Ghost Empire

by Richard Fidler

  CHAPTER FIVE

  Children of Ishmael

  The empire in 718, at the second Arab siege of Constantinople.

  Prayer is Better than Sleep

  JOE AND I have fallen into a routine whereby we retire after dinner at an early hour and get up at daybreak when the first call to prayer floats out of the minarets of the Blue Mosque: Come and flourish, God is great, Prayer is better than sleep.

  Joe is not so sure about that last part. He finds the call to prayer grating, but I don’t mind it at all. After a while it mixes into the general hubbub of the city and I barely notice it. Istanbul is, as Constantinople once was, the largest city in Europe and the benefits of pausing for a moment of peace and reflection several times in the course of a busy day are suddenly obvious to me. But at Joe’s age, I think I would have hated it too.

  I am trying on this trip to open Joe’s mind to the glory and emotional intensity of sacred art and architecture. Khym and I have not brought our kids up as Christians and they’ve never shown an interest in any kind of religion. Joe has almost no acquaintance with Bible stories, so the Byzantine mosaics of Istanbul are as incomprehensible to him as a column of hieroglyphics. His exposure to religion thus far has also been an entirely negative experience. Evangelical Christians are active in our suburb and he’s had arguments with kids his own age who insist the world is only six thousand years old, that Darwin was wrong and that humans coexisted with dinosaurs.

  ‘Don’t be too hard on them,’ I tell him. ‘They’re just trying to be loyal to their parents and to the creed they’ve been raised on.’

  ‘But they’re so annoying. They say I’ll go to hell if I don’t agree with them.’

  ‘Is there any part of you that believes that?’

  Joe screws up his face, ‘Of course not. I don’t believe in God at all.’

  Blue Mosque, interior.

  Richard Fidler

  Some years ago I interviewed biologist and well-known atheist Richard Dawkins. I mentioned in passing something I’d been taught in first-year philosophy: that we can apprehend knowledge through either reason or faith. Dawkins didn’t like the faith part of that equation, and replied in his distinctive staccato, ‘Well, I don’t see how any responsible academic could ever utter such a foolish proposition . . .’

  Dawkins takes a very dim view of religious fundamentalists who present creation myths to children as scientific fact. It troubles me too; teaching kids to believe six impossible things before breakfast will probably, in the long run, be counterproductive, or convince them they can assert whatever ‘facts’ they like, so long as they do it confidently and self-righteously. I want Joe to be open to religious art and philosophy, but I want him to hate bullshit as well.

  To prepare for the Dawkins interview I watched a British documentary he had written and presented called The God Delusion, where he travelled to America and the Holy Land to investigate the baleful effects of religious superstition and bigotry. Dawkins finished the program in Jerusalem, where he stood in front of the Dome of the Rock deploring the intractable hatreds inspired by the city’s three great religions.

  But, I thought that as he spoke, he seemed oblivious to the glittering golden beauty of the great mosque behind him. To him, the Church of the Holy Sepulchre was just a rabbit warren of fanatics and charlatans. Beauty, he says, can be found in science, in the elegance of a twist of DNA, in the song of a blackbird or in the complex symmetry of a flower. Well, yes, but I wondered if there wasn’t a degree of philistinism among some of the new atheists too, if their aversion to the sacred has left them indifferent to its beauty.

  Dawkins, naturally enough, sees religious fundamentalism as an attack on the values of the Enlightenment: reason, scepticism and a stubborn sticking to the facts, no matter how unwelcome they might be. Edward Gibbon, the eighteenth-century historian whose work did so much to give Byzantium a bad name, was also very much a man of the Enlightenment, who cared not at all for the Greek-speaking Romans of Constantinople.

  ‘Superstition riveted their chains,’ he sighed. To him their history was ‘a tedious and uniform tale of weakness and misery’. Voltaire was similarly disgusted by the God-haunted Byzantines, denouncing their thousand-year civilisation as ‘a disgrace to the human mind’. As a result of this chorus of enlightened disapproval, the word ‘byzantine’ is embedded in the language as a slur, a cliché used to describe anything pointlessly complex and bureaucratic. There are still a great many people today who know the meaning of the word ‘byzantine’ but almost nothing of Byzantium.

  In the twentieth century a new generation of western historians looked afresh at Byzantine history and concluded that these gentlemen of the Enlightenment had thrown a very large baby out with the bathwater. The critics had failed to answer the obvious question: if the Romans of Constantinople were so effete, so paralysed by superstition, how did their civilisation endure for so long? How did they inspire so many with their vision of heaven on Earth? Was it all just a silly hoax, bolstered with conjuror’s tricks?

  I can’t help but love and admire Byzantium’s readiness to turn its back on the self and fix its gaze directly into the face of Creation. There is something in me that is drawn to the numinous, the sacred. I feel its gravitic force drawing me towards it like an invisible planet. It’s sometimes led me to the gate of a church, but never made me want to stay. Several times in foreign countries I’ve slipped into the back of a cathedral to witness a mass so that I might absorb the beauty of the liturgy in a language I can’t understand. If I could, I’m certain it would irritate me no end. I’d rather be an observer than a participant: I don’t want to be required to recite creeds I don’t believe in.

  My father, Alan, was never comfortable in a church. On those occasions when he was obliged to be present for weddings, for funerals and on Christmas Eve, he would distract himself by observing the antics of children in the congregation who were as bored as he was, impishly goading them to misbehave. Mum would stifle a laugh and whisper, Stop it, Alan.

  Alan had a terrible childhood. His mother, my grandmother, died of tuberculosis when he was three, and his father, a veteran of the Great War, neglected him. Dad was given a cursory education at a Christian Brothers Catholic school where the Brothers tried to beat godliness and obedience into him.

  My mother, Pamela, had a much happier exposure to Christianity. She was raised an Anglican in a small country town, and had fond memories of church and the seasonal rhythm it brought to community life.

  Pamela and Alan on their wedding day.

  Richard Fidler

  They were married in 1959, when Catholic–Protestant unions were still, in some places, frowned upon. Pamela said she was happy to convert to Catholicism, but Alan wasn’t interested, so they were married in an Anglican church in Adelaide. Sectarianism was dying in Australia anyway, and they were by no means an odd couple – they looked like they were made for each other. In their wedding photos they’re movie-star good-looking: Dad resembles a young John Barrymore, Mum is as luminous as Grace Kelly.

  The Hollywood wedding photos belie their very modest circumstances. My sister and I were brought up in the outer suburbs of Melbourne and Sydney, and educated in suburban state schools where religious instruction was kept at arm’s length. Pamela wanted us to be familiar with the Bible stories and hymns of her childhood, so she took us to the local Anglican church. When I entered high school, church attendance petered out as my Sunday mornings were given over to sleeping in and watching TV, but at fifteen I joined a local Anglican youth group, not because I was particularly spiritually curious, but because I wanted to meet girls.

  Youth group meetings involved some kind of social activity on a Sunday afternoon followed by Evensong. The local minister’s approach was low-key rather than evangelical. Some of my friends were Christianised by their years in youth group, but I wasn’t, which disappointed them. Temperamentally I’m a doubter rather than a believer. And I wasn’t able to reconcile the God of love and
forgiveness in the New Testament with the angry, mercurial creator of the Old Testament.

  The stories of Genesis are, for me, still so beguiling and strange. The book begins by taking us into the mind of God as He creates the heavens and the Earth. It’s a creation myth that can be read today like a poetic interpretation of Big Bang theory: there is a lump of primordial matter, a ripple of energy and then a sudden burst of light, followed by the creation of the Earth and all life upon it.

  Yahweh, the God of the Hebrews, is as awesome and as harsh as the Land of Canaan. In Genesis he walks with Abraham and wrestles with Jacob. In Exodus he appears as a pillar of fire and as a disembodied voice within a burning bush. He drowns the population of the world because humanity has become irredeemably corrupt, but he spares Noah and his family. Yahweh evades all human understanding; His reasoning is too large for us to grasp.

  Christianity appears in Palestine like a viral mutation of Judaism. Jesus comes to Jerusalem as the messiah, the anointed one of the Hebrew prophecies. He redefines the relationship between God and his human creations, and countermands the ancient laws given to Moses with new commandments of love and kindness. After his crucifixion, the Christians are a small Jewish sect until Paul of Tarsus brings Jesus’s new monotheism to the wider Roman world. Christianity gives hope and dignity to slaves and the poor, who in turn begin to convert their masters. There is a new moral perspective. The humble sermons of a carpenter’s son eventually conquer the Roman empire.

  Six hundred years after the death of Christ, an Arab desert merchant named Muhammad delivers a third and final refinement of the religion revealed many times before by Abraham, Moses and Jesus (who is named as a prophet, not as the son of God). There would be, he said, no further refinements. Muhammad leaves no room for doubt. The word this time, transcribed into the Holy Qur’an, is not mediated and diluted by mortal men; the Qur’an is presented to the world as nothing less than pure, unadulterated language from the mind of God.

  The Prophet

  THE ORIGINS OF ISLAM are shrouded in uncertainty, at least for non-believers. The earliest written accounts of the life of Muhammad are based on oral traditions, transcribed by pious Muslims centuries after the Prophet’s death. The traditional Muslim version of events currently exists in a state of tension with modern historical inquiry, based on non-Muslim accounts from the time.

  ACCORDING TO ISLAMIC TRADITION, Muhammad was born in Mecca in 570. His mother died when he was still a child, and he was raised by his grandfather and his uncle, Abu Talib.

  Muhammad belonged to a tribe known as the Quraysh, which worshipped Allah, the supreme God, but also a collection of lesser goddesses, who were believed to be the daughters of Allah. As a young man, Muhammad accompanied the trading caravans that passed between Mecca and Syria, and he was introduced on his travels to Jewish and Christian teachings. At 25 he married a wealthy widow named Khadija.

  While the traders of the Quraysh enjoyed their worldly pleasures, Muhammad was drawn to a simpler, ascetic life, and he would sometimes retreat into a tiny cave in Mount Jabal al-Nour, to pray and meditate.

  One night, while in his cave, Muhammad’s mind was flooded with a single dramatic command: Recite!

  In a terror, he ran outside the cave, where it is recorded that he was confronted by an angel so immense that he covered every part of the sky and spoke with a voice like thunder: Recite in the name of your Lord who created man from clots of blood! O Muhammad, you are the prophet of God and I am Jibrīl.*

  And from Muhammad’s lips poured divinely inspired words. More recitations would follow over the next twenty-three years, which were memorised by Muhammad’s followers and written down on parchment, stones and palm leaves and carved into the shoulder bone of a camel.

  The revelations were physically painful to Muhammad. ‘Never once did I receive a revelation,’ he said, ‘without thinking that my soul had been torn away from me.’

  AT FIRST, MUHAMMAD only spoke of these revelations to his family, then to a few friends. After three years, he began to preach to members of his tribe, the Quraysh. Muhammad’s message to his people was as simple and as stark as the desert lands it came from: your old gods have failed. There is only one God, Allah, and everyone must submit to his will, for the day of judgement and resurrection could come at any moment: ‘When the sky is rent asunder; when the stars scatter and the oceans roll together; when the graves are hurled about; each soul shall know what it has done and what it has failed to do’.

  Muhammad demanded justice, humility and charity from his followers. His was a call to a properly ordered moral life, and his words were warmly received among those of the Quraysh who were troubled by the greed and arrogance of the newly wealthy merchant class. His followers were expected to give over a portion of their income to the destitute, to abstain from food within daylight hours during the month of Ramadan and to acquaint themselves with the hardships of poor and hungry people.

  Muhammad’s radical message began to win him powerful enemies among the wealthy leaders of the Quraysh. In 622 Muhammad escaped Mecca, foiling a murder plot against him. He and his followers migrated to Yathrib (later named Medina) where he was welcomed by his many supporters in that city. Those who accompanied the Prophet to Medina were called muhajirun, ‘emigrants’.

  In 624 a Quraysh army clashed with a much smaller force of Muhammad’s muhajirun at Badr. The Muslims were victorious, with Muhammad crediting the victory to a host of invisible angels. A truce was signed, and in 629 the Prophet was permitted to enter Mecca unharmed. He came directly to the black, cubic shrine of Mecca known as the Kaaba, and demanded that it be cleansed of its pagan idols and reconsecrated to the one God, Allah.

  The dignity and breadth of Muhammad’s vision dissolved ancient rivalries and united the tribes of Arabia under his leadership. The Prophet preached that all willing servants of God form a single community, an umma, and prepare themselves to engage in a struggle, a jihad, to serve the purposes of God on Earth. Unlike Jesus, Muhammad never claimed divinity for himself: he was a prophet, not a messiah. Where Christians agonised over the intricacies of the Holy Trinity, Muhammad offered a jewel-like clarity: ‘There is no God but God’.

  MUHAMMAD DIED OF A FEVER IN 632, but there were many followers willing to pick up his banner. Leadership passed to the Prophet’s good friend Abu Bakr, who became the first caliph.* Abu Bakr launched successful invasions of the exhausted, plague-raddled Roman and Persian empires. Umar the second caliph completed the Arab conquest of Iran and Iraq to the north-east, along with Syria, Palestine and Egypt to the north-west. The cascading victories of the armies of Allah carried the Arabs far beyond anything their tribal ancestors could have known or imagined, and left them with a sense that something extraordinary had happened. An anonymous Muslim pamphleteer from the tenth century would later write:

  We set out, barefoot and naked, lacking in every kind of equipment, utterly powerless, deprived in every sort of armament and devoid of all the necessary provisions, to fight the peoples with the most widely extended empires, the peoples that were most manifestly mighty, possessing the most numerous troops . . . namely the Persians and the Romans. We went to meet them with small abilities and weak forces, and God made us triumph and gave us possession of their territories.

  For the muhajirun, it was living proof of the correctness of the Qur’an’s message that a society living in harmony with God’s laws would flourish and prevail over the enemies of God.

  Hagar and Ishmael

  THE EMERGENCE OF the Arab juggernaut tormented the Christians of Constantinople. The Romans of the ancient world had regarded the Arabs with a mix of contempt and uneasiness that characterised their attitudes to all the barbarian tribes lurking on the empire’s borders. The Arabs were known to be fierce and resourceful, but feuding between the tribes had always prevented them from constituting a real threat. Now they were united, apparently unstoppable, and moving inexorably towards Constantinople.

  In Jerusalem there was
hope among both the Christians and the Jews that their new Arab rulers were people of the same faith. The Romans in the city noted that they called themselves ‘believers’ – but in what? Who were these people in the eyes of God?

  One clue can be found in a letter from this time that records a meeting between the patriarch of Antioch and the new emir of Syria. The document notes that the Arab leader quizzed the patriarch on the laws and beliefs of the Christians and the Jews, but the emir’s people are referred to not as Muslims or followers of Muhammad, but as Mhaggráyé or ‘Hagarenes’.

  Another clue can be gleaned from the words of an arrogant Arab demand, issued to Heraclius, that claimed the province of Palestine as their birthright: ‘God gave that country as the inherited property of Abraham and of his sons after him. We are the sons of Abraham. It is too much that you hold our country. Leave in peace, and we shall demand from you what you have seized, plus interest.’

  The Prophet Muhammad was described as ‘a man of the sons of Ishmael’. And in that name, the Romans could find an answer of sorts why the blessing of heaven had fallen so manifestly upon the Arabs. The explanation lay within the first book of the bible, the Book of Genesis.