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

by Tom Holland

  A telling anecdote—and all the more so for having been founded upon an astounding reversal of fortunes. Back in the heyday of the Christian empire, it was the desert, the realm of the Arabs, that had provided ascetics with the wilderness most appropriate to their ambitions—but now, in the age of the Caliphate, it was the Christian empire itself. That Cilicia had become a nightmarish realm of abandoned cities, blackened fields and mosquito-clouded swamps went without saying; but even beyond the Taurus, across the rump of what had once been the universal empire of the Romans, decay and impoverishment were rife. Muslim war bands, whenever they succeeded in breaking through the mountain passes, would make a point of plundering and destroying all they could—but found themselves hamstrung, as they would often grumble, by the lack of portable wealth. “Rich cities are few in their kingdom and country, despite its situation, size, and the antiquity of their rule.” So one Muslim, anatomising the Romans, sniffed. “This is because most of it consists of mountains, castles, fortresses, cave dwellings and villages dug out of the rock or buried under the earth.”67 The world had been turned upside down. A people who had once disdained the Arabs as wolves were now, thanks to Muslim prowess, reduced themselves to living like hunted beasts—whether by clinging to the tops of mountains, or else by burrowing deep underground.

  Yet it did not do to scorn the “Rum” out of hand. Dread of their power remained something visceral in many Arabs: a foreboding that the Romans, given even the sniff of a chance, might descend upon Kufa and “flatten it like a leather skin.”68 Stretched almost to breaking point though they were, and despite almost a century of unrelenting pressure, they had refused to give way. Still, albeit with bleeding fingertips, they clung on to their empire’s status as a great power. Such an achievement, secured with such indomitability, and in the face of such odds, had owed much to the Romans’ own courage and resolve—but even more to their inheritance from the past. There were officers stationed in the wilds of the Taurus who still bore Latin titles and commanded regiments that could trace their origins back to the time of Constantine. There were engineers, and architects, and shipwrights, trained in the skills that had been honed when the New Rome had stood at the pinnacle of her power, who could still provide her with a technological edge. Above all, across the span of the shrunken empire, there were Christians everywhere, from the heights of the imperial palace down to the most flea-bitten hamlet, who took for granted that they remained a people chosen of God. The loss of the southern provinces, calamitous though it had been, had at least served to shear the New Rome of any number of troublesome heretics: Monophysites, and Samaritans, and Jews. At long last, in the teeth of all its troubles, the empire had become precisely what Justinian had always dreamed that it might be: impregnably orthodox.

  Roman and Arab alike, then, were united in the one conviction: that the future of the world would be decided by the fate of Constantinople. And very possibly of the entire universe as well. Although certainly an incomparable strategic prize—the key to all the former and present lands of Rome’s ancient empire—the city’s ultimate significance was as the stage for an altogether more cosmic drama. Among Christians, the inevitable failure of a great Ishmaelite assault upon the Roman capital was confidently expected to herald the coming of the last and greatest Caesar of them all: a conqueror who would triumph over the Arabs even more heroically than Heraclius had done over Khusrow, recapture Jerusalem and usher in the return of Christ. Among Muslims, it was the capture of Constantinople that was expected to presage the End Days. Nevertheless, they could not help but be haunted by a dread that time might be running out for them. Just like the Romans, they anticipated the coming of a mighty Caesar; but as a nightmare. A prince would be born in Constantinople who would grow as fast in one day as a normal child grows in a year; when he was twelve, he would launch a devastating war of reconquest: his fleets and armies would spread ruin across the Caliphate. The more that hadiths expressing this alarming prospect spread, the more urgent it seemed to foreclose it once and for all. The continued existence of a Christian empire was a menace patently not to be borne. The gaze of the Umayyads, as it had not done since the time of Mu’awiya, began to turn upon al-Qustantiniyya itself.

  By 715, when Walid was succeeded as Caliph by his brother, Suleiman, it was evident that the hammer blow would not be long in falling. In Cilicia, brutal campaigning temporarily cleared the Taurus of Roman garrisons, while in Syria, freshly minted hadiths proclaimed “the name of the Caliph destined to take Constantinople to be the name of a prophet.”69 Not that Suleiman, despite sharing his name with the fabled king who had built the Temple in Jerusalem and married the Queen of Sheba, intended to lead the campaign in person. In 716, when a mighty task force smashed its way through the mountain passes and advanced towards the Aegean, its commander was yet another of Abd al-Malik’s sons: a seasoned Rum-fighter by the name of Maslama. Effective generalship and sheer weight of numbers combined to devastating effect. The Roman high command proved helpless in the face of the invasion. Those in the path of the Arab juggernaut found themselves with no recourse save for appeals to the supernatural. Most raised their prayers to heaven; but some, in their desperation, turned to hell. At Pergamum, an ancient city just north of Ephesus, the sight of Maslama’s army camped outside the walls reduced the citizens to such terror that a necromancer was able to persuade them to slice open the belly of a pregnant woman, boil her foetus, and then dip their sleeves in the resulting casserole. The spell proved signally ineffective. Maslama stormed Pergamum, ransacked it, and converted it into winter quarters for his army. Then, with the coming of spring, the invaders continued their advance. When they reached the straits directly opposite Europe, the Arab fleet, freshly arrived from Cilicia for the purpose, ferried them to the far shore. Nothing now stood between Maslama and the Roman capital, that abiding object of all his dynasty’s fondest dreams. In mid-summer, guards on the walls of Constantinople were able to mark a haze of darkness spreading towards them from the western horizon, as fields and villages were burned, and dusty roads were trampled by a great multitude of marching feet. Then Arab outriders began to appear, approaching the landward bulwarks of the New Rome, and ships from Maslama’s fleet, churning the waters directly below the great palace of the Caesars. By 15 August, the encirclement was complete: Constantinople was besieged, enclosed in a ring of foes.

  Well might her citizens have offered up desperate prayers. Almost a century had passed since the Persians and the Avars had appeared before the city’s walls, and in that time the calamities that had afflicted the empire had hardly spared the capital itself. Her former greatness now seemed to hang loose about her, like a giant’s robe on a dwarfish thief. Harbours once crowded with colossal grain ships had contracted to a quarter of their former size; beneath the triumphal column where ambassadors had once been greeted with splendid and awful ceremonial a pig market now stood; entire stretches of the city consisted of nothing but farmland interspersed with ruins, from which masonry would periodically crash. Yet even if much in the great city had crumbled, so equally much had not. The Hippodrome, the imperial palace and Hagia Sophia: all endured. Above all, monuments to an age when the New Rome’s resources had truly matched her pretensions, there loomed the giant walls of Theodosius, and which now, once again, proved their impregnable worth. Nor, as the Arab sea captains would soon find out to their horror, had the Romans permitted their primordial habits of attack to atrophy either. The sheer scale of Maslama’s navy, its vast expanse of timbers, rendered it mortally vulnerable to a counter-strike. In the still of late summer, with the Bosphorus glassy calm, the Arab war fleet sought to force the city’s sea walls: a fatal error. The Romans, launching their own ships from the Golden Horn, unleashed the deadliest weapon at their command: fire. Blazing hulks crashed into the Arab fleet and sent flames dancing across the great forest of masts, while smaller ships, armed with siphons, sprayed viscous oil so miraculous and terrifying in its effects that sailors continued to burn from its tou
ch even as they screamed and tore at themselves on the boiling waves. Hygron pyr, this devastating invention was called: “liquid fire.” That the secret had been brought to Constantinople a few decades earlier by an architect called Callinicos did not obscure for the city’s defenders, as they watched the blazing Arab ships sink, or else drift helplessly into one another or out to sea, its ultimate derivation. Clearly, it was God who had shattered all the invaders’ plans—“at the intercession of His wholly chaste Mother.”70

  Nor was the Virgin done yet. Calamity after calamity struck at the besiegers. Some of these—the thick snow that covered the Arab camp during the winter, the famine and plague that afflicted it during the summer—clearly derived from the prayers of the Christian people; but so too, they knew in their souls, did the many triumphs of their agents. When Coptic squadrons from the Arab fleet were persuaded to desert, or when barbarians from the north were bribed to attack Maslama’s land forces, the dramatic success of these various gambits seemed to the defenders to bear striking witness to the favour of the heavens. By the summer of 717, after a siege of almost a year, it was evident that the Arab attempt on Constantinople had failed. In Syria, Suleiman was already dead, and the new Caliph, cutting his losses, ordered the expedition to withdraw. Maslama, even though his missives home had been growing ever more cheery as the situation worsened, was left with no choice but to obey. The retreat, afflicted as it was by devastating storms at sea, proved brutal. “Many terrible things happened to them,” as a monk piously gloated, “so that from their own efforts they realised that God and His all-holy maiden Mother watched over the City and the Empire of the Christians.”71

  Naturally, this was not remotely the Muslim perspective. Although the great siege had certainly been a calamity, the debacle could have been far worse: no sinister, twelve-year-old Caesar had materialised, for instance, nor had Kufa been squashed flat. In the decade that followed the failure to take Constantinople, the raids launched by the vengeful Muslims were as savage and remorseless as they had ever been, slicing so deep into Roman territory that in 727 an Arab army even managed briefly to put Nicaea under siege. Yet there was, in the sheer frenzied quality of these assaults, something of a raging against the dying of the light. The blaze of a dream that the Umayyads had long nurtured, that the entire world might be brought beneath their sway, was coming to gutter badly. Victory, which God had previously been pleased to bestow upon their armies whenever they met with unbelievers, could no longer, it seemed, be taken entirely for granted. In 732, for instance, in the distant wilds of Gaul, a Muslim raid on the Franks’ wealthiest and most cherished shrine, a great church in a town named Tours, was met by a phalanx of outraged locals, and murderously put to flight. Eight years later, near the town of Acroinum, beyond the Taurus Mountains, it was the turn of the Romans to corner an Arab war band, and inflict on it a decisive defeat. Thirteen thousand were killed, and many more taken prisoner: a serious loss of manpower. This, the first victory ever won by the hated Rum in pitched battle against a Muslim army, seemed to confirm that God, in His ineffable wisdom, did indeed intend to leave entire swaths of His creation in the darkness of unbelief. For the first time, the devout dared to contemplate a chilling possibility: that humanity, rather than being brought into a single “House of Islam,” was destined to remain forever divided in two. Increasingly, when pious Muhajirun in the shadow of the Taurus gazed out at the grim mountainscape before them, they did not see a gateway to fresh conquests but rather the ramparts of a perpetual “House of War.” The fall of Constantinople—and the End Days—no longer seemed imminent. Instead, Muslims were coming to see in their war with the Romans only a grinding stalemate: one that might well endure for numberless generations. “They are people of sea and rock.” So the Prophet himself was said to have lamented. “Alas, they are your associates to the end of time.”72

  Against the backdrop of such prophecies, defenders of the House of Islam came to cast the empire of Constantinople, and all the Christian realms beyond it, as a ghoul-like doppelgänger: hellish, predatory, undead. Against such an adversary, it was not only warriors who were needed, but lawyers: men who could advise the faithful on how best to secure and maintain the favour of God. By 740, the year of the disastrous defeat at Acroinum, men whose truest proficiency lay in a library rather than on the battlefield were becoming a common sight on the Roman front.73 Such scholars, it was true, hardly lacked for martial courage: one, Ali ibn Bakkar, when slashed across his belly, cheerfully used his turban to stop his entrails from spilling out and then went on to kill no fewer than thirteen enemy soldiers, while his idea of relaxation, when away from the battlefield, was to make pets out of the dreaded lions of Cilicia. Yet the true value to the Muslim cause of these scholars lay neither on the battlefield nor in the field of pest control. Rather, what they contributed to the great death-struggle with the House of War was something even more precious: an assurance to the faithful that they were indeed, by taking up arms against the unbelievers, performing the will of God.

  Standing in the shadow of the Taurus Mountains, it was not enough for the frontier guards of the Caliphate merely to construct fortifications out of the plundered rubble of abandoned Roman cities. Far more urgent was the need to fashion, along the border with the House of War, a dimension that could rank as authentically, purely and impregnably Islamic. This was why the frontiersmen’s word for a fortified stronghold—ribat—was also applied to the particular brand of pious activity associated with the ulama: a determination to permit nothing to the faithful that did not derive directly from the Prophet. “He was the one who taught the inhabitants of the frontier region how to behave.” So it was recorded of one lawyer, a Kufan by the name of Abu Ishaq. “He instructed them in the Sunna and used to command and prohibit. Whenever a man inclined to innovation entered the frontier region, Abu Ishaq would throw him out.”74

  Yet there was, in the presence of such figures amid all the dangers and deprivations of Cilicia, an awkward paradox. When Abu Ishaq risked a whipping to upbraid a local commandant, when Ali ibn Bakkar wept until he went blind, when other scholars fasted, or ate dust, or wore rags, or refused to wash, they were not following the example of Muhammad. Rather, they were aping Syria’s famously ascetic monks. This, in the context of the interminable war with the Christians, could hardly help but appear a mounting embarrassment. How could Islam ever hope to scour the world of unbelief, when there still lurked in the souls of its own shock troops a lingering taint bred of their foes? Fortunately for the ulama, however, the solution to this problem—an increasingly tried and tested one—lay ready to hand. “The words of our Prophet have reached us—a correct and truthful statement.”75 So declared Ibn al-Mubarak, a Turk whose relish for fighting the Rum had led him to travel to the Taurus all the way from far distant Khorasan, and who would come to rank as perhaps the most formidable of all the warrior-scholars. The “imam of the Muslims,” as he was admiringly hailed, he possessed not only a rare aptitude for defeating Romans in single combat, but a familiarity with hadiths so detailed and passionate that he was known to discourse on them even in the heat of battle. Who better, then, to reassure the Muhajirun that the mortifications required of them on the frontier had in fact been authentically Islamic all along, and owed nothing to the example of infidels? Why, the Prophet himself, so it suddenly appeared from a flurry of hadiths brandished to triumphant effect by Ibn al-Mubarak, had given Muslims explicit instructions not to copy monks. “Every community has its monasticism—and the monasticism of my comunity is jihad.”76

  Quite what was being suggested by this word remained, however, in Ibn al-Mubarak’s own lifetime, something very much up for grabs. Its literal meaning was “struggle,” and in the Qur’an reference to the jihad required of believers was as likely to imply a good argument with the Mushrikun, or the giving of alms, or perhaps the freeing of a slave, as it was any commitment to pious violence. With warrior-scholars such as Ibn al-Mubarak desperate to claim the Prophet as their exemplar, ho
wever, the word came increasingly to take on a much narrower connotation: warfare in the cause of God. Riding to the frontiers of the embattled House of Islam and slaughtering stiff-necked Christians was cast not merely as an option for dutiful Muslims, but as a positive obligation. To one battle-shy friend who had boasted of his pilgrimages to Mecca and Medina, Ibn al-Mubarak gave a blistering retort. “Were you to see us,” he lectured, “you would realise your worship is mere play. For you the fragrance of spices, but for us the fragrance of dust, and dirt, and blood flowing down our necks—which is altogether more pleasant.”77

  And certainly, a hundred years and more after the death of the Prophet, evidence for this robust approach to the essentials of Islamic worship was coming to be marshalled in impressive quantities. Ibn al-Mubarak himself compiled an entire book of hadiths devoted to the single topic: jihad. Other scholars, turning to the Qur’an and finding themselves puzzled by the alternation of passages that urged perpetual warfare with others that seemed to urge the precise opposite, sought to organise the verses in what they trusted was a chronological manner—with one in particular, targeted originally at treaty-breaking Mushrikun, being placed right at the end of the Prophet’s life. “Kill them, seize them, besiege them, wait for them at every lookout post”78—maxims with an obvious value for those with a taste for fighting Romans. It was therefore crucial for such scholars to establish that the verse was indeed revealed to the Prophet late in his career: for only so could it plausibly be demonstrated to have superseded other, less bellicose passages. As a result, it was not only hadith collections that were starting to be shaped by the martial enthusiasms of the ulama, but details of the Prophet’s biography. For scholars such as Ibn al-Mubarak, the stakes could hardly have been higher. Fail to demonstrate that they were following Muhammad’s example, and not only their increasingly complex doctrine of jihad but all their suffering amid the killing fields of Cilicia would effectively rank as worthless. Render the Prophet satisfyingly in their own image, however, and the prize would be a truly fabulous one. Not only would the past of Islam be theirs—its future would as well.