by Tom Holland
Copyright © 2012 by Tom Holland
All rights reserved. Published in the United States by Doubleday, a division of Random House, Inc., New York, and in Canada by Random House of Canada Limited, Toronto.
www.doubleday.com
Originally published in Great Britain by Little, Brown, a division of Hachette U.K., London.
DOUBLEDAY and the portrayal of an anchor with a dolphin are registered trademarks of Random House, Inc.
Cover design by Michael J. Windsor
Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data
Holland, Tom.
In the shadow of the sword : the birth of Islam and the rise of the global Arab empire / Tom Holland.—1st U.S. ed.
p. cm.
Includes bibliographical references and index.
1. Islamic Empire—History. 2. Islam—History. I. Title.
DS36.85.H65 2012
956’.013—dc23
2012000207
eISBN: 978-0-385-53136-8
v3.1
To Hillos
In memoriam
Contents
Cover
Title Page
Copyright
Dedication
Acknowledgements
List of Maps
Epigraph
I INTRODUCTION
1 KNOWN UNKNOWNS
II JAHILIYYA
2 IRANSHAHR
3 NEW ROME
4 THE CHILDREN OF ABRAHAM
5 COUNTDOWN TO APOCALYPSE
III HIJRA
6 MORE QUESTIONS THAN ANSWERS
7 THE FORGING OF ISLAM
ENVOI: PLUS ÇA CHANGE?
Timeline
Dramatis Personae
Glossary
Notes
Bibliography
Index
Illustrations
About the Author
Also by Tom Holland
Acknowledgements
This is a book that has taken me a horribly long time to complete, and opened my eyes to entire realms of complexity and fascination that I had little idea existed when I first embarked upon the project. The debts of gratitude that I owe are correspondingly immense. Firstly, to my editor, Richard Beswick; to Iain Hunt, Susan de Soissons, and everyone at Little, Brown; to Gerry Howard; to Teresa Löwe-Bahners; and to Frits van der Meij. My thanks as well to that best of agents, Patrick Walsh, and to everyone at Conville and Walsh. Whether as a pygmy standing on the shoulders of giants, or as a fool rushing in where angels fear to tread, I owe a particular due to the scholars who have helped me to negotiate a field of historical study that is, perhaps, more interestingly seeded with landmines than any other. Reza Aslan, James Carleton Paget, Patricia Crone, Vesta Curtis, Gerald Hawting, Robert Irwin, Christopher Kelly, Hugh Kennedy, Dan Madigan, Ziauddin Sardar, Guy Stroumsa and Bryan Ward-Perkins all read parts or the whole of the first draft—with responses as varied as their kindness and generosity were unfailing. I am grateful as well to Fred Donner and Robert Hoyland for allowing me to pick their brains in private conversations, and to Robin Lane Fox for stiffening my backbone at a time when I was first waking up to the full scale of the challenge I had taken on. Like an infinitely greater historian than myself, “I must profess my total ignorance of the Oriental tongues, and my gratitude to the learned interpreters, who have transfused their science into the Latin, French, and English languages.” Translations from Arabic and Syriac were done for me by Salam Rassi, in whom prodigious learning goes hand in glove with remarkable patience and efficiency. Andrea Wulf, as ever, made good my lamentable lack of German. Last but not last, I must thank friends and family for putting up with five years of crazed mutterings about Hephthalites, Chalcedonians and Kharijites. Particular thanks, as ever, to Jamie Muir, for all his unstinting support, encouragement and advice; to Kevin Sim, who provided such a close and brilliant reading of the manuscript that he somehow managed to extract a film from it, and is now the person I automatically turn to whenever my desire to discuss Umayyad coinage becomes uncontrollable; and, of course, last but very much not least, to my beloved family—Sadie, Katy and Eliza.
Maps
map.1 The World of Late Antiquity
map.2 Iranshahr
map.3 The Roman Empire
map.4 Constantinople
map.5 Jerusalem
map.6 Holy Land
map.7 Arabia
map.8 Justinian’s Empire
map.9 Early Arab Conquests
map.10 The Caliphate Under the Umayyads
Do not look for a fight with the enemy. Beg God for peace and security. But if you do end up facing the enemy, then show endurance, and remember that the gates of Paradise lie in the shadow of the sword.
Saying of Muhammad, as recorded by Salih Muslim
I
INTRODUCTION
I shall include in my narrative only those things by which first we ourselves, then later generations, may benefit.
Eusebius, The History of the Church
The degree of authority one can give to the evangelists about the life of Christ is relatively small. Whereas for the life of Muhammad, we know everything more or less. We know where he lived, what his economic situation was, who he fell in love with. We know a great deal about the political circumstances and the socio-economic circumstances of the time.
Salman Rushdie
1
KNOWN UNKNOWNS
Between Two Worlds
Yusuf As’ar Yath’ar, an Arab king celebrated for his long hair, his piety and his utter ruthlessness, had been brought to defeat. Leaving the reek of the battlefield, he rode his blood-flecked white charger down to the very edge of the Red Sea. Behind him, he knew, Christian outliers would already be advancing against his palace—to seize his treasury, to capture his queen. Certainly, his conquerors had no cause to show him mercy. Few were more notorious among the Christians than Yusuf. Two years previously, looking to secure the south-west of Arabia for his own faith, he had captured their regional stronghold of Najran. What had happened next was a matter of shock and horror to Christians far beyond the limits of Himyar, the kingdom on the Red Sea that Yusuf had ruled, on and off, for just under a decade. The local church, with the bishop and a great multitude of his followers locked inside, had been put to the torch. A group of virgins, hurrying to join them, had hurled themselves on to the flames, crying defiantly as they did so how sweet it was to breathe in “the scent of burning priests!”1 Another woman, “whose face no one had ever seen outside the door of her house and who had never walked during the day in the city,”2 had torn off her headscarf, the better to reproach the king. Yusuf, in his fury, had ordered her daughter and granddaughter killed before her, their blood poured down her throat, and then her own head to be sent flying.
Martyrdoms such as these, fêted though they were by the Church, could not readily be forgiven. A great army, crossing from the Christian kingdom of Ethiopia, had duly landed in Himyar. The defenders had been cornered, engaged and routed. Now, with the shallows of the Red Sea lapping at his horse’s hooves, Yusuf had come to the end of the road. Not all his obedience to the laws granted to God’s chosen prophet had been sufficient to save him from ruin. Slowly, he urged his horse forwards, breasting the water, until at last, weighed down by his armour, he disappeared beneath the waves. So perished Yusuf As’ar Yath’ar: the last Jewish king ever to rule in Arabia.
The collapse of the kingdom of the Himyarites in AD 525 is not, it is fair to say, one of the more celebrated episodes of anc
ient history. Himyar itself, despite having prospered for some six centuries until its final overthrow under Yusuf, lacks the ready brand recognition today of a Babylon, or an Athens, or a Rome. Unsurprisingly so, perhaps: for southern Arabia, then as now, was firmly peripheral to the major centres of civilisation. Even the Arabs themselves, whom the peoples of more settled lands tended to dismiss as notorious brutes—“of all the nations of the earth, the most despised and insignificant”3—might look askance at the presumed barbarities of the region. The Himyarites, so one Arab poet reported in shocked tones, left their women uncircumcised, “and do not think it disgusting to eat locusts.”4 Behaviour that clearly branded them as beyond the pale.
Yet, it is not only in terms of its geography that Himyar seems to lie in shadow. Similarly obscure is the period in which the death of Yusuf occurred. The sixth century AD defies precise categorisation. It seems to stand between two ages. If it looks back to the world of classical civilisation, then so also does it look forward to the world of the Crusades. Historians categorise it, and the centuries either side of it, as “late antiquity”: a phrase that conveys a sense of lengthening shadows, and the Middle Ages soon to come.
For anyone accustomed to thinking of history as a succession of neatly defined and self-enclosed epochs, there is something vaguely unsettling about this. Rather like the scientist in the classic horror film The Fly, who ends up a mutant combination of human and insect, the world of late antiquity can seem, from our own perspective, peculiarly hybrid. Far beyond the borders of Yusuf’s Himyarite kingdom, empires raised on fabulously ancient foundations still dominated the Near East and the Mediterranean, as they had done for centuries. Yet, their very age served only to highlight how profoundly they were coming to slip the moorings of their past. Take, for instance, the region immediately to the north of Arabia: the land we know today as Iraq. Here, across mudflats that had witnessed the dawn of urban civilisation, loyalty was owed to a king who was, just as his predecessor had been a whole millennium previously, a Persian. His dominions, like those of the Persian Empire that had existed a thousand years before, stretched eastwards to the frontiers of India, and deep into Central Asia. The splendours of the court over which he presided, the magnificence of its rituals, and the immodesty of his pretensions: all would have been perfectly familiar to a king of Babylon. That this was so, however, had been almost forgotten by the people of Iraq themselves. A spreading amnesia was blotting out memories that had endured for millennia. Even the Persians, far from venerating the truth about their glorious imperial heritage, had begun to obscure and distort it. The legacy of Iraq’s incomparable history lived on—preserved in the Persians’ fantasies of global rule and in the many glories that lent such fantasies credence—but increasingly it wore the look, not of ages departed, but of something new.
Other superpowers were less neglectful of their pasts. The great cities of the Mediterranean, built of stone and marble rather than the mud-bricks favoured by the people of Iraq, were less prone to crumbling into dust. The empire that ruled them likewise wore, in 525, a veneer of venerable indestructibility. Even to the Persians, Roman might appeared something primordial. “God so arranged things,” they would occasionally acknowledge, albeit through gritted teeth, “that the whole world was lit up from the beginning by two eyes: namely, by the wise rulers of the Persian realm, and by the powerful empire of the Romans.”5 Nevertheless, the Romans themselves, although certainly never averse to flattery, knew better. Rather than believing that their empire had existed since the dawn of time, they knew perfectly well that all its greatness had evolved from nothing. To trace the course of that evolution might therefore be to fathom the secrets of its success. Even as Yusuf was vanishing into the Red Sea, plans were being laid in the Roman capital for an immense ransacking of libraries and archives, an unprecedented labour of scholarship whose goal was the preservation for all eternity of the empire’s vast inheritance of laws. This was no arid, merely antiquarian project. History, no less than armies or gold, had come to function as one of the sinews of the Roman state. It offered the empire reassurance that it was precisely what it claimed to be: the model of human order. How, then, was the prestige of Caesar to be maintained, if not by a perpetual trumpeting of Rome’s triumphant antiquity?
The challenge for Roman policy-makers, of course, was that the glories of the past did not necessarily provide them with a reliable guide for the future. Indisputably, the empire remained what it had been for almost a millennium: the most formidable superpower of all. Wealthier and more populous than its great Persian rival, its hold over the eastern Mediterranean, always the richer half, appeared secure. From the mountains of the Balkans to the deserts of Egypt, Caesar ruled them all. Nevertheless, it was clearly an embarrassment, to put it mildly, that what had once been the western half of Rome’s empire had ceased, by 525, to be Roman at all. Over the course of the previous century, an immense swath of her holdings, like a sandcastle battered by the waves of an incoming tide, had crumbled utterly away. Britain had been lost as early as 410. Other provinces, over the succeeding decades, had followed. By the end of the century, the entire western half of the empire, even Italy, even Rome itself, had gone. In place of the venerable imperial order there was now a patchwork of independent kingdoms, all of them—with the exception of a few in western Britain—ruled by warrior elites from beyond the limits of the former empire. The relationship that existed between the natives and these “barbarian” newcomers varied from realm to realm: some, like the Britons, fought the invaders tooth and nail; others, like the Italians, were given to hailing them as though they were Caesars. Yet, in every case, the empire’s collapse resulted in the forging of new identities, new values, new presumptions. These, over the long term, would lead to the establishment of a radically new political order in western Europe. Rome’s abandoned provinces would never again acknowledge a single master.
Time would see both the great empires of the age—the Persian as well as the Roman—go the way of Nineveh and Tyre. Not so the states established in Rome’s western provinces, some of which still commemorate in their modern names the intrusions back in late antiquity of barbarian war bands. Small wonder, then, that European historians have traditionally seen the arrival of the Franks in the land that would eventually become France, and of the Angles in the future England, as events of far greater long-term significance than the activities of any Caesar or Persian king. We know now, as their contemporaries did not, that ruin was stalking both the rival empires. A century on from the collapse of the Himyarite kingdom, and the two superpowers were staring into the abyss. That the Persian Empire would end up toppled completely while that of the Romans was left as little more than a mangled trunk, has traditionally served to mark them as dead-ends, bed-blockers, dinosaurs. How tempting it is to presume, then, that they must have perished of decrepitude and old age. The lateness of late antiquity, to those who trace in it only a calamitous arc of decline and fall, has the quality of dinner guests who refuse to get their coats once the party is over.
Except that the empires raised by the peoples of the age were not solely of this earth. Radiant though a Caesar might appear to his subjects, awesomely though his palaces and citadels might tower above the common run, and remorselessly though his array of soldiers, and bureaucrats, and tax-collectors might serve his will, yet even he was merely a mortal, in a cosmos governed by a celestial king. There was only one universal monarch—and that was God. This presumption, by the time that Yusuf was brought to bay early in the sixth century AD, was one virtually unchallenged across the entire sweep of the Near East—and it affected almost every aspect of geopolitics in the region. When Yusuf clashed with the Ethiopian invaders, far more was at stake than the petty ambitions of squabbling warlords. The interests of heaven as well had been intimately involved. Between those fighting in the Jewish cause and those in the name of Christ, the differences were so profound as to be irreconcilable. Confident though both sides were that the god they wors
hipped was the only god—monos theos in Greek—this shared conviction only rendered them all the more implacably opposed. Not just in southern Arabia, but across the entire span of the civilised world, devotion to a particular understanding of the divine had become an emotion that defined the lives of millions upon millions of people. In an age when realms might crest and fall like the spume of a wave, and even great empires totter, there was certainly no earthly power that could command such allegiance. Identity was coming to be defined, not by the kingdoms of this world, but by various conceptions of the One, the Only God: by “monotheisms.”
This development signalled a transformation of human society with incalculable consequences for the future. Of all the various features of the modern world that can be traced back to antiquity—alphabets, democracy, gladiator films—none, perhaps, has been more globally influential than the establishment, for the first time in history, of various brands of monotheism as state religions. At the start of the third millennium since the birth of Christ, some three and a half billion people—over half the population of the world—identify themselves with one or other of the various religions that assumed something approaching their modern form in the 250 years either side of Yusuf’s death. The period of late antiquity, then, unfamiliar though it may be in comparison to other epochs of history, is no less pregnant with relevance for that. Wherever men or women are inspired by a belief in a single god to think or to behave in a certain way, they demonstrate its abiding influence. The impact of the revolution that it witnessed still reverberates today.
