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

The Wolves of Arabia

Like sand borne on an easterly wind, hints of the strange and aberrant beliefs that simmered in the desert were occasionally still to be found even in the Holy Land itself. Some twenty miles south of Jerusalem, for instance, at a spot set among open fields named Mamre, pagans from beyond the frontiers of Palestine would gather every summer “to keep a brilliant feast.”⁶¹ The roots of this festival were quite fabulously ancient: for they had as their focus an oak that was the oldest tree in the world. Neither Jews nor Christians thought to dispute this sensational pedigree. Both were agreed that the tree was “as ancient as creation”⁶²—and that it had been a favourite of Abraham’s to boot. A well dug by the patriarch still stood beside it, and although the oak itself, thanks to the merciless attentions of Christian souvenir-hunters, had long since been hacked down to a stump, an unmistakable aura of holiness still attached itself to the mutilated trunk. In the first book of the Bible, it was recorded that Abraham, sitting in the shade of the oak, had played host to three mysterious strangers, who had delivered him the good news that his wife, Sarah, hitherto barren, was to bear him a son. Two of the strangers had then continued on their way; but the third, informing Abraham of His intention to wipe out Sodom, had stood revealed as none other than God Himself.

Nothing, then, could have been more offensive to Jews and Christians alike than the hosting of a festival at such a spot—and sure enough, both had made repeated efforts to redeem it from the polluted attentions of the pagans. As far back as the time of Jesus, a Jewish king had raised a large wall around both tree and well, with the aim of staking out the very place—the maqom—where Abraham “had stood before the Lord.”⁶³ Some three hundred years later, Constantine had gone one better by ordering a church to be constructed directly over the oak. As well he might have done: for Christians were agreed that the three strangers entertained by Abraham could only have been the Trinity, and that Mamre, as a result, had always been a place of “pristine sanctity, devoted to the worship of our Saviour.”⁶⁴ Certainly, in the stern judgement of Constantine, all pagan claims to the site were the merest falsehood and blasphemy. Stripped of all its obscene accumulation of idols and bloodstained altars, the oak stood revealed as what it had been way back in the time of Abraham: a thoroughly Christian tree.

The pagans, however, oblivious to this transcendent truth, had persisted in visiting Mamre. More than a century after Constantine had attempted to ban their summer festival, they were still flocking to the sacred oak, where they would sacrifice cockerels, pour wine and throw cakes into Abraham’s well, and ostentatiously abstain from sex. Such behaviour, at a time when paganism elsewhere in the Holy Land was being harried and bullied into extinction, required a deal of nerve. Nor was it greatly surprising that most of the festival-goers came from beyond the borders of Palestine. Indeed that they belonged to a people widely scorned across the Near East as “the most superstitious and ignorant in the world,”⁶⁵ and whose contempt for monarchs and their laws had long been notorious.

The Arabs, tribesmen who haunted the interminable wastes that stretched south of the Fertile Crescent, could boast a record of barbarism more venerable than the empires of either Persia or Rome. “Dwelling as they do in the distant desert, they know neither overseers nor officials”: a state of affairs so mind-bogglingly unnatural that even a king of Mesopotamia, back in the distant days when Solomon’s temple still stood in Jerusalem, had thought to make a note of it.⁶⁶ A thousand years on, opinions had barely improved. The Arabs appeared as reluctant as ever to put down roots. They were despised not merely as pagans, but as pagans who lived in tents. To an aristocrat in his palace, as to a peasant in his field, the inveterate shiftlessness of such nomads was both a menace and an affront. That the Arabs, in their disdain for the norms of civilisation, were possessed of an almost timeless quality of ferocity, like that of the deserts where they lurked, was widely taken for granted. Less than human, they were something more than beasts. In battle, it was not unknown for them to drink their victims’ blood, while even in their love-making, so it was darkly rumoured, “they were quite explosively violent—women as well as men.”⁶⁷ Nervous travellers venturing beyond the limits of cities and farms viewed the half-naked Arabs on their horses or camels as a menace no less deadly than the most ferocious desert predator: “For, like rapacious kites, which have only to catch sight of prey from on high to swoop down upon it with outstretched talons, they make off with whatever they can seize.”⁶⁸

An insult that would no doubt have delighted the Arabs themselves. To be as free and as feared as a bird of prey was, in many ways, everything they most desired. What other peoples condemned as shiftlessness, they prized as liberty. “I journeyed with a brown whip, its handle bare of its original thonging, with its lash hanging from its loop”:⁶⁹ to ride like this, alone with the horizon infinite all around, was to know oneself, with a rare and vaunting conviction, the utter opposite of a slave. Wherever Arabs gathered, whether in the shade of an embroidered tent or around a fire beneath the stars, they were sure to sing the praises of wine, slim-waisted women, and warriors who acknowledged no master. The nomads of the desert might have been despised—but they were also feared. When the Persians charged Dahag, the demon king, with having been one of their number, and the Romans condemned them for their slaving and kidnapping as agents of the Devil, the Arabs were being paid a form of tribute. Better a bandit than a dependant, after all. Who were the subjects of the Shahanshah or of Caesar to presume otherwise?

In truth, though, the Arabs were not quite the lone wolves of their victims’ paranoia. Their realm was an unremittingly harsh one, and no man could possibly survive amid the sand, salt flats and wind-weathered lava beds without others to watch out for him. Even to the hardiest and haughtiest warrior, family was everything. “We follow the ways of our forefathers, those who kindled wars and were faithful to the ties of kinship.”⁷⁰ This resounding brag expressed the very essence of an Arab’s identity. Extended networks of relatives blurred seamlessly into tribe. All men who could claim descent, however implausibly, from a single imam—a founding father—were to be reckoned his sons. Bound by a single inheritance of custom and achievement, of Sunna, warriors who might otherwise have torn each other to shreds were enabled to unite without loss of face, and turn on all those neighbouring bands of rivals who might have done the same. The great joy of an Arab’s life, even more than the pillaging of caravans or the slaughtering of camels in honour of some ivory-skinned beauty, was to feud violently with another tribe. Much was bound to derive from it: honour, excitement, maybe even a well or two. That there was an essential pointlessness to such contests, an unvarying and remorseless quality much like that of the desert itself, did not in any way lessen the enjoyment of those who indulged in them. The great deeds performed by a tribe’s ancestors, rehearsed as they were in glowing, if suspiciously interchangeable, verses by its poets, offered its warriors both backdrop and inspiration. Memories of ancient battles, if gilded with sufficient imagination, might serve to dignify even the most squalid scuffle. As a result, among the Arabs, past and present were barely distinguishable. While it might be possible for one particularly recent and stirring episode to serve the tribe who commemorated it as a line drawn in the otherwise interminable sands of time, all it needed was for some new victory to be won, some new livestock or women to be seized, and the line would promptly be erased and quite forgotten. Certainly, the lore that every tribe lovingly preserved about itself was concerned with nothing so tedious as chronology. It was known quite simply as ayyam—“days.”

Yet in truth, even in the remotest stretches of the desert, the Arabs were never wholly immune to the tug of great events in the world beyond. The ebb and flow of great power politics had even, on occasion, come to alter their entire way of living. Time was, for instance, when Arab merchants had been famously sweet-smelling: for frankincense, an aromatic spice that had once been burned in near-industrial quantities on pagan altars, was cultivated exclusively in Himyar, on the southernmost tip of their peninsula. Back in the age of Solomon, the queen of this incense-growing land—Sheba, as it had then been known—had visited the great king in Jerusalem, trailing perfumed clouds of glory in her wake; while more recently, among the Romans, its inhabitants had been famed as the happiest and most prosperous of men. All that, however, had changed with the toppling of the pagan gods. Christ demanded no incense. The trade between Rome and the frankincense growers of Himyar had duly withered. The Arabs, no longer renowned for their perfumes, became notorious instead for their reek of leather and camel shit. Caravans might still toil across the desert, but those who rode alongside them now tended to play the demeaning and insecure role of middle men. That it was worth the while of camels freighted with all the luxuries of India—pepper, gemstones and castrated pageboys—to plod their way across the sands towards Palestine and Syria owed everything to the whims of distant emperors, to the calculations of bureaucrats. A treaty renegotiated here, a customs post closed down there, and everything would abruptly change. Merchants, camel-drivers, bandits: all might find themselves ruined overnight.

Prey as they were to such insecurity, there had always been some Arab tribes eager to set their fortunes on a firmer footing. Some, like the Nabataeans, a people who occupied the southern fringes of Palestine, had exploited their position between the trade routes of the desert and the Mediterranean to create a fabulously wealthy commercial hub, centred on their pink-hued capital of Petra. Others, looking to take a short cut to power, had aimed to infiltrate the cities of other peoples and then to seize their commanding heights: a policy of playing cuckoo in the nest that explained why the kings of Edessa had been of Arab descent. Nevertheless, the independence of such states, menaced as it was by the domineering shadow of Rome, had always been a rickety thing. As early as AD 106, the kingdom of Nabataea had been gobbled up entire, and reconstituted as the province of Arabia—and although Edessa held out against formal assimilation into the empire for a further 150 years, it had never been left in any doubt as to its thoroughly subordinate status. Riches and sophistication: these, it appeared, might certainly be obtained by the Arabs. The price, however, was a high one: the loss of honour, of liberty, of all that made an Arab.

How, then, was this awkward circle to be squared? In 270, just a few decades after the annexation of Edessa, there had arrived a spectacular straw on the wind. Zenobia, the queen of an oasis city named Palmyra, midway between Antioch and Ctesiphon, had made a pitch for nothing less than the whole of the Roman Near East. Syria, Egypt and much of Asia Minor all fell to the sudden onslaught of her armies. Granted, her moment in the sun was fleeting: defeated outside Antioch in 272, she was taken to Rome, and paraded as a living trophy, while her desert capital was abandoned to slow decay and oblivion. The true significance of her comet-like blaze, however, had lain less in its trajectory than in the circumstances that had made it possible. Zenobia’s own defeat and humiliation had been paralleled, twelve years previously, by the fate of the Emperor Valerian. His captor, of course, had been a rival monarch, the lord of a dominion no less intimidatingly formidable than Rome’s: the recently established empire of Iranshahr. By using a Caesar as his mounting block, Shapur had proclaimed—in terms that no Roman emperor would ever again be able to discount—the arrival of an authentic equal upon the global scene. For the Arabs too, the implications of the rise to greatness of the House of Sasan had been momentous. The deserts where they lived had abruptly come to constitute the frontier not of one superpower but of two. Situated as they now were on the world’s deadliest geopolitical fault-line, they would never again be able to claim even the most precarious neutrality. Yet the deadly grinding of the twin tectonic plates of Rome and Iranshahr, even as it crushed for ever the independence of such cities as Edessa and Palmyra, spelled opportunity as well as calamity for upwardly mobile Arabs. In a war zone, after all, what more precious commodity than bands of seasoned warriors? Rome and Persia alike: both had urgent need of swords. The Arabs found themselves ideally placed to hawk their services to the highest bidder.

To the Romans, of course, there was nothing remotely novel about the employment of barbarians. As along the Rhine prior to the collapse of the western empire, so along the borders of Syria and Palestine, the imperial authorities were well versed in the hiring of tribes as confederates: as foederati. Even prior to the emergence of the Persian threat, back in the second century AD, the Romans had successfully bribed and cajoled a number of tribes into serving as a desert police force; and the example of this confederation, the Thamud, would long be commemorated by Arab poets.⁷¹ Understandably so, perhaps: for what it had served to demonstrate was that even the proudly and inveterately fractious tribes of the desert might, under certain circumstances, be forged into a shirkat—a “partnership.”⁷² Such a lesson, against the backdrop of escalating superpower confrontation, had certainly not gone unnoted by ambitious chieftains. Horizons had steadily expanded, wild fantasies taken wing. In 328, for instance, one Arab warlord had been buried beneath a tombstone that grandiloquently proclaimed him to have been “King of all the Arabs.” A title no less bogus than it was unprecedented—but most suggestive all the same. As Rome and Iranshahr competed ever more vigorously for the services of the desert tribes, so the potential pickings on offer for the tribesmen themselves had indeed grown steadily more lucrative. Although the confederation of the Thamud had long since imploded, having been struck down in sensational fashion, so Arab lore claimed, by a thunderbolt, other foederati had fast emerged to take its place.^f It is telling that Roman authors, from the fourth century onwards, began to use a new word to designate the Arabs, one that seems ultimately to have derived from shirkat: “Saracens.”⁷³ Although the Romans themselves appear to have been wholly ignorant of the original meaning, and although the stereotype they had of the “Saracens” remained the reassuringly traditional one, of nomads, bandits and savages, the use they made of the new name did nevertheless hint at a new and emerging order. In the yawning deserts between Palestine and Mesopotamia, Arab tribesmen were no longer operating merely on a freelance basis. While they still indulged in their traditional pastimes—slaving, cattle rustling, raiding caravans and frontier posts—they increasingly did so as agents of the rival superpowers. “To the Arabs on both sides,” so the twitchy inhabitants of the Fertile Crescent began to observe, “war between Persia and Rome is a source of very great profit indeed.”⁷⁴

Nowhere better illustrated this than a town famed throughout Arabia as the epitome of power and glamour. Hira stood only a few miles south of Sura, on the southern flank of Mesopotamia; but it might as well have been a world away from the lecture halls of the rabbis. Situated in an oasis between the Euphrates and the desert, it served in every sense as a place of hybrids. Although a linchpin of Sasanian defences, the great bulwark that blocked access from the south to Ctesiphon, it was commanded not by a Persian but by an Arab. The Banu Lakhm—“Lakhm’s Sons”—had long been based in the region, where they had enjoyed a profitable existence as mercenaries in the service of the Shahanshah. Even under Peroz, despite all the tempting convulsions of his reign, they had remained loyal to the Persian crown. The decision had been a thoroughly calculating one—and in due course it had reaped spectacular reward. Kavad, ever innovative, had graced the Lakhmids with an unprecedented promotion when, shortly after the outbreak of war with Rome in 502, he appointed their youthful and brutally able chieftain, Mundhir, to rule as king over all the scattered Arab tribes that were then confederated to Iranshahr. Hira—a sprawl of settlements that alternated mud-brick walls with encampments, gardens with desert scrub, and wheat fields with herds of camels—provided the Lakhmid chieftain with the perfect showcase for this trend-setting fusion of royalty and banditry. Not for nothing, in the Lakhmids’ own language, did the city’s name mean “camp.”⁷⁵ Mundhir, who spent his time there living alternately in a palace and a tent, aimed to combine the best of Persian sophistication with the noblest traditions of his own people. Profits from plunder were spent not only on beefing up his offensive capabilities but on the manifold glories and pleasures of life as an Arab. From camel-archers to poets, brigands to dancing girls, Hira boasted them all. Even the odd scribe was to be found there: for the city, so it was plausibly claimed, was where the Arabs had first learned to put their language into writing. Unsurprisingly, it attracted a steady stream of migrants from across the desert, all hungry for the patronage that Mundhir could so swaggeringly provide. “A day and a night at Hira,” it was said, “are better than a whole year of medicine.”⁷⁶

No single place in the Roman sphere of influence could quite rival the dazzle of this appeal. That this was so, however, reflected not any lack of contacts between the Arabs and Rome, but rather their sheer range and antiquity. Along the western fringes of the desert, no particular exoticism attached itself to the notion that the realms of the nomad and the city might be blended. The Nabataeans, and many other tribes too, had been citizens of Rome for centuries. One of their number had even risen to become Caesar: Philip, the same emperor who had presided over the capital’s millennial celebrations, had hailed from a city on the frontier, to the east of the Sea of Galilee, and been derisively nicknamed “the Arab.” The existence of settlements such as Philip’s home town right on the margins of the desert were evidence enough of the whole-hearted relish with which the Arabs, no less than any other people of the empire, might embrace the pax Romana and settle down.

Nowhere, however, was this more apparent than in the Negev, the arid wilderness that stretched between the Sinai and Petra, and where, even as Mundhir was establishing his regime in Hira, vines and olives were being conjured from the sand. Take one of the paved roads—the strata—that criss-crossed the region, and in due course an entire city would materialise on the horizon, rising like a mirage above the desolation, a paradise of farmland, stone houses and baths. A miracle? Hardly. It was only through the most back-breaking labour that the ceaseless battle against the sands could hope to be won, only with the most exhaustive maintenance of cisterns, aqueducts and dams. Yet the cities of the Negev, for all that the water might sometimes taste brackish, and the scrub-flecked desert stretch away barren in every direction, did truly serve as outposts of the wider world beyond. Even in the most remote, an isolated settlement by the name of Nessana that served pilgrims on the road to Sinai as a final way-stop, there were bureaucrats who wrote in Greek and would-be lawyers who studied Latin. More than two centuries after Constantine had filched the Palladium for his new capital, there was even a copy of the Aeneid in the local library. In Nessana, time, as well as distance, might be dissolved: for the myths of which Virgil had sung were older by far than himself, older even than Rome. On frayed papyri in the depths of a lonely desert, the halls of Mount Olympus—where the gods of Greece had reclined on exquisite couches, partnered by ox-eyed goddesses, and served wine by eternally beautiful youths—still preserved a spectral hold.

Given enough time, then, it seemed that even “the wolves of Arabia”⁷⁷ might be domesticated into lawyers or literary critics. Certainly, from the perspective of such cities as Nessana—where the prodigious array of hydraulic works was accompanied by a quite striking absence of fortifications—it did genuinely appear as though the desert had been tamed. A comforting reassurance, perhaps—except that, in truth, the imperial authorities had no desire to see every last Saracen de-fanged. Along the limits of the empire, where Mundhir’s Lakhmids were conducting ever more audacious raids, there was an urgent need for attack-dogs of their own. Many a Roman base might boast an encampment of Saracens: a hira. Other concentrations of Arab foederati—entire cities of tents, thronged with a shifting population of warriors, horses and camels—lay under the command of tribal chieftains rather than Roman officers. The reign of Justinian would see the largest of these—a teeming settlement east of the Golan Heights called Jabiya—become to Syria and Palestine what Hira was to Ctesiphon: a key defensive stronghold. The tribesmen who lived there—the Banu Ghassan—were recognisably the mirror-image of the Lakhmids: for the “Sons of Ghassan” combined a ferocious loyalty to their imperial patrons with a haughty Arab chauvinism. Certainly, the Latin spoken in Jabiya owed little to the study of Virgil. The phrases familiar to the Arabs of the frontier derived not from poets but from the army. Over the course of the previous centuries, the sheer awesome immensity of Rome’s military apparatus had stamped itself indelibly upon the language spoken by the foederati. So it was, for instance, that the camps of the frontier-system—the castra—had provided the Arabs with their own word for fortress: qasr. So it was too that the strata, the paved roads built by Roman military engineers to link each camp along the frontier, had bequeathed their name to the entire desert south of Palmyra. Indeed, such was their impact upon the foederati that sirat—the form that the original Latin word had come to take in Arabic—could signify almost any kind of path.⁷⁸ The strata, those great gashes of gravel and stone scored in straight lines across even the most unforgiving of landscapes, had become for the Arabs the very quintessence of a highway.

Not that they themselves, of course, had much need of paving stones. What would their record of banditry have been, after all, without a talent for going off-road? In early 529, when Mundhir suddenly appeared in northern Syria, looting and burning almost to the walls of Antioch, the leaden-footed response of the provincial authorities was little different to that of some hapless farmer finding his sheep-pen being cleaned out. “For with such speed did he move, and with such ruthless calculation, that invariably he would be gone with his loot before the military authorities could even discover what was going on, let alone arrive to stop it.”⁷⁹ Fire of this order could only hope to be fought with fire; and Justinian knew it. A few months after Mundhir’s rampage through Syria, he crowned an Arab all of his own. His choice, predictably enough, had fallen upon the chieftain of the Banu Ghassan, a youthful but already seasoned warlord by the name of al-Harith—or, as he was known by his patrons, Arethas. Summoned from Jabiya to Constantinople, the Ghassanid prince was splendidly arrayed in the white silken cloak of Roman monarchy and a bejewelled coronet.⁸⁰ His promotion bore witness to Justinian’s customary eye for talent. Arethas, no less than Mundhir, was a man of boldness, charisma and vision. What was more, he positively revelled in a blood feud. Before long, the two warlords’ struggle had come to possess its own furious and deadly rhythm, as relentless as it was personal. To no one’s great surprise, the signing in 532 of a treaty between Justinian and Khusrow, for all its ambition to establish “an eternal peace”⁸¹ between the two empires, did little to dampen the mutual hatred of their respective Arab clients. Ghassanid and Lakhmid: both, across the desert sands, continued to eyeball each other.

Nor was it merely their political loyalties, or even their personal vanities, that rendered their mutual hatreds so unblinking. Neither Arethas nor Mundhir had any doubt that they were engaged in a conflict that was more than earthly. If Christians saw in the desert the ultimate arena, where athletes of God might test themselves to the limits of their endurance against entire armies of demonic adversaries, then it certainly needed no baptism for an Arab to recognise in it a realm alive with spirits. Many of these—whether borne on a scorching wind or haunting a bone-littered salt flat—were malevolent in the extreme; but not all were, by any means. Some—such as the owls that rose from the heads of men slain in battle—served as the guardians of individual warriors, while others stood watch over particular places. The favour of the divine might be experienced wherever there was water, or shade, or merely a landscape of startling beauty. The Arabs had little need of idols, let alone temples, to alert those who approached a god of his presence. Focus of their awe was much more likely to be a natural feature: if not a tree, as at Mamre, then a spring, or a mountain-peak, or a rock. Always, however, there was only the one certain measure of holiness. A god could be reckoned no god who did not on occasion keep his sanctuary free of violence. At certain times, in certain places, tribes who might otherwise have slaughtered one another with ferocious abandon would assemble upon ground staked out as hallowed—haram—and there join in festivities quite as joyous and peaceable as those staged every summer at Mamre. Of the Arabs’ major shrine, which lay surrounded by palm trees somewhere in the desert south of Palestine, and where the local people were reported to gather twice a year for a whole month or more at a time, it was rumoured “that even the wild beasts live in peace with men, and among themselves.”⁸² Not, however, that pacifism was necessarily on the agenda the whole year round. The gods of the desert, away from their shrines, rarely objected to bloodshed. On occasion, they might positively demand it. At Hira, for instance, there stood two stones sacred to a god named Dushara, which his worshippers would regularly make sticky with gore.⁸³ A second deity, al-’Uzza—the “Mighty Queen”—was graced with an even more spectacular draught of blood when, in 527, Mundhir sacrificed no fewer than four hundred Christian virgins in her honour. Such a goddess—one able to consecrate the soil of the Lakhmid capital as haram while simultaneously sponsoring the most flamboyant atrocities—could hardly have been better suited to the warlord’s needs.

Yet there remained something strangely pallid about her, and Dushara too, and all the various gods of the desert. Many, to their worshippers, were little more than names. Loyalty, as a result, was rarely a feature of Arab devotions. A deity who failed a tribe in battle, or neglected to keep it in food, or scared away the camels, would be dumped without a moment’s hesitation. Many were the oases where there stood altars “old in years, bearing inscriptions in ancient letters of unknown tongues,”⁸⁴ raised to gods whose very names had been forgotten. Temples would cheerfully be used to pen goats.⁸⁵ To Christian scholars—whose dread of demons such as Artemis was often a form of reluctant tribute paid to their inherent glamour—the Arabs’ gods seemed reassuringly dull. Even attempts to condemn them risked making them more interesting than they were. When Epiphanius, the same energetic cataloguer of heresies who had condemned the Ebionites, turned his beady eye on Dushara, he reported that the god’s worshippers, in a blasphemous parody of Christian belief, believed the deity to have been born of a virgin—a ka’iba. The bishop, however, had misheard: Dushara was not a god of a ka’iba but of a ka’ba—a “cube.” The allusion was to the stone, black and uncarved, that the Nabataeans worshipped as an incarnation of the god, somewhere in a shrine to the south of the Dead Sea.⁸⁶ Dushara certainly had nothing so sophisticated as a virgin mother.

Meanwhile, many Arabs were turning to the worship of a god who did. Nabataean cities had grown crowded with churches; and even in the wilds of the desert, beyond the reach of either emperor or bishop, whole tribes were turning to Christ. There was often a fair degree of opportunism in this: for it was well known that the Romans would only ever bestow their patronage upon Arabs who ranked as fellow Christians. Yet, the Ghassanids—and Arethas especially—were the decided opposite of lukewarm. They refused, on principle, to abandon the distinctively Monophysite character of their faith. They built, resplendently solid amid the tents of their encampment at Jabiya, a massive church. They paraded, in their ongoing vendetta against the Lakhmids, a devotion to Christ that was quite as militant as Mundhir’s loyalty to al-’Uzza. Granted, the Ghassanids did not think to offer up virgins in sacrifice—but neither did they ever doubt, as they hacked down their pagan adversaries, that their swords were touched by the authentic fire of heaven.

And who was to say that they were wrong? Time was when any notion that the Saracens might have been blessed by the particular favour of God would have been greeted with hilarity—but lately, in the bringing of the desert tribes to Christ, there had been hints, just perhaps, of the workings of some broader, more mysterious providence. Many were the wonders, after all, that had assisted with their conversion. The presence in the desert of so many saints, so many Spirit-charged men of God, had certainly helped to deliver a steady stream of miracles to the Saracens. Their barren had been given children, and their sick had been restored to health: a record of medical achievement that no pagan could begin to rival. Stylites were particularly popular; and many were the tribes who would gather to gawp at them and their austerities in wide-eyed stupefaction. To Christians, most of whom had been brought up to loathe and dread the Saracens, the spectacle of desert nomads smashing idols before the pillar of a saint, pledging themselves loudly to Christ and even, in the ultimate act of renunciation, “vowing to forgo the flesh of donkey and camel,”⁸⁷ might be cause for considered reflection. One such, a bishop from Antioch by the name of Theodoret, had been brought to conclude that the Saracens, despite their illiteracy and their taste for slumming it in tents, were “endowed with an intelligence lively and penetrating, and a judgement fully capable of discerning truth and refuting falsehood.”⁸⁸ He had seen whole crowds of them gathered before the pillar of the original stylite, Saint Simeon the Elder himself—and had marked the effect. To a people wild and free such as the Saracens prided themselves on being, the show of a man prostrating himself before God, as Simeon had done, over and over again, might at first have appeared demeaning; but not after they had watched him persist with it for days and nights at a time. In submission, so the spectacle had taught them, lay the surest path to God. Saracens, even Saracens, might be brought to grasp that truth.

But there was an additional, and more haunting, reason why scholars such as Theodoret should have taken a particular interest in the Saracens: they were the only barbarians who featured in the Bible. Isaac had not been Abraham’s sole son; nor Sarah his sole bed-partner. Prior to the dramatic appearance of the Almighty at Mamre, the barrenness of the patriarch’s wife had prompted him to take as a concubine her maid, an Egyptian by the name of Hagar. Sure enough, the slave-girl had borne Abraham a son; but Sarah, bitter and jealous, had driven the mother and her newborn baby out into the desert. There an angel had appeared to Hagar and told her that Ishmael, her child, was destined to prove “a wild ass of a man, his hand against every man and every man’s hand against him”⁸⁹—and the father of a great people. But which people? The answer to that, the clues being as glaring as they were, was self-evident. The Children of Ishmael, that “wild ass of a man”: who were these, if not the Arabs? Certainly, such an identification had long been accepted as fact.⁹⁰ And the potential implications of this Hagarene bloodline? They, by and large, had been left to hang. Perhaps, however, they should not have been. Like Isaac, so it was recorded in Holy Scripture, Ishmael had been circumcised by Abraham’s own hand; and, like Jacob, he had fathered twelve sons. Suggestive markers of the favour of God, surely? That, at any rate, was what numerous Saracens had begun to ask. Theodoret himself had cited the example of the nomads who roamed the wilds east of Antioch: “for, in that desert live those who are proud to derive their descent from their ancestor Ishmael.”⁹¹

Other Arabs, though, were not so sure. Hagar hardly ranked as the classiest of ancestors, after all. A slave-girl and a brood-mare, she had been a refugee to boot: driven not once but twice into exile by a resentful Sarah. The second occasion had followed the birth of Isaac, when Ishmael and his hapless mother had been obliged to take up residence “in the wilderness of Paran.”⁹² The location of this particular desert was much debated, with some scholars, including Saint Paul himself, identifying it with the Sinai. The overwhelming consensus, however, was that it could only have been the Negev. No other wilderness stood closer to the sites most associated with Abraham: Mamre, and the Church of Saint Lot, and Hebron, where the patriarch lay buried in a cave with Isaac and Jacob. Certainly, the Arabs of the Negev, when they accepted baptism, appear to have had a particular enthusiasm for naming themselves “Abraham”—as though to remind their fellow Christians that they, unlike other converts, had been blessed by the marks of God’s favour long before the time of Christ.⁹³ Yet this pedigree, even so, was a potentially awkward one for them to flaunt. How, after all, were the Arabs to lay claim to a primal inheritance from Abraham without also acknowledging their descent from a slave-girl? A measure of embarrassment, perhaps, was only natural. So much so, in fact, that it seems to have led one scholar, a contemporary of Theodoret’s by the name of Sozomen, to offer a particularly ingenious explanation for the origin of the word “Saracen.” “Mortified by the servile character of Hagar,” he explained, “the Ishmaelites decided to conceal the opprobrium of their origin by adopting a name which would imply that they were descended instead from Sarah, the wife of Abraham.”⁹⁴

An implausible theory—but a telling one all the same. Sozomen came from near Gaza, between the Mediterranean and the Negev, and was an experienced observer of the region. He had travelled to Mamre, for instance, and witnessed the crowds that gathered there: he knew full well that it was not only Christians who reverenced Abraham, but Jews and pagans too. This led him, in contrast to Theodoret, to contemplate a quite hideous possibility. What if the Saracens’ knowledge of their ancestry did not necessarily lead them to Christ? What if it led them in a different direction altogether?

After all, their origin being what it is, they practise circumcision like the Jews, refrain from the use of pork like the Jews, and observe many other Jewish rites and customs. That they deviate at all from the Laws of the Jewish people can only be ascribed to the lapse of time, and to the influence upon them of other, pagan peoples.

⁹⁵

It was a devastating insight—and had an obvious corollary. Cleanse the Arabs of their paganism, and it might not be a Christian people at all that emerged from beneath the ordure, but something alarmingly different: whole tribes of Jews. In fact, according to Sozomen, this had already happened: “There are those of them who, by coming into contact with Jews, learn the truth of their origins, and so return to the ways of their kinsmen, and are persuaded to adopt Jewish customs and laws.”⁹⁶ Who precisely these Jews might be, Sozomen did not think to say; but it certainly suggested that Christianity, beyond the reaches of Roman control, was not the only option available to Arabs embarked on a spiritual quest.

Or indeed to Arabs who wished simply to dig in their heels and defy the superpower. In 524, at a time when Roman ambassadors were closeted with Mundhir, negotiating the release of two prominent prisoners, a delegation of emissaries from the distant kingdom of Himyar arrived unexpectedly at the summit. These ambassadors, to the Romans’ horror, brought news of an atrocity fit to put even those of Mundhir in the shade: the wholesale slaughter of the Christians of Najran. Even more terrifyingly, Yusuf, the Himyarite king, had sent a proposal of alliance to his Lakhmid counterpart: one that he suggested be sealed with the blood of the Christians of Hira.

Out of the blue, the ambassadors from Constantinople found themselves confronted by a nightmare of threateningly global proportions. An alliance of pagan and Jewish interests, forged well beyond the reach of Roman arms, was too hellish to be countenanced. With Iranshahr in firm control of the Persian Gulf, trade links to India were already being steadily asphyxiated; and now, with a Jewish kingdom established beside the Red Sea straits, there was pressure coming to bear on a second vital windpipe. The menace, however, was more than merely material. The Jewish character of Himyar was no mere pretension or show. Yusuf, although he had seized power by toppling a Christian regime, was not, by any means, the first Jew to rule the kingdom. In fact, there had been Jewish monarchs in Himyar for almost as long as there had been Christian emperors in Rome. In 440, when a massive dam had been repaired at Marib, the ancient capital of Sheba, the king had publicly dedicated it to the God of Israel: Rahmanan—“The Merciful.”⁹⁷ The same identical title, as it happened, was one much bandied about in the Talmud; nor was it surprising that the rabbis of Palestine, resentful as they were of their Christian masters, took a good deal of interest in the Himyarite monarchy. Granted, the enthusiasm of Yusuf and his predecessors for aping King David was hardly one of which they could entirely approve; and it may be that the presence of rabbis from Tiberias at his court reflected a desire on their part to temper some of his more flamboyant excesses. That, however, was not how it appeared to the local Christians, who predictably blamed the holocaust at Najran on the machinations of the rabbis—nor, of course, to the fretful Roman authorities.

To the profound relief of Constantinople, though, no sooner had the danger of an alliance between Hira’s pagans and Himyar’s Jews flared up than it was successfully being extinguished. Mundhir, far removed from Himyar, was bought off easily enough. Then, even as one Roman embassy returned in triumph from Hira, another set off for the kingdom that lay directly opposite Himyar, and which by great good fortune just happened to be Christian: Ethiopia. Not that the country’s king was entirely without his drawbacks. The “Negus,” in addition to being a Monophysite, was also quite insufferably conceited: for it was his claim, based as it was on a presumed descent from Solomon and the Queen of Sheba, to rank as the world’s pre-eminent Christian monarch. Under normal circumstances, of course, the ambassadors of Caesar would have laughed this pretension to scorn; but the circumstances were hardly normal. A treaty was duly patched up. When the Ethiopians launched their invasion of Himyar, they made the crossing in a borrowed Roman fleet. In the wake of Yusuf’s overthrow and death, the conquered kingdom was transformed into an Ethiopian protectorate and Roman merchants were once again free to use its harbours and trading stations. Meanwhile, at Najran, a domed monument named the Ka’ba, on account of its cuboid base, was raised above the ruins of the cathedral: a memorial to the priests and virgins left slaughtered by Yusuf.

All of which, back in Constantinople, could be viewed with tremendous satisfaction. Imperial policy towards the Saracens appeared to be in excellent shape. Irrespective of the pestiferous brews of heresy and insurrection that might occasionally bubble up beyond the frontier, the Roman state clearly had the wherewithal—and the reach—to deal with them all. After the successful pacification of Himyar, it was evident that the Roman Empire remained what it had always been: a global superpower.

“Dominion without limit”: it seemed that the ancient maxim still held good.

^a Long after Simeon’s death, it was his hairiness which particularly enabled people to recognise him when he appeared to them in visions.

^b What is today known as the Church of the Holy Sepulchre was rebuilt in the eleventh century after the original was destroyed by a messianic Egyptian Caliph, and it now contains the rock of Golgotha as well as the tomb of Christ. Whether either of these sites is authentically what Christian tradition has for so long presumed them to be is much debated. Ironically, the probability is that Helena’s excavations, and her son’s subsequent building works, served to obliterate memories that had been preserved by local Christians of the original sites.

^c The word Ioudaismos is overwhelmingly confined to Christian texts—most of which date from after the conversion of Constantine. “Judaism,” in the sense that it is used in modern English, was a Christian invention.

^d This is a translation of the biblical “Adommim.” According to Jerome, it was on this road that the traveller in the famous parable of the good Samaritan “fell among thieves.”

^e The tradition that the inhabitants of Sodom and Gomorrah were prone to farting in public was Islamic.

^f In the fourth century, some units in both Palestine and Egypt were still described as belonging to the Thamud; but none, so far as we know, beyond the limits of the Roman Empire.