That’s Tabari’s version, but sources dating from the actual time of the conquest do not depict the conquerors as being quite so magnanimous. Sophronius, the patriarch of Jerusalem who, according to legend, turned the city over to a magnanimous and tolerant Umar after the Arab conquest in 637, lamented the advent of “the Saracens who, on account of our sins, have now risen up against us unexpectedly and ravage all with cruel and feral design, with impious and godless audacity.”62
In a sermon in December 636 or 637, Sophronius deplored “so much destruction and plunder” and the “incessant outpourings of human blood.” He said that churches had been “pulled down” and “the cross mocked,” and that the “vengeful and God-hating Saracens…plunder cities, devastate fields, burn down villages, set on fire the holy churches, overturn the sacred monasteries, oppose the Byzantine armies arrayed against them, and in fighting raise up the trophies [of war] and add victory to victory.”63 Strikingly, he made no mention of the conquerors’ coming with a new prophet, religion, or holy book.
Islamic legend, widely taken as fact, has it that Sophronius escorted Umar around Jerusalem. When they reached the Church of the Holy Sepulchre, which Christians said housed Christ’s tomb and was the site of his resurrection from the dead, Sophronius invited Umar to pray inside the great church. Umar magnanimously turned him down, explaining that his followers would use his prayer as a pretext to turn the church into a mosque, and that he wanted to leave it for the Christians instead.64 In his actual writings, Sophronius never mentioned this incident; nor did he even mention Umar at all.
According to Islamic tradition, however, Umar and Sophronius concluded a pact in which the Christians were not allowed to build new churches, carry arms, or ride on horses, and must pay the jizya, but were generally allowed to practice their religion and live in relative peace.65 Although this “Pact of Umar” is not likely to be authentic, it reflected the core tenets of the Islamic legal system of the dhimma, or contract of protection, which to this day remains part of Islamic law. “Protection” was meant in the sense more of Mafiosi than of benefactors, since the dhimmi’s life would be spared only if he converted to Islam or paid the jizya.
“The little left-handed man” was not so magnanimous when it came to Khalid ibn al-Walid. He accused him of wrongfully appropriating funds that belonged to Muslims, and Umar summoned him to Medina. Khalid, maintaining his innocence, was incensed, and confronted the caliph: “I have complained about you to the Muslims. So help me God, Umar, you have treated me like dirt!”66
Umar was in no mood to argue with Khalid over his treatment and stuck to the matter at hand, asking the great general, “Where did you get the money?”67 Khalid insisted that it had come from the spoils of war, lawfully distributed, and that Umar’s share was ready for him to take it. Umar assessed Khalid’s possessions and found this to be true. He declared that Khalid was an honorable man but relieved him permanently from his command anyway, explaining his reasoning (because of Khalid’s great fame among the Muslims):
I have not relieved Khalid from his post because he has caused me displeasure or because of deceit on his part. But the people were captivated by illusions on account of him, so I was afraid that they would confer too much trust upon him and would consequently be tested. I wanted them to realize that it is God who is the creator of all things and I did not want them to be subject to an illusion.68
Khalid ibn al-Walid retired to Emesa in Syria. Despite Umar’s cosmetic explanation, it was clear to everyone that he had been dismissed in disgrace. His contempt for Umar burned brighter than ever; he told his wife: “Umar appointed me over Syria until it turned to wheat and honey; then he dismissed me!”69 He wondered why Allah had not allowed him the glory of a death on the battlefield as a martyr. Khalid, one of the most successful generals in history, died in his bed a few years later, an embittered and broken man.
TAKING EGYPT
The jihad continued. When the Muslim armies entered Egypt in 639, they behaved much the same way as they had elsewhere. The leader of the invasion, Amr ibn al-As, was extremely brutal. John of Nikiou, a seventh-century Coptic Christian bishop, recounted in the 690s about what happened when Umar’s army arrived in Egypt some fifty years before:
Amr oppressed Egypt. He sent its inhabitants to fight the inhabitants of the Pentapolis [Tripolitania] and, after gaining a victory, he did not allow them to stay there. He took considerable booty from this country and a large number of prisoners.… The Muslims returned to their country with booty and captives. The patriarch Cyrus felt deep grief at the calamities in Egypt, because Amr, who was of barbarian origin, showed no mercy in his treatment of the Egyptians and did not fulfill the covenants which had been agreed with him.70
When they arrived in John’s native town of Nikiou, they were no more merciful:
Then the Muslims arrived in Nikiou. There was not one single soldier to resist them. They seized the town and slaughtered everyone they met in the street and in the churches—men, women and children, sparing nobody. Then they went to other places, pillaged and killed all the inhabitants they found.… But let us now say no more, for it is impossible to describe the horrors the Muslims committed when they occupied the island of Nikiou…71
Amr’s men began to demand payment of the jizya:
Amr’s position became stronger from day to day. He levied the tax that had been stipulated.… But it is impossible to describe the lamentable position of the inhabitants of this town, who came to the point of offering their children in exchange for the enormous sums that they had to pay each month, finding no one to help them because God had abandoned them and had delivered the Christians into the hands of their enemies.72
Similarly, an eyewitness to the conquest of a village near Alexandria recounted:
We assembled all those captives who were still in our care, and the Christians among them were grouped together. Then we began to bring forward every single man from among them and we gave him the choice between Islam and Christianity. When he chose Islam, we all shouted, “God is great,” even louder than we had done when that village was conquered, and we gathered him within our ranks. When he opted for Christianity, the Christians would snort and pull him back into their midst, while we imposed the jizyah on him.73
In light of all this, it is understandable that some of the captive people did not see the conquerors as pious, but as hypocritical. The Panegyric of the Three Holy Children of Babylon, a Christian homily dating from soon after the Arab conquest of Egypt, said that the Arab conquerors “give themselves up to prostitution, massacre and lead into captivity the sons of men, saying: ‘We both fast and pray.’ ”74
Accordingly, the conquered people did not welcome their new overlords. Umar asked a Muslim who complained about the expenditures they were making to conquer these vast new territories: “Do you think that these vast countries, Syria, Mesopotamia, Kufa, Basra, Misr [Egypt] do not have to be covered with troops who must be well paid?”75 Apparently the troops were needed in order to keep the captive populations in line.
Persia and Egypt were not by any means the only theater of jihad at this point; the Muslims were proceeding northward as well. When the Arabs conquered Armenia in 642, they behaved no less brutally than they had elsewhere, killing untold numbers of people and taking captive many more: “The enemy’s army rushed in and butchered the inhabitants of the town by the sword.… After a few days’ rest, the Ismaelites [Arabs] went back whence they had come, dragging after them a host of captives, numbering thirty-five thousand.”76
The Arabs were now a global force, controlling much of Syria and the Levant, as well as most of Persia and Egypt. In the process of amassing this vast empire, they had smashed one great power, the Sassanian Empire, and greatly weakened the other, the Byzantine Empire. And much, much more victory in jihad was to come.
Yet Umar did not have long to savor his victories: his harsh treatment of the peoples he had
conquered ended up killing him. In 644, Fayruz al-Nihawandi (aka Abu Luluah), a Christian slave who had been captured by the Muslims during the conquest of Persia, stabbed Umar many times while he was leading prayers in the mosque in Medina. He died three days later.77
UTHMAN: THE THIRD “RIGHTLY-GUIDED CALIPH”
Another early follower of Muhammad, Uthman ibn Affan, was chosen as the next caliph. Ali was once again passed over, as he had been when Abu Bakr was chosen. They did not formally leave the fold of Uthman’s followers, but Ali’s partisans, the party of Ali (shiat Ali, whence the word “Shia”), never accepted Uthman as the legitimate caliph.
Ali’s supporters mocked Uthman for cowardice, saying that he had run away during some of the early battles of the Muslims, “like a donkey runs from the lion.”78 Uthman didn’t deny this; he just said he had permission: a hadith depicts a Muslim asking the caliph Umar’s son Abdullah, who was an old man by this time, if he was aware that Uthman fled from the Battle of Uhud, was absent also from the Battle of Badr, and didn’t even attend when Muhammad’s closest companions pledged their fealty to him. Abdullah explains that Allah had “excused” Uthman from Uhud, that Uthman’s wife was ailing and Muhammad asked him to stay behind from Badr to care for her, as she was also Muhammad’s daughter, and that Uthman had also been on assignment from Muhammad when his companions gathered to pledge their loyalty.79
However implausible these explanations may have sounded to many of the early Muslims, Uthman had no trouble marshaling forces to continue the jihad. The Muslims completed the conquest of Egypt and kept moving in North Africa, taking the former Roman territories of North Africa and imposing the payment of the jizya upon those who refused to convert to Islam. The jihadis also completed the conquest of Armenia.
Uthman’s caliphate saw the beginning of jihad on the high seas, as well as the jihadis’ first incursion into Europe, albeit its outlying islands. An enterprising young commander named Muawiya prevailed upon Uthman in 649 to allow a jihadi naval expedition to Cyprus. The Muslims defeated the Byzantines on the island easily, imposed the jizya, and carried off much booty; then they proceeded to Rhodes, the site of one of the ancient wonders of the world, the 108-foot-tall Colossus of Rhodes, a statue of the sun god Helios that had been constructed in 280 BC to stand bestride the harbor entrance, so that ships entering the harbor would pass between its enormous legs. This magnificent effect lasted only 54 years, however, as the Colossus toppled over in an earthquake in 226 BC.
Even though toppled, the statue was still valued by the inhabitants of Rhodes, even after they converted to Christianity, and because of its immense size, it became a tourist attraction. But the Muslims had no patience for such trifles: as far as Islam is concerned, all the artifacts of pre-Islamic civilization are the products of jahiliyya, the society of unbelievers, retaining no value whatsoever. The Qur’an even sees the ruins of pre-Islamic civilizations as a sign of the judgment of Allah upon the unbelievers: “Many were the ways of life that have passed away before you: travel through the earth, and see what was the end of those who rejected truth” (3:137). Muawiya unsentimentally had the pieces of the Colossus carted off the island and sold as scrap metal to a Jewish merchant, who loaded the metal onto nine hundred camels and took it to Emesa.80
Appointed governor of Syria by Uthman, Muawiya wrote to the Byzantine emperor Constantine “the Bearded” in 651, calling on him to renounce Christianity and take up Abrahamic monotheism, or else:
If you wish to live in peace…renounce your vain religion, in which you have been brought up since infancy. Renounce this Jesus and convert to the great God whom I serve, the God of our father Abraham.… If not, how will this Jesus whom you call Christ, who was not even able to save himself from the Jews, be able to save you from my hands?81
Meanwhile, the Egyptian city of Alexandria, having earlier agreed to submit to Muslim rule and pay the jizya, revolted and had to be subdued with extreme violence. Other revolts broke out as well, in the newly subdued African province and in Persia. Nonetheless, the Arab empire was growing with astonishing rapidity; according to Islamic tradition, Uthman moved to ensure that Islam would grow with it by compiling the Qur’an as it stands today. It is said that he began this initiative in the early 650s after a Muslim named Hudhaifa bin al-Yaman warned Uthman that the Muslims were in danger of becoming like the Jews and Christians: “O chief of the Believers! Save this nation before they differ about the Book [Qur’an] as Jews and the Christians did before.”82
Uthman appointed a commission to standardize and codify the Qur’anic text, and once this work was done in 653, Uthman is supposed to have distributed the final version to all the Islamic provinces and burned all the variants.83 Yet contrary to this account, which most historians to this day take for granted as true, the Qur’an isn’t mentioned anywhere for several more decades. If it was indeed standardized, copied, and distributed in the year 653, it is extremely strange that no one seems to have taken notice of the fact, and that neither the Arabs nor the people they conquered mentioned that the conquerors came with a new religion, prophet, and holy book.
Uthman was assassinated in 656 by some Muslims who had rebelled against his rule. His detractors accused him of the sin of bid’a (innovation) for changing some of the practices to which the Muslims had become accustomed. This was a serious offense for those who believed in a religion that proclaimed its own perfection (“This day I have perfected your religion for you,” Allah says in the Qur’an, 5:3.) When he saw the forces arrayed against him, Uthman wrote in desperation to Muawiya, one of his top generals, equating obedience to himself with adherence to Islam: “The Medinese have become unbelievers; they have abandoned obedience and renounced their oath of allegiance. Therefore send to me the Syrian soldiers who are at your disposal, on every camel you have, whether docile or stubborn.”84
Muawiya, however, knowing that some of the Companions of Muhammad (that is, Muhammad’s earliest and closest disciples) did not support Uthman, delayed action on the caliph’s order. Muawiya had his eye on the prize himself, but it would be a few years before he attained it. In the meantime, after Uthman’s death, Ali ibn Abi Talib, the fourth and last of the “Rightly-Guided Caliphs,” finally got his chance.
ALI’S TROUBLED CALIPHATE
After so many spectacular conquests, now the jihad turned inward, as the Muslims became more preoccupied with fighting among themselves than with fighting infidels. Ali immediately faced challenges to his rule so severe that his caliphate came to be known as the period of the First Fitna (disturbance)—a time of chaos and civil war. Muhammad’s youngest and favorite wife, Aisha, hated Ali with burning intensity because of an incident late in Muhammad’s life, when Aisha was accused of adultery, and instead of defending her, Ali advised Muhammad to forget about her and let her be stoned to death. After all, the prophet of Islam could always get other women.
Over two decades later, Aisha was not happy to hear that Ali was now caliph. She had started out from her home in Mecca to make the journey to Medina, but when she heard the news, she returned to Mecca; when its governor, Abdallah ibn Amir al-Hadrami, asked her why she had returned, she answered: “The fact that Uthman has been killed unjustly and that as long as the mob rules, order will not be established.” She cried out to Abdallah: “Seek revenge for the blood of Uthman, and you will strengthen Islam!”85
Aisha now embarked upon a jihad of her own, organizing an armed revolt against Ali. She had no difficulty finding people who were willing to join her, enraged at the murder of Uthman and unwilling to accept Ali as caliph; despite Muawiya’s inaction when Uthman asked him for help, they supported him for caliph instead of Ali. Those who thought Uthman had been rightly killed as an innovator in Islamic practice supported Ali.
At the Battle of the Camel in Basra on November 7, 656, Aisha directed her forces from the back of a camel, on which she was sitting fully veiled and concealed inside a howdah. Ali, victorious p
erhaps because he could move and see much more easily than she could, spared her life.
This magnanimous act, however, won him no supporters among his enemies.86 Aisha’s defeat did not unite the Muslims under Ali’s leadership. Muawiya continued to press his claim to the caliphate; he and Ali battled in 657 in Siffin, a village on the banks of the Euphrates River in Syria.
Tabari, writing two centuries after the events he was recounting supposedly occurred, recounted that when addressing Muawiya’s forces, Ali framed the entire controversy as one of obedience or disobedience to Islam: “I have given you time so that you might revert to the truth and turn to it in repentance. I have argued against you with the Book of God and have called you to it, but you have not turned away from oppression or responded to truth.”87 Speaking to his own men on the eve of battle, he framed the conflict as an act of religious devotion: “Tomorrow you will meet the enemy, so lengthen the night standing in prayer, make abundant recitation of the Qur’an, and ask God for help and steadfastness.”88
The battle was hotly contested and protracted; finally, when it looked as if victory was in sight for Ali, one of Muawiya’s commanders, the conqueror of Egypt, Amr ibn al-As, offered his chief a plan: in battle his forces would raise aloft their copies of the Qur’an and proclaim, “Their contents are to be authoritative in our dispute.” When Muawiya’s men did this, Ali claimed that Muawiya was ignorant of the true religion, calling his enemies “men without religion and without qur’an.”89 He charged that the raising up of copies of the Qur’an was a ruse: “They do not exalt them and do not know what it is that they contain. They have raised them up to you only to deceive you, to outwit you, and to trick you.” He insisted: “The only reason I have fought against them was so that they should adhere to the authority of this Book, for they have disobeyed God in what He has commanded and forgotten His covenant and rejected His Book.”90
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