Sea of Faith

by Stephen O'Shea

  From 610 onward Muhammad elaborated an ethical, monotheist view of the world that would do away with the metaphysical indiscipline of the desert ani-mist and the political anarchy of a people riven by blood feuds and narrow tribal beliefs. In descriptions of the creed, attention is usually lavished on the five pillars of Islam (profession of faith, ritual prayer, alms-giving, fasting, and pilgrimage), but other features characterized the new dispensation as well. Among the most important: a permanent exhortation to lead a life of personal piety and probity, a clear description of what awaited in heaven and hell, a project for constructing a society and system of law, and, critically for its subsequent universal appeal, a call for brotherhood and decency in dealings with others, a decency that cut across tribal and eventually ethnic and even religious lines. Islam was seen as perfecting what had come before; Muhammad, then, was the conduit of a god giving his final and complete revelation.

  The Prophet's first convert was his wife, Khadija. She was followed in her faith by a few members of the Beni Hashim family as well as some of the dispossessed of Mecca. Timorously at first, then with increasing confidence, Muhammad brought his message to the Quraysh at large, urging them to destroy the idols cluttering Mecca. He deplored that the haram's cube-shaped Kaaba—a building said to have been erected by Adam and restored by Ibrahim (Abraham) and Ismail (Ishmael)—had become a site for the worship of al-Lat, al-Uzza, and Manat, the goddesses revered as the daughters of God. While some of his listeners from within the Quraysh converted, most remained unmoved. They were comfortable with what is called henotheism, that is, belief in a supreme god that does not exclude the existence of other divinities.

  At one point, no doubt hoping to win over the stubborn, Muhammad came close to admitting the validity of God's associate gods—but he soon backtracked, claiming that these "satanic verses" had been dictated by an evil presence imitating the divine voice that visited him. Instead, Muhammad grew more uncompromising in his monotheism and resumed hectoring his kinsman into abandoning the gods and goddesses of their fathers. At this moment, his standing in Mecca must have resembled that of Socrates in Athens—a loquacious local irritant who eventually inspired mortal enmity.

  Old photograph of the central courtyard of the main mosque at Mecca. The black building surrounded by pilgrims is the Kaaba.

  Although constrained by tribal custom to respect their own, some of the Quraysh finally had their fill of this monotheist innovator, whose preaching threatened to disrupt the flow of pilgrims and their purses to Mecca. The unconverted Meccans—the majority—first tried shunning all of the Beni Hashim, whether Muslim or not, and excluding them from the life of the city. When this internal economic exile didn't work—it may even have strengthened Muhammad's hand with the rebellious younger members of the Quraysh—darker stratagems were devised. Muhammad may have caught wind of a plot against his life or simply seen ominous clouds gathering: following a secret negotiation with the men of Madina, he fled Mecca with his few dozen followers. But more than a flight from something, the hijra was a movement toward a goal: autonomy for the community of Muslim believers, the umma, under the leadership of Muhammad. Out from under the baleful glare of the conservative Quraysh, Islam could thrive.

  Once in Madina, the Prophet proved to be an extraordinarily nimble leader, entering into nearly a dozen politically useful marriages after Khadija's death and exhorting his followers to repeated feats of valor, all the while giving utterance to the social and spiritual precepts to be enshrined in the Quran. When not relying on the innate persuasiveness of their faith, the near-destitute Muslim pioneers of Madina subdued Arabia through warfare, the shrewd division of spoils and collection of tribute, and tactical assassination. First subsumed were their hosts, the two pagan tribes of Madina who had invited Muhammad, as a holy man, to arbitrate a dispute—a custom common in pre-Islamic Arabia among those too tired or wary of its alternative, the blood feud. The Prophet resolved the argument by converting the Madinans wholesale: they are known to historians of Islam as the Helpers, as opposed to his Quraysh converts who are called Companions. The Helpers' long-standing ties to the bedouin nomads of the vicinity swelled the ranks of the Muslim armies. Muhammad had less success with the three Jewish Arabian clans of Madina, who welcomed the newcomers but refused to give up their faith and join the Muslim umma. Eventually they were dealt with brutally—either through expropriation and banishment or, in the case of the unfortunate Banu Qurayza clan, mass execution of the adult males and enslavement of their women and children. They were accused of abetting the Muslims' bitterest enemies, the Meccans.

  Defeating those wealthy and obdurate kinsmen became the highest priority for the Muslim emigres of Madina. Not only did the Meccans' refusal to convert still rankle, but their power and alliances remained a mortal threat. Battle was first joined in 624—the Muslims launched a raid on the caravan of Abu Sufyan, a prominent Meccan Qurayshi, as it passed near Madina on its return from Palestine laden with treasure. The raid was a failure; even more alarming, a large Meccan force, hastily assembled and rushed northward to defend Abu Sufyan, came across the Muslim contingents, almost by accident, at the oasis of Badr. Far outnumbered, the Muslims nonetheless won a resounding victory. Many had been emboldened by the Prophet's guarantee of instant admission to paradise for anyone slain in the service of Islam—an incentive destined to have a long and violent posterity. Badr, the initial blooding between Arabian brothers, sparked a series of skirmishes in the ensuing years, a seesawing campaign of desert dustups marked by the customary horror of fratricidal war. Abu Su-fyan's wife, Hind, to cite just one perpetrator, has gone down in Islamic history for eating, after a battle of 625, the liver of Muhammad's slain uncle, Hamza. (Then again, Hind's father had been killed by Hamza at Badr the year before.)

  In the latter half of the decade, however, the Muslims prevailed, both on the battlefields and in the hearts of the people. Then as now, it was hard to argue with success. Muhammad's record of unrelenting triumph elsewhere in the Arabian peninsula was an outstanding inducement to convert, as was the Prophet's well-earned reputation for magnanimity toward any who accepted his message, however tardily. In 630 Mecca welcomed back her wayward son and acquiesced in his leadership—although Hind, the liver-eater, is supposed to have heckled him. Wisely, Muhammad held no grudges. In the two years remaining in his life, the prominent people who had so long mocked him were appointed to positions of prominence in the Islamic polity, and the spoils of further wars were freely distributed to former enemies. A new society—a state, in effect—began taking shape, marked by the galvanizing presence of a young faith; a heretofore unattainable unity of purpose among oasis dwellers, quasi-sedentary merchants, and warrior nomads; and most significantly, a willingness to disperse beyond the sandy confines of Arabia. Out in the larger world, where the armies of Heraclius and Chosroes were fighting themselves into exhaustion, where the two great empires reeled from years of battle, opportunity awaited. Muhammad's successors would seize it.

  The Byzantines were weary. Their Persian wars were going well, but they bled the treasury dry. Safe behind its massive land walls constructed by Emperor Theodosius II in the fifth century, Constantinople managed to withstand Persian and Avar sieges while Heraclius, confident in his capital's capacity to repulse assault, was ceaselessly ranging through Anatolia, Syria, and Mesopotamia, coordinating three separate armies against Chosroes. Faced with reverses in the field, the vainglorious shahanshah drifted into the neverland of the deranged—at one point he ordered the body of a defeated and defunct general to be packed in salt and shipped back to Mesopotamia so that he could personally supervise the flaying of the corpse. The Persians watched impotently as the cities of the eastern Mediterranean were reoccupied by the Byzantines. By the dawn of the 630s, the Greeks had won.

  In victory Heraclius, unlike Muhammad, did not forgive and forget: fierce punishment was meted out to all who had sided with the Persians. This led to a further souring of relations between the Greeks and
the subject Semitic peoples of the Near East—Jews and monophysite Christians. At the same time the empire's long-standing Arab warrior allies, the Ghassanids, who had for generations served as Byzantine proxies in defending Syria from Persian incursions and bedouin raids, had a falling-out with Constantinople. Although this breach was patched up by the time the Companions of the Prophet came calling with their spears, it frayed the loyalty felt by the Ghassanids to their Greek paymasters.

  A Muslim tradition, or hadith, holds that Muhammad actually wrote letters to Heraclius and Chosroes in an attempt to avert the coming storm. True to form, the embattled shahanshah threw the bearer of Muhammad's missive out on his ear. Heraclius, however, had the letter read aloud: it exhorted him to embrace Islam. His curiosity piqued, the basileus is said to have summoned a non-Muslim Qurayshi merchant passing through Jerusalem and questioned him about the Prophet. The merchant was none other than Abu Sufyan, the intended victim of the attack at the Badr oasis and then still an opponent of the Muslims. (He and his wife Hind would convert at the last minute, on the eve of Muhammad's return to Mecca.) Abu Sufyan, according to the hadith, conceded that Muhammad was a man of unimpeachable integrity with a growing number of disciples, an admission that greatly impressed the basileus.

  In a further twist, the tradition holds that Heraclius received an astrological message that told him that the Byzantine Empire would be undone by a circumcised people. After considering, in keeping with his idea of Christian kingship, the murder of all male Jews, Heraclius is supposed to have paused, seized by an intuition—and then asked that the ambassador from the Ghassanids be relieved of his clothes. The envoy, duly examined, explained that his circumcised state was in keeping with age-old Arab custom. The hadith reported that Heraclius, newly enlightened, raced up to Horns, in the Orontes Valley of Syria, and convened an episcopal conclave in which he pleaded for the conversion of all Greeks to Islam, in order to thwart the astrological sentence of doom. The bishops, as might be imagined, thought he was out of his mind.

  However much they strain credulity, these stories of foreboding and flightiness suggest that their authors had some sympathy for the Byzantine predicament in these years. As the sands inexorably ran down toward Yarmuk, the Greeks had no idea of what was in store. They were victors over a rival empire, in the manner of Romans of the past, ready to resume the normal peacetime pursuits of trade, the hunt, the games at the hippodromes and, as always, interconfessional bickering. The Persians, their only threat in the east, were neutralized—in 630 Heraclius took the recovered relic of the True Cross back to Jerusalem, rebuilt the Church of the Holy Sepulchre, and as was his wont, ordered a massacre of the Jews in Galilee. He could have had no inkling that at the same time Muhammad was returning to Mecca amid similar scenes of triumph. Notwithstanding the hadith, he might not even have heard of Muhammad. Heraclius, during this last visit of a basileus to Jerusalem, may have been told of a minor action in the south of Jordan—a Byzantine and Ghassanid detachment had beaten back an Arabian raiding party the year previously—but he could not possibly have known, unless he were a prophet himself, that the small Jordanian skirmish had lit a short fuse or that the attackers had been animated by a faith that would soon rival his own.

  For the Muslims of Arabia, by contrast, this preliminary period spawned few complacent illusions of the type afflicting the Byzantines. On the death of the Prophet in Madina in 632, Abu Bekr was chosen as head of the Muslim umma. He had been one of Islam's earliest acolytes and had fathered Aisha, Muhammad's cherished child-bride. A man of great devotion to the memory of his revered friend, Abu Bekr hewed closely to Muhammad's example of simple piety and discerning leadership. In staffing his army, he sought to juggle Muslim bona fides—the seniority of a commander's conversion to Islam—with demonstrable talent, even if the candidate in question was a conspicuous latecomer to the cause of the Prophet. Among the latter was Khalid Ibn al Walid, an ally of Abu Sufyan's, whose conversion came a few years after he had distinguished himself at the head of Qurayshi armies inimical to Muhammad and the Muslims. Late as it was, Khalid's conversion was a boon to the young movement—during Abu Bekr's caliphate, he subdued tribe after tribe of Arabians who, on hearing of the Prophet's demise, opportunistically recanted their faith and began touting homegrown imitators of Muhammad. These wars of reconquest, called the ridda, established Khalid as a military commander of great ability. Thenceforth known as the Sword of God (Sayf Allah), he was selected to lead the offensive east into Mesopotamia to topple the already-tottering Sassanid Persians—or rather, to take advantage of the uprisings against the Sassanids in the wake of their defeat at the hands of Heraclius. By decade's end, the Muslims would bring Mesopotamia definitively into their orbit.

  The caliph Abu Bekr also made the fateful decision to take on the Byzantines, although he claimed to be only fulfilling Muhammad's wishes: had not the Prophet ordered the raid into southern Jordan? No excuse was needed—the Persian and Greek empires both dangled like overripe fruit on the borders of Arabia. The popular western idea of the early Arab conquest as the work of wild-eyed warrior missionaries, converting the quivering masses at swordpoint, should be retired. Islam, the new dispensation, fostered a novel cohesion in a disorganized desert people, who thus far had practiced only the sporadic razzia (raid) on the tantalizingly rich civilizations at their doorstep. Under the stewardship of Muhammad and his successors, the umma became a protostate capable of coordinated movement and campaigning. Certainly the new generation was fired by faith, but the motive behind the wars of aggression lies less in the nature of Islam than in the nature of mankind. Weakness and division had been detected; strength and enthusiasm, marshaled—and wealth lay there for the taking. In 634 the Muslims at last moved on Palestine.

  The leader of this first expeditionary force, Amr Ibn al As, like Khalid a late convert destined to be lionized by the faithful, chose to make his attack near Gaza. The engagement at the oasis of Dathin was hardly more than a skirmish, but the Muslim victory shocked the Byzantine Near East. The Persians had just been evicted after decades of warfare; suddenly the Arabians, a manageable (and commercial) people, were recast as conquerors. Peasants fled in panic from the great estates of Palestine, the cities swelled with refugees, and the patriarch of Jerusalem, Sophronius, thundered from the pulpit about the "diabolic savagery" of the invaders. Amr and his Muslims pressed their advantage—marauding bedouins plundered the countryside, avoiding the fortified towns and keeping clear of the coast, which the Byzantine fleet patrolled. East of the Dead Sea, on the Jordanian plateau, armies looted at will. Heraclius, from his palace in Horns, called on his brother Theodore, a veteran of the Persian wars, to go south in force and counter this wholly unexpected bolt from the blue. Abu Bekr, from his deathbed in Madina, called on Khalid Ibn al Walid. He was to cease operations in Iraq and head to Palestine. This turned out to be the order that tipped the balance.

  In the late spring of 634 Khalid and his men raced directly from Iraq across the hell of the Syrian desert. The ride has entered legend—in one of its variants, Khalid at first denied his thirsty pack-camels any water, then let them greedily overdrink their fill from the Euphrates so that in the desert they could be culled successively, their stomachs cut open, and the precious water within shared out among his warriors. However it was accomplished, Khalid's dash through the scorching badlands concluded with an irruption not in Palestine or Jordan but in southwestern Syria, just a day's ride from Damascus. In a twinkling he besieged and captured Bosra (where Muhammad had been recognized as a prophet by a Christian mystic). The Arabians, whom conventional Byzantine wisdom held to be mere raiders, the martial equivalent of purse-snatchers, had taken an imperial city—and one not on the borderlands of southern Palestine or Jordan but in Syria. Heraclius, sensing his august person to be in harm's way, moved north to the safer precincts of Antioch, close to Anatolia and the sea. Khalid went south: he met up with Amr to take command of the forces mustering to face the army of Theodore, the brother of t
he basileus.

  The first major clash occurred on July 30, 634, at a place called Ajnadayn, which is believed to have been located approximately twenty kilometers to the west of Bethlehem. Although details of the engagement are sketchy, the Muslims won a crushing victory. One account has Khalid's greatest champion challenging the Byzantines to duels prior to the battle, taunting them thus: "I am the death of the Pale Faces, I am the killer of Romans; I am the scourge sent upon you, I am Zarrar Ibn al Azwar." Zarrar lived up to his boasts—he is credited with slaying several Byzantine grandees and shoring up morale at a key juncture in the battle. The defeated Theodore was sent home to Constantinople in disgrace and to the not-so-tender mercies of Martina, his all-powerful niece and sister-in-law.

  The Muslim armies probed farther northward, their numbers no doubt growing as tales of booty spread. Throughout the following year the invaders won a series of engagements near the Dead Sea, until finally they broke through in strength into Syria and began to capture its great cities. These age-old desert "ports," outposts of the Mediterranean world that received the caravans from the east, were the key to power. From south to north—Damascus, Horns, Hama, Aleppo—the string of sophisticated trading centers seemed perilously close to slipping from the control of Constantinople. Huddled behind their city walls, the subject peoples of Syria began to look askance at the Byzantine status quo. Did not these invading Muslims promise them freedom of worship? Were they not fellow Semites? With the imperial Greeks, one paid exorbitant taxes but was never sure to be left alone. Under the Muslims, the exactions and tyranny would continue, but synagogue and monophysite church would be inviolate.

  Heraclius was reaping what he had sown with his years of cruelty and revenge. Damascus fell, then Horns. The basileus, sensing the faintheartedness abroad in the province, chose to move resolutely. Armies were levied in Anatolia, warriors summoned from Armenia. The majority-Greek cities of the coast provided supplies and more men. The Ghassanid Arabs, longtime allies of Constantinople, gathered their forces. For all its battle fatigue, the Byzantine Empire in its reach and world-beating ambition remained a worthy successor to the Roman; its full weight was brought into play against the intruder.