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

When?

Those who anticipated that Heraclius’s triumph would provide only a temporary lull in the surge and swirl of great events were to be proved quite spectacularly correct. A bare three decades after the conclusion of the terrible war between Iranshahr and the New Rome, the balance of power that for centuries had divided the Fertile Crescent into two rival spheres of influence was no more. In the East, Persian rule had collapsed utterly. All the glory of the House of Sasan had been trampled into the dust. The Shahanshah himself had perished squalidly in the wilds of Khorasan, murdered, so it was said, by a local miller for his gold. His son, the heir of Ardashir and Khusrow the Great, was now a fugitive in China. Such an outcome, it might have been thought, was all that generations of Caesars had ever dreamed of achieving; and yet the overthrow of Iranshahr had certainly not been due to any triumph of Roman arms. A new people had risen to greatness; and these conquerors aimed at the conquest of Constantinople no less than they had Ctesiphon. The Roman Empire, unlike that of the Persians, still stood defiant; but only just. As in the darkest days of the war against Iranshahr, so now, nothing but a rump remained to the New Rome of her dominions. Syria, Palestine and Egypt had all been lost. Even in Anatolia, the front line was being held only through desperate and blood-sodden effort.

Stupefied onlookers, in their attempts to make sense of these astounding convulsions, naturally turned to scripture for elucidation. Was it possible, they began to ask themselves, that the fourth beast seen by Daniel was not, as had long been presumed, the empire of the Romans, after all? It had certainly never been more manifest that God, for His own inscrutable reasons, was redrawing the affairs of men in a wholly startling manner. Global rule had passed into the hands of those previously scorned descendants of Ishmael, the bastard offspring of Abraham, the children of the slave-girl Hagar: the Arabs. “And behold, a fourth beast, terrible and dreadful and exceedingly strong; and it had great iron teeth; it devoured and broke in pieces, and stamped the residue with its feet.”¹ Already, by the 660s, there were many prepared to revise their understanding of what Daniel had meant by this vision. “He is saying,” so a chronicler in Armenia suggested, “that this fourth beast, which arises from the south, is the kingdom of the sons of Ishmael.”²

As the decades and then the centuries passed, and still the empire won by the Arabs endured, this reading became ever more accepted among Christians and Jews alike. The Arabs themselves, of course, would have bristled at any notion that they were something bestial; but they too, as they surveyed with pride the awesome sweep of their dominions, never doubted for a moment that their conquests were indeed the expression of the will of the heavens. How else to explain their astonishing dismemberment of what had once been the two greatest empires in the world? “We went to meet them with small abilities and weak forces, and God made us triumph, and gave us possession of their territories.”³ By the tenth Christian century, when this self-satisfied assertion was penned, the defeat of the Persians and the Romans had come to be interpreted as something even more epochal than the replacement of two superpowers by a third. The lands won by “the sons of Ishmael” were no longer defined as an Arab empire but as the Dar al-Islam—the “House of Islam.” The first generation of conquerors, even though they had called themselves “believers” or “emigrants”—Muhajirun—had come to be designated by a quite different word: “Muslims.”⁴ The collapse of Persian and Roman power was attributed, not to the agonies of plague and war that had racked the Near East for decades, but to the revelation of the word of God to His Prophet in far-off Mecca. “When you encounter the unbelievers, blows to necks it shall be until, once you have routed them, you are to tighten their fetters.” So Muhammad, serving as the mouthpiece of God, had informed his followers. “Thereafter, it is either gracious bestowal of freedom or holding them to ransom, until war has laid down its burdens.”⁵

The notion that a people might be entrusted by the heavens with a charge to spare the vanquished and to overthrow the haughty was hardly original to the Qur’an, of course. Back in the heyday of Roman greatness, Virgil had articulated a very similar sense of mission. What had changed, however, and to seismic effect, was people’s understanding of what the sanction of the heavens might actually mean. Just as Constantine had discovered in Christ an infinitely more potent patron than Athena or Artemis had ever been, so those who turned to the pages of the Qur’an found revealed there a celestial monarch of such limitless and terrifying power that there could certainly be no question of portraying Him—as the Christians did with their own god—in human form. Nothing, literally nothing, was beyond Him. “If He wishes, O mankind, He can make you disappear and bring others in your stead.”⁶ To a deity capable of such a prodigious feat of annihilation, what was the overthrow of an empire or two? Remarkable though it certainly was that the Dar al-Islam had been raised upon the rubble of Persian and Roman power, no explanation was needed for this, so Muslim scholars taught, that did not derive from an even more awesome and heart-stopping miracle: the revelation to the Prophet of the Qur’an. What surprise that a fire lit far beyond the reach of the ancient superpowers should have spread to illumine the entire world, when that fire was the Word of God?

And it is here, of course, in any interpretation of Islam’s origins as an intrusion of the divine into the sweep of earthly events—as a lightning strike from heaven, owing nothing to what had gone before—that history must needs meet and merge with faith. Almost fourteen centuries on from the lifetime of Muhammad, the conviction that he was truly a prophet of God continues to move and inspire millions upon millions of people around the globe. As a solution to the mystery of what might actually have taken place in the early seventh-century Near East, however, it is unlikely to strike those historians raised in the traditions of secular scholarship as entirely satisfactory. By explaining everything, it runs the risk of explaining nothing much at all. Nevertheless, it is a measure of how potently an aura of the supernatural has always clung to the Qur’an, and to the story of its genesis, that historians have found it so difficult to rationalise its origins. Mecca, so the biographies of the Prophet teach us, was an inveterately pagan city, devoid of any Jewish or Christian presence, situated in the midst of a vast, untenanted desert: how else, then, are we to account for the sudden appearance there of a fully fledged monotheism, complete with references to Abraham, Moses and Jesus, if not as a miracle? In a sense, the entire history of secular enquiry into the origins of Islam has been an attempt to arrive at a plausible answer to this question. Muslims, understandably sensitive to any hint that the Prophet might have been a plagiarist, have always tended to resent the inevitable implications of such a project; and yet, once God is discounted as an informant, it is surely not unreasonable to wonder just how it came to be that so many characters from the Bible feature in the Qur’an. Perhaps, so it has been suggested, Muhammad absorbed Jewish and Christian influences during his business trips to Syria.⁷ Or perhaps, despite what the Muslim sources tell us, there were in fact thriving colonies of Jews, Christians, or both in Mecca.⁸ Or perhaps there was a crisis of capitalism among the Quraysh, one that saw successful merchants and financiers growing ever more obscenely rich, even as those on the breadline were left “searching for a new spiritual and political solution to the malaise and disquiet in the city,”⁹ and finding it—somehow, in some unspecified manner, in the spirit of the age.

Yet all these explanations run up against a familiar stumbling block. Given that the Prophet’s earliest biographers were writing almost two centuries after his death, how far can we legitimately accept their presumption that seventh-century Mecca was genuinely a place of great significance and wealth—the “Mother of Cities”?¹⁰ It is plausible enough that it might have been a centre of pilgrimage for the local pagans, but that it ranked as the Dubai of its day, a prosperous and cosmopolitan trading hub brought to flourish in the depths of the desert, is most certainly not. What incentive could there possibly have been for anyone with an eye for a profit to base himself in a barren valley many hundreds of miles from the nearest consumerist fleshpot? Even the few camel-trains that still plodded northwards from Himyar, heading for a Roman market that had long since lost its appetite for incense, went by a road that bypassed Mecca altogether.¹¹ A merchant from Alexandria might cheerfully discourse about the trading opportunities in entrepôts as far afield as India, and never even so much as allude to Mecca—on his doorstep though it effectively was.¹² In gazetteers written by Muhammad’s contemporaries—whether diplomats, geographers or historians—mentions of it are notable by their glaring absence.¹³ Even in the Qur’an itself, the word appears just once. “In the belly of Mecca, it was God who held their hands back from you”¹⁴—an allusion that might as well be to a valley as to a city. Otherwise, in all the vast corpus of ancient literature, there is not a single reference to Mecca—not one.¹⁵ Only in 741, more than a hundred years after the Prophet’s death, does it finally crop up on the pages of a foreign text—and even then the author locates it in Mesopotamia, “midway between Ur and Harran.”¹⁶ Clearly, then, whatever else Mecca might have been in the early seventh century, it was no multicultural boom-town.

So how is it, in a book supposedly composed there in Muhammad’s lifetime, that the monotheisms of the far-distant Fertile Crescent should have been given such a starring role? It is all very mysterious; and made even more so by the fact that Mecca is not alone in seeming to have had a spectrally low profile in the early decades of the Arab Empire. So too did the Qur’an itself. As with the reputed birthplace of the Prophet, so with the compendium of his revelations: there is not a single mention of it in writings of the period. In the first flush of the Ishmaelite takeover, the Patriarch of Antioch assumed that his new masters’ holy book was the Torah.¹⁷ Such a presumption, of course, might well have reflected nothing more than wilful blindness—except that it was far from being confined to bishops. More than a century after the death of Muhammad, Muslims—as they were now starting to call themselves—might betray a very similar ignorance. Even as Christian bureaucrats, tracking the peculiar beliefs of their Arab overlords, began to note the existence of various “frivolous tales”¹⁸ composed by Muhammad, Muslim scholars, in their concern to identify precisely what the Prophet might have taught, were still perfectly capable of overlooking the Qur’an altogether. How, for instance, did God wish adulterers to be punished? To this question, hadith after hadith provided the same unyielding answer as was to be found in the Torah: He wished them to be stoned. Yet this was not at all what was taught in the Qur’an. There, it could be read that God, “ever-compassionate,” merely wished adulterers to be given “a hundred lashes.”¹⁹ How to explain such a discrepancy? If the Qur’an truly originated in the lifetime of Muhammad, and had been preserved and cherished by his followers ever since as the unchanging word of God, why was it that so many Muslim jurists—and prominent ones at that—had disregarded it as a source for their rulings? The mystery seems only compounded by the complete absence of any commentaries on the Qur’an prior to the ninth Christian century, and by the fact that even then different communities of the faithful preserved different versions of the holy text.^aPerhaps it is hardly surprising, then, that many a scholar today, confronted by the dogma which teaches that the Qur’an derives unaltered and immaculate from the lifetime of Muhammad, should be tempted to raise an eyebrow, at the very least.

How far is such scepticism justified? Much, of course, hangs on the answer. Nothing better illustrates the extreme sensitivity of the issues at stake than the fate of a cache of Qur’ans that were found some forty years ago in Sana’a—capital of what was once the Jewish Kingdom of Himyar and is now the Muslim Republic of Yemen. Uncovered by workmen in the ceiling of the city’s oldest mosque, stuffed into seventeen rough hessian sacks and preserved from oblivion only by the sharp eyes of the Yemeni antiquities chief, the great mass of parchment contained fragments of what are almost certainly the oldest Qur’ans in existence. Four decades on from their discovery, however, these precious manuscripts remain shrouded in mystery. Only two researchers, both German, have been permitted to study them. When one of these, an expert in Arabic palaeography by the name of Gerd-Rüdiger Puin, publicly asserted that the fragments demonstrated that the Qur’an, no less than the Bible, had evolved over time and was a veritable “cocktail of texts,”²⁰ the Yemeni authorities reacted with fury. To this day, the Qur’anic fragments in Sana’a remain unpublished—nor have any further Western scholars been permitted to study them. As a result, their true significance remains opaque.

But not wholly so. Granted that Puin’s researches do indeed seem to suggest that words, spellings and even the order of verses in the Qur’an were perfectly capable of being misread and miscopied, it is apparent as well that these alterations were only ever involuntary errors. There is not a hint of deliberate fabrication in any of the Sana’a fragments. Phrases may vary substantially from manuscript to manuscript, but entire passages never do. At no point, it seems, was the Qur’an ever the equivalent of a collection of hadiths—something to be added to upon the whim of some Caliph or scholar. In fact, nothing better testifies to the dread and reverence with which every last word of it, every last letter, was patently regarded than the fact that jurists were prepared to swallow even a glaring embarrassment such as its ruling on adultery. Wriggle though they might—with some claiming that stoning was actually prescribed in the Qur’an as the original penalty for the offence, but that the relevant verse had been devoured by a hungry goat—no attempt was ever made to improvise something new. Even the earliest Sana’a fragments reveal an awed sense on the part of those responsible for them that something of profound and terrible holiness was being put to paper, far transcending human invention. If, as both Puin and his colleague have argued, these earliest fragments are to be dated to the beginning of the eighth century, it would suggest that their ultimate origins must lie well before that time.²¹ The daring thesis floated some decades back, by a few venturesome scholars, that the Qur’an might have been the product of protracted evolution, and that it arrived at something like its current state only at the end of the eighth Christian century, seems to have been conclusively disproved.²² Irrespective of all the revisions and variations Puin has traced in the Sana’a fragments, the bedrock of the Qur’an appears hewn out of solid granite.

This, however, begs any number of questions in turn. How was it that a book so revered should simultaneously have been neglected for so long by so many Muslim jurists? What, precisely, was the prehistory of the Qur’an prior to its first appearance in the written record in the early eighth century? Does the fact that every man who ever copied it appears to have done so in the unshakable conviction that he was transcribing words of unparalleled holiness mean that we can trust the Muslim traditions that explain how it came into being, after all? Perhaps. But a familiar problem, like a nagging headache, persists. It remains the case, and disconcertingly so, that the earliest surviving biographies of the Prophet were written whole generations after his death—and that their accounts of the origins of the Qur’an are such as cannot possibly be taken for granted. Just how yawning, then, just how much of a rupture, might the gap between the traditional date of the holy book’s composition and the first commentaries on it actually have been? The Qur’an, as it disarmingly acknowledges in one of its own verses, contains no lack of “ambiguous”²³ material: there are contradictions, abrupt shifts in voice, topic and tone, and baffling allusions. That brilliant intellects, from the ninth century onwards, should have devoted themselves to the immense task of clarifying these same ambiguities does not necessarily mean that they had inherited authentic information as to what the holy text had originally meant.

In fact, it might mean just the opposite. Long before the coming of Islam, scholars labouring over other works of scripture had inadvertently demonstrated an unsettling truth: the greater the sense of awe with which a text was regarded, the more complete might be the amnesia as to the original circumstances of its composition. Back in the Iranshahr of Peroz, the Zoroastrian priests, resolved as they were to adapt their inheritance of ancient scriptures to the political requirements of their Church, had shown not the slightest hesitation in shifting the birthplace of Zoroaster to Media. The Talmud, of course, was nothing if not a project to demonstrate that Moses would have been perfectly at home in the yeshivas of Sura and Tiberias. Christian scholars, keen to establish the primal antiquity of their own faith, wrote whole reams of commentaries on the Tanakh, proving that what they termed the “Old Testament” was in fact a foreshadowing of Christ. If adherents of the evolving religion of Islam, confronted by a scripture of indubitable holiness, but rife all the same with passages that they could barely understand, did set themselves to the elucidation of its mysteries, not as historians but rather as men concerned to comprehend the workings of God, then they would have been doing nothing that mowbeds, or rabbis, or bishops had not already set themselves to achieve.

To establish when the Qur’an might have been composed, therefore, and whether it does indeed provide us with an authentic source for the Prophet’s life and times, it is essential first to strip away the great cladding of commentary that has been woven tightly around the holy text since the early ninth century, and make an attempt, at the very least, to see it naked and unadorned. This is no easy task, however. The same ambiguities that prompted Muslim scholars to compose their immense array of commentaries and biographies of the Prophet still render it challenging, to put it mildly, to read the Qur’an in the light of the Qur’an alone. Unlike the Bible, which name-checks any number of conveniently datable rulers—from Cyrus to Augustus—the Qur’an betrays what is, to any historian, a most regrettable lack of interest in geopolitics. Those who are named in its pages tend to be angels, demons or prophets. There are the four mentions of Muhammad himself, of course. Then there is an enigmatic figure called Zayd, who seems to be both the ex-husband of one of the Prophet’s wives and his adopted son: tradition would subsequently identify him as a one-time slave who died in battle as an early martyr for Islam. Finally, there is an unbeliever by the name of Abu Lahab, who appears in the biographies of the Prophet as his uncle, and who is condemned, together with his wife, to “burn in the Flaming Fire.”²⁴ No other contemporaries of Muhammad are mentioned by name in the holy text. The focus of the Qur’an is fixed implacably, not on the personal, but on the divine. Before the awful dimension of such a radiance, in which God’s omnipotence can be experienced as something both intimate and cosmic, as a presence that is simultaneously closer to the believer than his own “jugular vein”²⁵ and more remote than the most distant star in the universe, what is any mere mortal? The voices that feature in the Qur’an are those of God Himself and His prophet: no one else gets much of a hearing.

Which is not to say that there is no sense of dialogue in the Qur’an—for in truth it is a most disputatious book. Always, however, those who are being variously scorned, chided and refuted by the Prophet lurk off-stage—their voices unheard, their beliefs unaired. Mushrikun, they are called—“those who are guilty of shirk.” Such an offence—the belief that supernatural beings might be partnered with God as fit objects of worship—would end up enshrined by Islam as the most unforgivable of sins, of course; and so perhaps it is no surprise that the presumption should have grown up among Muslim scholars that the Mushrikun had been rank idolators and pagans, worshippers of stock and stone. This, however, is not at all what the Qur’an itself implies.²⁶ Indeed, based purely on the evidence contained in the holy text, the Mushrikun seem to have shared a whole range of beliefs with Jews and Christians—not to mention the Prophet himself. That the world was created by a single god; that this god would listen to those who approached him, whether through prayer or pilgrimage; that he ruled as lord of the angels: all this, it is clear enough, was common ground between Muhammad and his opponents. So too was familiarity with characters from the Bible—something taken wholly for granted in the Qur’an. Where the Mushrikun erred, however, according to the Prophet, was in their adherence to a truly shocking notion: that God had fathered the angels, and would listen to any prayers that might be raised to Him through their agency. Even worse, in a world where no man ever doubted his superiority over women, the Mushrikun actually presumed “to turn the angels, servants of the All-Merciful, into females”!²⁷

Whether this was actually what the Mushrikun had done is, of course, a rather different matter. “They follow nothing, those who worship partners apart from God—they follow nothing but conjecture; they utter nothing but lies.”²⁸ Hardly, it is fair to say, the most nuanced cataloguing of what the Mushrikun might actually have believed. The Prophet was clearly no encyclopedist: he lacked the insatiable passion of an Epiphanius for cataloguing the precise details of his opponents’ follies. Whoever or whatever the Mushrikun may have been, it is impossible to glimpse them save through a swirling fog-bank of polemic. Certainly, there is nothing in the mere fact of their existence that helps us to pinpoint when they flourished.

It is fortunate, then, that the Qur’an does not float entirely free of history’s moorings. Among its 114 chapters—or “suras”—there are just a few scattered clues to its likeliest date of composition. Of one thing, at least, we can be certain: its final form long post-dates the implosion of the Thamud, that large confederation of Arab tribes employed by the Romans, and who are commemorated by the Prophet as the exemplification of worldly greatness brought low. Time was, he reminds their ghosts, when God “granted you mastery over the earth, when you seized its plains to build your mansions, and carved houses from the mountains”²⁹—until, as payback for straying off the straight and narrow, they were dispatched by a scream so terrible that it left them withered, like dry straw. If this name-checking of the Thamud appears to imply a certain familiarity on the part of the Prophet with the workings of Roman imperialism, then it is dramatically confirmed by another verse—the only one in the entire Qur’an to name a contemporary power. “The Romans,” it is reported, “have been defeated in a nearby land, and yet, after their defeat, they shall be victorious—in a few years.”³⁰ It is hard to know to what this might conceivably be alluding, if not the loss of Palestine to Khusrow II. The prophecy might appear brief, and almost throwaway—but its implications are momentous. So terrible was the great war between Persia and the New Rome, and so devastating its impact, that even in the very throne-room of the heavens its reverberations were being felt. No other earthly conflict, after all, had served to prompt a long-range forecast from the Lord of Worlds Himself.

All of which, for the historian, suggests a most welcome and promising conclusion. Compared to the bogs and quicksand of other sources for the life of the Prophet, the book of his revelations does authentically appear to offer us something precious: something almost like solid ground. Unlike the witness provided by the hadiths, or the biographies of Muhammad, or the commentaries on the Qur’an, the text of the Qur’an itself does seem to derive authentically from the Prophet’s lifetime. That makes it, a few other brief and enigmatic documents aside, our only primary source for his career. Such a resource is, in consequence, beyond compare: one that positively demands to be sifted for clues to the Prophet’s career and background. Identify these, and it may then be possible to find reflected in the Qur’an glimpses, not merely of the Prophet’s personal circumstances but of something even more suggestive: the broader context of the age.

Take, for instance, the verse that prophesies which of the two great imperial peoples will emerge victorious from their terrible war. In its presumption that God favours the cause of the Romans, and that their fate has been graced with a literally cosmic significance, there is nothing incompatible with the Romans’ own perennial self-conceit. Elsewhere in the Qur’an, too, there can be detected just the faintest echo of Heraclius’s blowing on the embattled empire’s war-trumpet. “They ask you,” God tells Muhammad, “about ‘The Two-Horned One’ ”³¹—Dhu’l Qarnayn, in Arabic. This, so the Qur’an goes on to reveal, was the title of a great ruler who journeyed to the ends of the earth, where he built gates of iron faced with bronze, and thereby imprisoned the surging hordes of Gog and Magog. To the apocalypse-haunted Roman people, this biography would have suggested only one man—and during the reign of Heraclius, especially so. Alexander the Great, conqueror of the Persians, and gaoler of Gog and Magog, had lately become the name on every Christian’s lips. Amid the humiliations and triumphs of the great war against Iranshahr, Roman propagandists repeatedly invoked his memory. Then, in 630, with Khusrow finally toppled and Heraclius about to enter Jerusalem, a fabulous story had begun to circulate in Syria, clearly written in honour of the moment, and featuring Alexander.³² The great conqueror, it appeared, had not only reached the setting of the sun and walled up Gog and Magog—he had also delivered a prophecy, foretelling how, at the end of days, the sway of the Christian empire would be extended to the limits of the world. Reassuring news for Heraclius—and sure enough, just to ensure that no one missed the point, Alexander was shown in the story vowing to head for Jerusalem, and to take with him a silver throne, “so that when the Messiah comes from heaven, He may sit upon this kingly throne, for His kingdom lasts for ever.”³³ Not the most subtle parallel with Heraclius’s own shouldering of the True Cross, perhaps—but ringing enough, to be sure. In fact, it is a measure of just how effective the story was as a celebration of the emperor’s entry into Jerusalem that the tale of Dhu’l Qarnayn in the Qur’an appears to have been modelled directly upon it. Plot, imagery, even the hero’s distinctive horns—all are identical.³⁴ Here, then, if anywhere, it is possible to pin a precise date upon a segment of the Qur’an. And yet, despite this, the tale told of Dhu’l Qarnayn betrays barely a trace-element of its genesis in the Roman propaganda of 630. Certainly, nothing remains in it of Alexander’s prophecy that the New Rome will inherit the world, and that Christ will then come again. Instead, its vision of the End Days—complete with the surging like waves of Gog and Magog and the dramatic materialisation of hell—has a quality of the utmost timelessness: nothing overtly Christian, and certainly nothing overtly Roman.

Nor, in a book positively obsessed by the prospect of the world’s annihilation, are all the numerous other predictions of the End Days any different.

When the sky disintegrates;

When the stars are strewn;

When the seas are made to erupt;

When graves are dispersed,

Each soul will know what it did,

And what it failed to do.

³⁵

There is nothing here, in the terrifying power of such a vision, to suggest that it might have been prompted by any specific mood of crisis. Just the opposite: the clear and fearsome message of the Qur’an—that the wicked stand in the shadow of eternal punishment, and that those who have oppressed the weak will answer to God for their crimes upon “a day of resurrection”³⁶—possesses an all-too-universal resonance. Nevertheless, the sheer urgency with which the Prophet hammers home his warnings and tells his followers to prepare for the hour of judgement suggests that he had good reason to dread its imminence. Muhammad, as his familiarity with Heraclius’s propaganda demonstrates, was not oblivious to the firestorm sweeping through the Near East. The cloud of ash that had hung dark over mowbeds in Ctesiphon, monks in Constantinople and rabbis in Tiberias had the Prophet in its shadow, too. Far from reaching him as distant rumours, the terrors and upheavals of the age seem to have been sufficiently close to ring in his ears. The Qur’an, haunted as it is by a dread of the wrath of God, and of the puniness of mankind before an omnipotence that can convert the entire world into dust, is no less of its time for having a perspective that disdains to focus on specific events—whether a plague that had recently wiped out a third of the population of the Near East or a war that had been raging for decades.

“For every nation there is an appointed span of time; when their time arrives, they can neither delay it nor bring it forward, even for an instant.”³⁷ Viewed from this perspective, the calamities that were even then convulsing the empires of Persia and the New Rome were nothing exceptional. The gaze that Muhammad brought to the agonies of his own generation was one that distinguished in the rise and fall of great powers merely the ceaseless gusting of grains of sand upon desert winds. Ever since the moment of creation, what had mattered to humanity was not the vagaries of history but rather a question as eternal as it was urgent: how best to choose between good and evil. This is why, in the pages of the Qur’an, it is not kings or emperors who feature, but prophets. Muhammad was, of course, only one in a long succession of messengers sent by God to summon people to repentance. What need, then, when the truths that they revealed were unchanging, to specify where or when they might have lived? To God, and to God alone, belongs “the knowledge of all that is hidden in the heavens and earth.”³⁸ Figures from even the recent past were of interest to Muhammad only once they had been bleached of all context, all individuality. So, for instance, when the seven sleepers of Ephesus are introduced into the Prophet’s revelations, to be praised by him as “youths who believed in their Lord,”³⁹ he does not mention Ephesus, nor that there were seven of them, nor even that they were Christians. As with “the Two-Horned One,” so with “the People of the Cave,” threads drawn from the rich tapestry of Roman fantasy have been woven into a very different pattern.

Not, of course, that every filament drawn from the past could be reworked in such a manner. The world, as Muhammad well knew, was a various and error-ravaged place. It behoved the Believers to stand on their guard. A stern and awful warning—and one that the Prophet would never tire of issuing. Here, in the fretful consciousness that there existed only the One True God, but that many different faiths claimed to understand Him, was the authentic neuralgia of the age. No less than a rabbi fretting over the minim, or a bishop sniffing anxiously after heretics, Muhammad was both appalled and transfixed by the sheer variety of peoples with different beliefs who filled the world. The adherents of some of these—such as the Mushrikun and the fire-worshipping devotees of Zoroaster—clearly lay beyond the pale.⁴⁰ But what of the Jews, say, or the Christians? “Who so disbelieves in God, His angels, His Books, His messengers and the Last Day has strayed far in error.”⁴¹ By this measure—as Muhammad himself seems to have been uncomfortably aware—there was precious little to separate a rabbi or a monk from a mu’min’: a “believer.” Indeed, to some extent, all the Prophet’s many pronouncements on the Jews and the Christians, scattered throughout the pages of the Qur’an, resemble nothing so much as a protracted twisting in the wind. At times, the Torah and the Gospel might be hailed as “Guidance to mankind,”⁴² sent down from heaven, and those who reverence them as the Ahl al-Kitab—the “People of the Book.” At other times, the Jews might be damned with blood-curdling ferocity for their treachery, and the Christians for ascribing a son to God. Such tension was nothing new: it echoed the same mingling of fascination and loathing that had characterised Jewish and Christian attitudes to one another in the first few centuries after Christ. Perhaps, had a Christian written a book that gave a voice to Ebionites and Marionites in the years before the Council of Nicaea, it would have spanned the same extremes of tolerance and hostility towards the Jews that are found in the Qur’an. Muhammad, in his struggle to decide where precisely to draw the frontier between his own teachings and those of the “People of the Book,” and how high to raise the barriers and watchtowers, was wrestling with a problem many centuries older than himself.

Nor, it seems, was he wholly oblivious to the fact. On one level, it is true, the Qur’an records a very specific moment in history: a moment that internal evidence, as well as tradition, identifies with the early decades of the seventh Christian century. Muhammad, in his concern to define for the Believers the troublesome border zone that separated them from the Jews and the Christians, was perfectly capable of doing so in a manner that any pious Caesar would have recognised. Just as Justinian had prescribed swingeing financial penalties for “all those who do not rightly worship God,”⁴³ so was it decreed in the Qur’an that Jews and Christians should pay a special tithe, the jizya—and in such a manner as to render their inferiority manifest to all.⁴⁴ Taxation combined with triumphalism: here was bullying in the grand tradition of the Roman state. That it was Christians who now faced fiscal penalties for belonging to a superseded faith, rather than imposing the fines themselves, only compounded the irony, of course. The Prophet, insofar as he did care to offer specific policy recommendations to his followers on the patrolling of religious diversity, was very much a man of his age.

And yet, in truth, his gaze was only partially fixed upon the present. In the Qur’an, the pretensions of the Jews and Christians are presumed to be something timeless. As with great empires, so with great religions: the precise parabola of their evolution was as nothing to the Prophet. The stirring events that had shaped the imperial Church no more intruded upon his consciousness than did the wars of the Caesars. Of the great councils, of the anguished disagreements between Chalcedonians and Monophysites, of all those emperors, bishops and saints who, over the centuries, had struggled with such passion and such earnestness to arrive at a consensus as to the nature of Christ—of these, in the Qur’an, there is not so much as a hint. In fact, there are no Christians at all in its pages that the contemporary Church would have acknowledged as its own, save for the monks of the desert—and even these are so shadowy a presence that the Prophet can never quite decide whether to laud them as models of humility or condemn them as monsters of greed.⁴⁵ So, when Muhammad spoke of Christians, whom did he have in mind? A clue, perhaps, lies in the unexpected word he uses to describe them: Nasara. The name would have meant very little to the vast majority of seventh-century Christians. Only the learned—scholars familiar with the works of Jerome and Epiphanius, perhaps—might have pricked up their ears. The Nazoreans—those curious heretics who held to the Law of Moses and believed that the Holy Spirit was Christ’s mother—had long since vanished from their ancient Palestinian heartland. Yet, in the Qur’an—composed a full two centuries after Jerome had noted the Nazoreans as a mere fading curiosity—not only is their name used by the Prophet as shorthand for all the “People of the Gospel,”⁴⁶ but their doctrines provoke some of his bitterest contempt. “ ‘Did you really say to people,’ ” God is shown asking of Jesus, “ ‘Take me and my mother as two gods, instead of God?’ ”⁴⁷ An indignant Jesus volubly protests his innocence. As well he might have done—for the charge being laid against him was the mortal charge of shirk.

Now, it is true, of course, that the Qur’an was labouring here under an almost grotesque misapprehension: orthodox Christians, despite what the Nazoreans may have believed, had absolutely no notion of any “God the Mother.” Nevertheless, the Prophet had not wholly got the wrong end of the stick. By accusing the Christians of shirk, he had ripped the bandage off a very ancient sore. For six hundred years, the issue of how the relationship between God and Jesus was properly to be defined had been an itch that few Christians had been able to leave alone. For half of this span, admittedly, ever since the Council of Nicaea, it had pleased the leaders of the Catholic Church to imagine that there did exist a definitive answer to the problem, approved by Caesar, and sanctioned by the heavens. In reality, of course, as the Arian loyalties of the Ostrogoths and Vandals had shockingly served to demonstrate, the garden of Christian orthodoxy had never been totally cleared of weeds. A heresy, if it could manage to put down roots beyond the reach of the imperial Church, might still enjoy a certain, late-flourishing bloom. What, then, to make of the references in the Qur’an to the mysterious Nasara? That Arianism had long been able to prosper amid the bogs and forests of the North suggests that the Nazoreans might very plausibly have endured in the deserts of the South. The implications of this, nevertheless, are more than a little disorienting. The origins of the Nazoreans, after all, stretched far beyond the time of Jerome—right back to the origins of the Christian Church. The questions posed by their doctrines struck at the heart of what Christianity, in the wake of Nicaea, had evolved to become. What, precisely, did it mean to say that Jesus was the Son of God? How might the Trinity best be defined and explained? Were Jews and Christians doomed to eternal mutual hatred, or were they better regarded as children of the same book?

Certainly, if the Nasara are indeed to be equated with the Nazoreans, then it might help to explain why the Qur’an, despite clearly having attained something like its final form early in the seventh Christian century, should seem haunted as well by the whispers of some very ancient ghosts. The one-sided debate to be found in its pages on the nature of Christ—one which firmly rejects the Trinity and affirms that Jesus himself was only ever a man—has a breath about it that seems to rise from an eerily distant age. Older than Nicaea, let alone Chalcedon, it had raged most bitterly back when there was no single Church, merely a multiplicity of sects. “They killed him not,” the Prophet declares, “nor did they crucify him, but so it was made to appear to them.”⁴⁸ Such a notion had not been heard for many centuries. What was it, after all, if not the very argument of the long-scotched Gospel of Basilides?

The voice we hear is not necessarily that of Basilides himself, of course. Nevertheless, the echoes of long-muted Christian heretics—of Gnostics and Nazoreans—are sufficiently loud in the Qur’an to make one wonder from where, if not from God, they might possibly have come. This issue is rendered all the more haunting because vanished gospels are not the only traces of an often fabulously distant past to be found in the verses of the holy text. Like a mighty cliff-face compounded of different layers of sediment, in which, just occasionally, fossils are to be glimpsed, exposed by rock-falls and weathering, the Qur’an hints at entire aeons that have been and gone, and yet endure contained within itself. Many of these same hints, not surprisingly, have always been regarded by commentators as somewhat of a puzzle. Just as fossils, prior to a proper understanding of the earth’s geology, provoked many a furrowed brow among those who found them, there are phrases and even entire passages in the Qur’an that have always perplexed the learned. What, for instance, might one make of a short sura that takes as its theme the punishment of wrongdoers known as “the People of the Trench”?⁴⁹ Over the course of the centuries, numerous attempts have been made to explain this enigmatic phrase. Perhaps, so one early scholar suggested, it referred to the servants of a king who fired Abraham into a burning trench by means of a catapult. Or perhaps it related to the atrocities perpetrated by Yusuf against the Christians of Najran.⁵⁰ But what if it were not original to the Qur’an at all, but derived instead from another written source—specifically, one of those mysterious, ancient Jewish texts that occasionally cropped up in the wilds of the desert beyond Jerusalem in late antiquity? The discovery in more recent times of an entire cache of such manuscripts—the so-called “Dead Sea Scrolls”—has led a number of scholars to suspect a link between their teachings and those of the Qur’an.⁵¹ What should be a designation for hell in the Dead Sea Scrolls, for instance, if not “the Trench”? And what should be the fate of the damned on the Day of Judgement if not to be consigned to that Trench’s fires? Could this, then, be a possible source for the mysterious and much-debated phrase in the Qur’an—a vision of the End Days preserved from a distant Jewish past?

Certainly, it is notable, throughout the course of his revelations, that the Prophet returns again and again to a notion that few of his contemporaries in either synagogue or monastery would have thought to dispute: that the will of God can indeed be fathomed through the written word.

With Him are the keys of the Unseen; none but He has knowledge thereof.

He knows all that is on land and on sea;

Not a leaf falls but He knows it.

Not a seed in the darkness of earth,

Not anything, fresh or dried,

But it is inscribed in a Manifest Book.

⁵²

This, rather in the manner of the Talmud, is to cast the whole of creation as a scripture; but elsewhere, the Prophet is more explicit in his praise of the truths to be found in “ancient scrolls.” By these, he hurriedly goes on to specify, he means “the scrolls of Abraham and Moses”⁵³—and yet the sheer wealth of allusions, echoes and remembrances in the Qur’an, enriching it and yet never overwhelming it, drawn from a bewilderingly eclectic array of sources, and yet made triumphantly, inimitably its own, serves to suggest that Abraham and Moses were not, perhaps, alone in having influenced the Prophet. From the propaganda of Roman emperors to tales of Christian saints, from long-vanished Gnostic gospels to ancient Jewish tracts: traces of all these writings have been convincingly identified in the Qur’an. Just as Muhammad claimed to be the Seal of the Prophets, so did his revelations contain within themselves, as a revenant and spectral presence, hints of how other peoples, back in the often distant past, had similarly had experience of the divine. Even gods that were ancient when Alexander was born are not wholly absent from its pages: for what are the horns that Dhu’l Qarnayn sports, after all, if not the ram horns of Amun? Some would go further yet, and claim that the very visions of paradise contained within the Qur’an, complete with eternally boyish cup-bearers, handsome “like hidden pearls,”⁵⁴ who are bestowed upon the Believers when they ascend to heaven, and beauteous, “wide-eyed maidens,”⁵⁵ shimmer with the primordial glamour of the banished gods of Greece and Rome. Certainly, it would seem a striking coincidence otherwise that Zeus, the pagan Lord of Olympus, should have had as his cup-bearer an exquisitely pearl-like youth and that his queen, Hera, the goddess of marital bliss, should have been famed for her seductively large eyes. Muslim scholars would certainly find themselves both perplexed and unsettled by the Prophet’s insistence that celestial maidens had “wide eyes,” believing it a description better suited to cows. Their twitchiness would hardly have been improved if they had known that Hera, in the poetry of the pagan Greeks, was invariably hailed as “ox-eyed.”⁵⁶ The Olympians might have been long toppled from their thrones—and yet, in the pages of the Qur’an, the golden halls of their palace still blaze with a brilliant after-glow.

Yet if this is the case, and if the revelations of the Prophet do draw for at least some of their power upon visions of the sacred that elsewhere, in the Christian empire of the Romans, had long since been driven underground, then the mystery of their origins seems only to deepen. Even more far-fetched than the portrait of Mecca as a bustling city of merchant princes, after all, is any likelihood that it might once have been teeming with Gnostics, Roman propagandists and enthusiasts for Homer and Virgil. Yet if the Qur’an, with all its rich and haunting sophistication, did not originate in Mecca, then from where did it come?

If we are to attempt an answer to that question, there is only one place to look: within the pages of the Qur’an itself.