by Colin Wells
“Say Not ‘Three’ ”
Where Sant’Apollinare Nuovo brashly pleads the Gothic case for assimilation, the Dome of the Rock takes Byzantine art and flings it in the empire's face. The Gothic decorations feel merely saucy; the Arab ones convey a sense of energized superiority. Elaborate Byzantine-inspired mosaics ring the heart of the structure, its interior colonnade. Their patterns incorporate repeated emblems of Byzantine (and to a lesser extent Persian) power that would have been immediately recognizable to all: crowns, bracelets, earrings, necklaces, breastplates. Persia by this time had been completely conquered by the victorious Arabs, but the Byzantines still held out, though much of their former territory was now in Arab hands. The Holy Land had fallen, and even as the Dome went up Abd al-Malik was wresting North Africa from Byzantine control. By displaying their imperial symbols this way, the Dome flouted Islam's older enemies. One of those enemies the Arabs had vanquished. The other, they believed, they were in the process of vanquishing.
The Dome of the Rock also has a number of Koranic inscriptions that drive the same point home in religious terms. These are clearly directed at Christians and (less so) at Jews, the Muslims’ monotheistic forebears, both of whom the Koran honors as ahl al-kitab, People of the Book.
Despite this limited recognition, the inscriptions’ main religious point is that in worshiping Jesus, and in further introducing the idea of the Trinity, Christians have corrupted the original monotheistic message of God's unity:
Say: He is God, the One, God the eternal; He has not begotten nor was He begotten; and there is none comparable to Him…. Believe therefore in God and his apostles, and say not “Three.” It will be better for you. God is only one God. Far be it from His glory that He should have a son.
Later Islamic buildings would use many of the same inscriptions, though the Dome of the Rock is unusual in the high number of them that it features.
The Dome of the Rock is not a mosque. Instead, it is a mashhad, a shrine for pilgrims, as its location might suggest. According to Jewish tradition, it was here, on the rock over which the dome is suspended, that God commanded Abraham to sacrifice Isaac. Later Umayyad propaganda would build on this association, linking Jerusalem with Muhammad's famous Night Journey and his miraculous ascent to heaven, which would be located at Moriah as well. Like Abd al-Malik's construction of the Dome, all this was meant to buttress the importance of Jerusalem for Muslims. But for Abd al-Malik, the connection with Abraham was the one that mattered; the historically spurious connection with Muhammad lay in the future. Claiming common descent with the Jews from Abraham (through Hagar and Ishmael), the Arabs in Abd al-Malik's day saw their new faith as the culmination of the Abrahamic tradition.
Islam, Abd al-Malik was telling the world, was here to stay.
Up to then the world had good reason to wonder. The Arab empire had been split almost from its inception by dissension, factional strife, and assassination. One of Abd al-Malik's main reasons for wishing to enhance Jerusalem's religious prestige was that Mecca and Medina were at that time outside of his control. Jerusalem, by contrast, was close to the Umayyad capital, Damascus.
It was under the Umayyads, who ruled from 661 to 750, that the center of Muslim power had moved from Arabia to Syria, territory the Umayyads had conquered from Byzantium. In making the transfer they had not gone unchallenged. It was also under the Umayyads, and under Abd al-Malik especially, that Islam took the first steps toward becoming a civilization as well as a faith.
Islamic civilization had two parents, and they were the same two older civilizations from which Abd al-Malik took such pains to distinguish his own in the decorations of the Dome of the Rock: Byzantium and Persia. But Byzantium and Persia also influenced Islam before it became a civilization, starting with the rise of the new faith during the disparate yet oddly intertwined lives of Islam's founder, the prophet Muhammad, and his near exact contemporary, the Byzantine emperor Heraclius.
Heraclius, Muhammad, and the First Jihad
For centuries, Byzantium and Persia had fought each other. The border between them oscillated back and forth within a relatively narrow band that divided the Fertile Crescent in two. Neither could get the upper hand for long, though both enjoyed periods of brief dominance over the other. By the early seventh century, however, this long war was changing its shape. At that point Heraclius and Muhammad both were around forty, and both were about to embark on the ventures that would determine the rest of their lives.
On the Byzantine side, Christianity had soaked into society in a way that had not been the case earlier, as the religious sponge that was Byzantine civilization reached its saturation point. The traumas that attended Justinian's over-ambitious adventurism pushed this process forward: plague, riots, wars, earthquakes, oppressive taxation, and the empire's many looming enemies. Slavs had burst into Greece from the north, and in the Balkans they had allied themselves with the fearsome Avars;∗ most of Italy was lost to the Lombards; Persia was resurgent against Byzantine armies in the east. People needed reassurance.
They found it in the form of icons, which took on a new importance in public and private worship, and Constanti-nopolitans found it especially in the image of the Virgin Mary, who now emerged as the city's special patron and protector. In 566, the year after Justinian's death, the poet Corippus first described Constantinople as a city guarded by God. The idea would last as long as Byzantium itself, and the Virgin Mary's powers of intercession were the key to ensuring that divine protection. Byzantine armies began taking the field behind large icons. By the time Heraclius came to the throne in 610, Byzantines commonly compared their threatened nation with that of the ancient Israelites.
The Persians, too, had a state monotheism, Zoroastrianism, that had gradually been assuming a more and more central role over the past few centuries. The Sassanid dynasty, which had come to power in the early third century, portrayed itself as reviving the glory days of Achaemenid rule, and the promulgation of state Zoroastrianism was part of this effort.∗ As in Byzantium, church and state grew closely linked under Sassanid rule, with increasing centralization, intolerance, and persecution of heresies marking the alliance of religion and government.
Struck over centuries, the sparks from these two increasingly flinty monotheisms eventually ignited holy war. In 614, the Persian sack of Jerusalem brought the war's new religious aspect into sharp relief. Since the time of Constantine, the holy city had been growing in importance as a destination for Christian pilgrims. Jews there had been expelled or persecuted as part of a general rise in state-supported anti-Semitism since the time of Justinian. Now, in addition to slaughtering untold numbers of Jerusalem's defenders, the Persians destroyed churches and exultantly seized or destroyed precious Christian relics. Adding insult to injury, the Persians opened the city to Jewish settlers and left them in charge of it. By the end of the decade, Byzantium had lost nearly half its territory to the Persian onslaught, and it was the wealthier half. Byzantium was broken, finished, and everyone knew it.
Except Heraclius, who marched with his army deep into Persia, gambling that his capital would hold out. He was right, but only just. In 626, the Persians allied themselves with the Avars and the Slavs to lay siege to Constantinople by both land and sea, which was the only hope an attacker had of taking the city. At Byzantium's moment of maximum peril, the Byzantine navy saved the day, breaking the siege by defeating the Avars and Slavs at sea and preventing the Persians from crossing the Bosporus.
From the Byzantine point of view, the real work was done by the Virgin Mary, and by the staunch patriarch Sergius, whom Heraclius had left in command. At the worst moments, Sergius could be seen parading along the city walls holding up the famous icon of the Blessed Virgin. It was clear to all that victory was owed to her intercession. Hadn't she herself appeared sword in hand over the waters of the Golden Horn—close by her church at Blachernai—encouraging her people to slay the enemy? Hadn't even the Avar Khan glimpsed her stalking the battlements?
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br /> It was Byzantium's finest hour, and the turning point of the war. Heraclius went on to win a series of battles in the East. Soon enough, the Persian king was overthrown and a Byzantine puppet installed in his place. In 630, Heraclius celebrated with a magnificent ceremony in which he restored the fragments of the True Cross to their place at the Church of the Holy Sepulcher in Jerusalem.
With Heraclius as his instrument, and through the Virgin Mary's intercession, God had miraculously saved the Byzantine empire and His chosen people. Everyone breathed a big sigh of relief. But like a horror flick in which the monster keeps coming back to life, the show wasn't over yet.
In 622, just when Byzantine morale had reached its lowest ebb, far to the south another chosen people had also come under threat of extinction. This was the hijra, the sojourn that Muhammad and his small band of followers spent in nearby Medina after being driven out of Mecca by the hostile Meccans.
At that point Islam was about a decade old. The newfound religious vibrancy of the two great clashing monotheistic empires to the north had set off resonating vibrations among the disorganized and feuding Arabs. Muhammad brilliantly focused these chaotic impulses. His basic message was one of religious and political unity under his personal leadership, unity along the lines aspired to, if never achieved, by the Byzantines and the Persians. Looking at the failed unity especially of the Christians, Muhammad thought he could get it right by dwelling on God's unity, which both reflected and would be reflected in the oneness of the Muslim community, the ummah.
Over the next several years in Medina, Muhammad's unity movement steadily gained in force. In 630, the same year that Heraclius returned the fragments of the True Cross to Jerusalem, Muhammad led an army of ten thousand against Mecca. The city surrendered peacefully, and many Meccans now embraced Islam, “submission” to the will of the one God. A flood of new warriors bolstered Muhammad's growing army. Now the strongest leader in Arabia, Muhammad imposed the condition of conversion to Islam upon those seeking his protection. Muslim (“one who submits”) could not attack Muslim, so conversion meant security. Once a certain threshold was reached, it also meant that the Muslims had to go farther and farther a field to find conquests. “Believers, make war on the infidels who dwell around you,” the Koran orders Muslims. “Deal firmly with them. Know that Allah is with the righteous.”
In 632 Muhammad died after a brief illness. He was somewhere in his early sixties. He and his Muslims controlled virtually the entire Arabian peninsula, and he had begun leading exploratory raids in Byzantine Syria, where he planned the next stage of conquest. Having mastered the new art of holy war, the student had decided to test it against the teachers. It would be up to his successors to carry out the mission.
The Road to Damascus
First stop, Byzantium. Or more precisely, Byzantine Syria and Palestine, where disturbing omens would later be recalled: “There was an earthquake in Palestine, and a sign called an apparition appeared in the heavens to the south, predicting the Arab conquest. It remained thirty days stretching from south to north, and it was sword-shaped.”
Victorious Byzantium was also exhausted and off guard. The Arabs engaged and destroyed the main Byzantine army of Syria at a spot of the Arabs’ choosing on the Yarmuk River. A decisive turning point, the victory of the Yarmuk cracked Byzantine Palestine, Syria, and Mesopotamia wide open, leaving the cities there totally exposed. Those that tried to hold out were conquered and sacked; to avoid that fate, most capitulated voluntarily. The great Byzantine cities of Damascus, Antioch, and Jerusalem all fell to the Arab armies only a few short years after the Byzantines had so exultantly regained them from the Persians. Damascus would remain in Muslim hands forever after, while Antioch and Jerusalem would be temporarily recaptured by Christian forces much later, the former falling to the revived Byzantines in the late tenth century and the latter to Western European Crusaders in the early twelfth. By 640, Byzantine power in Syria, Palestine, and Mesopotamia was shattered. By the mid-640s, Byzantine Egypt too had fallen, with its glorious city of Alexandria, a vital center of ancient Greek learning. In all these places, many people were Monophysite Christians, whom the Byzantines persecuted as heretics. Often they welcomed the Arabs as liberators.
The Arabs had also begun looking westward to the Maghrib, “the West,” as they called coastal North Africa. But at that point Heraclius, who had lived just long enough to feel his miraculous triumph over Persia turn to ashes in his mouth, was dead. Reportedly driven mad by the harsh turn of fate, he succumbed to dropsy in 641, a broken and pathetic figure.
The beleaguered Byzantines held the Arabs off at the border of Syria and Asia Minor, just north of Antioch, turning back numerous raids into the peninsula's mountainous interior, where the Arabs, desert fighters unused to the high country, never really got a foothold. It would be up to the migrating Turks, whose origins lay in the mountain uplands of Central Asia, to claim Asia Minor for Islam, but that big step lay centuries in the future. For now, though deprived once again (and permanently, this time) of its richest provinces, and still facing real peril, Byzantium would survive.
Soon after the first victories had been won in Palestine and Syria, the Arabs had also begun simultaneous incursions into Persian territory, starting with today's southern Iraq. Around the same time as the victory on the Yarmuk opened the Byzantine north and west to them, they had struck a similarly decisive blow against the Persians at Qadisiyah in Iraq, opening up the Persian East.
The Persian capital of Ctesiphon lay just over the border from Arabia. Near the site of the future Baghdad, it was within easy striking distance of the Arab raiders and fell rapidly. Once Ctesiphon fell, the already shaky Sassanid state crumbled, unable to mount an effective defense from its provincial centers, where ties to the capital had not yet been firmly reestablished after the war. The Persian strategic situation was the opposite of the Byzantine one: Byzantium was exposed in its provinces, perhaps, but relatively secure in its distant, well-fortified capital.
By about 650, the Arabs had conquered nearly all of the Fertile Crescent, as well as Egypt and most of Persia, where some mopping-up operations remained. These lands, a huge area that the British began calling the “Middle East” in the early twentieth century, would constitute the heart of the Arab Islamic empire. Muslim Arab settlers immediately began pouring into them from Arabia, many of them at first living in newly founded garrison towns (such as Basrah or Kufah in southern Iraq) and only later blending with the local populations.
But Muhammad's beautiful dream of unity now fell apart. Uthman, the fourth and last of Muhammad's elderly companions to hold power as caliph, and a member of the Umayyad clan, was assassinated by mutinous soldiers. Followers of the prophet's nephew Ali pushed him forward as caliph, but opposition to Ali coalesced around Ayesha, the prophet's favorite wife. It included Muawiyah, the governor of Syria, who was an Umayyad cousin of the murdered Uthman.
Muawiyah had conquered Syria for Islam, and he now refused to recognize Ali as caliph. When Ali was assassinated by an embittered former supporter, Muawiyah was confirmed as caliph. In these events, though, were the seeds of further dissension, because they gave rise to the Shiite movement, creating Islam's bitterest division. Alienated from the Sunni mainstream, Shiites would cling to the memory of Ali's assassination.
Muawiyah moved the Muslims’ capital from Medina to Damascus, a logical choice for him, since it was from there that he had governed Syria. Thus the Umayyad dynasty was founded, with the former Byzantine city of Damascus serving as what amounted to the Arabs’ first imperial capital. And, for the moment anyway, a semblance of unity was restored.
The “Neo-Byzantine Empire”
of the Umayyads
“The first to use a throne in Islam was Muawiyah,” writes the great fourteenth-century Muslim historian Ibn Khaldun, picking out a key moment as the caliphate evolved from its original Bedouin simplicity toward the majesty familiar to Westerners from sources such as the Arabian Nights. Earlie
r, Ibn Khaldun explains, the Muslims had “despised pomp, which has nothing whatever to do with the truth. The caliphate then came to be royal authority, and the Muslims learned to esteem the splendour and luxury of this world.”
The move to Damascus that established royal authority also put the center ofthat authority firmly in a Byzantine milieu: the Arabs’ first teachers in pomp and circumstance were the Byzantines. The Arabs could scarcely have done better, unless perhaps they had chosen the Persians—who would become their second teachers.
That second stage, the Persian-inspired Abbasid caliphate of Baghdad that we associate with the Arabian Nights, was nearly a century off when Muawiyah assumed the first caliphal throne in Damascus.∗ Long before Baghdad was founded, the splendor of Byzantine court ritual first seduced the Arabs into imitating it in their own ceremonials. Not that Muawiyah wasn't criticized for putting on royal airs. In defense he explained “that Damascus was full of Greeks, and that none would believe in his power if he did not behave and look like an emperor.”
But Byzantine influence on the emerging Islamic civilization, a tidal pull that now reached its high-water mark, went far beyond the caliph's assumption of royal ways. It covered virtually all areas of life.
On the official side of things, from the first conquests of Byzantine and Persian lands in the 630s, the Arab conquerors had maintained the civic institutions that already existed in those lands. As newcomers to the challenges of ruling such vast territories, the Arabs had no time-tested institutions of their own to impose. Wisely, they let things go on pretty much as before, relying on their new subjects to keep the wheels turning. “The Muslims were illiterate Arabs who did not know how to write and keep books,” writes Ibn Khaldun of this early period. “For bookkeeping they employed Jews, Christians, or certain non-Arab clients versed in it.”
