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

by Tom Holland

  c Although vines and pomegranates would have been grown in oases such as Yathrib, the cultivated olive would not. In late antiquity, it was indigenous to the Mediterranean region.

  d Hunayn—which, like Badr, is clearly identified in the Qur’an as the site of a battle—features in biographies of the Prophet as the location of a decisive Muslim victory. Safa and Marwa are identified by Muslim tradition as small hills in the immediate vicinity of the Ka’ba, while Arafat is equated to a mountain that lies some twelve miles outside Mecca.

  e Most scholars distinguished Bakka from Mecca by identifying the former specifically with the Ka’ba and the latter with the surrounding area, although some suggested the opposite.

  f The composition of Genesis, the book of the Bible in which Abraham appears, is generally dated to the seventh or sixth century BC. The implications of this for the historicity of Abraham are, of course, not themselves without significance.

  g A few lines scribbled in Syriac on the fly-leaf of a gospel allude to a battle fought at Jabiya. From internal evidence, this source seems to be almost contemporaneous with the battle, but its date cannot be definitively established. Fredegar, a chronicler writing in Gaul some twenty years after the Arab invasion of Syria, refers to Heraclius’s army being “smitten by the sword of God: 52,000 of his men died where they slept”—valuable evidence for the probable scale of the Roman defeat.

  h The date of Ali’s assassination derives from Muslim historians, but it is typical of the general murk of the sources for the period that a near-contemporaneous Christian chronicle, written in Syria, dates it to 658.

  7

  THE FORGING OF ISLAM

  God’s Deputy

  In 679, almost twenty years after Mu’awiya had sat and prayed at Golgotha, a Frankish bishop named Arculf arrived in Jerusalem for his own tour of the city’s sites. The stresses and convulsions of the age had failed to fracture one of Christianity’s most innovative presumptions: that pilgrimage to its holy places was as much for those who lived on the edge of the world as it was for locals. Even though Jerusalem’s tourist trade was greatly diminished from what it had been in its heyday, the city still seemed to the wide-eyed bishop to be positively heaving with “crowds of all different peoples.” With beasts of burden too—and in such numbers that Arculf found himself clutching his nose, and sloshing uncomfortably through “the filth from their discharges, which spreads everywhere across the streets.”1 Not, of course, that a pilgrim hardened by a gruelling journey from Gaul was likely to be thrown off his stride by a few droppings—and sure enough, Arculf proved himself a tireless enthusiast for the city’s many wonders. The highlight, inevitably, was the Church of the Resurrection: a shrine unimpaired in its magnificence, the bishop was delighted to discover, since the time of Constantine. Indeed, to an out-of-towner such as Arculf, it might have seemed that Roman rule had never ended. The travel documents issued to him were written in Greek. The coins in his purse were weighted according to standards set by the mints of Constantinople. Many of them were even stamped with that ultimate symbol of the Christian empire—a cross. Power, in the Holy Land, still sported a decidedly Roman look.

  Naturally, Arculf was not oblivious to the recent changing of the guard. News of the calamities afflicting the New Rome had circulated to sensational effect in Gaul. It was widely reported that the Saracens had laid waste entire provinces, “as was their habit.”2 Even Jerusalem, that incomparable city of churches, was branded with the stamp of their rule: “In the celebrated place where once the Temple arose in its magnificence,” Arculf noted, “the Saracens now have a quadrangular prayer house.”3 He was almost certainly describing the building begun by Umar, and still unfinished in the early years of Mu’awiya’s reign: a mosque—or “place of prostration”—as the Arabs termed it. That they might apply this designation to any place of worship had certainly done little to lower Christian hackles: for it was clear enough, whatever else the “prayer house” might be, that it was no church. The supreme blasphemy of its location, of course, only heightened Christian anxiety—as did the fact that there were still Jews, ever optimistic, who clung to the hope that the Arabs were actually restoring “the walls of the Temple.”4 An infernal project, then, it seemed to most Christians—and sure enough, one monk, taking a peek at the building site, reported seeing the workforce accompanied in their labours by a whole crack squad of demons.5

  Notwithstanding this supernatural assistance, however, the end result did seem rather jerry-built. That, at any rate, was the verdict of Arculf himself. Despite being large enough to accommodate some three thousand worshippers, the building did not impress the bishop: “They put it up roughly,” he complained, “by erecting upright boards and great beams on some ruined remains.”6 Perhaps, however, it took a Frank to notice such things. The barbarians of the West had certainly had a good deal of practice in the art of cannibalising Roman monuments. Indeed, as Theoderic had demonstrated to notable effect, the entire labour of state-building amid the wreckage of the crumbled empire might easily rank as precisely such a project writ large. Perhaps, then, that is why Arculf, although dismissive of the Saracens’ mosque, seems not to have been greatly startled by it—nor by their presence in Jerusalem. Although Mu’awiya had risen to become incomparably mighty, yet the difference between him and Arculf’s own king, back in Gaul, was one of quality, not of kind. Saracens and Franks both lived like squatters amid the splendours of a vanished greatness. No matter that this inheritance from the past was immeasurably richer and more imposing in the East than in the West—the helplessness of the Saracens to improve upon it seemed no less than that of the Franks. Patched together as it was out of brick and wood, Mu’awiya’s palace inspired eye-rolling paroxysms of condescension in Roman ambassadors. “The ceiling will do for birds,” one sniffed, “and the walls will do for rats.”7 Even the great ambition of Mu’awiya’s life—the capture of Constantinople—spoke of cultural cringe. Fuelling it was an unspoken acknowledgement of the Romans’ own perennial conceit—that a man could truly rule the world only from the city of Constantine.

  Yet in one sense, despite the failure of Mu’awiya’s assault on al-Qustantiniyya, his pretensions had already surpassed those of the Caesars. Not even Justinian at his most megalomaniacal had presumed to pose as an intercessor between the great toiling mass of humanity and God Himself. Clearly, then, in Mu’awiya’s precocious conception of monarchy, there were influences coming to bear that owed nothing to Roman example. Was it mere coincidence, for instance, that he should have cast himself in a relationship to God so similar to that played by angels in the prayers of the Mushrikun? Assuredly, a ready supply of building materials was far from the limit of what the Fertile Crescent had to offer invaders. Richer as well than anything to be found in the West was its immense array of faiths. Theoderic—keen to distinguish himself from the emperor in Constantinople and from his own Roman subjects—had lived and died an Arian. Mu’awiya—the lord of Chalcedonian and Monophysite Christians, of Jews and Samaritans, of Zoroastrians and Manichaeans—had far more options available to him. Above all, in the swirl of beliefs that was his inheritance as an Arab, he possessed something formidably precious: an assurance of God’s favour that owed nothing to Rome or to any other earthly power. That he was perfectly content to pray at the site of the crucifixion, or to restore Edessa’s cathedral after it had been toppled by an earthquake, or to have the odd public inscription on a bath-house adorned with a cross, implied, not that he was a Christian, but rather that he shared in that respect for Jesus, and for the Jewish prophets too, which had once united Muhammad and the Mushrikun.8 Whatever the precise doctrines in which Mu’awiya put his trust, though, they were certainly not supported by anything that could compare with the massive buttressing that rabbis, bishops and mowbeds, over the course of the centuries, had erected around their faiths. Nothing as yet had been fashioned out of the various teachings and traditions held sacred by the Arab conquerors that a Christian would have recognised as
a religio: a “religion.” Instead, like blazing points of fire scattered by a starburst, there was a whole shimmering flamescape of sects. For a global monarch such as Mu’awiya, this was opportunity on a scale that not even Constantine had enjoyed. In his determination to understand why God had graced him with the rule of the world—and what best might be done to ensure that rule’s perpetuation—he could toy with beliefs and doctrines that were still very much up for grabs.

  Mu’awiya, nevertheless, was not alone in seeking to capitalise on this opportunity. In Iraq, at a safe distance from both his direct authority and the gravitational pull of the Holy Land, the urgent question of what, precisely, God wanted from His people had prompted a quite bewildering array of responses. The Kharijites, as militant as ever in their loathing for anything that smacked of monarchy, had retreated from Kufa to the deserts around the Persian Gulf, where they had founded a series of tiny, terrorist republics. Meanwhile, their old adversaries, the Shi’a of Ali, still clung to their own passionately held convictions. There were some partisans of Muhammad’s murdered cousin, taking a leaf out of the Sasanian book, who had even begun to claim that only under the command of a leader who shared directly in his bloodline could the world of men hope to know true order, and be assured of the favour of God. Others went further still and proclaimed themselves prophets. One of these, an illiterate tailor who claimed to be the heir of both Jesus and Muhammad, and to have a book from heaven that proved it, was eventually cornered by an imperial task force and vanished into a hole that mysteriously opened in the side of a mountain. Finally, aged but hedged about still by the numinous, there were the last remaining Sahabah: the Companions of Muhammad. The most celebrated of these, a Qurayshi aristocrat by the name of Abdullah ibn al-Zubayr, had been just eight years old when the Prophet had died, but his admirers still revered him as a living link to a more heroic and God-touched age. Certainly, his disdain for the Umayyads knew no bounds. For some twenty years, his response to the blasphemy of Mu’awiya’s reign had been to remain in Medina, in a pious and ostentatious sulk, and lovingly tend the flame of the Prophet’s memory.

  Among people who believed themselves graced by the most sensational revelation imaginable, of a direct intrusion into the fabric of human history by God Himself, such rivalries were only to be expected, perhaps. The struggle to make sense of such a mystery, as the prodigious appetite for factionalism of the early Christians had shown, was bound to be a gruelling one. Unlike the Church, however, the Muhajirun had not had to wait three long centuries before seizing the commanding heights of a mighty empire. They had captured theirs in a matter of decades. As a result, disagreements between the Umayyads and their opponents—although no less fixated on the purposes of God than the conflicts between Marcion and the Ebionites had been—had an extra, and ominously geopolitical, dimension. When Mu’awiya, corpulent and near death, proclaimed that his son—a notorious playboy by the name of Yazid—was God’s choice as his successor, the result was not merely widespread shock at the blasphemy but a jolting lurch towards civil war. It was bad enough, in the opinion of the pious, that Yazid himself was “a sinner in respect of his belly and his private parts”9 and kept a monkey as a pet; more truly shocking was any notion that all the upheavals of the previous sixty years, all the struggles and the stupefying triumphs, might have had as their only object the installation of a dynasty such as the Umayyads upon the throne of the world.

  As news travelled in April 680 of Mu’awiya’s death, something else was abroad as well. The baleful spectre of fitna had returned to stalk the Arabian Empire. Syria, unsurprisingly, held firm for Yazid—but Arabia and Iraq did not. First to raise the banner of rebellion was Husayn, the youngest and by now only surviving grandson of the Prophet. Middle-aged and long since retired from the bear pit of the Fertile Crescent, he made for an improbable warrior. Sure enough, when he led his small band of followers on a sudden dash from Medina to Kufa, the local Umayyad agent found it a simple matter to block their approach. Holed up in a flea-bitten village called Karbala, frustrated in his expectation of support from the Muhajirun of Kufa, and increasingly tormented by thirst, Husayn decided to trust his fate to the will of God. Charging the large army that had boxed him in, he and his pathetic retinue were hacked down amid the unforgiving sands. A squalid end for a grandson beloved of the Prophet; and although in the long run his death at the hands of Umayyad heavies would do wonders for his standing as a martyr, in the short term it ensured that Iraq, however precariously, remained under Yazid’s control.

  Meanwhile, back in Medina, an altogether more dangerous adversary had been biding his time. Ibn al-Zubayr, as grim and austere as ever, had very publicly refused to take the oath of allegiance to the new Amir. As a result, he, rather than any relative of Ali, had emerged as the most prominent opponent of the Umayyads. Tempers in Medina were not helped by the fact that Yazid’s representative in the oasis was none other than the fabulously venal and slippery Marwan. The locals’ mistrust of their new governor ran particularly deep. Rumours abounded that it was he, back in the last calamitous days of Uthman’s rule, who had advised his uncle to double-cross the Egyptian war band that had come to visit the Amir, and thereby goaded it into becoming a lynch-mob. Nothing Marwan had done since, during all the years of his tenure as governor of the Hijaz, had helped to improve his reputation for double-dealing. Negotiations between Ibn al-Zubayr and the Umayyads grew increasingly fractious. By 683 they had broken down for good. Ibn al-Zubayr damned the new Amir as a usurper. As Marwan fled Medina for Syria, Yazid sent a task force in the opposite direction. The rebels made frantic efforts to gird their oasis with fortifications, but their defiance was doomed to prove no more effective than had been that of Husayn at Karbala. Despite some brave resistance, Yazid’s army stormed the makeshift ditches and ramparts, wiped out the defenders, and seized the city. The stories of what happened next grew ever more blood-bolstered with the telling. The City of the Prophet, it is said, was put to the sword for three days; and nine months on from the sack, over a thousand babies were born.

  Ibn al-Zubayr, however, was not among the dead. Implacable in his piety, and “full of threats against the Syrians, whom he claimed were transgressors of the law,”10 he had resolved to make a stand that would truly challenge his opponents to do their worst. Accordingly, rather than wait in Medina to confront Yazid’s strike-force, he had headed for a spot that was even more redolent of holiness: the “House of God.”11 Muslim historians, writing more than a century after the fact, would take for granted, of course, that such a sanctuary was to be identified with Mecca; but nowhere in the writings of contemporaries is this actually said. Instead, all is studied indeterminacy. “He came to a certain locality in the South where their sanctuary was, and lived there.”12 So wrote one Christian chronicler about Ibn al-Zubayr. Evidently, then, the precise location of the Arabs’ desert shrine remained as much a puzzle to outsiders as it had ever been. Nevertheless, there were certain suggestive clues. It was noted by one bishop, for instance, that the Muhajirun of Iraq, when they bowed to pray, did so towards the West—“towards the Ka’ba, the primordial wellspring of their race”—while those in Alexandria turned to the East.13 Muslim tradition too, rather startlingly, recorded something very similar. The founder of the first mosque in Kufa, so it was said, had fired an arrow to determine the qibla—the direction of prayer—and it had landed not to the south of the mosque, in a line with Mecca, but somewhere to its west. So, although no contemporary tells us explicitly where Ibn al-Zubayr took refuge, the weight of evidence would suggest a location to the north of the Hijaz, midway between Kufa and Alexandria. Since this is precisely the region with which Muhammad himself appears to have been most familiar, and since Ibn al-Zubayr was consciously aiming to defend the Prophet’s legacy, the likelihood must surely be that the House of God in which he barricaded himself stood not in Mecca but between Medina and Palestine: in that “blessed place” named by the Prophet himself as Bakka.

  Yet whether all
the Arabs, a full half-century on from his death, would necessarily have revered it is another matter. The notion inherited from Jews and Christians—that a single shrine might be possessed of a holiness so awesome as to merit pilgrimage from every corner of the world—competed in their minds with a radically opposed tradition. All very helpful of a bishop to identify the sanctuary of the Muhajirun as “the Ka’ba”—except, of course, that there were Ka’bas reaching from Nabataea to Najran. To glimpse the sacred in a feature even as relatively mundane as a spring, or a well, or an oddly coloured stone was a time-hallowed instinct among the Arabs; and yet, while this indisputably spoke of a sensitivity to the numinous, it also betrayed a certain cavalier attitude towards the status of specific shrines. Over the course of the generations, sanctuaries had repeatedly been staked out as hallowed—haram—and then just as abruptly been abandoned. Even the Prophet, while trying to define the direction in which his followers should pray, had been capable of the occasional volte-face: “The foolish people will say, ‘What has turned them away from the prayer direction they used to face?’ ”14 What the original qibla might have been, and what its replacement, the Prophet had not thought to specify—but that one sanctuary had been promoted, and at the expense of another, was clear enough.a No wonder then, descending upon the House of God, that Ibn al-Zubayr should have been concerned to make “his voice heard from a distance.”15 After all, with time passing by, with those who could remember the Prophet slipping into oblivion, and with the double-dealing Umayyads preening themselves amid the magnificent and seductive monuments of Christian Jerusalem, who was to say how long the memory—let alone the primacy—of Bakka could be kept alive?

  In the event, two accidents would serve to boost Ibn al-Zubayr in his ambitions for the site. The first of these, paradoxically, might have seemed to spell its doom. In the summer of 683, with Yazid’s army camped out before the House of God, the Ka’ba, it is said, caught fire and burned to the ground. Some blamed this calamity on torches hurled by the Syrians, others on Ibn al-Zubayr’s own clumsiness; but all are agreed on the ruinous extent of the damage. And so, perhaps, the sanctuary might well have been left, as nothing but blackened rubble—had not the second accident then intervened. Yazid, back in Syria, keeled over and died. The news, when it reached the task force, left them abruptly shiftless. With Yazid’s death, they felt themselves doubly bereft: not only of their imam but of the favour of God. Not so Ibn al-Zubayr, of course. He, with his great enemy dead, could now feel even more soaringly justified in all his pretensions. When Yazid’s army, scouting around for a new Amir, promised him their loyalty if he would only accompany them to Syria, Ibn al-Zubayr indignantly refused. He had higher things by far on his mind.