by Tom Holland
Nor, in fact, is there anything in the Qur’an itself that would serve to contradict this universal presumption. Just the opposite, in fact. The Bakka described by the Prophet shimmers with the same numinous aura that had long attached itself to another sanctuary: Mamre. “It is the place where Abraham stood to pray”:78 so the Prophet describes Bakka. Of what, then, can this conceivably be an echo, if not the maqom? Certainly, between the Hebrew word for “place” and its Arabic equivalent, there was a manifest resonance. “Take as your place of prayer,” it is recorded in the Qur’an, “the place where Abraham stood”79—the Maqam Ibrahim. In time to come, with Mecca enshrined once and for all as the site of Islam’s holiest sanctuary, Muslim scholars would identify this Maqam Ibrahim with a stone that stood just to the north of the Ka’ba—an explanation that gives little hint as to its far more likely origins, many hundreds of miles to the north.80
That the Prophet repeatedly echoes the traditions associated with Mamre in his accounts of how the House at Bakka came to be built does not mean, of course, that the two shrines were one and the same thing—but it does suggest, to haunting and potent effect, a very particular context for his revelations. The Qur’an is a work manifest with distinctive habits of worship. Again and again, throughout its pages, the Prophet is insistent that these derive, not from his own invention but from the deepest wellsprings of monotheism. The ground he treads, he and the Mushrikun both, is stamped with the footprints of Abraham, and of Ishmael, the patriarch’s son, and of Lot, his nephew, as well. Why, then, the Prophet demands, do his opponents not read the lessons that are written for them in such a landscape? “Lot too was a messenger,” he reminds the Mushrikun:
Remember when We delivered him and all his household,
Except for an old woman, who was left behind.
Then We destroyed the others.
You pass by them morning and night; will you not understand?81
The allusion is to the petrified remains of the Sodomites—and it could hardly be any clearer in its implications. Wherever the Prophet’s audience may have been settled, it was evidently at no great remove from what the Arabs themselves called the Bahr Lut, the “Sea of Lot”—what we know today as the Dead Sea.
And if the Qur’an is to be trusted, and if Muhammad’s opponents did indeed live within an easy journey of the ruins of Sodom and Gomorrah, then the significance of the sanctuary at Bakka would hardly have been confined to the dimension of the heavenly alone. Back in the reign of Justinian, when a Roman ambassador had reported on the great desert shrine where “even the wild beasts live in peace with men,” he had included another intriguing detail: that it was sacred to “a majority of the Saracens.”82 Could this desert shrine have been Bakka? The ambassador’s description is so vague that it is impossible to say for sure. Nevertheless, a particularly intriguing detail among the Prophet’s many revelations does seem to echo the Roman report. The Qur’an reveals that Abraham and Ishmael raised a prayer to God as they laboured to build the House at Bakka: “Make our descendants into a community devoted to you.”83 Which was, of course, to cast those descendants, the Ishmaelites, as something rather more than the sum of their parts. Fragmented into various tribes they might have been, and yet they were to be regarded, so it would seem from the Qur’an, as a single people—a “community.” Bound by a unity of purpose, and joined by a common ancestry, what would they therefore share in, if not a God-sanctioned partnership—a shirkat?
Except that God, in the wilds beyond Palestine, was not the only patron of such partnerships. Behind the Thamud—and every confederation of Arab tribes since—had lurked Roman interests and Roman influence. It was only to be expected—in an age when proxy-fighting between the two superpowers cast a longer shadow over Arabia than ever before, extending as far south as distant Himyar—that the provincial authorities in Palestine should have shown themselves grimly determined not to drop their guard an inch. It was this, in the decades prior to the great war with Persia, that had encouraged a major recruitment drive on the part of Roman strategists, as they sought to compensate for their relative lack of manpower along the frontier by hiring Arabs to patrol it in depth. This, in turn, encouraged mass emigration from all over Arabia, with entire tribes drifting steadily northwards from the Hijaz towards Palestine. The concern of the provincial authorities to control and regulate this movement was evident in the care with which they sought to catalogue the newcomers. Exotic names duly flourished on the roster of foederati. Not an ethnic grouping between Palestine and the Hijaz, but the provincial authorities had sought to sponsor it. Never before, perhaps, had the tribal make-up of Arabia quite so pressingly held the interest of Roman strategists.
And yet, in every register of the age, there is one intriguing absence. As with Mecca, the city in which the Prophet supposedly grew up, so with the Quraysh, the tribe to which Muhammad supposedly belonged—all is deafening silence. Once again, it is not until a century and more after the Prophet’s death that the name makes its first, fleeting appearance in a datable text—and even then it is not entirely clear what is meant by the allusion.84 This is doubly puzzling: for not only were the Quraysh, according to Muslim tradition, the dominant power in the Hijaz, renowned far and wide across Arabia, but Muhammad’s own ancestor, an adventurer named Qusayy, is supposed to have seized power in Mecca only after Qaysar—“Caesar”— “had extended him aid.”85 Why, then, should the Romans appear never to have heard of the Quraysh? Such a group of people certainly did exist: they are described in four tantalising verses of the Qur’an as embarking on winter and summer journeys, and receiving both provisions and security from God. Yet, even eminent Muslim scholars might confess themselves puzzled by the precise meaning of the word “Quraysh.” Perhaps, they mused, it derived from the name of a prominent travel guide, or else a breed of camel, or perhaps a type of shark? The truth was, however, that no one—not two centuries on from the Prophet’s death—really knew any more. The derivation of “Quraysh” had long since been forgotten.
There was nothing particularly unusual about this. Back in the fourth century, when the Romans had started to refer to the Arabs as “Saracens,” few of them had appreciated that the name might well have derived from a word in the Arabs’ own incomprehensible tongue: shirkat. So perhaps it is not a total coincidence that Quraysh itself should seem to echo the same identical concept of “partnership”—but in Syriac. Qarisha, in the language that had increasingly come to be the Fertile Crescent’s readiest lingua franca, meant “collected together”—“confederated.”86 Is this, then, to what “Quraysh” had originally referred—those tribes brought together in a common partnership, as foederati of the New Rome? It is telling, certainly, that the Ghassanid kings—and doubtless other Arab commanders—spoke at least a smattering of Syriac as a matter of course.87 The word qarisha, duly Arabised, might well then have been used far beyond the imperial frontier: a convenient shorthand for all those tribes that had grown fat on Roman patronage.
All of this is speculation, of course. Nevertheless, it would imply, if true, that the mention of “Quraysh” in the Qur’an does not refer to a specific people in a specific place, but rather to an entire confederation of peoples; that the lands where they were to be found ranged from the Negev to the northern Hijaz; and that the sustenance and security provided them by God was mediated by Caesar. If so, then it would certainly explain why tidings of Roman defeat “in the nearby land” should have been broadcast even in the Qur’an itself. After all, the Arabs beyond the frontier were not far distant from the earthquake that convulsed the lands of the Fertile Crescent; rather, they were directly and intimately affected by it. By shattering the Roman hold on Syria and Palestine, the Persian onslaught severed for good what the Arab foederati had always previously taken for granted: the supply of gold from their imperial sponsors. Not, perhaps, that this would necessarily have spelled total disaster: for the Persian occupiers would have been desperate for the same leather, provisions and provender that Ar
ab merchants had previously supplied to the Romans. Moreover, on the evidence of the Qur’an, the Mushrikun could provide these items to order. It is telling that trade, no less than agriculture, appears to have obsessed the Prophet, with even God being cast by him as a merchant: one who accepts the souls of mortals as pledges for their debts and remorselessly keeps track of their deeds in “an unblotted ledger-book.”88 Telling as well, no doubt, is the Prophet’s evident familiarity with what appear to have been lengthy business trips—across the sea as well as the land. Perhaps here, then, in the need to travel by ship during the summer, and with pack animals during the winter, is an explanation for the two ventures made annually by the Quraysh.89 As for the Prophet himself, more than a century before Ibn Hisham’s biography, in the 690s, and it was already being recorded by a Christian chronicler in Edessa that “Muhammad travelled for the purposes of trade to the lands of Palestine, Arabia and Syria.”90 A tantalising snippet of detail—and if authentic, one that would suggest a record of business dealings at the height of the Persian occupation. “No offence,” as the Qur’an itself puts it, “to seek some bounty from your Lord.”91 War, after all, will often provide scope for those on its margins to coin a profit.
But also for much more: reflections upon the mutability of all things, and the evils of the age, and the pettiness of human doings when compared to the omnipotence of God. “Have they not travelled the world,” the Prophet asked the unbelievers, “and seen how those before them met their end?”92 All that is human can totter: a lesson fit for the age. The Prophet’s revelations may have been haunted by ancient cities abandoned to encroaching sands, but they also contained hints of other, more recent monuments to human vanity. Traces of the decaying imperial frontier are manifest in the very language of the Qur’an: the words for roads, forts and even legionaries’ painted shields—transliterated from the original Greek and Latin—all have spectral presences in the Prophet’s revelations.93 When, for instance, in the opening sura of the Qur’an, the prayer was raised to God, “Guide us to the straight path,”94 it represented a dazzlingly audacious act of appropriation. The great military roads—the strata—that for centuries had girded the eastern frontier, and served as both emblems and tools of Roman might, were being brought to fade before the radiance of a celestial sirat—a road eternally straight.
This vision, of a truth so blinding that earthly empires were as nothing before it but shadows, was hardly novel, of course. Even the candlelit golds of Hagia Sophia, even the fires in the three holiest temples of Iranshahr, blazed as the merest reflections of the effulgence of God. This, in the barren desert beyond Palestine, far from the cockpits of worldly power, was a truth that had long been appreciated. Not only in the souls of the fugitive and the penitent, but as words inscribed on manuscripts, many of them centuries old, the experience of the divine had taken many forms and left many marks. Whether they were otherwise forgotten gospels, or ancient Jewish writings discovered in caves, or copies of pagan epics that had been stashed in libraries for would-be lawyers to use, books as well as people might speak of the yearning to understand heaven. “Those who disbelieve say: ‘This is nothing but fables of the ancients.’ ”95 That the Prophet was sensitive to this particular accusation is evident enough from his repeated efforts, made throughout the Qur’an, to rebut it.96 Yet, never did he veer to the opposite extreme, and proclaim the novelty of his message. “It is indeed a revelation from the Lord of the Worlds, brought down by the Trustworthy Spirit, upon your heart, so that you may be a warner, in manifest Arabic speech—but it is also in the Books of the ancients.”97 Just as Jews might cast the Talmud as a record of eternity, and Christians see an image of the immutable order of the heavens in the Church, so did the Prophet—ever a man of his time—insist upon the timelessness of his message. Well might he have proclaimed “the straight path” to God with such boldness and conviction. When set against such a highway, what were the rutted and weed-covered strata, long since left in a state of chronic disrepair by Justinian’s budget cuts? One was eternal; the others were already returning to the desert sands.
And just as roads might crumble, so might confederations. Compared with a community of believers faithful only to God, what was a ragbag of mercenaries in hock to a foreign power? The Thamud had long since fallen, and so too, God willing, would their heirs. “We conferred guidance upon them—but they chose blindness over guidance.”98 The Prophet’s opponents were doubly Mushrikun: for not only did they partner angels with God as fit objects of worship, but they themselves were bound in a shared subservience as associates in a Roman-sponsored shirkat. They were not only blasphemers but collaborators. Naturally, it was the offence against God that stank most noxiously to the heavens—but there were hints as well, in the Qur’an, of more earthly crimes and follies. Remorselessly, the Prophet casts his followers as the mirror-image of the foederati. Just as whole tribes had long been emigrating northwards, eager for Caesar’s bounty, so in a similar manner, but now in the cause of God, were the Believers to rank as emigrants—as the Muhajirun. A manoeuvre of genius. Service was being offered to a monarch infinitely greater than either Caesar or Shahanshah. An entire pattern of mass-movement was being reconfigured and set in spectacular reverse. “Whoso leaves his home as an emigrant to God and His Messenger and is overtaken by death, his reward falls upon God, and God is All-Forgiving, Compassionate to each.”99
Not that one necessarily had to die before being rewarded for joining the Muhajirun. If it was the pleasures of heaven—the ox-eyed maidens and the pearl-like cup-bearers—that shimmered most deliciously before the gaze of the Believers, then earthly profits as well were far from being disdained. “They ask you about booty.” So begins one sura, in bald and ringing terms. “Say: ‘Booty belongs to God and His Messenger.’ ”100 Here, at a time of global calamity, was a message calculated to appeal to anyone feeling the economic pinch. Well and good as were the profits to be had from flogging leather to the Persians, these were hardly likely to compensate, even in small part, for the loss of subsidies from Caesar’s agents. The Arab tribes who had emigrated northwards on the scent of Roman gold—and who had relied on their paymasters’ lucre for decades—had grown much impoverished. Well, then, might the message proclaimed by the Prophet—that he had a licence from God to plunder unbelievers—have met with an enthusiastic up-take. “Remember a time when you were few in number and held to be weak on earth, when you feared men would tear you to pieces. He gave you refuge and aided you with His victory; and He bestowed His bounties upon you.”101 Bounties that once, perhaps, Muhammad’s followers would have been content to receive from the Roman authorities—but not anymore. A wellspring that had run dry was no longer a wellspring at all.
Here, then, was a crisis, and an attempt to resolve it, bred thoroughly of its time. The arc of its parabola can still just about be traced, discernible despite all the thick overlay applied centuries later by pious biographers and commentators. The Qur’an, far from standing at some fantastical remove from the currents and convulsions of the age, is the supreme monument to them. It is the record of a man living through an unprecedented period of upheaval, alert, in every way he can be, to the word of God, and betraying a sensibility, even as he contemplates the ruin of the universe itself, that is decidedly bookish. “That will be the Day,” so God says at one point, in a description of the looming End Times, “when We roll up the sky, as a writer rolls up his scrolls.” Such images, which occur throughout the Qur’an, suggest a man who was the polar opposite of illiterate, and who, even as he laid claim to traditions of divine inspiration that were immeasurably venerable, knew full well what he was doing. Such it was to be the Seal of the Prophets: “a herald of good tidings, a bearer of warning.”102 The good tidings provided a solution to humanity’s troubles that did not depend upon mortal agency; the warning explained what would happen to those who closed their ears to it.
But it was not enough for the Prophet’s message to be inscribed simply upon the souls of h
is audience. The evils of the time were as political as they were spiritual, and as economic as they were moral. Like the rabbis of Mesopotamia and Tiberias, like Justinian and his great team of jurists, the Prophet appreciated that not only individuals but society itself required moulding to the purposes of God. This was why, it seems, he set himself to the founding of a state—first among the Mushrikun, and then, in the wake of their rejection, among the Muhajirun. And its capital? Here, at any rate, there is no contradiction between the Qur’an and the great spider’s web of subsequent Islamic tradition. A battle fought against overwhelming odds, “a violent wind and invisible forces”103 sent by God against the Prophet’s enemies, a glorious victory snatched from the jaws of defeat: all this, so the Qur’an records, occurred at a place that, for once, it actually names. Yathrib, that fertile oasis in the northern Hijaz, was indeed, it would appear, ’Madinat an-Nabi—the “City of the Prophet.” Medina, just as tradition records, ranked as the very first bridgehead of the heavenly established by Muhammad on earth.
Does that mean, then, that the story told of a single, dramatic flight there, a hijra, is similarly based on fact? It is notable, certainly, that the word itself does not appear anywhere in the Qur’an; and, as with so many details of his biography, all references to the Prophet’s escape to Yathrib are frustratingly late in origin.104 Reason enough, then, perhaps, to be suspicious—and to wonder whether the whole notion of “emigration” might possibly have had a significance for the Prophet and his followers that subsequent tradition has obscured. Memorable the story of the hijra may be—and yet there seems to lurk behind it the hint of something much more seismic. In the Qur’an, emigration is cast as a duty incumbent upon all believers—no matter their circumstances, no matter their location. Far from alluding to a single journey into exile—whether to Yathrib or to anywhere else—it seems to imply a call to arms that is all-embracing, universal and unbounded by time or place. “Anyone who migrates for God’s cause will find many a refuge and great plenty in the earth.”105 Nothing could conceivably have sounded more radical or terrifying to the Prophet’s audience. Abandoning family and tribe was the most stomach-churning prospect imaginable for any Arab. And yet, if the Qur’an is to be trusted, this was precisely the commitment that the Prophet was demanding—and not just of his own people but of all the various descendants of Ishmael, wherever they might live, across the entire sweep of Arabia. The successful planting of his banner in Yathrib, set against the backdrop of the apparent breaking of the world, was to be only the start. All those with the courage—or perhaps the sheer desperation—to accept the Prophet’s challenge and embark on a new beginning were invited to join him on a journey that might lead God alone knew where.