by Emmet Scott
It would appear then that the Byzantines may have been falsifying history with regard to Heraclius’ later career. An earlier war between Romans and Persians, in the time of Alexander Severus (third century), was equally doctored by Roman chroniclers to make its outcome more palatible, as Gibbon dryly remarks: “If we credit what should seem the most authentic of all records, an oration, still extant, delivered by the emperor himself to the senate, we must allow that the victory of Alexander Severus was not inferior to any of those formerly obtained over the Persians by the son of Philip [Alexander the Great].” However, “far from being inclined to believe that the arms of Alexander [Severus] obtained any memorable advantage over the Persians, we are induced to suspect that all this blaze of imaginary glory was designed to conceal some real disgrace.”[14]
If the Persians were the real architects of the Islamic Empire, this would explain why early Islam is so thoroughly Persian in character. The Islamic symbol par excellence, for example, the crescent moon enclosing a star, is Persian: the motif is encountered repeatedly on monumental Iranian art and Sassanid coins. And Persian influence is all-pervasive. The great Islamic cities of the time, including Baghdad and Samarra followed a typically Persian ground-plan, with Persian features such as “paradises,” or ornamental gardens. The artwork found at the Mesopotamian city of Samarra, including pottery, painting, and architectural features, is all thoroughly Persian. It is well-known too that the early caliphs ruled largely, if not completely, through a Persian bureaucracy.[15] In addition, archaeologists have found that in Mesopotamia and Iran the transition from Sassanid to Islamic epochs has left no evident destruction layer – in marked contrast to the situation in the former Byzantine territories of Syria, Egypt and Anatolia. In the territories of the Sassanids all indications are of a peaceful transition from Zoroastrian to Islamic civilization. And we remind ourselves that the earliest Islamic coins are straightforwardly Persian, usually with the addition of an Arab or rather Syriac phrase such as besm Allah, and with the name of Chosroes II or his successor Yazdegerd III. But in all other particulars they are indistinguishable from Sassanid currency.
Did then Chosroes II convert to “Islam” or Arab Christianity at the start of his great war against Byzantium?
We know for a fact that Chosroes II did indeed embrace some form of Christianity. Shortly after ascending the throne he faced a rebellion from one of his generals, Bahram Chobin, who proclaimed himself King Bahram VI. In his hour of need Chosroes fled to the Byzantine Emperor Maurice, who put an army at his disposal with which he regained the crown. This fostered a liberal attitude to Christianity, as did his marriage to Maurice's daughter Maria and to the beautiful Shirin, another Christian, apparently from Syria. The Persian Emperor, we are told, adopted the religion of his favorite wife, though the sincerity of his faith was always suspect. Gibbon speaks of “the imaginary conversion of the king of Persia,” which “was reduced to a local and superstitious veneration for Sergius, one of the saints of Antioch, who heard his prayers and appeared to him in dreams.”[16] But if Chosroes' conversion to Christianity was suspect, his behavior at Jerusalem, where he plundered the most sacred relics of Christianity and ordered the massacre of the city's Christian population, marks him out as a fanatic, and a very violent one at that. The evidence indicates that Chosroes remained a Christian, of sorts, but of a very different kind to that which pertained at Constantinople. His “Christianity” was of a type violently opposed to the Nicean variety.
As historian Hugh Trevor-Roper so sagely noted, when one civilization converts to another's faith, it normally embraces a heresy of that faith:[17] thus the Roman Empire converted to a heresy of Judaism – Christianity – and thus it would appear that the Persian king and his people converted to a heresy of Christianity.
We are told that Chosroes' wife Shirin was a follower of the Nestorian branch of Christianity, though she later embraced the Syrian Miaphysite doctrine. Yet her exact beliefs are uncertain, and we may justifiably ask: Was it to the Syrian Miaphysite Church or the Syrian (or Arab) Ebionite Church which Shirin, Chosroes' favorite wife, adhered? If it was the Ebionite Church, then it was to a faith which was widespread in Arabia and which shared almost all its beliefs and customs with what we now call Islam. If this is the case, and if Chosroes II followed his wife into the Arab version of Christianity, then a host of hitherto intractable problems solve themselves.
To begin with, the astonishing narrative of the Arab conquests, which supposedly saw a few nomads on camels simultaneously attack and conquer the mighty Persian and Byzantine empires, is revealed as a fiction: it was the heavy cavalry of the Sassanid Persians which created the “Islamic” Empire, an empire which appeared quite suddenly in the middle of the seventh century and stretched from Libya to the borders of India. Secondly, the strange modesty of the “Rightly-guided” caliphs, Abu Bakr, Umar, and the others, in failing to leave a single coin or artifact bearing their names, is explained by the fact that they did not exist and were invented precisely to disguise the Arab usurpation of the Sassanid Empire. Thirdly, the “Islamic” coins of Chosroes II, a king who died supposedly over ten years before the Islamic conquest of Persia, are no longer a mystery and were minted not by a modest Arabian caliph, but by Chosroes II himself. And finally, the failure of the poet Firdausi to mention either a caliph named Umar or a prophet named Muhammad, is fully explained, and the war described in the Shahnameh during Yazdegerd's reign was a civil war pitting Islamicized (or Ebionitized) Persians against Arabs.
Huge numbers of Arab troops and irregular fighters had apparently accompanied the Persians on the march of conquest throughout Syria, Egypt and North Africa. The outcome of the Persian or rather “Islamic” civil war which broke out in the time of Yazdegerd III was an Arab coup d'etat: An Arab dynasty, under Mu'awyia (the Ummayads), seized control of the Sassanid proto-Islamic Empire. They were able to do this at least partly because of Yazdegerd’s unpopularity and because a majority of the Persian king's subjects were already Arabs, or at least Semite-speakers closely related culturally to the Arabs. The Persian kings themselves were mostly born and raised in Mesopotamia, a land whose Semitic language was very close to Arabic. Furthermore, the regions of the Middle East which they conquered were predominantly Syriac in speech. Even North Africa around Carthage had large populations of Semitic peoples, whose Punic language was also very close to Syriac and Arabic. In addition, we must not forget that the victorious Persian armies contained numerous divisions of Arab allies and these were followed by hordes of nomadic Arabs from Arabia proper, whose privileged position in the new religious establishment gave them influence far beyond their numbers.
The Arab seizure of power led to a realignment and redefinition of the Ebionite or rather proto-Islamic faith. As we saw, even in the time of Muawiya and his immediate successors, there was no Islam in the present understanding of the word. Yet in the decades that followed there came a pressing need to justify the Arab seizure of power from the Persians. A new creation-myth, as it were, was needed. Hence, during the time of Abd al-Malik (d. 705) and of his son Al Walid, the last vestiges of Persian influence were removed from the coinage, and Arabic became the official language of the court at Damascus. Along with these measures, it became expedient to “Arabize” the faith, with the invention of an Arabian prophet quite different from the original muhammad (Jesus). It was then too that the story of an Arab conquest of Persia and the Middle East was invented, along with the conquering caliphs, Abu Bakr and Umar, who supposedly carried it out.
If the above reconstruction of events is correct, it means that Islam was created for political purposes and was therefore as much as political ideology as a religion – precisely as we argued in Chapter 2. The faith which Islam grew out of and replaced, Arab “Christianity” (or proto-Islam or Ebionitism), was without question not a peace-loving or a tolerant one; but at least it was not anti-Semitic. Whence then, we might ask, came the virulent a
nti-Semitism of Islam?
An ideology such as Islam, which aims ultimately at world domination, cannot easily coexist with other systems or ideologies. The ambitions of the Jewish people, it is true, was confined solely to the possession of Canaan, the Promised Land, the land from which they had been expelled by the Babylonians and then by the Romans. Yet they also claimed to be God’s Chosen People and their faith had its own eschatology, which looked forward to a time (as the prophet Isaiah and others had said) when Jerusalem would be glorified among the nations. Islam of course claimed to be the fulfilment of this and other Old Testament prophecies: it was to the rise of Islam which the prophets had alluded and it was the conquests of Islam which would make Jerusalem the glorious city of all mankind. The refusal of the Jewish people to accept this would not have been well-received in Muslim circles; and it must have been this that led to the notorious antisemitic verses in the Qur’an, the Hadith and the Sira.
[1] Alfred Guillaume, “The Version of the Gospels Used in Medina Circa 700 AD.” Al-Andalus 15 (1950), pp. 289-96.
[2] Arthur Jeffery, The Foreign Vocabulary of the Qur’an (Oriental Institute Baroda, Vadodara, India, 1938), http://www.answering-islam.org/Books/Jeffrey/Vocabulary/intro.htm
[3]Ibid.
[4] Martin Lings, Muhammad: his life based on the earliest sources (Suhail Academy Co.)
[5] Spencer, Did Muhammad Exist? op cit., p. 155.
[6]Ibid., p. 166.
[7]Ibid., pp. 184-5.
[8] Jan Retso, The Arabs in Antiquity: Their History from the Assyrians to the Umayyads (Rutledge and Kegan Paul, 2003), pp. 464-6.
[9]Ibid.
[10] “Arab-Sasanian Coins,” Encyclopdaedia Iranica, at www.iranica.com/articles/arab-sasanian-coins
[11]Ibid.
[12] A single inscription, from north-west Arabia, mentions Umar, noting that he died the year (24) the writer, Zuhar, inscribed the message. It should be noted however that Umar is not described as a “commander of the faithful” as he should be if he were a caliph. Furthermore, the authenticity of the inscription is doubtful due to its very early use of diacritical marks, even though other evidence indicates that these were not employed in the Arabic script until much later. See http://www.nbcnews.com/id/27787506/ns/technology_and_science-science/t/-year-old-islamic-note-may-solve-mystery/#.Ui36K9IWL6Y
[13] See Gibbon, Decline and Fall, Chapter 46.
[14]Ibid., Chapter 8.
[15] See Trevor-Roper, op cit., p. 142.
[16] Gibbon, Decline and Fall, Chapter 46.
[17] Trevor-Roper, op cit., p. 57.
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