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

by Tom Holland

  How far is such scepticism justified? Much, of course, hangs on the answer. Nothing better illustrates the extreme sensitivity of the issues at stake than the fate of a cache of Qur’ans that were found some forty years ago in Sana’a—capital of what was once the Jewish Kingdom of Himyar and is now the Muslim Republic of Yemen. Uncovered by workmen in the ceiling of the city’s oldest mosque, stuffed into seventeen rough hessian sacks and preserved from oblivion only by the sharp eyes of the Yemeni antiquities chief, the great mass of parchment contained fragments of what are almost certainly the oldest Qur’ans in existence. Four decades on from their discovery, however, these precious manuscripts remain shrouded in mystery. Only two researchers, both German, have been permitted to study them. When one of these, an expert in Arabic palaeography by the name of Gerd-Rüdiger Puin, publicly asserted that the fragments demonstrated that the Qur’an, no less than the Bible, had evolved over time and was a veritable “cocktail of texts,”20 the Yemeni authorities reacted with fury. To this day, the Qur’anic fragments in Sana’a remain unpublished—nor have any further Western scholars been permitted to study them. As a result, their true significance remains opaque.

  But not wholly so. Granted that Puin’s researches do indeed seem to suggest that words, spellings and even the order of verses in the Qur’an were perfectly capable of being misread and miscopied, it is apparent as well that these alterations were only ever involuntary errors. There is not a hint of deliberate fabrication in any of the Sana’a fragments. Phrases may vary substantially from manuscript to manuscript, but entire passages never do. At no point, it seems, was the Qur’an ever the equivalent of a collection of hadiths—something to be added to upon the whim of some Caliph or scholar. In fact, nothing better testifies to the dread and reverence with which every last word of it, every last letter, was patently regarded than the fact that jurists were prepared to swallow even a glaring embarrassment such as its ruling on adultery. Wriggle though they might—with some claiming that stoning was actually prescribed in the Qur’an as the original penalty for the offence, but that the relevant verse had been devoured by a hungry goat—no attempt was ever made to improvise something new. Even the earliest Sana’a fragments reveal an awed sense on the part of those responsible for them that something of profound and terrible holiness was being put to paper, far transcending human invention. If, as both Puin and his colleague have argued, these earliest fragments are to be dated to the beginning of the eighth century, it would suggest that their ultimate origins must lie well before that time.21 The daring thesis floated some decades back, by a few venturesome scholars, that the Qur’an might have been the product of protracted evolution, and that it arrived at something like its current state only at the end of the eighth Christian century, seems to have been conclusively disproved.22 Irrespective of all the revisions and variations Puin has traced in the Sana’a fragments, the bedrock of the Qur’an appears hewn out of solid granite.

  This, however, begs any number of questions in turn. How was it that a book so revered should simultaneously have been neglected for so long by so many Muslim jurists? What, precisely, was the prehistory of the Qur’an prior to its first appearance in the written record in the early eighth century? Does the fact that every man who ever copied it appears to have done so in the unshakable conviction that he was transcribing words of unparalleled holiness mean that we can trust the Muslim traditions that explain how it came into being, after all? Perhaps. But a familiar problem, like a nagging headache, persists. It remains the case, and disconcertingly so, that the earliest surviving biographies of the Prophet were written whole generations after his death—and that their accounts of the origins of the Qur’an are such as cannot possibly be taken for granted. Just how yawning, then, just how much of a rupture, might the gap between the traditional date of the holy book’s composition and the first commentaries on it actually have been? The Qur’an, as it disarmingly acknowledges in one of its own verses, contains no lack of “ambiguous”23 material: there are contradictions, abrupt shifts in voice, topic and tone, and baffling allusions. That brilliant intellects, from the ninth century onwards, should have devoted themselves to the immense task of clarifying these same ambiguities does not necessarily mean that they had inherited authentic information as to what the holy text had originally meant.

  In fact, it might mean just the opposite. Long before the coming of Islam, scholars labouring over other works of scripture had inadvertently demonstrated an unsettling truth: the greater the sense of awe with which a text was regarded, the more complete might be the amnesia as to the original circumstances of its composition. Back in the Iranshahr of Peroz, the Zoroastrian priests, resolved as they were to adapt their inheritance of ancient scriptures to the political requirements of their Church, had shown not the slightest hesitation in shifting the birthplace of Zoroaster to Media. The Talmud, of course, was nothing if not a project to demonstrate that Moses would have been perfectly at home in the yeshivas of Sura and Tiberias. Christian scholars, keen to establish the primal antiquity of their own faith, wrote whole reams of commentaries on the Tanakh, proving that what they termed the “Old Testament” was in fact a foreshadowing of Christ. If adherents of the evolving religion of Islam, confronted by a scripture of indubitable holiness, but rife all the same with passages that they could barely understand, did set themselves to the elucidation of its mysteries, not as historians but rather as men concerned to comprehend the workings of God, then they would have been doing nothing that mowbeds, or rabbis, or bishops had not already set themselves to achieve.

  To establish when the Qur’an might have been composed, therefore, and whether it does indeed provide us with an authentic source for the Prophet’s life and times, it is essential first to strip away the great cladding of commentary that has been woven tightly around the holy text since the early ninth century, and make an attempt, at the very least, to see it naked and unadorned. This is no easy task, however. The same ambiguities that prompted Muslim scholars to compose their immense array of commentaries and biographies of the Prophet still render it challenging, to put it mildly, to read the Qur’an in the light of the Qur’an alone. Unlike the Bible, which name-checks any number of conveniently datable rulers—from Cyrus to Augustus—the Qur’an betrays what is, to any historian, a most regrettable lack of interest in geopolitics. Those who are named in its pages tend to be angels, demons or prophets. There are the four mentions of Muhammad himself, of course. Then there is an enigmatic figure called Zayd, who seems to be both the ex-husband of one of the Prophet’s wives and his adopted son: tradition would subsequently identify him as a one-time slave who died in battle as an early martyr for Islam. Finally, there is an unbeliever by the name of Abu Lahab, who appears in the biographies of the Prophet as his uncle, and who is condemned, together with his wife, to “burn in the Flaming Fire.”24 No other contemporaries of Muhammad are mentioned by name in the holy text. The focus of the Qur’an is fixed implacably, not on the personal, but on the divine. Before the awful dimension of such a radiance, in which God’s omnipotence can be experienced as something both intimate and cosmic, as a presence that is simultaneously closer to the believer than his own “jugular vein”25 and more remote than the most distant star in the universe, what is any mere mortal? The voices that feature in the Qur’an are those of God Himself and His prophet: no one else gets much of a hearing.

  Which is not to say that there is no sense of dialogue in the Qur’an—for in truth it is a most disputatious book. Always, however, those who are being variously scorned, chided and refuted by the Prophet lurk off-stage—their voices unheard, their beliefs unaired. Mushrikun, they are called—“those who are guilty of shirk.” Such an offence—the belief that supernatural beings might be partnered with God as fit objects of worship—would end up enshrined by Islam as the most unforgivable of sins, of course; and so perhaps it is no surprise that the presumption should have grown up among Muslim scholars that the Mushrikun had been rank idola
tors and pagans, worshippers of stock and stone. This, however, is not at all what the Qur’an itself implies.26 Indeed, based purely on the evidence contained in the holy text, the Mushrikun seem to have shared a whole range of beliefs with Jews and Christians—not to mention the Prophet himself. That the world was created by a single god; that this god would listen to those who approached him, whether through prayer or pilgrimage; that he ruled as lord of the angels: all this, it is clear enough, was common ground between Muhammad and his opponents. So too was familiarity with characters from the Bible—something taken wholly for granted in the Qur’an. Where the Mushrikun erred, however, according to the Prophet, was in their adherence to a truly shocking notion: that God had fathered the angels, and would listen to any prayers that might be raised to Him through their agency. Even worse, in a world where no man ever doubted his superiority over women, the Mushrikun actually presumed “to turn the angels, servants of the All-Merciful, into females”!27

  Whether this was actually what the Mushrikun had done is, of course, a rather different matter. “They follow nothing, those who worship partners apart from God—they follow nothing but conjecture; they utter nothing but lies.”28 Hardly, it is fair to say, the most nuanced cataloguing of what the Mushrikun might actually have believed. The Prophet was clearly no encyclopedist: he lacked the insatiable passion of an Epiphanius for cataloguing the precise details of his opponents’ follies. Whoever or whatever the Mushrikun may have been, it is impossible to glimpse them save through a swirling fog-bank of polemic. Certainly, there is nothing in the mere fact of their existence that helps us to pinpoint when they flourished.

  It is fortunate, then, that the Qur’an does not float entirely free of history’s moorings. Among its 114 chapters—or “suras”—there are just a few scattered clues to its likeliest date of composition. Of one thing, at least, we can be certain: its final form long post-dates the implosion of the Thamud, that large confederation of Arab tribes employed by the Romans, and who are commemorated by the Prophet as the exemplification of worldly greatness brought low. Time was, he reminds their ghosts, when God “granted you mastery over the earth, when you seized its plains to build your mansions, and carved houses from the mountains”29—until, as payback for straying off the straight and narrow, they were dispatched by a scream so terrible that it left them withered, like dry straw. If this name-checking of the Thamud appears to imply a certain familiarity on the part of the Prophet with the workings of Roman imperialism, then it is dramatically confirmed by another verse—the only one in the entire Qur’an to name a contemporary power. “The Romans,” it is reported, “have been defeated in a nearby land, and yet, after their defeat, they shall be victorious—in a few years.”30 It is hard to know to what this might conceivably be alluding, if not the loss of Palestine to Khusrow II. The prophecy might appear brief, and almost throwaway—but its implications are momentous. So terrible was the great war between Persia and the New Rome, and so devastating its impact, that even in the very throne-room of the heavens its reverberations were being felt. No other earthly conflict, after all, had served to prompt a long-range forecast from the Lord of Worlds Himself.

  All of which, for the historian, suggests a most welcome and promising conclusion. Compared to the bogs and quicksand of other sources for the life of the Prophet, the book of his revelations does authentically appear to offer us something precious: something almost like solid ground. Unlike the witness provided by the hadiths, or the biographies of Muhammad, or the commentaries on the Qur’an, the text of the Qur’an itself does seem to derive authentically from the Prophet’s lifetime. That makes it, a few other brief and enigmatic documents aside, our only primary source for his career. Such a resource is, in consequence, beyond compare: one that positively demands to be sifted for clues to the Prophet’s career and background. Identify these, and it may then be possible to find reflected in the Qur’an glimpses, not merely of the Prophet’s personal circumstances but of something even more suggestive: the broader context of the age.

  Take, for instance, the verse that prophesies which of the two great imperial peoples will emerge victorious from their terrible war. In its presumption that God favours the cause of the Romans, and that their fate has been graced with a literally cosmic significance, there is nothing incompatible with the Romans’ own perennial self-conceit. Elsewhere in the Qur’an, too, there can be detected just the faintest echo of Heraclius’s blowing on the embattled empire’s war-trumpet. “They ask you,” God tells Muhammad, “about ‘The Two-Horned One’ ”31—Dhu’l Qarnayn, in Arabic. This, so the Qur’an goes on to reveal, was the title of a great ruler who journeyed to the ends of the earth, where he built gates of iron faced with bronze, and thereby imprisoned the surging hordes of Gog and Magog. To the apocalypse-haunted Roman people, this biography would have suggested only one man—and during the reign of Heraclius, especially so. Alexander the Great, conqueror of the Persians, and gaoler of Gog and Magog, had lately become the name on every Christian’s lips. Amid the humiliations and triumphs of the great war against Iranshahr, Roman propagandists repeatedly invoked his memory. Then, in 630, with Khusrow finally toppled and Heraclius about to enter Jerusalem, a fabulous story had begun to circulate in Syria, clearly written in honour of the moment, and featuring Alexander.32 The great conqueror, it appeared, had not only reached the setting of the sun and walled up Gog and Magog—he had also delivered a prophecy, foretelling how, at the end of days, the sway of the Christian empire would be extended to the limits of the world. Reassuring news for Heraclius—and sure enough, just to ensure that no one missed the point, Alexander was shown in the story vowing to head for Jerusalem, and to take with him a silver throne, “so that when the Messiah comes from heaven, He may sit upon this kingly throne, for His kingdom lasts for ever.”33 Not the most subtle parallel with Heraclius’s own shouldering of the True Cross, perhaps—but ringing enough, to be sure. In fact, it is a measure of just how effective the story was as a celebration of the emperor’s entry into Jerusalem that the tale of Dhu’l Qarnayn in the Qur’an appears to have been modelled directly upon it. Plot, imagery, even the hero’s distinctive horns—all are identical.34 Here, then, if anywhere, it is possible to pin a precise date upon a segment of the Qur’an. And yet, despite this, the tale told of Dhu’l Qarnayn betrays barely a trace-element of its genesis in the Roman propaganda of 630. Certainly, nothing remains in it of Alexander’s prophecy that the New Rome will inherit the world, and that Christ will then come again. Instead, its vision of the End Days—complete with the surging like waves of Gog and Magog and the dramatic materialisation of hell—has a quality of the utmost timelessness: nothing overtly Christian, and certainly nothing overtly Roman.

  Nor, in a book positively obsessed by the prospect of the world’s annihilation, are all the numerous other predictions of the End Days any different.

  When the sky disintegrates;

  When the stars are strewn;

  When the seas are made to erupt;

  When graves are dispersed,

  Each soul will know what it did,

  And what it failed to do.35

  There is nothing here, in the terrifying power of such a vision, to suggest that it might have been prompted by any specific mood of crisis. Just the opposite: the clear and fearsome message of the Qur’an—that the wicked stand in the shadow of eternal punishment, and that those who have oppressed the weak will answer to God for their crimes upon “a day of resurrection”36—possesses an all-too-universal resonance. Nevertheless, the sheer urgency with which the Prophet hammers home his warnings and tells his followers to prepare for the hour of judgement suggests that he had good reason to dread its imminence. Muhammad, as his familiarity with Heraclius’s propaganda demonstrates, was not oblivious to the firestorm sweeping through the Near East. The cloud of ash that had hung dark over mowbeds in Ctesiphon, monks in Constantinople and rabbis in Tiberias had the Prophet in its shadow, too. Far from reaching him as distant rumours,
the terrors and upheavals of the age seem to have been sufficiently close to ring in his ears. The Qur’an, haunted as it is by a dread of the wrath of God, and of the puniness of mankind before an omnipotence that can convert the entire world into dust, is no less of its time for having a perspective that disdains to focus on specific events—whether a plague that had recently wiped out a third of the population of the Near East or a war that had been raging for decades.