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

The House of Islam

If the Umayyads found it hard to take the pretensions of uppity scholars seriously, then this was in part at least because a succession of Caliphs had their gaze fixed on an adversary that appeared altogether worthier of their attentions. Although Damascus stood at the heart of a mighty empire, it was only a few days’ ride from what Muslims termed al-dawahi—“the outer realm.” Venturing north from the Syrian heartlands, which by now had grown fat and prosperous under Umayyad rule, the road might seem to be leading the traveller back in time, to an age when Muhammad’s followers had ranked not as citified civilians, but as tireless warriors—Muhajirun. In Antioch, emigrants from across the Caliphate might still be seen riding on wiry ponies past the crumbling remains of great palaces and churches, embarked for the murderous badlands that marked the frontier with the empire of Qaysar—Caesar.

It was the Romans themselves who had first put the region to the torch. The ruin inflicted by Heraclius on his retreat north-westwards from Antioch had been ruthless and desperate in equal measure. Hunkering down behind a particularly forbidding range of mountains, the Taurus, the defeated emperor had made a deliberate effort to establish a cordon sanitaire between himself and the Syrian frontier. Almost a hundred years on, and the once-prosperous province of Cilicia—as the coastal lowlands were known—was a weed-choked and corpse-littered wilderness: the most dangerous place on earth. The very wildlife had turned carnivorous. Lions, descending from their customary haunts in the mountains, had taken to lying in ambush for human prey in overgrown marshes and fields. Not even an innovative attempt by Walid to trample down such hideaways through the introduction of Indian water buffalo had served to neutralise the menace. Bad news for the harried locals, to be sure—but not for visiting ascetics. To any Muslim scornful of idle pleasures, and with an appetite for hardship, the killing fields of Cilicia were close to paradise. Zuhhad, the Arabs termed such warriors: men who aimed to glimpse the dimension of the heavenly through a renunciation of the world.

A venerable ambition, of course. The Zuhhad themselves tended to look back to the heroic figure of Umar for their readiest role model—but in truth the wellsprings of their inspiration rose much further back in time, in the spectacular feats of self-mortification practised by those warriors of Christ, the monks. Between the stylite who consecrated his gangrenous flesh to worms and the Mujahid who willingly courted frostbite by raiding the villages of the Taurus throughout the bitter depths of winter, the differences were less of quality than of kind. That this was so might be perfectly evident to both monks and Muslims themselves. One traveller, happening to meet with a Christian hermit, and marking how his eyes were puffy from weeping, asked him the reason for his tears. “Because the hour of my death is fast approaching,” the monk replied, “and I still have far to go.” Some time later, when the traveller passed the monk’s cell again and saw that it was empty, he asked where the monk had gone. “He had become a Muslim,” came the answer, “and gone raiding, and been killed in the lands of the Romans.”⁶⁶

A telling anecdote—and all the more so for having been founded upon an astounding reversal of fortunes. Back in the heyday of the Christian empire, it was the desert, the realm of the Arabs, that had provided ascetics with the wilderness most appropriate to their ambitions—but now, in the age of the Caliphate, it was the Christian empire itself. That Cilicia had become a nightmarish realm of abandoned cities, blackened fields and mosquito-clouded swamps went without saying; but even beyond the Taurus, across the rump of what had once been the universal empire of the Romans, decay and impoverishment were rife. Muslim war bands, whenever they succeeded in breaking through the mountain passes, would make a point of plundering and destroying all they could—but found themselves hamstrung, as they would often grumble, by the lack of portable wealth. “Rich cities are few in their kingdom and country, despite its situation, size, and the antiquity of their rule.” So one Muslim, anatomising the Romans, sniffed. “This is because most of it consists of mountains, castles, fortresses, cave dwellings and villages dug out of the rock or buried under the earth.”⁶⁷ The world had been turned upside down. A people who had once disdained the Arabs as wolves were now, thanks to Muslim prowess, reduced themselves to living like hunted beasts—whether by clinging to the tops of mountains, or else by burrowing deep underground.

Yet it did not do to scorn the “Rum” out of hand. Dread of their power remained something visceral in many Arabs: a foreboding that the Romans, given even the sniff of a chance, might descend upon Kufa and “flatten it like a leather skin.”⁶⁸ Stretched almost to breaking point though they were, and despite almost a century of unrelenting pressure, they had refused to give way. Still, albeit with bleeding fingertips, they clung on to their empire’s status as a great power. Such an achievement, secured with such indomitability, and in the face of such odds, had owed much to the Romans’ own courage and resolve—but even more to their inheritance from the past. There were officers stationed in the wilds of the Taurus who still bore Latin titles and commanded regiments that could trace their origins back to the time of Constantine. There were engineers, and architects, and shipwrights, trained in the skills that had been honed when the New Rome had stood at the pinnacle of her power, who could still provide her with a technological edge. Above all, across the span of the shrunken empire, there were Christians everywhere, from the heights of the imperial palace down to the most flea-bitten hamlet, who took for granted that they remained a people chosen of God. The loss of the southern provinces, calamitous though it had been, had at least served to shear the New Rome of any number of troublesome heretics: Monophysites, and Samaritans, and Jews. At long last, in the teeth of all its troubles, the empire had become precisely what Justinian had always dreamed that it might be: impregnably orthodox.

Roman and Arab alike, then, were united in the one conviction: that the future of the world would be decided by the fate of Constantinople. And very possibly of the entire universe as well. Although certainly an incomparable strategic prize—the key to all the former and present lands of Rome’s ancient empire—the city’s ultimate significance was as the stage for an altogether more cosmic drama. Among Christians, the inevitable failure of a great Ishmaelite assault upon the Roman capital was confidently expected to herald the coming of the last and greatest Caesar of them all: a conqueror who would triumph over the Arabs even more heroically than Heraclius had done over Khusrow, recapture Jerusalem and usher in the return of Christ. Among Muslims, it was the capture of Constantinople that was expected to presage the End Days. Nevertheless, they could not help but be haunted by a dread that time might be running out for them. Just like the Romans, they anticipated the coming of a mighty Caesar; but as a nightmare. A prince would be born in Constantinople who would grow as fast in one day as a normal child grows in a year; when he was twelve, he would launch a devastating war of reconquest: his fleets and armies would spread ruin across the Caliphate. The more that hadiths expressing this alarming prospect spread, the more urgent it seemed to foreclose it once and for all. The continued existence of a Christian empire was a menace patently not to be borne. The gaze of the Umayyads, as it had not done since the time of Mu’awiya, began to turn upon al-Qustantiniyya itself.

By 715, when Walid was succeeded as Caliph by his brother, Suleiman, it was evident that the hammer blow would not be long in falling. In Cilicia, brutal campaigning temporarily cleared the Taurus of Roman garrisons, while in Syria, freshly minted hadiths proclaimed “the name of the Caliph destined to take Constantinople to be the name of a prophet.”⁶⁹ Not that Suleiman, despite sharing his name with the fabled king who had built the Temple in Jerusalem and married the Queen of Sheba, intended to lead the campaign in person. In 716, when a mighty task force smashed its way through the mountain passes and advanced towards the Aegean, its commander was yet another of Abd al-Malik’s sons: a seasoned Rum-fighter by the name of Maslama. Effective generalship and sheer weight of numbers combined to devastating effect. The Roman high command proved helpless in the face of the invasion. Those in the path of the Arab juggernaut found themselves with no recourse save for appeals to the supernatural. Most raised their prayers to heaven; but some, in their desperation, turned to hell. At Pergamum, an ancient city just north of Ephesus, the sight of Maslama’s army camped outside the walls reduced the citizens to such terror that a necromancer was able to persuade them to slice open the belly of a pregnant woman, boil her foetus, and then dip their sleeves in the resulting casserole. The spell proved signally ineffective. Maslama stormed Pergamum, ransacked it, and converted it into winter quarters for his army. Then, with the coming of spring, the invaders continued their advance. When they reached the straits directly opposite Europe, the Arab fleet, freshly arrived from Cilicia for the purpose, ferried them to the far shore. Nothing now stood between Maslama and the Roman capital, that abiding object of all his dynasty’s fondest dreams. In mid-summer, guards on the walls of Constantinople were able to mark a haze of darkness spreading towards them from the western horizon, as fields and villages were burned, and dusty roads were trampled by a great multitude of marching feet. Then Arab outriders began to appear, approaching the landward bulwarks of the New Rome, and ships from Maslama’s fleet, churning the waters directly below the great palace of the Caesars. By 15 August, the encirclement was complete: Constantinople was besieged, enclosed in a ring of foes.

Well might her citizens have offered up desperate prayers. Almost a century had passed since the Persians and the Avars had appeared before the city’s walls, and in that time the calamities that had afflicted the empire had hardly spared the capital itself. Her former greatness now seemed to hang loose about her, like a giant’s robe on a dwarfish thief. Harbours once crowded with colossal grain ships had contracted to a quarter of their former size; beneath the triumphal column where ambassadors had once been greeted with splendid and awful ceremonial a pig market now stood; entire stretches of the city consisted of nothing but farmland interspersed with ruins, from which masonry would periodically crash. Yet even if much in the great city had crumbled, so equally much had not. The Hippodrome, the imperial palace and Hagia Sophia: all endured. Above all, monuments to an age when the New Rome’s resources had truly matched her pretensions, there loomed the giant walls of Theodosius, and which now, once again, proved their impregnable worth. Nor, as the Arab sea captains would soon find out to their horror, had the Romans permitted their primordial habits of attack to atrophy either. The sheer scale of Maslama’s navy, its vast expanse of timbers, rendered it mortally vulnerable to a counter-strike. In the still of late summer, with the Bosphorus glassy calm, the Arab war fleet sought to force the city’s sea walls: a fatal error. The Romans, launching their own ships from the Golden Horn, unleashed the deadliest weapon at their command: fire. Blazing hulks crashed into the Arab fleet and sent flames dancing across the great forest of masts, while smaller ships, armed with siphons, sprayed viscous oil so miraculous and terrifying in its effects that sailors continued to burn from its touch even as they screamed and tore at themselves on the boiling waves. Hygron pyr, this devastating invention was called: “liquid fire.” That the secret had been brought to Constantinople a few decades earlier by an architect called Callinicos did not obscure for the city’s defenders, as they watched the blazing Arab ships sink, or else drift helplessly into one another or out to sea, its ultimate derivation. Clearly, it was God who had shattered all the invaders’ plans—“at the intercession of His wholly chaste Mother.”⁷⁰

Nor was the Virgin done yet. Calamity after calamity struck at the besiegers. Some of these—the thick snow that covered the Arab camp during the winter, the famine and plague that afflicted it during the summer—clearly derived from the prayers of the Christian people; but so too, they knew in their souls, did the many triumphs of their agents. When Coptic squadrons from the Arab fleet were persuaded to desert, or when barbarians from the north were bribed to attack Maslama’s land forces, the dramatic success of these various gambits seemed to the defenders to bear striking witness to the favour of the heavens. By the summer of 717, after a siege of almost a year, it was evident that the Arab attempt on Constantinople had failed. In Syria, Suleiman was already dead, and the new Caliph, cutting his losses, ordered the expedition to withdraw. Maslama, even though his missives home had been growing ever more cheery as the situation worsened, was left with no choice but to obey. The retreat, afflicted as it was by devastating storms at sea, proved brutal. “Many terrible things happened to them,” as a monk piously gloated, “so that from their own efforts they realised that God and His all-holy maiden Mother watched over the City and the Empire of the Christians.”⁷¹

Naturally, this was not remotely the Muslim perspective. Although the great siege had certainly been a calamity, the debacle could have been far worse: no sinister, twelve-year-old Caesar had materialised, for instance, nor had Kufa been squashed flat. In the decade that followed the failure to take Constantinople, the raids launched by the vengeful Muslims were as savage and remorseless as they had ever been, slicing so deep into Roman territory that in 727 an Arab army even managed briefly to put Nicaea under siege. Yet there was, in the sheer frenzied quality of these assaults, something of a raging against the dying of the light. The blaze of a dream that the Umayyads had long nurtured, that the entire world might be brought beneath their sway, was coming to gutter badly. Victory, which God had previously been pleased to bestow upon their armies whenever they met with unbelievers, could no longer, it seemed, be taken entirely for granted. In 732, for instance, in the distant wilds of Gaul, a Muslim raid on the Franks’ wealthiest and most cherished shrine, a great church in a town named Tours, was met by a phalanx of outraged locals, and murderously put to flight. Eight years later, near the town of Acroinum, beyond the Taurus Mountains, it was the turn of the Romans to corner an Arab war band, and inflict on it a decisive defeat. Thirteen thousand were killed, and many more taken prisoner: a serious loss of manpower. This, the first victory ever won by the hated Rum in pitched battle against a Muslim army, seemed to confirm that God, in His ineffable wisdom, did indeed intend to leave entire swaths of His creation in the darkness of unbelief. For the first time, the devout dared to contemplate a chilling possibility: that humanity, rather than being brought into a single “House of Islam,” was destined to remain forever divided in two. Increasingly, when pious Muhajirun in the shadow of the Taurus gazed out at the grim mountainscape before them, they did not see a gateway to fresh conquests but rather the ramparts of a perpetual “House of War.” The fall of Constantinople—and the End Days—no longer seemed imminent. Instead, Muslims were coming to see in their war with the Romans only a grinding stalemate: one that might well endure for numberless generations. “They are people of sea and rock.” So the Prophet himself was said to have lamented. “Alas, they are your associates to the end of time.”⁷²

Against the backdrop of such prophecies, defenders of the House of Islam came to cast the empire of Constantinople, and all the Christian realms beyond it, as a ghoul-like doppelgänger: hellish, predatory, undead. Against such an adversary, it was not only warriors who were needed, but lawyers: men who could advise the faithful on how best to secure and maintain the favour of God. By 740, the year of the disastrous defeat at Acroinum, men whose truest proficiency lay in a library rather than on the battlefield were becoming a common sight on the Roman front.⁷³ Such scholars, it was true, hardly lacked for martial courage: one, Ali ibn Bakkar, when slashed across his belly, cheerfully used his turban to stop his entrails from spilling out and then went on to kill no fewer than thirteen enemy soldiers, while his idea of relaxation, when away from the battlefield, was to make pets out of the dreaded lions of Cilicia. Yet the true value to the Muslim cause of these scholars lay neither on the battlefield nor in the field of pest control. Rather, what they contributed to the great death-struggle with the House of War was something even more precious: an assurance to the faithful that they were indeed, by taking up arms against the unbelievers, performing the will of God.

Standing in the shadow of the Taurus Mountains, it was not enough for the frontier guards of the Caliphate merely to construct fortifications out of the plundered rubble of abandoned Roman cities. Far more urgent was the need to fashion, along the border with the House of War, a dimension that could rank as authentically, purely and impregnably Islamic. This was why the frontiersmen’s word for a fortified stronghold—ribat—was also applied to the particular brand of pious activity associated with the ulama: a determination to permit nothing to the faithful that did not derive directly from the Prophet. “He was the one who taught the inhabitants of the frontier region how to behave.” So it was recorded of one lawyer, a Kufan by the name of Abu Ishaq. “He instructed them in the Sunna and used to command and prohibit. Whenever a man inclined to innovation entered the frontier region, Abu Ishaq would throw him out.”⁷⁴

Yet there was, in the presence of such figures amid all the dangers and deprivations of Cilicia, an awkward paradox. When Abu Ishaq risked a whipping to upbraid a local commandant, when Ali ibn Bakkar wept until he went blind, when other scholars fasted, or ate dust, or wore rags, or refused to wash, they were not following the example of Muhammad. Rather, they were aping Syria’s famously ascetic monks. This, in the context of the interminable war with the Christians, could hardly help but appear a mounting embarrassment. How could Islam ever hope to scour the world of unbelief, when there still lurked in the souls of its own shock troops a lingering taint bred of their foes? Fortunately for the ulama, however, the solution to this problem—an increasingly tried and tested one—lay ready to hand. “The words of our Prophet have reached us—a correct and truthful statement.”⁷⁵ So declared Ibn al-Mubarak, a Turk whose relish for fighting the Rum had led him to travel to the Taurus all the way from far distant Khorasan, and who would come to rank as perhaps the most formidable of all the warrior-scholars. The “imam of the Muslims,” as he was admiringly hailed, he possessed not only a rare aptitude for defeating Romans in single combat, but a familiarity with hadiths so detailed and passionate that he was known to discourse on them even in the heat of battle. Who better, then, to reassure the Muhajirun that the mortifications required of them on the frontier had in fact been authentically Islamic all along, and owed nothing to the example of infidels? Why, the Prophet himself, so it suddenly appeared from a flurry of hadiths brandished to triumphant effect by Ibn al-Mubarak, had given Muslims explicit instructions not to copy monks. “Every community has its monasticism—and the monasticism of my comunity is jihad.”⁷⁶

Quite what was being suggested by this word remained, however, in Ibn al-Mubarak’s own lifetime, something very much up for grabs. Its literal meaning was “struggle,” and in the Qur’an reference to the jihad required of believers was as likely to imply a good argument with the Mushrikun, or the giving of alms, or perhaps the freeing of a slave, as it was any commitment to pious violence. With warrior-scholars such as Ibn al-Mubarak desperate to claim the Prophet as their exemplar, however, the word came increasingly to take on a much narrower connotation: warfare in the cause of God. Riding to the frontiers of the embattled House of Islam and slaughtering stiff-necked Christians was cast not merely as an option for dutiful Muslims, but as a positive obligation. To one battle-shy friend who had boasted of his pilgrimages to Mecca and Medina, Ibn al-Mubarak gave a blistering retort. “Were you to see us,” he lectured, “you would realise your worship is mere play. For you the fragrance of spices, but for us the fragrance of dust, and dirt, and blood flowing down our necks—which is altogether more pleasant.”⁷⁷

And certainly, a hundred years and more after the death of the Prophet, evidence for this robust approach to the essentials of Islamic worship was coming to be marshalled in impressive quantities. Ibn al-Mubarak himself compiled an entire book of hadiths devoted to the single topic: jihad. Other scholars, turning to the Qur’an and finding themselves puzzled by the alternation of passages that urged perpetual warfare with others that seemed to urge the precise opposite, sought to organise the verses in what they trusted was a chronological manner—with one in particular, targeted originally at treaty-breaking Mushrikun, being placed right at the end of the Prophet’s life. “Kill them, seize them, besiege them, wait for them at every lookout post”⁷⁸—maxims with an obvious value for those with a taste for fighting Romans. It was therefore crucial for such scholars to establish that the verse was indeed revealed to the Prophet late in his career: for only so could it plausibly be demonstrated to have superseded other, less bellicose passages. As a result, it was not only hadith collections that were starting to be shaped by the martial enthusiasms of the ulama, but details of the Prophet’s biography. For scholars such as Ibn al-Mubarak, the stakes could hardly have been higher. Fail to demonstrate that they were following Muhammad’s example, and not only their increasingly complex doctrine of jihad but all their suffering amid the killing fields of Cilicia would effectively rank as worthless. Render the Prophet satisfyingly in their own image, however, and the prize would be a truly fabulous one. Not only would the past of Islam be theirs—its future would as well.

A prospect fit to give the Umayyads apoplexy, of course. It was bad enough that jumped-up pen-pushers—Turks, and Persians, and who knew what—should presume to dispute with the Khalifat Allah his right to determine the law of Islam; but it was beyond insufferable to have them prescribe for him the correct way to “fight in the way of God.”⁷⁹ No dynasty in history had presided over a more staggering array of conquests than the Umayyads. It was under their rule that the faithful had witnessed the fall of Carthage and Merv, the conquest of Spain and Transoxiana, the reaching of the Loire and the Hindu Kush. Clearly, then, the approval of God for their rule was something beyond dispute. And yet, like rodents burrowing and gnawing their way beneath some particularly glorious citadel, the ulama did dispute it. In their portrayal of Muhammad as the archetype of what they themselves felt a warrior of Islam should be, there was a peculiarly insidious threat to Umayyad authority. Any failure on the part of a Caliph to measure up to it could immediately be cast by them as a sinister deviation from true Islam—as defined, of course, by themselves. Even the proud assertion first made by Abd al-Malik—that to rule the Muslim people was to serve as the “Deputy of God”—might be turned against his dynasty. The earliest Commanders of the Faithful, so the ulama began to point out, had never thought to arrogate to themselves such a haughty title. Any notion of posing as God’s deputy, to a man as austere and devout as Umar, would surely have been beyond the pale. Accordingly, in the version of history written by the ulama, he came to be endowed with a far more modest title: not “Deputy of God” but “Deputy of the Prophet of God.” The Umayyads, when set against such a paragon, could hardly help but appear a gang of impious upstarts: arrogant gate-crashers squatting in the House of Islam.

Propaganda both brilliant and black. Indeed, such a travesty was it of all the many achievements wrought by the dynasty of Abd al-Malik on behalf of the Muslim people that the Umayyads, under more favourable circumstances, might well have laughed it to scorn. Circumstances, however, during the lengthy reign of the last of Abd al-Malik’s sons to ascend the caliphal throne—a squinting skinflint by the name of Hisham—were anything but favourable. Able and innovative a statesman though Hisham was, and especially when screwing his subjects out of their money, the seeming brilliance of his administration was in truth possessed of a mere surface glitter. His own personal lack of courage, which saw him palpitate violently whenever he received news of some reverse, did not prevent him from being guided by one fundamental conviction: that it was the prime and proper responsibility of a Caliph to secure the expansion of the House of Islam. Neither defeats at the hands of the Franks and the Romans nor a widespread revolt in North Africa in 739 could persuade him to reconsider this core presumption. As a result, by the time of his death in 743, his coffers were seriously depleted, and the Syrian army, which had served as the cutting edge of Umayyad power ever since the time of Mu’awiya, had been perilously blunted. Worn down by endless campaigning, the professionals who constituted its units were now scattered far and wide—from the Pyrenees to the Indus. In Syria itself, almost none remained.

And this, for Hisham’s successors, was to spell mortal danger. Even prior to his death, unrest was spreading fast. In Syria, it took the form of increasingly tribal-based factionalism; but in Iraq, it had an even more ominous source. Ghosts still unexorcised despite almost a century of Umayyad rule were re-emerging from the often blood-boltered mists of the past. In 740, the Shi’a demonstrated that they had lost none of their appetite for doomed uprisings when some two hundred Kufans, rallying in support of one of Ali’s great-grandsons and confident that they still enjoyed the favour of God, hurled themselves against an Umayyad attack squad ten times their size. The rebels were duly wiped out beneath a hail of arrows, and the headless trunk of Ali’s heir was nailed to a cross. At the same time, less flamboyantly but more effectively, agents for another family with a claim on the name of the Prophet were also at work, damning the Umayyads as false Muslims and usurpers. Despite their seeming obscurity, the Abbasids—a Qurayshi dynasty based in a remote farmstead in Nabataea—could lay claim to a truly priceless ancestor: none other than Abbas, the uncle of Muhammad. In the years that followed Hisham’s death, this was enough to pique the interest of a growing number of Muslims—and not only among those inveterate malcontents, the ulama. With the times seemingly fractured, speculation over the possible cause of God’s anger was rife. The answers given were rarely favourable to the ancien régime. Consequently, as Abbasid propagandists murmured their honeyed promises of a new dawn, the faithful began to listen to such whisperings with ever more attention. Perhaps, at such an excruciating moment of crisis, the appearance on the political scene of such living links with the Prophet might indeed be a part of God’s plan?

Umayyad loyalists were hardly alone in snorting at this notion. It was almost inevitable, with factionalism rife across the Caliphate, that Islam’s most fanatical insurgents would seize the opportunity to launch an uprising of their own; and sure enough, in 745, it was the turn of the Kharijites to raise the banner of revolt. Rather than martyr themselves needlessly—as the Shi’a had such a taste for doing—they brought to the business of revolution their customary attributes of ruthless efficiency and savagery. A few weeks after proclaiming their own Caliph, they had already gnawed off a major chunk of Iraq. Yet in truth, the Kharijites would never have had the opportunity to establish this breakaway state had it not been provided them by the most lethal of all the various outbreaks of fitna: a faction fight among the Umayyads themselves. In 744, Hisham’s heir, a dashing poseur by the name of Walid, had been assassinated in one of his desert pleasure palaces—a murder that had served to unleash an unparalleled bout of blood-letting among his relatives. The man who eventually emerged victorious from this carnivorous feuding was a grizzled but curly-headed warlord ostensibly well suited to power: a nephew of Abd al-Malik’s named Marwan. By 747, he had decisively trampled down his Umayyad and Kharijite rivals, and amply demonstrated both the kick and the stubbornness of the beast to which he was most often compared: a mule. Yet his triumph had come at a terrible cost. Iraq and Syria both lay in ruins, and Marwan was so despised in Damascus that he decamped from Syria altogether and established his court in Harran. An astounding development, to be sure: even with the Caliphate in a state of near collapse, a city still “ulcerous with idolatry”⁸⁰ had come to be established as the capital of the Deputy of God.

Many Muslims would doubtless have been shocked to learn that the moon continued to be worshipped anywhere in the House of Islam. The cult of Sin might almost have been designed to provoke their horror. Yet the pagans of Harran—who had suffered brutal persecution in the final years of Roman rule—had found their new masters, if not exactly more tolerant, then more laissez-faire, at least. Christians would snidely attribute this to the gullibility of the Muslim authorities, who were supposed to have been tricked into accepting that the moon worshippers were in fact the enigmatic “Sabaeans” mentioned in the Qur’an—and therefore, according to the Prophet, one of the three “Peoples of the Book.”⁸¹ Whatever the truth of such a tall-sounding story, Harranians were certainly still studying the future by sacrificing animals and then “examining their livers,”⁸² directly under Marwan’s nose. The persistence of such ancient practices within a capital of the Caliphate serves as a vivid reminder that Muslims were not alone, amid the evils of the age, in attempting to fathom the purposes of the heavens. In 745, for instance, during Marwan’s devastating campaign in Syria, a stylite had presumed to warn the passing warlord that he would be dealt with by God even as he had dealt with his subjects. “When Marwan heard this, he commanded that the pillar should be overthrown; and he brought down the old man, and burned him alive in the fire.”⁸³ Caliphs, of course, might treat Christian saints with a brutality and dismissiveness that would have appalled a Caesar—and yet even as Marwan hunkered down in Harran, he neglected the sensibilities of his non-Muslim subjects at his peril. Floodtides were swirling around him older by far than Islam. These were rising, however, not in the traditional heartlands of the Caliphate, in Syria or Iraq, but far to the east: in Khorasan.

Almost three centuries had passed since Peroz, in his war against the Hephthalites, had set the seal on a disastrous reign with one final, calamitous battle. Much had changed since then, and yet the miseries suffered by Khorasan under Hisham and his successors had come to wear a very familiar look. As resentments and frustrations bred of heavy taxation gnawed at an oppressed population, so had Muslim armies beyond the Oxus suffered a series of humiliating reverses. Not even the ultimate stabilisation of Transoxiana could erase the notorious reputations of a succession of incompetent Umayyad governors. “You abandoned us like pieces of a slaughtered beast, cut up for a round-breasted girl,”⁸⁴ the Arabs of the eastern front sang of one particularly epicene appointee from Damascus. Yet Umayyad authority was threatened by more than the resentments of Muslim settlers; it was in peril as well from the same traditions that had once blackened the name of Peroz. In Khorasan—where great Parthian dynasts such as the Karin still jealously guarded their prerogatives against the upstart Muslim elite, and where most towns and villages remained wholly untouched by Islam—it often seemed as though Iranshahr had never fallen. That the world was divided into rival spheres of good and evil; that a great monarch was either a defender of truth or he was nothing; that the wickedness of an oath-breaker would bring ruin to his realm: here were presumptions still widely taken for granted along the eastern marches of Iran. The result was, as Umayyad rule began to implode, that the stirrings of rebellion could be felt well beyond the Fertile Crescent. In 745, even as the Kharijites were launching their latest insurgency, a mysterious prophet appeared in Khorasan. Dressed all in green—the colour of Mihr—brandishing a book of revelations written in Persian, and proclaiming himself familiar with the byways of heaven, Bihafarid was a revolutionary conjured, it seemed, from the most haunting mists of the Iranian past. Having died and then risen again—or so his disciples proclaimed—he announced his mission in terms that nakedly scorned all the pretensions of Muhammad: “O people, I am Bihafarid, the Messenger of God!”⁸⁵

Of course, it could not possibly last. Muslim rule, whatever the hopes of the great multitudes of peasants who flocked in excitement to Bihafarid’s banner, was not so easily overthrown. Sure enough, in 749, the self-proclaimed prophet was arrested, put in chains and hanged in a nearby mosque. Yet his executioners, for all that it would have appalled them to contemplate it, were not, perhaps, wholly dissimilar to the man they had put to death. Bihafarid’s murderers were themselves followers of an insurrectionist who had emerged abruptly on the fringes of the former Iranshahr, and combined charisma with a dramatic claim to be an agent of God. “Father of a Muslim,” he called himself: a name so obviously a pseudonym as to give away nothing at all. His glamour, in part at least, was that of a man in a mask. “The knowledge of my deeds,” as he put it with a calculated show of mystery, “is better for you than the knowledge of my pedigree.”⁸⁶ Yet whether an Arab or an Iranian, an aristocrat or a former slave, one thing, at least, is certain: he was powerfully assisted in his preachings by the same identical swirl of yearnings and expectations as had inspired Bihafarid. Along the easternmost fringes of the Caliphate, faiths were not easily patrolled. So it had ever been, of course, in border zones. No wonder, then, far distant as they were from all the efforts of the ulama to raise barriers around the practice of their religion, that the Muslims of Khorasan should have betrayed the influence of beliefs older by far than the Sunna. What helped to give Abu Muslim his prestige among them was that he dared, as once the critics of Peroz had done, to damn their ruler as a man condemned by God. Although he did not, like Bihafarid, clothe himself in green, yet in the summer of 747, when he declared open rebellion against Marwan, he unfurled a banner dyed a single colour: black. That he did this in a village outside Merv, where the fugitive Yazdegird had been murdered, was hardly suggestive, of course, of any nostalgia on Abu Muslim’s part for the House of Sasan; and yet, to Iranians, his preachings might well have stirred memories of the toppled monarchy. The cause proclaimed by Abu Muslim was that of a single family, appointed by God to the rule of the world; and if the mark of their claim to this awesome status was the possession, not of a farr but rather of a bloodline traceable back to the uncle of the Prophet, then that, in an Islamic empire, promised qualification enough. Abu Muslim, like so many other rebels trained in subterfuge and insurrection, was an agent of the Abbasids; and by raising the East in their cause, he had succeeded in fusing the past with the future, the Iranian with the Arab, the Sasanian with the Islamic. It was to prove a quite staggeringly potent combination—and the ruin of the Umayyads.

The flames of rebellion swept westwards from Khorasan so fast and so ferociously that Marwan was caught out fatally short. Already, as the spring of 749 turned to summer, Abbasid forces had secured complete control of Iran. By August, they were across the Euphrates; by September, they were inside Kufa. On 28 November, in the very mosque where Ali had been murdered, an Abbasid was publicly hailed as Caliph. Marwan now had no option but to meet the provocation head on. Rather than wait for the full roster of his veterans to assemble, he opted instead to cobble together such units as were already available to him in Harran and lead them against the pretender. On 25 January 750, on the bank of a tributary of the Tigris called the Greater Zab, he spotted the black banners of the Abbasids, advanced, and fell upon the rebels. The result was calamity. His army was obliterated. As unyielding as ever, even in the face of such a disaster, the tireless Marwan fled the battlefield and desperately struggled to marshal further troops—but there were none to be found. Galloping past both Damascus—the capital he had abandoned—and Jerusalem—the city that now mocked his dynasty’s crumbled greatness more than any other—he made his way into Egypt. Here, in the heat of the summer, he was finally cornered by his pursuers. His head, topped by the frizz of his curly hair, was dispatched to his replacement upon the throne of the Caliphs. His tongue was fed to a cat.

Marwan’s relatives too were systematically tracked down. The death squads were grimly efficient. Of the entire Umayyad brood, the only one who managed to evade capture was a grandson of the miserly Hisham, who fled to Spain, where he set himself up as Amir. Otherwise, Islam’s founding dynasty was finished. The last wretched gaggle of survivors, hauled before the Abbasid Caliph, were butchered, laid side by side, covered by a carpet, and used as a banqueting table by honoured guests: “And those who were present at the scene,” it is said, “ate while the death-rattle still sounded in the throats of the expiring victims.”

An atrocity fit to stand as a gruesome coda to a revolution beyond compare, manifest in pages of divine revelations, and capacious systems of law, and incomparably beautiful buildings, and whole new cities, and would-be global empires, and entire habits of thought transformed. In the most literal and bloody way imaginable, the slaughter of the Umayyads served to illustrate what had been—for half a millennium or more—the supreme theme of the age: the raising of a new order upon the ruins of the old.

^a Muslim scholars would identify this verse as referring to a change in the direction of prayer from Jerusalem to Mecca—a tradition for which, of course, there is absolutely no evidence within the Qur’an itself.

^b In due course, this tradition would become an embarrassment to Muslim theologians, since it implied that God had a body. In the eleventh century, an alternative explanation for the construction of the Dome of the Rock was enshrined: that it commemorated the ascension into heaven not of God but of Muhammad, who was supposedly transported from Mecca to Jerusalem specifically for the purpose.

^c A monk in Iraq, writing in the early eighth century, alludes to a “Qur’an” but also to other writings by Muhammad, including a “Book of the Cow.” John of Damascus, a high-ranking civil servant in the last years of Abd al-Malik’s reign who took a deep interest in his master’s faith, also refers to a “Book” composed by Muhammad, together with various other texts that had supposedly been written by him. “The Cow” ended up as the title of a sura in the Qur’an; “The Woman” seems to be the same text as the sura that appears under the title “Women” in the Qur’an; “God’s She-Camel,” despite scattered references throughout the holy book to such a beast, bears no resemblance to any existing Qur’anic sura.

^d In the long run, a majority of Muslim jurists would decide that Zoroastrians were in fact a “People of the Book.”

^e The toothbrush was called a siwak and comprised a twig of the arak tree.

^f Deuteronomy: 22–21. In fact, as was invariably their way, the rabbis appended so many qualifications to the biblical proscriptions that they effectively abolished the death penalty in Jewish society. For instance, it could be enforced only if the adultery had been committed before two valid witnesses, and even then only after multiple warnings had been delivered.