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

by Tom Holland

  And in truth, with triumphs everywhere being recorded for Arab arms, the prospect shimmered before the victors of winning an empire even more vast than Alexander’s. Yet greatness, for all the plunder and the glory that it had brought the Muhajirun, was not without its challenges. That God had favoured them, and humbled their enemies, was obvious enough to everyone—conquerors and conquered alike. That God fully intended the Muhajirun to enjoy the profits of their victories was also—to the Muhajirun themselves, at any rate—no less self-evident. Even as the tide of warfare and ready plunder rolled ever onwards, to the limits of East and West, the extortion of tribute ensured that the already-subjugated lands would continue to turn a profit. It was true, of course, that such a pension scheme was bound to depend upon skills that were not readily associated with warriors on camels; but bureaucrats, as the town fathers of Herakleopolis had efficiently demonstrated, were hardly lacking in the conquered territories. Indeed, so remorseless had been the tax machines of both the New Rome and Iranshahr that despairing Christians had long taken for granted that it would take the return of Christ to ease their exactions. By that reckoning, at any rate, the arrival of the Ishmaelites did not presage the End Days. Officials of the two decapitated superpowers, seasoned as they were in the arts of extortion, and eager to maintain their positions of authority, had every incentive to work hard for their new masters. Vast and implacable, like a kraken of the deep undisturbed by storms raging across the ocean surface, the apparatus of empire still coiled its prodigious tentacles, ready to flex and squeeze its victims tightly, as it had ever done.

  Such was the beast that had served Justinian, the beast that had served Khusrow the Great. What more awesome proof of God’s power and mercy, then, than that He should have delivered it up into the hands of a leader such as Umar—a man so contemptuous of worldly rank that on inscriptions he might very well be name-checked without any title at all?139 Naturally, as Amir of the Faithful—their “Commander”—he was due their obedience; but hardly their grovelling. The stern message of the Prophet, that all his followers were brothers, made a mockery of any notion, such as the people of the conquered territories were prone to take for granted, that Umar might rank as their king. His right to all the prodigious wealth won by the Muhajirun lay precisely in the fact that he so palpably scorned it. What is virtue? So the Prophet had insistently demanded. Umar, conqueror of the known world though he might be, never disdained to illustrate the answer.

  Who dispenses money, though dear, to kinsmen, orphans, the needy, the traveller, the beggars and for ransom;

  Who performs the prayer and pays the alms;

  Who fulfil their contracts when they contract;

  Who are steadfast in hardship, calamity and danger;

  These are the true believers.

  These are truly pious.140

  Yet, as the years passed, and the expanse of sword-won lands continued to increase, so memories of the Prophet, inevitably, grew less immediate, and the value of his example more problematic. In 644, ten years into the great adventure of the Arab conquests, Umar was murdered by a deranged Persian slave, and the Faithful, in their search for a new commander, found themselves torn two ways. Their eventual choice, a man named Uthman, might have seemed the perfect continuity candidate: for tradition—and there seems no reason to doubt it—identifies him as one of the Prophet’s earliest and most pious companions. Yet, he also had the unmistakable whiff of a dynast: a man sprung from a family that was perfectly at ease with power and wealth. The Umayyads, according to Muslim historians, were Qurayshis who had made a fortune trading with the Romans, and had then invested it in Syrian real estate: a tradition that would seem to indicate an origin, not in the depths of Arabia, but somewhere along the imperial frontier. Certainly, they had enjoyed a track record of success during the conquest of the region that might well have suggested local knowledge: one brother, Yazid, is said to have ranged with a war band far and wide across the province, while another, Mu’awiya, had captured Caesarea, and been appointed governor of Syria by Umar. Uthman not only confirmed him in this role but also, in a blatant display of nepotism, made sure to promote other members of his family to similarly lucrative posts.

  Understandably, then, the Umayyads fast gained a reputation for quite spectacular greed. One nephew, a smooth opportunist by the name of Marwan, developed a particular name for insatiability: no sooner had he been graced with a hundred thousand silver coins by Uthman than he was off to North Africa, where he proved as effective at screwing the natives out of their wealth as he was shameless in monopolising the plunder. A second Umar he most decidedly was not.

  None of which, it went without saying, reflected well on the new Amir himself. Yet there was worse. Uthman, unlike Umar, was not content to divide up the loot of empires in the time-honoured manner of a bandit chieftain sharing out plunder after a successful raid. The Arabs, so it seemed to the new Amir, had moved on from that. The conquerors, if they were to make best use of the defeated superpowers’ bureaucracies, would themselves have to accept certain disciplines: a centralised administration, not least, and a clear-cut chain of command. Precisely the marks of slavery, in short, that the desert Arabs had always derided. No wonder, then, as Uthman sat in Medina and struggled to fashion his immense agglomeration of provinces into a properly imperial administration, that God, in the words of an Armenian bishop, “should have sent a disturbance among the armies of the sons of Ishmael, so that their unity was split.”141 In 656, a band of Muhajirun in Egypt, resentful of a newly appointed place-man, travelled back to Arabia to complain to the Amir in person. Uthman, taken by surprise, pretended to meet their grievances, but was then caught red-handed going back on his assurances. The Egyptians, outraged by his double-dealing, laid siege to his house, stormed it, and hacked him to death.

  Here, after all the noble talk of brotherhood that had animated the Muhajirun since their first emigration to Medina, was an abrupt reversion to a far more primordial way of conducting affairs. Uthman’s widow, so tradition had it, dispatched her husband’s bloodstained robe to Mu’awiya in Syria, together with a pointed quotation from the Prophet: “Fight the oppressors until they submit to God’s command.”142 In truth, though, it needed no divine revelation to prompt the Umayyads to seek vengeance. Nothing, to an Arab warlord, came more instinctively than a blood feud. That the Prophet had sternly warned against precisely such brawling seems to have inhibited Mu’awiya not in the slightest. In Syria, the sense of community that had supposedly obliterated all distinctions between the Quraysh and the Muhajirun was glaring by its absence. There, in contrast to Iraq and Egypt, there had been no great influx of settlers, no sudden rash of garrison towns. Even Jabiya, the original tent city, had been left largely abandoned after a particularly devastating visitation of the plague in 639. Mu’awiya, and other Qurayshi warlords like him, had not the slightest intention of sharing what they regarded as their patrimony with ragged newcomers from the desert. Syria was theirs: a private fiefdom to be ruled in the manner less of the Prophet than of a Ghassanid.

  That is not to say that Muhammad’s teachings were wholly cast aside. Back in Medina, his original capital, leaders of the state that he had founded were desperately struggling to hold together his legacy. Even as the empire palpably began to fragment—with banners of revolt raised in Iran as well as Syria, and a host of Arabs in Egypt rumoured to have accepted “belief in Christ”143—a new Amir was succeeding the murdered Uthman. Ali ibn Abi Talib could hardly have been more intimately associated with golden memories of the Prophet. At once both the cousin and the son-in-law of Muhammad—or so tradition reports—he also had a fierce commitment to the primal values of the Umma: of egalitarianism and brotherhood. As a result, to his admirers, he ranked as a veritable imam: a father to his people, and a Lion of God. Far from disdaining emigrants from the desert, Ali regarded them—no matter how hairy or stinking—as his natural constituency. Determined that the Muhajirun should retain their grip on the empire, he opted
to abandon Medina and make Kufa his new capital. From there, with the energy of the seasoned general that he was, Ali set himself to stamping his authority on all the Umma. In order to secure his rear, he first routed an army of rebels outside Basra. Buoyed by this success, he then led the Muhajirun of Kufa up the line of the Euphrates, with the aim of taming Syria. A great battle was fought, Mu’awiya brought to peace negotiations, and victory claimed. Ali, returning to Kufa, naturally made sure to trumpet the news as loudly as he could. The unity of the Umma, so his propaganda ran, had been triumphantly restored. The fitna—the “time of trial”—was at an end.

  Except that it was not. Mu’awiya, withdrawing from the Euphrates, coolly began to proclaim a message of victory identical to that of his rival. Even more threatening to Ali’s position, however, there were many now in his own ranks who likewise refused to accept him as Amir. His opening of negotiations with Mu’awiya, and his patching together of a treaty, was behaviour that smacked, in their opinion, less of an “imam” than of some arrogant and self-serving monarch. A true Believer, so they argued, would have trusted his fate, not to diplomacy, but to ongoing warfare and the will of God. The charge was a crippling one. All very well for the Umayyads to pose as the heirs of the Ghassanid kings; but Ali was a blood relative of Muhammad. Nothing, then, could have been more damaging to his prestige than to be dismissed as merely a latter-day Lakhmid—“the Amir of Hira.”144

  As Ali made his way back to Kufa, many of his soldiers seem simply to have melted away. Kharijites, these deserters were called—“those who go out.” What they were decidedly not, however, were deserters from the teachings of the Prophet. Instead, it was Ali whom the Kharijites condemned as the unbeliever, as the man who had strayed from the Straight Path. The fact that he was Muhammad’s nephew only confirmed them in the militancy of their egalitarianism: that the true aristocracy was one of piety, and not of blood. Even a Companion of the Prophet, if he did not pray until he developed marks on his forehead “comparable to the calluses of a camel,”145 if he did not look pale and haggard from regular fasting, if he did not live like a lion by day and a monk by night, ranked, in the opinion of the Kharijites, as no better than an apostate. “Those who reject God after believing in Him,” so the Prophet had warned, “and open their hearts to disbelief, will have the wrath of God upon them, and a grievous punishment awaiting them.”146 Here was a ruling that the Kharijites were more than willing to help enforce. So it was, for instance, that a band of them, meeting an aged Companion of the Prophet outside Basra, were said to have demanded that he renounce his loyalty to Ali; and when the Companion refused, they butchered him over the carcass of a pig, slit open the belly of his pregnant concubine, and murdered her three attendants. Other Kharijites, so it was reported, might “go out with their swords into the markets while people would stand around not realising what was happening; they would shout ‘no judgement except God!’ and plunge their blades into whomever they could reach, and go on killing until they themselves were killed.”147 A militant devotion to the Prophet’s teachings indeed; and fit for that reason, in the opinion of many of their fellow Muhajirun, profoundly to be admired. But not in the opinion of Ali. Abandoning his attempt to bring Mu’awiya to heel, he made it his priority instead to extirpate the Kharijites. In 658, he won a victory over them as crushing as it was to prove pyrrhic: for all he had done, in effect, was to fertilise the soil of Iraq with the blood of their martyrs. Three years later, and there came the inevitable blowback: a Kharijite assassin struck him down while he was praying in Kufa.h The Prophet’s dream of brotherhood, of a shared community of believers, seemed dealt a fatal blow, too.

  Into the breach, with great smoothness, stepped Mu’awiya. With Ali gone, no one in Iraq now had the resources to oppose him. Even Hasan, Ali’s eldest son and his obvious heir as imam, was persuaded to retract his claim and retire on a pension to Medina. With him too went his younger brother, Husayn—who as a boy, so it was said, had been a particular favourite of the Prophet, and been dangled lovingly on his knee. True, the removal from Kufa of the two grandsons of Muhammad did not neutralise all opposition to Mu’awiya. The Kharijites, on principle, remained obdurately opposed to Umayyad rule. So too did many Kufans, who preserved a ferocious loyalty to their murdered Amir. Yet Mu’awiya, who had not the slightest intention of basing himself in Kufa, could afford to ignore both the Kharijites and the Shi’a—or “Party”—of Ali. Annoyances they might be—but only in the manner of distantly buzzing wasps. The gaze of Mu’awiya was fixed, not upon a scurvy ragbag of desert Arabs, but upon altogether worthier opponents.

  Even though the last hint of resistance from the House of Sasan had been crushed back in 651, with the murder of Yazdegird in that great eastern stronghold of his dynasty, Merv, the Romans, despite all their losses, still stood defiant. Mu’awiya, looking to keep the Muhajirun busy, duly renewed the onslaught against the Christian empire with a vengeance. In 674, he even sponsored a siege of Constantinople itself. In the event, after a blockade of four years, the effort to capture the New Rome had to be abandoned; yet what was striking, perhaps, was not its failure but how close it had come to success. Certainly, there could be no denying that Mu’awiya—in the scope and sweep of his achievements, in the awesome scale of his authority, and in the radiant splendour of his name—was patently a favourite of God.

  But which God, precisely? Shrewd and calculating as he was in all his dealings with mortal powers, Mu’awiya seems to have practised a certain opportunism in his dealings with the heavens, too. Although he termed himself “Commander of the Faithful,” in succession to Umar and Uthman, his definition of who actually ranked as members of the “Faithful” was altogether more subtle and ambiguous than theirs had been. Rather than gathering to hail his accession at Medina, the Arabs had assembled in the shadow of the Temple Mount: for Mu’awiya had “refused to go to the seat of Muhammad.”148 Not even Umar, the Amir whose attentions to the sacred rock had seen him hailed by Jews as their “redeemer,” had thought to demonstrate to quite such flamboyant effect the abiding status of Jerusalem as the holiest city in the world. Mu’awiya, however, in providing this reassurance, was concerned principally to woo, not his Jewish but his Christian subjects. That the Arabs, in their original assault upon Palestine, had fought in alliance with Jews was now, to the new “King of the Holy Land,” something of an embarrassment. Both his tax base and his bureaucracy, after all, were composed primarily of Christians. The Jews could hardly compare. So it was, in addition to receiving the submission of the Arabs, that he had made sure to mark his investiture as Commander of the Faithful by going on pilgrimage around Jerusalem in the footsteps of Christ—“and he went up and sat down on Golgotha, and prayed there.”149 Evidently, that the Prophet had declared the crucifixion a fraud bothered Mu’awiya not a bit.

  In fact, there is precious little evidence that Mu’awiya paid much attention to the Prophet at all. Nowhere in his inscriptions, nor on his coins, nor in any of the documents preserved from his reign, is there so much as a single mention of Muhammad. Nor, despite the much later tradition that would attribute the compilation of the Prophet’s revelations to Uthman, are there any Qur’ans—or even fragments of Qur’ans—datable to Mu’awiya’s lifetime either. Records of the words spoken by Muhammad—“twigs of the burning bush, aflame with God”150—must surely have been preserved by those who still tended the light of his memory: the Muhajirun of Kufa, the Shi’a of Ali, the Kharijites. But the flame was guttering. Like Mani and Mazdak before him, Muhammad was a prophet whose memory had begun to fade before the encroaching shadow of the years. What value the example of his makeshift desert state, after all, to the ruler of an empire that had swallowed up the world? It was not the Prophet whom Mu’awiya cast as the interpreter of God to man, but himself. “Let the faithful profit by him”151—such was the prayer raised by his servants. Christians too, and Jews, and Samaritans, and Manichaeans: all of them, in Mu’awiya’s opinion, were to be ranked as “the faithful,” a
nd all of them duly joined in the praise. Savagely though Mu’awiya prosecuted his wars against the Romans, yet his subjects, no longer trampled by rival armies, no longer divided by hostile watchtowers, knew only peace at last. Perhaps it is hardly surprising, then, that they seem not to have begrudged the Amir his immodest claim to stand between humanity and God. “Justice flourished in his time, and there was great peace in the regions under his control. He allowed everyone to live as they wanted.”152

  Such, it must have seemed, was to be the future: a globe-spanning empire of many faiths, and none of them any longer with the whip-hand.

  * * *

  a A Muslim scholar of the tenth century, Ibn Mujahid, established what subsequently became the orthodoxy: that there were seven, equally valid qira’at—“readings”—of the Qur’an. The modern, widely held notion that there is one single text was established only in 1924, with the publication in Cairo of an edition of the Qur’an that went on to become the global standard.

  b Qur’an: 80.27–31. The traditional accounts of Mecca’s rise to greatness also imply that the city, as a teeming hub of international trade, must have had a substantial agricultural hinterland. The patent impossibility of this has led some historians to propose that grain was imported from Syria and Egypt: a case of the mountain coming to Muhammad, if there ever was one.