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

by Tom Holland

  A prospect fit to give the Umayyads apoplexy, of course. It was bad enough that jumped-up pen-pushers—Turks, and Persians, and who knew what—should presume to dispute with the Khalifat Allah his right to determine the law of Islam; but it was beyond insufferable to have them prescribe for him the correct way to “fight in the way of God.”79 No dynasty in history had presided over a more staggering array of conquests than the Umayyads. It was under their rule that the faithful had witnessed the fall of Carthage and Merv, the conquest of Spain and Transoxiana, the reaching of the Loire and the Hindu Kush. Clearly, then, the approval of God for their rule was something beyond dispute. And yet, like rodents burrowing and gnawing their way beneath some particularly glorious citadel, the ulama did dispute it. In their portrayal of Muhammad as the archetype of what they themselves felt a warrior of Islam should be, there was a peculiarly insidious threat to Umayyad authority. Any failure on the part of a Caliph to measure up to it could immediately be cast by them as a sinister deviation from true Islam—as defined, of course, by themselves. Even the proud assertion first made by Abd al-Malik—that to rule the Muslim people was to serve as the “Deputy of God”—might be turned against his dynasty. The earliest Commanders of the Faithful, so the ulama began to point out, had never thought to arrogate to themselves such a haughty title. Any notion of posing as God’s deputy, to a man as austere and devout as Umar, would surely have been beyond the pale. Accordingly, in the version of history written by the ulama, he came to be endowed with a far more modest title: not “Deputy of God” but “Deputy of the Prophet of God.” The Umayyads, when set against such a paragon, could hardly help but appear a gang of impious upstarts: arrogant gate-crashers squatting in the House of Islam.

  Propaganda both brilliant and black. Indeed, such a travesty was it of all the many achievements wrought by the dynasty of Abd al-Malik on behalf of the Muslim people that the Umayyads, under more favourable circumstances, might well have laughed it to scorn. Circumstances, however, during the lengthy reign of the last of Abd al-Malik’s sons to ascend the caliphal throne—a squinting skinflint by the name of Hisham—were anything but favourable. Able and innovative a statesman though Hisham was, and especially when screwing his subjects out of their money, the seeming brilliance of his administration was in truth possessed of a mere surface glitter. His own personal lack of courage, which saw him palpitate violently whenever he received news of some reverse, did not prevent him from being guided by one fundamental conviction: that it was the prime and proper responsibility of a Caliph to secure the expansion of the House of Islam. Neither defeats at the hands of the Franks and the Romans nor a widespread revolt in North Africa in 739 could persuade him to reconsider this core presumption. As a result, by the time of his death in 743, his coffers were seriously depleted, and the Syrian army, which had served as the cutting edge of Umayyad power ever since the time of Mu’awiya, had been perilously blunted. Worn down by endless campaigning, the professionals who constituted its units were now scattered far and wide—from the Pyrenees to the Indus. In Syria itself, almost none remained.

  And this, for Hisham’s successors, was to spell mortal danger. Even prior to his death, unrest was spreading fast. In Syria, it took the form of increasingly tribal-based factionalism; but in Iraq, it had an even more ominous source. Ghosts still unexorcised despite almost a century of Umayyad rule were re-emerging from the often blood-boltered mists of the past. In 740, the Shi’a demonstrated that they had lost none of their appetite for doomed uprisings when some two hundred Kufans, rallying in support of one of Ali’s great-grandsons and confident that they still enjoyed the favour of God, hurled themselves against an Umayyad attack squad ten times their size. The rebels were duly wiped out beneath a hail of arrows, and the headless trunk of Ali’s heir was nailed to a cross. At the same time, less flamboyantly but more effectively, agents for another family with a claim on the name of the Prophet were also at work, damning the Umayyads as false Muslims and usurpers. Despite their seeming obscurity, the Abbasids—a Qurayshi dynasty based in a remote farmstead in Nabataea—could lay claim to a truly priceless ancestor: none other than Abbas, the uncle of Muhammad. In the years that followed Hisham’s death, this was enough to pique the interest of a growing number of Muslims—and not only among those inveterate malcontents, the ulama. With the times seemingly fractured, speculation over the possible cause of God’s anger was rife. The answers given were rarely favourable to the ancien régime. Consequently, as Abbasid propagandists murmured their honeyed promises of a new dawn, the faithful began to listen to such whisperings with ever more attention. Perhaps, at such an excruciating moment of crisis, the appearance on the political scene of such living links with the Prophet might indeed be a part of God’s plan?

  Umayyad loyalists were hardly alone in snorting at this notion. It was almost inevitable, with factionalism rife across the Caliphate, that Islam’s most fanatical insurgents would seize the opportunity to launch an uprising of their own; and sure enough, in 745, it was the turn of the Kharijites to raise the banner of revolt. Rather than martyr themselves needlessly—as the Shi’a had such a taste for doing—they brought to the business of revolution their customary attributes of ruthless efficiency and savagery. A few weeks after proclaiming their own Caliph, they had already gnawed off a major chunk of Iraq. Yet in truth, the Kharijites would never have had the opportunity to establish this breakaway state had it not been provided them by the most lethal of all the various outbreaks of fitna: a faction fight among the Umayyads themselves. In 744, Hisham’s heir, a dashing poseur by the name of Walid, had been assassinated in one of his desert pleasure palaces—a murder that had served to unleash an unparalleled bout of blood-letting among his relatives. The man who eventually emerged victorious from this carnivorous feuding was a grizzled but curly-headed warlord ostensibly well suited to power: a nephew of Abd al-Malik’s named Marwan. By 747, he had decisively trampled down his Umayyad and Kharijite rivals, and amply demonstrated both the kick and the stubbornness of the beast to which he was most often compared: a mule. Yet his triumph had come at a terrible cost. Iraq and Syria both lay in ruins, and Marwan was so despised in Damascus that he decamped from Syria altogether and established his court in Harran. An astounding development, to be sure: even with the Caliphate in a state of near collapse, a city still “ulcerous with idolatry”80 had come to be established as the capital of the Deputy of God.

  Many Muslims would doubtless have been shocked to learn that the moon continued to be worshipped anywhere in the House of Islam. The cult of Sin might almost have been designed to provoke their horror. Yet the pagans of Harran—who had suffered brutal persecution in the final years of Roman rule—had found their new masters, if not exactly more tolerant, then more laissez-faire, at least. Christians would snidely attribute this to the gullibility of the Muslim authorities, who were supposed to have been tricked into accepting that the moon worshippers were in fact the enigmatic “Sabaeans” mentioned in the Qur’an—and therefore, according to the Prophet, one of the three “Peoples of the Book.”81 Whatever the truth of such a tall-sounding story, Harranians were certainly still studying the future by sacrificing animals and then “examining their livers,”82 directly under Marwan’s nose. The persistence of such ancient practices within a capital of the Caliphate serves as a vivid reminder that Muslims were not alone, amid the evils of the age, in attempting to fathom the purposes of the heavens. In 745, for instance, during Marwan’s devastating campaign in Syria, a stylite had presumed to warn the passing warlord that he would be dealt with by God even as he had dealt with his subjects. “When Marwan heard this, he commanded that the pillar should be overthrown; and he brought down the old man, and burned him alive in the fire.”83 Caliphs, of course, might treat Christian saints with a brutality and dismissiveness that would have appalled a Caesar—and yet even as Marwan hunkered down in Harran, he neglected the sensibilities of his non-Muslim subjects at his peril. Floodtides were swirling around him older
by far than Islam. These were rising, however, not in the traditional heartlands of the Caliphate, in Syria or Iraq, but far to the east: in Khorasan.

  Almost three centuries had passed since Peroz, in his war against the Hephthalites, had set the seal on a disastrous reign with one final, calamitous battle. Much had changed since then, and yet the miseries suffered by Khorasan under Hisham and his successors had come to wear a very familiar look. As resentments and frustrations bred of heavy taxation gnawed at an oppressed population, so had Muslim armies beyond the Oxus suffered a series of humiliating reverses. Not even the ultimate stabilisation of Transoxiana could erase the notorious reputations of a succession of incompetent Umayyad governors. “You abandoned us like pieces of a slaughtered beast, cut up for a round-breasted girl,”84 the Arabs of the eastern front sang of one particularly epicene appointee from Damascus. Yet Umayyad authority was threatened by more than the resentments of Muslim settlers; it was in peril as well from the same traditions that had once blackened the name of Peroz. In Khorasan—where great Parthian dynasts such as the Karin still jealously guarded their prerogatives against the upstart Muslim elite, and where most towns and villages remained wholly untouched by Islam—it often seemed as though Iranshahr had never fallen. That the world was divided into rival spheres of good and evil; that a great monarch was either a defender of truth or he was nothing; that the wickedness of an oath-breaker would bring ruin to his realm: here were presumptions still widely taken for granted along the eastern marches of Iran. The result was, as Umayyad rule began to implode, that the stirrings of rebellion could be felt well beyond the Fertile Crescent. In 745, even as the Kharijites were launching their latest insurgency, a mysterious prophet appeared in Khorasan. Dressed all in green—the colour of Mihr—brandishing a book of revelations written in Persian, and proclaiming himself familiar with the byways of heaven, Bihafarid was a revolutionary conjured, it seemed, from the most haunting mists of the Iranian past. Having died and then risen again—or so his disciples proclaimed—he announced his mission in terms that nakedly scorned all the pretensions of Muhammad: “O people, I am Bihafarid, the Messenger of God!”85

  Of course, it could not possibly last. Muslim rule, whatever the hopes of the great multitudes of peasants who flocked in excitement to Bihafarid’s banner, was not so easily overthrown. Sure enough, in 749, the self-proclaimed prophet was arrested, put in chains and hanged in a nearby mosque. Yet his executioners, for all that it would have appalled them to contemplate it, were not, perhaps, wholly dissimilar to the man they had put to death. Bihafarid’s murderers were themselves followers of an insurrectionist who had emerged abruptly on the fringes of the former Iranshahr, and combined charisma with a dramatic claim to be an agent of God. “Father of a Muslim,” he called himself: a name so obviously a pseudonym as to give away nothing at all. His glamour, in part at least, was that of a man in a mask. “The knowledge of my deeds,” as he put it with a calculated show of mystery, “is better for you than the knowledge of my pedigree.”86 Yet whether an Arab or an Iranian, an aristocrat or a former slave, one thing, at least, is certain: he was powerfully assisted in his preachings by the same identical swirl of yearnings and expectations as had inspired Bihafarid. Along the easternmost fringes of the Caliphate, faiths were not easily patrolled. So it had ever been, of course, in border zones. No wonder, then, far distant as they were from all the efforts of the ulama to raise barriers around the practice of their religion, that the Muslims of Khorasan should have betrayed the influence of beliefs older by far than the Sunna. What helped to give Abu Muslim his prestige among them was that he dared, as once the critics of Peroz had done, to damn their ruler as a man condemned by God. Although he did not, like Bihafarid, clothe himself in green, yet in the summer of 747, when he declared open rebellion against Marwan, he unfurled a banner dyed a single colour: black. That he did this in a village outside Merv, where the fugitive Yazdegird had been murdered, was hardly suggestive, of course, of any nostalgia on Abu Muslim’s part for the House of Sasan; and yet, to Iranians, his preachings might well have stirred memories of the toppled monarchy. The cause proclaimed by Abu Muslim was that of a single family, appointed by God to the rule of the world; and if the mark of their claim to this awesome status was the possession, not of a farr but rather of a bloodline traceable back to the uncle of the Prophet, then that, in an Islamic empire, promised qualification enough. Abu Muslim, like so many other rebels trained in subterfuge and insurrection, was an agent of the Abbasids; and by raising the East in their cause, he had succeeded in fusing the past with the future, the Iranian with the Arab, the Sasanian with the Islamic. It was to prove a quite staggeringly potent combination—and the ruin of the Umayyads.

  The flames of rebellion swept westwards from Khorasan so fast and so ferociously that Marwan was caught out fatally short. Already, as the spring of 749 turned to summer, Abbasid forces had secured complete control of Iran. By August, they were across the Euphrates; by September, they were inside Kufa. On 28 November, in the very mosque where Ali had been murdered, an Abbasid was publicly hailed as Caliph. Marwan now had no option but to meet the provocation head on. Rather than wait for the full roster of his veterans to assemble, he opted instead to cobble together such units as were already available to him in Harran and lead them against the pretender. On 25 January 750, on the bank of a tributary of the Tigris called the Greater Zab, he spotted the black banners of the Abbasids, advanced, and fell upon the rebels. The result was calamity. His army was obliterated. As unyielding as ever, even in the face of such a disaster, the tireless Marwan fled the battlefield and desperately struggled to marshal further troops—but there were none to be found. Galloping past both Damascus—the capital he had abandoned—and Jerusalem—the city that now mocked his dynasty’s crumbled greatness more than any other—he made his way into Egypt. Here, in the heat of the summer, he was finally cornered by his pursuers. His head, topped by the frizz of his curly hair, was dispatched to his replacement upon the throne of the Caliphs. His tongue was fed to a cat.

  Marwan’s relatives too were systematically tracked down. The death squads were grimly efficient. Of the entire Umayyad brood, the only one who managed to evade capture was a grandson of the miserly Hisham, who fled to Spain, where he set himself up as Amir. Otherwise, Islam’s founding dynasty was finished. The last wretched gaggle of survivors, hauled before the Abbasid Caliph, were butchered, laid side by side, covered by a carpet, and used as a banqueting table by honoured guests: “And those who were present at the scene,” it is said, “ate while the death-rattle still sounded in the throats of the expiring victims.”

  An atrocity fit to stand as a gruesome coda to a revolution beyond compare, manifest in pages of divine revelations, and capacious systems of law, and incomparably beautiful buildings, and whole new cities, and would-be global empires, and entire habits of thought transformed. In the most literal and bloody way imaginable, the slaughter of the Umayyads served to illustrate what had been—for half a millennium or more—the supreme theme of the age: the raising of a new order upon the ruins of the old.

  * * *

  a Muslim scholars would identify this verse as referring to a change in the direction of prayer from Jerusalem to Mecca—a tradition for which, of course, there is absolutely no evidence within the Qur’an itself.

  b In due course, this tradition would become an embarrassment to Muslim theologians, since it implied that God had a body. In the eleventh century, an alternative explanation for the construction of the Dome of the Rock was enshrined: that it commemorated the ascension into heaven not of God but of Muhammad, who was supposedly transported from Mecca to Jerusalem specifically for the purpose.

  c A monk in Iraq, writing in the early eighth century, alludes to a “Qur’an” but also to other writings by Muhammad, including a “Book of the Cow.” John of Damascus, a high-ranking civil servant in the last years of Abd al-Malik’s reign who took a deep interest in his master’s faith, also refers to a “Book�
� composed by Muhammad, together with various other texts that had supposedly been written by him. “The Cow” ended up as the title of a sura in the Qur’an; “The Woman” seems to be the same text as the sura that appears under the title “Women” in the Qur’an; “God’s She-Camel,” despite scattered references throughout the holy book to such a beast, bears no resemblance to any existing Qur’anic sura.

  d In the long run, a majority of Muslim jurists would decide that Zoroastrians were in fact a “People of the Book.”

  e The toothbrush was called a siwak and comprised a twig of the arak tree.

  f Deuteronomy: 22–21. In fact, as was invariably their way, the rabbis appended so many qualifications to the biblical proscriptions that they effectively abolished the death penalty in Jewish society. For instance, it could be enforced only if the adultery had been committed before two valid witnesses, and even then only after multiple warnings had been delivered.

  ENVOI

  PLUS ÇA CHANGE?

  Dinner parties hosted on corpses were hardly the limit of Abbasid achievement. In 762, on the banks of the Tigris, where the Garden of Eden had once stood, the construction began of a capital designed to serve as an image of paradise. Baghdad, “the City of Peace,” would certainly prove to be, if not a vision of heaven, then a place of superlatives. A mere couple of generations on from its founding, it was already the largest, the richest and the most beautiful city in the world. Damascus, that abandoned showcase for Umayyad power, was decisively eclipsed. So too was everywhere else. The universe, as even ambassadors from Constantinople might reluctantly acknowledge, had a whole new crossroads.