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

Where?

Muhammad is most unlikely to have realised it, but his claim to be setting a seal on the revelations of earlier prophets was not, in fact, original to him.⁵⁷ “Wisdom and deeds have always from time to time been brought to mankind by the messengers of God.”⁵⁸ So it had been declared, some three and a half centuries prior to the composition of the Qur’an, by a man who had aspired, and with great self-consciousness, to write the ultimate in holy books.

Mani, more than anyone before him, positively revelled in the blending of rival faiths. Born near Ctesiphon in 216, shortly before the city fell to Ardashir, he grew up within a Christian sect that, just like the Nazoreans, practised circumcision, held the Holy Spirit to be female, and prayed in the direction of Jerusalem. Such an upbringing clearly imbued in Mani a pronounced taste for the multicultural by 240, when he appeared before the newly crowned Shapur I, he had already successfully fused Jewish, Christian and Zoroastrian teachings into a spectacular new whole, while also claiming, just for good measure, to be the heir of the Buddha. Although Shapur himself, while intrigued by Mani’s teachings, had failed to be converted by them, the self-proclaimed prophet’s disciples spread to the limits of West and East and fashioned out of their master’s teachings an authentically global faith. From Carthage to China, there had come to exist cells of Manichaeans “in every country and in every language.”⁵⁹ They were even to be found, it may be, in Arabia: for the “Sabaeans,” a mysterious people who feature in the Qur’an alongside the Jews and Christians as one of the three “Peoples of the Book,” were, so it has plausibly been argued, none other than Manichaeans.⁶⁰

If that identification is correct, though, they were, at most, a tiny and beleaguered sect. Manichaeism, despite the best efforts of Mani himself, never managed to capture the loyalty of a Shahanshah, let alone a Caesar. As a result, by the lifetime of Muhammad, the two great empires of the age had forced its adherents into a desperate and bloody retreat. In Iranshahr, the prophet himself had ended up martyred on the personal orders of Shapur’s heir. Meanwhile, the Roman authorities, even prior to Constantine’s conversion, regarded his teachings with the utmost suspicion—as a perfidious Persian attempt to corrupt their “innocent and modest”⁶¹ citizens. The Christian empire, naturally enough, had inherited and refined this hostility, so that Manichaeism, by the time of Justinian’s death, had effectively been extirpated from the entire sweep of Constantinople’s dominions. The most bitter and implacable opposition to Mani’s doctrines had come, however, not from monarchs but from the leaders of rival faiths: bishops, mowbeds and rabbis. To them, the upstart prophet’s claims were doubly monstrous. It was not simply that Mani had cast their own scriptures as superseded revelations—although that, of course, was offensive enough. Even more loathsome, in their opinion, was the manner in which he had served as bawd to any number of rival faiths, forever mating and cross-breeding them, until, brought to life out of all the endless miscegenation, there had emerged the deformed hybrid that was his own sinister compound of teachings. Steeled by this perspective, both the Roman and the Persian authorities were confirmed in a fundamental presumption. The blurring and merging of beliefs, such as once had been common across the Fertile Crescent, was an offence that stank to the highest heavens. The no-man’s land that stretched between the various faiths was on no account to be trespassed upon. What the faithful needed, as a synod of Nestorian bishops expressed it in 554, were “high walls, impregnable fortresses, protecting their guardians against danger.”⁶² Divided though Christians, and Zoroastrians, and Jews might be, yet on one thing they could all agree: the prospect of a second Mani was a horror not to be borne.

War served only to deepen this conviction. Across the mangled provinces of Iranshahr and the New Rome, the horrors of the age saw an increasingly violent and desperate scrabbling by rival communities of monotheists for the patronage of God. Whether it was by Christians lamenting the rape of Jerusalem, or by Zoroastrians mourning the extinguished Fire of the Stallion, or by Jews bewailing the rumours of forced conversions, barricades were being raised, and trenches dug, on an ever more formidable scale. In such a world, where the borders of faith had come to be trammelled and patrolled as never before, what best enabled a religion to thrive was reach, and organisation, and scale: much the same advantages, in short, as made for military muscle. Any sect unable to command such resources was doomed to suffer a lethal rate of attrition.

By the start of the seventh century, monotheism’s triumph throughout the two rival empires was almost total. Of the ancient habits of pagan worship that had once been so universal, only a few scattered outposts still held out. In Khorasan, for instance, all the empire-building efforts of the Zoroastrian priesthood had failed to topple Mihr—that awful and sleepless avenger of injustice—from his mountainous and dawn-illumined throne. In Harran, too, which had long relied on its position midway between Rome and Iranshahr to perpetuate its venerable cult of Sin, the majority of the inhabitants still persisted in defying their nominal lord in Constantinople and refused to worship Christ. Nevertheless, the future for the Lord of the Moon looked bleak. Under Maurice, a particularly officious bishop had been appointed to the city’s see, charged with scouring it clean of demon worship once and for all. Secret pagans in high places had been exposed, put to death, and gibbeted in the high street. For the worshippers of the Moon, then, occupation by Khusrow II’s forces had come in the nick of time. The Persians had been far too preoccupied with their conquest of the world to concern themselves with the cult of Sin. By 629, however, with the conclusion of peace and the evacuation of the Persians from Harran, a restoration to Roman control was imminent. The writing now really did seem to be on the wall for the city’s idols.

Pagans and Manichaeans, Jewish Christians and Christian Jews: persecution had been the common fate of all. There was no secure refuge from the imperial authorities to be found anywhere in the Fertile Crescent, save where it had always been: along its margins. For centuries, whether as a sanctuary or as a place of exile, the immense wilderness to the south of the two great empires had played host to beliefs that elsewhere had faded away, like ink on a crumbling scroll. To cross the frontier and head into the desert was therefore to step back in time. Only in Arabia, beyond the reach of monarch, bishop or mowbed, did the ancient promiscuity of cults endure. That Jews and Christians were to be found among the Arabs was certainly true—but not so that either could be confident of dominating the other. Even in Himyar, where first a Jewish king and then a Christian invader had seized power, neither regime had done much to dispel Arabia’s ancient reputation as a breeding ground for heresy. By posing as the heir of David, Yusuf had indulged in precisely the kind of showmanship fit to appal most rabbis, while in Najran, the name given to the great shrine raised in honour of those martyred for Christ—the Ka’ba—bore unmistakable witness to the relish of the pagan Arabs for reverencing cubes. Nor, indeed, had Himyar ever been securely fire-proofed as a Christian realm. In the last years of Khusrow I’s reign, a Persian-sponsored coup had terminated the Ethiopian occupation, and within a couple of decades Ctesiphon had established direct rule over the kingdom. The merchant from Iranshahr, “adorned with ear-rings, and with a Persian twang to his speech,”⁶³ had become an ever more familiar figure to the Arabs; and with him, in his wake, he had brought the worship of Ohrmazd. One more religion added to all the others in the teeming seedbed.

Meanwhile, far to the north of Himyar, on the margins of the Fertile Crescent—and especially along the margins of Palestine—there was even greater scope for cross-pollination. Nowhere else in the entire Near East had so many varieties and shades of faith survived intact. There were Jews, whose appeal to the Arabs of the desert had been noted long previously by Sozomen; and monks, those unyielding defenders of Chalcedonian orthodoxy; and the Monophysite warriors of the Banu Ghassan. Samaritans too, despite the calamitous failure of their revolt against Justinian, had continued to dash themselves against the rock of Roman power, and then, in the wake of the inevitable defeat and repression that followed, to stream in broken misery out into the neighbouring deserts. By abandoning the Holy Land, they were merely following paths already well-trodden by others: by Ebionites, by Nazoreans, by any number of Christian heretics. Not, it went without saying, that every pattern in the mosaic of belief to be found in northern Arabia was fashioned out of materials that were brought across the Roman frontier. The pagan traditions that had prompted Mundhir to wet al-’Uzza’s altar stones with the blood of four hundred virgins and the Nabataeans to worship the black Ka’ba of Dushara had never—in contrast to those of the Fertile Crescent—suffered active repression. If even the Christians of Najran had preserved, in the name they gave to their great shrine, evidence of their ancestors’ reverence for worshipping rocks, then it suggests that elsewhere too in Arabia, wherever the faiths and customs of outsiders met with those native to the Arabs themselves, the scope existed not merely for conflict but for that ultimate nightmare of the imperial authorities: the cross-breeding of rival beliefs.

And this, by the time of the great war, was a nightmare becoming reality. Mutant habits of worship were indeed being spawned in Arabia. In these hybrid cults was provided alarming evidence of what might emerge in consequence of a free market in faiths. What, for instance, were rabbis or monks to make of a community that acknowledged a single god to be the creator of the world, freely confessed his omnipotence, and had a thoroughgoing knowledge of Moses and Jesus—yet offered up prayers to al-’Uzza? Here, so its bitterest critic fulminated, was nothing but the filthiest and most degraded example of shirk. But the man levelling this accusation was no Jew or Christian. To Muhammad, the Mushrikun were not unfathomable aliens but something altogether more unsettling: men and women forged in the identical crucible that had steeled his own message. The Prophet, although implacably contemptuous of his adversaries’ reverence towards al-’Uzza—and to other names summoned from the shadows of Arabian idol worship, those of al-Lat “and the third one, Manat”—never actually accuses the Mushrikun of worshipping this trinity of “females.”⁶⁴ The word “goddess” does not appear once in the Qur’an; nor does the Prophet so much as mention the existence of pagan sanctuaries or shrines. Idols too, despite all the triumphant smashing of images that the Prophet is supposed to have got up to at Mecca, are notable by their absence from his revelations—as also they are from the archaeological record.⁶⁵ So, if the Mushrikun did not think of al-’Uzza as a deity, what did they believe her to be? No sooner has the Prophet name-checked her than he makes sure to provide the answer: “Those who deny the life to come give the angels female names.”⁶⁶ Here was the record of a signal demotion. No longer a goddess, al-’Uzza had become merely a daughter of God: one of those many messengers of the Almighty whose beating wings, a brilliant gold amid the darkness of the age, were being heard in increasing numbers across the span of an anguished and desperate world.

Muhammad was hardly the first to insist that those who, like the Mushrikun, claimed to be monotheists, and yet directed prayers to angels, were hardly to be reckoned monotheists at all. Christians, ever since the time of Paul, had done exactly the same.⁶⁷ “To call upon the angels by name, and to organise their worship, is strictly forbidden.” Such was the stern admonition of a Church Council held shortly after the death of Julian, at a time when bishops had particular reason to warn the faithful off practices that might smack of the pagan. “Anyone who is apprehended devoting himself to this concealed idolatry, let him be cursed.”⁶⁸ Muhammad himself could hardly have put it any better. How easy it was for human beings, even those who devoutly believed themselves to be servants of the One True God, to remain in thrall to shirk. Time and again, it was the dread of a veiled paganism—a pretended monotheism—that most unsettled and outraged the Prophet. The offences of the Mushrikun were not only rank but insidious. Just as bishops in the time of Justinian, touring the hinterlands of their dioceses, had been appalled to discover the abiding relish of Christian peasants for the rituals that had been practised by their unbaptised forefathers, so was the Prophet no less obsessed by what one eminent scholar has termed “minor malpractices regarding the use of farm animals.”⁶⁹ It was not only by the worship of angels, he charged, that the Mushrikun insulted the Almighty. They did it as well by slitting the ears of their livestock, by exempting certain cattle from ever having to pull a plough or carry a load, and by sometimes refusing to utter the name of God in an abattoir.⁷⁰ Offences as heinous as these, the Prophet sternly warned, would see the guilty “consigned to Hell.”⁷¹

None of which, it is fair to say, would come to feature prominently in his biographies. If a concern to regulate the behaviour of agriculturalists seems to square awkwardly with the far more dramatic and crowd-pleasing accounts told centuries later of his activities at Mecca, then that is because it so plainly does. It is hard to know which is the more perplexing: the complete lack of evidence in the Qur’an for any idol smashing on the part of Muhammad, or its portrait of the Mushrikun as owners of great herds of oxen, cows and sheep. Mecca, a place notoriously dry and barren, is not, most agronomists would agree, an obvious spot for cattle ranching—just as the volcanic dust that constitutes its soil is signally unsuited to making “grain grow, and vines, fresh vegetation, olive trees, date palms, luscious gardens, fruit and fodder.”^b Yet God, according to the Prophet, had furnished the Mushrikun with all of these blessings. Nothing, of course, is impossible for the Almighty—but it would indeed have been a miracle had Mecca truly been adorned with spreading “gardens of vines, olives, and pomegranates.”⁷² These, if they were to be found in seventh-century Arabia at all, would have been confined to oases, or else to Nabataea and the Negev, where the desert, by the lifetime of the Prophet, had been made to bloom, and agriculture was flourishing as never before amid the desolate bleakness of the sands.^c Such a redemption of the wilderness, secured as it had been only on the back of quite astounding ingenuity and effort, was, of course, an achievement fit to give any community a certain thrill of pride. Perhaps, then, it is telling that the Prophet, amid all the other charges he levelled against the Mushrikun, accused them of both ingratitude and conceit: of believing that it was they, and not the Almighty, who had made the dead land come to life. “Consider the seeds you sow in the ground—is it you who make them grow, or We?”⁷³

Here, then, is one yet further puzzle, to add to all the many others. No less than the report to be found in the Qur’an of a Roman defeat in “a nearby land,” or its precise echoing of a tale told in Syria about Alexander the Great, or its fascination with the Thamud, the extensive details revealed by the Prophet as to how his opponents made their living would appear to suggest something rather unexpected: a context for Muhammad’s revelations well to the north of Mecca. A far-fetched notion, perhaps—were it not for a striking fact. As with politics, so with topography: the gaze of the Prophet was fixed on horizons infinitely beyond the local. That is why, in the entire Qur’an, there are only nine places actually named. Of these, in turn, only two can be securely identified from the records of the time: Mount Sinai and Yathrib, the oasis settlement that would subsequently become known as Medina. It is true that a third location, Badr, where the Qur’an indicates a battle was fought, had been mentioned a hundred years previously by a poet praising a particularly nifty camel—but the only clue he had given to its location was that it stood somewhere in the middle of an enormous desert.⁷⁴ Another five places, including Mecca itself, appear for the first time in the Qur’an, and might as well have been anywhere, for all the detail about them that the holy book provides.^d Most enigmatic of all, though, is the final site to be name-checked in the Qur’an: a “House” at a place called Bakka. Muslim scholars, puzzled by this allusion, and with a show of some considerable ingenuity, sought to demonstrate that here was merely an alternative name for Mecca—as well they might have done, for Bakka, in the Qur’an, is identified as a site of primal and incomparable holiness.^e “Pilgrimage to the House,” so the Prophet declares, “is a duty owed to God.”⁷⁵ No wonder, then, that the attempt to establish the precise location of this awesome site should have inspired commentators to pile speculation upon speculation. That Bakka was Mecca, and that Mecca stood in the Hijaz, were propositions taken wholly for granted by Ibn Ishaq and his heirs. Yet the unsettling fact remains that not a shred of backing for either exists within the pages of the Qur’an itself. Moreover, the texts in which they first appeared were separated from the lifetime of Muhammad by several generations. The suspicion must be, then, that they are no more likely to reflect authentic tradition than did the nose of Palestinian landowners for previously forgotten biblical landmarks, back in the first flush of Christian tourism to the Holy Land.

A murk such as this spreads impenetrably. Where precisely Muhammad believed Bakka to have stood it is surely now impossible to say. Such evidence as might once have existed has long since been lost. Clues remain, but they are all of them ambiguous and fragmentary in the extreme. The ancient Greeks told the story of a robber named Procrustes, who would tie his victims to a bed, and then either stretch or mutilate them until they had been made to fit it: a methodology that the historian of early Islam often has little choice but to follow. Speculation as to where Bakka may originally have stood must perforce be procrustean—but since this caveat applies as surely to theories that would identify it with modern-day Mecca as to those that would not, there seems no need to apologise for it. Some mysteries are doomed forever to defy solution.

That said, it is possible to hazard a speculation. It is surely significant, at the very least, that Arabs in the wilds beyond Palestine had a pronounced taste for the appropriation of biblical settings. No less than Jews or Christians, they had long flocked to the sanctuary at Mamre: the very place—or maqom—where Abraham “had stood before the Lord.” Furthermore, they had achieved what no other people beyond the limits of the Christian empire had even thought to obtain: a convincing claim upon the authentic bloodline of Abraham. The right of the Arabs to the title of “Ishmaelites,” by virtue of their descent from Hagar, Abraham’s concubine and Ishmael’s mother, was freely acknowledged across the Fertile Crescent; and if the faintest hint of a sneer might occasionally linger when someone from beyond the deserts brought up the name, then the Arabs themselves were perfectly capable of a matching snobbery all of their own. Far from feeling embarrassed at having had a slave-girl in the family, those who were aware of their Hagarene lineage had come to revel in it. In the 660s, some two centuries after Theodoret had first reported the Ishmaelites’ pride in their ancestry, a Nestorian chronicler on the Persian border with Mesopotamia alluded to the existence of a mysterious domed sanctuary, supposedly founded by Abraham and sacred to the Arabs. “Indeed,” the chronicler added, “it is nothing new for the Arabs to worship there—for, from the beginning, from their earliest days, they have shown reverence to the father of the head of their nation.”⁷⁶ A most arresting detail—for this is almost identical to what is reported in the Qur’an. There, in the passage on the House at Bakka, the Prophet identified the man who founded it as having been none other than Abraham himself. Is it possible, then, that the sanctuary praised in the Qur’an as the primal, the “blessed place,”⁷⁷ was the same identical one known as far afield as Persia as “the Dome of Abraham”?

Muslim scholars, in their understandable efforts to identify Bakka with Mecca, went to great and often fantastical lengths to explain how a patriarch who, according to venerable tradition, had been promised Canaan by God, and not Arabia, might conceivably have ended up in Mecca. Some had him abandoning Hagar and Ishmael there during the course of an extended road-trip; others, rather startlingly, described him as being guided by the Shekhinah—the name applied by the rabbis to the divine presence on earth. Such theories—floated in contradiction to both the Bible and an entire millennium of obsessive elaboration upon the story of Abraham and his bloodline—seem to have been wholly original to the Muslim scholars themselves.^f Certainly, if any contemporaries of Muhammad believed that Abraham had been active in Mecca, there is no record of it. That Abraham had settled in Canaan, and that Hagar and Ishmael had taken refuge in one of the various stretches of wilderness that neighboured it, remained in the Prophet’s lifetime what it had always been: something that everyone took utterly for granted.

Nor, in fact, is there anything in the Qur’an itself that would serve to contradict this universal presumption. Just the opposite, in fact. The Bakka described by the Prophet shimmers with the same numinous aura that had long attached itself to another sanctuary: Mamre. “It is the place where Abraham stood to pray”:⁷⁸ so the Prophet describes Bakka. Of what, then, can this conceivably be an echo, if not the maqom? Certainly, between the Hebrew word for “place” and its Arabic equivalent, there was a manifest resonance. “Take as your place of prayer,” it is recorded in the Qur’an, “the place where Abraham stood”⁷⁹—the Maqam Ibrahim. In time to come, with Mecca enshrined once and for all as the site of Islam’s holiest sanctuary, Muslim scholars would identify this Maqam Ibrahim with a stone that stood just to the north of the Ka’ba—an explanation that gives little hint as to its far more likely origins, many hundreds of miles to the north.⁸⁰

That the Prophet repeatedly echoes the traditions associated with Mamre in his accounts of how the House at Bakka came to be built does not mean, of course, that the two shrines were one and the same thing—but it does suggest, to haunting and potent effect, a very particular context for his revelations. The Qur’an is a work manifest with distinctive habits of worship. Again and again, throughout its pages, the Prophet is insistent that these derive, not from his own invention but from the deepest wellsprings of monotheism. The ground he treads, he and the Mushrikun both, is stamped with the footprints of Abraham, and of Ishmael, the patriarch’s son, and of Lot, his nephew, as well. Why, then, the Prophet demands, do his opponents not read the lessons that are written for them in such a landscape? “Lot too was a messenger,” he reminds the Mushrikun:

Remember when We delivered him and all his household,

Except for an old woman, who was left behind.

Then We destroyed the others.

You pass by them morning and night; will you not understand?

⁸¹

The allusion is to the petrified remains of the Sodomites—and it could hardly be any clearer in its implications. Wherever the Prophet’s audience may have been settled, it was evidently at no great remove from what the Arabs themselves called the Bahr Lut, the “Sea of Lot”—what we know today as the Dead Sea.

And if the Qur’an is to be trusted, and if Muhammad’s opponents did indeed live within an easy journey of the ruins of Sodom and Gomorrah, then the significance of the sanctuary at Bakka would hardly have been confined to the dimension of the heavenly alone. Back in the reign of Justinian, when a Roman ambassador had reported on the great desert shrine where “even the wild beasts live in peace with men,” he had included another intriguing detail: that it was sacred to “a majority of the Saracens.”⁸² Could this desert shrine have been Bakka? The ambassador’s description is so vague that it is impossible to say for sure. Nevertheless, a particularly intriguing detail among the Prophet’s many revelations does seem to echo the Roman report. The Qur’an reveals that Abraham and Ishmael raised a prayer to God as they laboured to build the House at Bakka: “Make our descendants into a community devoted to you.”⁸³ Which was, of course, to cast those descendants, the Ishmaelites, as something rather more than the sum of their parts. Fragmented into various tribes they might have been, and yet they were to be regarded, so it would seem from the Qur’an, as a single people—a “community.” Bound by a unity of purpose, and joined by a common ancestry, what would they therefore share in, if not a God-sanctioned partnership—a shirkat?

Except that God, in the wilds beyond Palestine, was not the only patron of such partnerships. Behind the Thamud—and every confederation of Arab tribes since—had lurked Roman interests and Roman influence. It was only to be expected—in an age when proxy-fighting between the two superpowers cast a longer shadow over Arabia than ever before, extending as far south as distant Himyar—that the provincial authorities in Palestine should have shown themselves grimly determined not to drop their guard an inch. It was this, in the decades prior to the great war with Persia, that had encouraged a major recruitment drive on the part of Roman strategists, as they sought to compensate for their relative lack of manpower along the frontier by hiring Arabs to patrol it in depth. This, in turn, encouraged mass emigration from all over Arabia, with entire tribes drifting steadily northwards from the Hijaz towards Palestine. The concern of the provincial authorities to control and regulate this movement was evident in the care with which they sought to catalogue the newcomers. Exotic names duly flourished on the roster of foederati. Not an ethnic grouping between Palestine and the Hijaz, but the provincial authorities had sought to sponsor it. Never before, perhaps, had the tribal make-up of Arabia quite so pressingly held the interest of Roman strategists.

And yet, in every register of the age, there is one intriguing absence. As with Mecca, the city in which the Prophet supposedly grew up, so with the Quraysh, the tribe to which Muhammad supposedly belonged—all is deafening silence. Once again, it is not until a century and more after the Prophet’s death that the name makes its first, fleeting appearance in a datable text—and even then it is not entirely clear what is meant by the allusion.⁸⁴ This is doubly puzzling: for not only were the Quraysh, according to Muslim tradition, the dominant power in the Hijaz, renowned far and wide across Arabia, but Muhammad’s own ancestor, an adventurer named Qusayy, is supposed to have seized power in Mecca only after Qaysar—“Caesar”— “had extended him aid.”⁸⁵ Why, then, should the Romans appear never to have heard of the Quraysh? Such a group of people certainly did exist: they are described in four tantalising verses of the Qur’an as embarking on winter and summer journeys, and receiving both provisions and security from God. Yet, even eminent Muslim scholars might confess themselves puzzled by the precise meaning of the word “Quraysh.” Perhaps, they mused, it derived from the name of a prominent travel guide, or else a breed of camel, or perhaps a type of shark? The truth was, however, that no one—not two centuries on from the Prophet’s death—really knew any more. The derivation of “Quraysh” had long since been forgotten.

There was nothing particularly unusual about this. Back in the fourth century, when the Romans had started to refer to the Arabs as “Saracens,” few of them had appreciated that the name might well have derived from a word in the Arabs’ own incomprehensible tongue: shirkat. So perhaps it is not a total coincidence that Quraysh itself should seem to echo the same identical concept of “partnership”—but in Syriac. Qarisha, in the language that had increasingly come to be the Fertile Crescent’s readiest lingua franca, meant “collected together”—“confederated.”⁸⁶ Is this, then, to what “Quraysh” had originally referred—those tribes brought together in a common partnership, as foederati of the New Rome? It is telling, certainly, that the Ghassanid kings—and doubtless other Arab commanders—spoke at least a smattering of Syriac as a matter of course.⁸⁷ The word qarisha, duly Arabised, might well then have been used far beyond the imperial frontier: a convenient shorthand for all those tribes that had grown fat on Roman patronage.

All of this is speculation, of course. Nevertheless, it would imply, if true, that the mention of “Quraysh” in the Qur’an does not refer to a specific people in a specific place, but rather to an entire confederation of peoples; that the lands where they were to be found ranged from the Negev to the northern Hijaz; and that the sustenance and security provided them by God was mediated by Caesar. If so, then it would certainly explain why tidings of Roman defeat “in the nearby land” should have been broadcast even in the Qur’an itself. After all, the Arabs beyond the frontier were not far distant from the earthquake that convulsed the lands of the Fertile Crescent; rather, they were directly and intimately affected by it. By shattering the Roman hold on Syria and Palestine, the Persian onslaught severed for good what the Arab foederati had always previously taken for granted: the supply of gold from their imperial sponsors. Not, perhaps, that this would necessarily have spelled total disaster: for the Persian occupiers would have been desperate for the same leather, provisions and provender that Arab merchants had previously supplied to the Romans. Moreover, on the evidence of the Qur’an, the Mushrikun could provide these items to order. It is telling that trade, no less than agriculture, appears to have obsessed the Prophet, with even God being cast by him as a merchant: one who accepts the souls of mortals as pledges for their debts and remorselessly keeps track of their deeds in “an unblotted ledger-book.”⁸⁸ Telling as well, no doubt, is the Prophet’s evident familiarity with what appear to have been lengthy business trips—across the sea as well as the land. Perhaps here, then, in the need to travel by ship during the summer, and with pack animals during the winter, is an explanation for the two ventures made annually by the Quraysh.⁸⁹ As for the Prophet himself, more than a century before Ibn Hisham’s biography, in the 690s, and it was already being recorded by a Christian chronicler in Edessa that “Muhammad travelled for the purposes of trade to the lands of Palestine, Arabia and Syria.”⁹⁰ A tantalising snippet of detail—and if authentic, one that would suggest a record of business dealings at the height of the Persian occupation. “No offence,” as the Qur’an itself puts it, “to seek some bounty from your Lord.”⁹¹ War, after all, will often provide scope for those on its margins to coin a profit.

But also for much more: reflections upon the mutability of all things, and the evils of the age, and the pettiness of human doings when compared to the omnipotence of God. “Have they not travelled the world,” the Prophet asked the unbelievers, “and seen how those before them met their end?”⁹² All that is human can totter: a lesson fit for the age. The Prophet’s revelations may have been haunted by ancient cities abandoned to encroaching sands, but they also contained hints of other, more recent monuments to human vanity. Traces of the decaying imperial frontier are manifest in the very language of the Qur’an: the words for roads, forts and even legionaries’ painted shields—transliterated from the original Greek and Latin—all have spectral presences in the Prophet’s revelations.⁹³ When, for instance, in the opening sura of the Qur’an, the prayer was raised to God, “Guide us to the straight path,”⁹⁴ it represented a dazzlingly audacious act of appropriation. The great military roads—the strata—that for centuries had girded the eastern frontier, and served as both emblems and tools of Roman might, were being brought to fade before the radiance of a celestial sirat—a road eternally straight.

This vision, of a truth so blinding that earthly empires were as nothing before it but shadows, was hardly novel, of course. Even the candlelit golds of Hagia Sophia, even the fires in the three holiest temples of Iranshahr, blazed as the merest reflections of the effulgence of God. This, in the barren desert beyond Palestine, far from the cockpits of worldly power, was a truth that had long been appreciated. Not only in the souls of the fugitive and the penitent, but as words inscribed on manuscripts, many of them centuries old, the experience of the divine had taken many forms and left many marks. Whether they were otherwise forgotten gospels, or ancient Jewish writings discovered in caves, or copies of pagan epics that had been stashed in libraries for would-be lawyers to use, books as well as people might speak of the yearning to understand heaven. “Those who disbelieve say: ‘This is nothing but fables of the ancients.’ ”⁹⁵ That the Prophet was sensitive to this particular accusation is evident enough from his repeated efforts, made throughout the Qur’an, to rebut it.⁹⁶ Yet, never did he veer to the opposite extreme, and proclaim the novelty of his message. “It is indeed a revelation from the Lord of the Worlds, brought down by the Trustworthy Spirit, upon your heart, so that you may be a warner, in manifest Arabic speech—but it is also in the Books of the ancients.”⁹⁷ Just as Jews might cast the Talmud as a record of eternity, and Christians see an image of the immutable order of the heavens in the Church, so did the Prophet—ever a man of his time—insist upon the timelessness of his message. Well might he have proclaimed “the straight path” to God with such boldness and conviction. When set against such a highway, what were the rutted and weed-covered strata, long since left in a state of chronic disrepair by Justinian’s budget cuts? One was eternal; the others were already returning to the desert sands.

And just as roads might crumble, so might confederations. Compared with a community of believers faithful only to God, what was a ragbag of mercenaries in hock to a foreign power? The Thamud had long since fallen, and so too, God willing, would their heirs. “We conferred guidance upon them—but they chose blindness over guidance.”⁹⁸ The Prophet’s opponents were doubly Mushrikun: for not only did they partner angels with God as fit objects of worship, but they themselves were bound in a shared subservience as associates in a Roman-sponsored shirkat. They were not only blasphemers but collaborators. Naturally, it was the offence against God that stank most noxiously to the heavens—but there were hints as well, in the Qur’an, of more earthly crimes and follies. Remorselessly, the Prophet casts his followers as the mirror-image of the foederati. Just as whole tribes had long been emigrating northwards, eager for Caesar’s bounty, so in a similar manner, but now in the cause of God, were the Believers to rank as emigrants—as the Muhajirun. A manoeuvre of genius. Service was being offered to a monarch infinitely greater than either Caesar or Shahanshah. An entire pattern of mass-movement was being reconfigured and set in spectacular reverse. “Whoso leaves his home as an emigrant to God and His Messenger and is overtaken by death, his reward falls upon God, and God is All-Forgiving, Compassionate to each.”⁹⁹

Not that one necessarily had to die before being rewarded for joining the Muhajirun. If it was the pleasures of heaven—the ox-eyed maidens and the pearl-like cup-bearers—that shimmered most deliciously before the gaze of the Believers, then earthly profits as well were far from being disdained. “They ask you about booty.” So begins one sura, in bald and ringing terms. “Say: ‘Booty belongs to God and His Messenger.’ ”¹⁰⁰ Here, at a time of global calamity, was a message calculated to appeal to anyone feeling the economic pinch. Well and good as were the profits to be had from flogging leather to the Persians, these were hardly likely to compensate, even in small part, for the loss of subsidies from Caesar’s agents. The Arab tribes who had emigrated northwards on the scent of Roman gold—and who had relied on their paymasters’ lucre for decades—had grown much impoverished. Well, then, might the message proclaimed by the Prophet—that he had a licence from God to plunder unbelievers—have met with an enthusiastic up-take. “Remember a time when you were few in number and held to be weak on earth, when you feared men would tear you to pieces. He gave you refuge and aided you with His victory; and He bestowed His bounties upon you.”¹⁰¹ Bounties that once, perhaps, Muhammad’s followers would have been content to receive from the Roman authorities—but not anymore. A wellspring that had run dry was no longer a wellspring at all.

Here, then, was a crisis, and an attempt to resolve it, bred thoroughly of its time. The arc of its parabola can still just about be traced, discernible despite all the thick overlay applied centuries later by pious biographers and commentators. The Qur’an, far from standing at some fantastical remove from the currents and convulsions of the age, is the supreme monument to them. It is the record of a man living through an unprecedented period of upheaval, alert, in every way he can be, to the word of God, and betraying a sensibility, even as he contemplates the ruin of the universe itself, that is decidedly bookish. “That will be the Day,” so God says at one point, in a description of the looming End Times, “when We roll up the sky, as a writer rolls up his scrolls.” Such images, which occur throughout the Qur’an, suggest a man who was the polar opposite of illiterate, and who, even as he laid claim to traditions of divine inspiration that were immeasurably venerable, knew full well what he was doing. Such it was to be the Seal of the Prophets: “a herald of good tidings, a bearer of warning.”¹⁰² The good tidings provided a solution to humanity’s troubles that did not depend upon mortal agency; the warning explained what would happen to those who closed their ears to it.

But it was not enough for the Prophet’s message to be inscribed simply upon the souls of his audience. The evils of the time were as political as they were spiritual, and as economic as they were moral. Like the rabbis of Mesopotamia and Tiberias, like Justinian and his great team of jurists, the Prophet appreciated that not only individuals but society itself required moulding to the purposes of God. This was why, it seems, he set himself to the founding of a state—first among the Mushrikun, and then, in the wake of their rejection, among the Muhajirun. And its capital? Here, at any rate, there is no contradiction between the Qur’an and the great spider’s web of subsequent Islamic tradition. A battle fought against overwhelming odds, “a violent wind and invisible forces”¹⁰³ sent by God against the Prophet’s enemies, a glorious victory snatched from the jaws of defeat: all this, so the Qur’an records, occurred at a place that, for once, it actually names. Yathrib, that fertile oasis in the northern Hijaz, was indeed, it would appear, ’Madinat an-Nabi—the “City of the Prophet.” Medina, just as tradition records, ranked as the very first bridgehead of the heavenly established by Muhammad on earth.

Does that mean, then, that the story told of a single, dramatic flight there, a hijra, is similarly based on fact? It is notable, certainly, that the word itself does not appear anywhere in the Qur’an; and, as with so many details of his biography, all references to the Prophet’s escape to Yathrib are frustratingly late in origin.¹⁰⁴ Reason enough, then, perhaps, to be suspicious—and to wonder whether the whole notion of “emigration” might possibly have had a significance for the Prophet and his followers that subsequent tradition has obscured. Memorable the story of the hijra may be—and yet there seems to lurk behind it the hint of something much more seismic. In the Qur’an, emigration is cast as a duty incumbent upon all believers—no matter their circumstances, no matter their location. Far from alluding to a single journey into exile—whether to Yathrib or to anywhere else—it seems to imply a call to arms that is all-embracing, universal and unbounded by time or place. “Anyone who migrates for God’s cause will find many a refuge and great plenty in the earth.”¹⁰⁵ Nothing could conceivably have sounded more radical or terrifying to the Prophet’s audience. Abandoning family and tribe was the most stomach-churning prospect imaginable for any Arab. And yet, if the Qur’an is to be trusted, this was precisely the commitment that the Prophet was demanding—and not just of his own people but of all the various descendants of Ishmael, wherever they might live, across the entire sweep of Arabia. The successful planting of his banner in Yathrib, set against the backdrop of the apparent breaking of the world, was to be only the start. All those with the courage—or perhaps the sheer desperation—to accept the Prophet’s challenge and embark on a new beginning were invited to join him on a journey that might lead God alone knew where.

And to be sure—whether they were tempted by heaven, plunder, or both—there was clearly no lack of Arabs who were prepared to answer the summons. “You are the best community ever brought forth among mankind, commanding virtue and forbidding vice, and believing in God.” So the Prophet hailed the Muhajirun: as a band of warriors who had it within them not only to found a whole new order of society but to inherit, as their reward for doing so, the earth itself.

A claim that was to be proved, and in short order, quite spectacularly correct.