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

Sunna-Side up

An ancient city, like a battle-scarred veteran, might often wear the marks of long-concluded wars. In Syria, no city was more ancient than Damascus. Indeed, the fame of its delights—from its climate to its plums—reached so far back in time that there were some rabbis prepared to rank it as a gateway to paradise. A whole century after its conquest by the Arabs, and four centuries after the reign of Constantine, Damascus had still not sloughed off every last mark of its pagan past. High and massive above the sprawl of the teeming markets, there loomed the walls of what might have seemed, to the first-time visitor, a particularly brooding citadel, but was in truth the outer shell of what had once been the city’s most domineering temple. Worship on the site was as old as Damascus itself—and as continuous. Although Jupiter, the deity in whose honour the sanctuary had originally been erected, no longer sat enthroned within the vast building, the walls themselves had been spared demolition by the triumphant Christians, and consecrated anew to the service of their own god. Now, however, 715 years on from the birth of Christ, a new faith had laid claim to the shrine. Not a trace remained of the cathedral that only a decade previously had nestled within the temple walls. In its place, marble-lined and mosaic-adorned, there had been raised a stupefyingly beautiful new monument: one so lavishly adorned that a train of eighteen camels, it was claimed, had been required merely to take away the builders’ receipts. And the new owners? An inscription emblazoned on one of the walls left no one in any doubt. “Our lord is God alone,” it proclaimed, “our religion is Islam, and our prophet is Muhammad, may God incline unto him and give him greeting.”⁴²

A bare two and a half decades earlier, when Abd al-Malik had commissioned the Dome on the Rock, he had done so with a wary eye on Jerusalem’s great churches, and made a point of using its walls to rubbish the doctrine of the Trinity. Walid—Abd al-Malik’s eldest son, and the Caliph responsible for the sumptuous new mosque in Damascus—was altogether more self-assured in the practice of his faith. Rather than keep glancing over his shoulder at the ludicrous errors of the Christians, he simply ignored them. It was through his identity as someone who submitted to God, as a “Muslim,” that Walid defined himself—and certainly not in relation to some lesser and superseded faith. Such self-confidence was hardly surprising. The splendours of Walid’s mosque bore stunning witness to the full range of blessings that had been showered by an approving deity upon the followers of Islam. The fire of jewels quarried from the highest mountains, the shimmer of pearls harvested from the depths of the oceans, the columns plundered from demolished cathedrals and the mosaics crafted by the most brilliant artists of the age: all served to demonstrate the unrivalled reach of the Khalifat Allah. Well might visitors to the mosque have reported, and believed, a rumour that one of its pillars had been fashioned out of the “magnificent throne”⁴³ of the Queen of Sheba. Just as Islam contained within itself all that was best and most noble in other faiths, the great mosque of Damascus enclosed within its towering walls any number of treasures garnered from vanished dominions: detritus reconfigured in the cause of a new and universal empire.

“There is hardly a tree or a notable town that has not been pictured on those walls.”⁴⁴ So wrote one admirer, in the assurance that the images he could see portrayed on them, from winged plants to hippodromes, were nothing if not a reflection of the many lands—extending infinitely beyond Damascus—that had been brought beneath the sway of Islam. By 715, when Walid declared his great mosque open, Arab armies had long since swept far beyond the limits of the crumbled empires ruled from Ctesiphon and the New Rome. In the East, they had advanced into the one-time kingdom of the Hephthalites, passing not only the abandoned red wall of Gurgan but an even mightier barrier, the River Oxus: a natural frontier so immense and fast flowing that the Arabs would come to define the whole vastness of Central Asia simply as “Transoxania.” Meanwhile, in the West, with Carthage and the long coastal strip of North Africa already subdued, they had crossed the sea in pursuit of fresh conquests. In 711, a tiny Arab raiding party had landed on Gibraltar. Within the course of only a few months, this venturesome war band had succeeded in defeating the Visigoths in battle, killing their king and seizing their capital of Toledo, deep in the vitals of Spain. An achievement such as this, secured on the outermost edge of the world, appeared so astounding to the Arabs as to verge on the fantastical. Stories of the conquest, told back in Damascus, cast Spain as a land of mysteries and wonders, where statues spoke, locked rooms contained miraculous visions of the future, and cities were made of bronze. So astounding had the scope of Arab triumphs become that they no longer seemed wholly real.

Which said, the proofs of Muslim conquests were a simple enough matter for anyone in Damascus to track down. Leave behind the courtyard of Walid’s mosque, with its gleaming marble and delicately ornamented fountains, and there in the city’s markets, penned amid their own filth and misery, were to be found human cattle corralled from every corner of the world. The stories told of Spain might have been conjured from a realm of fantasy—but not so the coffle of thirty thousand prisoners brought back to Syria by the conquerors of the Visigoths. Nothing had served more violently to rub the noses of the vanquished in the brute fact of the Arabs’ might than the depredations of their slavers. “Annually,” one monk recorded, “their robber bands went to distant parts and to the islands, bringing back captives from all the peoples under the heavens.”⁴⁵ Of course, there was nothing particularly novel about this expression of superpower status. The Romans had never shown the slightest hesitation in selling off inveterate rebels such as the Samaritans, while the presumptions governing the Persians’ treatment of their prisoners-of-war had been evident in the fact that ansahrig—their word for “slave”—had originally meant “foreigner.” Now, though, the boot was very much on the other foot. Wretches harvested from the former provinces of the Christian empire toiled on the estates or in the mines of great Arab landowners—and although it was not unknown for the odd prayer to be heard, and the occasional slave-driver to be felled by some miraculous act of the Virgin Mary, most could only lament that they had been abandoned by the heavens. “Why does God allow this to happen?”:⁴⁶ such was the cry that had gone up back in the time of Umar, when a band of Arab slavers had raided a festival held in the hills outside Antioch in celebration of Saint Simeon’s sojourn on his pillar. It was not only Christians who might ask the question. The terrible violence that marked the conquest of the Sasanian heartlands had seen the markets of Kufa and Basra flooded with a quite staggering number of Persian captives, while even on the easternmost frontiers of Iran—where Arab control was altogether more precarious—a tribute of slaves was the very least that might be demanded by the conquerors. Typical was the fate of Zaranj, a great fortress that commanded the approaches to the Hindu Kush, whose inhabitants had agreed as a term of their surrender to deliver annually a thousand of their most beautiful boys, each one holding in his hands a golden cup: a delicious foretaste for pious Muslims of the delights of paradise.

Like the blades of a giant plough, then, the Arab armies sliced apart families, scattered communities far and wide, churned up and mingled peoples who might otherwise never have met. Not since the first coming of Rome to the Near East eight hundred years earlier, when the conquest of the region by the legions had reputedly seen ten thousand slaves sold daily in a single entrepôt, had there been transplantation of human livestock on anything like such a scale. Naturally, for the Arabs themselves, there was peril as well as profit in this trade. Just as Italy, back in the distant days of the Roman Republic, had repeatedly been racked by slave revolts, so too, in times of fitna, had the heartlands of the Caliphate. Amid the chaos that followed the death of Mu’awiya, for instance, an army of prisoners-of-war had broken free and made a stronghold of Nisibis, so that “dread came upon all the Arabs.”⁴⁷ Nor dread alone—spluttering indignation as well. “Our slaves are rebelling against us!” So the warlords of Kufa had exclaimed in outrage. “But they are our booty—granted us by God!”⁴⁸

To the rebels themselves, however, it was far from self-evident that God did intend them to rank as booty. Presumptions that had underpinned the Roman slave trade back in its heyday were not all they once had been. Over the course of the centuries, callousness had grown ever less innocent. Among Christians, for instance, in an empire that had learned to take seriously Saint Paul’s injunction that there was neither slave nor free in Christ, the habit of regarding human chattels as mere walking machines had become increasingly problematic. “If God does not enslave what is free,” as one bishop sternly enquired of his slave-owning flock, “then who is he that sets his own power above God’s?”⁴⁹ In Iranshahr too, the communism preached by Mazdak had anticipated a golden age of universal brotherhood, when every class, so it was trusted, would be as one. It was true, of course, that Mazdak’s followers had ended up buried head-first in Khusrow’s flower-beds, and true as well that most Christian scholars, although they certainly regarded slavery as a damnable thing, tended to presume that it would endure until the end of days. Nevertheless, the logic of a faith that claimed all human beings, without exception, to have been created by a loving God ensured that increasingly, in pious Christian circles, the freeing of slaves was regarded less as charity than as a pressing obligation. Similarly, dutiful Muslims—if they only paid close attention to the awesome conception of their responsibilities as articulated by the Prophet—could hardly dispute that even the very lowest of the low might be a brother. “What will explain to you what the steep path is?” So Muhammad—slave-owner though he reputedly was himself—had demanded of his followers, before supplying his own answer. “It is to free a slave, to feed at a time of hunger an orphaned relative or a poor person in distress, and to be one of those who believe and urge one another to steadfastness and compassion.”⁵⁰

Which was all very well—except that there were plenty of Arabs who had not the slightest intention of sharing their god with foreigners. Right from the earliest days of their empire, they had been all too painfully aware of the danger of being swallowed up by the vast, amorphous mass of their subjects. This was why, in Iraq, they had founded entirely new cities on the margins of the desert, and it was why, in Syria and Palestine—where the Arabs had opted to settle directly among the natives—they had introduced a whole host of petty regulations in order to establish clear water between themselves and their inferiors. Christians, to their horror, found themselves subjected to laws originally designed by the Roman authorities to keep Jews in their place. Forbidden as they were to dress or speak like Arabs, to sit in the presence of an Arab, to wear swords or to ride on a saddle, the chasm of difference that separated them from their overlords could hardly have been more humiliatingly emphasised.⁵¹ “It was God who made you inherit their lands, their homes and their wealth.”⁵² So Muhammad had assured his followers. Well, then, might the Arabs, living off the fat of their conquests and revelling in their possession of a God-granted empire, have been protective of their winnings. Much, after all, was potentially on offer to those who could legitimately claim a descent from Ishmael. A couple of generations on from the defeat of the perfumed Romans and Persians, the taste for luxury of some Arabs would have given Umar apoplexy. Anxious though they were to differentiate themselves from the common run of their subject peoples, they did not have the slightest hesitation in aping the manners of the toppled ruling classes. In Syria, the furnishings of high-end properties owed nothing to Medina and everything to the Roman relish for wine, nude sculptures and mosaics. In Iraq, the peacock tastes of the Persian aristocracy were enthusiastically adopted by wealthy Arab warlords, who delighted in parading through the streets of Kufa or Basra arrayed in silken flares and shimmering robes of many colours, with their beards dyed a startling shade of yellow or red. Who, then, were the foreign slaves who escorted them on such processions, or kept their golden goblets polished back in their palaces, or toiled in chains on their fields, to imagine that they too might have a stake in such an inheritance?

Yet, in truth, any prospect of fashioning for the Arabs a religion comparable to that of the Jews—a legacy of faith borne on the bloodline of Abraham—had already long since been dissolved upon the swirl and clamour of their dazzling conquests. When Al-Hajjaj, in 702, founded a new city named Wasit to stand sentinel between Kufa and Basra, and posted guards upon its gates, to ensure that only Arabs could settle there, he was closing the doors of a stable from which the horse had long since bolted. How could there be any prospect of affirming the purity of an Ishmaelite descent when the streets of Wasit, and of every other garrison city too, were filled with slaves uprooted from every corner of the world, deprived of their families, their homes, their native lands, and with no consolation save the glimpse of heaven provided them by the faith of their masters? These captives were not only to be found in the streets: they were in the conquerors’ bedrooms, too. The right to sleep with “such slaves as God has assigned to you as war-booty”⁵³ was one that Muslims could enjoy on the say-so of the Prophet himself—and plenty of them had duly capitalised upon it with relish. The slave markets of the Caliphate were so glutted with female flesh that wealthy Arabs might debate the various merits of the merchandise as though evaluating the pedigree of bloodstock. Abd al-Malik himself was a noted connoisseur. “He who wishes to take a slave girl for pleasure,” the great Caliph sagely advised, “let him take a Berber; he who wishes to take one as a domestic servant, let him take a Roman; and he who wishes to take one to produce a child, let him take a Persian.”⁵⁴ In Iraq, however, where the markets were particularly well stocked with women plundered from Iran, Persian girls’ value was boosted by more than mere fecundity. Daughters from Zoroastrian families, each of whom was expected to kneel three times a day before her husband and humbly beg of him his desires, were famously well conditioned to obedience. At the absolute top end of this market were princesses of the House of Sasan: one raised the fabulous sum of fifty thousand gold pieces, while another, a granddaughter of Khusrow II himself, was installed in a specially built palace in Basra that supposedly had a thousand gates. The children of such mothers, it went without saying, were hardly likely to rest content with a status as the inferiors of anyone.

Nor, when slaves and their offspring looked around them at the insolent pride and squandered riches of their masters, could they fail to prick up their ears at the teachings of the Prophet:

You do not honour the orphan,

Nor urge one another to feed the poor.

You consume an inheritance to the last mouthful,

And you love wealth with a love inordinate.

⁵⁵

Here was a vision fit to inspire even the most downtrodden. Slaves might resent their masters, after all, and yet find fuel for that same resentment in the fecund range of their masters’ beliefs. The rebels who seized control of Nisibis, for instance, had claimed to be followers of Mukhtar—and they were duly massacred as such. Others sought inspiration in the relish of the Shi’a for tyrant-hatred. Then—with the ending of the fitna and the great labour of forging performed by Abd al-Malik upon the half-fashioned doctrines and recollections of the Arabs—fresh opportunities for damning those who would scorn the wretched began to present themselves. Inadvertently, by their very public promotion of Muhammad as a Messenger of God, the Umayyads provided those dismissed by the Arab warrior elite with a potent means of opposing their own continued subordination. With the likes of Al-Hajjaj enthroned behind gates and towers like latter-day Shahanshahs, those consigned to the stinking slums of Kufa or Basra might ponder the scorn of the Prophet for the arrogant and the over-mighty, and fashion a very different understanding of Islam to that of the Caliph and his lieutenants.

Meanwhile, beyond the ramparts of the great garrison cities of Iraq, others had also begun to observe the religion of the Arabs with a mixture of envy and fascination. After all, the Caliphate’s subjects hardly needed to be sold into slavery to feel the sting of their own inferiority. As Arab rule increasingly came to be identified with Abd al-Malik’s vision of Islam, so natives eager to join the society of their masters rushed to embrace the embryonic religion. Predictably, the Arabs, far from welcoming these converts as brothers, placed as many roadblocks as they could on the “straight path.” Those who wished to convert faced a whole host of indignities. It was not enough to submit to God. Only by submitting to an Arab patron as well might a Persian, or an Iraqi, or a Syrian come to be ranked as a Muslim. Here, for those with so much as a trace of snobbery, was a humiliation, perhaps, too far. Even for those habituated to tutelage, the path to Islam was rarely straightforward. During the reign of Abd al-Malik, for instance, when bands of Iraqi peasants converted en masse and took themselves off to the fleshpots of Basra, Al-Hajjaj’s response was iron-fisted. Far from delighting in a victory secured for Islam, he rounded up the renegades and returned them to the estates of their masters. Arab rule, as it had ever done, depended on the vanquished knowing their place.

By the time of Walid and his successors, conversions to Islam were coming to threaten not merely the exclusivity of the conquerors but the stability of the tax base. Abd al-Malik’s reforms, by transforming the toppled empires’ bureaucracies into something more acceptably Arabic, had given their extortions a tone that was increasingly Islamic, too. Taxes were coming to be demanded, not as dues of the kind that conquerors had always levied as a matter of course, but as something subtly different: a fine on unbelief. The Prophet might not have anticipated that his followers would subdue the whole world, but he had still given them helpful tips on how Jews and Christians should properly be exploited. That God wished infidels to pay a poll-tax—the jizya—to their Muslim masters, and to feel humiliated while doing so, was recorded in the Qur’an itself, after all. Granted, the precise form that this humiliation should take was something much disputed by commentators. Indeed, it was a mark of just how profoundly the chasm yawned between the compilation of the Prophet’s revelations into a single book and the original revelations themselves that the meaning of the Arabic phrase that specified how the jizya should be paid had ended up quite forgotten.⁵⁶ Fortunately, though, despite the inadequacy of all the frantic efforts to make good this embarrassing amnesia, the underlying message of the verse remained clear enough: Jews and Christians, if they wanted the right to live unmolested, would have to pay for it. Tolerance might be theirs—but only at a price.

Yet in truth, what made this protection racket viable was less the say-so of the Qur’an than presumptions forged over many centuries among Jews and Christians themselves. That the “Peoples of the Book” might be defined as such for taxation purposes was ringing and climactic affirmation of just how successful had been generations of rabbis and bishops in the construction of impregnable barriers around their respective faiths. In Iraq, certainly—where the Sasanian authorities had long categorised their subjects in religious, rather than ethnic, terms—Jews and Christians saw nothing remotely untoward in the weight-throwing of their new Muslim masters. Not, of course, that this made them any the keener to cough up taxes—and Christians, in particular, were often adept at evading them. One bishop in northern Iraq, for instance, managed to secure a tax exemption for his clergy by the dramatic expedient of casting out demons from the local governor’s daughters. Meanwhile, a second governor granted rebates to a monastery in the Zagros Mountains after a hermit living there had healed his horse. No Christians, however, nor Jews, ever thought to dispute the right of the Muslim authorities to tax them. Protection, in a world that had repeatedly been trampled down by contending war bands, was usually held to be well worth the price. In general, then, to the Jews and Christians of Iraq, the coming of Islam had represented less a dramatic upheaval than the final institutionalising of what they had always rather assumed was simply the way of the world.

The followers of Zoroaster, however, saw the convulsions of the age in a quite different light. To pious worshippers of Ohrmazd, the collapse of Sasanian power—and the conquest of Iranshahr—was a calamity beyond their darkest nightmares. “The faith was ruined and the Shahanshah slain like a dog.” So, in numbed terms, the catastrophe would always be commemorated by the mowbeds. “The world passes from us.”⁵⁷ Toppled as it had been into the dust from its former position of privilege and power, the Zoroastrian Church would never again enjoy the ear of kings. Instead, denied by the Qur’an even the pallid status enjoyed by rabbis or monks as “Peoples of the Book,” the mowbeds found their beloved religion of truth and light being treated with brutal contempt.^d In the eastern reaches of Iran—where Arab rule was most sketchy and dependent for such authority as it possessed upon treaties signed with still formidable Parthian dynasties such as the Karin—fire temples might continue to blaze as they had ever done; but elsewhere, only payment of extortionate bribes could stave off their demolition. In Iraq, they had fast been obliterated altogether. Their scorched ruins were abandoned to weeds and black ravens: birds of ill-omen that everyone knew were really demons.

Many worshippers of Ohrmazd, witnessing fire temples lost to such darkness, found their faith in the Lord of Light mortally shaken. Under the House of Sasan, such apostasy would have been punishable by death; but no longer. Instead, where previously all had been checks and restrictions, Iraq had come to provide, in the first decades following the implosion of Sasanian authority, something that it had not done for centuries: a free market in faiths. So where were the orphaned of Ohrmazd to go? Most, seeking shelter behind the most solid ramparts they could find, had turned in their misery to the Nestorian Church. As a result, Christians, far from being diminished by the Arab conquest of Iraq, rapidly became the majority. Under the strong and paternalistic rule of the Umayyads, they would enjoy a golden age. Across the northern reaches of Iraq, now far removed from the front line with the Romans, churches flourished as never before. Nisibis, especially, blazed with a particular brilliance. The city’s scholars, who were as familiar with the classics of Greek philosophy as they were with those of their own faith, soon re-established it as the foremost centre of learning in the entire Fertile Crescent, and far beyond. Meanwhile, outpacing even the advance of the Arab armies, Christian missionaries had begun to fan out from Iraq, treading the roads that stretched eastwards to the fabulous kingdoms of India and China. In time, the head of the Nestorian Church would plan a bishopric “for the peoples of Tibet,”⁵⁸ and the nomads of Mongolia adopt a version of the Syriac script. To many Christians, then, it appeared self-evident that the future of Asia belonged to them.

Except that there lay open as well, for bewildered refugees from the Zoroastrian Church, the pathway to a very different faith: one as newly-sprung and as yet unformed as Christianity was venerable and massy of structure. A hundred years on from the Arab conquest, it was a common complaint among the ruling elite of the Caliphate that Zoroastrian converts to Islam “have not become Muslims seriously, but only to escape the poll-tax.”⁵⁹ But this was sorely to underestimate the appeal of their prophet’s revelations. Tax-dodge though conversion certainly provided, yet it might represent as well something very much more. To the troubled, to the heaven-shadowed, to the seeker after truth, the awesome proofs that God had spoken to Muhammad were often irresistible. “Guide us to the straight path: the path of those You have blessed, those who incur no anger and who have not gone astray.”⁶⁰ How could the one-time mowbed who for the first time spoke these words, words that had supposedly proceeded from God Himself, not feel redeemed from the many errors to which his previous faith had been prey? Yet he could know as well, even as he set off along the straight path, that the road ahead still had to be cleared and mapped. The revelations of Muhammad, unlike those of Zoroaster, had been in circulation for barely a century. Among the followers of Islam, there was nothing to compare with the ancient legacy of hymns, commentaries and laws that had descended down the millennia to the Zoroastrian Church. Rather, in the great project of clarifying what precisely the Prophet’s message might have been, and the full scope of his intentions, there were roles a-plenty for those, like former mowbeds, with an aptitude for scholarship. As a result, in mosques and courtyards across Iraq, converts from the Zoroastrian Church began to join the descendants of the Arabs’ slaves, and meet with them in their urgent striving to define what a properly Muslim society should be.

Observing this process with some interest was a rabbi named Rav Yehudai. Living just a short distance from Kufa, in the great Talmudic school of Sura, he was well placed to note an intriguing development. The hearts of those mowbeds who had “converted to the religion of the Ishmaelites,” so he reported, were still not entirely clear of the trace of their former beliefs, even down to the third generation: “for part of their original religion still remains within them.”⁶¹ What evidence might the rabbi have had for making such a claim? Converts from the Zoroastrian Church did often, it was true, bring with them into Islam notions that might have seemed distinctively their own: that apostates should be executed, for instance, or that prayers should be offered up five times a day, or that it was a singular mark of piety to use a toothbrush.^e Certainly, there was no direct support in the Qur’an for any of these presumptions: hell, not execution, was the fate that it prescribed for apostates; prayers were mandated, not at five, but “at three times of day”;⁶² while of toothbrushes there was no mention at all. How strange it might have seemed, then, and how striking a coincidence, that Muslims, when dictating what the penalty for apostasy should be, or how many times a day they should pray, should increasingly have opted to side with Zoroastrian proscriptions and ignore the Qur’an altogether. What was more, they had developed a positive craze for dental hygiene.

“Whenever the Prophet got up at night, he used to clean his mouth with a toothbrush.”⁶³ A most intimate detail—and one fit to gladden the heart of any former mowbed, certainly. But how, when some other Zoroastrian convert might simply have made it up, could he, and the Muslim people as a whole, be sure that it was actually true? Such a question was more than mere idle nit-picking. The subjects of Abd al-Malik—who almost overnight had found themselves being informed every time they pulled out a coin or received an official document that Muhammad was the Prophet of God—had not been slow to grasp the implications. Only establish that an opinion had truly been voiced by this same Prophet of God, and it would immediately come to possess the full terrifying force of eternal law. Here, for the restless and ever-growing number of Muslims who were unable to trace their origins back to the first generation of the conquest, who were resentful of the haughty Arab elite and who yearned to fathom the true purposes of God, was a truly golden opportunity. Nevertheless, their way ahead was challenging. Unlike the Caliph, they could hardly claim to be God’s deputies, graced by the heavens with a direct responsibility for defining and regulating the Muslim realm. Only by compiling the sayings of the Prophet could they possibly hope to trump the forbidding authority of the Khalifat Allah. If a Sunna—a body of law capable of taming the extravagances and injustices of the age—were indeed to be fashioned without reference to the Caliph, then its origins would need to be grounded, and very publicly so, in the life and times of the Prophet himself. No other source, no other wellspring, would possibly do. But how to authenticate Muhammad’s sayings? Such was the question, a century on from the death of the Prophet, that confronted the first generation of a whole new class of scholars: legal experts whom Muslims would come to know as the ulama.

Fortunately for them, just across the mudflats from Kufa—where the yearning to forge a new understanding of Islam was at its most turbulent and intense—the perfect role models were ready to hand. The rabbis of Sura, after all, had been labouring for many centuries to solve precisely the sort of problem that now confronted the ulama. The secret Torah, so it was recorded in the Talmud, “had been received at Sinai by Moses, who communicated it to Joshua, who communicated it to the elders, who communicated it to the prophets”⁶⁴—who, in turn, had communicated it to a long line of rabbis, right down to the present. Nowhere in the world, in consequence, were there scholars better qualified to trace the chains of transmission that might link a lawyer and the sayings of a prophet than in the yeshivas of Iraq. Was it merely coincidence, then, that the earliest and most influential school of Islamic law should have been founded barely thirty miles from Sura? It was in Kufa, at around the same time as Walid, far distant in Damascus, was building his great mosque, that Muslim scholars first began to explore a momentous proposition: that there existed, alongside the Prophet’s written revelations, other, equally binding revelations that had never before been written down. Initially, in the manner of rabbis citing their own masters, members of the ulama were content to attribute these hitherto unrecorded doctrines to prominent local experts; then, as time went by, they began to link them to the Prophet’s companions; finally, as the ultimate in authorities, they fell to quoting the Prophet himself directly. Always, however, by bringing these previously unrecorded snatches of the past—these hadiths—to light, Muslim scholars were following a trail that had been blazed long before. Islamic though the isnads were, they were also more than a little Jewish.

The rabbis of Sura and Pumpedita, immured within their famous yeshivas, had spoken of their ambition to “build a fence around the Torah.”⁶⁵ And so they had done—a thoroughly impregnable one. Yet some of them, hearing as a faint roar the tumult of debate and enquiry that was filling the streets of nearby Kufa, might just have felt a touch of claustrophobia—and even envy. The mosques of Iraq were coming to offer what no synagogue, or church, or fire temple had done for centuries: a venue for enquiry into the nature of God where the terms of debate had not already long since been set in stone. More than that—in the teeming warrens of Kufa and Basra, people from various religious backgrounds were free to meet, and collaborate, and merge their perspectives in a way that had never previously been possible. There were the conquerors: the Arab elite, with their language, their venerable traditions and their burnished memories of the age of Muhammad. Then there were the slaves and the descendants of slaves: all impatient to apply to the wrongs of an unjust society the austere and chilling message of the Prophet. Finally, there were ever-increasing numbers of converts. “Part of their original religion still remains within them.” So Rav Yehudai, the rabbi of Sura, had observed of those mowbeds who turned to Islam. But what of those Muslims who had once been rabbis—was the same to be observed of them? If so, that would certainly help to explain why the Sunna—just like the Torah—aimed to regulate every dimension and aspect of human existence; why it should have forged for itself chains of transmission such as rabbis, and only rabbis, had ever previously deployed; and why, in direct contradiction of the Qur’an, it prescribed death as the punishment for adultery rather than whipping. As it had been written in the Torah by Moses himself: “They shall bring out the young woman to the door of her father’s house, and the men of her city shall stone her to death with stones, because she has wrought folly in Israel by playing the harlot in her father’s house.”^f

Such a ruling, once it had been reworked by Muslim lawyers, was no less authoritative for having been garnered from another—and infinitely more ancient—source. Rather, like Walid’s great mosque, the Sunna was a monument to just what could be achieved by fashioning old fragments into something new and extraordinary. Shards gleaned from the Torah, and from Zoroastrian ritual, and from Persian custom: all featured in the edifice pieced together by the ulama. The consequence of their labours, taking on an ever more clearly delineated form as the decades of Umayyad rule slipped by, was a guide to the wishes of God of quite astounding potency: one that even the most chauvinistic governor might learn to ignore at his peril.

Indeed, as a check upon the appetites and arrogance of an imperial elite, it was perhaps the most remarkable that a defeated people has ever devised. The ulama, whether descended from prisoners-of-war, or Zoroastrians, or Jews, were overwhelmingly comprised of the victims of the conquest. Yet they had won for themselves, by their collective efforts, a rare and impregnable dignity. It was they, not their ostensible masters, who had become the arbiters of the will of God. The jumble of beliefs and doctrines carried by bands of overwhelmingly illiterate warriors from the desert had been transformed, over the course of barely a century, into a religion of lawyers. Such an achievement, secured in the face of such odds, was a truly astounding one.

Yet it was an achievement as well, by its very nature, that could never be acknowledged. Although the Sunna was recognisably a product of its place of birth—a world where legally minded intellectuals, of whatever faith, had long endeavoured to frame God’s purposes—it could only ever hope to flourish by denying its roots in such a seedbed. Not a hadith, but there was a pressing obligation to derive it from the innermost bowels of Arabia. As a result, there could be no question of doing as the rabbis of the yeshivas had done, or the jurists at the court of Justinian, and revelling in the antiquity of the laws that it was their ambition to marshal. Quite the contrary: no matter how venerable a snatch of legal opinion might be, it could never have the force of law unless it had first been demonstrated to have emerged from the lifetime of Muhammad. Consequently, the Sunna was founded upon a paradox: the more the ulama of Iraq, in their eagerness to fashion a just society, drew upon the incomparable legacy of those who had laboured in a similar cause for millennia, the more did they identify the source of that wisdom with a barren and peripheral desert. Experience of the perfect society, so they taught, had been granted to one single place, and to one single period of history: Medina, in the lifetime of the Prophet. The role of the Sunna, and its supreme glory, was to serve the Muslim people as a signpost: one that could point them the way—the shariah—back to paradise lost.

And yet the way to paradise already had its guardians, of course. To the Umayyads the pretensions of the ulama constituted something altogether more menacing than a simple affront. What role, if the Prophet were to end up enshrined as the ultimate authority for the Muslim people, did this conceivably leave for the rival claims of the Caliph? Much, of course, was at stake. It was not merely the right of Abd al-Malik and his heirs to their privileged status as “deputies of God” that risked being undermined. The entire legitimacy of their regime was grievously threatened too. Cast the Prophet as the only acceptable wellspring for Islam, after all, and everything that had followed him was bound to seem a decline and fall. Indeed, how could the empire ruled from Damascus, when compared to the seductive vision of a primal and unspotted Islamic state, not appear a tyranny? The Umayyads risked appearing, not as the bulwarks and sponsors of Islam but as the opposite: deviants and usurpers, blotting the purity of the Sunna.

The Caliph and the lawyers, then, for all that they might not initially have realised it, were locked in mortal conflict. At stake was not merely the shape of the future but how the past would come to look as well. In the great and ongoing struggle between autocrats and clerics for God’s favour, one that long pre-dated both Caliphate and ulama, a new and potentially decisive battle had been joined.

The nature of Islam itself, and much more besides, would hang upon its outcome.