In the Shadow of the Sword: The Birth of Islam and the Rise of the Global Arab Empire
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In the autumn of 691, an army of some two thousand men duly set off from Kufa into the desert. Abd al-Malik, whose eye for talent was not a whit inferior to all his many other capabilities, had appointed his most trusted servant as its commander: a youthful former schoolteacher by the name of Al-Hajjaj. Not for nothing was this brilliantly able young man known as “Little Dog”; ugly and diminutive he may have been, but his nose for a scent was outstanding, and his teeth were razor sharp. By the spring of 692, he had cornered his quarry. Once again, Ibn al-Zubayr found himself holed up inside a “house of worship.”31 This time, though, there was to be no reprieve. Al-Hajjaj blockaded the old man for six months, pulverising his defences with catapults to such lethal effect that by autumn the entire sanctuary had once again been reduced to rubble and left littered with corpses—one of which was Ibn al-Zubayr’s. The whole of Arabia was finally Abd al-Malik’s.
Two years later, the Amir himself journeyed through the desert on an ostentatious pilgrimage. Already lord of the Temple Mount, where the Dome of the Rock had been completed in the same year as the defeat of Ibn al-Zubayr, he now also claimed dominion over a site equally awesome and sacred. “To us,” as a court poet wrote in celebration of his glittering achievement, “belong two Houses: the House of God, of which we are the governors, and the revered House on the mount of Jerusalem.”32
Yet here, once again, was a telling ambiguity. No mystery as to the location of the Dome of the Rock, of course—but where precisely was the enigmatic “House of God”? The poet did not think to specify. Nor did any of his contemporaries. Perhaps, however, this was only to be expected. Literate people, after all, did not tend to live in the desert—or visit it either. Even if the habit of going on pilgrimage to Arabia had become well established before the time of Abd al-Malik—and there is no evidence that it had—then the mounting anarchy of the times would surely have halted the practice. As a result, among those believers sufficiently educated to put pen to parchment, the precise details of the distant desert sanctuary, even down to its very name, appear to have been a blur. The surest pointers to its location were to be found, not in poetry, or in chronicles, or in gazetteers, but in stone. The years that followed Abd al-Malik’s pilgrimage to Arabia saw workmen tinkering with the layout of numerous mosques. From the busiest stretch of the Nile to the loneliest corner of the Negev, qiblas that had previously pointed east were painstakingly reoriented to the south. Meanwhile, in Kufa, the west-facing qibla was carefully angled in an identical direction.33 The House of God no longer seemed to stand where it had previously—between Medina and Palestine. Rather, if the calculations of the mosque renovators were to be trusted, it lay much further to the south, at a site in the depths of the Hijaz. A site that can only have been the one place: Mecca.
Naturally, such a change did not go unnoted. There were opponents of Abd al-Malik, a full sixty years on, who still damned him as the man who had “destroyed the sacred House of God.”34 Already, however, even in the immediate aftermath of his conquest of Arabia, confusion as to what might actually have happened, and what constituted “the sacred House of God,” was rife, and escalating. Umayyad propagandists, while not denying the destruction wrought by Al-Hajjaj, insisted that the true vandal had been Ibn al-Zubayr, and that Abd al-Malik had merely restored the Ka’ba to its original, pristine condition. Few Arabs thought to dispute this claim: the conviction that a sanctuary might be demolished and reconstructed, not once but several times, and still somehow remain numinously the same, was widely held. In due course, Abd al-Malik and Ibn al-Zubayr would take their places on a long list of people who had supposedly either repaired the House of God or rebuilt it from scratch: luminaries as heavyweight as Muhammad, Abraham and Adam. The future of the Ka’ba was one that would see it enshrined as both a marker of Adam’s tomb and the pivot of the cosmos itself. If there was an echo, in this sensational array of attributes, of the traditions that Christians, in the wake of Helena’s discovery of the True Cross, had attributed to the rock of Golgotha, then that was surely no coincidence. Just as it had taken Constantine to establish, once and for all, the site of Jesus’s crucifixion, so likewise, perhaps, had it needed a ruler such as Abd al-Malik—an autocrat no less visionary, self-confident or domineering—to define for his own religion the eternal heartbeat of the world.
None of which, of course, solves the mystery of why an obscure and barren spot a thousand miles from the centre of Umayyad power should have been chosen for such an honour. Clearly, though, Abd al-Malik must have had reasons that far transcended the merely opportunistic. Just as he would never have promoted Muhammad as the founder of his religion without truly believing that the Prophet had been an authentic medium for the words of God, so would he never have gone on pilgrimage to a site that lacked any aura of the sacred. Long before his arrival there, a Ka’ba must surely have stood on the spot. Perhaps, like the one at Bakka, it also had some association with Muhammad. If not, then the Umayyads would certainly have had both motive and opportunity for promoting it as the shrine named in the Prophet’s revelations as Mecca. Mu’awiya, based as he had been throughout his reign in Syria, had made a conscious effort to tighten his grip on Arabia. Any plot of land capable of supporting crops had been ruthlessly appropriated; its water supplies diverted; its settlements commandeered. In Medina, the intrusion of Umayyad henchmen into the oasis had only compounded the family’s unpopularity and precipitated Ibn al-Zubayr’s coup. But further south, in the Hijaz, the policy had reaped notably greater success. Indeed, Mu’awiya’s investment in the region had been so substantial that its summer capital, a flourishing oasis named Ta’if, was said to have migrated there from Palestine. Abd al-Malik’s links to the town were probably even closer. Not only had his father, Marwan, served as its governor, but his most trusted lieutenant, Al-Hajjaj, had grown up in the oasis. Both, then, would surely have been intimately familiar with the shrine that stood a mere sixty miles to the north-west, behind a wall of wind-scoured, black-baked mountain, and which Abd al-Malik himself, in 694, made a point of honouring as the House of God: the shrine that posterity would commemorate as the Ka’ba of Mecca.
So it was that a second sanctuary—paired with the Dome of the Rock—came to be enshrined once and for all as a fit object of pilgrimage for the faithful. This much seems clear enough. Beyond that, however, everything is obscurity and murk. Was Abd al-Malik the first Amir to renovate the site, or did he follow in the footsteps of Ibn al-Zubayr? Where had the sanctuary demolished by Al-Hajjaj stood—at Bakka or at Mecca? What had it been more important for the victor to establish—continuity with the past or a clean break? Certainly, more than a century after the time of Abd al-Malik, a vague sense still lingered that the House of God might not always have stood rooted to the spot in Mecca. “At the time of the Prophet, may God save him and give him peace, our faces were all turned in one direction—but after the death of the Prophet, we turned ourselves hither and thither.”35 So one Muslim scholar would recall. Others, in the reports given of Mecca itself, might betray similar anxieties. It was not only the Ka’ba, in these stories, that was forever being demolished and rebuilt—so too was the mosque that enclosed it. A sacred well was lost and then miraculously rediscovered on no less than two separate occasions. Most bewildering of all, perhaps, was the sheer range of sacred stones associated with the holy site, and which were forever being shifted or discovered. There was the Maqam Ibrahim, for instance, which had been carried along by a flood. Then there was the rock uncovered by Ibn al-Zubayr, and which had been stamped with the name of God. Finally, and perhaps most enigmatically of all, there was the much-venerated “Black Stone,” which enjoyed a prominent position in the wall of the Ka’ba. Some claimed that Adam had found it, whereupon it had gobbled up the parchment on which was written his contract with God. Others insisted that it was Abraham who had excavated it, and that he and Ishmael had then lugged it all the way to Mecca. Still others claimed that Ibn al-Zubayr had placed it in an ark, of the kind used by Moses to
transport the Torah around the desert. The Black Stone, it seemed, was not only fabulously ancient—it was surprisingly mobile as well.
And as such, hardly unique. For any ruler who wished to veil the parvenu status of a recent foundation behind a sheen of class, a talisman like the Black Stone had long been an essential prerequisite. Antiquity, after all, spelled class. This was why Constantine—if the story that had him pilfering the Palladium from Rome were to be trusted—had brought to his upstart capital a touch of antique Troy. It was also why the mowbeds, back in the reign of Peroz, had no sooner lit the Fire of the Stallion amid the desolate peaks of Media, than they were insisting that its flames were, in fact, eternal and had originally roamed the world. The claim, within a mere couple of generations, had worked a spectacular magic. Zoroastrians appalled by Heraclius’s destruction of the Temple had certainly had no idea that it might have been in existence for a mere century and a half. The past attributed to a sanctuary, especially if a lonely one, might bear witness, not to the preservation of authentic customs, of authentic traditions, of authentic memories, but to the polar opposite: bold innovation.
And certainly, in his determination to shape the world as he saw fit, Abd al-Malik was nothing if not a revolutionary. Even before his final victory over Ibn al-Zubayr, he had been plotting how to stamp his vast empire as he had already stamped Jerusalem: as hallowed by the authentic religion of God. In 691, the coins that had given Arculf the reassuring delusion that Palestine still belonged to a Christian order had been re-minted with images that owed nothing to Constantinople: a spear in a prayer niche, Abd al-Malik himself girt with a whip. Meanwhile, in Iraq, a matching programme of reform saw the erasure from the coinage of every last trace of the House of Sasan. Nothing or no one was permitted to obstruct this policy. All the coins were to be standardised, and all were to promote the authority of Abd al-Malik’s new religion. “Long have you pursued a course of faction and followed the path of waywardness—but now, by God, I will beat you as one does a camel not of the herd at the watering-hole.”36 So thundered Al-Hajjaj, following his appointment to the governorship of Iraq in 694. The warning was issued to a crowd of rebellious Basrans, but it might as well have been delivered to the Greek- and Persian-speaking elites. Unsettling though they had found Abd al-Malik’s initial reforms, far worse was brewing. An even more outright declaration of war against the past was about to be delivered. In 696, a radically new style of coin began to be minted, one that featured no images at all, but only writing—and Arabic writing, at that. Nothing, to bureaucrats long accustomed to regard the language as a marker of barbarism, could possibly have been more shocking. The world, however, as Abd al-Malik did not stint in emphasising, had been turned upside down. Coins were not the only expression of the new linguistic dispensation. So too were passports, and tax returns, and contracts, and laws, and receipts: everything, in short, that made for the running of a global empire.
To functionaries who suddenly found themselves with no prospect of employment unless they spoke or wrote in their master’s language, this was an upheaval that shook the foundations of their entire world. To Abd al-Malik himself, of course, it was something much more. Arabic, in his devout opinion, was the proper language of empire because it was also the language of God. Adorning the walls of the Dome of the Rock, fashioned out of cubes of brilliant gold, inscriptions proclaimed the core tenets of the Amir’s faith: the prophethood of Muhammad, and the sheer folly of believing, as did the Christians in their blindness, that God might conceivably be Three. Much of what was written consisted of excerpts patched together from the Prophet’s own revelations: the earliest surviving examples of phrases from the Qur’an. Posterity would claim that it was Uthman, decades previously, who had first collected and pieced these together, to compile what was from that moment on a fully formed scripture—but the snatches of verse patched together by Abd al-Malik on the Dome of the Rock suggest something rather different. So too, of course, does the resounding lack of even a single Qur’anic inscription dating from the reigns of his predecessors; and so too do the scattered hints from contemporaries. Christian scholars, noting for the first time the existence of writings attributed to Muhammad, described them not as a single book but rather as a jumble of fragments with such titles as “The Cow,” “The Woman” and “God’s She-Camel.”c If true, then who might have been tracking down these various scraps of text, and piecing them together? Certainly, that Abd al-Malik’s reign had indeed seen the Qur’an subjected to a state-sponsored makeover was something that no Muslim scholar would subsequently think to deny. In the vanguard of this editing process, as of so much else, was Al-Hajjaj. Peerless warrior, formidable governor, he would also enjoy a splendid posthumous reputation as a proof-reader of the Qur’an. Some traditions, however, would ascribe to him a role infinitely more intriguing. Rejecting the presumption that God, in the wake of Muhammad’s death, no longer permitted His purposes to be known through the agency of mortals, Al-Hajjaj is said to have retorted, “I work only by inspiration!”37 Ever the loyal servant, though, he always emphasised that his own role in collecting, collating and distributing the revelations of Muhammad—heaven-sanctioned though it might be—was as nothing compared to that of Abd al-Malik. In fact, so Al-Hajjaj declared flatly, his master “stood higher in God’s view than did the angels and prophets.”38
An opinion that the Commander of the Faithful himself, never a great one for modesty, did not think to dispute. The age of the prophets might have ended—but that did not mean, in the opinion of Abd al-Malik, that God had no further need of a chosen agent on earth. Deploying his favourite medium of coinage, he made sure to broadcast to the world precisely how he saw his role: as the Khalifat Allah, or “Deputy of God.” Just as Muhammad had been chosen to reveal the divine word, Abd al-Malik had been appointed to interpret it and broadcast it to humanity—and who was to say which one had been allotted the graver responsibility? Certainly, the title of “Caliph”—introduced to the public gaze for the first time by Abd al-Malik’s agents in the imperial mints—implied a dominance over realms that were no less supernatural than earthly. If it was upon the command of Abd al-Malik that roads were built and dams constructed, then it was also through his person that people might “pray for rain.”39 Formidably though his warriors stood guard upon the frontiers of the empire, yet they were not so formidable as the Caliph himself, who stood guard upon the highway that led to heaven. A “beater of skulls,” he was also the ultimate “imam of guidance.”40
These vaunting claims were not mere idle propaganda. The breathtaking scope of Abd al-Malik’s ambition was matched only by the sheer drive and creative brilliance with which he sought to fulfil it. By the time of his death in 705, a ramshackle patchwork of conquests that only two decades previously had been on the verge of utter disintegration had been reconstituted as a state no less brutally efficient than had been its toppled predecessors. Even more awesomely, it had been consecrated to a vision of the due owed by humanity to the divine that brooked very little contradiction. “Religion, in God’s eyes, is submission.”41 So Muhammad had declared. Featured on the Dome of the Rock, however, the meaning of the verse had been subtly altered. The “submission” demanded by God had come almost to serve as a proper noun. The faith proclaimed by Abd al-Malik, lord of an empire that reached from the rising to the setting of the sun, had been given a name. The slogan stamped on the Dome of the Rock had become one fit for the entire world.
“Religion, in God’s eyes,” so it declared, “is Islam.”
Sunna-Side up
An ancient city, like a battle-scarred veteran, might often wear the marks of long-concluded wars. In Syria, no city was more ancient than Damascus. Indeed, the fame of its delights—from its climate to its plums—reached so far back in time that there were some rabbis prepared to rank it as a gateway to paradise. A whole century after its conquest by the Arabs, and four centuries after the reign of Constantine, Damascus had still not sloughed off every last mark of its
pagan past. High and massive above the sprawl of the teeming markets, there loomed the walls of what might have seemed, to the first-time visitor, a particularly brooding citadel, but was in truth the outer shell of what had once been the city’s most domineering temple. Worship on the site was as old as Damascus itself—and as continuous. Although Jupiter, the deity in whose honour the sanctuary had originally been erected, no longer sat enthroned within the vast building, the walls themselves had been spared demolition by the triumphant Christians, and consecrated anew to the service of their own god. Now, however, 715 years on from the birth of Christ, a new faith had laid claim to the shrine. Not a trace remained of the cathedral that only a decade previously had nestled within the temple walls. In its place, marble-lined and mosaic-adorned, there had been raised a stupefyingly beautiful new monument: one so lavishly adorned that a train of eighteen camels, it was claimed, had been required merely to take away the builders’ receipts. And the new owners? An inscription emblazoned on one of the walls left no one in any doubt. “Our lord is God alone,” it proclaimed, “our religion is Islam, and our prophet is Muhammad, may God incline unto him and give him greeting.”42
A bare two and a half decades earlier, when Abd al-Malik had commissioned the Dome on the Rock, he had done so with a wary eye on Jerusalem’s great churches, and made a point of using its walls to rubbish the doctrine of the Trinity. Walid—Abd al-Malik’s eldest son, and the Caliph responsible for the sumptuous new mosque in Damascus—was altogether more self-assured in the practice of his faith. Rather than keep glancing over his shoulder at the ludicrous errors of the Christians, he simply ignored them. It was through his identity as someone who submitted to God, as a “Muslim,” that Walid defined himself—and certainly not in relation to some lesser and superseded faith. Such self-confidence was hardly surprising. The splendours of Walid’s mosque bore stunning witness to the full range of blessings that had been showered by an approving deity upon the followers of Islam. The fire of jewels quarried from the highest mountains, the shimmer of pearls harvested from the depths of the oceans, the columns plundered from demolished cathedrals and the mosaics crafted by the most brilliant artists of the age: all served to demonstrate the unrivalled reach of the Khalifat Allah. Well might visitors to the mosque have reported, and believed, a rumour that one of its pillars had been fashioned out of the “magnificent throne”43 of the Queen of Sheba. Just as Islam contained within itself all that was best and most noble in other faiths, the great mosque of Damascus enclosed within its towering walls any number of treasures garnered from vanished dominions: detritus reconfigured in the cause of a new and universal empire.