Adulis, where a single abandoned throne had documented the beginnings of this tumultuous history, lapsed back into the obscurity from which it had first emerged nearly a millennium before in the Hellenistic Age. Only the manuscripts of Cosmas Indicopleustes, together with several dozen broken thrones and inscriptions on the ground in Ethiopia today, survive to enlighten us.
9
RECKONING
Although there is no way of telling exactly when Abraha died, we know that the latest inscription to survive from his reign in Arabia is dated to 558, only six years after his expedition towards Mecca in what may or may not have been the Year of the Elephant.1 His two sons succeeded him for a brief period of no more than five years, and after that, through the intercession of the Jewish Sayf ibn dhī Yazan, the Persians established control over Ḥimyar and held it in the decades that followed. This constituted a profound shift in the power balance both inside and outside the region, not only because of the enmity between Byzantium and Persia but also because of the renewal of Persian support for Arabian Jews. Ethiopia’s negus was now definitively marginalized in Axum, although the monarchy continued to exist, to engage in limited overseas diplomacy, and to mint coins into the seventh century down to about 640. In view of the differences between the Monophysite Ethiopians and Chalcedonian Byzantines, the two Christian states drifted farther apart. They were no longer in a position to implement Justinian’s policy of supporting a Christian kingdom in Ḥimyar so as to reduce the influence of Persia. The collapse of Abraha and his family in Arabia transformed the social and political fabric of South Arabia. Although under Persian domination there was no possibility of a revival of the militant Judaism of Yūsuf from a half-century before, the Jews in Arabia at the end of the sixth century nonetheless had the satisfaction of knowing that their overlord had long been well disposed towards them.
The dissolution of the nexus that bound Ethiopia to Arabia created a volatile situation, for which a reckoning of some kind was bound to follow. The turbulent ports into which Cosmas Indicopleustes had piously sailed in 523 once again became isolated towns on both sides of the Red Sea and were no longer the staging platforms for imperialist and religious aggression. Persian domination in South Arabia did not, however, preclude Byzantine commercial rivalry in the Red Sea itself. Although documentation is slight apart from competition for the silk trade at the island of Iotabê, it seems probable that Byzantium slipped into the narrow vacuum that was now left between the Arabian peninsula and the coast of East Africa. It would not have been easy at the time to calculate the result of all this political, military, and economic upheaval, but some kind of repositioning of the powers and religions in the region clearly lay ahead. Without strong kings in Ethiopia and Ḥimyar the international arena was left to the struggle between Byzantium and Persia. Yet in the very midst of this arena the embers of the old conflagration between Jews and Christians, which had been ignited by the Jews in Arabia and fanned by the Ethiopians who attacked them, were still burning.
Out of these embers a new religion was born, and it was this that brought a wholly unanticipated, if protracted, resolution of the instability that the elimination of the house of Abraha had created. Neither the Persians nor the Byzantines could have perceived what was coming, and the hostility between the two fluctuated inconclusively in the final years of the sixth century, only to grow again at the beginning of the seventh. Less than a decade after the Persians assumed control over Ḥimyar the emperor Maurice, who became emperor at Constantinople in late 582, undertook to decentralize the administration of the Byzantine empire and even to divide it up among his three sons. At the same time his military and diplomatic initiatives with the Persians proved so successful that the Persian Chosroes II accepted, at least temporarily, the Byzantine hegemony in Palestine and Asia Minor. Maurice himself undertook rebuilding at the Church of the Holy Sepulchre in Jerusalem. Yet in 602 he was removed and executed by the rebel Phocas, and this led to a period of local turbulence that allowed the Persian king to return to a more aggressive policy towards Byzantium.
It was this renewal of Persian hostility that led directly to the capture of Jerusalem itself in 614. As the Christian poet Sophronius wrote afterwards of the Christian citizenry, “When they saw the presence of the Persians together with their friends the Jews, they ran straightaway and closed the city’s gates.”2 But their frantic effort was unavailing. This was the greatest disaster to befall Jerusalem from a foreign invader since the reign of Vespasian nearly six centuries earlier, and the ancestors of the Jews who had fled to Arabia at that time, particularly those in Yathrib, would not have missed the parallel. Nor would the Arab tribe of the Quraysh not far away in Mecca, where, since 610 according to the Arabic accounts, the prophet Muḥammad had been receiving revelations from God through the archangel Gabriel.
Muḥammad saw himself as God’s Messenger in conveying to others the revelations he received in Mecca, and these were destined to become the so-called Meccan chapters, called suras, in the Qur’ān, the holy book of the new religion. But among the newly converted supporters of Muḥammad, those who were called “Believers” in his divine message, some chose to leave Mecca soon after the Persian capture of Jerusalem.3 The reason for their exodus is unclear, possibly reflecting some internal divisions among the Believers or, perhaps more plausibly, revealing a fear that the Persian conquests, particularly the fall of Jerusalem, portended a danger to those Arabs who were not their partisans. For whatever reason, families who had accepted Muḥammad as their prophet and as God’s Messenger emigrated to the other side of the Red Sea in two successive stages. Remarkably the place they chose for their refuge was Axum in Ethiopia, where they would have seen the great steles erected there by earlier rulers. A magnificent specimen is still standing there today (Fig. 8).
Whether or not the Believers who fled did so at the invitation of the Ethiopian negus is unknown, but there can be little doubt from the testimony in the Arabic tradition, despite the proliferation of obviously fictional anecdotes, that the negus welcomed them.4 The involvement of Ethiopia in Arabia at precisely this period of Persian triumph seems like an uncanny echo of Ethiopian foreign policy in the previous century. Turning to the great international powers at a time of crisis was a maneuver that Muḥammad himself was later to employ, according to another Arab tradition, when he attempted by correspondence to win over various kings.5 Whatever the truth of the anecdotal accounts, it seems clear that a considerable number of Muḥammad’s followers chose to emigrate to Ethiopia. Many remained a long time, while others soon chose to move on when their prophet did.
Figure 8. The great Ethiopian obelisk that is still standing at Axum. Photo courtesy of Werner Forman/Art Resource, NY.
In 622, in a world in which Byzantium appeared to be overwhelmed by Persian forces that had advanced by now into Egypt, Muḥammad himself decided to emigrate from Mecca to Yathrib, which now became known henceforth simply as Medina (“the city”). This was his portentous hijra, which provided the date from which the Islamic era is still calculated today. It was an emigration that came, perhaps like the departure of his followers to Axum, also in response to an invitation. Certain tribal groups in Medina, who may even have been acting in consequence of clandestine diplomacy from Constantinople and the Jafnid Arab allies of the Byzantine emperor, coalesced to bring in God’s Messenger,6 and at this moment some of those who had made the earlier emigration to Axum, which was itself a kind of proto-hijra, elected to make a second one by moving on to Medina. It is not impossible that the Byzantine court, which had passed into the hands of the astute emperor Heraclius at the death of Phocas, had seen an opportunity, along the lines of Justinian’s foreign policy, to mobilize Arabs in order to build up support abroad that might weaken Persian authority. Certainly Heraclius would have known that the Jews of Yathrib would have been sympathetic to Persia, and that the pagans there, as well as any who were inclined to accept the new revelations of the Messenger, would have had no such sympath
y. Both the hijra to Axum of Muḥammad’s partisans in Mecca and the subsequent and far more famous hijra of Muḥammad himself to Medina, along with his remaining partisans and some of those who were in Ethiopia, would appear to be comparable in reflecting the instability in Mecca and to imply some diplomatic interference in the Arabian peninsula from the great powers that lay outside it. The reappearance of Axum at the time of the revelations to Muḥammad, coming after more some forty years of Ethiopian quiescence, suggests no less.
Muḥammad continued to receive his revelations in Medina, and the longer and more complex suras of the Qur’ān are conventionally called Medinan, to indicate the supposed later date of these texts. It was particularly, although not exclusively, in the Medinan revelations that the Messenger drew attention to the pagan communities of Arabs, with whom the Messenger of a new faith had to contend along with the Jews and Christians in the world around him. These pagans have left their traces in later Arabic tradition not only through the reports of 360 different divinities but through the consecration of the ancient structure called the Ka‘ba at Mecca to the pagan god Hubal, whose worship was associated with ceremonies of indeterminate origin. In the Quranic texts the pagan Arabs appear under the controversial name “sharers” (mushrikūn), polytheists whose gods shared their cult with other gods.
Building upon Gerald Hawting’s detailed examination of idolatry in the Qur’ān, Patricia Crone has attempted to discover the nature and extent of Arab paganism in the time of Muḥammad solely on the basis of the text of the Qur’ān and without reference to the huge tradition of commentary on it.7 She observes, as Hawting did, that most of the references to idols occur in allusions to the remote past rather than the present, and she claims that this suggests that the idols of the Messenger’s own day were “conceptual,” not physical. But Hawting had already pointed out one verse (22. 30) that clearly alluded to the present: “Avoid the filth that comes from idols (awthān).” Crone dismisses this verse as possibly referring to sacrificial stones (anṣāb) rather than idols, even though such a reading would make little sense for an Arabian culture that archaeology has shown to have displayed idols publicly throughout the later phases of the pre-Islamic age. The Qur’ān contains controversial words, such as ṭāghūt and jibt, which may or may not have designated those idols that were clearly indicated by aṣnām and awthān, but it contains nothing to imply that when idols were designated unambiguously by those words they were not physical idols but conceptual ones. To deny that they were tangible objects, in a world where idols could be seen in temples and on the ground, is minimalist beyond plausibility or credibility.
Crone observes that idols recur in the Quranic references to Abraham, and this is significant because Abraham himself not only rejected idols but was believed to have been some kind of monotheist. This means that Abraham was undoubtedly a figure of contemporary historical relevance for Muḥammad. The problem of what he meant in the earliest Islamic decades emerges nowhere so vividly as in Sura 3. 67, a Medinan verse for which Crone did not provide an analysis: “Abraham was not a Jew nor a Christian, but he was ḥanīfan musliman, and he was not one of the mushrikūn.” In other words, Abraham was not a pagan (“sharer”), nor was he a Jew or a Christian. What was he then? Presumably some kind of monotheist. He was not a Muslim in the confessional sense, nor could he have been, being an ancient figure from time immemorial. Since we are explicitly told that he belonged to neither of the two monotheist religions before Islam, the possibility of pagan monotheism naturally arises. It would be tempting, in the light of recent arguments for a monotheistic interpretation of some manifestations of Graeco-Roman paganism, to adopt this explanation for Abraham. There was certainly no doubt that the Messenger saw Abraham as his great predecessor, unsullied by the filth of idolatry, and the reference to him as muslim in Sura 3. 67 can only be taken in the literal sense of someone who had made peace with God. But how would this be different from a Jew or a Christian? Abraham is simply said to have been a ḥanīf who made his peace with God.
Unfortunately no one can say definitively what the meaning of ḥanīf is, although it is applied in the Arabic tradition to various monotheists in the period of Muḥammad, including not only some early Muslims who supported him but also others who opposed him. So it obviously will not do to interpret being a ḥanīf or professing ḥanīfiyya—the correlative belief—as an allusion to Islam or to the prophet’s Believers. This interpretation depends upon little more than the approving description of Abraham in the Qur’ān. Yet the word is evidently cognate with the Syriac ḥanpê to designate pagans, unbelievers, and apostates. In this sense it passed into modern, particularly Christian, Arabic as ḥanafī for pagan, heathen, or idolater, and ḥanafīyya for paganism. Because the root meaning of the triliteral verb ḥ-n-f is to turn or bend sideways, this could imply turning aside either in the sense of abandoning error or of abandoning truth. Abraham’s ḥanīfiyya had to have been pagan, to judge from the Quranic sura, but the identification of certain of Muḥammad’s opponents as ḥanīfs, as demonstrated by Uri Rubin, makes it unlikely that Abraham was imagined as some kind of proto-Believer in the party of Muḥammad.8
If the paganism of Abraham was monotheist, which is the only possible explanation of the statement that he was not a Jew, a Christian, or a mushrik, then we are left to explain all the acknowledged mushrikān of the Qur’ān. To view them all as monotheists too, as Crone is inclined to do,9 would make the distinction between them and Abraham meaningless. She is undoubtedly correct in emphasizing the existence of a hierarchy among the divinities of the polytheists and a widespread recognition of Allāh as God above others, but the parallels that have often been invoked with the Highest God (hypsistos theos) in the Graeco-Roman world not only illustrate comparable hierarchies of pagan gods with one at the top, but equally a diversity of pagan gods, in which the Highest God is by no means always the same and in which there is sometimes no Highest God at all. This would suggest that some pre-Islamic pagans might have been monotheist, just as Abraham was, but it also suggests that since he is said unambiguously not to have been a mushrik it would be unreasonable to assume that there was some sort of different class of mushrikūn who were, in fact, monotheists.
Abraham seems to have been a unique case before Muḥammad, or at least this is what the Qur’ān would have us believe. This leaves us with useful testimony about the nature and extent of Arab paganism on the eve of Islam. But it also leaves us with ḥanīf in the days of the Prophet. That such people were monotheists can hardly be doubted, but that they were all faithful Believers is certainly in doubt. Turning away from polytheism did not necessarily mean accepting the Messenger’s revelation.
The very ambivalence of the term ḥanīf encapsulates the reckoning that took place in the aftermath of the struggles between Ethiopia and Arabia in the sixth century. The Quranic assertion that Abraham was neither a Jew nor a Christian, and was not a polytheist (mushrik) either, exposes the theological space into which the angel Gabriel propelled God’s Messenger through the revelations that began in Mecca and continued in Medina. The paradoxical double sense of the word ḥanīf or ḥanafī, which allows it to describe both a Believer and a pagan, implies a world in which there could be both true and false monotheisms. The struggles between Jews and Christians had already demonstrated this. But polytheism had to be reckoned in as well, and the dualist Zoroastrianism of the Persians, who worked in consort with the monotheist Jews, showed that there was no inevitable alignment through visions of the godhead. Hence Muḥammad had to steer a course that was as treacherous theologically as it was politically and militarily.
Whether all this means, as several historians, like Hawting and Crone, are now arguing with growing confidence, that the polytheists (mushrikūn) in the Qur’ān—the pagans in the time of Muḥammad—were all monotheists may be doubted. This new orthodoxy turns upon the undoubted hierarchy of divinities among the polytheists and claims that if God or Allāh is supreme among the vario
us gods the polytheists have necessarily to be considered monotheists. Although this is a paradox, it is not, in fact, so arresting as it sounds. As we have already observed, pagan divinities throughout antiquity have been assigned ranks in relation to one another. Even those universally acknowledged monotheists, the Jews, recognized at one time in their ancient past an assembly of gods over which God himself presided, and throughout the Graeco-Roman world Zeus and Jupiter clearly had a comparable role to that of the old Jewish God. The translation of the Hebrew Bible into Greek in the corpus that we know as the Septuagint complicated the story by rendering a divine messenger (mal’āk) with the Greek word for messenger (angelos). This had the fateful consequence that such a being became increasingly known as an angel, a divine mediator between the supreme god and humans or other gods. The appearance of angels made the divine hierarchy more visible, but it was not an innovation. In classical Greece, the paradigmatic messenger of the Olympians, and of Zeus above all, was Hermes. No one called him an angel then or now, but that is precisely what he was.
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