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

by Tom Holland

  Parthians An Iranian people who lived mainly in the north of Iran. The dynasty overthrown by the Sasanians was Parthian, but so were other aristocratic dynasties that flourished well into the Islamic period.

  Qibla The direction of prayer. In mosques, it is generally indicated by a niche in a wall called a mihrab.

  Quraysh The tribe into which, according to Muslim tradition, Muhammad was born.

  Rashidun “Rightly guided.” An adjective used, from the third Muslim century (ninth century AD) onwards, to describe the first four Caliphs: Abu Bakr, Umar, Uthman and Ali.

  Sabaeans A mysterious people who are mentioned in the Qur’an alongside Jews and Christians as one of the three “Peoples of the Book.” The most widely supported theory is that they were Manichaeans.

  Sahabah The personal associates and followers of Muhammad—literally, his “companions.”

  Shahanshah The title of the Sasanian kings: “King of Kings.”

  Shekhinah A Hebrew word that refers to God’s dwelling place on earth.

  Shi’a An Arab word—literally “party”—that came to be applied to the followers of Ali and his descendants.

  Shirk Associating gods or other supernatural beings with the One True God—in Islam, the ultimate crime.

  Shirkat Arabic for “partnership.”

  Sira An Arab word—literally “exemplary behaviour”—used for a biography of Muhammad.

  Stylites Christian hermits who spent lengthy periods of time—often years—on top of pillars.

  Sunna An Arab word meaning “custom” or “achievement.” In Islam, it refers to the collection of hadiths that constitutes the body of sacred law.

  Syriac Prior to its replacement by Arabic, the most widely spoken common language in the Middle East.

  Tafsir A commentary on the Qur’an.

  Talmud The written record of rabbinical learning, composed in Palestine and Mesopotamia during late antiquity.

  Tanakh Hebrew for the body of scriptures known by Christians as the “Old Testament.”

  Theotokos A Greek title—meaning “the one who gives birth to God”—bestowed by many, although not all, eastern Christians on the Virgin Mary.

  Torah From the Hebrew for “instruction,” the shorthand term for the sacred law of the Jews.

  Ulama Muslim scholars and lawyers.

  Umayyads The first dynasty to rule the Caliphate.

  Umma A word used in the Qur’an to mean “community” or “people.”

  Yeshiva A rabbinical school. The most famous yeshivas were in Sura and Pumpedita, in Mesopotamia, and Tiberias, in Galilee.

  Zuhhad Muslim ascetics.

  Notes

  1 Known Unknowns

  1 From a letter of Simeon of Beth Arsham, discovered and quoted by Shahid (1971), p. 47.

  2 Ibid., p. 57.

  3 Chronicon ad Annum Christi 1234 Pertinens: 1.237.

  4 From a poem written in the Hijaz, the region of Arabia where Mecca is situated: quoted by Hoyland (2001), p. 69.

  5 Theophylact Simocatta: 4.2.2.

  6 Eusebius: History of the Church, 1.4.10.

  7 Eusebius: Life of Constantine, 1.6.

  8 Ibn Hisham, p. 629

  9 Ibid., p. 105.

  10 Qur’an: 96.1–5.

  11 Ibn Hisham, p. 106.

  12 Qur’an: 6.102.

  13 Ibid.: 15.94. Or perhaps “Do what you have been commanded to do.”

  14 Qur’an: 1.1.

  15 Ibid.: 33.40.

  16 Ibn Hisham, p. 155.

  17 The “Quraysh” are often referred to in English simply as “Quraysh,” without a definite article, reflecting the Arabic, which never refers to them as “al-Quraysh.”

  18 Qur’an: 89.20.

  19 Ibid.: 42.42–3.

  20 Ibn Hisham, p. 303.

  21 Waqidi:Kitab al-Maghazi, quoted by Hawting (1999), p. 69.

  22 Ibn Hisham, p. 555.

  23 From a West Syrian Christian text which records a disputation between a monk and “a man of the Arabs.” Although the monk—hardly surprisingly, considering its authorship—ends up decisively winning the argument, the suggestion that God’s approval of Islam had manifested itself in the sheer scale of the Arab conquests was a difficult one for Christians to rebut. The date of the text is unknown, but Hoyland, who quotes it (1997, p. 467), suggests that it is unlikely to be earlier than the mid-eighth century.

  24 Al-Jahiz, quoted by Robinson, p. 88.

  25 Qur’an: 33.21.

  26 Ibn Qutayba, p. 217.

  27 Al-Adab al-Mufrad al-Bukhari 6.112.

  28 Qur’an: 16.89.

  29 Ibid.: 29.51.

  30 Ibid.: 16.88.

  31 Or five, if a verse that alludes to a Messenger called “Ahmad” is counted (61.6).

  32 Qur’an: 3.164.

  33 Al-Tahawi, quoted by Watt (1994), p. 48.

  34 Gibbon, ch. 37, n. 17. The saint whose biographies of other saints are being dismissed is Jerome.

  35 Quoted by Wilson, p. 174.

  36 The great German theologian of the first half of the nineteenth century, Wilhelm M. L. de Wette, quoted by Friedman, p. 25.

  37 Or, as it is more commonly phrased by scholars of Islamic law, “the gate of ijtihad”—ijtihad being, according to the definition of Hallaq, “the exertion of mental energy in the search for a legal opinion to the extent that the faculties of the jurist become incapable of further effort” (p. 3). As Hallaq has convincingly demonstrated, the conventional attribution of the phrase to the tenth century is mistaken.

  38 Gibbon: Vol. 3, p. 230.

  39 Quoted by Gilliot, p. 4.

  40 Gibbon: Vol. 3, p. 190.

  41 Schacht (1977), p. 142.

  42 Ibid. (1950), p. 149.

  43 Ibid. (1949), p. 147.

  44 Rahman (1965), p. 70.

  45 Qur’an: 8.9.

  46 Ibn Hisham: p. 303.

  47 Rahman (1965), pp. 70–1.

  48 See, for instance, Gabriel, p. 94.

  49 Wansbrough (1978), p. 25.

  50 See Crone (1987a), pp. 226–30: a typically brilliant piece of detective work. The papyrus fragment is Text 71 in Grohmann (1963).

  51 Qur’an: 8.41. It refers to the nameless battle as having been fought on “the day of the furqan,” or “deliverance,” which we know from 2.181 was in Ramadan.

  52 The single name-check is Qur’an: 3.123.

  53 Ibn Ishaq is just one of many writers whom we know only through later authors’ reworkings of their texts. Another is Malik ibn Anas, a jurist who was known, somewhat optimistically, as “The Proof of the Community.”

  54 Robinson (2003), p. 51.

  55 Although see Nevo and Koren.

  56 Doctrina Iacobi: 5.16.

  57 Of more than four hundred private inscriptions from the Negev Desert in southern Palestine, carved in the eighth century AD, a mere eleven mention Muhammad by name. See Donner (1998), p. 88.

  58 Ibn Hisham, p. 691.

  59 Peters (1991), p. 292.

  60 For these theories, see books by, respectively, Wansbrough, Luxenberg and Ohlig.

  61 The paradigmatic example of the problems that can be faced by Muslim revisionists is the series of misfortunes that were suffered by an Egyptian academic, Nasr Abu Zayd, when he published a reading of the Qur’an as a work of literature that had evolved over the course of time. His book provoked a storm of outrage, and led to him being condemned as an apostate, having his wife declared divorced from him by virtue of his offence, and ultimately fleeing into exile. For a brief but suggestive account of how Abu Zayd himself views his intellectual pedigree, see his book, Reformation of Islamic Thought, pp. 53–9. At least, though, he was not defenestrated: the fate suffered by the unfortunate Palestinian historian Suliman Bashear.

  62 Muhammad Sven Kalisch. See http://www.qantara.de/webcom/show_article.php/_c-478/_nr-812/i.html

  63 Manzoor, p. 34.

  64 al-Azami (2003), p. 341. Interestingly, when it is the Bible which finds itself in the sights of revi
sionist scholars, the good professor suddenly becomes a great enthusiast for sceptical enquiry. He certainly never doubts the right of Muslims to deconstruct Jewish and Christian writings.

  65 The biography most widely read by non-Muslims is probably the one by Karen Armstrong, which in turn is a redaction of earlier biographies by Rodinson and Watt. Remarkably, for a book written by someone who has written extensively about the grand tradition of biblical scholarship, it does not so much as mention the problematic nature of the sources for the life of Muhammad. Among eminent scholars who still hold the Muslim tradition to be acceptable as historical evidence, by far the most readable is Hugh Kennedy.

  66 Donner (1998), p. 2.

  67 Neuwirth, p. 1. See also Donner’s frank admission that, “Those of us who study Islam’s origins have to admit collectively that we simply do not know some very basic things about the Qur’an—things so basic that the knowledge of them is usually taken for granted by scholars dealing with other texts” (in Reynolds, p. 29).

  68 For a taster of the range of opinions on offer, the interested reader could try sampling the mind-boggling perspectives on isnad authenticity to be found in al-Azami (1985), Motzki (2002) and Cook (1981). For a survey of all three studies, and many more, see Berg (2000), whose analysis of the entire “isnad debate” was particularly helpful in the writing of this chapter. Although Berg does not actually use the word “schism,” he sees academic opinion on early Islam as being riven down the middle. “Whether motivated by the need for positive results or the desire for methodological and theoretical sophistication, we are left with two very different, mutually exclusive, and to the outsider, almost equally plausible models of Islamic origins,” he writes. “Any conclusion drawn therefore will be a product of these underlying assumptions” (p. 226).

  69 Berg (2000), p. 219.

  70 Crone (1980), p. 7.

  71 There are three mentions of Gabriel in the Qur’an, two of which appear in Qur’an: 2.97–8. The warning to two gossiping wives that Gabriel is ready to intervene on the Prophet’s side appears in Qur’an: 66.4.

  72 John: 1.1.

  73 Sahih Bukhari 1.1.2. The hadith is attributed to Aisha, Muhammad’s favourite wife. The Prophet is remembered in it as describing the experience of revelation as being “like the ringing of bell. This form of inspiration is the hardest of all.”

  74 See, for instance, Gospel of Pseudo-Matthew, ch. 20. There are strong parallels generally between the Qur’anic account of Mary’s life and various Christian apocryphal writings. For more detail, see Horn. Suleiman Mourad, in a stimulating essay, has convincingly argued that the Christian legend of the palm tree that fed the pregnant Mary itself derives from the Greek myth of Apollo and Artemis, whose mother Leto was similarly nourished by a palm tree.

  75 The word itself derived from the Qur’an—although the use to which Muslim scholars put it probably did not.

  76 PERF 558—“PERF” being the standard abbreviation of the “Archduke Rainer Collection.” See Grohmann and Jones (1998). A full transcript of PERF 558 can be found at http://www.islamic-awareness.org/History/Islam/Papyri/PERF558.html. A second document, P Berol 15002, also gives us the date “Twenty-Two,” but it is fragmentary.

  77 One partial exception is the treatment by Muslim historians of Persia, which does seem to preserve authentic native traditions. See Noth (1994), p. 39.

  78 Averil Cameron, in Bowersock, Brown and Grabar, p. 16.

  2 Iranshahr

  1 Letter of Tansar, p. 64.

  2 Ibid.

  3 Ibid., p. 27.

  4 Procopius: History of the Wars, 1.3.

  5 Procopius (History of the Wars, 1.3) records that the Hephthalite capital was named “Gorgo,” and that it lay not far beyond the Persian frontier. The likeliest location of the city, and therefore of the Persian invasion, is somewhere in the region of Gonbad-e Kavus, site of the magnificent eleventh-century AD tower so admired by Robert Byron. It is true that later sources have Peroz crossing the Oxus, a river much further to the north, but scholars are generally agreed that Procopius’s account must derive from a contemporary Persian source, and is therefore much to be preferred.

  6 Ammianus: 19.1.2.

  7 Theophylact Simocatta: 4.4.8.

  8 Procopius: History of the Wars, 1.4. Based on the evidence of his coins, Peroz also had earrings comprised of three pearls.

  9 Ammianus: 26.6.80.

  10 Ibid.: 26.6.77

  11 Tabari: Vol. 5, p. 112. Scholars have long recognised that some authentic Sasanian material was preserved by Persian historians and poets following the Arab conquest of their country; but how much precisely is a question that has become increasingly controversial. As with the Muslim sources for Arab history, so with those for the Sasanian period: no methodology exists for distinguishing authentic material from that which has been mangled or simply fabricated from scratch. The stern admonition of a leading historian of the period is worth bearing in mind: “none of the information which [Tabari] presents should be accepted unless it receives some corroboration from independent sources of provable worth” (Howard-Johnston (2006), p. 172).

  12 This process began under Peroz’s father, Yazdegird II.

  13 This is the so-called “Alexander’s Wall.” In fact, as recent archaeological surveys have demonstrated, it had nothing to do with Alexander. Dated as it has been to a period in the fifth century or early sixth century, its association with Peroz appears, if not certain, then highly probable. See Rekavandi et al.

  14 Agathias: 4.27.3.

  15 Letter of Tansar, p. 64.

  16 In point of fact, only three of the “Seven Houses”—including the Karin—are attested to in pre-Sasanian sources, but others are mentioned in inscriptions dating from the early Sasanian period, implying that they must have held prominent positions under the previous regime. It is always possible, of course, that some of the families may have fabricated the antiquity of their lineages. See Christensen (1944), pp. 98–103.

  17 Theophylact Simocatta: 3.18.7.

  18 Elishe, p. 167.

  19 For a detailed explication of the relationship between the Persian monarchy and the dynasts of Parthia, see the ground-breaking work of Parvaneh Pourshariati. Whereas once the Sasanian state was seen as the very model of a centralised autocracy, scholars now increasingly emphasise its character as a confederacy: yet another paradigm shift, to go along with all the others that are currently revolutionising the study of late antiquity.

  20 Elishe, p. 242.

  21 According to Procopius, this was “Gorgo,” “located just beyond the Persian frontier, and frequently fought over as a result” (1.3.2). No archaeological traces of such a city have been found, and it seems improbable that the region could have supported any major settlement. Presumably, then, “Gorgo” was a tent city, of the kind common on the steppes. I am grateful to Eberhard Sauer, the excavator of the Gurgan Wall, for a discussion on this point.

  22 Heliodorus: 9.15.1.

  23 Ibid.: 9.15.5.

  24 Ibid.: 9.15.3.

  25 Procopius: History of the Wars, 1.4.

  26 Joshua the Stylite, p. 11.

  27 It is suggested in the Cambridge History of Iran (p. 403) that the details preserved by later Iranian historians of raids on the mythical Kayanid realm were modelled on actual events that took place in the aftermath of Peroz’s defeat: yet another example of how late antiquity can sometimes resemble a hall of mirrors.

  28 Strabo: 15.3.15. The description dates from the first century BC, but corresponds to the physical remains of fire temples from the Sasanian period: a reflection of the ancient roots of Zoroastrian practice.

  29 Lazar P’arpec’i, p. 213.

  30 An alternative theory places this fire temple even further north. See Boyce, “Adur Burzen-Mihr.”

  31 Greater Bundahishn: 18.8.

  32 Yasna: 30.3.

  33 Ibid.: 29.8.

  34 Agathias: 2.26.3.

  35 Ibn Miskawayh, p. 102. The phrase is attributed to t
he supposed will of Ardashir, a document faked in the fifth or sixth century, and then preserved in Arabic.

  36 Letter of Tansar, pp. 33–4. The realisation that such a statement was an aspiration rather than a statement of fact has been one of the great breakthroughs in contemporary Sasanian studies. As Pourshariati (2008, p. 326) has aptly warned, “In assessing church–state relations, it is prudent to remember that the history of the Zoroastrian church as a monarchy-independent, hierarchically organised church dates only to the 5th C AD.”