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

by Tom Holland

  “For every nation there is an appointed span of time; when their time arrives, they can neither delay it nor bring it forward, even for an instant.”37 Viewed from this perspective, the calamities that were even then convulsing the empires of Persia and the New Rome were nothing exceptional. The gaze that Muhammad brought to the agonies of his own generation was one that distinguished in the rise and fall of great powers merely the ceaseless gusting of grains of sand upon desert winds. Ever since the moment of creation, what had mattered to humanity was not the vagaries of history but rather a question as eternal as it was urgent: how best to choose between good and evil. This is why, in the pages of the Qur’an, it is not kings or emperors who feature, but prophets. Muhammad was, of course, only one in a long succession of messengers sent by God to summon people to repentance. What need, then, when the truths that they revealed were unchanging, to specify where or when they might have lived? To God, and to God alone, belongs “the knowledge of all that is hidden in the heavens and earth.”38 Figures from even the recent past were of interest to Muhammad only once they had been bleached of all context, all individuality. So, for instance, when the seven sleepers of Ephesus are introduced into the Prophet’s revelations, to be praised by him as “youths who believed in their Lord,”39 he does not mention Ephesus, nor that there were seven of them, nor even that they were Christians. As with “the Two-Horned One,” so with “the People of the Cave,” threads drawn from the rich tapestry of Roman fantasy have been woven into a very different pattern.

  Not, of course, that every filament drawn from the past could be reworked in such a manner. The world, as Muhammad well knew, was a various and error-ravaged place. It behoved the Believers to stand on their guard. A stern and awful warning—and one that the Prophet would never tire of issuing. Here, in the fretful consciousness that there existed only the One True God, but that many different faiths claimed to understand Him, was the authentic neuralgia of the age. No less than a rabbi fretting over the minim, or a bishop sniffing anxiously after heretics, Muhammad was both appalled and transfixed by the sheer variety of peoples with different beliefs who filled the world. The adherents of some of these—such as the Mushrikun and the fire-worshipping devotees of Zoroaster—clearly lay beyond the pale.40 But what of the Jews, say, or the Christians? “Who so disbelieves in God, His angels, His Books, His messengers and the Last Day has strayed far in error.”41 By this measure—as Muhammad himself seems to have been uncomfortably aware—there was precious little to separate a rabbi or a monk from a mu’min’: a “believer.” Indeed, to some extent, all the Prophet’s many pronouncements on the Jews and the Christians, scattered throughout the pages of the Qur’an, resemble nothing so much as a protracted twisting in the wind. At times, the Torah and the Gospel might be hailed as “Guidance to mankind,”42 sent down from heaven, and those who reverence them as the Ahl al-Kitab—the “People of the Book.” At other times, the Jews might be damned with blood-curdling ferocity for their treachery, and the Christians for ascribing a son to God. Such tension was nothing new: it echoed the same mingling of fascination and loathing that had characterised Jewish and Christian attitudes to one another in the first few centuries after Christ. Perhaps, had a Christian written a book that gave a voice to Ebionites and Marionites in the years before the Council of Nicaea, it would have spanned the same extremes of tolerance and hostility towards the Jews that are found in the Qur’an. Muhammad, in his struggle to decide where precisely to draw the frontier between his own teachings and those of the “People of the Book,” and how high to raise the barriers and watchtowers, was wrestling with a problem many centuries older than himself.

  Nor, it seems, was he wholly oblivious to the fact. On one level, it is true, the Qur’an records a very specific moment in history: a moment that internal evidence, as well as tradition, identifies with the early decades of the seventh Christian century. Muhammad, in his concern to define for the Believers the troublesome border zone that separated them from the Jews and the Christians, was perfectly capable of doing so in a manner that any pious Caesar would have recognised. Just as Justinian had prescribed swingeing financial penalties for “all those who do not rightly worship God,”43 so was it decreed in the Qur’an that Jews and Christians should pay a special tithe, the jizya—and in such a manner as to render their inferiority manifest to all.44 Taxation combined with triumphalism: here was bullying in the grand tradition of the Roman state. That it was Christians who now faced fiscal penalties for belonging to a superseded faith, rather than imposing the fines themselves, only compounded the irony, of course. The Prophet, insofar as he did care to offer specific policy recommendations to his followers on the patrolling of religious diversity, was very much a man of his age.

  And yet, in truth, his gaze was only partially fixed upon the present. In the Qur’an, the pretensions of the Jews and Christians are presumed to be something timeless. As with great empires, so with great religions: the precise parabola of their evolution was as nothing to the Prophet. The stirring events that had shaped the imperial Church no more intruded upon his consciousness than did the wars of the Caesars. Of the great councils, of the anguished disagreements between Chalcedonians and Monophysites, of all those emperors, bishops and saints who, over the centuries, had struggled with such passion and such earnestness to arrive at a consensus as to the nature of Christ—of these, in the Qur’an, there is not so much as a hint. In fact, there are no Christians at all in its pages that the contemporary Church would have acknowledged as its own, save for the monks of the desert—and even these are so shadowy a presence that the Prophet can never quite decide whether to laud them as models of humility or condemn them as monsters of greed.45 So, when Muhammad spoke of Christians, whom did he have in mind? A clue, perhaps, lies in the unexpected word he uses to describe them: Nasara. The name would have meant very little to the vast majority of seventh-century Christians. Only the learned—scholars familiar with the works of Jerome and Epiphanius, perhaps—might have pricked up their ears. The Nazoreans—those curious heretics who held to the Law of Moses and believed that the Holy Spirit was Christ’s mother—had long since vanished from their ancient Palestinian heartland. Yet, in the Qur’an—composed a full two centuries after Jerome had noted the Nazoreans as a mere fading curiosity—not only is their name used by the Prophet as shorthand for all the “People of the Gospel,”46 but their doctrines provoke some of his bitterest contempt. “ ‘Did you really say to people,’ ” God is shown asking of Jesus, “ ‘Take me and my mother as two gods, instead of God?’ ”47 An indignant Jesus volubly protests his innocence. As well he might have done—for the charge being laid against him was the mortal charge of shirk.

  Now, it is true, of course, that the Qur’an was labouring here under an almost grotesque misapprehension: orthodox Christians, despite what the Nazoreans may have believed, had absolutely no notion of any “God the Mother.” Nevertheless, the Prophet had not wholly got the wrong end of the stick. By accusing the Christians of shirk, he had ripped the bandage off a very ancient sore. For six hundred years, the issue of how the relationship between God and Jesus was properly to be defined had been an itch that few Christians had been able to leave alone. For half of this span, admittedly, ever since the Council of Nicaea, it had pleased the leaders of the Catholic Church to imagine that there did exist a definitive answer to the problem, approved by Caesar, and sanctioned by the heavens. In reality, of course, as the Arian loyalties of the Ostrogoths and Vandals had shockingly served to demonstrate, the garden of Christian orthodoxy had never been totally cleared of weeds. A heresy, if it could manage to put down roots beyond the reach of the imperial Church, might still enjoy a certain, late-flourishing bloom. What, then, to make of the references in the Qur’an to the mysterious Nasara? That Arianism had long been able to prosper amid the bogs and forests of the North suggests that the Nazoreans might very plausibly have endured in the deserts of the South. The implications of this, nevertheless, are more than a li
ttle disorienting. The origins of the Nazoreans, after all, stretched far beyond the time of Jerome—right back to the origins of the Christian Church. The questions posed by their doctrines struck at the heart of what Christianity, in the wake of Nicaea, had evolved to become. What, precisely, did it mean to say that Jesus was the Son of God? How might the Trinity best be defined and explained? Were Jews and Christians doomed to eternal mutual hatred, or were they better regarded as children of the same book?

  Certainly, if the Nasara are indeed to be equated with the Nazoreans, then it might help to explain why the Qur’an, despite clearly having attained something like its final form early in the seventh Christian century, should seem haunted as well by the whispers of some very ancient ghosts. The one-sided debate to be found in its pages on the nature of Christ—one which firmly rejects the Trinity and affirms that Jesus himself was only ever a man—has a breath about it that seems to rise from an eerily distant age. Older than Nicaea, let alone Chalcedon, it had raged most bitterly back when there was no single Church, merely a multiplicity of sects. “They killed him not,” the Prophet declares, “nor did they crucify him, but so it was made to appear to them.”48 Such a notion had not been heard for many centuries. What was it, after all, if not the very argument of the long-scotched Gospel of Basilides?

  The voice we hear is not necessarily that of Basilides himself, of course. Nevertheless, the echoes of long-muted Christian heretics—of Gnostics and Nazoreans—are sufficiently loud in the Qur’an to make one wonder from where, if not from God, they might possibly have come. This issue is rendered all the more haunting because vanished gospels are not the only traces of an often fabulously distant past to be found in the verses of the holy text. Like a mighty cliff-face compounded of different layers of sediment, in which, just occasionally, fossils are to be glimpsed, exposed by rock-falls and weathering, the Qur’an hints at entire aeons that have been and gone, and yet endure contained within itself. Many of these same hints, not surprisingly, have always been regarded by commentators as somewhat of a puzzle. Just as fossils, prior to a proper understanding of the earth’s geology, provoked many a furrowed brow among those who found them, there are phrases and even entire passages in the Qur’an that have always perplexed the learned. What, for instance, might one make of a short sura that takes as its theme the punishment of wrongdoers known as “the People of the Trench”?49 Over the course of the centuries, numerous attempts have been made to explain this enigmatic phrase. Perhaps, so one early scholar suggested, it referred to the servants of a king who fired Abraham into a burning trench by means of a catapult. Or perhaps it related to the atrocities perpetrated by Yusuf against the Christians of Najran.50 But what if it were not original to the Qur’an at all, but derived instead from another written source—specifically, one of those mysterious, ancient Jewish texts that occasionally cropped up in the wilds of the desert beyond Jerusalem in late antiquity? The discovery in more recent times of an entire cache of such manuscripts—the so-called “Dead Sea Scrolls”—has led a number of scholars to suspect a link between their teachings and those of the Qur’an.51 What should be a designation for hell in the Dead Sea Scrolls, for instance, if not “the Trench”? And what should be the fate of the damned on the Day of Judgement if not to be consigned to that Trench’s fires? Could this, then, be a possible source for the mysterious and much-debated phrase in the Qur’an—a vision of the End Days preserved from a distant Jewish past?

  Certainly, it is notable, throughout the course of his revelations, that the Prophet returns again and again to a notion that few of his contemporaries in either synagogue or monastery would have thought to dispute: that the will of God can indeed be fathomed through the written word.

  With Him are the keys of the Unseen; none but He has knowledge thereof.

  He knows all that is on land and on sea;

  Not a leaf falls but He knows it.

  Not a seed in the darkness of earth,

  Not anything, fresh or dried,

  But it is inscribed in a Manifest Book.52

  This, rather in the manner of the Talmud, is to cast the whole of creation as a scripture; but elsewhere, the Prophet is more explicit in his praise of the truths to be found in “ancient scrolls.” By these, he hurriedly goes on to specify, he means “the scrolls of Abraham and Moses”53—and yet the sheer wealth of allusions, echoes and remembrances in the Qur’an, enriching it and yet never overwhelming it, drawn from a bewilderingly eclectic array of sources, and yet made triumphantly, inimitably its own, serves to suggest that Abraham and Moses were not, perhaps, alone in having influenced the Prophet. From the propaganda of Roman emperors to tales of Christian saints, from long-vanished Gnostic gospels to ancient Jewish tracts: traces of all these writings have been convincingly identified in the Qur’an. Just as Muhammad claimed to be the Seal of the Prophets, so did his revelations contain within themselves, as a revenant and spectral presence, hints of how other peoples, back in the often distant past, had similarly had experience of the divine. Even gods that were ancient when Alexander was born are not wholly absent from its pages: for what are the horns that Dhu’l Qarnayn sports, after all, if not the ram horns of Amun? Some would go further yet, and claim that the very visions of paradise contained within the Qur’an, complete with eternally boyish cup-bearers, handsome “like hidden pearls,”54 who are bestowed upon the Believers when they ascend to heaven, and beauteous, “wide-eyed maidens,”55 shimmer with the primordial glamour of the banished gods of Greece and Rome. Certainly, it would seem a striking coincidence otherwise that Zeus, the pagan Lord of Olympus, should have had as his cup-bearer an exquisitely pearl-like youth and that his queen, Hera, the goddess of marital bliss, should have been famed for her seductively large eyes. Muslim scholars would certainly find themselves both perplexed and unsettled by the Prophet’s insistence that celestial maidens had “wide eyes,” believing it a description better suited to cows. Their twitchiness would hardly have been improved if they had known that Hera, in the poetry of the pagan Greeks, was invariably hailed as “ox-eyed.”56 The Olympians might have been long toppled from their thrones—and yet, in the pages of the Qur’an, the golden halls of their palace still blaze with a brilliant after-glow.

  Yet if this is the case, and if the revelations of the Prophet do draw for at least some of their power upon visions of the sacred that elsewhere, in the Christian empire of the Romans, had long since been driven underground, then the mystery of their origins seems only to deepen. Even more far-fetched than the portrait of Mecca as a bustling city of merchant princes, after all, is any likelihood that it might once have been teeming with Gnostics, Roman propagandists and enthusiasts for Homer and Virgil. Yet if the Qur’an, with all its rich and haunting sophistication, did not originate in Mecca, then from where did it come?

  If we are to attempt an answer to that question, there is only one place to look: within the pages of the Qur’an itself.

  Where?

  Muhammad is most unlikely to have realised it, but his claim to be setting a seal on the revelations of earlier prophets was not, in fact, original to him.57 “Wisdom and deeds have always from time to time been brought to mankind by the messengers of God.”58 So it had been declared, some three and a half centuries prior to the composition of the Qur’an, by a man who had aspired, and with great self-consciousness, to write the ultimate in holy books.

  Mani, more than anyone before him, positively revelled in the blending of rival faiths. Born near Ctesiphon in 216, shortly before the city fell to Ardashir, he grew up within a Christian sect that, just like the Nazoreans, practised circumcision, held the Holy Spirit to be female, and prayed in the direction of Jerusalem. Such an upbringing clearly imbued in Mani a pronounced taste for the multicultural by 240, when he appeared before the newly crowned Shapur I, he had already successfully fused Jewish, Christian and Zoroastrian teachings into a spectacular new whole, while also claiming, just for good measure, to be the heir of the Buddha. Although Shapur hi
mself, while intrigued by Mani’s teachings, had failed to be converted by them, the self-proclaimed prophet’s disciples spread to the limits of West and East and fashioned out of their master’s teachings an authentically global faith. From Carthage to China, there had come to exist cells of Manichaeans “in every country and in every language.”59 They were even to be found, it may be, in Arabia: for the “Sabaeans,” a mysterious people who feature in the Qur’an alongside the Jews and Christians as one of the three “Peoples of the Book,” were, so it has plausibly been argued, none other than Manichaeans.60

  If that identification is correct, though, they were, at most, a tiny and beleaguered sect. Manichaeism, despite the best efforts of Mani himself, never managed to capture the loyalty of a Shahanshah, let alone a Caesar. As a result, by the lifetime of Muhammad, the two great empires of the age had forced its adherents into a desperate and bloody retreat. In Iranshahr, the prophet himself had ended up martyred on the personal orders of Shapur’s heir. Meanwhile, the Roman authorities, even prior to Constantine’s conversion, regarded his teachings with the utmost suspicion—as a perfidious Persian attempt to corrupt their “innocent and modest”61 citizens. The Christian empire, naturally enough, had inherited and refined this hostility, so that Manichaeism, by the time of Justinian’s death, had effectively been extirpated from the entire sweep of Constantinople’s dominions. The most bitter and implacable opposition to Mani’s doctrines had come, however, not from monarchs but from the leaders of rival faiths: bishops, mowbeds and rabbis. To them, the upstart prophet’s claims were doubly monstrous. It was not simply that Mani had cast their own scriptures as superseded revelations—although that, of course, was offensive enough. Even more loathsome, in their opinion, was the manner in which he had served as bawd to any number of rival faiths, forever mating and cross-breeding them, until, brought to life out of all the endless miscegenation, there had emerged the deformed hybrid that was his own sinister compound of teachings. Steeled by this perspective, both the Roman and the Persian authorities were confirmed in a fundamental presumption. The blurring and merging of beliefs, such as once had been common across the Fertile Crescent, was an offence that stank to the highest heavens. The no-man’s land that stretched between the various faiths was on no account to be trespassed upon. What the faithful needed, as a synod of Nestorian bishops expressed it in 554, were “high walls, impregnable fortresses, protecting their guardians against danger.”62 Divided though Christians, and Zoroastrians, and Jews might be, yet on one thing they could all agree: the prospect of a second Mani was a horror not to be borne.