In the Shadow of the Sword: The Birth of Islam and the Rise of the Global Arab Empire
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It is the ambition of this book to trace the origins and the progress of that same revolution. How was it that the patterns of people’s thought, over the course of only a few centuries, came to be altered so radically and so enduringly? The story is a richly human one, replete with vivid drama, extraordinary characters and often riotous colour. Yet, it is also one that imposes peculiar demands upon the historian: for much of it takes place in a dimension beyond the physical. It features kings, but also angels; warlords, but also demons. Consequently, not every event in the pages that follow can be explained purely in terms of material self-interest or political calculation. Shadowing the often brutally vivid world of mortal affairs is a dimension that is heaven-lit and damnation-haunted. Certainly, when Yusuf’s contemporaries analysed his downfall, they were not naïve in their analysis. They recognised that complex issues of trade policy and the rivalries of the two distant superpowers had been lurking in the background. Yet they never doubted that the sands of Arabia had become the stage for an authentically celestial drama. The forces of heaven and hell had met and clashed. It was a matter of opinion whether Yusuf was on the side of the angels or the demons; but neither Jews nor Christians had any doubt that what had happened had derived ultimately from God. This was the core presumption of the age; and a history of late antiquity that neglects to pay due acknowledgement to it is a history that has failed.
The beliefs of the period must therefore be treated with both seriousness and empathy. Yet this does not mean that their claims should be taken wholly at face value. Back in the early fourth century, a Palestinian bishop by the name of Eusebius wrote a history of the early Church. In it, he initiated a tradition of historical enquiry that explained the past as the tracing of patterns upon time by the forefinger of God. This presumption, although stupendously influential, and not merely among Christian authors, fell out of fashion in the West several centuries ago. Whatever their personal religious convictions may be, modern historians do not generally explain past events as the workings of divine providence. All aspects of human society—even beliefs themselves—are now presumed to be products of evolution. Nor is this a uniquely modern perspective. Eusebius himself, fifteen hundred years before Darwin, had recognised in it a pernicious and peculiarly threatening heresy. Nothing was more alarming to him than the notion propagated by the enemies of his faith that it was something upstart and contingent, a mere distorted echo of more venerable traditions. His history, far from tracing changes in the doctrines and institutions of the Church, aimed to demonstrate that they had never changed in the slightest. And Christianity itself? Christianity, Eusebius presumed, had existed since the dawn of time: “For, obviously, we must regard the religion proclaimed in recent years to every nation through Christ’s teaching as none other than the first, the most ancient, and the most primitive of religions.”6
To many of us today, familiar as we are with Neanderthal burial sites and Cro-Magnon cave art, this claim does not seem obvious at all. Nevertheless, its underlying presumption—that religions have some mysterious and fundamental essence, immune to the processes of time—remains widely taken for granted. In large part, this is due to Eusebius and others like him. The great innovation of late antiquity was to fashion, out of what might otherwise have been an inchoate blur of beliefs and doctrines, individual templates for individual religions, and then to establish them as definitive. How this was accomplished is a fascinating and remarkable tale—for it touches upon the highest politics and the profoundest human emotions. The clash of great empires and the wretchedness of slaves; the shimmering of mosaics and the stench of plague pits; the clamour of teeming cities and the silence of empty deserts: all must feature. Beginning in a world recognisably ancient and ending in one medieval, it ranks as a transformation as momentous as any in history.
Yet the story is, for all that, a treacherous one to tell. Partly, this is due to the inevitable gaps and contradictions in the sources that bedevil all periods of ancient history. Take, for example, the story of Yusuf’s death. There are some accounts which describe him as falling in the heat of battle, rather than riding out into the sea. More problematic still is the bias in our sources—almost all of which are Christian.a Even the chronology is a muddle, with some historians dating Yusuf’s death, not to 525, but to 520. All these, it might be thought, are mere problems of detail—except that there is an additional, and much greater, complication. Any history tracing the development of rival monotheisms cannot help but use such words as “Christian” and “Jew”; and yet, as the story of Yusuf suggests, these did not necessarily mean in late antiquity what they have come to mean today. A narrative that features the persecution of veiled Christian women in Arabia by a Jewish king is clearly one set in a world at some remove from our own.
It is for this reason that the story of late antiquity is altogether stranger and more surprising than might at first appear. Indeed, it is precisely the measure of those who shaped it to such stupefying effect that they succeeded so well in veiling their own astounding creativity. In every period, of course, there are those who labour to redraft the past in the service of the present; but none, perhaps, has done it so potently, or to such enduring effect, as the historians of late antiquity. The supreme achievement of the Jewish and Christian scholars of the age was to craft a history of their respective faiths that cast themselves as its rightful and inevitable culmination, and left anything that might have served to contradict such an impression out of the story altogether. Whoever Moses might truly have been, and whether he even existed, most Jews’ understanding of him today has been incalculably influenced by the rabbis of late antiquity: brilliantly learned and ingenious men who devoted entire centuries of effort to demonstrating that their greatest prophet—no matter how far removed from them in time—had in fact been someone very much like themselves. Similarly, whatever Jesus might truly have believed himself to be, the Christian understanding of his mission and divinity, as taught by the vast majority of today’s Churches, bears witness to the turbulent ebb and flow of late Roman politics: to the exhaustive efforts of bishops and emperors to fashion a creed that could unite all of God’s people as one. The essential architecture of Judaism and Christianity, no matter how far back in time its ultimate origins may stretch, was designed in late antiquity.
Only faith—or the lack of it—can ultimately answer the great questions that lie at the heart of these religions: whether the Jews are truly God’s Chosen People; and whether Jesus did in reality rise from the dead. Much the same, however, could be said of other puzzles too: how and why the Jewish belief in a single god first evolved; and what might have been the full range of doctrines in the early Church. Some of the sparks that first ignited the flames of Jewish and Christian practice can be glimpsed by the historian; but many more cannot. We see through a glass, darkly—and that glass, by and large, was fashioned by the men and women who are the protagonists of this book.
Granted, it was hardly a novel paradox that veneration of a primordial past might lead to its being masked, or even obliterated altogether. Many a wealthy patron in the ancient world flaunted his piety by erecting a colossal edifice over a modest shrine. The Jewish and Christian scholars of late antiquity, however, by the sheer force of their labours, succeeded in performing an infinitely more enduring feat of renovation. Their ultimate achievement was to craft an interpretation not only of their own various forms of monotheism but of religion itself: an interpretation that billions of people now take for granted as the supreme influence affecting both their behaviour on this earth, and the eternal destiny of their souls. It is this that makes the project of sifting through the writings of late antiquity for evidence of what might actually have happened so sensitive—and so fascinating as well.
Such a project, it goes without saying, is not one to be undertaken lightly. Nor, the complexity and ambiguity of these sources being what they are, can the story that is this book’s theme be narrated without a prior explanation of how and why it is be
ing told in the way it is.
That is why, before I embark on telling it, I pause, to tell something quite else: the making of a story.
The Greatest Story Ever Told
Winners were the favourites of heaven. Even Christians—whose god had died as a convicted criminal, nailed to a wooden cross—might succumb to this presumption. Eusebius certainly took it for granted. How could he not have done, when he had the spectacle before him of a Roman state that for centuries had been gore-streaked with Christian blood miraculously transformed into a bulwark of the Church? No need for the Caesar who had first bowed his head before Christ to wait for death to receive his due reward. Eusebius, who combined the talents of an instinctive polemicist with a profound streak of hero-worship, wrote an entire biography of the emperor, just to ram the point home. “So dear was he to God, and so blessed, so pious and so fortunate in all he undertook, that with the greatest facility he obtained authority over more nations than any who had preceded him—and yet retained his power, undisturbed, to the very close of his life.”7
Confidence in this formula—that faith in Christ would lead to earthly glory—would take a number of knocks over the course of the succeeding centuries. Awkwardly, the more Christian the Romans became, the more their empire’s frontiers seemed to contract. Theologians devised various explanations for this puzzling phenomenon—explanations which Christians, who had only to study the gospels to learn Jesus’s views on the earthly and the overweening, might well find perfectly persuasive. Nevertheless, the core equation so lovingly dwelt upon by Eusebius—that worldly greatness was bestowed by God upon those who pleased Him—appeared altogether too plausible simply to be dismissed out of hand. Instead, the more the Romans found themselves locked in a desperate struggle for survival, so the more it came to be appropriated by a new and quite startlingly upstart imperial people. The identity of these same conquerors, who had not only deprived the Romans of their wealthiest provinces but had crushed the Persians underfoot altogether, could hardly have come as more of a shock to the defeated. Indeed, so unexpected was what had happened, so utterly jaw-dropping, as to appear self-evidently miraculous. What else but the hand of God could possibly explain the conquest of the world by a people previously scorned as the ultimate in savagery and backwardness: the Arabs?
Half a millennium on from the time of Eusebius, at the start of the ninth Christian century, and the close identification made by the learned between piety and worldly power still enjoyed spectacular traction. Christians themselves might have grown uncomfortable with the notion; but not so the Arabs, who rejoiced in a rampant conviction that all their astounding victories were owed directly to the favour of God. Two centuries previously, so they believed, heaven had graced their ancestors with a stream of supernatural revelations: a dispensation that trumped those of the Jews and the Christians, and had set those who subjected themselves to it upon a road to global empire. Indeed, eight hundred years after the birth of Christ, it was as “Muslims”—“those who submit to God”—that most Arabs had come to identify themselves. The vast agglomeration of territories won by the swords of their forefathers, stretching from the shores of the Atlantic to the fringes of China, served as the ultimate monument to what God had demanded of them: their submission. “Islam,” they called it—shorthand for what had become, by the early ninth century, an entire civilisation.
It was not only the Arabs themselves, however, who had been granted a rare new dignity by the coming of Islam. So too had their language. It was in Arabic, so Muslims believed, that God had climactically, and for all time, revealed His purposes to humanity. What was good enough for the Almighty, it went without saying, was good enough for mortals. By AD 800, so redeemed was Arabic from the contempt in which it had once been held that its sound had come to rank as the very music of power, and its cursives as things of pure beauty, refined to a rare and exquisite perfection by the art of its calligraphers. Among the Arabs, the written word was on the verge of becoming a mania. One scholar, when he died in 822, left behind him a library that filled a whole six hundred trunks. Another was said to have been flattened to a pulp when a tower of books collapsed on top of him while he was drunk. The story does not seem wholly implausible. One volume of Arab history, it is claimed, stretched to almost eighty thousand pages—which would have made for a crushing weight, to be sure. Clearly, then, a people who could boast of such titanic literary endeavours were far removed from an age that had scorned them as barbarians—as the Arabs themselves delighted in pointing out.
The sense of compulsion they brought to the study of their past was hardly surprising. The yearning to understand the reason for the spectacular upsurge in their fortunes, to clarify the process by which it had been brought about, and to elucidate what it revealed about the character of their god, never ceased to gnaw. Just as Eusebius, five hundred years previously, had sought answers to very similar questions in the life of a Roman emperor, so now did Ibn Hisham—a scholar originally from Iraq who by the early ninth century had settled in Egypt—likewise turn to biography in order to fathom the purposes of heaven. “Sira,” he termed his chosen genre: “exemplary behaviour.” It was less what his subject had done that concerned Ibn Hisham than how he had done it. There was an urgent reason for this. The hero of Ibn Hisham’s biography, so Muslims believed, offered the ultimate in role models. God had chosen him to serve as His mouthpiece. It was through him that the All Merciful had revealed His wishes to the Arabs, and graced them with those same revelations that had then inspired them, two centuries before the time of Ibn Hisham, to erupt from their deserts and tear the world’s superpowers to pieces. “We are God’s helpers and the assistants of His prophet, and will fight men until they believe in God; and he who believes in God and His prophet has protected his life and property from us; and he who disbelieves we will fight in God unceasingly, and killing him will be a small matter to us.”8 This, according to Ibn Hisham, was the swaggering manifesto promoted by Arab warriors on the eve of their conquest of the world.
But who, precisely, was this “prophet?” Ibn Hisham’s aim was to provide the answer. Sitting in Egypt, surrounded by the ruins of forgotten and superseded civilisations, he regarded his sira not merely as a biography but as a record of the most momentous revolution in history. Its subject was a man who had died only two years before the dismemberment of the Roman and Persian empires had begun: an Arab by the name of Muhammad. Aged forty, and with a moderate career as a merchant behind him, he had experienced—if Ibn Hisham were to be believed—history’s most epochal mid-life crisis. Restless and dissatisfied, he had begun to roam the wilderness which stretched beyond his home town, “and not a stone or tree that he passed by but would say, ‘Peace be unto you, O prophet of God.’ ”9 Muhammad, understandably enough, had been left most unsettled. Voices were rarely heard in the places where he chose to wander, on his lonely quest after spiritual enlightenment. Mecca, the nearby town, stood in the depths of the Arabian desert: the ring of mountains that surrounded it, baked black by the pitilessly broiling sun, rose barren, wind-lashed and empty. Yet, it was on the slope of one of those same mountains, lying at night inside a cave, that Muhammad heard the most startling voice of all. He felt it at first as a vice tightening around his body: the grip of some terrifying supernatural entity. Next came a single command: “Recite!”b Then, as though his words were a desperate, violent exhalation of air, Muhammad himself started to gasp out whole lines of verse:
Recite: in the name of your Lord!
He Who created!
He created man from a blood clot.
Recite! Your Lord is most bountiful.
He taught with the pen.
He taught man what he knew not.10
Muhammad was speaking, but the words were not his own. Then whose? Muhammad himself, it is said, initially suspected a jinn, a spirit of the deserts and winds. Perhaps this was not surprising. Mecca was, according to Ibn Hisham, a hag-ridden, demon-haunted place. Right in the centre of the city there
stood a shrine built of stone and mud—the Ka’ba, or “Cube”—in which there squatted a whole host of fearsome gods, totems of such sinister power that men from across Arabia would gather there to pay their respects. On top of these, every household in Mecca had its own private idol: there to be rubbed against for luck before a journey. So inveterately pagan were the Meccans that they even offered sacrifices to boulders: among which were a couple of one-time lovers who had dared to have sex in the Ka’ba, and promptly been turned to rock. It was only natural, then, in a city so eerie, so perfumed by blood and magic, that clairvoyants should have been a common sight, rolling about in the dirt of its narrow streets, vomiting up revelations, possessed by jinn in the depths of their guts. So overwhelming was Muhammad’s dread that he might now be suffering an identical fate that he thought to take his life. Rising to his feet, he left the cave and stumbled out into the night. Up the side of the mountain he hurried. Heading for the summit, he prepared to hurl himself from the peak, to dash himself on to the rocks.
But now the voice returned: “O Muhammad! Thou art the apostle of God and I am Gabriel.” Could it really be so? Gabriel was a mighty angel, the messenger of the one God worshipped by the Jews and the Christians, who back in ancient times—or so it was said—had revealed visions to the Prophet Daniel, and told the Virgin Mary that she was to bear a son. Looking up to the heavens, Muhammad saw the figure of a man, his “feet astride the horizon”:11 who else but the angel himself? Returning down the mountain, seeking comfort from his wife, reflecting upon the shattering trauma he had been through, Muhammad dared to contemplate a truly awesome possibility: that the voice had spoken the truth. He would not hear it again for another two years—but when at last Gabriel returned, and the silence was broken, Muhammad had no doubt that he was hearing, courtesy of the angel, the authentic words of a god. And not just any god, but the one God, the true God, the indivisible God. “There is no god but He, Creator of all things.”12