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

by Tom Holland

  Meanwhile, Heraclius had more than likely been in secret communication with Shahrbaraz.94 The Parthian general, his troops stationed in ostentatious inactivity in Syria, had been in deep disgrace with Khusrow ever since the failure of the assault on Constantinople. Now, with the Shahanshah in headlong flight before Heraclius’ outriders, the Mihranid warlord prepared to add to his dynasty’s long record of treachery towards the House of Sasan, and stab Khusrow in the back. On 23 February 628, two of Shahrbaraz’s sons arrested the bedraggled monarch, who was suffering from chronic dysentery at the time, and imprisoned him in one of his own palaces. There, they set before him “a great heap of gold, and silver, and precious stones”95—but no food. The wretched Khusrow was left to starve, and literally shit himself, for five days. On the sixth day, his captors shot him to death with arrows. With that, the great war—which had raged for twenty-five years and had spread destruction to the furthest limits of East and West—was over at last.

  The victory belonged, decisively, to Heraclius. His insight, that in a world rendered a living hell by plague and war what mattered most was to have a convincing claim upon the favour of the heavens, had been proved correct in the most resounding fashion imaginable. Khusrow had not been defeated militarily: the walls of his capital would certainly have stood proof against the tiny Roman invasion force, and his western conquests were still staked out by Persian garrisons. Yet so meticulously had his prestige been shredded that all his authority had simply melted away—leaving his subjects to ponder the unthinkable, and ask themselves whether the House of Sasan itself might have been abandoned by its farr. Certainly, by the summer of 629, when Heraclius negotiated the treaty that officially concluded the great war, the key player was not the seven-year-old grandson of Khusrow who now sat perched precariously on the Persian throne, but Shahrbaraz. Ignoring the infant Shahanshah with high-handed disdain, the emperor and the Parthian dynast “agreed among themselves that all Roman territory occupied by the Persians should be restored to the Romans.”96 Then, quietly, tipping his fellow negotiator the wink, Heraclius agreed to back Shahrbaraz, should the Mihranid chief wish to pursue his own royal ambitions. To no one’s great surprise, in April 630, Shahrbaraz duly made his power grab, murdered the child-king and proclaimed himself Shahanshah. A mere forty days later, he himself was dead—toppled in yet another coup. Assorted Sasanian wraiths, backed by assorted Parthian sponsors, now set to clawing one another to pieces. Heraclius could feel well content. Like a fish, Iranshahr was patently rotting from its head.

  Yet, even as the House of Sasan snatched desperately after its disintegrating authority and prestige, Heraclius knew that there was an urgent need to preserve his own empire from suffering a similar fate. Even in Constantinople, that victorious and Christ-guarded city, a mood of exhaustion was manifest: in the suburbs left wasted by the Avars, and in the churches stripped bare to fund the war effort. Elsewhere, in the provinces only just evacuated by their Persian occupiers, marks of ruin were even more omnipresent: in the forts now blackened and gate-less; in the fields overrun by bandits; in the weed-choked streets of ravaged cities. Burned, looted, depopulated—entire swaths of the empire lay mouldering in a state of the most gangrenous misery. Clearly, then, urgent as it was to restore to the redeemed provincials the long-atrophied habits of obedience to Roman rule, more urgent still was the need to reassure them that the victory won by Heraclius had indeed been a victory won by God. This was why, in his negotiations with Shahrbaraz, no more urgent demand had been pressed by the emperor than the return from its ignominious captivity of the True Cross. On 21 March 630, stripped of all his imperial regalia and walking humbly on foot, as Christ Himself had done on his way to Golgotha, Heraclius entered Jerusalem, bearing with him the precious relic. Men reported that the manner of his arrival had been the result of advice given him by an angel, who had personally instructed him to take off his diadem, and to dismount from his horse. A supreme honour for Heraclius to receive: orders direct from the heavens to imitate the last journey of his Saviour.

  The restoration of the True Cross to Jerusalem was the profoundest demonstration imaginable of the great victory that had been won in the cause of Christ. It also served as a ringing statement of Heraclius’s intent: never again would he permit the Christian empire to be pushed by its enemies to the edge of oblivion. On his approach to Jerusalem, he had made a point of stopping off in Tiberias, where he had been hosted by a wealthy Jew notorious, under the Persian occupation, for his persecution of the city’s churches. Asked by Heraclius why he had so mistreated the local Christians, the Jew had answered disingenuously, “Why, because they are the enemies of my faith.”97 Heraclius, grim-faced, had advised his host to accept baptism on the spot—which the Jew had prudently done. Two years later, this order was repeated on a far more universal scale. From Africa to distant Gaul, leaders across the Christian world received news of a startling imperial decision: all Jews and Samaritans were to be brought compulsorily to baptism. Heraclius, conscious of how close he had come to defeat, and of the debt he owed to Christ, was not prepared to take any second chances. From now on, the Roman Empire would be undilutedly, and therefore impregnably, Christian.

  But what of those who lay beyond the reach of the empire? In 632, the same year that saw Heraclius issue his decree on the forcible conversion of the Jews, barbarian horsemen, “harsh and strange,”98 descended upon Palestine, ravaging the undefended margins of the province and then disappearing as suddenly as they had arrived. Who were they, and what did they portend? No one could be entirely certain. There were some Christians, however, notwithstanding the triumphant return to Jerusalem of the True Cross, who feared the worst. Dread that the end of time might be at hand had not entirely been abated by the great victory of Heraclius. “To see a savage people emerge from the desert and run through land that is not theirs, as if it were their own, laying waste our sweet and organised country with their wild and tamed beasts”99—what could be more ominous than that?

  Perhaps, then, indeed, when the End Times arrived, it would be upon the winding shadows of the indignant desert birds.

  * * *

  a “Serapis” was the Greek form of “Osiris-Apis”: Osiris being the Egyptian god of the dead, and Apis a sacred bull who manifested himself at regular intervals in Egypt. There was a massive Serapeum at Saqqara, to which Alexander made offerings, and it was this that inspired the cult of Serapis in Alexandria.

  b No source explicitly states that the scrolls stored in the Serapeum were destroyed by the triumphant Christians, but it is hard to imagine what else might have happened to them.

  c Muhammad himself agreed. A celebrated hadith recorded the Prophet’s praise of his favourite wife. “Allah’s Apostle said, ‘The superiority of Aisha over other women is like the superiority of Tharid to other meals.’ ” (Sahih al-Bukhari: Vol. 5, Book 57, 114).

  d Almost certainly not his real name. The original Nehemiah had served as a governor of Jerusalem back in the fifth century BC, under the original Persian Empire. A book in the Bible is named after him.

  III

  HIJRA

  Once the world of ideas has been transformed, reality cannot hold out for long.

  Georg Wilhelm Friedrich Hegel

  6

  MORE QUESTIONS THAN ANSWERS

  When?

  Those who anticipated that Heraclius’s triumph would provide only a temporary lull in the surge and swirl of great events were to be proved quite spectacularly correct. A bare three decades after the conclusion of the terrible war between Iranshahr and the New Rome, the balance of power that for centuries had divided the Fertile Crescent into two rival spheres of influence was no more. In the East, Persian rule had collapsed utterly. All the glory of the House of Sasan had been trampled into the dust. The Shahanshah himself had perished squalidly in the wilds of Khorasan, murdered, so it was said, by a local miller for his gold. His son, the heir of Ardashir and Khusrow the Great, was now a fugitive in China. Such an outcome, it
might have been thought, was all that generations of Caesars had ever dreamed of achieving; and yet the overthrow of Iranshahr had certainly not been due to any triumph of Roman arms. A new people had risen to greatness; and these conquerors aimed at the conquest of Constantinople no less than they had Ctesiphon. The Roman Empire, unlike that of the Persians, still stood defiant; but only just. As in the darkest days of the war against Iranshahr, so now, nothing but a rump remained to the New Rome of her dominions. Syria, Palestine and Egypt had all been lost. Even in Anatolia, the front line was being held only through desperate and blood-sodden effort.

  Stupefied onlookers, in their attempts to make sense of these astounding convulsions, naturally turned to scripture for elucidation. Was it possible, they began to ask themselves, that the fourth beast seen by Daniel was not, as had long been presumed, the empire of the Romans, after all? It had certainly never been more manifest that God, for His own inscrutable reasons, was redrawing the affairs of men in a wholly startling manner. Global rule had passed into the hands of those previously scorned descendants of Ishmael, the bastard offspring of Abraham, the children of the slave-girl Hagar: the Arabs. “And behold, a fourth beast, terrible and dreadful and exceedingly strong; and it had great iron teeth; it devoured and broke in pieces, and stamped the residue with its feet.”1 Already, by the 660s, there were many prepared to revise their understanding of what Daniel had meant by this vision. “He is saying,” so a chronicler in Armenia suggested, “that this fourth beast, which arises from the south, is the kingdom of the sons of Ishmael.”2

  As the decades and then the centuries passed, and still the empire won by the Arabs endured, this reading became ever more accepted among Christians and Jews alike. The Arabs themselves, of course, would have bristled at any notion that they were something bestial; but they too, as they surveyed with pride the awesome sweep of their dominions, never doubted for a moment that their conquests were indeed the expression of the will of the heavens. How else to explain their astonishing dismemberment of what had once been the two greatest empires in the world? “We went to meet them with small abilities and weak forces, and God made us triumph, and gave us possession of their territories.”3 By the tenth Christian century, when this self-satisfied assertion was penned, the defeat of the Persians and the Romans had come to be interpreted as something even more epochal than the replacement of two superpowers by a third. The lands won by “the sons of Ishmael” were no longer defined as an Arab empire but as the Dar al-Islam—the “House of Islam.” The first generation of conquerors, even though they had called themselves “believers” or “emigrants”—Muhajirun—had come to be designated by a quite different word: “Muslims.”4 The collapse of Persian and Roman power was attributed, not to the agonies of plague and war that had racked the Near East for decades, but to the revelation of the word of God to His Prophet in far-off Mecca. “When you encounter the unbelievers, blows to necks it shall be until, once you have routed them, you are to tighten their fetters.” So Muhammad, serving as the mouthpiece of God, had informed his followers. “Thereafter, it is either gracious bestowal of freedom or holding them to ransom, until war has laid down its burdens.”5

  The notion that a people might be entrusted by the heavens with a charge to spare the vanquished and to overthrow the haughty was hardly original to the Qur’an, of course. Back in the heyday of Roman greatness, Virgil had articulated a very similar sense of mission. What had changed, however, and to seismic effect, was people’s understanding of what the sanction of the heavens might actually mean. Just as Constantine had discovered in Christ an infinitely more potent patron than Athena or Artemis had ever been, so those who turned to the pages of the Qur’an found revealed there a celestial monarch of such limitless and terrifying power that there could certainly be no question of portraying Him—as the Christians did with their own god—in human form. Nothing, literally nothing, was beyond Him. “If He wishes, O mankind, He can make you disappear and bring others in your stead.”6 To a deity capable of such a prodigious feat of annihilation, what was the overthrow of an empire or two? Remarkable though it certainly was that the Dar al-Islam had been raised upon the rubble of Persian and Roman power, no explanation was needed for this, so Muslim scholars taught, that did not derive from an even more awesome and heart-stopping miracle: the revelation to the Prophet of the Qur’an. What surprise that a fire lit far beyond the reach of the ancient superpowers should have spread to illumine the entire world, when that fire was the Word of God?

  And it is here, of course, in any interpretation of Islam’s origins as an intrusion of the divine into the sweep of earthly events—as a lightning strike from heaven, owing nothing to what had gone before—that history must needs meet and merge with faith. Almost fourteen centuries on from the lifetime of Muhammad, the conviction that he was truly a prophet of God continues to move and inspire millions upon millions of people around the globe. As a solution to the mystery of what might actually have taken place in the early seventh-century Near East, however, it is unlikely to strike those historians raised in the traditions of secular scholarship as entirely satisfactory. By explaining everything, it runs the risk of explaining nothing much at all. Nevertheless, it is a measure of how potently an aura of the supernatural has always clung to the Qur’an, and to the story of its genesis, that historians have found it so difficult to rationalise its origins. Mecca, so the biographies of the Prophet teach us, was an inveterately pagan city, devoid of any Jewish or Christian presence, situated in the midst of a vast, untenanted desert: how else, then, are we to account for the sudden appearance there of a fully fledged monotheism, complete with references to Abraham, Moses and Jesus, if not as a miracle? In a sense, the entire history of secular enquiry into the origins of Islam has been an attempt to arrive at a plausible answer to this question. Muslims, understandably sensitive to any hint that the Prophet might have been a plagiarist, have always tended to resent the inevitable implications of such a project; and yet, once God is discounted as an informant, it is surely not unreasonable to wonder just how it came to be that so many characters from the Bible feature in the Qur’an. Perhaps, so it has been suggested, Muhammad absorbed Jewish and Christian influences during his business trips to Syria.7 Or perhaps, despite what the Muslim sources tell us, there were in fact thriving colonies of Jews, Christians, or both in Mecca.8 Or perhaps there was a crisis of capitalism among the Quraysh, one that saw successful merchants and financiers growing ever more obscenely rich, even as those on the breadline were left “searching for a new spiritual and political solution to the malaise and disquiet in the city,”9 and finding it—somehow, in some unspecified manner, in the spirit of the age.

  Yet all these explanations run up against a familiar stumbling block. Given that the Prophet’s earliest biographers were writing almost two centuries after his death, how far can we legitimately accept their presumption that seventh-century Mecca was genuinely a place of great significance and wealth—the “Mother of Cities”?10 It is plausible enough that it might have been a centre of pilgrimage for the local pagans, but that it ranked as the Dubai of its day, a prosperous and cosmopolitan trading hub brought to flourish in the depths of the desert, is most certainly not. What incentive could there possibly have been for anyone with an eye for a profit to base himself in a barren valley many hundreds of miles from the nearest consumerist fleshpot? Even the few camel-trains that still plodded northwards from Himyar, heading for a Roman market that had long since lost its appetite for incense, went by a road that bypassed Mecca altogether.11 A merchant from Alexandria might cheerfully discourse about the trading opportunities in entrepôts as far afield as India, and never even so much as allude to Mecca—on his doorstep though it effectively was.12 In gazetteers written by Muhammad’s contemporaries—whether diplomats, geographers or historians—mentions of it are notable by their glaring absence.13 Even in the Qur’an itself, the word appears just once. “In the belly of Mecca, it was God who held their hands back from y
ou”14—an allusion that might as well be to a valley as to a city. Otherwise, in all the vast corpus of ancient literature, there is not a single reference to Mecca—not one.15 Only in 741, more than a hundred years after the Prophet’s death, does it finally crop up on the pages of a foreign text—and even then the author locates it in Mesopotamia, “midway between Ur and Harran.”16 Clearly, then, whatever else Mecca might have been in the early seventh century, it was no multicultural boom-town.

  So how is it, in a book supposedly composed there in Muhammad’s lifetime, that the monotheisms of the far-distant Fertile Crescent should have been given such a starring role? It is all very mysterious; and made even more so by the fact that Mecca is not alone in seeming to have had a spectrally low profile in the early decades of the Arab Empire. So too did the Qur’an itself. As with the reputed birthplace of the Prophet, so with the compendium of his revelations: there is not a single mention of it in writings of the period. In the first flush of the Ishmaelite takeover, the Patriarch of Antioch assumed that his new masters’ holy book was the Torah.17 Such a presumption, of course, might well have reflected nothing more than wilful blindness—except that it was far from being confined to bishops. More than a century after the death of Muhammad, Muslims—as they were now starting to call themselves—might betray a very similar ignorance. Even as Christian bureaucrats, tracking the peculiar beliefs of their Arab overlords, began to note the existence of various “frivolous tales”18 composed by Muhammad, Muslim scholars, in their concern to identify precisely what the Prophet might have taught, were still perfectly capable of overlooking the Qur’an altogether. How, for instance, did God wish adulterers to be punished? To this question, hadith after hadith provided the same unyielding answer as was to be found in the Torah: He wished them to be stoned. Yet this was not at all what was taught in the Qur’an. There, it could be read that God, “ever-compassionate,” merely wished adulterers to be given “a hundred lashes.”19 How to explain such a discrepancy? If the Qur’an truly originated in the lifetime of Muhammad, and had been preserved and cherished by his followers ever since as the unchanging word of God, why was it that so many Muslim jurists—and prominent ones at that—had disregarded it as a source for their rulings? The mystery seems only compounded by the complete absence of any commentaries on the Qur’an prior to the ninth Christian century, and by the fact that even then different communities of the faithful preserved different versions of the holy text.aPerhaps it is hardly surprising, then, that many a scholar today, confronted by the dogma which teaches that the Qur’an derives unaltered and immaculate from the lifetime of Muhammad, should be tempted to raise an eyebrow, at the very least.