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

Why?

Early in AD 634, alarming news reached Caesarea, the handsome city on the coast of Palestine that had long served as the hinterland’s capital. A war band of Saracens, trespassing directly on Roman territory, had crossed into the Negev, and was now aiming northwards for the rich fields and villages of Samaria. A most tiresome intrusion—and one that the provincial authorities were naturally anxious to nip in the bud. No matter that the Roman military, in the wake of plague and war, remained extremely stretched: a task force of infantry, summoned hurriedly to arms, marched out into the open, and swung briskly south.¹⁰⁶ At their head, resplendent in the white uniform that marked him out as a personal favourite of the emperor, rode a patrician by the name of Sergius.¹⁰⁷ He had particular cause to relish the challenge ahead. Already, he had been looking to replenish the finances of the exhausted province by restricting the profits that Saracen merchants were permitted to take back across the frontier. Now, with the barbarians seemingly provoked to open larceny by this measure, it was time to reacquaint them with the brute facts of Roman might. The region’s ancient mistress, after her temporary absence, was back.

Sergius and his small army met the invaders in the afternoon of 4 February, some twelve miles east of Gaza.¹⁰⁸ The result was utter debacle. The infantry were ambushed and Sergius himself, having reputedly fallen three times from his horse, was taken prisoner. His fate, according to one report, was a peculiarly unpleasant one: sewn up inside a freshly flayed camel hide, he was suffocated to death as the stinking skin dried out. Further calamities quickly followed. The Saracens, with devilish cunning, turned out to have launched a pincer movement against Palestine. The second war band, crossing the eastern frontier even as the first was rampaging through the Negev, joined exultantly in the scouring of the province. Over fields thick with thistles, weed-covered highways and crumbling walls they swept. “Saracens,” Roman strategists had always asserted with imperious complacency, “are by nature unable to conduct sieges”¹⁰⁹—but now, to the horror of the authorities, this reassurance was proving a worthless one. If it was cities, with their dense populations and rat-infested byways, that had always proved most vulnerable to the scythings of the plague, then the distinction between town and countryside, after whole decades of visitations, was one that had come increasingly to be blurred. Sheep grazed amid toppled pillars, while cattle, tethered against the depredations of bandits, spent their nights in abandoned shops and foundries. If the average city of Palestine was not yet wholly a ghost town, then it certainly had one foot in the grave.¹¹⁰ Unsurprisingly, then, in the wake of Sergius’s defeat, and with Roman field armies nowhere to be seen, ambassadors from settlement after settlement sought to follow the path of least resistance, and buy off the invaders.

Not that many could seriously have thought that the Saracens would be around for long. As with Samaritan uprisings, so with incursions from the desert: the imperial authorities had seen it all before. Inveterately barbarian as the Saracens were, perhaps it was only to be expected that they would once in a while turn rogue. Back in 582, for instance, when Ghassanid resentment at the exile of their king had provoked the foederati into open revolt, they had inflicted a crushing defeat on an imperial army in open battle and then ranged at will across Syria. A couple of centuries before that, an Arab queen named Mavia, “long celebrated in song by the Saracens,”¹¹¹ had launched a series of devastating raids that had taken her all the way to Egypt. The Roman response, on both occasions, had been the time-honoured one of dazzling the barbarians with bribes. Both Mavia and the Ghassanids, despite the undoubted scares that they had given the provincial authorities, had been successfully pacified with a whole range of exotic gewgaws. Golden furnishings and fancy titles had, as ever, proved their worth. No reason, then, for Heraclius to feel particularly perturbed by the defeat outside Gaza. Alarming though the swift return of warfare to Palestine clearly was, the Saracens hardly rivalled the Persians as foes. After all, if history had taught Roman officials anything, it was that the wolves of Arabia, no matter how much of a passing threat they might be on occasion, could always be muzzled in the end.

This latest invasion would prove very different, though. The Saracens did not content themselves with the extortion of subsidies and silken cloaks. Rather than wait to be graced with treasure from the hands of Caesar, they aimed instead to rip it brutally from his grasp. With Palestine effectively secured, they immediately flung themselves against the defences of Syria. Fifty years later, a monk writing in Sinai would record what ensued: two terrible battles, one at the Ghassanid camp city of Jabiya, and the other a few miles to the west, on the Golan Heights above the River Yarmuk.¹¹² The details are slight—and it is the measure of how impossible it has proved for historians to agree on the actual progress of the Arab invasion, and the struggle of the Romans to resist it, that not a single earlier reference to these fateful clashes exists in either Arabic or Greek.^g The dates, the details and the course of the Syrian campaign—all are veiled by contradiction and confusion.¹¹³ Nevertheless, if the particulars of what happened during the campaigning have defied repeated attempts to arrive at a consensus, then not so the result. “For the Roman army,” as the monk in Sinai would note with bleak finality, “it proved a defeat as fatal as it was terrible.”¹¹⁴ By late 636, with the campaigning season drawing to a close, Heraclius seems to have bowed to the inevitable. Burning villages and fields as he withdrew, he abandoned the very provinces that he had moved heaven and earth to retake just a few years previously. “Peace be upon you, Syria!” he is said to have cried, as he paused for one last yearning look back. “What a rich country is this for the enemy!”¹¹⁵

Yet others were richer still. Across the desert from Syria, where the humiliating collapse of the House of Sasan into debilitation and factionalism had brought a beardless king by the name of Yazdegird to the throne, Iranshahr itself was no less exhausted and divided than its royal family. The marks of the Roman invasion still scarred the landscape. The River Tigris, having burst its banks in AD 629, had swept away an immense swath of irrigation works and left Kavad’s great canal silted up. Parthian warlords, snarling and snapping as ever, now threatened the entire fabric of the imperial high command with disintegration. Never—not even in the dark days following the death of Peroz—had the empire been so enfeebled; and the Arabs, alert as they were to the scents of weakness, well knew it. Either a few weeks or a few years after the Roman defeat at the Yarmuk—the sources, as usual, are at sixes and sevens—a similarly decisive battle was fought on Iranshahr’s desert flank.¹¹⁶ Qadisiyya was a small, palm-fringed town just to the south of the one-time Lakhmid capital of Hira. Now, it would be the scene of an epically terminal disaster for Iranshahr. After fighting that spanned several days, and the failure of elephants as well as the Persian heavy cavalry to turn the tide, the Arabs emerged triumphant. Their women, stalking the palm groves, were said to have busied themselves slitting the throats of those of the enemy still left there alive. Meanwhile, the exultant Arab army, pursuing the remnants of their defeated foes across canals and pontoon bridges, caught up with the fugitives amid the ruins of Babylon and briskly wiped them out. Iranshahr had been decapitated, “for all the leading nobles were killed.”¹¹⁷ Ctesiphon, a bare hundred miles to the north, now lay directly in the Arabs’ path. Its fall, with the flower of the empire’s chivalry left blackened and rotting in the killing fields of the south, was only a matter of time. Sure enough, despite bitter resistance that seems to have lasted almost a year, the great city was duly stormed. Yazdegird himself, amid much confusion, managed to escape his doomed capital, zigzagging across the mudflats in a desperate effort to evade his pursuers. He finally reached the relative security of the Iranian uplands and his ancestral hometown of Istakhr, from which Ardashir, five centuries previously, had embarked on his own great project of conquest; but the royal regalia and the imperial treasury, all were lost. So too was Mesopotamia—which the invaders, in imitation of the Persians, knew by the name of “Iraq.”

That Arab fingers could prod at the crown worn by Khusrow the Great; that Arab feet could tread on carpets from the royal palace woven with gold and adorned with precious stones; that Arab prayers could be heard in the great throne room of Ctesiphon, from the sides of which statues of Yazdegird’s ancestors gazed out stern and impassive, oblivious to the ruin that had engulfed the House of Sasan: all this, in the opinion of the Arabs themselves, taught a lesson so edifying that they would never tire of repeating it. The coin of contempt dealt them for so long by Caesar and Shahanshah alike had been richly, deliciously, repaid. Two and a half centuries on from Qadisiyya, by which time the Muslims ruled an empire even vaster than Khusrow the Great’s, their pride in having scorned superpower dazzle could still rank for them as the surest measure of their dignity. “In the past, those of us who came to you were obedient to you, they humbled themselves before you, they sought what was in your hands.” So one Arab, as pious as he was lacking in personal hygiene, was supposed to have told the silken Persians on the eve of the great battle. “But now we no longer come to you looking for the things of this world. Our desire and aspiration is for paradise.”¹¹⁸

Hairy, badly dressed, and stinking of camel as he was, this ambassador to the perfumed tents of the Persian high command would be commemorated in histories of the conquest as the heroic embodiment of Muslim brotherhood. “God loves not the swaggering and the conceited.”¹¹⁹ So the Prophet had taught. Even though, if tradition is to be trusted, Muhammad died in 632, two whole years before the first rubbing of a superpower nose in the dirt, it was his revelations, of a God who humbles the proud, and slaughters them in battle, and permits them to be despoiled of all their goods, that had given the Arabs the courage and sheer self-confidence to go eyeball to eyeball with their former masters.¹²⁰ Riding in to meet Roman or Persian officials, their ambassadors were said to have made a point of trampling down their cushions and stabbing with spears at their carpets. The conquest of the world, and the scorning of its seductions: such, it seemed to Muslim historians writing centuries later, had been the supreme achievement of the generation that had known Muhammad.

It had one supreme exemplar. Umar bin al-Khattab had ranked as the most formidable and domineering of all the Prophet’s companions, the leader under whose guidance both Syria and Iraq had been won, the veritable sword arm of the Prophet. Tradition would commemorate him not merely as a great Amir—“commander”—but as something very much more: as a Muslim so flame-lit by his knowledge of God’s will that several Qur’anic verses were said to have been revealed purely to provide his opinions with some heavenly back-up. Even Muhammad, according to certain traditions, had acknowledged that Umar was the better Muslim of the two. “When people differ on any issue,” one celebrated ruling declared, “look for Umar’s doing and abide by it.”¹²¹ Like the Qur’an itself, then, the character of the second Caliph was a book in which might be read the lessons of God’s will. Mighty warrior and mighty ascetic; quick to draw his sword and no less quick to trample down in righteous scorn the luxuries won by that same sword; a man who from his mud-brick home in Medina could direct the overthrow of mighty empires, and yet who, if he saw his lieutenants dressed in silks and brocade, would leap down from his saddle and pelt them with stones: such, in the opinion of Muslim scholars, was the man who had secured the world for Islam.

A plausible characterisation? Certainly, as with Muhammad, so with Umar—his historicity is beyond dispute. An Armenian bishop, writing a decade or so after Qadisiyya, described Umar in a brief, throwaway sentence much as Muslim historians would subsequently do: as a mighty potentate coordinating the advance of “the sons of Ishmael” from the depths of the desert.¹²² Nor is that all. There do indeed seem to be found, preserved in the traditions that Muslims would record of the Sahabah, the “Companions,” of Muhammad, authentic echoes of the God-haunted and strife-torn age that had witnessed the Futuh—the “Conquest.” If there seems no reason to doubt that Umar, that model of ferocious piety, was directly inspired by the awesome thunder of the Prophet’s revelations, then so too is it evident that the Prophet himself, in his summoning of the Arabs to holy war, was perfectly in accord with the spirit of the times. “In truth,” he informed his followers, “the punishment of those who make war against God and His Messenger, and roam the earth corrupting it, is that they be killed, or crucified, or have their hands and feet amputated, alternately, or be exiled from the land.”¹²³ Such a message was all the more resonant, no doubt, for being delivered direct from the Almighty Himself; and yet, the sentiments informing it would have been instantly recognisable to anyone familiar with the workings of Roman power. Whether it was Justinian breaking the rebellious Samaritans, or Saint Simeon incinerating Mundhir with a fireball, or Heraclius bringing ruin to the fire-temples of the Persians, examples were hardly lacking of spectacular violence committed in the cause of God. Umar, turning the pretensions of the Christian empire back upon itself, seemed to those he conquered, as well as to those he commanded, a warlord of a thoroughly recognisable kind. What added incomparably to his prestige, however, and did truly suggest something novel, was that his earth-shaking qualities as a generalissimo were combined with a most distinctive cast of virtue. Rather than ape the manners of a Caesar, as the Ghassanid kings had done, he drew on the example of a quite different kind of Christian. Umar’s threadbare robes, his diet of bread, salt and water, and his rejection of worldly riches would have reminded anyone from the desert reaches beyond Palestine of a very particular kind of person. Monks out in the Judaean desert had long been casting themselves as warriors of God. The achievement of Umar was to take such language to a literal, and previously unimagined, extreme.

Just like the Qur’an itself, then, the heroic stories that were told of the second Caliph seem to reach back to a specific place and moment: to the fringes of Palestine, and that terrifying period of superpower conflict when it appeared that the world itself stood in the shadow of the End Days. That war might be waged in the name of God, and that a contempt for earthly pleasures too was a form of warfare: these twin presumptions, which Umar embodied in a supremely radical way, were nevertheless far from being original to him. Naturally, the truth of this cannot help but be obscured by histories that locate his beginnings, like those of the Prophet himself, in a desert backwater many hundreds of miles from the Fertile Crescent. Composed centuries later, by men of intense piety who could feel God nearer to them than their jugular veins, it is no wonder that such narratives, like sandstone shaped by ceaseless weathering, should have been transformed out of recognition over the course of the generations. Hence, in trying to explain how a state came to be forged in the depths of Arabia formidable enough to subdue the Fertile Crescent, the perennial frustration. The aftermath of the conquests masterminded by Umar could hardly be more manifest—but not so the course, and still less the cause, of the original eruption.

Which said, despair need not be total. There has been preserved, embedded within the vast corpus of subsequent writings on the Prophet, at least a single lump of magma sufficiently calcified to have stood proof against all erosion. The “Constitution of Medina,” it has been termed: a series of eight brief treaties concluded between the Muhajirun and the natives of Yathrib, and which—not least because they refer to the emigrants as “Believers” rather than “Muslims”—are accepted by even the most suspicious of scholars as deriving from the time of Muhammad. Here, in these precious documents, it is possible to glimpse the authentic beginnings of a movement that would succeed, in barely two decades, in prostrating both the New Rome and Iranshahr. That the Prophet consciously aimed at state-building; that it was his ambition to forge his own people and the local Arab tribes into a single Umma; that this confederation was to fight “in the path of God”:¹²⁴ these brief details, the veritable building blocks out of which all the much later stories of Muhammad’s life would be constructed, do authentically seem rock solid. What the Constitution of Medina does not tell us, however, is where the Muhajirun had originally come from; nor does it reveal precisely whom they felt called upon by God to fight. Most regrettably of all, it sheds no light on how an alliance stitched together in a remote oasis might conceivably have expanded to embrace the whole of Arabia, and then to take on the world. Nevertheless, its very existence would seem to suggest that the hard core of Muslim tradition may truly derive from the time of Muhammad, and have stood proof, after all, against the weathering effects of time. Conflict between the upstart Umma and the Quraysh; eventual compromise on both sides, and the agreement between them of a treaty; a brutal crushing by the new confederation of any Arab tribes bold enough to stand in its way: such a process of state-building seems, at the very least, plausible.

And if accurate, then it would imply that there may perhaps be other clues, preserved in the stories told centuries later of the Prophet’s career, as to how and why, as if from the blue, the imperial authorities in both Syria and Iraq were overwhelmed by precisely the kind of Arab federation that hitherto had always been theirs to sway. Even though Muslim tradition would cast the conflict between Muhammad and the Quraysh as a struggle for control of Mecca, this tradition itself contains hints of a suggestively alternative one. Particularly striking, for instance, is the number of leading Qurayshi dynasts who, despite supposedly being based in Mecca, are said to have purchased estates in Syria during the Prophet’s lifetime: an example of long-distance property speculation which, if genuinely conducted from the Hijaz, would have had no precedent in the entire span of Roman history. Previously, whether along the Rhine or in Armenia, the only barbarians who owned land on either side of the imperial frontier were those who directly bordered it.¹²⁵ All of which would seem to imply a rather awkward conundrum. Either the Quraysh truly came from Mecca, in which case they could not have owned property in Roman territory—or else they owned property in Roman territory, in which case they are most unlikely to have come from Mecca.

Of these two alternatives, it is clear that the second is the likelier. Even on the evidence of Muslim tradition itself, the obsession of the Prophet with securing the border zone south of Palestine is manifest. With the single exception of Mecca itself, all the targets of his campaigning, all the objects of his military ambitions, are said to have lain in this region: the stretches of desert that the Romans’ Arab allies had always traditionally patrolled. If the Quraysh did go from attempting to strangle the Prophet’s infant confederation in its cradle to allying themselves with it—and there seems no reason to doubt it—they would obviously have been putting their stake in any imperially sanctioned order in serious jeopardy. This, however, at a time when the supply of gold from Caesar had long since dried up, seems to have struck them as a gamble well worth taking. The winnings on offer, after all, were potentially dazzling. It was not only the plunder promised them by Muhammad’s terrifyingly omnipotent god that would have glimmered in the imaginings of the Qurayshi leaders. So too would something even more seductive: the prospect of toppling the Ghassanids, of laying claim to the heritage of the Lakhmids, of fashioning a whole new shirkat, with themselves as the region’s top dogs. What the new confederation of Muhajirun and Quraysh appears initially to have aimed at, as their primary strategic goal, was the mastery of the Syrian desert. That it ended up conquering Syria itself, and Mesopotamia too, may well, then, have come as big a surprise to its leaders as it did to the Romans and Persians themselves.

It certainly seems no coincidence that the invaders’ two most decisive victories were won on the doorsteps of two places that had long featured prominently in Arab dreams. For generations, the tales told of the courts of Jabiya and Hira, and the songs sung of their splendours, had haunted the imaginings of the desert tribes. Now, with the defeat of the Romans at the Yarmuk, calamity had overwhelmed their Ghassanid clients as well—just as the shattering of the Persian monarchy at Qadisiyya had spelled doom for all those local desert chieftains with fantasies of sitting on the vacant throne of the Lakhmids. The likelihood is, in fact, that both imperial armies, as they sought to stem the Saracen onslaught, consisted themselves in large part of Arab tribesmen. Muslim historians, not surprisingly, would take an exultant delight in emphasising the immensity of the manpower available to the toppled empires: of how their troops numbered in the hundreds of thousands, and of how their blood, when it was spilled, had flowed in such prodigious quantities as to turn the wheels of local water-mills.¹²⁶ Contemporaries knew better, though. They understood the true condition of anaemia that had afflicted both superpowers. Heraclius, as one bishop bluntly put it, “could raise no more troops to oppose the Ishmaelites.”¹²⁷ Given the absence of regular troops, he had no alternative but to rely on foederati to defend Roman territory. The Ghassanids, and all the other tribes allied to them, repaid Heraclius’s trust with fierce loyalty; but it ensured, when the Muhajirun first appeared across the Syrian desert, that the Roman military itself was reduced to something of a sideshow.¹²⁸ Almost a century of pestilence, and whole decades of war: these, in their combined effects, had left the emperor with no clothes.

So it was that Syria and Palestine slipped away a second time from the grasp of the New Rome, and those Qurayshis who had previously held estates under the sufferance of the imperial authorities now took possession of entire provinces. But they were not alone, of course, in claiming title deeds to the Holy Land—as the defeated Christians, in their bewilderment and demoralisation, were all too bitterly aware. Torn between blaming the calamities that had overwhelmed them on either their own sinfulness or the machinations of the Jews, many, not surprisingly, plumped for the latter option. Was it any coincidence, they wondered, that “the horror of the invasion of the Ishmaelites”¹²⁹ should have followed so fast upon Heraclius’s campaign of forced baptisms? Dark rumours began to swirl: of how Jewish refugees from this decree had fled to Arabia; of how, upon their arrival in the desert, they had turned the head of the Saracens with honeyed talk of their shared descent from Abraham; of how Muhammad, looking to claim their birthright, had duly set off at their head to conquer Palestine. Stories such as these, of course, were prone only to grow wilder with the telling; and yet the wildest rumours of all, perhaps, were the very earliest. Back in 634, with Sergius freshly entombed in his shroud of camel skin, fabulous reports of a Saracen prophet had swept through Caesarea. By Christians, of course, he had been scorned as the rankest impostor—“for since when did prophets come armed with a sword?” Among the Jews of the city, however, the reaction had been very different. Delight, no doubt, would have been their response to any Roman defeat; but their joy, in that spring of 634, had been blended with a fierce and familiar hope. “People were saying that the prophet had appeared, coming with the Saracens.” And his message? “They say that he is proclaiming the advent of the Anointed One—the Christ who is to come.”¹³⁰

It was exactly twenty years since Nehemiah, amid a similar groundswell of excitement, had sought to rebuild Jerusalem’s Temple, and promptly been impaled for his pains. To the Jews of Palestine, though, the Ishmaelites must have seemed altogether more promising agents of deliverance than the Persians had ever been. They might have been wild asses among men—but they were at least distant cousins. Then there was the fact that the Prophet himself, or so it would seem, had chosen Moses as his particular role model. “O people, enter the holy land which God has marked out for you, and do not go back to your old ways, only to end up as losers.”¹³¹ Any Jews, hearing Muhammad attribute this exhortation to their greatest prophet—the original rabbi, the man who had led them out of bondage and back to the Promised Land—might well have pricked up their ears. Indeed, some might well have done a good deal more than that. Such, at any rate, is the evidence of the Constitution of Medina. Muhajirun and local Arabs, it seems, were not alone in having ranked as original members of the Umma. Also listed as Believers, and graced with a starring role in the founding document of their state, had been some other, perhaps rather more unexpected enthusiasts for the Prophet: whole quantities of Jews.

Later Muslim historians, clearly discombobulated by this, would attempt to explain them away as members of three Jewish clans supposedly native to Medina, who were said initially to have given their backing to the Prophet, and then, after turning fractious, to have been variously driven into exile or massacred and dumped into pits. Yet there are serious difficulties in accepting this tradition as true. It is not simply that the three Jewish clans mentioned by the historians do not feature anywhere in the Constitution of Medina. There is also another, and familiar, problem: that our only sources for the annihilation of these Jews are all suspiciously late. Not only that, but they date from the heyday of Muslim greatness: a period when the authors would have had every interest in fabricating the sanction of the Prophet for the brusque slapping down of uppity infidels.¹³² Certainly, if it were truly the case that entire communities of Jews had been expelled into the desert or else wiped out by Ishmaelites in a bloodbath, then no contemporary seems to have noted it. This, at a time when Jews, just like Christians, had never been more alert to the propaganda value of martyrs, is most peculiar. So peculiar, in fact, as to appear downright implausible. Far likelier, it would seem, is that the compact recorded in the Constitution of Medina, between the Muhajirun and assorted bands of Jewish warriors, had held firm—and that it had culminated in the conquest of Palestine. Christians, when they fingered their old enemies as the tutors of Muhammad, were undoubtedly indulging themselves in a familiar paranoia—but less so, perhaps, when they accused “the sons of Israel” of joining with the Arabs “to form a large army.”¹³³ Venerable the scorn of the Jews for the Ishmaelites may have been; but it was nothing like so savage as their loathing for the Romans. “Do not fear, son of man”: So an angel was supposed to have reassured a twitchy rabbi. “The Almighty only brings the kingdom of Ishmael in order to deliver you from the wicked ones.”¹³⁴

In the first disorienting flush of the Ishmaelite occupation, such a reassurance might well have seemed a perfectly convincing one. How else, after all, was the humiliation of Heraclius to be interpreted, if not as a deliverance ordained of God? Unsurprisingly, then, in the wake of the Jews’ redemption from the threat of forced baptism, their enthusiasm for the new order seems to have flared with some flamboyance—and to have had a familiar focus. Jerusalem, that perennial object of Jewish longing, had been lost to the Romans along with the rest of the Holy Land. The Arabs—who, in a curious show of antiquarianism, insisted on calling it Iliy’a, after its old pagan name of Aelia Capitolina—were quick to mark it with their own stamp. To Christian horror, the ancient ban on Jews entering the city’s sacred limits—which dated back to the heyday of the pagan empire and which Heraclius had pointedly renewed—was revoked. Work also began on clearing rubble and refuse from the holiest Jewish spot of all—the Temple Mount. No surprise, then, that Umar, “the second king who arises from Ishmael,” and the man who had given the order, should have been hailed in breathless tones by one rabbi as “a lover of Israel.”¹³⁵ As the work continued, first with the levelling of the bedrock, and then with the cannibalisation of the Kapitolion, the temple of Jupiter, there were some Jews who dared to go even further and dream that it was the Temple itself being rebuilt. No prospect could possibly have been more dazzling. With the Temple restored, after all, there would arise a new Israel. Inevitably, then, the excited rumours prompted by the defeat of Sergius at Gaza, of the Messiah’s imminent arrival, continued to swirl.

Time, it was true, would prove this optimism sorely misplaced. The more extravagant hopes of the Jews were destined, as ever, to be disappointed. The Temple was not restored. The Messiah did not appear hot on the heels of the Ishmaelites’ prophet. Nevertheless, there was, in the febrile speculations of the Jews, something more than mere wishful thinking. Those who sensed in the Ishmaelites a particular obsession with the Promised Land were surely not mistaken. Just as Jabiya and Hira had been the initial objects of the conquerors’ strategic ambitions, Palestine had clearly blazed in their imaginings as a prize that transcended mere earthly considerations. Although it had been a simple matter for them to cross the undefended frontier into what the Prophet had termed the “Holy Land,” ease of access had hardly been the primary consideration. God had promised Palestine to the descendants of Abraham—and so it had come to pass. No wonder, then, in the immediate wake of the conquest, that Muhajirun as well as Jews appear to have indulged in any number of wild surmises. Indeed, on occasion, it might be hard to tell them apart. Amid the general fracturing of the times, old identities and old certainties had the potential to warp very quickly. When Jews, praising Umar for his scouring of the Romans from Jerusalem, and his cleansing of the Temple Mount, hailed him as the Messiah, there were certain Muhajirun who did not think to scorn the notion. Instead, caught up in the mood of excitement, they surrendered to it. Umar, so it was boldly proclaimed, ranked as none other than al-Faruq—“the Redeemer.”¹³⁶ Such, it appeared, was the true potency of the Temple Mount: that it could persuade Arabs to share in the fantasies of Jews.

And perhaps, had the Muhajirun rested content with their conquest of the Holy Land, and not set their horizons far wider, then their faith might ultimately have mutated into something truly messianic—a Jerusalem-haunted blurring of Jewish beliefs and the Prophet’s revelations. Yet already, even as Umar’s workmen set to work on clearing the rubbish from the Temple Mount, it was apparent that Palestine, no matter how awesome a prize, provided far too small a stage for the evolving pretensions of the conquerors. What value the Promised Land, after all, when God had graced the Muhajirun with so much more besides? A question fit, perhaps, to perplex the conquerors themselves. Certainly, there had been nothing in the Prophet’s revelations to forewarn them that they might end up the masters of the world. Muhammad himself, when reporting God’s assurance that He would settle the Muhajirun “in a good abode,” had seemed to take for granted that this same “good abode” was merely their inheritance from Abraham.¹³⁷ The limits of his ambitions, it would appear, had been Arabia and Palestine. Yet both, in the event, had provided merely stepping-stones. As too, in due course, would the entire glittering sweep of Syria and Iraq. Fabulous a prize though the Fertile Crescent was, infinitely beyond the dreams of previous generations of Arabs, it ultimately served only to whet the appetite of the Muhajirun for more. The world lay all before them—and God, it seemed, intended them to take it.

So it was, in late 639, that a tiny war band of Arabs, following the high road that led south from Gaza, crossed into Egypt. The bread-basket of Constantinople, most precious of all the various territories retrieved by Heraclius from Persian occupation, the province had been back under imperial rule for a decade—but not contentedly so. The return of Roman administrators had seen the return as well to the determinedly Monophysite province of a Chalcedonian patriarch. Heraclius, no less determined than Justinian had been to secure the unity of the Church, had sponsored a programme of increasingly repressive bullying. The Copts, digging in their heels, had responded by embracing every opportunity to pose as martyrs. The brother of the Monophysite patriarch, for instance, despite having his flanks griddled over a fire and his teeth pulled out, proved so obdurate in his defiance that the Chalcedonians, giving up on their attempts to convert him, had him dumped out at sea. Or so the story went. Certainly, the fact that so many Monophysites could swap such a rumour, and believe it to be true, reflected a groundswell of hostility to Constantinople that would ultimately prove fatal to Roman rule. Imperial exhaustion, Arab self-confidence and the studied neutrality of the vast majority of the native population all contributed to the Muhajirun winning their most glittering prize yet. In September 642, after the expiration of an eleven-month armistice and a wholesale evacuation of the province by the Roman forces, the new lords of the Nile entered Alexandria. The disaster, so a Monophysite bishop piously declared, had been entirely due “to the wickedness of the emperor Heraclius, and his persecutions.”¹³⁸ If so, then God had exacted a high price. There were to be no more grain ships sailing from Alexandria to Constantinople.

Meanwhile, the demand slapped on the city fathers of Herakleopolis for sixty-five sheep was an early indication of what the toppling of Roman rule might mean for those Christian officials left behind in Egypt. The Magaritai—the Muhajirun—still thought instinctively, as their ancestors had ever done, in terms of plunder and rustled livestock. Even when clattering down marble-paved high streets, past palaces and cathedrals, they retained instincts bred of the desert. Great cities such as Alexandria and Ctesiphon, for all the fabulous wealth that they promised, were viewed with dark suspicion—as breeding grounds of pestilence and black magic. Just as their forefathers had done when making their own hijra northwards from the depths of Arabia to serve Caesar or Shahanshah, the Muhajirun preferred to settle amid open fields, where they could live among their own kind and graze their sheep. Above all, they aimed to revel in the pleasures and the profits that war, by venerable tradition, had most honourably provided the Arabs. No wonder, then, that the settlements in which they congregated should fast have developed the character of garrison towns.

In Iraq, where the unconquered uplands of Iran beckoned tantalisingly, two particularly large cities of tents and reed huts were soon sprouting among the mudflats. One, Basra, lay in the far south, near where the Tigris and Euphrates met with the sea. The other, Kufa, stood across the palm groves from the God-blessed site of Qadisiyya. Regularly, in the decade that followed the fall of Alexandria, Muhajirun from these two bases would ride out eastwards, embarked upon a fresh, and far more challenging, project of conquest. Persia, in marked contrast to Egypt, was a land of mountains and defiant citadels. Unremitting in a way that none of the previous campaigns of the Muhajirun had been, the subjugation of the Sasanian heartlands was to prove a brutal one. Although certainly marked by some lucrative gains—including the capture of yet more royal treasure and the body of the prophet Daniel, no less—it was only in 650, after a grinding, five-year campaign, that Istakhr was finally stormed. Although Yazdegird, once again, made good his escape, the rest of the population were not so lucky. Forty thousand in all were put to the sword, and the monuments and fire temples of Ardashir’s city left as smoking rubble. No such calamity had been visited upon Persia since the time of Alexander, and the burning of Persepolis.

And in truth, with triumphs everywhere being recorded for Arab arms, the prospect shimmered before the victors of winning an empire even more vast than Alexander’s. Yet greatness, for all the plunder and the glory that it had brought the Muhajirun, was not without its challenges. That God had favoured them, and humbled their enemies, was obvious enough to everyone—conquerors and conquered alike. That God fully intended the Muhajirun to enjoy the profits of their victories was also—to the Muhajirun themselves, at any rate—no less self-evident. Even as the tide of warfare and ready plunder rolled ever onwards, to the limits of East and West, the extortion of tribute ensured that the already-subjugated lands would continue to turn a profit. It was true, of course, that such a pension scheme was bound to depend upon skills that were not readily associated with warriors on camels; but bureaucrats, as the town fathers of Herakleopolis had efficiently demonstrated, were hardly lacking in the conquered territories. Indeed, so remorseless had been the tax machines of both the New Rome and Iranshahr that despairing Christians had long taken for granted that it would take the return of Christ to ease their exactions. By that reckoning, at any rate, the arrival of the Ishmaelites did not presage the End Days. Officials of the two decapitated superpowers, seasoned as they were in the arts of extortion, and eager to maintain their positions of authority, had every incentive to work hard for their new masters. Vast and implacable, like a kraken of the deep undisturbed by storms raging across the ocean surface, the apparatus of empire still coiled its prodigious tentacles, ready to flex and squeeze its victims tightly, as it had ever done.

Such was the beast that had served Justinian, the beast that had served Khusrow the Great. What more awesome proof of God’s power and mercy, then, than that He should have delivered it up into the hands of a leader such as Umar—a man so contemptuous of worldly rank that on inscriptions he might very well be name-checked without any title at all?¹³⁹ Naturally, as Amir of the Faithful—their “Commander”—he was due their obedience; but hardly their grovelling. The stern message of the Prophet, that all his followers were brothers, made a mockery of any notion, such as the people of the conquered territories were prone to take for granted, that Umar might rank as their king. His right to all the prodigious wealth won by the Muhajirun lay precisely in the fact that he so palpably scorned it. What is virtue? So the Prophet had insistently demanded. Umar, conqueror of the known world though he might be, never disdained to illustrate the answer.

Who dispenses money, though dear, to kinsmen, orphans, the needy, the traveller, the beggars and for ransom;

Who performs the prayer and pays the alms;

Who fulfil their contracts when they contract;

Who are steadfast in hardship, calamity and danger;

These are the true believers.

These are truly pious.

¹⁴⁰

Yet, as the years passed, and the expanse of sword-won lands continued to increase, so memories of the Prophet, inevitably, grew less immediate, and the value of his example more problematic. In 644, ten years into the great adventure of the Arab conquests, Umar was murdered by a deranged Persian slave, and the Faithful, in their search for a new commander, found themselves torn two ways. Their eventual choice, a man named Uthman, might have seemed the perfect continuity candidate: for tradition—and there seems no reason to doubt it—identifies him as one of the Prophet’s earliest and most pious companions. Yet, he also had the unmistakable whiff of a dynast: a man sprung from a family that was perfectly at ease with power and wealth. The Umayyads, according to Muslim historians, were Qurayshis who had made a fortune trading with the Romans, and had then invested it in Syrian real estate: a tradition that would seem to indicate an origin, not in the depths of Arabia, but somewhere along the imperial frontier. Certainly, they had enjoyed a track record of success during the conquest of the region that might well have suggested local knowledge: one brother, Yazid, is said to have ranged with a war band far and wide across the province, while another, Mu’awiya, had captured Caesarea, and been appointed governor of Syria by Umar. Uthman not only confirmed him in this role but also, in a blatant display of nepotism, made sure to promote other members of his family to similarly lucrative posts.

Understandably, then, the Umayyads fast gained a reputation for quite spectacular greed. One nephew, a smooth opportunist by the name of Marwan, developed a particular name for insatiability: no sooner had he been graced with a hundred thousand silver coins by Uthman than he was off to North Africa, where he proved as effective at screwing the natives out of their wealth as he was shameless in monopolising the plunder. A second Umar he most decidedly was not.

None of which, it went without saying, reflected well on the new Amir himself. Yet there was worse. Uthman, unlike Umar, was not content to divide up the loot of empires in the time-honoured manner of a bandit chieftain sharing out plunder after a successful raid. The Arabs, so it seemed to the new Amir, had moved on from that. The conquerors, if they were to make best use of the defeated superpowers’ bureaucracies, would themselves have to accept certain disciplines: a centralised administration, not least, and a clear-cut chain of command. Precisely the marks of slavery, in short, that the desert Arabs had always derided. No wonder, then, as Uthman sat in Medina and struggled to fashion his immense agglomeration of provinces into a properly imperial administration, that God, in the words of an Armenian bishop, “should have sent a disturbance among the armies of the sons of Ishmael, so that their unity was split.”¹⁴¹ In 656, a band of Muhajirun in Egypt, resentful of a newly appointed place-man, travelled back to Arabia to complain to the Amir in person. Uthman, taken by surprise, pretended to meet their grievances, but was then caught red-handed going back on his assurances. The Egyptians, outraged by his double-dealing, laid siege to his house, stormed it, and hacked him to death.

Here, after all the noble talk of brotherhood that had animated the Muhajirun since their first emigration to Medina, was an abrupt reversion to a far more primordial way of conducting affairs. Uthman’s widow, so tradition had it, dispatched her husband’s bloodstained robe to Mu’awiya in Syria, together with a pointed quotation from the Prophet: “Fight the oppressors until they submit to God’s command.”¹⁴² In truth, though, it needed no divine revelation to prompt the Umayyads to seek vengeance. Nothing, to an Arab warlord, came more instinctively than a blood feud. That the Prophet had sternly warned against precisely such brawling seems to have inhibited Mu’awiya not in the slightest. In Syria, the sense of community that had supposedly obliterated all distinctions between the Quraysh and the Muhajirun was glaring by its absence. There, in contrast to Iraq and Egypt, there had been no great influx of settlers, no sudden rash of garrison towns. Even Jabiya, the original tent city, had been left largely abandoned after a particularly devastating visitation of the plague in 639. Mu’awiya, and other Qurayshi warlords like him, had not the slightest intention of sharing what they regarded as their patrimony with ragged newcomers from the desert. Syria was theirs: a private fiefdom to be ruled in the manner less of the Prophet than of a Ghassanid.

That is not to say that Muhammad’s teachings were wholly cast aside. Back in Medina, his original capital, leaders of the state that he had founded were desperately struggling to hold together his legacy. Even as the empire palpably began to fragment—with banners of revolt raised in Iran as well as Syria, and a host of Arabs in Egypt rumoured to have accepted “belief in Christ”¹⁴³—a new Amir was succeeding the murdered Uthman. Ali ibn Abi Talib could hardly have been more intimately associated with golden memories of the Prophet. At once both the cousin and the son-in-law of Muhammad—or so tradition reports—he also had a fierce commitment to the primal values of the Umma: of egalitarianism and brotherhood. As a result, to his admirers, he ranked as a veritable imam: a father to his people, and a Lion of God. Far from disdaining emigrants from the desert, Ali regarded them—no matter how hairy or stinking—as his natural constituency. Determined that the Muhajirun should retain their grip on the empire, he opted to abandon Medina and make Kufa his new capital. From there, with the energy of the seasoned general that he was, Ali set himself to stamping his authority on all the Umma. In order to secure his rear, he first routed an army of rebels outside Basra. Buoyed by this success, he then led the Muhajirun of Kufa up the line of the Euphrates, with the aim of taming Syria. A great battle was fought, Mu’awiya brought to peace negotiations, and victory claimed. Ali, returning to Kufa, naturally made sure to trumpet the news as loudly as he could. The unity of the Umma, so his propaganda ran, had been triumphantly restored. The fitna—the “time of trial”—was at an end.

Except that it was not. Mu’awiya, withdrawing from the Euphrates, coolly began to proclaim a message of victory identical to that of his rival. Even more threatening to Ali’s position, however, there were many now in his own ranks who likewise refused to accept him as Amir. His opening of negotiations with Mu’awiya, and his patching together of a treaty, was behaviour that smacked, in their opinion, less of an “imam” than of some arrogant and self-serving monarch. A true Believer, so they argued, would have trusted his fate, not to diplomacy, but to ongoing warfare and the will of God. The charge was a crippling one. All very well for the Umayyads to pose as the heirs of the Ghassanid kings; but Ali was a blood relative of Muhammad. Nothing, then, could have been more damaging to his prestige than to be dismissed as merely a latter-day Lakhmid—“the Amir of Hira.”¹⁴⁴

As Ali made his way back to Kufa, many of his soldiers seem simply to have melted away. Kharijites, these deserters were called—“those who go out.” What they were decidedly not, however, were deserters from the teachings of the Prophet. Instead, it was Ali whom the Kharijites condemned as the unbeliever, as the man who had strayed from the Straight Path. The fact that he was Muhammad’s nephew only confirmed them in the militancy of their egalitarianism: that the true aristocracy was one of piety, and not of blood. Even a Companion of the Prophet, if he did not pray until he developed marks on his forehead “comparable to the calluses of a camel,”¹⁴⁵ if he did not look pale and haggard from regular fasting, if he did not live like a lion by day and a monk by night, ranked, in the opinion of the Kharijites, as no better than an apostate. “Those who reject God after believing in Him,” so the Prophet had warned, “and open their hearts to disbelief, will have the wrath of God upon them, and a grievous punishment awaiting them.”¹⁴⁶ Here was a ruling that the Kharijites were more than willing to help enforce. So it was, for instance, that a band of them, meeting an aged Companion of the Prophet outside Basra, were said to have demanded that he renounce his loyalty to Ali; and when the Companion refused, they butchered him over the carcass of a pig, slit open the belly of his pregnant concubine, and murdered her three attendants. Other Kharijites, so it was reported, might “go out with their swords into the markets while people would stand around not realising what was happening; they would shout ‘no judgement except God!’ and plunge their blades into whomever they could reach, and go on killing until they themselves were killed.”¹⁴⁷ A militant devotion to the Prophet’s teachings indeed; and fit for that reason, in the opinion of many of their fellow Muhajirun, profoundly to be admired. But not in the opinion of Ali. Abandoning his attempt to bring Mu’awiya to heel, he made it his priority instead to extirpate the Kharijites. In 658, he won a victory over them as crushing as it was to prove pyrrhic: for all he had done, in effect, was to fertilise the soil of Iraq with the blood of their martyrs. Three years later, and there came the inevitable blowback: a Kharijite assassin struck him down while he was praying in Kufa.^h The Prophet’s dream of brotherhood, of a shared community of believers, seemed dealt a fatal blow, too.

Into the breach, with great smoothness, stepped Mu’awiya. With Ali gone, no one in Iraq now had the resources to oppose him. Even Hasan, Ali’s eldest son and his obvious heir as imam, was persuaded to retract his claim and retire on a pension to Medina. With him too went his younger brother, Husayn—who as a boy, so it was said, had been a particular favourite of the Prophet, and been dangled lovingly on his knee. True, the removal from Kufa of the two grandsons of Muhammad did not neutralise all opposition to Mu’awiya. The Kharijites, on principle, remained obdurately opposed to Umayyad rule. So too did many Kufans, who preserved a ferocious loyalty to their murdered Amir. Yet Mu’awiya, who had not the slightest intention of basing himself in Kufa, could afford to ignore both the Kharijites and the Shi’a—or “Party”—of Ali. Annoyances they might be—but only in the manner of distantly buzzing wasps. The gaze of Mu’awiya was fixed, not upon a scurvy ragbag of desert Arabs, but upon altogether worthier opponents.

Even though the last hint of resistance from the House of Sasan had been crushed back in 651, with the murder of Yazdegird in that great eastern stronghold of his dynasty, Merv, the Romans, despite all their losses, still stood defiant. Mu’awiya, looking to keep the Muhajirun busy, duly renewed the onslaught against the Christian empire with a vengeance. In 674, he even sponsored a siege of Constantinople itself. In the event, after a blockade of four years, the effort to capture the New Rome had to be abandoned; yet what was striking, perhaps, was not its failure but how close it had come to success. Certainly, there could be no denying that Mu’awiya—in the scope and sweep of his achievements, in the awesome scale of his authority, and in the radiant splendour of his name—was patently a favourite of God.

But which God, precisely? Shrewd and calculating as he was in all his dealings with mortal powers, Mu’awiya seems to have practised a certain opportunism in his dealings with the heavens, too. Although he termed himself “Commander of the Faithful,” in succession to Umar and Uthman, his definition of who actually ranked as members of the “Faithful” was altogether more subtle and ambiguous than theirs had been. Rather than gathering to hail his accession at Medina, the Arabs had assembled in the shadow of the Temple Mount: for Mu’awiya had “refused to go to the seat of Muhammad.”¹⁴⁸ Not even Umar, the Amir whose attentions to the sacred rock had seen him hailed by Jews as their “redeemer,” had thought to demonstrate to quite such flamboyant effect the abiding status of Jerusalem as the holiest city in the world. Mu’awiya, however, in providing this reassurance, was concerned principally to woo, not his Jewish but his Christian subjects. That the Arabs, in their original assault upon Palestine, had fought in alliance with Jews was now, to the new “King of the Holy Land,” something of an embarrassment. Both his tax base and his bureaucracy, after all, were composed primarily of Christians. The Jews could hardly compare. So it was, in addition to receiving the submission of the Arabs, that he had made sure to mark his investiture as Commander of the Faithful by going on pilgrimage around Jerusalem in the footsteps of Christ—“and he went up and sat down on Golgotha, and prayed there.”¹⁴⁹ Evidently, that the Prophet had declared the crucifixion a fraud bothered Mu’awiya not a bit.

In fact, there is precious little evidence that Mu’awiya paid much attention to the Prophet at all. Nowhere in his inscriptions, nor on his coins, nor in any of the documents preserved from his reign, is there so much as a single mention of Muhammad. Nor, despite the much later tradition that would attribute the compilation of the Prophet’s revelations to Uthman, are there any Qur’ans—or even fragments of Qur’ans—datable to Mu’awiya’s lifetime either. Records of the words spoken by Muhammad—“twigs of the burning bush, aflame with God”¹⁵⁰—must surely have been preserved by those who still tended the light of his memory: the Muhajirun of Kufa, the Shi’a of Ali, the Kharijites. But the flame was guttering. Like Mani and Mazdak before him, Muhammad was a prophet whose memory had begun to fade before the encroaching shadow of the years. What value the example of his makeshift desert state, after all, to the ruler of an empire that had swallowed up the world? It was not the Prophet whom Mu’awiya cast as the interpreter of God to man, but himself. “Let the faithful profit by him”¹⁵¹—such was the prayer raised by his servants. Christians too, and Jews, and Samaritans, and Manichaeans: all of them, in Mu’awiya’s opinion, were to be ranked as “the faithful,” and all of them duly joined in the praise. Savagely though Mu’awiya prosecuted his wars against the Romans, yet his subjects, no longer trampled by rival armies, no longer divided by hostile watchtowers, knew only peace at last. Perhaps it is hardly surprising, then, that they seem not to have begrudged the Amir his immodest claim to stand between humanity and God. “Justice flourished in his time, and there was great peace in the regions under his control. He allowed everyone to live as they wanted.”¹⁵²

Such, it must have seemed, was to be the future: a globe-spanning empire of many faiths, and none of them any longer with the whip-hand.

^a A Muslim scholar of the tenth century, Ibn Mujahid, established what subsequently became the orthodoxy: that there were seven, equally valid qira’at—“readings”—of the Qur’an. The modern, widely held notion that there is one single text was established only in 1924, with the publication in Cairo of an edition of the Qur’an that went on to become the global standard.

^b Qur’an: 80.27–31. The traditional accounts of Mecca’s rise to greatness also imply that the city, as a teeming hub of international trade, must have had a substantial agricultural hinterland. The patent impossibility of this has led some historians to propose that grain was imported from Syria and Egypt: a case of the mountain coming to Muhammad, if there ever was one.

^c Although vines and pomegranates would have been grown in oases such as Yathrib, the cultivated olive would not. In late antiquity, it was indigenous to the Mediterranean region.

^d Hunayn—which, like Badr, is clearly identified in the Qur’an as the site of a battle—features in biographies of the Prophet as the location of a decisive Muslim victory. Safa and Marwa are identified by Muslim tradition as small hills in the immediate vicinity of the Ka’ba, while Arafat is equated to a mountain that lies some twelve miles outside Mecca.

^e Most scholars distinguished Bakka from Mecca by identifying the former specifically with the Ka’ba and the latter with the surrounding area, although some suggested the opposite.

^f The composition of Genesis, the book of the Bible in which Abraham appears, is generally dated to the seventh or sixth century BC. The implications of this for the historicity of Abraham are, of course, not themselves without significance.

^g A few lines scribbled in Syriac on the fly-leaf of a gospel allude to a battle fought at Jabiya. From internal evidence, this source seems to be almost contemporaneous with the battle, but its date cannot be definitively established. Fredegar, a chronicler writing in Gaul some twenty years after the Arab invasion of Syria, refers to Heraclius’s army being “smitten by the sword of God: 52,000 of his men died where they slept”—valuable evidence for the probable scale of the Roman defeat.

^h The date of Ali’s assassination derives from Muslim historians, but it is typical of the general murk of the sources for the period that a near-contemporaneous Christian chronicle, written in Syria, dates it to 658.