In the Shadow of the Sword: The Birth of Islam and the Rise of the Global Arab Empire
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War served only to deepen this conviction. Across the mangled provinces of Iranshahr and the New Rome, the horrors of the age saw an increasingly violent and desperate scrabbling by rival communities of monotheists for the patronage of God. Whether it was by Christians lamenting the rape of Jerusalem, or by Zoroastrians mourning the extinguished Fire of the Stallion, or by Jews bewailing the rumours of forced conversions, barricades were being raised, and trenches dug, on an ever more formidable scale. In such a world, where the borders of faith had come to be trammelled and patrolled as never before, what best enabled a religion to thrive was reach, and organisation, and scale: much the same advantages, in short, as made for military muscle. Any sect unable to command such resources was doomed to suffer a lethal rate of attrition.
By the start of the seventh century, monotheism’s triumph throughout the two rival empires was almost total. Of the ancient habits of pagan worship that had once been so universal, only a few scattered outposts still held out. In Khorasan, for instance, all the empire-building efforts of the Zoroastrian priesthood had failed to topple Mihr—that awful and sleepless avenger of injustice—from his mountainous and dawn-illumined throne. In Harran, too, which had long relied on its position midway between Rome and Iranshahr to perpetuate its venerable cult of Sin, the majority of the inhabitants still persisted in defying their nominal lord in Constantinople and refused to worship Christ. Nevertheless, the future for the Lord of the Moon looked bleak. Under Maurice, a particularly officious bishop had been appointed to the city’s see, charged with scouring it clean of demon worship once and for all. Secret pagans in high places had been exposed, put to death, and gibbeted in the high street. For the worshippers of the Moon, then, occupation by Khusrow II’s forces had come in the nick of time. The Persians had been far too preoccupied with their conquest of the world to concern themselves with the cult of Sin. By 629, however, with the conclusion of peace and the evacuation of the Persians from Harran, a restoration to Roman control was imminent. The writing now really did seem to be on the wall for the city’s idols.
Pagans and Manichaeans, Jewish Christians and Christian Jews: persecution had been the common fate of all. There was no secure refuge from the imperial authorities to be found anywhere in the Fertile Crescent, save where it had always been: along its margins. For centuries, whether as a sanctuary or as a place of exile, the immense wilderness to the south of the two great empires had played host to beliefs that elsewhere had faded away, like ink on a crumbling scroll. To cross the frontier and head into the desert was therefore to step back in time. Only in Arabia, beyond the reach of monarch, bishop or mowbed, did the ancient promiscuity of cults endure. That Jews and Christians were to be found among the Arabs was certainly true—but not so that either could be confident of dominating the other. Even in Himyar, where first a Jewish king and then a Christian invader had seized power, neither regime had done much to dispel Arabia’s ancient reputation as a breeding ground for heresy. By posing as the heir of David, Yusuf had indulged in precisely the kind of showmanship fit to appal most rabbis, while in Najran, the name given to the great shrine raised in honour of those martyred for Christ—the Ka’ba—bore unmistakable witness to the relish of the pagan Arabs for reverencing cubes. Nor, indeed, had Himyar ever been securely fire-proofed as a Christian realm. In the last years of Khusrow I’s reign, a Persian-sponsored coup had terminated the Ethiopian occupation, and within a couple of decades Ctesiphon had established direct rule over the kingdom. The merchant from Iranshahr, “adorned with ear-rings, and with a Persian twang to his speech,”63 had become an ever more familiar figure to the Arabs; and with him, in his wake, he had brought the worship of Ohrmazd. One more religion added to all the others in the teeming seedbed.
Meanwhile, far to the north of Himyar, on the margins of the Fertile Crescent—and especially along the margins of Palestine—there was even greater scope for cross-pollination. Nowhere else in the entire Near East had so many varieties and shades of faith survived intact. There were Jews, whose appeal to the Arabs of the desert had been noted long previously by Sozomen; and monks, those unyielding defenders of Chalcedonian orthodoxy; and the Monophysite warriors of the Banu Ghassan. Samaritans too, despite the calamitous failure of their revolt against Justinian, had continued to dash themselves against the rock of Roman power, and then, in the wake of the inevitable defeat and repression that followed, to stream in broken misery out into the neighbouring deserts. By abandoning the Holy Land, they were merely following paths already well-trodden by others: by Ebionites, by Nazoreans, by any number of Christian heretics. Not, it went without saying, that every pattern in the mosaic of belief to be found in northern Arabia was fashioned out of materials that were brought across the Roman frontier. The pagan traditions that had prompted Mundhir to wet al-’Uzza’s altar stones with the blood of four hundred virgins and the Nabataeans to worship the black Ka’ba of Dushara had never—in contrast to those of the Fertile Crescent—suffered active repression. If even the Christians of Najran had preserved, in the name they gave to their great shrine, evidence of their ancestors’ reverence for worshipping rocks, then it suggests that elsewhere too in Arabia, wherever the faiths and customs of outsiders met with those native to the Arabs themselves, the scope existed not merely for conflict but for that ultimate nightmare of the imperial authorities: the cross-breeding of rival beliefs.
And this, by the time of the great war, was a nightmare becoming reality. Mutant habits of worship were indeed being spawned in Arabia. In these hybrid cults was provided alarming evidence of what might emerge in consequence of a free market in faiths. What, for instance, were rabbis or monks to make of a community that acknowledged a single god to be the creator of the world, freely confessed his omnipotence, and had a thoroughgoing knowledge of Moses and Jesus—yet offered up prayers to al-’Uzza? Here, so its bitterest critic fulminated, was nothing but the filthiest and most degraded example of shirk. But the man levelling this accusation was no Jew or Christian. To Muhammad, the Mushrikun were not unfathomable aliens but something altogether more unsettling: men and women forged in the identical crucible that had steeled his own message. The Prophet, although implacably contemptuous of his adversaries’ reverence towards al-’Uzza—and to other names summoned from the shadows of Arabian idol worship, those of al-Lat “and the third one, Manat”—never actually accuses the Mushrikun of worshipping this trinity of “females.”64 The word “goddess” does not appear once in the Qur’an; nor does the Prophet so much as mention the existence of pagan sanctuaries or shrines. Idols too, despite all the triumphant smashing of images that the Prophet is supposed to have got up to at Mecca, are notable by their absence from his revelations—as also they are from the archaeological record.65 So, if the Mushrikun did not think of al-’Uzza as a deity, what did they believe her to be? No sooner has the Prophet name-checked her than he makes sure to provide the answer: “Those who deny the life to come give the angels female names.”66 Here was the record of a signal demotion. No longer a goddess, al-’Uzza had become merely a daughter of God: one of those many messengers of the Almighty whose beating wings, a brilliant gold amid the darkness of the age, were being heard in increasing numbers across the span of an anguished and desperate world.
Muhammad was hardly the first to insist that those who, like the Mushrikun, claimed to be monotheists, and yet directed prayers to angels, were hardly to be reckoned monotheists at all. Christians, ever since the time of Paul, had done exactly the same.67 “To call upon the angels by name, and to organise their worship, is strictly forbidden.” Such was the stern admonition of a Church Council held shortly after the death of Julian, at a time when bishops had particular reason to warn the faithful off practices that might smack of the pagan. “Anyone who is apprehended devoting himself to this concealed idolatry, let him be cursed.”68 Muhammad himself could hardly have put it any better. How easy it was for human beings, even those who devoutly believed themselves to be servants of the One True God,
to remain in thrall to shirk. Time and again, it was the dread of a veiled paganism—a pretended monotheism—that most unsettled and outraged the Prophet. The offences of the Mushrikun were not only rank but insidious. Just as bishops in the time of Justinian, touring the hinterlands of their dioceses, had been appalled to discover the abiding relish of Christian peasants for the rituals that had been practised by their unbaptised forefathers, so was the Prophet no less obsessed by what one eminent scholar has termed “minor malpractices regarding the use of farm animals.”69 It was not only by the worship of angels, he charged, that the Mushrikun insulted the Almighty. They did it as well by slitting the ears of their livestock, by exempting certain cattle from ever having to pull a plough or carry a load, and by sometimes refusing to utter the name of God in an abattoir.70 Offences as heinous as these, the Prophet sternly warned, would see the guilty “consigned to Hell.”71
None of which, it is fair to say, would come to feature prominently in his biographies. If a concern to regulate the behaviour of agriculturalists seems to square awkwardly with the far more dramatic and crowd-pleasing accounts told centuries later of his activities at Mecca, then that is because it so plainly does. It is hard to know which is the more perplexing: the complete lack of evidence in the Qur’an for any idol smashing on the part of Muhammad, or its portrait of the Mushrikun as owners of great herds of oxen, cows and sheep. Mecca, a place notoriously dry and barren, is not, most agronomists would agree, an obvious spot for cattle ranching—just as the volcanic dust that constitutes its soil is signally unsuited to making “grain grow, and vines, fresh vegetation, olive trees, date palms, luscious gardens, fruit and fodder.”b Yet God, according to the Prophet, had furnished the Mushrikun with all of these blessings. Nothing, of course, is impossible for the Almighty—but it would indeed have been a miracle had Mecca truly been adorned with spreading “gardens of vines, olives, and pomegranates.”72 These, if they were to be found in seventh-century Arabia at all, would have been confined to oases, or else to Nabataea and the Negev, where the desert, by the lifetime of the Prophet, had been made to bloom, and agriculture was flourishing as never before amid the desolate bleakness of the sands.c Such a redemption of the wilderness, secured as it had been only on the back of quite astounding ingenuity and effort, was, of course, an achievement fit to give any community a certain thrill of pride. Perhaps, then, it is telling that the Prophet, amid all the other charges he levelled against the Mushrikun, accused them of both ingratitude and conceit: of believing that it was they, and not the Almighty, who had made the dead land come to life. “Consider the seeds you sow in the ground—is it you who make them grow, or We?”73
Here, then, is one yet further puzzle, to add to all the many others. No less than the report to be found in the Qur’an of a Roman defeat in “a nearby land,” or its precise echoing of a tale told in Syria about Alexander the Great, or its fascination with the Thamud, the extensive details revealed by the Prophet as to how his opponents made their living would appear to suggest something rather unexpected: a context for Muhammad’s revelations well to the north of Mecca. A far-fetched notion, perhaps—were it not for a striking fact. As with politics, so with topography: the gaze of the Prophet was fixed on horizons infinitely beyond the local. That is why, in the entire Qur’an, there are only nine places actually named. Of these, in turn, only two can be securely identified from the records of the time: Mount Sinai and Yathrib, the oasis settlement that would subsequently become known as Medina. It is true that a third location, Badr, where the Qur’an indicates a battle was fought, had been mentioned a hundred years previously by a poet praising a particularly nifty camel—but the only clue he had given to its location was that it stood somewhere in the middle of an enormous desert.74 Another five places, including Mecca itself, appear for the first time in the Qur’an, and might as well have been anywhere, for all the detail about them that the holy book provides.d Most enigmatic of all, though, is the final site to be name-checked in the Qur’an: a “House” at a place called Bakka. Muslim scholars, puzzled by this allusion, and with a show of some considerable ingenuity, sought to demonstrate that here was merely an alternative name for Mecca—as well they might have done, for Bakka, in the Qur’an, is identified as a site of primal and incomparable holiness.e “Pilgrimage to the House,” so the Prophet declares, “is a duty owed to God.”75 No wonder, then, that the attempt to establish the precise location of this awesome site should have inspired commentators to pile speculation upon speculation. That Bakka was Mecca, and that Mecca stood in the Hijaz, were propositions taken wholly for granted by Ibn Ishaq and his heirs. Yet the unsettling fact remains that not a shred of backing for either exists within the pages of the Qur’an itself. Moreover, the texts in which they first appeared were separated from the lifetime of Muhammad by several generations. The suspicion must be, then, that they are no more likely to reflect authentic tradition than did the nose of Palestinian landowners for previously forgotten biblical landmarks, back in the first flush of Christian tourism to the Holy Land.
A murk such as this spreads impenetrably. Where precisely Muhammad believed Bakka to have stood it is surely now impossible to say. Such evidence as might once have existed has long since been lost. Clues remain, but they are all of them ambiguous and fragmentary in the extreme. The ancient Greeks told the story of a robber named Procrustes, who would tie his victims to a bed, and then either stretch or mutilate them until they had been made to fit it: a methodology that the historian of early Islam often has little choice but to follow. Speculation as to where Bakka may originally have stood must perforce be procrustean—but since this caveat applies as surely to theories that would identify it with modern-day Mecca as to those that would not, there seems no need to apologise for it. Some mysteries are doomed forever to defy solution.
That said, it is possible to hazard a speculation. It is surely significant, at the very least, that Arabs in the wilds beyond Palestine had a pronounced taste for the appropriation of biblical settings. No less than Jews or Christians, they had long flocked to the sanctuary at Mamre: the very place—or maqom—where Abraham “had stood before the Lord.” Furthermore, they had achieved what no other people beyond the limits of the Christian empire had even thought to obtain: a convincing claim upon the authentic bloodline of Abraham. The right of the Arabs to the title of “Ishmaelites,” by virtue of their descent from Hagar, Abraham’s concubine and Ishmael’s mother, was freely acknowledged across the Fertile Crescent; and if the faintest hint of a sneer might occasionally linger when someone from beyond the deserts brought up the name, then the Arabs themselves were perfectly capable of a matching snobbery all of their own. Far from feeling embarrassed at having had a slave-girl in the family, those who were aware of their Hagarene lineage had come to revel in it. In the 660s, some two centuries after Theodoret had first reported the Ishmaelites’ pride in their ancestry, a Nestorian chronicler on the Persian border with Mesopotamia alluded to the existence of a mysterious domed sanctuary, supposedly founded by Abraham and sacred to the Arabs. “Indeed,” the chronicler added, “it is nothing new for the Arabs to worship there—for, from the beginning, from their earliest days, they have shown reverence to the father of the head of their nation.”76 A most arresting detail—for this is almost identical to what is reported in the Qur’an. There, in the passage on the House at Bakka, the Prophet identified the man who founded it as having been none other than Abraham himself. Is it possible, then, that the sanctuary praised in the Qur’an as the primal, the “blessed place,”77 was the same identical one known as far afield as Persia as “the Dome of Abraham”?
Muslim scholars, in their understandable efforts to identify Bakka with Mecca, went to great and often fantastical lengths to explain how a patriarch who, according to venerable tradition, had been promised Canaan by God, and not Arabia, might conceivably have ended up in Mecca. Some had him abandoning Hagar and Ishmael there during the course of an extended road-trip; others, rather startling
ly, described him as being guided by the Shekhinah—the name applied by the rabbis to the divine presence on earth. Such theories—floated in contradiction to both the Bible and an entire millennium of obsessive elaboration upon the story of Abraham and his bloodline—seem to have been wholly original to the Muslim scholars themselves.f Certainly, if any contemporaries of Muhammad believed that Abraham had been active in Mecca, there is no record of it. That Abraham had settled in Canaan, and that Hagar and Ishmael had taken refuge in one of the various stretches of wilderness that neighboured it, remained in the Prophet’s lifetime what it had always been: something that everyone took utterly for granted.