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

by Tom Holland

  As the Syrians drifted aimlessly away from their siege, Ibn al-Zubayr set about constructing a sanctuary that could serve, without any further compromise or ambiguity, as a fit object for the veneration of all the Faithful. Taking a pick in his own hands, it is said, he levelled what remained of the incinerated shrine and raised an entirely new one in its place. The whiff of paradox in this was palpable, even by the standards of the Arabs—a people who traditionally had always been perfectly content to abandon sanctuaries with barely a second thought. A question as obvious as it was unsettling shadowed Ibn al-Zubayr’s labours: how precisely could his new House of God be reckoned timeless when it had only just been erected? His propagandists, it would appear, had not stinted in providing answers. Centuries on from Ibn al-Zubayr’s great building project, fantastical stories of the discoveries that were made during the course of the excavations would still be lovingly repeated. It was said that the original foundations, laid down by Abraham, had been miraculously brought to light. A mysterious text had been found, guaranteeing divine favour for all who visited the sanctuary. Most sensationally of all, when a black stone had been dug up, the whole sanctuary had begun to tremble. On this stone, so some reported, had been stamped the very name and title of God: “I am Allah, the Lord of Bakka.”16

  And as with the House of God, so with the great empire beyond: Ibn al-Zubayr aimed to set it on new foundations. Just as fire had left the Ka’ba a crumbling ruin, fitna had come to ravage the world. In Syria, Yazid had been succeeded by his son—an infant so sickly that he had died after only a couple of months on the throne. Amid the resulting power vacuum, the Arabs had once again begun to turn upon themselves. Partisans of Ali, in mourning for Husayn, vented their sense of mingled grief and shame upon the garrisons of the hated Umayyads. Kharijite war bands, fanning out across southern Iraq, renewed their campaign of shadowy and calculated terror. In Kufa, a charismatic figure whom posterity would damn as “Mukhtar the Deceiver” seized the city’s treasury, distributed its entire reserve of nine million coins to the poor, and urged a revolution in which all men were to be equal, “claiming he was a prophet.”17 He provoked particular excitement by parading a brocade-draped chair, which his enemies ridiculed as a piece of junk looted from Ali’s attic, but which enthusiasts, taking a leaf out of a thoroughly Jewish book, hailed as a manifestation of the presence of God Himself: the Shekhinah. The presence of this fabulous totem on campaign, either carried on a grey donkey or borne aloft into battle by litter-bearers, proved, not surprisingly, a potent boost to Mukhtar’s record as both a general and a prophet. It helped as well that Mukhtar himself, whenever he charged his enemies, was said to be accompanied by a bodyguard of angels mounted on horses of flame.

  In the face of such wild and competing enthusiasms, the frameworks of governance just lately restored by Mu’awiya began once again to buckle. The antagonisms unleashed by the fitna proved relentless, the hatreds bewildering, the violence exhausting and savage. Much, after all, was at stake. To the venerable thrill of tribal rivalries—still potent as these were among the various Arab emigrants—had been added whole new dimensions of chauvinism. Factionalists, when they chose an imam or a prophet to follow, were choosing as well what their fate in the next world was to be—and so it was, when they fought, that they would invariably do so to the death. Once again, as in the time of the great war between Heraclius and Khusrow, or that of the first coming of the Arabs, the sense was palpable of a conflict in which more, very much more, was at stake than mere earthly ambitions.

  Even those whose fate it was to cower as impotent bystanders before the agonies of the age were alert to this. War was far from being the only expression of God’s anger. Plague too had returned to Iraq, strewing roads with the dead and polluting the canals and rivers with corpses. Pestilence, in turn, led to famine: children with limbs “like dry sticks of wood” would graze on withered grass, while mothers, it was darkly rumoured, might feed on their own babies. “Worst of all were the looters, from whom no one could escape—for they wandered about everywhere, following their prey like gleaners, hauling them out of hidden places and stripping them of their belongings, and leaving them naked.”18 It could be hard to tell the difference between such bandits, the Kharijites and Mukhtar’s “cudgel-bearers.”19 Humanity, like monsters of the deep, was preying on itself. Events, once again, appeared to be portending the end of days.

  Certainly, whether such an eventuality were imminent or not, it was the divinely appointed duty of Ibn al-Zubayr, as Commander of the Faithful, to prepare the world for it. “Nearer to mankind their reckoning draws, and yet in heedlessness they turn away.”20 So the Prophet had lamented. Ibn al-Zubayr, in harkening to this ominous warning, made sure to take decisive steps. Doing as Umar and Uthman had done, and directing the affairs of the world from the depths of the desert, he sent his brother, Mus’ab, to bring order to Iraq. Mus’ab undertook this seemingly thankless commission with efficiency and relish. Mukhtar, that preacher of an unsettlingly radical egalitarianism, was briskly defeated, cornered in the governor’s palace, and put to death. His severed hand, a trophy for the faithful to admire on their way to prayers, was nailed to the side of Kufa’s mosque, while his holy chair was consigned to a bonfire. Simultaneously, across the south of Iraq, the far bloodier and more exhausting task of suppressing the Kharijites inspired Mus’ab to launch a troop surge that reached as far as the Persian uplands.

  It was not only through a counter-insurgency campaign, however, that Ibn al-Zubayr aimed to bring order to a tottering world. Not every message was to be delivered on the point of a sword. “Judgement,” so the Kharijite slogan ran, “belongs to God alone.”21 Ibn al-Zubayr and his lieutenants, while certainly not disputing this message, aimed to refine it: by stating with the utmost clarity just how and when it was that the judgement of God had been made known. So it was, in either 685 or 686, as the fitna continued to rage in Iraq, that one of his lieutenants minted a coin in Persia with a novel and fateful message. “Bismallah Muhammad rasul Allah,” it ran—“In the name of God, Muhammad is the Messenger of God.”22

  The potency of this slogan, amid the carnage and confusion of the times, was self-evident. Ibn al-Zubayr’s genius was to recognise, as Constantine had recognised long before him, that any lord of a great empire who claimed God’s favour must ensure that the basis of that favour stood rock solid. Military action alone would never serve to bring the fitna to an end. Only a framework of doctrines that all the combatants could accept as authentic and bestowed of God had any hope of achieving that. Hence the supreme value of the example of the Prophet. Whereas Constantine at Nicaea had been obliged to depend upon fractious and fallible bishops to stamp a particular brand of his chosen faith as orthodox, Ibn al-Zubayr had identified a far less troublesome sanction: for not only had Muhammad claimed to be a medium for divine revelation, but he was also safely dead. Ram home the point that he had authentically been a Messenger of God, and anything that could be attributed to him would perforce have to be accepted by the faithful as a truth descended from heaven. “Those who offend the Prophet,” so it had been revealed to Muhammad, “are cursed by God in this life and in the hereafter.”23 Here, for any warlord looking to damn his enemies, was a literal godsend. This was why, with Ibn al-Zubayr and his henchmen increasingly alert to its potential, they made ever more play with their new message: that Muhammad had truly been the Prophet of God. Far more effectively than any troop surge in Iraq, it seemed to promise them the rule of the world.

  There was, however, a problem. Ibn al-Zubayr was not the only self-proclaimed Commander of the Faithful to have spotted the uses to which such a slogan might be put. Widely though he had established his authority, across Arabia, Iraq and Persia, Syria still stood defiant. There, the Umayyad cause, though scotched, had not been killed. Conditions in the wake of Yazid’s death, chaotic as they were, had been ideally suited to the talents of a schemer such as Marwan. At a tribal assembly convened at the old Ghassanid capital of Jabiya i
n the summer of 684, held to debate whether Ibn al-Zubayr should be acknowledged as Amir, he proposed putting the whole issue to a vote—and so finessed the proceedings that, to much astonishment, “it was his own name that came up.”24 Marwan, a man grown old in his pursuit of power, would have only nine months to enjoy his triumph; but already, by the time he died in the spring of 685, he had done enough to ensure that Syria, at any rate, would remain Umayyad. His successor, hailed enthusiastically by the Syrians as Amir, was also his son: a man in his forties, notorious for his golden dentures and the foul quality of his halitosis, named Abd al-Malik.

  The new Amir had talents that extended far beyond an ability to slay flies with a single breath. Abd al-Malik was very much a chip off the Umayyad block. Brutality was seamlessly fused in him with ambition, intelligence and vision. The same man who could leash a political rival, lead him around like a dog and then straddle his chest to hack off his head was also a man who could swallow his own pride sufficiently to pay tribute to the Romans in an effort to secure his northern border, and lurk patiently in Syria, leaving it to Mus’ab to crush the Kharijites and the Shi’a. Only in 689, four years after he had succeeded his father as Amir, did Abd al-Malik finally go on the offensive, doing as Julian had done long before him, and snatching after global empire by invading northern Iraq. Unlike Julian, however, he was to secure fabulous success. In early 691, beneath fluttering banners and swirling dust, he succeeded in bringing Mus’ab to defeat and death:

  The tribesman saw clearly

  the error of their ways,

  And he straightened out the smirk

  upon their faces.25

  Yet Abd al-Malik, even as he trampled down the corpse of his rival, did not neglect to heed the lessons of Mus’ab’s earlier triumphs in Iraq. Smirks had to be straightened out—but so too, if the conquerors of the far-flung empire were ever to be unified as a single people, did their sense of what they owed to God. Abd al-Malik, having wrenched Iraq from Ibn al-Zubayr’s grasp, did not hesitate to purloin his slogan as well. Even as the last embers of opposition to Umayyad rule were being stamped out in Basra, new coins were starting to circulate in the city: “In the name of God,” they proclaimed, “Muhammad is the Messenger of God.”

  The assertion was no less potent for appearing on the coins of an Umayyad. Startling though the sudden emphasis on the Prophet’s role must have appeared to those in the markets and counting-houses of Basra, there is no reason to doubt Abd al-Malik’s personal sincerity. Not only had he grown up in Medina—where memories of Muhammad were uniquely vivid and cherished—but his reputation for austere godliness rivalled that of Ibn al-Zubayr. Nevertheless, it is clear as well that his abrupt parading of Muhammad’s name—something that no other member of his dynasty had ever thought to do—was prompted by self-interest as well as piety. Concerned as Abd al-Malik was to spike Ibn al-Zubayr’s pretensions, he also had an eye fixed on a second adversary. Despite the expediency of the tribute that he had paid to Constantinople, it still rankled as a bitter humiliation, and one that he aimed to wipe clean. What better way, then, than by striking directly at the heart of Roman conceit? Mu’awiya, despite his unwearying appetite for dyeing the Christian empire with blood, had never thought to dispute with his adversaries the truth of their faith. Abd al-Malik, however, suffered from no such inhibition. Not for him a respectful pilgrimage to Golgotha. Rather than soothing Christian sensibilities by professing a vague brand of monotheism, he sought to rub Roman noses in the obvious inferiority of their superstitions. As surely as Mu’awiya had sought the annihilation of Constantinople’s worldly power, Abd al-Malik aimed to shred her claim to a special relationship with God. A radical—and far from easy—step to take. Just as the strategy of challenging the Romans by sea had required the building of entire fleets from scratch, disputing the highway to heaven with them would demand truly formidable feats of innovation. Out of the scattered flotsam and jetsam of beliefs left scattered by the great floodtide of Arab conquests, something coherent—something manifestly God-stamped—would have to be fashioned: in short, a religion.

  And if the enshrining of Muhammad as its founder was a start, then it was only that—a start. No better way to appreciate the full scale of what remained to be done than to visit the city where Abd al-Malik, like Mu’awiya before him, had first been saluted as Amir: Jerusalem. There, where the radiance of candles in the churches burned so bright that, by night, the entire city and the hills that surrounded it appeared as one great dazzling blaze of light, the splendour of Christianity, and the heft of its antiquity, remained intimidating things. Well might Abd al-Malik, “noting the scale of the dome of the Church of the Resurrection and its magnificence, have been moved lest it dazzle the minds of the Faithful.”26 Yet the possession of Jerusalem, although certainly a challenge, presented an opportunity, too. Even as Abd al-Malik was leading his armies to victory in Iraq, workmen on the Temple Mount were busy labouring to secure him an equally brilliant triumph. The ramshackle mosque sniffed at so disdainfully by Arculf had been demolished, and was now being replaced in sumptuous style. A wall was being built around the limits of the rock, to mark it out as haram, and gates set in the wall opened on to upgraded roads. Most stupefying of all, however, and most wondrously beautiful too, was an octagonal building of such prominence as to put even the Church of the Resurrection in the shade. That this was a deliberate ploy could hardly have been made any more emphatic. Not only did the dimensions of the new structure exactly replicate those of Constantine’s great church, but its piers were to be surmounted, when completed, by a vast gilded cupola. Yet, what really served to fling back in the teeth of Christians all their arrogance and their pretensions was the deliberate positioning of this same “Dome of the Rock.” Enclosed within it, its surface unadorned and bare, was the perforated expanse of stone over which the Roman authorities had permitted a ragbag of sobbing Jews to blow their rams’ horns each year. Just as the rabbis had identified this spot with the Shekhinah—the immanence of the divine on earth—Abd al-Malik and his architects attributed to it a no less awesome role. At the beginning of time, they believed, with the universe just completed, God had stood upon the rock and then ascended into heaven—leaving behind an imprint of His foot.b The end of time too would see the rock transfigured: for on the Day of Judgement all the faithful, and all the mosques across the world, and even the Ka’ba itself, were destined to travel to Jerusalem, “so that the people will cry, ‘Hail to you, who come as pilgrims, and hail to her to whom the pilgrimage is made.’ ”27

  Perhaps, given the seeming imminence of the End Days, it was only to be expected that Abd al-Malik should have wished to raise a monument appropriate to the climactic role in them that the Rock was destined to play. Only to be expected as well—with the “House of God” still in the hands of Ibn al-Zubayr—that he should have been reluctant to wait for the Day of Judgement before promoting it as a site of pilgrimage. He even went so far as to furnish it with souvenirs of Abraham. As a result, the local Muhajirun had no need to travel into the desert to wonder at relics of their august forefather. Instead, they could journey to the Dome of the Rock and see hanging there the desiccated horns of the ram that Abraham had supposedly offered up in sacrifice on the very spot. Sure enough, among his immediate subjects, Abd al-Malik’s grand projet proved a quite stunning success. “All the rough Arabs of Syria,” so a Kharijite sneered, “go to it on pilgrimage.”28 What was the Dome of the Rock, so locals might boast, if not “the holiest spot on earth”?29

  Yet there was in this same vaunt a nagging irony. Flattering to Abd al-Malik it may have been—but it also had the potential to be lethal to the broader sweep of his ambitions. It was all very well for inscriptions repeated across the Dome of the Rock to echo the slogan on his coins and proclaim that Muhammad was the “Messenger of God”—but it begged a most awkward question. Since the Prophet had never stepped foot in Jerusalem, how could any notion of the Temple Mount as “the holiest spot on earth” be squared with Abd
al-Malik’s simultaneous promotion of Muhammad as the founder of his infant religion? Inexorably though the years had slipped by, and hazy though memories of the Prophet had become, yet there could be no forgetting that he had dwelt beyond the limits of Palestine. Clearly, then, Abd al-Malik could not afford to do as the Roman and Persian authorities had done, and simply leave the depths of the desert well alone. He had no option but to go after Ibn al-Zubayr. His rival’s continued hold upon the holy places where the Prophet had received his revelations affronted not only Abd al-Malik’s authority but that of the heavens themselves. Jerusalem on its own would never be adequate to the full purposes of his mission. He urgently needed Arabia as well. Otherwise, without it, what prospect of fashioning what Abd al-Malik devoutly believed himself set on earth to complete: the authentic “Religion of Truth”?30