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

by Tom Holland

  And to be sure—whether they were tempted by heaven, plunder, or both—there was clearly no lack of Arabs who were prepared to answer the summons. “You are the best community ever brought forth among mankind, commanding virtue and forbidding vice, and believing in God.” So the Prophet hailed the Muhajirun: as a band of warriors who had it within them not only to found a whole new order of society but to inherit, as their reward for doing so, the earth itself.

  A claim that was to be proved, and in short order, quite spectacularly correct.

  Why?

  Early in AD 634, alarming news reached Caesarea, the handsome city on the coast of Palestine that had long served as the hinterland’s capital. A war band of Saracens, trespassing directly on Roman territory, had crossed into the Negev, and was now aiming northwards for the rich fields and villages of Samaria. A most tiresome intrusion—and one that the provincial authorities were naturally anxious to nip in the bud. No matter that the Roman military, in the wake of plague and war, remained extremely stretched: a task force of infantry, summoned hurriedly to arms, marched out into the open, and swung briskly south.106 At their head, resplendent in the white uniform that marked him out as a personal favourite of the emperor, rode a patrician by the name of Sergius.107 He had particular cause to relish the challenge ahead. Already, he had been looking to replenish the finances of the exhausted province by restricting the profits that Saracen merchants were permitted to take back across the frontier. Now, with the barbarians seemingly provoked to open larceny by this measure, it was time to reacquaint them with the brute facts of Roman might. The region’s ancient mistress, after her temporary absence, was back.

  Sergius and his small army met the invaders in the afternoon of 4 February, some twelve miles east of Gaza.108 The result was utter debacle. The infantry were ambushed and Sergius himself, having reputedly fallen three times from his horse, was taken prisoner. His fate, according to one report, was a peculiarly unpleasant one: sewn up inside a freshly flayed camel hide, he was suffocated to death as the stinking skin dried out. Further calamities quickly followed. The Saracens, with devilish cunning, turned out to have launched a pincer movement against Palestine. The second war band, crossing the eastern frontier even as the first was rampaging through the Negev, joined exultantly in the scouring of the province. Over fields thick with thistles, weed-covered highways and crumbling walls they swept. “Saracens,” Roman strategists had always asserted with imperious complacency, “are by nature unable to conduct sieges”109—but now, to the horror of the authorities, this reassurance was proving a worthless one. If it was cities, with their dense populations and rat-infested byways, that had always proved most vulnerable to the scythings of the plague, then the distinction between town and countryside, after whole decades of visitations, was one that had come increasingly to be blurred. Sheep grazed amid toppled pillars, while cattle, tethered against the depredations of bandits, spent their nights in abandoned shops and foundries. If the average city of Palestine was not yet wholly a ghost town, then it certainly had one foot in the grave.110 Unsurprisingly, then, in the wake of Sergius’s defeat, and with Roman field armies nowhere to be seen, ambassadors from settlement after settlement sought to follow the path of least resistance, and buy off the invaders.

  Not that many could seriously have thought that the Saracens would be around for long. As with Samaritan uprisings, so with incursions from the desert: the imperial authorities had seen it all before. Inveterately barbarian as the Saracens were, perhaps it was only to be expected that they would once in a while turn rogue. Back in 582, for instance, when Ghassanid resentment at the exile of their king had provoked the foederati into open revolt, they had inflicted a crushing defeat on an imperial army in open battle and then ranged at will across Syria. A couple of centuries before that, an Arab queen named Mavia, “long celebrated in song by the Saracens,”111 had launched a series of devastating raids that had taken her all the way to Egypt. The Roman response, on both occasions, had been the time-honoured one of dazzling the barbarians with bribes. Both Mavia and the Ghassanids, despite the undoubted scares that they had given the provincial authorities, had been successfully pacified with a whole range of exotic gewgaws. Golden furnishings and fancy titles had, as ever, proved their worth. No reason, then, for Heraclius to feel particularly perturbed by the defeat outside Gaza. Alarming though the swift return of warfare to Palestine clearly was, the Saracens hardly rivalled the Persians as foes. After all, if history had taught Roman officials anything, it was that the wolves of Arabia, no matter how much of a passing threat they might be on occasion, could always be muzzled in the end.

  This latest invasion would prove very different, though. The Saracens did not content themselves with the extortion of subsidies and silken cloaks. Rather than wait to be graced with treasure from the hands of Caesar, they aimed instead to rip it brutally from his grasp. With Palestine effectively secured, they immediately flung themselves against the defences of Syria. Fifty years later, a monk writing in Sinai would record what ensued: two terrible battles, one at the Ghassanid camp city of Jabiya, and the other a few miles to the west, on the Golan Heights above the River Yarmuk.112 The details are slight—and it is the measure of how impossible it has proved for historians to agree on the actual progress of the Arab invasion, and the struggle of the Romans to resist it, that not a single earlier reference to these fateful clashes exists in either Arabic or Greek.g The dates, the details and the course of the Syrian campaign—all are veiled by contradiction and confusion.113 Nevertheless, if the particulars of what happened during the campaigning have defied repeated attempts to arrive at a consensus, then not so the result. “For the Roman army,” as the monk in Sinai would note with bleak finality, “it proved a defeat as fatal as it was terrible.”114 By late 636, with the campaigning season drawing to a close, Heraclius seems to have bowed to the inevitable. Burning villages and fields as he withdrew, he abandoned the very provinces that he had moved heaven and earth to retake just a few years previously. “Peace be upon you, Syria!” he is said to have cried, as he paused for one last yearning look back. “What a rich country is this for the enemy!”115

  Yet others were richer still. Across the desert from Syria, where the humiliating collapse of the House of Sasan into debilitation and factionalism had brought a beardless king by the name of Yazdegird to the throne, Iranshahr itself was no less exhausted and divided than its royal family. The marks of the Roman invasion still scarred the landscape. The River Tigris, having burst its banks in AD 629, had swept away an immense swath of irrigation works and left Kavad’s great canal silted up. Parthian warlords, snarling and snapping as ever, now threatened the entire fabric of the imperial high command with disintegration. Never—not even in the dark days following the death of Peroz—had the empire been so enfeebled; and the Arabs, alert as they were to the scents of weakness, well knew it. Either a few weeks or a few years after the Roman defeat at the Yarmuk—the sources, as usual, are at sixes and sevens—a similarly decisive battle was fought on Iranshahr’s desert flank.116 Qadisiyya was a small, palm-fringed town just to the south of the one-time Lakhmid capital of Hira. Now, it would be the scene of an epically terminal disaster for Iranshahr. After fighting that spanned several days, and the failure of elephants as well as the Persian heavy cavalry to turn the tide, the Arabs emerged triumphant. Their women, stalking the palm groves, were said to have busied themselves slitting the throats of those of the enemy still left there alive. Meanwhile, the exultant Arab army, pursuing the remnants of their defeated foes across canals and pontoon bridges, caught up with the fugitives amid the ruins of Babylon and briskly wiped them out. Iranshahr had been decapitated, “for all the leading nobles were killed.”117 Ctesiphon, a bare hundred miles to the north, now lay directly in the Arabs’ path. Its fall, with the flower of the empire’s chivalry left blackened and rotting in the killing fields of the south, was only a matter of time. Sure enough, despite bitter resistance that seems to have lasted
almost a year, the great city was duly stormed. Yazdegird himself, amid much confusion, managed to escape his doomed capital, zigzagging across the mudflats in a desperate effort to evade his pursuers. He finally reached the relative security of the Iranian uplands and his ancestral hometown of Istakhr, from which Ardashir, five centuries previously, had embarked on his own great project of conquest; but the royal regalia and the imperial treasury, all were lost. So too was Mesopotamia—which the invaders, in imitation of the Persians, knew by the name of “Iraq.”

  That Arab fingers could prod at the crown worn by Khusrow the Great; that Arab feet could tread on carpets from the royal palace woven with gold and adorned with precious stones; that Arab prayers could be heard in the great throne room of Ctesiphon, from the sides of which statues of Yazdegird’s ancestors gazed out stern and impassive, oblivious to the ruin that had engulfed the House of Sasan: all this, in the opinion of the Arabs themselves, taught a lesson so edifying that they would never tire of repeating it. The coin of contempt dealt them for so long by Caesar and Shahanshah alike had been richly, deliciously, repaid. Two and a half centuries on from Qadisiyya, by which time the Muslims ruled an empire even vaster than Khusrow the Great’s, their pride in having scorned superpower dazzle could still rank for them as the surest measure of their dignity. “In the past, those of us who came to you were obedient to you, they humbled themselves before you, they sought what was in your hands.” So one Arab, as pious as he was lacking in personal hygiene, was supposed to have told the silken Persians on the eve of the great battle. “But now we no longer come to you looking for the things of this world. Our desire and aspiration is for paradise.”118

  Hairy, badly dressed, and stinking of camel as he was, this ambassador to the perfumed tents of the Persian high command would be commemorated in histories of the conquest as the heroic embodiment of Muslim brotherhood. “God loves not the swaggering and the conceited.”119 So the Prophet had taught. Even though, if tradition is to be trusted, Muhammad died in 632, two whole years before the first rubbing of a superpower nose in the dirt, it was his revelations, of a God who humbles the proud, and slaughters them in battle, and permits them to be despoiled of all their goods, that had given the Arabs the courage and sheer self-confidence to go eyeball to eyeball with their former masters.120 Riding in to meet Roman or Persian officials, their ambassadors were said to have made a point of trampling down their cushions and stabbing with spears at their carpets. The conquest of the world, and the scorning of its seductions: such, it seemed to Muslim historians writing centuries later, had been the supreme achievement of the generation that had known Muhammad.

  It had one supreme exemplar. Umar bin al-Khattab had ranked as the most formidable and domineering of all the Prophet’s companions, the leader under whose guidance both Syria and Iraq had been won, the veritable sword arm of the Prophet. Tradition would commemorate him not merely as a great Amir—“commander”—but as something very much more: as a Muslim so flame-lit by his knowledge of God’s will that several Qur’anic verses were said to have been revealed purely to provide his opinions with some heavenly back-up. Even Muhammad, according to certain traditions, had acknowledged that Umar was the better Muslim of the two. “When people differ on any issue,” one celebrated ruling declared, “look for Umar’s doing and abide by it.”121 Like the Qur’an itself, then, the character of the second Caliph was a book in which might be read the lessons of God’s will. Mighty warrior and mighty ascetic; quick to draw his sword and no less quick to trample down in righteous scorn the luxuries won by that same sword; a man who from his mud-brick home in Medina could direct the overthrow of mighty empires, and yet who, if he saw his lieutenants dressed in silks and brocade, would leap down from his saddle and pelt them with stones: such, in the opinion of Muslim scholars, was the man who had secured the world for Islam.

  A plausible characterisation? Certainly, as with Muhammad, so with Umar—his historicity is beyond dispute. An Armenian bishop, writing a decade or so after Qadisiyya, described Umar in a brief, throwaway sentence much as Muslim historians would subsequently do: as a mighty potentate coordinating the advance of “the sons of Ishmael” from the depths of the desert.122 Nor is that all. There do indeed seem to be found, preserved in the traditions that Muslims would record of the Sahabah, the “Companions,” of Muhammad, authentic echoes of the God-haunted and strife-torn age that had witnessed the Futuh—the “Conquest.” If there seems no reason to doubt that Umar, that model of ferocious piety, was directly inspired by the awesome thunder of the Prophet’s revelations, then so too is it evident that the Prophet himself, in his summoning of the Arabs to holy war, was perfectly in accord with the spirit of the times. “In truth,” he informed his followers, “the punishment of those who make war against God and His Messenger, and roam the earth corrupting it, is that they be killed, or crucified, or have their hands and feet amputated, alternately, or be exiled from the land.”123 Such a message was all the more resonant, no doubt, for being delivered direct from the Almighty Himself; and yet, the sentiments informing it would have been instantly recognisable to anyone familiar with the workings of Roman power. Whether it was Justinian breaking the rebellious Samaritans, or Saint Simeon incinerating Mundhir with a fireball, or Heraclius bringing ruin to the fire-temples of the Persians, examples were hardly lacking of spectacular violence committed in the cause of God. Umar, turning the pretensions of the Christian empire back upon itself, seemed to those he conquered, as well as to those he commanded, a warlord of a thoroughly recognisable kind. What added incomparably to his prestige, however, and did truly suggest something novel, was that his earth-shaking qualities as a generalissimo were combined with a most distinctive cast of virtue. Rather than ape the manners of a Caesar, as the Ghassanid kings had done, he drew on the example of a quite different kind of Christian. Umar’s threadbare robes, his diet of bread, salt and water, and his rejection of worldly riches would have reminded anyone from the desert reaches beyond Palestine of a very particular kind of person. Monks out in the Judaean desert had long been casting themselves as warriors of God. The achievement of Umar was to take such language to a literal, and previously unimagined, extreme.

  Just like the Qur’an itself, then, the heroic stories that were told of the second Caliph seem to reach back to a specific place and moment: to the fringes of Palestine, and that terrifying period of superpower conflict when it appeared that the world itself stood in the shadow of the End Days. That war might be waged in the name of God, and that a contempt for earthly pleasures too was a form of warfare: these twin presumptions, which Umar embodied in a supremely radical way, were nevertheless far from being original to him. Naturally, the truth of this cannot help but be obscured by histories that locate his beginnings, like those of the Prophet himself, in a desert backwater many hundreds of miles from the Fertile Crescent. Composed centuries later, by men of intense piety who could feel God nearer to them than their jugular veins, it is no wonder that such narratives, like sandstone shaped by ceaseless weathering, should have been transformed out of recognition over the course of the generations. Hence, in trying to explain how a state came to be forged in the depths of Arabia formidable enough to subdue the Fertile Crescent, the perennial frustration. The aftermath of the conquests masterminded by Umar could hardly be more manifest—but not so the course, and still less the cause, of the original eruption.

  Which said, despair need not be total. There has been preserved, embedded within the vast corpus of subsequent writings on the Prophet, at least a single lump of magma sufficiently calcified to have stood proof against all erosion. The “Constitution of Medina,” it has been termed: a series of eight brief treaties concluded between the Muhajirun and the natives of Yathrib, and which—not least because they refer to the emigrants as “Believers” rather than “Muslims”—are accepted by even the most suspicious of scholars as deriving from the time of Muhammad. Here, in these precious documents, it is possible to glimpse the authentic begin
nings of a movement that would succeed, in barely two decades, in prostrating both the New Rome and Iranshahr. That the Prophet consciously aimed at state-building; that it was his ambition to forge his own people and the local Arab tribes into a single Umma; that this confederation was to fight “in the path of God”:124 these brief details, the veritable building blocks out of which all the much later stories of Muhammad’s life would be constructed, do authentically seem rock solid. What the Constitution of Medina does not tell us, however, is where the Muhajirun had originally come from; nor does it reveal precisely whom they felt called upon by God to fight. Most regrettably of all, it sheds no light on how an alliance stitched together in a remote oasis might conceivably have expanded to embrace the whole of Arabia, and then to take on the world. Nevertheless, its very existence would seem to suggest that the hard core of Muslim tradition may truly derive from the time of Muhammad, and have stood proof, after all, against the weathering effects of time. Conflict between the upstart Umma and the Quraysh; eventual compromise on both sides, and the agreement between them of a treaty; a brutal crushing by the new confederation of any Arab tribes bold enough to stand in its way: such a process of state-building seems, at the very least, plausible.