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

by Tom Holland

  And if accurate, then it would imply that there may perhaps be other clues, preserved in the stories told centuries later of the Prophet’s career, as to how and why, as if from the blue, the imperial authorities in both Syria and Iraq were overwhelmed by precisely the kind of Arab federation that hitherto had always been theirs to sway. Even though Muslim tradition would cast the conflict between Muhammad and the Quraysh as a struggle for control of Mecca, this tradition itself contains hints of a suggestively alternative one. Particularly striking, for instance, is the number of leading Qurayshi dynasts who, despite supposedly being based in Mecca, are said to have purchased estates in Syria during the Prophet’s lifetime: an example of long-distance property speculation which, if genuinely conducted from the Hijaz, would have had no precedent in the entire span of Roman history. Previously, whether along the Rhine or in Armenia, the only barbarians who owned land on either side of the imperial frontier were those who directly bordered it.125 All of which would seem to imply a rather awkward conundrum. Either the Quraysh truly came from Mecca, in which case they could not have owned property in Roman territory—or else they owned property in Roman territory, in which case they are most unlikely to have come from Mecca.

  Of these two alternatives, it is clear that the second is the likelier. Even on the evidence of Muslim tradition itself, the obsession of the Prophet with securing the border zone south of Palestine is manifest. With the single exception of Mecca itself, all the targets of his campaigning, all the objects of his military ambitions, are said to have lain in this region: the stretches of desert that the Romans’ Arab allies had always traditionally patrolled. If the Quraysh did go from attempting to strangle the Prophet’s infant confederation in its cradle to allying themselves with it—and there seems no reason to doubt it—they would obviously have been putting their stake in any imperially sanctioned order in serious jeopardy. This, however, at a time when the supply of gold from Caesar had long since dried up, seems to have struck them as a gamble well worth taking. The winnings on offer, after all, were potentially dazzling. It was not only the plunder promised them by Muhammad’s terrifyingly omnipotent god that would have glimmered in the imaginings of the Qurayshi leaders. So too would something even more seductive: the prospect of toppling the Ghassanids, of laying claim to the heritage of the Lakhmids, of fashioning a whole new shirkat, with themselves as the region’s top dogs. What the new confederation of Muhajirun and Quraysh appears initially to have aimed at, as their primary strategic goal, was the mastery of the Syrian desert. That it ended up conquering Syria itself, and Mesopotamia too, may well, then, have come as big a surprise to its leaders as it did to the Romans and Persians themselves.

  It certainly seems no coincidence that the invaders’ two most decisive victories were won on the doorsteps of two places that had long featured prominently in Arab dreams. For generations, the tales told of the courts of Jabiya and Hira, and the songs sung of their splendours, had haunted the imaginings of the desert tribes. Now, with the defeat of the Romans at the Yarmuk, calamity had overwhelmed their Ghassanid clients as well—just as the shattering of the Persian monarchy at Qadisiyya had spelled doom for all those local desert chieftains with fantasies of sitting on the vacant throne of the Lakhmids. The likelihood is, in fact, that both imperial armies, as they sought to stem the Saracen onslaught, consisted themselves in large part of Arab tribesmen. Muslim historians, not surprisingly, would take an exultant delight in emphasising the immensity of the manpower available to the toppled empires: of how their troops numbered in the hundreds of thousands, and of how their blood, when it was spilled, had flowed in such prodigious quantities as to turn the wheels of local water-mills.126 Contemporaries knew better, though. They understood the true condition of anaemia that had afflicted both superpowers. Heraclius, as one bishop bluntly put it, “could raise no more troops to oppose the Ishmaelites.”127 Given the absence of regular troops, he had no alternative but to rely on foederati to defend Roman territory. The Ghassanids, and all the other tribes allied to them, repaid Heraclius’s trust with fierce loyalty; but it ensured, when the Muhajirun first appeared across the Syrian desert, that the Roman military itself was reduced to something of a sideshow.128 Almost a century of pestilence, and whole decades of war: these, in their combined effects, had left the emperor with no clothes.

  So it was that Syria and Palestine slipped away a second time from the grasp of the New Rome, and those Qurayshis who had previously held estates under the sufferance of the imperial authorities now took possession of entire provinces. But they were not alone, of course, in claiming title deeds to the Holy Land—as the defeated Christians, in their bewilderment and demoralisation, were all too bitterly aware. Torn between blaming the calamities that had overwhelmed them on either their own sinfulness or the machinations of the Jews, many, not surprisingly, plumped for the latter option. Was it any coincidence, they wondered, that “the horror of the invasion of the Ishmaelites”129 should have followed so fast upon Heraclius’s campaign of forced baptisms? Dark rumours began to swirl: of how Jewish refugees from this decree had fled to Arabia; of how, upon their arrival in the desert, they had turned the head of the Saracens with honeyed talk of their shared descent from Abraham; of how Muhammad, looking to claim their birthright, had duly set off at their head to conquer Palestine. Stories such as these, of course, were prone only to grow wilder with the telling; and yet the wildest rumours of all, perhaps, were the very earliest. Back in 634, with Sergius freshly entombed in his shroud of camel skin, fabulous reports of a Saracen prophet had swept through Caesarea. By Christians, of course, he had been scorned as the rankest impostor—“for since when did prophets come armed with a sword?” Among the Jews of the city, however, the reaction had been very different. Delight, no doubt, would have been their response to any Roman defeat; but their joy, in that spring of 634, had been blended with a fierce and familiar hope. “People were saying that the prophet had appeared, coming with the Saracens.” And his message? “They say that he is proclaiming the advent of the Anointed One—the Christ who is to come.”130

  It was exactly twenty years since Nehemiah, amid a similar groundswell of excitement, had sought to rebuild Jerusalem’s Temple, and promptly been impaled for his pains. To the Jews of Palestine, though, the Ishmaelites must have seemed altogether more promising agents of deliverance than the Persians had ever been. They might have been wild asses among men—but they were at least distant cousins. Then there was the fact that the Prophet himself, or so it would seem, had chosen Moses as his particular role model. “O people, enter the holy land which God has marked out for you, and do not go back to your old ways, only to end up as losers.”131 Any Jews, hearing Muhammad attribute this exhortation to their greatest prophet—the original rabbi, the man who had led them out of bondage and back to the Promised Land—might well have pricked up their ears. Indeed, some might well have done a good deal more than that. Such, at any rate, is the evidence of the Constitution of Medina. Muhajirun and local Arabs, it seems, were not alone in having ranked as original members of the Umma. Also listed as Believers, and graced with a starring role in the founding document of their state, had been some other, perhaps rather more unexpected enthusiasts for the Prophet: whole quantities of Jews.

  Later Muslim historians, clearly discombobulated by this, would attempt to explain them away as members of three Jewish clans supposedly native to Medina, who were said initially to have given their backing to the Prophet, and then, after turning fractious, to have been variously driven into exile or massacred and dumped into pits. Yet there are serious difficulties in accepting this tradition as true. It is not simply that the three Jewish clans mentioned by the historians do not feature anywhere in the Constitution of Medina. There is also another, and familiar, problem: that our only sources for the annihilation of these Jews are all suspiciously late. Not only that, but they date from the heyday of Muslim greatness: a period when the authors would have had every interest in fabricatin
g the sanction of the Prophet for the brusque slapping down of uppity infidels.132 Certainly, if it were truly the case that entire communities of Jews had been expelled into the desert or else wiped out by Ishmaelites in a bloodbath, then no contemporary seems to have noted it. This, at a time when Jews, just like Christians, had never been more alert to the propaganda value of martyrs, is most peculiar. So peculiar, in fact, as to appear downright implausible. Far likelier, it would seem, is that the compact recorded in the Constitution of Medina, between the Muhajirun and assorted bands of Jewish warriors, had held firm—and that it had culminated in the conquest of Palestine. Christians, when they fingered their old enemies as the tutors of Muhammad, were undoubtedly indulging themselves in a familiar paranoia—but less so, perhaps, when they accused “the sons of Israel” of joining with the Arabs “to form a large army.”133 Venerable the scorn of the Jews for the Ishmaelites may have been; but it was nothing like so savage as their loathing for the Romans. “Do not fear, son of man”: So an angel was supposed to have reassured a twitchy rabbi. “The Almighty only brings the kingdom of Ishmael in order to deliver you from the wicked ones.”134

  In the first disorienting flush of the Ishmaelite occupation, such a reassurance might well have seemed a perfectly convincing one. How else, after all, was the humiliation of Heraclius to be interpreted, if not as a deliverance ordained of God? Unsurprisingly, then, in the wake of the Jews’ redemption from the threat of forced baptism, their enthusiasm for the new order seems to have flared with some flamboyance—and to have had a familiar focus. Jerusalem, that perennial object of Jewish longing, had been lost to the Romans along with the rest of the Holy Land. The Arabs—who, in a curious show of antiquarianism, insisted on calling it Iliy’a, after its old pagan name of Aelia Capitolina—were quick to mark it with their own stamp. To Christian horror, the ancient ban on Jews entering the city’s sacred limits—which dated back to the heyday of the pagan empire and which Heraclius had pointedly renewed—was revoked. Work also began on clearing rubble and refuse from the holiest Jewish spot of all—the Temple Mount. No surprise, then, that Umar, “the second king who arises from Ishmael,” and the man who had given the order, should have been hailed in breathless tones by one rabbi as “a lover of Israel.”135 As the work continued, first with the levelling of the bedrock, and then with the cannibalisation of the Kapitolion, the temple of Jupiter, there were some Jews who dared to go even further and dream that it was the Temple itself being rebuilt. No prospect could possibly have been more dazzling. With the Temple restored, after all, there would arise a new Israel. Inevitably, then, the excited rumours prompted by the defeat of Sergius at Gaza, of the Messiah’s imminent arrival, continued to swirl.

  Time, it was true, would prove this optimism sorely misplaced. The more extravagant hopes of the Jews were destined, as ever, to be disappointed. The Temple was not restored. The Messiah did not appear hot on the heels of the Ishmaelites’ prophet. Nevertheless, there was, in the febrile speculations of the Jews, something more than mere wishful thinking. Those who sensed in the Ishmaelites a particular obsession with the Promised Land were surely not mistaken. Just as Jabiya and Hira had been the initial objects of the conquerors’ strategic ambitions, Palestine had clearly blazed in their imaginings as a prize that transcended mere earthly considerations. Although it had been a simple matter for them to cross the undefended frontier into what the Prophet had termed the “Holy Land,” ease of access had hardly been the primary consideration. God had promised Palestine to the descendants of Abraham—and so it had come to pass. No wonder, then, in the immediate wake of the conquest, that Muhajirun as well as Jews appear to have indulged in any number of wild surmises. Indeed, on occasion, it might be hard to tell them apart. Amid the general fracturing of the times, old identities and old certainties had the potential to warp very quickly. When Jews, praising Umar for his scouring of the Romans from Jerusalem, and his cleansing of the Temple Mount, hailed him as the Messiah, there were certain Muhajirun who did not think to scorn the notion. Instead, caught up in the mood of excitement, they surrendered to it. Umar, so it was boldly proclaimed, ranked as none other than al-Faruq—“the Redeemer.”136 Such, it appeared, was the true potency of the Temple Mount: that it could persuade Arabs to share in the fantasies of Jews.

  And perhaps, had the Muhajirun rested content with their conquest of the Holy Land, and not set their horizons far wider, then their faith might ultimately have mutated into something truly messianic—a Jerusalem-haunted blurring of Jewish beliefs and the Prophet’s revelations. Yet already, even as Umar’s workmen set to work on clearing the rubbish from the Temple Mount, it was apparent that Palestine, no matter how awesome a prize, provided far too small a stage for the evolving pretensions of the conquerors. What value the Promised Land, after all, when God had graced the Muhajirun with so much more besides? A question fit, perhaps, to perplex the conquerors themselves. Certainly, there had been nothing in the Prophet’s revelations to forewarn them that they might end up the masters of the world. Muhammad himself, when reporting God’s assurance that He would settle the Muhajirun “in a good abode,” had seemed to take for granted that this same “good abode” was merely their inheritance from Abraham.137 The limits of his ambitions, it would appear, had been Arabia and Palestine. Yet both, in the event, had provided merely stepping-stones. As too, in due course, would the entire glittering sweep of Syria and Iraq. Fabulous a prize though the Fertile Crescent was, infinitely beyond the dreams of previous generations of Arabs, it ultimately served only to whet the appetite of the Muhajirun for more. The world lay all before them—and God, it seemed, intended them to take it.

  So it was, in late 639, that a tiny war band of Arabs, following the high road that led south from Gaza, crossed into Egypt. The bread-basket of Constantinople, most precious of all the various territories retrieved by Heraclius from Persian occupation, the province had been back under imperial rule for a decade—but not contentedly so. The return of Roman administrators had seen the return as well to the determinedly Monophysite province of a Chalcedonian patriarch. Heraclius, no less determined than Justinian had been to secure the unity of the Church, had sponsored a programme of increasingly repressive bullying. The Copts, digging in their heels, had responded by embracing every opportunity to pose as martyrs. The brother of the Monophysite patriarch, for instance, despite having his flanks griddled over a fire and his teeth pulled out, proved so obdurate in his defiance that the Chalcedonians, giving up on their attempts to convert him, had him dumped out at sea. Or so the story went. Certainly, the fact that so many Monophysites could swap such a rumour, and believe it to be true, reflected a groundswell of hostility to Constantinople that would ultimately prove fatal to Roman rule. Imperial exhaustion, Arab self-confidence and the studied neutrality of the vast majority of the native population all contributed to the Muhajirun winning their most glittering prize yet. In September 642, after the expiration of an eleven-month armistice and a wholesale evacuation of the province by the Roman forces, the new lords of the Nile entered Alexandria. The disaster, so a Monophysite bishop piously declared, had been entirely due “to the wickedness of the emperor Heraclius, and his persecutions.”138 If so, then God had exacted a high price. There were to be no more grain ships sailing from Alexandria to Constantinople.

  Meanwhile, the demand slapped on the city fathers of Herakleopolis for sixty-five sheep was an early indication of what the toppling of Roman rule might mean for those Christian officials left behind in Egypt. The Magaritai—the Muhajirun—still thought instinctively, as their ancestors had ever done, in terms of plunder and rustled livestock. Even when clattering down marble-paved high streets, past palaces and cathedrals, they retained instincts bred of the desert. Great cities such as Alexandria and Ctesiphon, for all the fabulous wealth that they promised, were viewed with dark suspicion—as breeding grounds of pestilence and black magic. Just as their forefathers had done when making their own hijra northwards from the depths of Ara
bia to serve Caesar or Shahanshah, the Muhajirun preferred to settle amid open fields, where they could live among their own kind and graze their sheep. Above all, they aimed to revel in the pleasures and the profits that war, by venerable tradition, had most honourably provided the Arabs. No wonder, then, that the settlements in which they congregated should fast have developed the character of garrison towns.

  In Iraq, where the unconquered uplands of Iran beckoned tantalisingly, two particularly large cities of tents and reed huts were soon sprouting among the mudflats. One, Basra, lay in the far south, near where the Tigris and Euphrates met with the sea. The other, Kufa, stood across the palm groves from the God-blessed site of Qadisiyya. Regularly, in the decade that followed the fall of Alexandria, Muhajirun from these two bases would ride out eastwards, embarked upon a fresh, and far more challenging, project of conquest. Persia, in marked contrast to Egypt, was a land of mountains and defiant citadels. Unremitting in a way that none of the previous campaigns of the Muhajirun had been, the subjugation of the Sasanian heartlands was to prove a brutal one. Although certainly marked by some lucrative gains—including the capture of yet more royal treasure and the body of the prophet Daniel, no less—it was only in 650, after a grinding, five-year campaign, that Istakhr was finally stormed. Although Yazdegird, once again, made good his escape, the rest of the population were not so lucky. Forty thousand in all were put to the sword, and the monuments and fire temples of Ardashir’s city left as smoking rubble. No such calamity had been visited upon Persia since the time of Alexander, and the burning of Persepolis.