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

by Tom Holland

  Many worshippers of Ohrmazd, witnessing fire temples lost to such darkness, found their faith in the Lord of Light mortally shaken. Under the House of Sasan, such apostasy would have been punishable by death; but no longer. Instead, where previously all had been checks and restrictions, Iraq had come to provide, in the first decades following the implosion of Sasanian authority, something that it had not done for centuries: a free market in faiths. So where were the orphaned of Ohrmazd to go? Most, seeking shelter behind the most solid ramparts they could find, had turned in their misery to the Nestorian Church. As a result, Christians, far from being diminished by the Arab conquest of Iraq, rapidly became the majority. Under the strong and paternalistic rule of the Umayyads, they would enjoy a golden age. Across the northern reaches of Iraq, now far removed from the front line with the Romans, churches flourished as never before. Nisibis, especially, blazed with a particular brilliance. The city’s scholars, who were as familiar with the classics of Greek philosophy as they were with those of their own faith, soon re-established it as the foremost centre of learning in the entire Fertile Crescent, and far beyond. Meanwhile, outpacing even the advance of the Arab armies, Christian missionaries had begun to fan out from Iraq, treading the roads that stretched eastwards to the fabulous kingdoms of India and China. In time, the head of the Nestorian Church would plan a bishopric “for the peoples of Tibet,”58 and the nomads of Mongolia adopt a version of the Syriac script. To many Christians, then, it appeared self-evident that the future of Asia belonged to them.

  Except that there lay open as well, for bewildered refugees from the Zoroastrian Church, the pathway to a very different faith: one as newly-sprung and as yet unformed as Christianity was venerable and massy of structure. A hundred years on from the Arab conquest, it was a common complaint among the ruling elite of the Caliphate that Zoroastrian converts to Islam “have not become Muslims seriously, but only to escape the poll-tax.”59 But this was sorely to underestimate the appeal of their prophet’s revelations. Tax-dodge though conversion certainly provided, yet it might represent as well something very much more. To the troubled, to the heaven-shadowed, to the seeker after truth, the awesome proofs that God had spoken to Muhammad were often irresistible. “Guide us to the straight path: the path of those You have blessed, those who incur no anger and who have not gone astray.”60 How could the one-time mowbed who for the first time spoke these words, words that had supposedly proceeded from God Himself, not feel redeemed from the many errors to which his previous faith had been prey? Yet he could know as well, even as he set off along the straight path, that the road ahead still had to be cleared and mapped. The revelations of Muhammad, unlike those of Zoroaster, had been in circulation for barely a century. Among the followers of Islam, there was nothing to compare with the ancient legacy of hymns, commentaries and laws that had descended down the millennia to the Zoroastrian Church. Rather, in the great project of clarifying what precisely the Prophet’s message might have been, and the full scope of his intentions, there were roles a-plenty for those, like former mowbeds, with an aptitude for scholarship. As a result, in mosques and courtyards across Iraq, converts from the Zoroastrian Church began to join the descendants of the Arabs’ slaves, and meet with them in their urgent striving to define what a properly Muslim society should be.

  Observing this process with some interest was a rabbi named Rav Yehudai. Living just a short distance from Kufa, in the great Talmudic school of Sura, he was well placed to note an intriguing development. The hearts of those mowbeds who had “converted to the religion of the Ishmaelites,” so he reported, were still not entirely clear of the trace of their former beliefs, even down to the third generation: “for part of their original religion still remains within them.”61 What evidence might the rabbi have had for making such a claim? Converts from the Zoroastrian Church did often, it was true, bring with them into Islam notions that might have seemed distinctively their own: that apostates should be executed, for instance, or that prayers should be offered up five times a day, or that it was a singular mark of piety to use a toothbrush.e Certainly, there was no direct support in the Qur’an for any of these presumptions: hell, not execution, was the fate that it prescribed for apostates; prayers were mandated, not at five, but “at three times of day”;62 while of toothbrushes there was no mention at all. How strange it might have seemed, then, and how striking a coincidence, that Muslims, when dictating what the penalty for apostasy should be, or how many times a day they should pray, should increasingly have opted to side with Zoroastrian proscriptions and ignore the Qur’an altogether. What was more, they had developed a positive craze for dental hygiene.

  “Whenever the Prophet got up at night, he used to clean his mouth with a toothbrush.”63 A most intimate detail—and one fit to gladden the heart of any former mowbed, certainly. But how, when some other Zoroastrian convert might simply have made it up, could he, and the Muslim people as a whole, be sure that it was actually true? Such a question was more than mere idle nit-picking. The subjects of Abd al-Malik—who almost overnight had found themselves being informed every time they pulled out a coin or received an official document that Muhammad was the Prophet of God—had not been slow to grasp the implications. Only establish that an opinion had truly been voiced by this same Prophet of God, and it would immediately come to possess the full terrifying force of eternal law. Here, for the restless and ever-growing number of Muslims who were unable to trace their origins back to the first generation of the conquest, who were resentful of the haughty Arab elite and who yearned to fathom the true purposes of God, was a truly golden opportunity. Nevertheless, their way ahead was challenging. Unlike the Caliph, they could hardly claim to be God’s deputies, graced by the heavens with a direct responsibility for defining and regulating the Muslim realm. Only by compiling the sayings of the Prophet could they possibly hope to trump the forbidding authority of the Khalifat Allah. If a Sunna—a body of law capable of taming the extravagances and injustices of the age—were indeed to be fashioned without reference to the Caliph, then its origins would need to be grounded, and very publicly so, in the life and times of the Prophet himself. No other source, no other wellspring, would possibly do. But how to authenticate Muhammad’s sayings? Such was the question, a century on from the death of the Prophet, that confronted the first generation of a whole new class of scholars: legal experts whom Muslims would come to know as the ulama.

  Fortunately for them, just across the mudflats from Kufa—where the yearning to forge a new understanding of Islam was at its most turbulent and intense—the perfect role models were ready to hand. The rabbis of Sura, after all, had been labouring for many centuries to solve precisely the sort of problem that now confronted the ulama. The secret Torah, so it was recorded in the Talmud, “had been received at Sinai by Moses, who communicated it to Joshua, who communicated it to the elders, who communicated it to the prophets”64—who, in turn, had communicated it to a long line of rabbis, right down to the present. Nowhere in the world, in consequence, were there scholars better qualified to trace the chains of transmission that might link a lawyer and the sayings of a prophet than in the yeshivas of Iraq. Was it merely coincidence, then, that the earliest and most influential school of Islamic law should have been founded barely thirty miles from Sura? It was in Kufa, at around the same time as Walid, far distant in Damascus, was building his great mosque, that Muslim scholars first began to explore a momentous proposition: that there existed, alongside the Prophet’s written revelations, other, equally binding revelations that had never before been written down. Initially, in the manner of rabbis citing their own masters, members of the ulama were content to attribute these hitherto unrecorded doctrines to prominent local experts; then, as time went by, they began to link them to the Prophet’s companions; finally, as the ultimate in authorities, they fell to quoting the Prophet himself directly. Always, however, by bringing these previously unrecorded snatches of the past—these hadiths—to light, Muslim scholars were
following a trail that had been blazed long before. Islamic though the isnads were, they were also more than a little Jewish.

  The rabbis of Sura and Pumpedita, immured within their famous yeshivas, had spoken of their ambition to “build a fence around the Torah.”65 And so they had done—a thoroughly impregnable one. Yet some of them, hearing as a faint roar the tumult of debate and enquiry that was filling the streets of nearby Kufa, might just have felt a touch of claustrophobia—and even envy. The mosques of Iraq were coming to offer what no synagogue, or church, or fire temple had done for centuries: a venue for enquiry into the nature of God where the terms of debate had not already long since been set in stone. More than that—in the teeming warrens of Kufa and Basra, people from various religious backgrounds were free to meet, and collaborate, and merge their perspectives in a way that had never previously been possible. There were the conquerors: the Arab elite, with their language, their venerable traditions and their burnished memories of the age of Muhammad. Then there were the slaves and the descendants of slaves: all impatient to apply to the wrongs of an unjust society the austere and chilling message of the Prophet. Finally, there were ever-increasing numbers of converts. “Part of their original religion still remains within them.” So Rav Yehudai, the rabbi of Sura, had observed of those mowbeds who turned to Islam. But what of those Muslims who had once been rabbis—was the same to be observed of them? If so, that would certainly help to explain why the Sunna—just like the Torah—aimed to regulate every dimension and aspect of human existence; why it should have forged for itself chains of transmission such as rabbis, and only rabbis, had ever previously deployed; and why, in direct contradiction of the Qur’an, it prescribed death as the punishment for adultery rather than whipping. As it had been written in the Torah by Moses himself: “They shall bring out the young woman to the door of her father’s house, and the men of her city shall stone her to death with stones, because she has wrought folly in Israel by playing the harlot in her father’s house.”f

  Such a ruling, once it had been reworked by Muslim lawyers, was no less authoritative for having been garnered from another—and infinitely more ancient—source. Rather, like Walid’s great mosque, the Sunna was a monument to just what could be achieved by fashioning old fragments into something new and extraordinary. Shards gleaned from the Torah, and from Zoroastrian ritual, and from Persian custom: all featured in the edifice pieced together by the ulama. The consequence of their labours, taking on an ever more clearly delineated form as the decades of Umayyad rule slipped by, was a guide to the wishes of God of quite astounding potency: one that even the most chauvinistic governor might learn to ignore at his peril.

  Indeed, as a check upon the appetites and arrogance of an imperial elite, it was perhaps the most remarkable that a defeated people has ever devised. The ulama, whether descended from prisoners-of-war, or Zoroastrians, or Jews, were overwhelmingly comprised of the victims of the conquest. Yet they had won for themselves, by their collective efforts, a rare and impregnable dignity. It was they, not their ostensible masters, who had become the arbiters of the will of God. The jumble of beliefs and doctrines carried by bands of overwhelmingly illiterate warriors from the desert had been transformed, over the course of barely a century, into a religion of lawyers. Such an achievement, secured in the face of such odds, was a truly astounding one.

  Yet it was an achievement as well, by its very nature, that could never be acknowledged. Although the Sunna was recognisably a product of its place of birth—a world where legally minded intellectuals, of whatever faith, had long endeavoured to frame God’s purposes—it could only ever hope to flourish by denying its roots in such a seedbed. Not a hadith, but there was a pressing obligation to derive it from the innermost bowels of Arabia. As a result, there could be no question of doing as the rabbis of the yeshivas had done, or the jurists at the court of Justinian, and revelling in the antiquity of the laws that it was their ambition to marshal. Quite the contrary: no matter how venerable a snatch of legal opinion might be, it could never have the force of law unless it had first been demonstrated to have emerged from the lifetime of Muhammad. Consequently, the Sunna was founded upon a paradox: the more the ulama of Iraq, in their eagerness to fashion a just society, drew upon the incomparable legacy of those who had laboured in a similar cause for millennia, the more did they identify the source of that wisdom with a barren and peripheral desert. Experience of the perfect society, so they taught, had been granted to one single place, and to one single period of history: Medina, in the lifetime of the Prophet. The role of the Sunna, and its supreme glory, was to serve the Muslim people as a signpost: one that could point them the way—the shariah—back to paradise lost.

  And yet the way to paradise already had its guardians, of course. To the Umayyads the pretensions of the ulama constituted something altogether more menacing than a simple affront. What role, if the Prophet were to end up enshrined as the ultimate authority for the Muslim people, did this conceivably leave for the rival claims of the Caliph? Much, of course, was at stake. It was not merely the right of Abd al-Malik and his heirs to their privileged status as “deputies of God” that risked being undermined. The entire legitimacy of their regime was grievously threatened too. Cast the Prophet as the only acceptable wellspring for Islam, after all, and everything that had followed him was bound to seem a decline and fall. Indeed, how could the empire ruled from Damascus, when compared to the seductive vision of a primal and unspotted Islamic state, not appear a tyranny? The Umayyads risked appearing, not as the bulwarks and sponsors of Islam but as the opposite: deviants and usurpers, blotting the purity of the Sunna.

  The Caliph and the lawyers, then, for all that they might not initially have realised it, were locked in mortal conflict. At stake was not merely the shape of the future but how the past would come to look as well. In the great and ongoing struggle between autocrats and clerics for God’s favour, one that long pre-dated both Caliphate and ulama, a new and potentially decisive battle had been joined.

  The nature of Islam itself, and much more besides, would hang upon its outcome.

  The House of Islam

  If the Umayyads found it hard to take the pretensions of uppity scholars seriously, then this was in part at least because a succession of Caliphs had their gaze fixed on an adversary that appeared altogether worthier of their attentions. Although Damascus stood at the heart of a mighty empire, it was only a few days’ ride from what Muslims termed al-dawahi—“the outer realm.” Venturing north from the Syrian heartlands, which by now had grown fat and prosperous under Umayyad rule, the road might seem to be leading the traveller back in time, to an age when Muhammad’s followers had ranked not as citified civilians, but as tireless warriors—Muhajirun. In Antioch, emigrants from across the Caliphate might still be seen riding on wiry ponies past the crumbling remains of great palaces and churches, embarked for the murderous badlands that marked the frontier with the empire of Qaysar—Caesar.

  It was the Romans themselves who had first put the region to the torch. The ruin inflicted by Heraclius on his retreat north-westwards from Antioch had been ruthless and desperate in equal measure. Hunkering down behind a particularly forbidding range of mountains, the Taurus, the defeated emperor had made a deliberate effort to establish a cordon sanitaire between himself and the Syrian frontier. Almost a hundred years on, and the once-prosperous province of Cilicia—as the coastal lowlands were known—was a weed-choked and corpse-littered wilderness: the most dangerous place on earth. The very wildlife had turned carnivorous. Lions, descending from their customary haunts in the mountains, had taken to lying in ambush for human prey in overgrown marshes and fields. Not even an innovative attempt by Walid to trample down such hideaways through the introduction of Indian water buffalo had served to neutralise the menace. Bad news for the harried locals, to be sure—but not for visiting ascetics. To any Muslim scornful of idle pleasures, and with an appetite for hardship, the killing fields of Cilicia were close to parad
ise. Zuhhad, the Arabs termed such warriors: men who aimed to glimpse the dimension of the heavenly through a renunciation of the world.

  A venerable ambition, of course. The Zuhhad themselves tended to look back to the heroic figure of Umar for their readiest role model—but in truth the wellsprings of their inspiration rose much further back in time, in the spectacular feats of self-mortification practised by those warriors of Christ, the monks. Between the stylite who consecrated his gangrenous flesh to worms and the Mujahid who willingly courted frostbite by raiding the villages of the Taurus throughout the bitter depths of winter, the differences were less of quality than of kind. That this was so might be perfectly evident to both monks and Muslims themselves. One traveller, happening to meet with a Christian hermit, and marking how his eyes were puffy from weeping, asked him the reason for his tears. “Because the hour of my death is fast approaching,” the monk replied, “and I still have far to go.” Some time later, when the traveller passed the monk’s cell again and saw that it was empty, he asked where the monk had gone. “He had become a Muslim,” came the answer, “and gone raiding, and been killed in the lands of the Romans.”66