to its thoroughly subordinate status. Riches and sophistication: these, it appeared, might certainly be obtained by the Arabs. The price, however, was a high one: the loss of honour, of liberty, of all that made an Arab.

  How, then, was this awkward circle to be squared? In 270, just a few decades after the annexation of Edessa, there had arrived a spectacular straw on the wind. Zenobia, the queen of an oasis city named Palmyra, midway between Antioch and Ctesiphon, had made a pitch for nothing less than the whole of the Roman Near East. Syria, Egypt and much of Asia Minor all fell to the sudden onslaught of her armies. Granted, her moment in the sun was fleeting: defeated outside Antioch in 272, she was taken to Rome, and paraded as a living trophy, while her desert capital was abandoned to slow decay and oblivion. The true significance of her comet-like blaze, however, had lain less in its trajectory than in the circumstances that had made it possible. Zenobia’s own defeat and humiliation had been paralleled, twelve years previously, by the fate of the Emperor Valerian. His captor, of course, had been a rival monarch, the lord of a dominion no less intimidatingly formidable than Rome’s: the recently established empire of Iranshahr. By using a Caesar as his mounting block, Shapur had proclaimed—in terms that no Roman emperor would ever again be able to discount—the arrival of an authentic equal upon the global scene. For the Arabs too, the implications of the rise to greatness of the House of Sasan had been momentous. The deserts where they lived had abruptly come to constitute the frontier not of one superpower but of two. Situated as they now were on the world’s deadliest geopolitical fault-line, they would never again be able to claim even the most precarious neutrality. Yet the deadly grinding of the twin tectonic plates of Rome and Iranshahr, even as it crushed for ever the independence of such cities as Edessa and Palmyra, spelled opportunity as well as calamity for upwardly mobile Arabs. In a war zone, after all, what more precious commodity than bands of seasoned warriors? Rome and Persia alike: both had urgent need of swords. The Arabs found themselves ideally placed to hawk their services to the highest bidder.

  To the Romans, of course, there was nothing remotely novel about the employment of barbarians. As along the Rhine prior to the collapse of the western empire, so along the borders of Syria and Palestine, the imperial authorities were well versed in the hiring of tribes as confederates: as foederati. Even prior to the emergence of the Persian threat, back in the second century AD, the Romans had successfully bribed and cajoled a number of tribes into serving as a desert police force; and the example of this confederation, the Thamud, would long be commemorated by Arab poets.71 Understandably so, perhaps: for what it had served to demonstrate was that even the proudly and inveterately fractious tribes of the desert might, under certain circumstances, be forged into a shirkat—a “partnership.”72 Such a lesson, against the backdrop of escalating superpower confrontation, had certainly not gone unnoted by ambitious chieftains. Horizons had steadily expanded, wild fantasies taken wing. In 328, for instance, one Arab warlord had been buried beneath a tombstone that grandiloquently proclaimed him to have been “King of all the Arabs.” A title no less bogus than it was unprecedented—but most suggestive all the same. As Rome and Iranshahr competed ever more vigorously for the services of the desert tribes, so the potential pickings on offer for the tribesmen themselves had indeed grown steadily more lucrative. Although the confederation of the Thamud had long since imploded, having been struck down in sensational fashion, so Arab lore claimed, by a thunderbolt, other foederati had fast emerged to take its place.f It is telling that Roman authors, from the fourth century onwards, began to use a new word to designate the Arabs, one that seems ultimately to have derived from shirkat: “Saracens.”73 Although the Romans themselves appear to have been wholly ignorant of the original meaning, and although the stereotype they had of the “Saracens” remained the reassuringly traditional one, of nomads, bandits and savages, the use they made of the new name did nevertheless hint at a new and emerging order. In the yawning deserts between Palestine and Mesopotamia, Arab tribesmen were no longer operating merely on a freelance basis. While they still indulged in their traditional pastimes—slaving, cattle rustling, raiding caravans and frontier posts—they increasingly did so as agents of the rival superpowers. “To the Arabs on both sides,” so the twitchy inhabitants of the Fertile Crescent began to observe, “war between Persia and Rome is a source of very great profit indeed.”74

  Nowhere better illustrated this than a town famed throughout Arabia as the epitome of power and glamour. Hira stood only a few miles south of Sura, on the southern flank of Mesopotamia; but it might as well have been a world away from the lecture halls of the rabbis. Situated in an oasis between the Euphrates and the desert, it served in every sense as a place of hybrids. Although a linchpin of Sasanian defences, the great bulwark that blocked access from the south to Ctesiphon, it was commanded not by a Persian but by an Arab. The Banu Lakhm—“Lakhm’s Sons”—had long been based in the region, where they had enjoyed a profitable existence as mercenaries in the service of the Shahanshah. Even under Peroz, despite all the tempting convulsions of his reign, they had remained loyal to the Persian crown. The decision had been a thoroughly calculating one—and in due course it had reaped spectacular reward. Kavad, ever innovative, had graced the Lakhmids with an unprecedented promotion when, shortly after the outbreak of war with Rome in 502, he appointed their youthful and brutally able chieftain, Mundhir, to rule as king over all the scattered Arab tribes that were then confederated to Iranshahr. Hira—a sprawl of settlements that alternated mud-brick walls with encampments, gardens with desert scrub, and wheat fields with herds of camels—provided the Lakhmid chieftain with the perfect showcase for this trend-setting fusion of royalty and banditry. Not for nothing, in the Lakhmids’ own language, did the city’s name mean “camp.”75 Mundhir, who spent his time there living alternately in a palace and a tent, aimed to combine the best of Persian sophistication with the noblest traditions of his own people. Profits from plunder were spent not only on beefing up his offensive capabilities but on the manifold glories and pleasures of life as an Arab. From camel-archers to poets, brigands to dancing girls, Hira boasted them all. Even the odd scribe was to be found there: for the city, so it was plausibly claimed, was where the Arabs had first learned to put their language into writing. Unsurprisingly, it attracted a steady stream of migrants from across the desert, all hungry for the patronage that Mundhir could so swaggeringly provide. “A day and a night at Hira,” it was said, “are better than a whole year of medicine.”76

  No single place in the Roman sphere of influence could quite rival the dazzle of this appeal. That this was so, however, reflected not any lack of contacts between the Arabs and Rome, but rather their sheer range and antiquity. Along the western fringes of the desert, no particular exoticism attached itself to the notion that the realms of the nomad and the city might be blended. The Nabataeans, and many other tribes too, had been citizens of Rome for centuries. One of their number had even risen to become Caesar: Philip, the same emperor who had presided over the capital’s millennial celebrations, had hailed from a city on the frontier, to the east of the Sea of Galilee, and been derisively nicknamed “the Arab.” The existence of settlements such as Philip’s home town
right on the margins of the desert were evidence enough of the whole-hearted relish with which the Arabs, no less than any other people of the empire, might embrace the pax Romana and settle down.

  Nowhere, however, was this more apparent than in the Negev, the arid wilderness that stretched between the Sinai and Petra, and where, even as Mundhir was establishing his regime in Hira, vines and olives were being conjured from the sand. Take one of the paved roads—the strata—that criss-crossed the region, and in due course an entire city would materialise on the horizon, rising like a mirage above the desolation, a paradise of farmland, stone houses and baths. A miracle? Hardly. It was only through the most back-breaking labour that the ceaseless battle against the sands could hope to be won, only with the most exhaustive maintenance of cisterns, aqueducts and dams. Yet the cities of the Negev, for all that the water might sometimes taste brackish, and the scrub-flecked desert stretch away barren in every direction, did truly serve as outposts of the wider world beyond. Even in the most remote, an isolated settlement by the name of Nessana that served pilgrims on the road to Sinai as a final way-stop, there were bureaucrats who wrote in Greek and would-be lawyers who studied Latin. More than two centuries after Constantine had filched the Palladium for his new capital, there was even a copy of the Aeneid in the local library. In Nessana, time, as well as distance, might be dissolved: for the myths of which Virgil had sung were older by far than himself, older even than Rome. On frayed papyri in the depths of a lonely desert, the halls of Mount Olympus—where the gods of Greece had reclined on exquisite couches, partnered by ox-eyed goddesses, and served wine by eternally beautiful youths—still preserved a spectral hold.