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

by Tom Holland

  Given enough time, then, it seemed that even “the wolves of Arabia”77 might be domesticated into lawyers or literary critics. Certainly, from the perspective of such cities as Nessana—where the prodigious array of hydraulic works was accompanied by a quite striking absence of fortifications—it did genuinely appear as though the desert had been tamed. A comforting reassurance, perhaps—except that, in truth, the imperial authorities had no desire to see every last Saracen de-fanged. Along the limits of the empire, where Mundhir’s Lakhmids were conducting ever more audacious raids, there was an urgent need for attack-dogs of their own. Many a Roman base might boast an encampment of Saracens: a hira. Other concentrations of Arab foederati—entire cities of tents, thronged with a shifting population of warriors, horses and camels—lay under the command of tribal chieftains rather than Roman officers. The reign of Justinian would see the largest of these—a teeming settlement east of the Golan Heights called Jabiya—become to Syria and Palestine what Hira was to Ctesiphon: a key defensive stronghold. The tribesmen who lived there—the Banu Ghassan—were recognisably the mirror-image of the Lakhmids: for the “Sons of Ghassan” combined a ferocious loyalty to their imperial patrons with a haughty Arab chauvinism. Certainly, the Latin spoken in Jabiya owed little to the study of Virgil. The phrases familiar to the Arabs of the frontier derived not from poets but from the army. Over the course of the previous centuries, the sheer awesome immensity of Rome’s military apparatus had stamped itself indelibly upon the language spoken by the foederati. So it was, for instance, that the camps of the frontier-system—the castra—had provided the Arabs with their own word for fortress: qasr. So it was too that the strata, the paved roads built by Roman military engineers to link each camp along the frontier, had bequeathed their name to the entire desert south of Palmyra. Indeed, such was their impact upon the foederati that sirat—the form that the original Latin word had come to take in Arabic—could signify almost any kind of path.78 The strata, those great gashes of gravel and stone scored in straight lines across even the most unforgiving of landscapes, had become for the Arabs the very quintessence of a highway.

  Not that they themselves, of course, had much need of paving stones. What would their record of banditry have been, after all, without a talent for going off-road? In early 529, when Mundhir suddenly appeared in northern Syria, looting and burning almost to the walls of Antioch, the leaden-footed response of the provincial authorities was little different to that of some hapless farmer finding his sheep-pen being cleaned out. “For with such speed did he move, and with such ruthless calculation, that invariably he would be gone with his loot before the military authorities could even discover what was going on, let alone arrive to stop it.”79 Fire of this order could only hope to be fought with fire; and Justinian knew it. A few months after Mundhir’s rampage through Syria, he crowned an Arab all of his own. His choice, predictably enough, had fallen upon the chieftain of the Banu Ghassan, a youthful but already seasoned warlord by the name of al-Harith—or, as he was known by his patrons, Arethas. Summoned from Jabiya to Constantinople, the Ghassanid prince was splendidly arrayed in the white silken cloak of Roman monarchy and a bejewelled coronet.80 His promotion bore witness to Justinian’s customary eye for talent. Arethas, no less than Mundhir, was a man of boldness, charisma and vision. What was more, he positively revelled in a blood feud. Before long, the two warlords’ struggle had come to possess its own furious and deadly rhythm, as relentless as it was personal. To no one’s great surprise, the signing in 532 of a treaty between Justinian and Khusrow, for all its ambition to establish “an eternal peace”81 between the two empires, did little to dampen the mutual hatred of their respective Arab clients. Ghassanid and Lakhmid: both, across the desert sands, continued to eyeball each other.

  Nor was it merely their political loyalties, or even their personal vanities, that rendered their mutual hatreds so unblinking. Neither Arethas nor Mundhir had any doubt that they were engaged in a conflict that was more than earthly. If Christians saw in the desert the ultimate arena, where athletes of God might test themselves to the limits of their endurance against entire armies of demonic adversaries, then it certainly needed no baptism for an Arab to recognise in it a realm alive with spirits. Many of these—whether borne on a scorching wind or haunting a bone-littered salt flat—were malevolent in the extreme; but not all were, by any means. Some—such as the owls that rose from the heads of men slain in battle—served as the guardians of individual warriors, while others stood watch over particular places. The favour of the divine might be experienced wherever there was water, or shade, or merely a landscape of startling beauty. The Arabs had little need of idols, let alone temples, to alert those who approached a god of his presence. Focus of their awe was much more likely to be a natural feature: if not a tree, as at Mamre, then a spring, or a mountain-peak, or a rock. Always, however, there was only the one certain measure of holiness. A god could be reckoned no god who did not on occasion keep his sanctuary free of violence. At certain times, in certain places, tribes who might otherwise have slaughtered one another with ferocious abandon would assemble upon ground staked out as hallowed—haram—and there join in festivities quite as joyous and peaceable as those staged every summer at Mamre. Of the Arabs’ major shrine, which lay surrounded by palm trees somewhere in the desert south of Palestine, and where the local people were reported to gather twice a year for a whole month or more at a time, it was rumoured “that even the wild beasts live in peace with men, and among themselves.”82 Not, however, that pacifism was necessarily on the agenda the whole year round. The gods of the desert, away from their shrines, rarely objected to bloodshed. On occasion, they might positively demand it. At Hira, for instance, there stood two stones sacred to a god named Dushara, which his worshippers would regularly make sticky with gore.83 A second deity, al-’Uzza—the “Mighty Queen”—was graced with an even more spectacular draught of blood when, in 527, Mundhir sacrificed no fewer than four hundred Christian virgins in her honour. Such a goddess—one able to consecrate the soil of the Lakhmid capital as haram while simultaneously sponsoring the most flamboyant atrocities—could hardly have been better suited to the warlord’s needs.

  Yet there remained something strangely pallid about her, and Dushara too, and all the various gods of the desert. Many, to their worshippers, were little more than names. Loyalty, as a result, was rarely a feature of Arab devotions. A deity who failed a tribe in battle, or neglected to keep it in food, or scared away the camels, would be dumped without a moment’s hesitation. Many were the oases where there stood altars “old in years, bearing inscriptions in ancient letters of unknown tongues,”84 raised to gods whose very names had been forgotten. Temples would cheerfully be used to pen goats.85 To Christian scholars—whose dread of demons such as Artemis was often a form of reluctant tribute paid to their inherent glamour—the Arabs’ gods seemed reassuringly dull. Even attempts to condemn them risked making them more interesting than they were. When Epiphanius, the same energetic cataloguer of heresies who had condemned the Ebionites, turned his beady eye on Dushara, he reported that the god’s worshippers, in a blasphemous parody of Christian belief, believed the deity to have been born of a virgin—a ka’iba. The bishop, however, had misheard: Dushara was not a god of a ka’iba but of a ka’ba—a “cube.” The allusion was to the stone, black and uncarved, that the Nabataeans worshipped as an incarnation of the god, somewhere in a shrine to the south of the Dead Sea.86 Dushara certainly had nothing so sophisticated as a virgin mother.

  Meanwhile, many Arabs were turning to the worship of a god who did. Nabataean cities had grown crowded with churches; and even in the wilds of the desert, beyond the reach of either emperor or bishop, whole tribes were turning to Christ. There was often a fair degree of opportunism in this: for it was well known that the Romans would only ever bestow their patronage upon Arabs who ranked as fellow Christians. Yet, the Ghassanids—and Arethas especially—were the decided opposite of lukewarm. They refused
, on principle, to abandon the distinctively Monophysite character of their faith. They built, resplendently solid amid the tents of their encampment at Jabiya, a massive church. They paraded, in their ongoing vendetta against the Lakhmids, a devotion to Christ that was quite as militant as Mundhir’s loyalty to al-’Uzza. Granted, the Ghassanids did not think to offer up virgins in sacrifice—but neither did they ever doubt, as they hacked down their pagan adversaries, that their swords were touched by the authentic fire of heaven.

  And who was to say that they were wrong? Time was when any notion that the Saracens might have been blessed by the particular favour of God would have been greeted with hilarity—but lately, in the bringing of the desert tribes to Christ, there had been hints, just perhaps, of the workings of some broader, more mysterious providence. Many were the wonders, after all, that had assisted with their conversion. The presence in the desert of so many saints, so many Spirit-charged men of God, had certainly helped to deliver a steady stream of miracles to the Saracens. Their barren had been given children, and their sick had been restored to health: a record of medical achievement that no pagan could begin to rival. Stylites were particularly popular; and many were the tribes who would gather to gawp at them and their austerities in wide-eyed stupefaction. To Christians, most of whom had been brought up to loathe and dread the Saracens, the spectacle of desert nomads smashing idols before the pillar of a saint, pledging themselves loudly to Christ and even, in the ultimate act of renunciation, “vowing to forgo the flesh of donkey and camel,”87 might be cause for considered reflection. One such, a bishop from Antioch by the name of Theodoret, had been brought to conclude that the Saracens, despite their illiteracy and their taste for slumming it in tents, were “endowed with an intelligence lively and penetrating, and a judgement fully capable of discerning truth and refuting falsehood.”88 He had seen whole crowds of them gathered before the pillar of the original stylite, Saint Simeon the Elder himself—and had marked the effect. To a people wild and free such as the Saracens prided themselves on being, the show of a man prostrating himself before God, as Simeon had done, over and over again, might at first have appeared demeaning; but not after they had watched him persist with it for days and nights at a time. In submission, so the spectacle had taught them, lay the surest path to God. Saracens, even Saracens, might be brought to grasp that truth.

  But there was an additional, and more haunting, reason why scholars such as Theodoret should have taken a particular interest in the Saracens: they were the only barbarians who featured in the Bible. Isaac had not been Abraham’s sole son; nor Sarah his sole bed-partner. Prior to the dramatic appearance of the Almighty at Mamre, the barrenness of the patriarch’s wife had prompted him to take as a concubine her maid, an Egyptian by the name of Hagar. Sure enough, the slave-girl had borne Abraham a son; but Sarah, bitter and jealous, had driven the mother and her newborn baby out into the desert. There an angel had appeared to Hagar and told her that Ishmael, her child, was destined to prove “a wild ass of a man, his hand against every man and every man’s hand against him”89—and the father of a great people. But which people? The answer to that, the clues being as glaring as they were, was self-evident. The Children of Ishmael, that “wild ass of a man”: who were these, if not the Arabs? Certainly, such an identification had long been accepted as fact.90 And the potential implications of this Hagarene bloodline? They, by and large, had been left to hang. Perhaps, however, they should not have been. Like Isaac, so it was recorded in Holy Scripture, Ishmael had been circumcised by Abraham’s own hand; and, like Jacob, he had fathered twelve sons. Suggestive markers of the favour of God, surely? That, at any rate, was what numerous Saracens had begun to ask. Theodoret himself had cited the example of the nomads who roamed the wilds east of Antioch: “for, in that desert live those who are proud to derive their descent from their ancestor Ishmael.”91

  Other Arabs, though, were not so sure. Hagar hardly ranked as the classiest of ancestors, after all. A slave-girl and a brood-mare, she had been a refugee to boot: driven not once but twice into exile by a resentful Sarah. The second occasion had followed the birth of Isaac, when Ishmael and his hapless mother had been obliged to take up residence “in the wilderness of Paran.”92 The location of this particular desert was much debated, with some scholars, including Saint Paul himself, identifying it with the Sinai. The overwhelming consensus, however, was that it could only have been the Negev. No other wilderness stood closer to the sites most associated with Abraham: Mamre, and the Church of Saint Lot, and Hebron, where the patriarch lay buried in a cave with Isaac and Jacob. Certainly, the Arabs of the Negev, when they accepted baptism, appear to have had a particular enthusiasm for naming themselves “Abraham”—as though to remind their fellow Christians that they, unlike other converts, had been blessed by the marks of God’s favour long before the time of Christ.93 Yet this pedigree, even so, was a potentially awkward one for them to flaunt. How, after all, were the Arabs to lay claim to a primal inheritance from Abraham without also acknowledging their descent from a slave-girl? A measure of embarrassment, perhaps, was only natural. So much so, in fact, that it seems to have led one scholar, a contemporary of Theodoret’s by the name of Sozomen, to offer a particularly ingenious explanation for the origin of the word “Saracen.” “Mortified by the servile character of Hagar,” he explained, “the Ishmaelites decided to conceal the opprobrium of their origin by adopting a name which would imply that they were descended instead from Sarah, the wife of Abraham.”94

  An implausible theory—but a telling one all the same. Sozomen came from near Gaza, between the Mediterranean and the Negev, and was an experienced observer of the region. He had travelled to Mamre, for instance, and witnessed the crowds that gathered there: he knew full well that it was not only Christians who reverenced Abraham, but Jews and pagans too. This led him, in contrast to Theodoret, to contemplate a quite hideous possibility. What if the Saracens’ knowledge of their ancestry did not necessarily lead them to Christ? What if it led them in a different direction altogether?

  After all, their origin being what it is, they practise circumcision like the Jews, refrain from the use of pork like the Jews, and observe many other Jewish rites and customs. That they deviate at all from the Laws of the Jewish people can only be ascribed to the lapse of time, and to the influence upon them of other, pagan peoples.95

  It was a devastating insight—and had an obvious corollary. Cleanse the Arabs of their paganism, and it might not be a Christian people at all that emerged from beneath the ordure, but something alarmingly different: whole tribes of Jews. In fact, according to Sozomen, this had already happened: “There are those of them who, by coming into contact with Jews, learn the truth of their origins, and so return to the ways of their kinsmen, and are persuaded to adopt Jewish customs and laws.”96 Who precisely these Jews might be, Sozomen did not think to say; but it certainly suggested that Christianity, beyond the reaches of Roman control, was not the only option available to Arabs embarked on a spiritual quest.

  Or indeed to Arabs who wished simply to dig in their heels and defy the superpower. In 524, at a time when Roman ambassadors were closeted with Mundhir, negotiating the release of two prominent prisoners, a delegation of emissaries from the distant kingdom of Himyar arrived unexpectedly at the summit. These ambassadors, to the Romans’ horror, brought news of an atrocity fit to put even those of Mundhir in the shade: the wholesale slaughter of the Christians of Najran. Even more terrifyingly, Yusuf, the Himyarite king, had sent a proposal of alliance to his Lakhmid counterpart: one that he suggested be sealed with the blood of the Christians of Hira.

  Out of the blue, the ambassadors from Constantinople found themselves confronted by a nightmare of threateningly global proportions. An alliance of pagan and Jewish interests, forged well beyond the reach of Roman arms, was too hellish to be countenanced. With Iranshahr in firm control of the Persian Gulf, trade links to India were already being steadily asphyxiated; and now, with a Jewish kingdo
m established beside the Red Sea straits, there was pressure coming to bear on a second vital windpipe. The menace, however, was more than merely material. The Jewish character of Himyar was no mere pretension or show. Yusuf, although he had seized power by toppling a Christian regime, was not, by any means, the first Jew to rule the kingdom. In fact, there had been Jewish monarchs in Himyar for almost as long as there had been Christian emperors in Rome. In 440, when a massive dam had been repaired at Marib, the ancient capital of Sheba, the king had publicly dedicated it to the God of Israel: Rahmanan—“The Merciful.”97 The same identical title, as it happened, was one much bandied about in the Talmud; nor was it surprising that the rabbis of Palestine, resentful as they were of their Christian masters, took a good deal of interest in the Himyarite monarchy. Granted, the enthusiasm of Yusuf and his predecessors for aping King David was hardly one of which they could entirely approve; and it may be that the presence of rabbis from Tiberias at his court reflected a desire on their part to temper some of his more flamboyant excesses. That, however, was not how it appeared to the local Christians, who predictably blamed the holocaust at Najran on the machinations of the rabbis—nor, of course, to the fretful Roman authorities.