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

by Tom Holland

  There remained others, however, who were harder to sort. Not everyone who trod the sacred dust of the Holy Land could be categorised neatly as a Christian or a Jew. Much though both emperors and rabbis might have wished it otherwise, Palestine was simply too God-haunted, too dream-crowded, too memory-stalked for that. Right in the heart of the province, for instance, there was a people who openly derided both Christian churches and Jewish synagogues as abodes of idolatry, and all those who worshipped in them as upstarts. The Samaritans, inhabitants of a region midway between Jerusalem and Galilee named Samaria, claimed that they, and they alone, had preserved the unadorned wishes of heaven. “There is no God but One,”43 they declared. “Let us believe in Him and in Moses, His Prophet.”44 From these simple presumptions, so it seemed to the Samaritans, much else inevitably flowed: all the scriptures penned since the time of Moses, whether by Jews or Christians, were mere deluded vanity; the purity of the teachings that God revealed to His Prophet had been corrupted by any number of subsequent accretions; Jerusalem, far from being a holy city, had been promoted as such by David and Solomon for purely political reasons. In truth, it was neither the Temple Mount nor the rock of Golgotha that constituted the centre of the world, but rather a wooded peak in Samaria—Mount Gerizim. It was here—on a flat expanse of rock named the “Eternal Hill” by the Samaritans—that Noah’s ark had landed, Abraham had prepared to sacrifice Isaac, and the laws given to Moses had been preserved. To believe any differently, as the Jews and the Christians did, was to distort the primal teachings that God had revealed to the ancient prophets. It was to neglect the principal duty of humanity: due submission to God.45

  None of which, needless to say, did much for the Samaritans’ popularity with their neighbours. Jewish scorn for their pretensions ran particularly deep. For centuries, in a blatantly tit-for-tat manner, the rabbis had accused the Samaritans themselves of being the idolators—this on the supposed grounds that they were descended from pagans and worshipped a dove. As a result, far from embracing them as potential allies, most Jews refused even to sit down with them, let alone consume their wine or food—although the odd rabbi was prepared to grant that it might be legitimate to tuck into one of their boiled eggs.46 As for Christians, the sanctions they applied would prove, in the long run, to be of an altogether more forceful order of brutality: an exercise in state-sponsored violence bred of wholly predictable tensions. Despite the fact that the Samaritans were permitted to serve in the Roman army, and indeed had long enjoyed an impressive reputation among their commanders for martial savagery, Christian relic-hunters had still ransacked Mount Gerizim, and Christian colonists had still flooded into Samaria. In 484, Samaritan patience had finally snapped. A bishop had been mutilated in his own cathedral; churches had been desecrated; open rebellion had blazed right across central Palestine. The provincial authorities, although initially taken by surprise, had been ruthless in crushing the revolt. Samaria had been left littered with some ten thousand corpses. All Samaritans, unsurprisingly, had been demobbed from imperial service for good. The crowning act of vengeance, however, had been to ban them from the sacred slopes of Mount Gerizim, and to build, on its previously unadorned summit, a church within a fortress. And on the church, as one Samaritan historian would bitterly record, “there was constructed a very high tower which was painted white, and from which lamps were hung to glow in the night, so that all in Constantinople and Rome might see them.”47

  There was, of course—as any Jew could have pointed out—nothing particularly ground-breaking about this display of imperial vindictiveness. The Samaritans, however, had not had four hundred years to adjust to the loss of their holiest sanctuary; nor could they quite bring themselves to believe that God would permit its continued desecration. Desperation and rage duly festered. A few decades on from the great revolt, when a small band of Samaritan insurgents, “prompted by the suggestion of a woman,”48 sought to seize back the summit of Mount Gezirim from its Christian garrison, the incipient rebellion was quarantined only with difficulty; and in 529, when rioting saw a number of Jews and Christians killed by a mob of Samaritans, the spark proved sufficient to light a second conflagration. For a brief while, it seemed as though not only Palestine but the whole empire might be cut in two: for a warlord who shared with the long-dead pagan emperor the sinister name of Julian, a man variously described as a king, a messiah, or “a bandit chief,”49 proclaimed the foundation of a Samaritan empire, blocking the roads from the north, and menacing Jerusalem. Adding yet further spice to the rebellion, the insurgents staged a number of highly pointed atrocities, of which the most spectacular was the incineration of a bishop on a bonfire fuelled by the relics of Christian martyrs. Insults such as these, of course, might almost have been calculated to provoke a devastating response. The imperial vengeance, when it finally came, was inevitably a terrible one. The rebel army, brought to battle, was annihilated with such efficiency that twenty thousand Samaritan warriors were left dead, including a summarily decapitated Julian. New, more impregnable fortifications were raised around the summit of the Eternal Hill, and the slopes of Mount Gezirim scoured clean of every last trace of a Samaritan presence. Meanwhile, across the rest of Samaria, the ruin was universal. Land that had once been hailed as “the most fertile in the world”50 was now a wilderness of carrion, rubble and weeds.

  As for the Samaritans themselves, there seemed nothing left to them but despair. Many, abandoning the god who had so transparently failed them, sullenly submitted to baptism; others, slumping into a numb isolationism, hunkered down in remote villages, where they ostentatiously covered any footprints left by visiting Jews or Christians with burning straw. Yet others, however, tried to keep the banner of rebellion flying—not by making a stand in Samaria, but by retreating beyond the border. As many as fifty thousand of them, fleeing the reprisals of Justinian’s death-squads, made a break for Mesopotamia, where they threw themselves on the mercy of the aged Kavad. The Shahanshah, rather than swallow the assurances of the Samaritans that they could deliver him Palestine, opted instead to put them all in chains and pack them off to toil in a gold mine. Nevertheless, back in Palestine itself, the Roman authorities remained twitchy in the extreme at any prospect of a Samaritan retrenchment just over the border. In the wake of the revolt, when twenty thousand Samaritan boys and girls were handed over to slavers, it was specifically decreed that they must be sold as far afield as possible— preferably in Persia or India. The prospect that any of them might grow up within striking distance of their homeland was altogether too alarming to be tolerated.

  There was more to this anxiety than mere paranoia. Notwithstanding the milk and honey that flowed through the Holy Land, it bordered directly onto wilderness—and wilderness, as it had ever done, spelled danger. Right on the doorstep of Jerusalem, along the fifteen-mile road that led eastwards to Jericho, menace lurked behind every barren rock, so that what had long since come to be named the “Bloody Way”d was as notorious for banditry as anywhere in the empire. South of Jericho, where steepling cliffs plunged down towards the aptly named Dead Sea, there was an even more intimidating landscape, formed of nothing but dust, salt and mud. It was here, in the wake of the burning of the Temple in the first century AD, that an army of Jewish rebels had made a last, doomed stand. But already, long, long previously, the region had borne spectacular witness to the incineration of a sinful people and to the full, devastating horror of where the angering of God might lead. On the eastern shore of the Dead Sea, where the mud bubbled at its filthiest and most stinking, two mighty cities had once stood: Sodom and Gomorrah. Their inhabitants, so moralists recorded, had been wholly given over to vice: to rape, to sex with people of their own gender, and to breaking wind in public.e Provoked beyond endurance by such depravity, the Almighty had duly decreed the obliteration of the two cities. Fire and brimstone had rained down upon them. “The smoke of the land went up like the smoke of a furnace.”51 Of Sodom and Gomorrah, nothing had remained, saving only the odd salt-cak
ed ruin, to serve passers-by as an admonition and a terror.

  The lesson was not entirely bleak, though. On the southern shore of the Dead Sea, there stood a church; and inside the church, there was a cave. It was said that Abraham’s nephew, Lot, graced by a tip-off from some angels, had sheltered here with his family: the only survivors of the annihilation of Sodom. The implication of this—that a righteous man, such as Lot, might be spared the ruin of a doomed people by fleeing into the wilderness—had not gone unremarked over the centuries. Samaritans were hardly the first refugees to have sought sanctuary beyond the borders of the Promised Land. Back in the days of their own persecution by Rome, Christians had done the self-same thing. Some of them, even after the conversion of Constantine, had refused to return from the desert to the temptations of everyday life: among the cliffs beyond Jerusalem, as on the mountains around Antioch or in the desert of Sinai, ascetics had looked to build for themselves a city of God. In the midst of a drear and bandit-haunted wilderness, the monasteries that dotted the eastern flank of Palestine aimed to blaze like bulwarks of paradise. Manned by warriors of God from across the empire, linked by paths that criss-crossed the wilds like the cords of a far-flung net, and buttressed by imposing stonework that gave them the look of fortresses, these lavras, as they were called, served the Church, in its great battle against the demonic, as an awesome first line of defence. Out in the desert, where Christ Himself had been tempted by the Devil, only the spiritual elite could hope to prosper. The weak fell away; the strong grew even stronger. This was why, in the Holy Land, it was the monks who constituted the shock troops of orthodoxy. Forged in the blast furnace of the desert, they brought to the practice of their faith a show of fortitude, of discipline, of steel. They, more than anyone, could be relied upon to embrace martyrdom at the hands of Samaritans; to stage public protests against any hint of concession to Monophysites; to press the imperial authorities to hold their nerve in the battle against every last enemy of God. Vital tasks anywhere—but in the Holy Land especially so.

  “Arm yourselves against heresies, against Jews, against Samaritans, against pagans.” So had urged Cyril, a golden-tongued Bishop of Jerusalem back in the first century of the city’s existence as a Christian capital, warning converts there of the peculiar charge that God had laid upon their shoulders. “Many are your enemies: be sure you have ammunition.”52 Two centuries later, the marks of just how successful Cyril’s call to arms had been were everywhere to be seen, stamped on the face of the Holy Land: on the hill above Tiberias, on the summit of Mount Gerizim, in the mouldering shells of abandoned temples. There were, however, few visible traces of perhaps the most telling victory of all. Cyril, in the advice offered to his converts, had lingered on one particularly mortal threat: “If a book is not read in a church, then do not read it yourself, even alone.” Specifically, he had cautioned against those seeming-scriptures that “bore the title of ‘gospel,’ but were false, and full of deceit.”53 Such a warning, of course, would have been valid anywhere; but in the Holy Land, especially so. Not every Christian who flocked there was necessarily orthodox, after all. A yearning to walk in the footsteps of Christ did not necessarily imply obedience to the Council of Nicaea. There were grounds for alarm as well as self-satisfaction in the cosmopolitan character of the Holy Land. Nowhere else in the world, as Cyril had well appreciated, were banned gospels, banned doctrines, banned identities, likelier to be available.

  Moreover, immigrants were not the only heretics to be found in Palestine. Camped out on the frontier between Christianity and Judaism, on what had become, since the Council of Nicaea, an ever more brutally patrolled no-man’s land, there lingered still a few obdurate squatters. Jews who “honoured Christ as a just man”54 and Christians who yearned to see the Temple restored: how were these to be categorised? As pestiferous impostors, came the ringing answer of the Church: “for, though they pretend to be both Jews and Christians, yet they are neither.”55 Add to this unsettling mix the Samaritans, who were darkly suspected of having fostered the swarming plague of Gnostics, and it was no wonder that bishops such as Cyril regarded the melting-pot of faiths to be found in Palestine as so potentially toxic. To scholars of his generation, the threat from heresy in the Holy Land seemed as terrifying as ever. After all, if a Jew could be a Christian—and a Christian a Jew—then who was to say what further monstrous fusions of beliefs might be possible?

  Answers to that, in the manuscript-littered libraries of the Holy Land, were certainly still there for those with eyes to see. Jerome, ever the assiduous bookworm, had reported in a tone of mingled horror and fascination his perusal of a gospel written in Hebrew that contained the noxious teachings of a sect called the Nazoreans. These, heretics who had the nerve to claim descent from the original Jewish Church that had existed prior to the arrival of Paul upon the scene, taught something truly shocking: that the Holy Spirit was not only female but the heavenly “mother”56 of Christ. Nor was that the worst, by any means. To true connoisseurs of heresy, the Nazoreans ranked as mere beginners. The Church’s leading specialist in such matters, a bishop from Cyprus by the name of Epiphanius, had identified an infinitely more sinister attempt to poison the faithful with the toxin of Jewishness. Explaining to his shocked readers the existence of Christians who denied the Trinity and held Jesus to have been merely a man who obeyed the Law of Moses, and who turned in the direction of Jerusalem when they performed their daily prayers, the learned bishop had fingered a teacher called Ebion: a veritable monster, so Epiphanius claimed, who had blended Judaism with “the repulsiveness of the Samaritans,”57 not to mention a whole host of other heresies, too. In such a figure, then, could be caught the ultimate glimpse of a world in which Christians and Jews forgot their proper place: a world in which there was nothing to stop some innovative heretic from “taking an item of preaching from every sect, and patterning himself after them all.”58

  No wonder, then, that bishops such as Cyril and Epiphanius, backed up by the militant fervour of the province’s monks, and the muscle of the imperial Roman state, should have laboured long and hard to impose an orthodox model of Christianity on the Holy Land. No wonder either that the Jews, menaced as they were by such a project, should have regarded with an increasingly suspicious hatred those of their number who still thought to call upon the name of Christ. People such as the Nazoreans or the Ebionites, squeezed from both sides, duly found themselves pushed ever deeper into the shadows. There was nothing for them to do, in the battleground for rival faiths that Palestine had become, save to retreat into ever deeper oblivion. No-man’s land, in the final reckoning, had proved an impossible place to be. Certainly, by the time of Justinian, no bishop thought to bother himself with the Ebionites—nor any rabbi either. Their doctrines and their doings had become things so spectral as to have been almost entirely forgotten. The Christians and the Jews of Palestine, cordially though they might detest one another, could at least agree on one thing: hybrids were beyond the pale.

  And perhaps literally so. If indeed the Ebionites and their like did manage to cling on to a precarious existence within the Christian empire, then it could only ever have been on the margins: on the Golan Heights above Galilee, perhaps, or in outposts planted deep in the desert.59 To those defined by the Church as heretics, as to refugees from Samaria, it was no longer their traditional heartlands that held out the surest prospects of survival, but rather the wilderness. The result was a curious irony: for even as the frontier between Palestine and the desert was being colonised by the shock troops of Christian orthodoxy, by monks and ascetics, so also did it bear a certain ghostly witness to the world as it had been before the establishment of Christianity, when the borders between rival faiths had been less clear-cut, more fissiparous. Just as the massive stonework of a lavra, a desert monastery, proclaimed the triumph of the new, so also were there to be glimpsed, faint perhaps, but present all the same for those inspired to track them down, the broken traces of a far more ancient order. In the wilds between Pale
stine and Sinai, for instance, there stood shrines raised by tribesmen who still worshipped a whole multitude of gods: “polytheists” as they were contemptuously termed. Meanwhile, in the cliffs above the Dead Sea, it was not unheard of for mysterious scrolls to be excavated from “chambers in the middle of the mountain with many books in them”:60 scrolls that might prove to contain versions of the Jewish scriptures, but fabulously ancient, and with strange and variant readings. Clearly, then, amid the dryness of the sands, prospects for the survival of otherwise long-forgotten manuscripts were not altogether hopeless; and perhaps, that being so, the same was true of long-obsolete doctrines too.

  Out in the wilderness, after all, beyond the reach of the Christian empire, and the monks who had colonised its periphery, there was no one greatly to care which gods people might worship, nor which books they might read, nor which obsolete beliefs they might hug to themselves. Out in the wilderness, there was no one to patrol the frontiers of faiths that elsewhere, once and for all, had put up the barricades.

  The Wolves of Arabia

  Like sand borne on an easterly wind, hints of the strange and aberrant beliefs that simmered in the desert were occasionally still to be found even in the Holy Land itself. Some twenty miles south of Jerusalem, for instance, at a spot set among open fields named Mamre, pagans from beyond the frontiers of Palestine would gather every summer “to keep a brilliant feast.”61 The roots of this festival were quite fabulously ancient: for they had as their focus an oak that was the oldest tree in the world. Neither Jews nor Christians thought to dispute this sensational pedigree. Both were agreed that the tree was “as ancient as creation”62—and that it had been a favourite of Abraham’s to boot. A well dug by the patriarch still stood beside it, and although the oak itself, thanks to the merciless attentions of Christian souvenir-hunters, had long since been hacked down to a stump, an unmistakable aura of holiness still attached itself to the mutilated trunk. In the first book of the Bible, it was recorded that Abraham, sitting in the shade of the oak, had played host to three mysterious strangers, who had delivered him the good news that his wife, Sarah, hitherto barren, was to bear him a son. Two of the strangers had then continued on their way; but the third, informing Abraham of His intention to wipe out Sodom, had stood revealed as none other than God Himself.