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

The Sectarian Milieu

Gabriel—or Jibril, as he is called in Arabic—is not entirely absent from the Qur’an. One verse confirms him as the agent who has been bringing down revelations into the heart of God’s chosen messenger; a second, somewhat bathetically, describes him as primed to intervene in a domestic squabble between the Prophet and two of his wives.⁷¹ Clearly, then, wherever and whenever the Qur’an may have been composed, its target audience was perfectly familiar with the most celebrated angel in the Bible. Clinching proof of this is provided by the detailed coverage given by the Prophet to what, for Christians, had always ranked as the ultimate in annunciations: Gabriel’s visitation to Mary, the mother of Christ. The episode is given a notably starry role as well in the Qur’an—where it is retold not once, but twice. Mary was evidently a person much on the Prophet’s mind. Not only is she the one woman in his revelations to be mentioned by name, but she features as well in a whole range of incidents quite aside from the Annunciation. Details left unrecorded by the New Testament—for instance, that she went into labour beneath a palm tree, where her son, speaking from within her womb, encouraged her to snack on a date or two—are given pride of place in the Qur’an. Gratifying evidence, so it appeared to Muslims contemptuous of the Christian scriptures, that they were far better informed about the life of Jesus than were those who, in their folly and delusion, presumed to worship him as a god.

But how had the Prophet come by these various stories? To Muslims, of course, the question was a waste of breath. Muhammad had been visited by the divine. Just as Christians believed that Mary, by giving birth to her son, had delivered what they termed the Logos, or the “Word,”⁷² so Muhammad’s followers knew that his revelations, gasped out with “the sweat dripping from his forehead,”⁷³ were the veritable speech of God. Muslims were no more likely to ask whether the Prophet had been influenced by the writings of other faiths than were Christians to wonder whether Mary had truly been a virgin. What the stiff-necked Jews and the obdurately blinkered Christians had failed to realise, in the opinion of the Muslim faithful, was that every single prophet mentioned in the Bible had actually been a follower of Islam. Hence the starring roles granted to so many of them, from Adam to Jesus, in the Qur’an. And to Mary too, of course. That stories of the Virgin being succoured by a friendly palm tree had actually been a Christian tradition for centuries, and seem in turn to have derived from a legend told by the pagan Greeks, was blithely ignored—as, of course, it was bound to be.⁷⁴ No Muslim scholar could possibly have countenanced a notion that the Prophet might have been in the business of filching anecdotes from infidels. The Qur’an, after all, did not derive from outside sources. Rather, it was the Jews and the Christians, by allowing their holy books to become corrupted, who had ended up with distorted, second-hand scriptures. Only in the Qur’an had the awful purity of the divine revelation been properly preserved. Every last word of it, every last syllable, every last letter, came directly from God, and from God alone.

Perhaps it was only to be expected, then—despite the profoundly ambiguous testimony of the holy text itself—that a tradition should gradually have grown up, which in due course hardened into orthodoxy, that Muhammad himself had been illiterate.^g Even had the Prophet wished to curl up with an infidel book or two, in other words, it would have been beyond him to decipher them. Yet reassuring a reflection though this certainly provided to the faithful, it still did not rank, perhaps, as the surest evidence that the Qur’an had truly descended from the celestial heights. Even more infallible a proof was witnessed by the circumstances of Muhammad’s upbringing. Mecca, after all, had been inhabited by pagans, not Jews or Christians—and it stood right in the middle of an enormous and empty desert. The ancient capitals of the Near East, which for more than four thousand years had served as the cockpits of civilisation, immense petri-dishes teeming with peoples of every conceivable faith, dense with temples, and synagogues, and churches, were a colossal distance away. Even to the borders of Palestine, where Abraham had built his tomb, and Solomon reigned, and Jesus been crucified, it was a full eight hundred miles. What likelihood, then, the Muslim faithful demanded to know, that a prophet born and raised so far from such a milieu could conceivably have been influenced by its traditions and doctrines and writings? The sheer prophylactic immensity of the desert that surrounded Mecca, impenetrable to outsiders as it was, appeared to render the answer obvious. Just as it was the blood and muscle of Mary’s virgin womb that had, in the opinion of Christians, nurtured the coming into the world of the divine, so likewise, in the opinion of Muslims, was it the spreading sands of Arabia which had served to preserve the word of God, over the course of its protracted delivery, in a fit condition of untainted purity.

But the emptiness into which Islam had been born was more than physical. The void had been a spiritual one as well. Muslim scholars termed it Jahiliyyah—the “Age of Ignorance.”⁷⁵ The Arabs, who had drunk, and stolen, and brawled, and thought nothing of burying unwanted children in the sands, nor of practising the most unspeakable sexual abominations, nor of conducting the most interminable feuds, had been lost, it appeared to their heirs, in that pitchest blackness which was the lack of knowledge of God; and this it was that had made the coming of the Prophet all the brighter, all the more dazzling and refulgent a dawn. The contrast between Islam and the age that had preceded it was as clear as that between midday and the dead of night. Yet, it was not only Arabia that had been lost in darkness. The whole world had laboured in the shadows of jahl—“ignorance.” God, however, was great. The old order had been gloriously toppled, and a Caliphate established in its place. Everything had been brought to change. The white radiance of Islam, blazing beyond the borders of Arabia to the limits of the globe, had served to bring all humanity into a wholly new age of light.

This, however, was to redraft history in a quite stunningly radical way. Never before had the past been dismissed with such utter and imperious disdain. Even to Christians, the cycles of time redeemed by the birth of Christ had served as a preparation for the coming of the Messiah. To Muslims, however, everything that had preceded the revelations of their Prophet, all its manifold splendours and achievements, had been the merest phantom show, a shirk-haunted wasteland, to which Islam owed precisely nothing. The effect of this presumption was to prove incalculable. To this day, even in the West, it continues to inform the way in which the history of the Middle East is interpreted and understood. Whether in books, museums or university departments, the ancient world is invariably presumed to have ended with the coming of Muhammad. It is as though everything that had made antiquity what it was came to a sudden and crunching halt around AD 600. The inherent implausibility of this is rarely considered. Instead, at a time when most historians are profoundly suspicious of any notion that great civilisations might emerge from nowhere, owing nothing to what went before, and transforming human behaviour in the merest blinking of an eye, Islam continues to be portrayed as somehow exceptional: lightning from a clear blue sky.

Clearly, if the Qur’an did descend from heaven, then there is no problem in explaining why the stories it tells of Mary, say, should contain such palpable trace-elements of Christian folklore and classical myth. All things, after all, are possible to God. Yet even on the presumption that what Islam teaches is correct, and that the midwife of the faith was genuinely an angel, it is still pushing things to imagine that the theatre of its conquests might suddenly have been conjured, over the span of a single generation, into a set from The Arabian Nights. Just because histories written by pious Muslims two hundred years later can serve to give us such an impression does not mean that they are right. The Near East of the Caliphate at the peak of its power and glory was decidedly not that of its foundation two centuries before. To presume otherwise is not merely to perpetuate the notion of the Arab conquests as the sudden dropping of a guillotine onto the neck of everything that preceded them, but to risk enshrining bogus tradition as historical fact. To understand the origins of Islam, and why it evolved in the way that it did, we must look far beyond the age of Ibn Hisham. We must explore the empires and religions of late antiquity.

And if we do, then the landscape through which the first Arab conquerors rode does not seem so very different from landscapes elsewhere in the one-time Roman Empire. Landscapes marked by the seismic shock of superpower collapse; by the desperate struggle of erstwhile provincials to fashion new lives, and new security, for themselves; and by the depredations of foreign invaders, speaking strange languages and adhering to peculiar creeds. What the Arab conquest of formerly Roman provinces such as Palestine and Syria served to demonstrate was that the rising tide beneath which the western half of the empire had vanished was now rolling in across its eastern possessions.

“I took from you at Herakleopolis sixty-five sheep. I repeat—sixty-five and no more, and as an acknowledgement of this fact, we have made the present confirmation.”⁷⁶ This was the receipt issued by an Arab war band in 642 to the city fathers of Herakleopolis, a somnolent backwater in what only two years previously had still ranked as the Roman province of Egypt. The seamless fusion of extortion and bureaucracy contained in the document would have been nothing unfamiliar to the elites of other abandoned provinces—whether in North Africa or Spain, Italy or Gaul. The security of Rome’s empire had gone—and gone for good. Compromise with barbarian overlords, in an age of Roman retreat and diminishment, had become the name of the game.

Granted, the Arabs who had come swaggering into Herakleopolis do seem to have been uniquely self-possessed. Fastidiously, they logged the date of their transaction with the city elders: in Greek, as “the thirtieth of the month of Pharmouthi of the first indiction,” and in their own language, as “the year Twenty-Two.” To us, with the benefit of hindsight, it is the latter detail that leaps out. Redeemed from a provincial rubbish tip, it constitutes something truly momentous: the earliest mention on any surviving datable document of what would end up enshrined as the Muslim calendar. Clearly, then, it was something more than merely a greed for mutton that had brought the Arabs to Herakleopolis. But what? Some sense of a new beginning, of a new order, self-evidently. Yet whether their beliefs and ambitions were equivalent to what we would recognise today as Islam is altogether less clear. It is noteworthy, for instance, that the conquerors are described on the back of the receipt, not as Muslims, but as something altogether more enigmatic: Magaritai. What precisely this might have meant, and how it was to be linked to the unfamiliar dating system employed by the newcomers, and whether, if at all, it had been inspired by some novel understanding of God, the document does not reveal. Instead, it is the motives of those who are being screwed for livestock, the city fathers of Herakleopolis, that are the more readily transparent. How else, after all, save by attempting to patch together an accommodation with their unwanted guests, were they to salvage anything of the status quo? If there was much from the past that would necessarily have to be junked, then so too was there much that might be redeemed. In what had once, two centuries before, been the western half of the empire, the ghosts of Rome’s vanished order still haunted the barbarian kingdoms that had been founded upon its grave. In the East as well, judging from the receipt issued at Herakleopolis, the old order did not change overnight, yielding place to new. Its legacy endured.

Of course, it was not only Roman ghosts who haunted the dominion established by the Arabs in the seventh century. In the lowlands of Mesopotamia and the uplands of Iran, there was the spectre of the empire of the Persian kings. This dominion had in turn been raised upon the foundations of still older monarchies, sediment upon sun-baked sediment: for imperialism, in the East, reached back to the dawn of time. Dimly, in the scriptures of the Jews and the Christians, this was remembered: that there had once been such things as pharaohs and great towers raised up on the banks of the Euphrates to the sky. Yet their sense of this rarely served to oppress them: for if the landscapes of Egypt and Mesopotamia could not help but bear witness to their disorientingly ancient pasts, then so also, in the East, had it become the practice of its peoples to look fixedly to the future. The Jews awaited their messiah; the Christians the return of Christ. Others too shared in what had become the common presumption of the age: that the patterns of human affairs were being traced directly by the finger of God. There were the followers of the Persian prophet Zoroaster, who saw the world as divided into warring factions of good and evil; and the Samaritans, who proclaimed in their creed how there was no god but God, and the Gnostics, who believed that it was possible for a revelation of the divine to descend via angels to chosen mortals; and all the other numerous heretics, and cultists, and sectarians that the Near East had long seemed effortlessly to breed. Prodigious the number of empires sprung from its soil might well have been—and yet not half so prodigious as the number of gods. And this was the soil, the very soil, from which were destined to sprout the pillars of the Caliphate: a dominion that proclaimed itself to be both a universal state and the instrument of heaven’s purpose.

Given all this, how can it possibly make sense to explain the emergence of Islam with reference to Islam alone? That Muslim tradition attributes the origins of the Qur’an and the Sunna to an illiterate man living in a pagan city in the middle of a desert is a problem, not a solution. Perhaps, had the revelations of the Prophet materialised in some other period and place, then the fact that the presumptions of the late antique Near East are shot through them like letters through a stick of rock would indeed appear an authentic miracle. As it is, the distance between Mecca and the lands of the Roman and Persian empires to the north suggests a mystery of the kind that perplexed early cartographers when they mapped Africa and South America, and observed that the eastern and western coasts of the Atlantic Ocean seemed to match like the pieces of a gigantic jigsaw puzzle. Any notion that continents might have been drifting around the globe appeared too ludicrous to contemplate. Only in the 1960s, with the theory of plate tectonics, did a convincing solution finally emerge. A remarkable coincidence turned out not to have been a coincidence at all.

The close fit between the religion that came to be known as Islam and the teeming melting-pot of the late antique Near East would seem to suggest an identical conclusion. Indisputably, the order established by the Arabs in the century following the hijra was something novel. But originality alone does not tell the whole story. Prototype of every subsequent Islamic empire that it certainly was, the Caliphate founded in the seventh century was also something very much more: the last, the climactic, and the most enduring empire of antiquity. Such is the claim that this book aims to prove. Yet it is as well to admit, at the outset, that such a task is far from easy. Certainty, on a whole range of issues, is impossible. There can only ever be speculation. Cosmologists speak of “singularities”—warpings of time and space where the laws of physics do not apply. The puzzle of Islam’s origins might be viewed in a similar way—as a black hole sucking in a great spiralling swirl of influences before casting them back out in a radically different form. The career of Muhammad, traditionally cast as the pivotal episode in the entire history of the Middle East, serves both as the climax of my narrative of the collapse of Roman and Persian power, and as the point where that narrative fragments and breaks down. Does the Qur’an really date from the Prophet’s lifetime? Where, if not in Mecca, might he have lived? Why are the references to him in the early Caliphate so sparse, so enigmatic, and so late? The answers I have given to these questions are all of them unashamedly provisional—as I believe they have no choice but to be. That said, my ambition has been to sift and weigh the awesomely complex sources, to try and take account of all the many gaps and inconsistencies that exist within them, and then, albeit tentatively, to marshal them into something resembling a narrative. The context for this attempt, however, is not the traditional one, derived from the works of Muslims who lived whole centuries after Muhammad’s death, but rather from those who inhabited the world into which he was born: the empire-shadowed, God-haunted world of late antiquity.

Of the full dazzling colour, variety and complexity of this age, the chronicles written by Muslim historians give barely a hint. Infidels, when they appear at all, are made to speak and act precisely as though they were Arabs.⁷⁷ Roman emperors are transformed into mirror-images of Caliphs; Jewish scholars and Christian saints become straw men, shadowy and faceless.^h Fortunately, though, our understanding of the extraordinary melting-pot of imperial and religious traditions that provided the context for Islam’s evolution does not depend solely on Muslim chronicles. Far from it. While seventh-century sources are threadbare to the point of non-existent, those from the preceding two centuries offer sumptuous riches. We have, for the last time, narratives composed by writers who self-consciously regarded themselves as the heirs of the great historians of classical Greece; we have collections of letters, and digests of laws, and compilations of speeches; we have a gazetteer written by a merchant, and a work of anthropology written by a barbarian, and a seeming infinitude of works of Christian piety, from histories of the Church to lives of fabulously self-mortifying saints. In fact, by the standards of other periods of ancient history, we have an almost miraculous volume of evidence—something that historians of antiquity, like magpies flocking above a cache of diamonds, have seized upon with glee. As a result, over the past few decades, the study of the period has been revolutionised. A civilisation previously dismissed as exhausted, sterile and decaying has been comprehensively rehabilitated. What scholars emphasise now is less its decrepitude, more its energy, its exuberance, its inventiveness.

“We see in late antiquity,” as one of its foremost historians has put it, “a mass of experimentation, new ways being tried and new adjustments made.”⁷⁸ What emerges in the century or so after Muhammad as the religion called Islam is one consequence of this “mass of experimentation”—but there are a whole multitude of others too. The most significant of all these, of course, are Judaism and Christianity: faiths that by the time of Muhammad had taken on something like the form they wear today, but that had once themselves been swirls of beliefs and doctrines no less unformed than those professed by the Arabs in the first century of their empire. The story of how Islam came to define itself, and to invent its own past, is only part of a much broader story: one that is ultimately about how Jews, Christians and Muslims all came by their understanding of religion. No other revolution in human thought, perhaps, has done more to transform the world. No other revolution, then, it might be argued, demands more urgently to be put in proper context.

That is why a history of Islam’s origins cannot be written without reference to the origins of Judaism and Christianity—and why in turn a history of the origins of Judaism and Christianity cannot be written without reference to the world that incubated them both. The vision of God to which both rabbis and bishops subscribed, and which Muhammad’s followers inherited, did not emerge out of nowhere. The monotheisms that would end up established as state religions from the Atlantic to central Asia had ancient, and possibly unexpected, roots. To trace them is to cast a searchlight across the entire civilisation of late antiquity. From the dental hygiene of Zoroastrian priests to the frontier policy of Roman strategists; from fantasies about Alexander the Great in Syria to tales of buried books of spells in Iraq; from Jews who thought Christ the messiah to Christians who lived like Jews: all are pieces in the jigsaw. It would certainly make little sense to trace the course of the revolution that would climax with the forging of the Caliphate by starting with the revelations of the Muslim Prophet. Accordingly, we begin not in Mecca, nor even in Jerusalem, but in a land that was the wellspring for two incalculably fruitful convictions: that a human empire might be global; and that the power of an all-good god might be universal.

We begin in Persia.

^a We have three brief but contemporary inscriptions giving the Himyarite side of the story. Unsurprisingly, perhaps, these accuse the Christians of Najran of what today might be described as terrorism.

^b Or perhaps “Read!” According to Ibn Hisham, the recitation appeared before Muhammad in the form of writing on a brocaded coverlet.

^c This thesis, that Muhammad’s religion was a threat to the trade of the Quraysh as guardians of the Ka’ba, is nowhere explicitly mentioned in Muslim tradition, but is almost universally taken for granted in modern, Western biographies of the Prophet.

^d In some traditions, he is cast as the Prophet’s brother: Aaron to Muhammad’s Moses.

^e That Moses could not possibly have been the author of the first five books of the Bible was a conclusion that had first been drawn as far back as the eleventh century, by a Jewish physician employed at a Muslim court in Spain.

^f Not all Muslims have accepted the authenticity of the great collections of the Sunna: some, back in the past, rejected them out of hand, and some, still today, have collections of their own. Other Muslims, as early as the ninth century, rejected the reliability of hadiths altogether, arguing—rather in the manner of modern-day Western scholars—that they were all unreliable and fabricated.

^g Two verses, Qur’an: 7.157 and 29.48, are used to adduce the theory of Muhammad’s illiteracy. 7.157 refers to him as “ummi”: a word conventionally translated as “unlettered,” but which could also mean “lacking a scripture,” in the sense of being neither Jewish or Christian. Adding to the uncertainty is the fact that the Qur’an frequently refers to itself as a kitab, a book, while in 25.4–6, it is strongly implied that Muhammad could indeed read. Even more suggestively, Ibn Hisham has reports which imply that Muhammad could not merely read, but write.

^h It is only fair to point out that Christian historians were identically partisan. Just as infidels tended to be invisible in Muslim histories, so were pagans, back in the fourth and fifth centuries, no less invisible in histories written by Christians.