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

Making the Desert Bloom

Hagia Sophia was not, nor intended to be, a modest building: “Every structure there has ever been,” so one enthusiast gushed, “must cower before it.”¹ It was also, of course, the duty of mortals to cower before the god who was glorified there, and whose cross, fashioned out of brilliant gold, blazed from the monumental dome of the cathedral, to the awe and wonder of the worshippers far below. “Pantokrator,” the Romans of Constantinople termed Christ: “The Ruler of All.” In Hagia Sophia, and in churches across the Greek world, He was imagined as presiding over a dominion without limits, surrounded by an exquisitely graded hierarchy of angels and saints, unfathomably distant from the indignities of human existence. Precisely the kind of deity, in short, to appeal to Justinian.

But there were ways too of approaching Christ that did not require the sumptuousness of gold and purple. In 527, five years before work began on Hagia Sophia, a small boy named Simeon had trotted through the bazaars and shanty-towns of Antioch, out through the olive groves that stretched southwards of the city, and up the slopes of a nearby mountain. Its rugged heights were no place for a child, nor for anyone with a care for comfort. The wilderness was a realm of danger: the haunt of bandits, lions and bears. To settle amid its crags was to abandon all that made for civilisation, to become a monachos, or “one who lives alone.” Yet the fact was, of course, as the Christian people well understood, that no man was ever truly alone—no, nor woman either. Demons, like flies around a butcher’s stall, swarmed wherever there rose the stench of sin; angels, serried in fiery ranks, served as the legions of God. Veiled from the gaze of fallen humanity, they blazed no less brilliantly for that. Only a monachos—a “monk”—could hope to glimpse them. Those men and women who chose to abandon the perfumed filth of human company, to fix their gaze upon the heavens, to devote themselves exclusively to the service of God, might hope to become suffused with the fire of the Holy Spirit, flesh and bone though they were: “If you will, you can become all flame.”²

It took more than withdrawal from the world for a man or woman to attain this happy condition, however. One monk, asked how salvation could be attained, promptly stripped stark naked and raised his hands to the sky. “So should the monk be,” he declared. “Denuded of all things, and crucified.”³ But in a world where martyrdom was no longer an option, what precisely did it mean to be “crucified”? Here was a question fit to stimulate some truly spectacular feats of self-abnegation. Most monks were content to submit themselves to the communal discipline of a mone—a “monastery.” They would “strip for the contest, spending their days in physical toil and their nights without sleep in giving praise to the Lord.”⁴ Some, however, looking to go the extra mile, might make a point of mixing ashes into their gruel, or subsisting entirely on waste scraped off the soles of sandals, or living like cattle, chained to cowsheds, and feeding on grass. One particularly creative act of renunciation saw a woman confine herself to a cell with a spectacular riverside view, and then, for the remainder of her life, refuse even once to look out through the window. It required suffering as well as solitude to become a true athlete of God.

Yet when it came to the training—ascesis—required to attain a truly miraculous pinnacle of holiness, there were few who would have denied the palm to the “ascetics” of Syria. Spectacular feats of self-mortification had long been a speciality of the region. One particularly venerable tradition had seen pagans climb pillars—styloi—and stay there for a week at a time, “communing with the gods on high.”⁵ The bathing of Syria in the light of Christ, even though it had scoured the demons from their temples, had not banished the close association between pillars and access to the supernatural. In around AD 430, a whole century before the young Simeon of Antioch abandoned his home town, another Simeon—a shepherd—had climbed a sixty-foot column on the edge of the Syrian desert. There he had remained, precariously balanced, not for a week, but for thirty long years, until in due course his soul had been gathered up to heaven. The challenge aimed at the demons by this unprecedented feat had been quite deliberate. Simeon’s prodigious austerities had easily eclipsed anything achieved by the pagans. To a people only recently deprived of their ancient gods, the withered, worm-infested and quite fabulously hairy body of the “stylite” had served as an awesome manifestation of the power of their new deity.^a Reports of the miracles achieved by Simeon’s prayers had spread as far afield as Ethiopia and Britain. In Rome, his adoring fans had taken to pinning pictures of his pillar to their doorposts. By the time of his death, he had become, quite simply, the most famous man in the world.

The lesson taught by a thoroughbred stylite could hardly have been more emphatic. Sumptuously though great cities might be adorned by monuments to Christ, it was in the wilds that God was likeliest to be heard. Even a child, if sufficiently precocious, might look to part the veil that obscured the realm of the angels and become a vessel for the transfiguring power of the heavens. This was why, almost seven decades on from the death of his illustrious namesake, the young boy named Simeon abandoned his home in Antioch and headed into the wilderness. His aim too was to spend what remained of his life on top of a pillar. Heavenly approval of this youthful ambition was manifest; only a short while before Simeon’s arrival on the mountain, a local monk had been granted a spectacular vision of “a child dressed all in white, and a glowing column, both of them whirling around in the sky.”⁶ Sure enough, when the boy finally mounted his pillar, after a whole year of heavy-duty training, he was formidably steeled. Not even the demons tugging on his arms, not even the spread of ulcers on his legs, could distract him from his course. Day and night, in rain and blazing sunshine, he kept up his prayers. The infant ascetic was seven years old.

Time passed. As childhood turned to puberty, and puberty to adulthood, and still the demons could not tempt Simeon down from his pillar, his reward was often to see “a great mass of cloud like a carpet of brilliant purple” rolled out before him.⁷ This was the dimension of the celestial; and sure enough, angels would often appear to the saint, sometimes flanking Christ Himself, sometimes holding a snow-white parchment on which they would write the names of all those mentioned in Simeon’s prayers in blazing letters of gold. As reports of these visions spread, crowds began to mass before his pillar. Many were the miracles performed by the saint, “more numerous than the grains of sand in the sea.”⁸ The dumb and the blind were healed, as too were a man afflicted by unfeasibly large testicles, “like a pair of clay jars,”⁹ and another who suffered from chronic constipation, the consequence of “a demon camped out in his colon.”¹⁰ Above all, though, Simeon offered blessings to those who could normally expect to receive none: lepers, whores and children, always children. By contrast, towards the mighty, he was unbendingly stern—as well he might have been, for the rich of Antioch, even by the standards of the time, were notorious for their arrogance and cruelty.

Far from resenting this, however, the local elite took great pride in Simeon. As his fame spread, so a day-trip up the side of the mountain to gawp at him silhouetted on the summit became the height of chic. Simeon, who had fled Antioch for the wilderness, discovered that Antioch had followed him. The opportunity to glimpse the authentic radiance of holiness in the stylite’s emaciated and ragged form was simply too precious to waste, even for the very grandest. And perhaps this was just as well: for tourist attractions, after all, did not come cheap. Pilgrims, whether shuffling up the mountainside on leprous stumps or borne in gold-fringed palanquins, needed to be watered, fed, and housed. Inexorably, the longer that Simeon remained on his pillar, the more the rocks that had once surrounded it came to be replaced by impeccably well-dressed marble. The very rage with which the saint berated the rich served only to quicken the flow of gifts to his shrine. This might have appeared a paradox; but it was not. Nothing quite like power, after all, to make the nostrils of the mighty flare; and the power of the divine, the power that made of Simeon a veritable lightning rod of the supernatural, was like nothing else on earth.

Even in far-off Constantinople, where there had always been a tendency to dismiss Syrians as morbid and prone to hysteria, a bona fide stylite had fast become a must-have accessory. As early as 460, a mere year after the death of the original Simeon, one of his disciples had climbed a pillar just outside the capital. There he had remained for the next three decades, lecturing heretics on their duty to submit to the Council of Chalcedon and causing anyone who might jeer at him to explode. A succession of emperors had revelled in his austerities, journeying to the pillar to gawp at his sores “and perpetually boasting of the Saint, and showing him off to all.”¹¹ Nothing but the best for Constantinople; just as Constantine had beautified his capital with the plundered statues of pagan gods, his heirs looked to endow the city with the potent mystique of the Syrian ascetics. Indeed, one emperor’s agents had gone so far as to pilfer a few portions of the elder Simeon’s corpse from Antioch, where the saint’s relics were jealously guarded as the city’s most precious treasure. Even those reminders of the stylite that could not be transported to Constantinople had been ostentatiously graced with the marks of an emperor’s favour: for the once lonely pillar on which he had stood, halfway to the sky, had ended up flanked by marble hallways and covered by a colossal dome. The precious wellsprings of holiness, even when they existed on the empire’s frontiers, right on the margins of the desert, were far too precious not to be stamped as imperial.

Nevertheless, there was, in the acknowledgement by Constantinople that certain locations might rank as hallowed ground, just the hint of defeat. The “New Rome,” as its title suggested, had been founded on the presumption that the sacred was readily transferable. Almighty God, who had created the heavens and the entire earth, was not to be pinned down for ever to a single spot. All very well for pagans to imagine that groves, or springs, or rocks might be sacred, and travel on pilgrimage to grovel before them; but Christians were supposed to know better. The charge of the supernatural properly attached itself, not to places but to relics. Of these, Constantinople could boast a quite astounding abundance: for the reach of the emperor was long and grasping, as the guardians of Simeon had discovered to their cost. The heads of prophets, the bodies of apostles, the limbs of martyrs: the capital had bagged them all. Indeed, Constantinople’s array of relics was so incomparable that it lent her precisely what her rulers had always most craved for their capital: the authentic aura of a holy city. Yet, as the crowds who continued to cluster around the elder Simeon’s empty pillar suggested, there were some things that could not be imported. The same pilgrim who travelled to Constantinople or Antioch to pray before the saint’s relics might nevertheless still wish to rub the stone that had once borne the stylite’s stinking feet. Foul-smelling though the ascetics of Syria notoriously were, yet in the air that had once been breathed by Simeon there hung, so many Christians believed, a lingering perfume-trace of paradise.

And there were places on the fallen earth that needed no stylites to sanctify them: places that had been touched not by saints but by the presence of God Himself. While human flesh, whether on the tops of pillars or in desert cells, might still become interfused with the Holy Spirit, it had once been possible, back in the mists of time, for men to talk directly with the Almighty. Abraham, of course, was the proof of that: a man graced with the promise that he would become a father of many nations. To his wife, Sarah, though barren and old at the time, God had granted a son; and that son, Isaac, fathered in turn a son named Jacob. One night, this same Jacob met a mysterious stranger by a ford and wrestled with him “until the breaking of the day.” When dawn came and the man asked to be released, Jacob demanded a blessing from him in return; and the stranger, with studied ambiguity, answered, “Your name shall no more be called Jacob, but Israel, for you have striven with God and with men, and have prevailed.” And Jacob, who was now called Israel, found himself struck by a sudden realisation: “I have seen God face to face!”¹² Certainly, whoever the stranger might truly have been, his blessing would prove a momentous one. Twelve sons Jacob would father in all—the Children of Israel. These then travelled from Canaan to Egypt, where they and their descendants, gathered into tribes, proved themselves astoundingly fecund, “so that the land was filled with them.”¹³ Ultimately, so prolifically did the twelve tribes of Israel breed that Pharaoh, the King of Egypt, grew alarmed; and so he ordered them enslaved, “and made their lives bitter with hard service.”¹⁴ God, however, had not forgotten His promise to Abraham. As the instrument of His Chosen People’s salvation, He selected a man named Moses, a descendant of Israel who had been brought up in high privilege as an Egyptian—the foster-son of Pharaoh’s daughter, no less. Then, one day, seeing one of his countrymen under the lash, Moses struck the overseer down dead, and fled into the desert. There, while working as a shepherd, he came across a bush that was on fire: “And he looked, and lo, the bush was burning, yet it was not consumed.”¹⁵ The voice of God was in the fire; and it told Moses to return to Egypt and to demand of Pharaoh that he let the Children of Israel go. For, as the Almighty explained, “I have seen the affliction of my people who are in Egypt, and have heard their cry because of their taskmasters; I know their sufferings, and I have come down to deliver them out of the hand of the Egyptians, and to bring them up out of that land to a good and broad land, a land flowing with milk and honey.”¹⁶

Set as this episode was back in the distant reaches of time, and in the wilds of a tenantless desert, it might have been thought hardly the kind to have left much behind in the way of proofs. Christians, however, knew better. The echoes of the voice of God could never truly fade. When, in the fourth century AD, monks ventured into the barren wilderness that stretched to the east of Egypt, they arrived in due course at a narrow valley beneath the granite crags of two steepling mountains. They had not hesitated to identify this spot, from its palpable holiness, as the very place where Moses had seen the burning bush. Not only that, but they even discovered, in a yet further and clinching miracle, the bush itself, “still alive and putting out shoots.”¹⁷ The monks, confident that they were walking across rocks trodden by Moses, duly installed themselves in caves at the head of the valley. Over time, they added a small church, complete with a garden in which the bush itself, naturally enough, enjoyed pride of place. Two centuries later, with Justinian on the throne, the renown of the bleak and distant valley was secure across the Christian world. The emperor himself, nobly resisting the temptation to have the holy bush dug up and carted off to Constantinople, opted instead to stamp his mark on the desert by restoring and enlarging the monastery. In addition, at the base of the mountain, he built “a very strong fortress, and established there a considerable garrison of troops.”¹⁸ A touch of Roman power had been brought to the depths of the desert.

The ostensible justification given for this show of strength was the need to intimidate bandits. The walling of the bush served a further purpose, though: no one could see the fortifications and doubt that the hallowed earth enclosed within them was indeed impregnably Christian. This mattered: for Christians were not alone in laying claim to Moses as their own. The Children of Israel, whom the great prophet, in obedience to God’s instructions, had redeemed from slavery and led from Egypt, amid the thundering of flame-lit wonders, signs and deadly plagues, still had their descendants in the present: none other than the Jews. To the rabbis, Moses was both the fountainhead and the model of all their learning: the ultimate rabbi. Great though his achievement had been in securing the exodus, or “emigration,” of his people, even that had not been his most awesome feat. Leading the freed slaves through the desert to the east of Egypt, he had arrived at a mountain named Sinai; and “on the morning of the third day there were thunders and lightnings, and a thick cloud upon the mountain, and a very loud trumpet blast, so that all the people who were in the camp trembled.”¹⁹ Nothing daunted, Moses had vanished into the fiery depths of the cloud; and there, high on the peak of Sinai, he had spoken again with God, “face to face.”²⁰ The fruit of this conversation was the Torah itself. Portions of it were inscribed on tablets of clay and placed in a transportable chest named an “Ark,” which then accompanied and guided the Children of Israel on their journey through the desert. Other portions, though, were not written down, but instead kept hidden by Moses and taught exclusively to Joshua, his favourite pupil. This, at any rate, was what the rabbis taught—and as proof, they could point to the Talmud, which was, in their opinion, nothing less than the final revelation of the Torah that Moses had received on Mount Sinai, and which had been handed down, via assorted elders, prophets and scholars, directly to themselves.

Should Justinian ever have had this notion of a secret Jewish wisdom brought to his attention, he would doubtless have snorted with derision. Yet, he would also surely have been confirmed in his sense of just how urgent was the need to identify Moses, and all the prophets of the Old Testament, with his own faith. Above the valley where God had spoken from the burning bush there rose a particularly barren peak. The monks who lived in its shadow had long since decided that this was none other than Mount Sinai itself. The fort built at its foot ensured that no one could approach its summit without the knowledge of the monks themselves. Just in case there were any who might still miss the implications of this, they could always visit the church built by Justinian and admire a mosaic of the prophet pointing in awe at Christ. “On the mountain of the Father,” as an early enthusiast for the monks of Sinai exulted, “there stands a monument to the Son.”²¹ Moses was best commemorated not as a Jew, let alone as a rabbi, but as a Christian.

It was this that underpinned the monks’ claim to the scene of the prophet’s greatest triumph; just as it also gave to the universal Church its tenant’s stake in an even more precious prize. Moses himself had never made it to Canaan, the land that God had promised to Abraham; but the Children of Israel, after forty years of aimless wandering in the desert, had swept down upon their birthright to take possession of the land itself, and all its milk and honey. It was the story of what had happened next that constituted the greater part of both the Jewish and the Christian scriptures: the “Books”—or Biblia, in Greek. Unlike Mount Sinai, which it had required a band of intrepid monks to track down and identify, many locations with a starring role in the “Bible” had never been lost. Take, for example, Jericho, the first Canaanite city to be captured by the Children of Israel, after Joshua, their leader in succession to Moses, had ordered them to blow their trumpets and bring the walls tumbling down. Then there was Bethlehem, the birthplace of David, a shepherd boy who, in addition to rising to rule as king over all the tribes of Israel, had composed some of the most haunting passages in the Bible: songs and poems known as “psalms.” Most luminously of all, there stood Jerusalem, a city captured by David to serve him as his capital, and which had remained the stronghold of his dynasty until the calamitous descent upon Judah of the King of Babylon.

Yet all this, so Christians knew, had been only the opening acts of an ongoing drama. The Old Testament had been succeeded by the New, and ground trodden by Abraham, Joshua and David had been hallowed a second time by the footsteps of Christ Himself. In Jericho, He had healed a blind man, and in Bethlehem He had been born in a manger, and in Jerusalem He had been crucified and buried, and after three days had risen from the dead, and then, from the Mount of Olives, just outside the city, ascended to the heavens. Well, then, might Christians have felt proprietorial towards the scene of such cosmos-shaking events. As the self-designated heirs of Abraham and as the followers of Christ, they could feel themselves to have a double claim on it, after all. The land promised to God’s people was theirs, triumphantly theirs: a Holy Land.

Admittedly, there were many Christians, anxious about “restricting to a narrow strip of earth Him whom the heavens cannot contain,” who remained profoundly uncomfortable with this notion. The presence of God, so they sternly reminded the faithful, might be experienced in even the remotest, the most barbarous of lands: “Access to the courts of heaven is as easy from Britain as it is from Jerusalem.”²² Nevertheless, it is telling that the monk who issued this admonition—a translator of the Bible originally from the Balkans by the name of Jerome—did so from a cell outside Bethlehem. The year was 395, and already, as exemplified by Jerome’s own presence in the Holy Land, something unprecedented was afoot. Never before in history had so many pilgrims, from such a wide variety of starting-points, travelled such gruelling distances to the same destinations. Christians, unlike pagans, did not limit themselves to visiting their native shrines. Instead, from the moment when Constantine’s conversion had rendered the Holy Land safe for them to visit, a steady stream of Christian tourists had begun to head there from every corner of the Roman world. Pre-eminent among these had been the emperor’s own mother, Helena, who had set the trend for later pilgrims by virtue of being female, fabulously wealthy and obsessed with collecting relics. She herself, as befitted her imperial rank, had headed straight for Jerusalem, where she had scooped the most glamorous trophy of all: the very cross and nails used in Jesus’s crucifixion. But this sensational find represented only a starting point: for it had not taken locals long to wake up to the opportunities that might be provided them by the sudden arrival in their neighbourhood of a well-heeled Christian lady. Boom time for tour guides; and especially for those who knew where the bones of an Old Testament prophet might be uncovered, or perhaps an exercise book used by the infant Christ, or a robe once worn by the Virgin. The consequence of all this treasure-hunting had been not merely to fill the voracious reliquaries of Constantinople to bursting, but also to provide visitors to the Holy Land with an ever more impressive list of must-see destinations. After all, while a relic could be packed off easily enough to the capital, the same was hardly true of the site of its discovery. Once again, it was Helena who had most trail-blazingly demonstrated the implications of this. Rooting around in the foundations of a pagan temple after the True Cross, she had uncovered the sepulchre of Christ, no less: a thrilling example of just how spectacular the fruits of archaeology in the Holy Land might be. Two centuries later, with the seam of top-grade relics long since exhausted, there was barely an episode in the Bible that had not been identified with some specific pile of stones or patch of dust. It was hardly surprising, then, that pilgrims from every corner of the Christian world should have flocked to tour a landscape so imbued with the numinous. What had once been a trickle of visitors had swollen to become a flood. Their appearance in the Holy Land marked the arrival of a revolutionary new notion—that a specific place might be holy to peoples everywhere, no matter their place of birth.

And there were many Christians who came to the Holy Land not merely as visitors, but as settlers. Even Jerome, despite his occasionally sniffy attitude towards the local tourist industry, rejoiced in the multicultural character of Christian life there, and saw in it the fulfilment of God’s primordial promise: “What were His first words to Abraham? Go out, He says, from your land and from your kindred, and go to the land I will show you.”²³ While Constantinople, “the second Jerusalem,”²⁴ was ranked by Christians as the capital of the world, Jerusalem herself was prized as its centre. To walk the winding streets of the Holy City was to see people from every corner of the empire and beyond. In distant Sinai the monastery’s leaders were expected to be “learned in Latin, Greek, Syriac, Egyptian and Persian”²⁵ —but in Jerusalem Gauls, Armenians and Indians might need translators, too. Some of them might be lepers, some aristocrats, some scholars. Even a bona fide empress—Eudocia, the wife of Theodosius II—moved to the Holy City for a couple of decades in the middle of the fifth century. Nowhere else in the empire, with the possible exception of Constantinople itself, was more thorough-goingly cosmopolitan. Yet if Jerusalem was a city of immigrants, it hardly ranked as multi-faith. Few who lived there were immune to the suggestive power of a place that had witnessed the passion of Christ. A public reading from a gospel might be all it took to reduce them to sudden tears, displays of grief that would then ripple through the crowded streets, filling the colonnades and squares with wails and sobs. Certainly, those who lived in Jerusalem, and especially those who had moved there, had no doubt that they were better Christians for it. The sheer quality of the city’s virgins, “like fair flowers or priceless gems,”²⁶ was proof of that. Some, however, went further. By the sixth century, it had become a popular notion among the monks of Jerusalem, and of the Holy Land generally, that the rest of the faithful owed them a special debt of gratitude. Athletes of Christ, they served Him too as His particular bodyguards: “For, it is we, the inhabitants of this Holy Land, who keep it invulnerable and inviolable.”²⁷

Perhaps—but not exclusively so. Jerusalem, centre of the world though it may have been, and object of universal Christian devotion, was also, as it had been for five centuries and more, a possession of the Caesars—a city in a province named Palestine. It was hardly to be expected, then, that its Christian rulers would neglect the defences of such an incomparable jewel. Sure enough, a century or so after the conversion of Constantine, a great ring of walls was built to gird the Holy City. Yet the surest defences, it went without saying, were those raised not against mortal adversaries, but against supernatural foes. Jerusalem, which had once been just as pagan a city as Ephesus or Athens, filthy with idols and the smoke of sacrifices, had been systematically scoured clean of the occupying demons. In place of their temples, a great host of churches had risen. The process of renovation seemed a perpetual one. For as long as anyone living in Jerusalem could remember, the blows of hammers and chisels had provided perpetual accompaniments to the clanging of bells and the chanting of hymns. Justinian, predictably, ordered a new church commissioned by Anastasius to be completed in a particularly overweening style: so massive did it end up that entire streets had to be demolished before the blocks used in its construction could be transported to the site.

Yet, not even Justinian could hope to rival the holiest and most precious monument founded in Jerusalem by a Christian emperor. Helena, in addition to uncovering the sepulchre of Christ, had excavated the rock of Golgotha—the “Place of the Skull”—where He had suffered death. Although tomb and excavation-ground alike had been buried for centuries beneath a shrine to a particularly noxious demon, there could be no doubting the identification: for Helena had been shown the site by an angel in a dream.^b In 326, her son ordered a great domed church to be built over the site of Christ’s tomb, and nine years later it was consecrated: the Church of the Resurrection. Next to it, over the site of the crucifixion, another church was built. Together, these two edifices—pairing, as they did, the sites where Christ had died and then risen from the dead—constituted the absolute centre of the centre of the world: a single plot of earth around which the order of the cosmos, and time itself, revolved. Beneath a fissure in the rock of Golgotha, so Christians confidently believed, lay the tomb of Adam—the first man of all to suffer death. Abraham too, in obedience to a command from God that he should sacrifice Isaac, his beloved son, had journeyed to the same identical spot. But it had all been a test; and Abraham, even as he was raising his knife to strike Isaac where he lay bound upon an altar of stone, had been halted by an angel, who had provided him instead with a ram caught in a thicket. An unmistakable foreshadowing of what was to come: for aeons later, of course, it was not a ram that had been slain upon Golgotha, but the Son of God Himself. Who, then, could doubt that there was to be traced, in this awesome patterning of mysteries, the guiding hand of the Almighty? To stand before the rock of Golgotha, and to see there as well the altar on which Abraham had placed Isaac, and the tomb of the first man to die, was to know that there were contained many mirrors in the order of time: a truth that boded well for the future. A Christian Jerusalem at the heart of a Christian empire: here, surely, was the certain evidence of an order destined to endure until the end of things?