In the Shadow of the Sword: The Birth of Islam and the Rise of the Global Arab Empire

by Tom Holland

  Of course, it was not only Roman ghosts who haunted the dominion established by the Arabs in the seventh century. In the lowlands of Mesopotamia and the uplands of Iran, there was the spectre of the empire of the Persian kings. This dominion had in turn been raised upon the foundations of still older monarchies, sediment upon sun-baked sediment: for imperialism, in the East, reached back to the dawn of time. Dimly, in the scriptures of the Jews and the Christians, this was remembered: that there had once been such things as pharaohs and great towers raised up on the banks of the Euphrates to the sky. Yet their sense of this rarely served to oppress them: for if the landscapes of Egypt and Mesopotamia could not help but bear witness to their disorientingly ancient pasts, then so also, in the East, had it become the practice of its peoples to look fixedly to the future. The Jews awaited their messiah; the Christians the return of Christ. Others too shared in what had become the common presumption of the age: that the patterns of human affairs were being traced directly by the finger of God. There were the followers of the Persian prophet Zoroaster, who saw the world as divided into warring factions of good and evil; and the Samaritans, who proclaimed in their creed how there was no god but God, and the Gnostics, who believed that it was possible for a revelation of the divine to descend via angels to chosen mortals; and all the other numerous heretics, and cultists, and sectarians that the Near East had long seemed effortlessly to breed. Prodigious the number of empires sprung from its soil might well have been—and yet not half so prodigious as the number of gods. And this was the soil, the very soil, from which were destined to sprout the pillars of the Caliphate: a dominion that proclaimed itself to be both a universal state and the instrument of heaven’s purpose.

  Given all this, how can it possibly make sense to explain the emergence of Islam with reference to Islam alone? That Muslim tradition attributes the origins of the Qur’an and the Sunna to an illiterate man living in a pagan city in the middle of a desert is a problem, not a solution. Perhaps, had the revelations of the Prophet materialised in some other period and place, then the fact that the presumptions of the late antique Near East are shot through them like letters through a stick of rock would indeed appear an authentic miracle. As it is, the distance between Mecca and the lands of the Roman and Persian empires to the north suggests a mystery of the kind that perplexed early cartographers when they mapped Africa and South America, and observed that the eastern and western coasts of the Atlantic Ocean seemed to match like the pieces of a gigantic jigsaw puzzle. Any notion that continents might have been drifting around the globe appeared too ludicrous to contemplate. Only in the 1960s, with the theory of plate tectonics, did a convincing solution finally emerge. A remarkable coincidence turned out not to have been a coincidence at all.

  The close fit between the religion that came to be known as Islam and the teeming melting-pot of the late antique Near East would seem to suggest an identical conclusion. Indisputably, the order established by the Arabs in the century following the hijra was something novel. But originality alone does not tell the whole story. Prototype of every subsequent Islamic empire that it certainly was, the Caliphate founded in the seventh century was also something very much more: the last, the climactic, and the most enduring empire of antiquity. Such is the claim that this book aims to prove. Yet it is as well to admit, at the outset, that such a task is far from easy. Certainty, on a whole range of issues, is impossible. There can only ever be speculation. Cosmologists speak of “singularities”—warpings of time and space where the laws of physics do not apply. The puzzle of Islam’s origins might be viewed in a similar way—as a black hole sucking in a great spiralling swirl of influences before casting them back out in a radically different form. The career of Muhammad, traditionally cast as the pivotal episode in the entire history of the Middle East, serves both as the climax of my narrative of the collapse of Roman and Persian power, and as the point where that narrative fragments and breaks down. Does the Qur’an really date from the Prophet’s lifetime? Where, if not in Mecca, might he have lived? Why are the references to him in the early Caliphate so sparse, so enigmatic, and so late? The answers I have given to these questions are all of them unashamedly provisional—as I believe they have no choice but to be. That said, my ambition has been to sift and weigh the awesomely complex sources, to try and take account of all the many gaps and inconsistencies that exist within them, and then, albeit tentatively, to marshal them into something resembling a narrative. The context for this attempt, however, is not the traditional one, derived from the works of Muslims who lived whole centuries after Muhammad’s death, but rather from those who inhabited the world into which he was born: the empire-shadowed, God-haunted world of late antiquity.

  Of the full dazzling colour, variety and complexity of this age, the chronicles written by Muslim historians give barely a hint. Infidels, when they appear at all, are made to speak and act precisely as though they were Arabs.77 Roman emperors are transformed into mirror-images of Caliphs; Jewish scholars and Christian saints become straw men, shadowy and faceless.h Fortunately, though, our understanding of the extraordinary melting-pot of imperial and religious traditions that provided the context for Islam’s evolution does not depend solely on Muslim chronicles. Far from it. While seventh-century sources are threadbare to the point of non-existent, those from the preceding two centuries offer sumptuous riches. We have, for the last time, narratives composed by writers who self-consciously regarded themselves as the heirs of the great historians of classical Greece; we have collections of letters, and digests of laws, and compilations of speeches; we have a gazetteer written by a merchant, and a work of anthropology written by a barbarian, and a seeming infinitude of works of Christian piety, from histories of the Church to lives of fabulously self-mortifying saints. In fact, by the standards of other periods of ancient history, we have an almost miraculous volume of evidence—something that historians of antiquity, like magpies flocking above a cache of diamonds, have seized upon with glee. As a result, over the past few decades, the study of the period has been revolutionised. A civilisation previously dismissed as exhausted, sterile and decaying has been comprehensively rehabilitated. What scholars emphasise now is less its decrepitude, more its energy, its exuberance, its inventiveness.

  “We see in late antiquity,” as one of its foremost historians has put it, “a mass of experimentation, new ways being tried and new adjustments made.”78 What emerges in the century or so after Muhammad as the religion called Islam is one consequence of this “mass of experimentation”—but there are a whole multitude of others too. The most significant of all these, of course, are Judaism and Christianity: faiths that by the time of Muhammad had taken on something like the form they wear today, but that had once themselves been swirls of beliefs and doctrines no less unformed than those professed by the Arabs in the first century of their empire. The story of how Islam came to define itself, and to invent its own past, is only part of a much broader story: one that is ultimately about how Jews, Christians and Muslims all came by their understanding of religion. No other revolution in human thought, perhaps, has done more to transform the world. No other revolution, then, it might be argued, demands more urgently to be put in proper context.

  That is why a history of Islam’s origins cannot be written without reference to the origins of Judaism and Christianity—and why in turn a history of the origins of Judaism and Christianity cannot be written without reference to the world that incubated them both. The vision of God to which both rabbis and bishops subscribed, and which Muhammad’s followers inherited, did not emerge out of nowhere. The monotheisms that would end up established as state religions from the Atlantic to central Asia had ancient, and possibly unexpected, roots. To trace them is to cast a searchlight across the entire civilisation of late antiquity. From the dental hygiene of Zoroastrian priests to the frontier policy of Roman strategists; from fantasies about Alexander the Great in Syria to tales of buried books of spells in Iraq; from Jews who though
t Christ the messiah to Christians who lived like Jews: all are pieces in the jigsaw. It would certainly make little sense to trace the course of the revolution that would climax with the forging of the Caliphate by starting with the revelations of the Muslim Prophet. Accordingly, we begin not in Mecca, nor even in Jerusalem, but in a land that was the wellspring for two incalculably fruitful convictions: that a human empire might be global; and that the power of an all-good god might be universal.

  We begin in Persia.

  * * *

  a We have three brief but contemporary inscriptions giving the Himyarite side of the story. Unsurprisingly, perhaps, these accuse the Christians of Najran of what today might be described as terrorism.

  b Or perhaps “Read!” According to Ibn Hisham, the recitation appeared before Muhammad in the form of writing on a brocaded coverlet.

  c This thesis, that Muhammad’s religion was a threat to the trade of the Quraysh as guardians of the Ka’ba, is nowhere explicitly mentioned in Muslim tradition, but is almost universally taken for granted in modern, Western biographies of the Prophet.

  d In some traditions, he is cast as the Prophet’s brother: Aaron to Muhammad’s Moses.

  e That Moses could not possibly have been the author of the first five books of the Bible was a conclusion that had first been drawn as far back as the eleventh century, by a Jewish physician employed at a Muslim court in Spain.

  f Not all Muslims have accepted the authenticity of the great collections of the Sunna: some, back in the past, rejected them out of hand, and some, still today, have collections of their own. Other Muslims, as early as the ninth century, rejected the reliability of hadiths altogether, arguing—rather in the manner of modern-day Western scholars—that they were all unreliable and fabricated.

  g Two verses, Qur’an: 7.157 and 29.48, are used to adduce the theory of Muhammad’s illiteracy. 7.157 refers to him as “ummi”: a word conventionally translated as “unlettered,” but which could also mean “lacking a scripture,” in the sense of being neither Jewish or Christian. Adding to the uncertainty is the fact that the Qur’an frequently refers to itself as a kitab, a book, while in 25.4–6, it is strongly implied that Muhammad could indeed read. Even more suggestively, Ibn Hisham has reports which imply that Muhammad could not merely read, but write.

  h It is only fair to point out that Christian historians were identically partisan. Just as infidels tended to be invisible in Muslim histories, so were pagans, back in the fourth and fifth centuries, no less invisible in histories written by Christians.

  II

  JAHILIYYA

  Religion taught by a prophet or by a preacher of the truth is the only foundation on which to build a great and powerful empire.

  Ibn Khaldun, A Universal History

  2

  IRANSHAHR

  Shah Thing

  Any Persian king who doubted that he ruled the most favoured of peoples had only to stroke his chin. Whereas the creator of the universe, in His ineffable wisdom, had seen fit to give the inhabitants of more benighted regions hair that was either too curly or too straight, He had granted the men of Persia beards that embodied the “happy medium.”1 Here, in the magnificence of their personal grooming, the Persians found evidence of a far more profound pre-eminence. “Our land,” they liked to point out, “lies in the midst of other lands, and our people are the most noble and illustrious of beings.”2 As with facial hair, then, so with the various attributes and qualities that made for greatness: the Persian people appeared to enjoy the best of all possible worlds.

  And certainly, in the centuries that had followed Christ, the name they had carved out for themselves had been a splendid one. Their dominion had spread far beyond the limits of Persia itself: from the frontiers of Syria in the west to those of the Hindu Kush in the east; from the deserts of Arabia in the south to the mountains of Armenia in the north. Nevertheless, the very wealth and glory of such an empire could on occasion lead to anxiety as well as pride. Just as flies were drawn to sumptuous banquets, and locusts to fields of corn, so savages were to silk and gold. The Persians, whose reputation for “courage, and boldness, and skill on the day of battle”3 was well merited, had rarely deigned to regard such intruders as anything other than annoyances, to be swatted every so often with an almost disdainful ease; but that, over the course of the fourth Christian century, had begun to change. Rumours of war from distant frontiers had come to shadow the mood of the Persian heartlands. Victories were still being won, but against increasingly fearsome opponents. The waves crashing against the bulwarks of Persian power appeared to be growing more violent with every passing year. Whole tribes of people, whole nations, were on the move. Soon enough, and the news was darkening even further. Nomads were alarming enough; but not half so alarming as nomads with a taste for putting down roots. By the middle of the fifth Christian century, the empire of the Persians was standing eyeball to eyeball with a menacingly new order of foe: a kingdom of warrior horsemen who had parked themselves directly on its north-eastern flank.

  Who were the Hephthalites, and where did they come from? No one was entirely sure. When a people such as the Persians, long settled in a much-cherished homeland, ventured to contemplate the drear immensity of the lands that stretched northwards of their empire, the origins of the savages who infested it, and of the winds that gusted though its grasses, were liable to appear to them mysteries equally without an answer. One popular theory, it was true, held that the enigmatic newcomers were Huns: the most fearsome, as they were the ugliest, of all the steppeland tribesmen. Others, however, pointed out that the Hephthalites—despite their curiously elongated skulls, their sinister taste for mullets and their contemptibly un-Persian beards—“had countenances that were almost attractive.”4 Their skin was not a sallow Hunnic yellow but, like that of the Persians themselves, fetchingly pale. Some took to calling them “White Huns”: a suggestion of hybridity that emphasised precisely why the Persians found them so unsettling. These were savages who had dared to found their own monarchy, their own capital city, even their own body of laws. The Persians—who had long gloried in their own triumphant possession of those appurtenances of civilisation—could not possibly ignore such presumption. Nomads who forgot their place needed to be reminded of it—and fast. Indeed, so urgent was the problem that the Persian monarchy decided it could no longer afford to do as it had traditionally done, and delegate the patrolling of the eastern frontier to its underlings. The peril had grown too great. The time had come for the King of Persia, the Shahanshah, the “King of Kings” himself, to tame the Hephthalites.

  So it was, during the campaigning season of AD 484, that an immense army advanced across the Gurgan Plain, an unsettled frontier zone extending east from the southernmost tip of the Caspian Sea, and which had increasingly come to mark the limits of Persian power.5 Beyond a landscape patterned with the reassuring marks of civilisation—fields, kilns and canals—there lurked untenanted badlands. “The realm of the wolves,” men called them: fit reflection of their aura of menace. As the wooded ramparts of a great chain of mountains, the Alburz, gradually receded into the distance, there came to stretch ahead of the taskforce an unbroken immensity of wild barley, and oats, and corn, rippling, so it seemed, to the limits of the world: the beginning of the steppes. Featureless as this landscape was, and lacking in anything that the Persians would have recognised as civilisation, it had repeatedly frustrated the ambitions of would-be conquerors. Yet, on this occasion, to anyone watching the great host of men, horses and elephants as they trampled down the grasses, the invaders’ prospects must have appeared no less glittering than the heads of their ferociously heavy lances. A Persian army at full strength was a fearsome sight. “Everything so far as the eye can reach,” as one awe-struck observer put it, “is filled with the shimmer of arms. Whole plains and hills are crowded out by mail-clad horsemen.”6 And by banners as well: since if there was one thing that a Persian warrior really adored, it was a showy flag. Every unit of cavalry p
ossessed one, great, heavy drapes slung from crossbars, and emblazoned with flamboyant heraldic devices: stars, lions, boars. Most splendid of all, it went without saying, was the royal banner: immeasurably the largest, it was also the most sumptuously adorned. Seeing it flapping massively in the breeze, the sunlight glinting off its embroidered gold, silver and jewels, no one could have doubted who was leading the expedition into the realm of the Hephthalites.

  The King of Kings, like all his royal ancestors, possessed a literally supernatural mystique. Every Persian knew it, and what was owed to it: not merely their empire, but their very freedom. Two and a half centuries previously, when their forefathers had been slaves of foreign masters, the banner of their independence had been raised by a nobleman named Ardashir—a mighty hero possessed of a mandate from the heavens. No one in the whole of Persia had been more favoured of the gods. One of Ardashir’s ancestors, a man named Sasan, had officiated as the high priest of the country’s holiest and most venerable temple, at Istakhr. Here, ever since ancient times, it had been the custom to present the severed heads of vanquished enemies to the great warrior goddess, Anahita, “the Strong and Immaculate.” Ardashir himself had proved a worthy lieutenant of this ferocious divinity: by AD 224, he had liberated Persia from the rule of outsiders, and to such crushing effect that he had established the Persians themselves as the masters of a host of subject peoples. It was scarcely surprising, then, in the light of such a colossal achievement, that his countrymen should have distinguished about his person the eerie flickering of an aura more than human. His farr, the Persians termed it: the mark of his divine election. Here, no less than the empire he had founded, had been a precious heirloom. Unceasingly, as the years went by, and generation sprung from the family of Sasan succeeded generation to the throne of Persia, so had a farr continued to shadow each new king. Sometimes it was glimpsed in the shape of a ram; sometimes as a golden ray of light; sometimes in human form, like the sudden flitting of a figure that was no reflection across a mirror. The glamour of it all, naturally enough, helped contribute to a fearsome reputation. Even the Sasanians’ enemies, people with every reason to loathe their pretensions, found it difficult not to cringe before them. “A monarchy that is proud and exceedingly powerful”: so one foreign commentator described the dynasty in a tone of rueful awe. “For it is old and most intimidating, most intimidating indeed, to those who inhabit the world.”7