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

by Tom Holland

  “Whoever carries out the teachings of the sages is worthy to be named a saint.”108 Once, even in a land as respectful of learning as Mesopotamia, such a maxim would have been dismissed by many Jews as merely an ivory tower fantasy. Increasingly, however, as the leaders of the yeshivas responded to the convulsions of the age with an outward show of defiance and an inner display of certitude, they were gathering ever more admirers to themselves. Lacking in swords, or silks, or mail-clad horses the rabbis might have been; but they had their own markers of power, nevertheless. There were the pregnant women, eager for their unborn sons to be imbued with a spirit of sanctity and scholarship, who haunted the limits of Sura and Pumpedita. There was the widespread conviction that even a blind rabbi, should he ever be mocked, had only to turn his gaze upon the wretch who had insulted him, and the offender would immediately be reduced to “a heap of bones.”109 Above all, saturating every level of Jewish society in Mesopotamia, there was the gathering acceptance that the rabbis were justified in all their soaring claims: that the will of God could indeed only be known through the prism of their scholarship. The Torah, revealed to a grateful people in all its hitherto unsuspected complexity and detail, could now begin its proper task: that of moulding every last Jew into a rabbi.

  A consummation devoutly to be wished: for then the Messiah would come, every grape would yield “thirty full measures of wine,”110 and every woman would “bear a child on a daily basis.”111 In the meanwhile, however, prior to the dawning of this happy age, there was an additional reason, perhaps, why the rabbis of Mesopotamia could revel in the gathering pace of their winning of Jewish hearts and minds. At the beginning of time, so it was recorded in the Talmud, God had spoken to all the nations of the world, offering them each in turn the Torah; “but all had repudiated it and refused to receive it.”112 Only the ancestors of the Jews had been willing to accept the precious gift; and by doing so, they had preserved humanity from annihilation, for had the Torah only been rejected, the entire purpose of Creation would have failed. The rabbis, then, by awakening their countrymen to a profounder understanding of what was required of them by the law of God, were also working to keep the world itself upon an even keel. The more Jewish that the Jews became, in short, the better for everyone.

  But what if the opposite happened? What if the Chosen People, seduced by some treacherous and plausible idolatry, should stumble, and fall, and lose their identity altogether? For centuries before the founding of the schools of Sura and Pumpedita, the Jews of Mesopotamia had managed to stand proof against the temptations of all the false gods of Babylon, and demonstrated that it needed no rabbis for them to maintain their distinctiveness. Yet over time, a new and more dangerous temptation had arisen, a teasing and honey-voiced heresy that adorned itself with the beauties of the Tanakh itself, and wore them as a whore would her paint. Across the entire span of Mesopotamia, living in the self-same villages, towns and cities in which the Jews themselves lived, there were people whose beliefs served as the most noxious mockery of everything that the rabbis taught. There was no hidden Torah, these minim, or heretics, claimed, beyond that which the rabbis themselves had fabricated; nor was there any need to prepare for the coming of the Messiah, for the Messiah had already come. His name, according to the minim, was Jesus; a man who, half a millennium previously, had been nailed by the Romans to a cross, and then risen from the dead. The reality, it went without saying, was far different. The real Jesus, so the rabbis of Mesopotamia could reveal, was in fact “the son of a harlot”:113 a failed student who had been dismissed by his rabbi for assorted sexual misdemeanours, and had then, out of pique, fallen to worshipping a brick. Far from reigning in heaven, as the minim laughably claimed, the truth was that he had been consigned to hell, where he would spend the rest of eternity in a plunge-bath of boiling shit.114 God Himself, in His infinite wisdom, had foreseen the threat that Jesus would pose His Chosen People, and that was precisely why he had given them a hidden as well as written Torah: so that the minim would not be able to get their filthy hands on it, “and say that they were the Chosen People.”115

  Yet it remained terrifyingly the case that never, not in all their long history, had the Jewish people faced a more insidious and oppressive danger than that posed them by the worshippers of Jesus. Insidious, because the heresy was sufficiently similar to their own faith to exert a secret and terrible fascination on many of them, including even some rabbis; and oppressive because there was nowhere, it seemed, not in the whole world, that it had failed to reach. Far and wide across Mesopotamia, and Persia, and eastwards even of Iranshahr, the contagion had spread; but most alarming of all was its progress in the West. There, as even the Jewish subjects of the Shahanshah might be brought to admit, lay what was “the most important kingdom in the world: the kingdom of the Romans.”116 This kingdom it was, for half a millennium and more now, which had exercised the mastery of Jerusalem and the Promised Land; and many had been the sufferings, in all that time, that it had inflicted upon the Jewish people. Now, however, five hundred years after the birth of Jesus, the Jews had a fresh reason to dread the power and the might of Rome. The Caesars, who had once, like the kings of Babylon, raised temples to a whole infinitude of demons, had since set to closing them down—but only to replace them with a cult that was, if anything, even worse. To what had the Roman people chosen to devote themselves, if not to the most menacing false idol of all? Christos, they called him—which meant, in Greek, “Messiah.”

  Yes—in the palace of Caesar, it was now none other than Jesus who was worshipped. The Jews were no longer alone in believing themselves a people chosen of a single god. The Romans too, those lords of a dominion even richer and more intimidating than that of the Persians, had recently come to enshrine as the pulsing heartbeat of their empire a conviction that Jesus did indeed reign in heaven. The roots of this assurance, however, were of a very great antiquity: older than the written Talmud, older even than Jesus himself. That the Romans had been converted to a belief in Christ was true enough; but true as well was the fact that belief in Christ, across much of the world, had taken on a colouring that was more than a little Roman.

  One empire, one god: an entire millennium’s worth of history had served to make them seem a natural fit.

  * * *

  a A spider’s web of misinformation that it has taken generations of scholars to untangle. For a long while, it was widely assumed that Zoroaster had lived when the Sasanian priesthood claimed that he had lived: “258 years before Alexander,” or, according to our own dating system, in the early sixth century BC. Only recently has close analysis of the sacred texts served to push their likeliest date of origin very much further back, to some point between the tenth and seventeenth centuries BC. Also discounted has been the supposed Median origin of the Prophet: none of the sacred texts so much as mentions western Iran. As to whether the traditions told of Zoroaster are genuine, it is impossible at such an incalculable distance to say. “Such a choice is neither legitimate nor illegitimate: it is a mere wager” (Kellens, p. 3).

  b The degree to which the Sasanians were aware of Cyrus and his successors is hotly debated by historians. The likelihood is that consciousness of them faded over time, for reasons largely to do with the rewriting of Iranian history in the fifth century AD. “The Place of a Hundred Pillars” does seem to be an echo of one of the original names applied to Persepolis.

  c The stories told about Jamshid—or Yima, as he was originally known—bear testimony to centuries, and possibly millennia, of elaboration. Long before the time of Zoroaster, he was being commemorated by Iranians and Indians alike as the first man. In this primal myth, he was installed as the king of the underworld following his death.

  d This is the name by which Persepolis is known in Iran to this day.

  e Such, at any rate, was the testimony of Rabbi Zera, whose own dream of barley prompted his immediate emigration. Another anecdote described how an overly drunken celebration ended up with his throat being cut
by a fellow rabbi. “The next day, this rabbi prayed on Rabbi Zera’s behalf, and brought him back to life. Next year, he said to Rabbi Zera, ‘Will you honour me, and come and feast with me again?’ But Rabbi Zera replied, ‘A miracle cannot be guaranteed.’ ”

  3

  NEW ROME

  Shored Against Ruin

  The Romans, although hardly a people given to false modesty, were sternly conscious of what their greatness owed to the realm of the supernatural. The sheer scale of their achievements made it hard for them not to be. A hint of the unearthly had always shadowed the parabola of Rome’s rise to global rule. Back when the city was founded, seven and a half centuries before the birth of Christ, it had ranked as little more than an encampment of peasants and cattle rustlers, scattered unpromisingly over seven hills in an obscure corner of Italy. A thousand years later, however, as the House of Sasan was making its own first pitch for world empire, Rome’s dominion had come to extend from the icy northern ocean to the sands of Africa. How on earth had it happened that a single city sat enthroned as the mistress of the world? The Romans themselves, for much of their history, had never doubted the answer. If the heavens had favoured them, then this could only be because they were the most god-fearing of peoples. “We stand powerful as much by our piety as by our force of arms.”1

  Yet, the Romans, despite enjoying the evident backing of the gods, had never quite been able to escape the faint gnawings of an inferiority complex. If their conquests in the West—in Spain, Gaul and Britain—had brought them mastery over tribesmen whom they could cheerfully dismiss as barbarians, then in the East it had been a rather different story. There, in lands once ruled by Cyrus and Alexander, there were civilisations that could hardly help but make them feel like parvenus. Most intimidating of all—the inventors of the Doric column and the hypotenuse, of philosophy and the cookery book—were a people who ranked as the veritable cynosures of sophistication: the Greeks. The Romans, who did not care to think of themselves as provincial, had always flinched from confessing too openly to their resulting cultural cringe. They, after all, were the ones who had conquered the Greeks—not the other way round. This was why, however much they might enjoy name-dropping Plato in their letters and conversation, they had never forgotten what they owed to their own ancestral rites and customs, which had helped to bring them all their greatness. Even the Greeks themselves, when they attempted to fathom the secret of Roman success, might find themselves agreeing with this analysis. “Their state,” pronounced Posidonius, a celebrated polymath who had died some fifty years before the birth of Christ, “is founded not only upon their manpower, but upon their traditional way of doing things.”2 So potent were some of these traditions that they could barely even be put into words. Too much, far too much, was at stake. What, for instance, was the name of the god or goddess whose charge it was to protect and keep watch over Rome? Reveal it, and the whole city might be undermined. Only one man had ever had the nerve to do so—and he, unsurprisingly, had come at once “to a sticky end.”3

  Yet, even when it came to state secrets such as these, the Romans could still not quite bring themselves to trust exclusively to their own cults. If it were true, as they tended to take for granted, that the most efficacious traditions were also the most ancient, then there could be no denying, yet again, the infuriating primacy of their most brilliant subjects. Centuries before the founding of Rome, so the Greeks claimed, there had stood on the Asian shores of the Hellespont, the straits that separated Asia from Europe, a city by the name of Troy; and this city, within its walls, had sheltered a most potent talisman. It portrayed Pallas Athena, the virgin goddess who, way back in the mists of time, had dropped it from the heavens, and given it her name: the Palladium. So long as the Trojans kept guard over this statue, so the story went, their city would stand impregnable—which was why, when an army of Greeks laid siege to Troy, they had found it impossible to break through the city’s walls for ten long and terrible years. Finally, though, their spies had managed to steal the Palladium—whereupon Troy had promptly fallen, and been razed utterly to the ground. And the Palladium? Its fate had been much disputed. Any number of Greek cities had claimed to be its final resting place—as well they might have done, since the Palladium was not merely a priceless status symbol but the ultimate in security guarantees. Yet in truth, as time would more than demonstrate, there was only the one city that could convincingly claim to have been endowed with its awesome power. As the Greek world was increasingly put in the shade by the rising power of Rome, so the conquerors had set to appropriating the past of the conquered as well as their lands.4 The origins of the Roman people, it had come to be asserted, lay not in Italy at all, but far to the east—in Troy. Romulus, the wolf-raised founder of Rome and its first king, had himself, so it was claimed, been descended from Aeneas, a Trojan prince. With the help of the gods, this Aeneas had escaped the sack of his city and sailed to Italy to make a new beginning. Nor was that all. Somehow—although by what precise means, no one could entirely agree—the Palladium had ended up in Rome. The future would be secure for as long as it remained there, carefully preserved in the Forum—the venerable and monument-crowded public space that had always served as the heart of the city. Link to a past immeasurably vaster and more ancient than the Romans’ own, the Palladium was also something very much more: “a pledge from Fate that the empire would never fall.”5

  In AD 248, a couple of decades after the House of Sasan had seized the mastery of Iranshahr, the Roman people celebrated their millennium. A thousand years on from the founding by Romulus of the city to which he had given his name, however, and it was not only those who actually lived in Rome who could glory in the name of “Roman.” Thirty-six years earlier, each and every free man in the empire had been granted citizenship: an enfranchisement dismissed sourly by some as an underhand attempt to broaden the tax base, but which could also plausibly be viewed in a nobler light. The Romans, despite the brutal and ravening quality of their ascent to greatness, had always sheltered, at the back of their minds, the vague but gratifying conviction that their conquest of the world had been for the world’s own good. No one had expressed this more stirringly than a poet named Virgil. Back in the first flush of Rome’s global rule, he had written the Aeneid, a sweeping epic in which the Romans were ringingly admonished never to forget their god-given duty: “to impose the works and ways of peace, to spare the vanquished and to overthrow the haughty by means of war.”6 A mission statement calculated to delight the Romans themselves, of course; yet also with a resonance that was more than merely Roman. Virgil’s epic, as its title suggested, told the story of Aeneas; and while it certainly looked forward to the age when the descendants of the Trojan prince would rule the world, it looked back as well, to a heritage that derived from the East. Nor was it only Roman poets who bought into the seemingly implausible notion that an empire won amid slaughter and exploitation might embody a brotherhood of man: so too did Greek philosophers. Posidonius, a near contemporary of Virgil, had been the first of many to suggest that Rome’s dominion might be nothing less than an earthly reflection of the order of the cosmos. This notion, by the time of the Roman millennium, had come almost to be taken for granted. Rome had indeed, for a period of some two centuries, imposed “the works and ways of peace.” Never in recorded history had so many people lived for so long without experience of war. Given this, it was hardly surprising that distant provincials had become proud to call themselves “Roman” and hymned the world’s capital in gratitude. “Everywhere, you have made citizens of those who rank as the noblest, most accomplished and powerful of peoples … All the world has been adorned by you as a pleasure garden.”7

  Except that increasingly, by the time of Rome’s millennium, there were weeds in the garden, and brambles. The order that for so long had kept it flourishing had slumped into disrepair. Repeatedly, over the preceding half-century, soldiers’ boots had trampled down its blooms. The decade immediately preceding the millennium had been p
articularly brutal. Rival generals had butchered one another with a wearying degree of savagery. The Roman people, standing in the shadow of the millennium, were perfectly entitled to shiver. They knew full well the ghosts that were being roused. A talent for imposing order was not their only inheritance from the distant past. So too was civil bloodshed. Romulus, the founder of Rome, had murdered his own twin brother. The line of kings that succeeded him had then been ended by a coup d’état, and the monarchy abolished. The republic that replaced it, and which had gone on to conquer the world, had itself, some four and a half centuries on from its establishment, collapsed amid murderous violence. The ambitions of rival generals—imperatores—had made the whole world to bleed. Many at the time had thought Rome herself doomed; and perhaps she would have been, had not a particularly ruthless “imperator” by the name of Caesar planted the banner of autocracy atop the corpse-littered rubble of the republic, and founded a second monarchy. Augustus, he called himself—the “Divinely Favoured One.” An immodest title—but well merited. Indeed, it was the measure of his success that the word imperator itself evolved, over the course of his reign, to mean something much more than “general”: what we, in an echo of the original Latin, now term “emperor.” Virgil, who began his great epic at least in part due to the promptings of Augustus, hailed his patron as a man fated to “bring back the Age of Gold”8—and an age of gold, by and large, was precisely what the world had been given. True, there had been the odd lunatic emperor: Nero, for instance, half a century on from the death of Augustus, was remembered with horror by the Roman people as a man who had killed his mother, married a eunuch, and burned down half of Rome. Yet even the civil war that followed his suicide lasted barely a year; and for 150 years after his death, the empire had enjoyed a golden age. All the more alarming for the Romans, then, as the millennium was ushered in amid the scrabbling after power by would-be Caesars, to imagine that gold might be reverting to iron, and evolution going into reverse: that emperors might once again come to rank as nothing more than rival warlords.