Byzantine art, so generated, dedicated itself to expounding the doctrines of Christianity, and displaying the glory of the state. It recounted on vestments and tapestries, in mosaics and murals, the life of Christ, the sorrows of Mary, the career of the apostle or martyr whose bones were enshrined in the church. Or it entered the court, decorated the palace of the sovereign, covered his official robes with symbolic emblems or historical designs, dazzled his subjects with flamboyant pageantry, and ended by representing Christ and Mary as an emperor and a queen. The Byzantine artist had small choice of patron, and therefore of subject or style; monarch or patriarch told him what to do, and how. He worked in a group, and seldom left an individual name to history. He achieved miracles of brilliance, he exalted and humbled the people with the splendor of his creations; but his art paid in formalism, narrowness, and stagnation for serving an absolute monarch and a changeless creed.

He commanded abundant materials: marble quarries in the Proconnesus, Attica, Italy; spoliable columns and capitals wherever a pagan temple survived; and bricks almost growing in the sun-dried earth. Usually he worked with mortared brick; it lent itself well to the curved forms imposed upon him by Oriental styles. Often he contented himself with the cruciform plan—a basilica crossed with a transept and prolonged to an apse; sometimes he broke the basilica into an octagon, as in Sts. Sergius and Bacchus’ at Constantinople, or in San Vitale’s at Ravenna. But his distinctive skill, in which he surpassed all artists before him or since, lay in raising a circular dome over a polygonal frame. His favorite means to this end was the pendentive: i.e., he built an arch or semicircle of bricks over each side of the polygon, raised a spherical triangle of bricks upward and inward between each semicircle, and laid a dome upon the resultant circular ring. The spherical triangles were the pendentives, “hanging” from the rim of the dome to the top of the polygon. In architectural effect the circle was squared. Thereafter the basilican style almost disappeared from the East.

Within the edifice the Byzantine builder lavished all the skills of a dozen arts. He rarely used statuary; he sought not so much to represent figures of men and women as to create an abstract beauty of symbolic form. Even so the Byzantine sculptors were artisans of ability, patience, and resource. They carved the “Theodosian” capital by combining the “ears” of the Ionic with the leaves of the Corinthian order; and to make profusion more confounded, they cut into this composite capital a very jungle of animals and plants. Since the result was not too well adapted to sustain a wall or an arch, they inserted between these and the capital an impost or “pulvino,” square and broad at the top, round and narrower at the base; and then, in the course of time, they carved this too with flowers. Here again, as in the domed square, Persia conquered Greece.—But further, painters were assigned to adorn the walls with edifying or terrifying pictures; mosaicists laid their cubes of brightly colored stone or glass, in backgrounds of blue or gold, upon the floors or walls, or over the altar, or in the spandrels of the arches, or wherever an empty surface challenged the Oriental eye. Jewelers set gems into vestments, altars, columns, walls; metalworkers inserted gold or silver plates; woodworkers carved the pulpit or chancel rails; weavers hung tapestries, laid rugs, and covered altar and pulpit with embroidery and silk. Never before had an art been so rich in color, so subtle in symbolism, so exuberant in decoration, so well adapted to quiet the intellect and stir the soul.


3. St. Sophia

Not till Justinian did the Greek, Roman, Oriental, and Christian factors complete their fusion into Byzantine art. The Nika revolt gave him, like another Nero, an opportunity to rebuild his capital. In the ecstasy of a moment’s freedom the mob had burned down the Senate House, the Baths of Zeuxippus, the porticoes of the Augusteum, a wing of the imperial palace, and St. Sophia, cathedral of the patriarch. Justinian might have rebuilt these on their old plans, and within a year or two; instead he resolved to spend more time, money, and men, make his capital more beautiful than Rome, and raise a church that would outshine all other edifices on the earth. He began now one of the most ambitious building programs in history: fortresses, palaces, monasteries, churches, porticoes, and gates rose throughout the Empire. In Constantinople he rebuilt the Senate House in white marble, and the Baths of Zeuxippus in polychrome marble; raised a marble portico and promenade in the-Augusteum; and brought fresh water to the city in a new aqueduct that rivaled Italy’s best. He made his own palace the acme of splendor and luxury: its floors and walls were of marble; its ceilings recounted in mosaic brilliance the triumphs of his reign, and showed the senators “in festal mood, bestowing upon the Emperor honors almost divine.”36 And across the Bosporus, near Chalcedon, he built, as a summer residence for Theodora and her court, the palatial villa of Herion, equipped with its own harbor, forum, church, and baths.

Forty days after the Nika revolt had subsided, he began a new St. Sophia-dedicated not to any saint of that name, but to the Hagia Sophia, the Holy Wisdom, or Creative Logos, of God Himself. From Tralles in Asia Minor, and from Ionian Miletus, he summoned Anthemius and Isidore, the most famous of living architects, to plan and superintend the work. Abandoning the traditional basilican form, they conceived a design whose center would be a spacious dome resting not on walls but on massive piers, and buttressed by a half dome at either end. Ten thousand workmen were engaged, 320,000 pounds of gold ($134,000,000) were spent, on the enterprise, quite emptying the treasury. Provincial governors were directed to send to the new shrine the finest relics of ancient monuments; marbles of a dozen kinds and tints were imported from a dozen areas; gold, silver, ivory, and precious stones were poured into the decoration. Justinian himself shared busily in the design and the construction, and took no small part (his scornful adulator tells us) in solving technical problems. Dressed in white linen, with a staff in his hand and a kerchief on his head, he haunted the operation day after day, encouraging the workers to complete their tasks competently and on time. In five years and ten months the edifice was complete; and on December 26, 537, the Emperor and the Patriarch Menas led a solemn inaugural procession to the resplendent cathedral. Justinian walked alone to the pulpit, and lifting up his hands, cried out: “Glory be to God who has thought me worthy to accomplish so great a work! O Solomon! I have vanquished you!”

The ground plan was a Greek cross 250 by 225 feet; each end of the cross was covered by a minor dome; the central dome rose over the square (100 by 100 feet) formed by the intersecting arms; the apex of the dome was 180 feet above the ground; its diameter was 100 feet—32 less than the dome of the Pantheon in Rome. The latter had been poured in concrete in one solid piece; St. Sophia’s dome was made of brick in thirty converging panels—a much weaker construction.* The distinction of this dome was not in size but in support: it rested not on a circular structure, as in the Pantheon, but on pendentives and arches that mediated between the circular rim and the square base; never has this architectural problem been more satisfactorily solved. Procopius described the dome as “a work admirable and terrifying … seeming not to rest on the masonry below it, but to be suspended by a chain of gold from the height of the sky.”37

The interior was a panorama of luminous decoration. Marble of many colors—white, green, red, yellow, purple, gold—made the pavement, walls, and two-storied colonnades look like a field of flowers. Delicate stone carvings covered capitals, arches, spandrels, moldings, and cornices with classic leaves of acanthus and vine. Mosaics of unprecedented scope and splendor looked down from walls and vaults. Forty silver chandeliers, hanging from the rim of the dome, helped as many windows to illuminate the church. The sense of spaciousness left by the long nave and aisles, and by the pillarless space under the central dome; the metal lacework of the silver railing before the apse, and of the iron railing in the upper gallery; the pulpit inset with ivory, silver, and precious stones; the solid silver throne of the patriarch; the silk-and-gold curtain that rose over the altar with figures of the Emperor and the Empress receiving the benedictions of Christ and Mary; the golden altar itself, of rare marbles, and bearing sacred vessels of silver and gold: this lavish ornamentation might have warranted Justinian in anticipating the boast of the Mogul shahs—that they built like giants and finished like jewelers.

St. Sophia was at once the inauguration and the culmination of the Byzantine style. Men everywhere spoke of it as “the Great Church,” and even the skeptical Procopius wrote of it with awe. “When one enters this building to pray, he feels that it is not the work of human power. … The soul, lifting itself to the sky, realizes that here God is close by, and that He takes delight in this, His chosen home.”†38


4. From Constantinople to Ravenna

St. Sophia was Justinian’s supreme achievement, more lasting than his conquests or his laws. But Procopius describes twenty-four other churches built or rebuilt by him in the capital, and remarks: “If you should see one of them by itself you would suppose that the Emperor had built this work only, and had spent the whole time of his reign on this one alone.”39 Throughout the Empire this fury of construction raged till Justinian’s death; and that sixth century which marked the beginning of the Dark Ages in the West was in the East one of the richest epochs in architectural history. In Ephesus, Antioch, Gaza, Jerusalem, Alexandria, Salonika, Ravenna, Rome, and from Crimean Kerch to African Sfax, a thousand churches celebrated the triumph both of Christianity over paganism and of the Oriental-Byzantine over the Greco-Roman style. External columns, architraves, pediments; and friezes made way for the vault, the pendentive, and the dome. Syria had a veritable renaissance in the fourth, fifth, and sixth centuries; her schools at Antioch, Berytus (Beirut), Edessa, and Nisibis poured forth orators, lawyers, historians, and heretics; her artisans excelled in mosaics, textiles, and all decorative arts; her architects raised a hundred churches; her sculptors adorned them with lavish reliefs.

Alexandria was the one city in the Empire that never ceased to prosper. Her founder had chosen for her a site that almost forced the Mediterranean world to use her ports and enhance her trade. None of her ancient or early medieval architecture has survived; but the scattered relics of her work in metal, ivory, wood, and portraiture suggest a people as rich in art as in sensuality and bigotry. Coptic architecture, which had begun with the Roman basilica, became under Justinian predominantly Oriental.

The architectural splendor of Ravenna began soon after Honorius made it the seat of the Western Empire in 404. The city prospered in the long regency of Galla Placidia; and the close relations maintained with Constantinople brought Eastern artists and styles to mingle with Italian architects and forms. The typical Oriental plan of a dome placed with pendentives over the transept of a cruciform base appeared there as early as 450 in the Mausoleum where Placidia at last found tranquillity; within it one may still see the famous mosaic of Christ as the Good Shepherd. In 458 Bishop Neon added to the domed baptistery of the Basilica Ursiana a series of mosaics that included remarkably individual portraits of the Apostles. About 500 Theodoric built for his Arian bishop a cathedral named after St. Apollinaris, the reputed founder of the Christian community in Ravenna; here, in world-renowned mosaics, the white-robed saints bear themselves with a stiff solemnity that already suggests the Byzantine style.

The conquest of Ravenna by Belisarius advanced the victory of Byzantine art in Italy. The church of San Vitale was completed (547) under Justinian and Theodora, who financed its decoration, and lent their unseductive features to its adornment. There is every indication that these mosaics are realistic portraits; and emperor and empress must be credited with courage in permitting their likenesses to be transmitted to posterity. The attitudes of these rulers, ecclesiastics, and eunuchs are hard and angular; their stiff frontality is a reversion to preclassical forms; the robes of the women are a mosaic triumph, but we miss here the happy grace of the Parthenon procession, or the Ara pacis of Augustus, or the nobility and tenderness of the figures on the portals of Chartres or Reims.

Two years after dedicating San Vitale the Bishop of Ravenna consecrated Sant’ Apollinare in Classe—a second church for the city’s patron saint, placed in the maritime suburb that had once been the Adriatic base of the Roman fleet (classis). Here is the old Roman basilican plan; but on the composite capitals a Byzantine touch appears in the acanthus leaves unclassically curled and twisted, as if blown by some Eastern wind. The long rows of perfect columns, the colorful (seventh-century) mosaics in the archivolts and spandrels of the colonnades, the lovely stucco plaques in the choir, the cross of gems on a bed of mosaic stars in the apse, make this one of the outstanding shrines of a peninsula that is almost a gallery of art.


5. The Byzantine Arts

Architecture was the masterpiece of the Byzantine artist, but about it or within it were a dozen other arts in which he achieved some memorable excellence. He did not care for sculpture in the round; the mood of the age preferred color to line; yet Procopius lauded the sculptors of his time—presumably the carvers of reliefs—as the equals of Pheidias and Praxiteles; and some stone sarcophagi of the fourth, fifth, and sixth centuries have human figures chiseled with almost Hellenic grace, confused with an Asiatic plethora of ornament. The carving of ivory was a favorite art among the Byzantines; they used it for diptychs, triptychs, book covers, caskets, perfume boxes, statuettes, inlays, and in a hundred decorative ways; in this craft Hellenistic techniques survived unimpaired, and merely turned gods and heroes into Christ and the saints. The ivory chair of Bishop Maximian in the Basilica Ursiana at Ravenna (c. 550) is a major achievement in a minor art.

While the Far East, in the sixth century, was experimenting with oil colors,40 Byzantine painting adhered to traditional Greek methods: encaustic—colors burnt into panels of wood, canvas, or linen; fresco—colors mixed with lime and applied to wet plaster surfaces; and tempera—colors mixed with size or gum or glue and white of egg, and applied to panels or to plaster already dry. The Byzantine painter knew how to represent distance and depth, but usually shirked the difficulties of perspective by filling in the background with buildings and screens. Portraits were numerous, but few have survived. Church walls were decorated with murals; the fragments that remain show a rough realism, unshapely hands, stunted figures, sallow faces, and incredible coiffures.

The Byzantine artist excelled and reveled in the minute; his extant masterpieces of painting are not murals or panels, but the miniatures with which he literally “illuminated”—made bright with color—the publications of his age.* Books, being costly, were adorned like other precious objects. The miniaturist first sketched his design upon papyrus, parchment, or vellum with a fine brush or pen; laid down a background usually in gold or blue; filled in his colors, and decorated background and borders with graceful and delicate forms. At first he had merely elaborated the initial letter of a chapter or a page; sometimes he essayed a portrait of the author; then he illustrated the text with pictures; finally, as his art improved, he almost forgot the text, and spread himself out in luxurious ornament, taking a geometrical or floral motive, or a religious symbol, and repeating it in a maze of variations, until all the page was a glory of color and line, and the text seemed like an intrusion from a coarser world.

The illumination of manuscripts had been practiced in Pharaonic and Ptolemaic Egypt, and had passed thence to Hellenistic Greece and Rome. The Vatican treasures an Aeneid, the Ambrosian Library at Milan an Iliad, both ascribed to the fourth century, and completely classic in ornament. The transition from pagan to Christian miniatures appears in the Topographia Christiana of Cosmas Indicopleustes (c. 547), who earned his sobriquet by sailing to India, and his fame by trying to prove that the earth is flat. The oldest extant religious miniature is a fifth-century Genesis, now in the Library of Vienna; the text is written in gold and silver letters on twenty-four leaves of purple vellum; the forty-eight miniatures, in white, green, violet, red, and black, picture the story of man from Adam’s fall to Jacob’s death. Quite as beautiful are the Joshua Rotulus (Little Roll of the Book of Joshua) in the Vatican, and the Book of the Gospels illuminated by the monk Rabula in Mesopotamia in 586. From Mesopotamia and Syria came the figures and symbols that dominated the iconography, or picture-writing, of the Byzantine world; repeated in a thousand forms in the minor arts, they became stereotyped and conventional, and shared in producing the deadly immutability of Byzantine art.

Loving brilliance and permanence, the Byzantine painter made mosaic his favorite medium. For floors he chose tesserae of colored marble, as Egyptians, Greeks, and Romans had done; for other surfaces he used cubes of glass or enamel in every shade, cut in various sizes, but usually an eighth of an inch square. Precious stones were sometimes mingled with the cubes. Mosaic was often employed in making portable pictures or icons, to be set up in churches or homes, or carried on travels as aids to devotion and safety; preferably, however, the mosaicist sought the larger scope of church or palace walls. In his studio, upon a canvas bearing a colored design, he tentatively laid his cubes; and here his art was strained to produce immediately under his hand the precise gradation and melting of colors to be felt by other eyes from greater distances. Meanwhile a coat of heavy cement, and then a coat of fine cement, were laid upon the surface to be covered; into this matrix the mosaicist, following his canvas model, pressed his cubes, usually with cut edges to the front to catch the light. Curved surfaces like domes, and the conches or shell-like half domes of apses, were favored, since they would catch at different times and angles a variety of softened and shaded light. From this painstaking art Gothic would derive part of its inspiration for stained glass.

Such glass is mentioned in fifth-century texts, but no example remains, and apparently the stain was external, not fused.41 Glass-cutting and blowing were now a thousand years old, and Syria, their earliest known home, was still a center of the crafts. The art of engraving precious metals or stones had deteriorated since Aurelius; Byzantine gems, coins, and seals are of relatively poor design and workmanship. Jewelers nevertheless sold their products to nearly every class, for ornament was the soul of Byzantium. Goldsmith and silversmith studios were numerous in the capital; gold pyxes, chalices, and reliquaries adorned many altars; and silver plate oppressed the tables of moneyed homes.

Every house, almost every person, carried some textile finery. Egypt led the way here with its delicate, many-colored, figured fabrics—garments, curtains, hangings, and coverings; the Copts were the masters in these fields. Certain Egyptian tapestries of this period are almost identical in technique with the Gobelins.42 Byzantine weavers made silk brocades, embroideries, even embroidered shrouds—linens realistically painted with the features of the dead. In Constantinople a man was known by the garments he wore; each class prized and defended some distinctive refinement of dress; and a Byzantine assemblage doubtless shone like a peacock’s tail.

Among all classes music was popular. It played a rising role in the liturgy of the Church, and helped to fuse emotion into belief. In the fourth century Alypius wrote a Musical Introduction, whose extant portions are our chief guide to the musical notation of the Greeks. This representation of notes by letters was replaced, in that century, by abstract signs, neumes; Ambrose apparently introduced these to Milan, Hilary to Gaul, Jerome to Rome. About the end of the fifth century Romanus, a Greek monk, composed the words and music of hymns that still form part of the Greek liturgy, and have never been equaled in depth of feeling and power of expression. Boethius wrote an essay De Musica, summarizing the theories of Pythagoras, Aristoxenus, and Ptolemy; this little treatise was used as a text in music at Oxford and Cambridge until our times.43

One must be an Oriental to understand an Oriental art. To a Western mind the essence of Byzantinism means that the East had become supreme in the heart and head of Greece: in the autocratic government, the hierarchical stability of classes, the stagnation of science and philosophy, the state-dominated Church, the religion-dominated people, the gorgeous vestments and stately ceremonies, the sonorous and scenic ritual, the hypnotic chant of repetitious music, the overwhelming of the senses with brilliance and color, the conquest of naturalism by imagination, the submergence of representative under decorative art. The ancient Greek spirit would have found this alien and unbearable, but Greece herself was now part of the Orient. An Asiatic lassitude fell upon the Greek world precisely when it was to be challenged in its very life by the renewed vitality of Persia and the incredible energy of Islam.


CHAPTER VII


The Persians


224–641


I. SASANIAN SOCIETY

BEYOND the Euphrates or the Tigris, through all the history of Greece and Rome, lay that almost secret empire which for a thousand years had stood off expanding Europe and Asiatic hordes, never forgetting its Achaemenid glory, slowly recuperating from its Parthian wars, and so proudly maintaining its unique and aristocratic culture under its virile Sasanian monarchs, that it would transform the Islamic conquest of Iran into a Persian Renaissance.

Iran meant more, in our third century, than Iran or Persia today. It was by its very name the land of the “Aryans,” and included Afghanistan, Baluchistan, Sogdiana, and Balkh, as well as Iraq. “Persia,” anciently the name of the modern province of Fars, was but a southeastern fraction of this empire; but the Greeks and Romans, careless about “barbarians,” gave the name of a part to the whole. Through the center of Iran, from Himalayan southeast to Caucasian northwest, ran a mountainous dividing barrier; to the east was an arid lofty plateau; to the west lay the green valleys of the twin rivers, whose periodic overflow ran into a labyrinth of canals, and made Western Persia rich in wheat and dates, vines, and fruits. Between or along the rivers, or hiding in the hills, or hugging desert oases, were a myriad villages, a thousand towns, a hundred cities: Ecbatana, Rai, Mosul, Istakhr (once Persepolis), Susa, Seleucia, and magnificent Ctesiphon, seat of the Sasanian kings.

Ammianus describes the Persians of this period as “almost all slender, somewhat dark … with not uncomely beards, and long, shaggy hair.”1 The upper classes were not shaggy, nor always slender, often handsome, proud of bearing, and of an easy grace, with a flair for dangerous sports and splendid dress. Men covered their heads with turbans, their legs with baggy trousers, their feet with sandals or laced boots; the rich wore coats or tunics of wool and silk, and girt themselves with belt and sword; the poor resigned themselves to garments of cotton, hair, or skins. The women dressed in boots and breeches, loose shirts and cloaks and flowing robes; curled their black hair into a coil in front, let it hang behind, and brightened it with flowers. All classes loved color and ornament. Priests and zealous Zoroastrians affected white cotton clothing as a symbol of purity; generals preferred red; kings distinguished themselves with red shoes, blue trousers, and a headdress topped with an inflated ball or the head of a beast or a bird. In Persia, as in all civilized societies, clothes made half the man, and slightly more of the woman.

The typical educated Persian was Gallicanly impulsive, enthusiastic, and mercurial; often indolent, but quickly alert; given to “mad and extravagant talk … rather crafty than courageous, and to be feared only at long range”2—which was where they kept their enemies. The poor drank beer, but nearly all classes, including the gods, preferred wine; the pious and thrifty Persians poured it out in religious ritual, waited a reasonable time for the gods to come and drink, then drank the sacred beverage themselves.3 Persian manners, in this Sasanian period, are described as coarser than in the Achaemenid, more refined than in the Parthian;4 but the narratives of Procopius leave us with the impression that the Persians continued to be better gentlemen than the Greeks.5 The ceremonies and diplomatic forms of the Persian court were in large measure adopted by the Greek emperors; the rival sovereigns addressed each other as “brother,” provided immunity and safe-conducts for foreign diplomats, and exempted them from customs searches and dues.6 The conventions of European and American diplomacy may be traced to the courts of the Persian kings.

“Most Persians,” Ammianus reported, “are extravagantly given to venery,”7 but he confesses that pederasty and prostitution were less frequent among them than among the Greeks. Rabbi Gamaliel praised the Persians for three qualities: “They are temperate in eating, modest in the privy and in marital relations.”8 Every influence was used to stimulate marriage and the birth rate, in order that man power should suffice in war; in this aspect Mars, not Venus, is the god of love. Religion enjoined marriage, celebrated it with awesome rites, and taught that fertility strengthened Ormuzd, the god of light, in his cosmic conflict with Ahriman, the Satan of the Zoroastrian creed.9 The head of the household practiced ancestor worship at the family hearth, and sought offspring to ensure his own later cult and care; if no son was born to him he adopted one. Parents generally arranged the marriage of their children, often with the aid of a professional matrimonial agent; but a woman might marry against the wishes of her parents. Dowries and marriage settlements financed early marriage and parentage. Polygamy was allowed, and was recommended where the first wife proved barren. Adultery flourished.10 The husband might divorce his wife for infidelity, the wife might divorce her husband for desertion and cruelty. Concubines were permitted. Like the ancient Greek hetairai, these concubines were free to move about in public, and to attend the banquets of the men;11 but legal wives were usually kept in private apartments in the home;12 this old Persian custom was bequeathed to Islam. Persian women were exceptionally beautiful, and perhaps men had to be guarded from them. In the Shahnama of Firdausi it is the women who yearn and take the initiative in courtship and seduction. Feminine charms overcame masculine laws.

Children were reared with the help of religious belief, which seems indispensable to parental authority. They amused themselves with ball games, athletics, and chess,13 and at an early age joined in their elders’ pastimes-archery, horse racing, polo, and the hunt. Every Sasanian found music necessary to the operations of religion, love, and war; “music and the songs of beautiful women,” said Firdausi, “accompanied the scene” at royal banquets and receptions;14 lyre, guitar, flute, pipe, horn, drum, and other instruments abounded; tradition avers that Khosru Parvez’ favorite singer, Barbad, composed 360 songs, and sang them to his royal patron, one each night for a year.15 In education, too, religion played a major part; primary schools were situated on temple grounds, and were taught by priests. Higher education in literature, medicine, science, and philosophy was provided in the celebrated academy at Jund-i-Shapur in Susiana. The sons of feudal chiefs and provincial satraps often lived near the king, and were instructed with the princes of the royal family in a college attached to the court.16

Pahlavi, the Indo-European language of Parthian Persia, continued in use. Of its literature in this age only some 600,000 words survive, nearly all dealing with religion. We know that it was extensive;17 but as the priests were its guardians and transmitters, they allowed most of the secular material to perish. (A like process may have deluded us as to the overwhelmingly religious character of early medieval literature in Christendom.) The Sasanian kings were enlightened patrons of letters and philosophy—Khosru Anushirvan above all: he had Plato and Aristotle translated into Pahlavi, had them taught at Jund-i-Shapur, and even read them himself. During his reign many historical annals were compiled, of which the sole survivor is the Karnamaki-Artakhshatr, or Deeds of Ardashir, a mixture of history and romance that served Firdausi as the basis of his Shahnama. When Justinian closed the schools of Athens seven of their professors fled to Persia and found refuge at Khosru’s court. In time they grew homesick; and in his treaty of 533 with Justinian, the “barbarian” king stipulated that the Greek sages should be allowed to return, and be free from persecution.

Under this enlightened monarch the college of Jund-i-Shapur, which had been founded in the fourth or fifth century, became “the greatest intellectual center of the time.”18 Students and teachers came to it from every quarter of the world. Nestorian Christians were received there, and brought Syriac translations of Greek works in medicine and philosophy. Neoplatonists there planted the seeds of Sufi mysticism; there the medical lore of India, Persia, Syria, and Greece mingled to produce a flourishing school of therapy.19 In Persian theory disease resulted from contamination and impurity of one or more of the four elements—fire, water, earth, and air; public health, said Persian physicians and priests, required the burning of all putrefying matter, and individual health demanded strict obedience to the Zoroastrian code of cleanliness.20

Of Persian astronomy in this period we only know that it maintained an orderly calendar, divided the year into twelve months of thirty days, each month into two seven-day and two eight-day weeks, and added five intercalary days at the end of the year.21 Astrology and magic were universal; no important step was taken without reference to the status of the constellations; and every earthly career, men believed, was determined by the good and evil stars that fought in the sky—as angels and demons fought in the human soul—the ancient war of Ormuzd and Ahriman.

The Zoroastrian religion was restored to authority and affluence by the Sasanian dynasty; lands and tithes were assigned to the priests; government was founded on religion, as in Europe. An archimagus, second only to the king in power, headed an omnipresent hereditary priestly caste of Magi, who controlled nearly all the intellectual life of Persia, frightened sinners and rebels with threats of hell, and kept the Persian mind and masses in bondage for four centuries.22 Now and then they protected the citizen against the taxgatherer, and the poor against oppression.23 The Magian organization was so rich that kings sometimes borrowed great sums from the temple treasuries. Every important town had a fire temple, in which a sacred flame, supposedly inextinguishable, symbolized the god of light. Only a life of virtue and ritual cleanliness could save the soul from Ahriman; in the battle against that devil it was vital to have the aid of the Magi and their magic—thai divinations, incantations, sorceries, and prayers. So helped, the soul would attain holiness and purity, pass the awful assize of the Last Judgment, and enjoy everlasting happiness in paradise.

Around this official faith other religions found modest room. Mithras, the sun god so popular with the Parthians, received a minor worship as chief helper of Ormuzd. But the Zoroastrian priests, like the Christians, Moslems, and Jews, made persistent apostasy from the national creed a capital crime. When Mani (c. 216–76), claiming to be a fourth divine messenger in the line of Buddha, Zoroaster, and Jesus, announced a religion of celibacy, pacifism, and quietism, the militant and nationalistic Magi had him crucified; and Manicheism had to seek its main success abroad. To Judaism and Christianity, however, the Sasanian priests and kings were generally tolerant, much as the popes were more lenient with Jews than with heretics. A large number of Jews found asylum in the western provinces of the Persian Empire. Christianity was already established there when the Sasanians came to power; it was tolerated until it became the official faith of Persia’s immemorial enemies, Greece and Rome; it was persecuted after its clergy, as at Nisibis in 338, took an active part in the defense of Byzantine territory against Shapur II,24 and the Christians in Persia revealed their natural hopes for a Byzantine victory.25 In 341 Shapur ordered the massacre of all Christians in his Empire; entire villages of Christians were being slaughtered when he restricted the proscription to priests, monks, and nuns; even so 16,000 Christians died in a persecution that lasted till Shapur’s death (379). Yezdegird I (399–420) restored religious freedom to the Christians, and helped them rebuild their churches. In 422 a council of Persian bishops made the Persian Christian Church independent of both Greek and Roman Christianity.

Within the framework of religious worship and dispute, governmental edicts and crises, civil and foreign wars, the people impatiently provided the sinews of state and church, tilling the soil, pasturing flocks, practicing handicrafts, arguing trade. Agriculture was made a religious duty: to clear the wilderness, cultivate the earth, eradicate pests and weeds, reclaim waste lands, harness the streams to irrigate the land—these heroic labors, the people were told, ensured the final victory of Ormuzd over Ahriman. Much spiritual solace was needed by the Persian peasant, for usually he toiled as tenant for a feudal lord, and paid from a sixth to a third of his crops in taxes and dues. About 540 the Persians took from India the art of making sugar from the cane; the Greek Emperor Heraclius found a treasury of sugar in the royal palace at Ctesiphon (627); the Arabs, conquering Persia fourteen years later, soon learned to cultivate the plant, and introduced it into Egypt, Sicily, Morocco, and Spain, whence it spread through Europe.26 Animal husbandry was a Persian forte; Persian horses were second only to Arab steeds in pedigree, spirit, beauty, and speed; every Persian loved a horse as Rustam loved Rakush. The dog was so useful in guarding flocks and homes that the Persians made him a sacred animal; and the Persian cat acquired distinction universally.

Persian industry under the Sasanians developed from domestic to urban forms. Guilds were numerous, and some towns had a revolutionary proletariat.27 Silk weaving was introduced from China; Sasanian silks were sought for everywhere, and served as models for the textile art in Byzantium, China, and Japan. Chinese merchants came to Iran to sell raw silk and buy rugs, jewels, rouge; Armenians, Syrians, and Jews connected Persia, Byzantium, and Rome in slow exchange. Good roads and bridges, well patrolled, enabled state post and merchant caravans to link Ctesiphon with all provinces; and harbors were built in the Persian Gulf to quicken trade with India. Governmental regulations limited the price of corn, medicines, and other necessaries, and prevented “corners” and monopolies.28 We may judge the wealth of the upper classes by the story of the baron who, having invited a thousand guests to dinner, and finding that he had only 500 dinner services, was able to borrow 500 more from his neighbors.29

The feudal lords, living chiefly on their rural estates, organized the exploitation of land and men, and raised regiments from their tenantry to fight the nation’s wars. They trained themselves to battle by following the chase with passion and bravery; they served as gallant cavalry officers, man and animal armored as in later feudal Europe; but they fell short of the Romans in disciplining their troops, or in applying the latest engineering arts of siege and defense. Above them in social caste were the great aristocrats who ruled the provinces as satraps, or headed departments of the government. Administration must have been reasonably competent, for though taxation was less severe than in the Roman Empire of East or West, the Persian treasury was often richer than that of the emperors. Khosru Parvez had $460,000,000 in his coffers in 626, and an annual income of $170,000,00030—enormous sums in terms of the purchasing power of medieval silver and gold.

Law was created by the kings, their councilors, and the Magi, on the basis of the old Avestan code; its interpretation and administration were left to the priests. Ammianus, who fought the Persians, reckoned their judges as “upright men of proved experience and legal learning.”31 In general, Persians were known as men of their word. Oaths in court were surrounded with all the aura of religion; violated oaths were punished severely in law, and in hell by an endless shower of arrows, axes, and stones. Ordeals were used to detect guilt: suspects were invited to walk over red-hot substances, or go through fire, or eat poisoned food. Infanticide and abortion were forbidden with heavy penalties; pederasty was punished with death; the detected adulterer was banished; the adulteress lost her nose and ears. Appeal could be made to higher courts, and sentences of death could be carried out only after review and approval by the king.

The king attributed his power to the gods, presented himself as their vicegerent, and emulated their superiority to their own decrees. He called himself, when time permitted, “King of Kings, King of the Aryans and the non-Aryans, Sovereign of the Universe, Descendant of the Gods”;32 Shapur II added “Brother of the Sun and Moon, Companion of the Stars.” Theoretically absolute, the Sasanian monarch usually acted with the advice of his ministers, who composed a council of state. Masudi, the Moslem historian, praised the “excellent administration of the” Sasanian “kings, their wellordered policy, their care for their subjects, and the prosperity of their domains.”33 Said Khosru Anushirvan, according to Ibn Khaldun: “Without army, no king; without revenues, no army; without taxes, no revenue; without agriculture, no taxes; without just government, no agriculture.”34 In normal times the monarchical office was hereditary, but might be transmitted by the king to a younger son; in two instances the supreme power was held by queens. When no direct heir was available, the nobles and prelates chose a ruler, but their choice was restricted to members of the royal family.

The life of the king was an exhausting round of obligations. He was expected to take fearlessly to the hunt; he moved to it in a brocaded pavilion drawn by ten camels royally dressed; seven camels carried his throne, one hundred bore his minstrels. Ten thousand knights might accompany him; but if we may credit the Sasanian rock reliefs he had at last to mount a horse, face in the first person a stag, ibex, antelope, buffalo, tiger, lion, or some other of the animals gathered in the king’s park or “paradise.” Back in his palace, he confronted the chores of government amid a thousand attendants and in a maze of officious ceremony. He had to dress himself in robes heavy with jewelry, seat himself on a golden throne, and wear a crown so burdensome that it had to be suspended an invisible distance from his immovable head. So he received ambassadors and guests, observed a thousand punctilios of protocol, passed judgment, received appointments and reports. Those who approached him prostrated themselves, kissed the ground, rose only at his bidding, and spoke to him through a handkerchief held to their mouths, lest their breath infect or profane the king. At night he retired to one of his wives or concubines, and eugenically disseminated his superior seed.


II. SASANIAN ROYALTY

Sasan, in Persian tradition, was a priest of Persepolis; his son Papak was a petty prince of Khur; Papak killed Gozihr, ruler of the province of Persis, made himself king of the province, and bequeathed his power to his son Shapur; Shapur died of a timely accident, and was succeeded by his brother Ardashir. Artabanus V, last of the Arsacid or Parthian kings of Persia, refused to recognize this new local dynasty; Ardashir overthrew Artabanus in battle (224), and became King of Kings (226). He replaced the loose feudal rule of the Arsacids with a strong royal power governing through a centralized but spreading bureaucracy; won the support of the priestly caste by restoring the Zoroastrian hierarchy and faith; and roused the pride of the people by announcing that he would destroy Hellenistic influence in Persia, avenge Darius II against the heirs of Alexander, and reconquer all the territory once held by the Achaemenid kings. He almost kept his word. His swift campaigns extended the boundaries of Persia to the Oxus in the northeast, and to the Euphrates in the west. Dying (241), he placed the crown on the head of his son Shapur, and bade him drive the Greeks and Romans into the sea.


FIG. 1—Interior of Santa Maria Maggiore

Rome


FIG. 2—Interior of Hagia Sophia

Constantinople


FIG. 3—Interior of San Vitale

Ravenna


FIG. 4—Detail of Rock Relief

Taq-I-Bustan

Courtesy of Asia Institute


FIG. 5—Court of the Great Mosque

Damascus

Courtesy of Metropolitan Museum of Art


FIG. 6—Dome of the Rock

Jerusalem


FIG. 7—Portion of Stone Relief

Mshatta, Syria


FIG. 8—Court of El Azhar Mosque

Cairo


FIG. 9—Wood Minbar in El Agsa Mosque

Jerusalem


FIG. 10—Pavilion on Court of Lions, the AIhambra

Granada


FIG. 11—Interior of Mosque

Cordova


FIG. 12—Façade of St. Mark’s

Venice


FIG. 13—Piazza of the Duomo, Showing Baptistry, Cathedral, and Learning Tower

Pisa


FIG. 14—Interior of Capella Palatina

Palermo


FIG. 15—Apse of Cathedral

Monreale

Shapur or Sapor I (241–72) inherited all the vigor and craft of his father. The rock reliefs represent him as a man of handsome and noble features; but these reliefs were doubtless stylized compliments. He received a good education, and loved learning; he was so charmed by the conversation of the Sophist Eustathius, the Greek ambassador, that he thought of resigning his throne and becoming a philosopher.35 Unlike his later namesake, he gave full freedom to all religions, allowed Mani to preach at his court, and declared that “Magi, Manicheans, Jews, Christians, and all men of whatever religion should be left undisturbed” in his Empire.36 Continuing Ardashir’s redaction of the Avesta, he persuaded the priests to include in this Persian Bible secular works on metaphysics, astronomy, and medicine, mostly borrowed from India and Greece. He was a liberal patron of the arts. He was not as great a general as Shapur II or the two Khosrus, but he was the ablest administrator in the long Sasanian line. He built a new capital at Shapur, whose ruins still bear his name; and at Shushtar, on the Karun River, he raised one of the major engineering works of antiquity—a dam of granite blocks, forming a bridge 1710 feet long and 20 feet wide; the course of the stream was temporarily changed to allow the construction; its bed was solidly paved; and great sluice gates regulated the flow. Tradition says that Shapur used Roman engineers and prisoners to design and build this dam, which continued to function to our own century.37 Turning reluctantly to war, Shapur invaded Syria, reached Antioch, was defeated by a Roman army, and made a peace (244) that restored to Rome all that he had taken. Resenting Armenia’s co-operation with Rome, he entered that country and established there a dynasty friendly to Persia (252). His right flank so protected, he resumed the war with Rome, defeated and captured the Emperor Valerian (260), sacked Antioch, and took thousands of prisoners to forced labor in Iran. Odenathus, governor of Palmyra, joined forces with Rome, and compelled Shapur again to resign himself to the Euphrates as the Roman-Persian frontier.

His successors, from 272 to 302, were royal mediocrities. History makes short shrift of Hormizd II (302–9), for he maintained prosperity and peace. He went about repairing public buildings and private dwellings, especially those of the poor, all at state expense. He established a new court of justice devoted to hearing the complaints of the poor against the rich, and often presided himself. We do not know if these strange habits precluded his son from inheriting the throne; in any case, when Hormizd died, the nobles imprisoned his son, and gave the throne to his unborn child, whom they confidently hailed as Shapur II; and to make matters clear they crowned the foetus by suspending the royal diadem over the mother’s womb.38

With this good start Shapur II entered upon the longest reign in Asiatic history (309–79). From childhood he was trained for war; he hardened his body and will, and at sixteen took the government and the field. Invading eastern Arabia, he laid waste a score of villages, killed thousands of captives, and led others into bondage by cords attached to their wounds. In 337 he renewed the war with Rome for mastery of the trade routes to the Far East, and continued it, with pacific intervals, almost till his death. The conversion of Rome and Armenia to Christianity gave the old struggle a new intensity, as if the gods in Homeric frenzy had joined the fray. Through forty years Shapur fought a long line of Roman emperors. Julian drove him back to Ctesiphon, but retreated ingloriously; Jovian, outmaneuvered, was forced to a peace (363) that yielded to Shapur the Roman provinces on the Tigris, and all Armenia. When Shapur II died Persia was at the height of its power and prestige, and a hundred thousand acres had been improved with human blood.

In the next century war moved to the eastern frontier. About 425 a Turanian people known to the Greeks as Ephthalites, and mistakenly called “White Huns,” captured the region between the Oxus and the Jaxartes. The Sasanian King Bahram V (420–38), named Gur—“the wild ass”—because of his reckless hunting feats, fought them successfully; but after his death they spread through fertility and war, and built an empire extending from the Caspian to the Indus, with its capital at Gurgan and its chief city at Balkh. They overcame and slew King Firuz (459–84), and forced King Balas (484–8) to pay them tribute.

So threatened in the east, Persia was at the same time thrown into chaos by the struggle of the monarchy to maintain its authority against the nobles and the priests. Kavadh I (488–531) thought to weaken these enemies by encouraging a communist movement which had made them the chief object of its attack. About 490 Mazdak, a Zoroastrian priest, had proclaimed himself God-sent to preach an old creed: that all men are born equal, that no one has any natural right to possess more than another, that property and marriage are human inventions and miserable mistakes, and that all goods and all women should be the common property of all men. His enemies claimed that he condoned theft, adultery, and incest as natural protests against property and marriage, and as legitimate approximations to utopia. The poor and some others heard him gladly, but Mazdak was probably surprised to receive the approval of a king. His followers began to plunder not only the homes but the harems of the rich, and to carry off for their own uses the most illustrious and costly concubines. The outraged nobles imprisoned Kavadh, and set his brother Djamasp upon the throne. After three years in the “Castle of Oblivion” Kavadh escaped, and fled to the Ephthalites. Eager to have a dependent as the ruler of Persia, they provided him with an army, and helped him to take Ctesiphon. Djamasp abdicated, the nobles fled to their estates, and Kavadh was again King of Kings (499). Having made his power secure, he turned upon the communists, and put Mazdak and thousands of his followers to death.39 Perhaps the movement had raised the status of labor, for the decrees of the council of state were henceforth signed not only by princes and prelates, but also by the heads of the major guilds.40 Kavadh ruled for another generation; fought with success against his friends the Ephthalites, inconclusively with Rome; and dying, left the throne to his second son Khosru, the greatest of Sasanian kings.

Khosru I (“Fair Glory,” 531–79) was called Chosroes by the Greeks, Kisra by the Arabs; the Persians added the cognomen Anushirvan (“Immortal Soul”). When his older brothers conspired to depose him, he put all his brothers to death, and all their sons but one. His subjects called him “the Just”; and perhaps he merited the title if we separate justice from mercy. Procopius described him as “a past master at feigning piety” and breaking his word;41 but Procopius was of the enemy. The Persian historian al-Tabari praised Khosru’s “penetration, knowledge, intelligence, courage, and prudence,” and put into his mouth an inaugural speech well invented if not true.42 He completely reorganized the government; chose his aides for ability regardless of rank; and raised his son’s tutor, Buzurgmihr, to be a celebrated vizier. He replaced untrained feudal levies with a standing army disciplined and competent. He established a more equitable system of taxation, and consolidated Persian law. He built dams and canals to improve the water supply of the cities and the irrigation of farms; he reclaimed waste lands by giving their cultivators cattle, implements, and seed; he promoted commerce by the construction, repair, and protection of bridges and roads; he devoted his great energy zealously to the service of his people and the state. He encouraged—compelled—marriage on the ground that Persia needed more population to man its fields and frontiers. He persuaded bachelors to marry by dowering the wives, and educating their children, with state funds.43 He maintained and educated orphans and poor children at the public expense. He punished apostasy with death, but tolerated Christianity, even in his harem. He gathered about him philosophers, physicians, and scholars from India and Greece, and delighted to discuss with them the problems of life, government, and death. One discussion turned on the question, “What is the greatest misery?” A Greek philosopher answered, “An impoverished and imbecile old age”; a Hindu replied, “A harassed mind in a diseased body”; Khosru’s vizier won the dutiful acclaim of all by saying, “For my part I think the extreme misery is for a man to see the end of life approaching without having practiced virtue.”44 Khosru supported literature, science, and scholarship with substantial subsidies, and financed many translations and histories; in his reign the university at Jund-i-Shapur reached its apogee. He so guarded the safety of foreigners that his court was always crowded with distinguished visitors from abroad.

On his accession he proclaimed his desire for peace with Rome. Justinian, having designs on Africa and Italy, agreed; and in 532 the two “brothers” signed “an eternal peace.” When Africa and Italy fell, Khosru humorously asked for a share of the spoils on the ground that Byzantium could not have won had not Persia made peace; Justinian sent him costly gifts.45 In 539 Khosru declared war on “Rome,” alleging that Justinian had violated the terms of their treaty; Procopius confirms the charge; probably Khosru thought it wise to attack while Justinian’s armies were still busy in the West, instead of waiting for a victorious and strengthened Byzantium to turn all its forces against Persia; furthermore, it seemed to Khosru manifest destiny that Persia should have the gold mines of Trebizond and an outlet on the Black Sea. He marched into Syria, besieged Hierapolis, Apamea, and Aleppo, spared them for rich ransoms, and soon stood before Antioch. The reckless population, from the battlements, greeted him not merely with arrows and catapult missiles, but with the obscene sarcasm for which it had earned an international reputation.46 The enraged monarch took the city by storm, looted its treasures, burned down all its buildings except the cathedral, massacred part of the population, and sent the remainder away to people a new “Antioch” in Persia. Then he bathed with delight in that Mediterranean which had once been Persia’s western frontier. Justinian dispatched Belisarius to the rescue, but Khosru leisurely crossed the Euphrates with his spoils, and the cautious general did not pursue him (541). The inconclusiveness of the wars between Persia and Rome was doubtless affected by the difficulty of maintaining an occupation force on the enemy’s side of the Syrian desert or the Taurus range; modern improvements in transport and communication have permitted greater wars. In three further invasions of Roman Asia Khosru made rapid marches and sieges, took ransoms and captives, ravaged the countryside, and peaceably retired (542–3). In 545 Justinian paid him 2000 pounds of gold ($840,000) for a five-year truce, and on its expiration 2600 pounds for a five-year extension. Finally (562), after a generation of war, the aging monarchs pledged themselves to peace for fifty years; Justinian agreed to pay Persia annually 30,000 pieces of gold ($7,500,000), and Khosru renounced his claims to disputed territories in the Caucasus and on the Black Sea.

But Khosru was not through with war. About 570, at the request of the Himyarites of southwest Arabia, he sent an army to free them from their Abyssinian conquerors; when the liberation was accomplished the Himyarites found that they were now a Persian province. Justinian had made an alliance with Abyssinia; his successor Justin II considered the Persian expulsion of the Abyssinians from Arabia an unfriendly act; moreover, the Turks on Persia’s eastern border secretly agreed to join in an attaack upon Khosru; Justin declared war (572). Despite his age, Khosru took the field in person, and captured the Roman frontier town of Dara; but his health failed him, he suffered his first defeat (578), and retired to Ctesiphon, where he died in 579, at an uncertain age. In forty-eight years of rule he had won all his wars and battles except one; had extended his empire on every side; had made Persia stronger than ever since Darius I; and had given it so competent a system of administration that when the Arabs conquered Persia they adopted that system practically without change. Almost contemporary with Justinian, he was rated by the common consent of their contemporaries as the greater king; and the Persians of every later generation counted him the strongest and ablest monarch in their history.

His son Hormizd IV (579–89) was overthrown by a general, Bahram Cobin, who made himself regent for Hormizd’s son Khosru II (589), and a year later made himself king. When Khosru came of age he demanded the throne; Bahram refused; Khosru fled to Hierapolis in Roman Syria; the Greek Emperor Maurice offered to restore him to power if Persia would withdraw from Armenia; Khosru agreed, and Ctesiphon had the rare experience of seeing a Roman army install a Persian king (596).

Khosru Parvez (“Victorious”) rose to greater heights of power than any Persian since Xerxes, and prepared his empire’s fall. When Phocas murdered and replaced Maurice, Parvez declared war on the usurper (603) as an act of vengeance for his friend; in effect the ancient contest was renewed. Byzantium being torn by sedition and faction, the Persian armies took Dara, Amida, Edessa, Hierapolis, Aleppo, Apamea, Damascus (605–13). Inflamed with success, Parvez proclaimed a holy war against the Christians; 26,000 Jews joined his army; in 614 his combined forces sacked Jerusalem, and massacred 90,000 Christians.47 Many Christian churches, including that of the Holy Sepulcher, were burned to the ground; and the True Cross, the most cherished of all Christian relics, was carried off to Persia. To Heraclius, the new Emperor, Parvez sent a theological inquiry: “Khosru, greatest of gods and master of the whole earth, to Heraclius, his vile and insensate slave: You say that you trust in your god. Why, then, has he not delivered Jerusalem out of my hands?”48 In 616 a Persian army captured Alexandria; by 619 all Egypt, as not since Darius II, belonged to the King of Kings. Meanwhile another Persian army overran Asia Minor and captured Chalcedon (617); for ten years the Persians held that city, separated from Constantinople only by the narrow Bosporus. During that decade Parvez demolished churches, transported their art and wealth to Persia, and taxed Western Asia into a destitution that left it resourceless against an Arab conquest now only a generation away.

Khosru turned over the conduct of the war to his generals, retired to his luxurious palace at Dastagird (some sixty miles north of Ctesiphon), and gave himself to art and love. He assembled architects, sculptors, and painters to make his new capital outshine the old, and to carve likenesses of Shirin, the fairest and most loved of his 3000 wives. The Persians complained that she was a Christian; some alleged that she had converted the King; in any case, amid his holy war, he allowed her to build many churches and monasteries. But Persia, prospering with spoils and a replenished slave supply, could forgive its king his self-indulgence, his art, even his toleration. It hailed his victories as the final triumph of Persia over Greece and Rome, of Ormuzd over Christ. Alexander at last was answered, and Marathon, Salamis, Plataea, and Arbela were avenged.

Nothing remained of the Byzantine Empire except a few Asiatic ports, some fragments of Italy, Africa, and Greece, an unbeaten navy, and a besieged capital frenzied with terror and despair. Heraclius took ten years to build a new army and state out of the ruins; then, instead of attempting a costly crossing at Chalcedon, he sailed into the Black Sea, crossed Armenia, and attacked Persia in the rear. As Khosru had desecrated Jerusalem, so now Heraclius destroyed Clorumia, birthplace of Zoroaster, and put out its sacred inextinguishable light (624). Khosru sent army after army against him; they were all defeated; and as the Greeks advanced Khosru fled to Ctesiphon. His generals, smarting under his insults, joined the nobles in deposing him. He was imprisoned, and fed on bread and water; eighteen of his sons were slain before his eyes; finally another son, Sheroye, put him to death (628).


III. SASANIAN ART

Of the wealth and splendor of the Shapurs, the Kavadhs, and the Khosrus nothing survives but the ruins of Sasanian art; enough, however, to heighten our wonder at the persistence and adaptability of Persian art from Darius the Great and Persepolis to Shah Abbas the Great and Isfahan.

Extant Sasanian architecture is entirely secular; the fire temples have disappeared, and only royal palaces remain; and these are “gigantic skeletons,”49 with their ornamental stucco facing long since fallen away. The oldest of these ruins is the so-called palace of Ardashir I at Firuzabad, southeast of Shiraz. No one knows its date; guesses range from 340 B.C to A.D. 460. After fifteen centuries of heat and cold, theft and war, the enormous dome still covers a hall one hundred feet high and fifty-five wide. A portal arch eighty-nine feet high and forty-two wide divided a façade 170 feet long; this façade crumbled in our time. From the rectangular central hall squinch arches led up to a circular dome.* By an unusual and interesting arrangement, the pressure of the dome was borne by a double hollow wall, whose inner and outer frames were spanned by a barrel vault; and to this reinforcement of inner by outer wall were added external buttresses of attached pilasters of heavy stones. Here was an architecture quite different from the classic columnar style of Persepolis—crude and clumsy, but using forms that would come to perfection in the St. Sophia of Justinian.

Not far away, at Sarvistan, stands a similar ruin of like uncertain date: a façade of three arches, a great central hall and side rooms, covered by ovoid domes, barrel vaults, and semicupolas serving as buttresses; from these half domes, by removing all but their sustaining framework, the “flying” or skeletal buttress of Gothic architecture may have evolved.51 Northwest of Susa another ruined palace, the Ivan-i-Kharka, shows the oldest known example of the transverse vault, formed with diagonal ribs.52 But the most impressive of Sasanian relics—which frightened the conquering Arabs by its mass—was the royal palace of Ctesiphon, named by the Arabs Taq-i-Kisra, or Arch of Khosru (I). It may be the building described by a Greek historian of A.D. 638, who tells how Justinian “provided Greek marble for Chosroes, and skilled artisans who built for him a palace in the Roman style, not far from Ctesiphon.”53 The north wing collapsed in 1888; the dome is gone; three immense walls rise to a height of one hundred and five feet, with a façade horizontally divided into five tiers of blind arcades. A lofty central arch—the highest (eighty-five feet) and widest (seventy-two feet) elliptical arch known—opened upon a hall one hundred and fifteen by seventy-five feet; the Sasanian kings relished room. These ruined façades imitate the less elegant of Roman front elevations, like the Theater of Marcellus; they are more impressive than beautiful; but we cannot judge past beauty by present ruins.

The most attractive of Sasanian remains are not the gutted palaces of crumbling sun-baked brick, but rock reliefs carved into Persia’s mountainsides. These gigantic figures are lineal descendants of the Achaemenid cliff reliefs, and are in some cases juxtaposed with them, as if to emphasize the continuity of Persian power, and the equality of Sasanian with Achaemenid kings. The oldest of the Sasanian sculptures shows Ardashir trampling upon a fallen foe—presumably the last of the Arsacids. Finer are those at Naqsh-i-Rustam, near Persepolis, celebrating Ardashir, Shapur I, and Bahram II; the kings are drawn as dominating figures, but, like most kings and men, they find it hard to rival the grace and symmetry of the animals. Similar reliefs at Naqsh-i-Redjeb and at Shapur present powerful stone portraits of Shapur I and Bahram I and II. At Taq-i-Bustan—“Arch of the Garden”—near Kermanshah, two column-supported arches are deeply cut into the cliff; reliefs on the inner and outer faces of the arches show Shapur II and Khosru Parvez at the hunt; the stone comes alive with fat elephants and wild pigs; the foliage is carefully done, and the capitals of the columns are handsomely carved. There is in these sculptures no Greek grace of movement or smoothness of line, no keen individualization, no sense of perspective, and little modeling; but in dignity and majesty, in masculine vitality and power, they bear comparison with most of the arch reliefs of imperial Rome.

Apparently these carvings were colored; so were many features of the palaces; but only traces of such painting remain. The literature, however, makes it clear that the art of painting flourished in Sasanian times; the prophet Mani is reported to have founded a school of painting; Firdausi speaks of Persian magnates adorning their mansions with pictures of Iranian heroes;54 and the poet al-Buhturi (d. 897) describes the murals in the palace at Ctesiphon.55 When a Sasanian king died, the best painter of the time was called upon to make a portrait of him for a collection kept in the royal treasury.56

Painting, sculpture, pottery, and other forms of decoration shared their designs with Sasanian textile art. Silks, embroideries, brocades, damasks, tapestries, chair covers, canopies, tents, and rugs were woven with servile patience and masterly skill, and were dyed in warm tints of yellow, blue, and green. Every Persian but the peasant and the priest aspired to dress above his class; presents often took the form of sumptuous garments; and great colorful carpets had been an appanage of wealth in the East since Assyrian days. The two dozen Sasanian textiles that escaped the teeth of time are the most highly valued fabrics in existence.57 Even in their own day Sasanian textiles were admired and imitated from Egypt to Japan; and during the Crusades these pagan products were favored for clothing the relics of Christian saints. When Heraclius captured the palace of Khosru Parvez at Dastagird, delicate embroideries and an immense rug were among his most precious spoils.58 Famous was the “winter carpet” of Khosru Anushirvan, designed to make him forget winter in its spring and summer scenes: flowers and fruits made of inwoven rubies and diamonds grew, in this carpet, beside walks of silver and brooks of pearls traced on a ground of gold.59 Harun al-Rashid prided himself on a spacious Sasanian rug thickly studded with jewelry.60 Persians wrote love poems about their rugs.61

Of Sasanian pottery little remains except pieces of utilitarian intent. Yet the ceramic art was highly developed in Achaemenid times, and must have had some continuance under the Sasanians to reach such perfection in Mohammedan Iran. Ernest Fenellosa thought that Persia might be the center from which the art of enamel spread even to the Far East;62 and art historians debate whether Sasanian Persia or Syria or Byzantium originated lusterware and cloisonné.*63 Sasanian metalworkers made ewers, jugs, bowls, and cups as if for a giant race; turned them on lathes; incised them with graver or chisel, or hammered out a design in repoussé from the obverse side; and used gay animal forms, ranging from cock to lion, as handles and spouts. The famous glass “Cup of Khosru” in the Bibliothèque Nationale at Paris has medallions of crystal glass inserted into a network of beaten gold; tradition reckons this among the gifts sent by Harun to Charlemagne. The Goths may have learned this art of inlay from Persia, and may have brought it to the West.64

The silversmiths made costly plate, and helped the goldsmiths to adorn lords, ladies, and commoners with jewelry. Several Sasanian silver dishes survive—in the British Museum, the Leningrad Hermitage, the Bibliothéque Nationale, and the Metropolitan Museum of Art; always with kings or nobles at the hunt, and animals more fondly and successfully drawn than men. Sasanian coins sometimes rivaled Rome’s in beauty, as in the issues of Shapur I.65 Even Sasanian books could be works of art; tradition tells how gold and silver trickled from the bindings when Mani’s books were publicly burned.66 Precious materials were also used in Sasanian furniture: Khosru I had a gold table inlaid with costly stones; and Khosru II sent to his savior, the Emperor Maurice, an amber table five feet in diameter, supported on golden feet and encrusted with gems.67

All in all, Sasanian art reveals a laborious recovery after four centuries of Parthian decline. If we may diffidently judge from its remains, it does not equal the Achaemenid in nobility or grandeur, nor the Islamic Persian in inventiveness, delicacy, and taste; but it preserved much of the old virility in its reliefs, and fore-shadowed something of the later exuberance in its decorative themes. It welcomed new ideas and styles, and Khosru I had the good sense to import Greek artists and engineers while defeating Greek generals. Repaying its debt, Sasanian art exported its forms and motives eastward into India, Turkestan, and China, westward into Syria, Asia Minor, Constantinople, the Balkans, Egypt, and Spain. Probably its influence helped to change the emphasis in Greek art from classic representation to Byzantine ornament, and in Latin Christian art from wooden ceilings to brick or stone vaults and domes and buttressed walls. The great portals and cupolas of Sasanian architecture passed down into Moslem mosques and Mogul palaces and shrines. Nothing is lost in history: sooner or later every creative idea finds opportunity and development, and adds its color to the flame of life.


IV. THE ARAB CONQUEST

Having killed and succeeded his father, Sheroye—crowned as Kavadh II—made peace with Heraclius; surrendered Egypt, Palestine, Syria, Asia Minor, and western Mesopotamia; returned to their countries the captives taken by Persia; and restored to Jerusalem the remains of the True Cross. Heraclius reasonably rejoiced over so thorough a triumph; he did not observe that on the very day in 629 when he replaced the True Cross in its shrine a band of Arabs attacked a Greek garrison near the River Jordan. In that same year pestilence broke out in Persia; thousands died of it, including the King. His son Ardashir III, aged seven, was proclaimed ruler; a general, Shahr-Baraz, killed the boy and usurped the throne; his own soldiers killed Shahr-Baraz, and dragged his corpse through the streets of Ctesiphon, shouting, “Whoever, not being of royal blood, seats himself upon the throne of Persia, will share this fate”; the populace is always more royalist than the king. Anarchy now swept through a realm exhausted by twenty-six years of war. Social disintegration climaxed a moral decay that had come with the riches of victory.68 In four years nine rulers contested the throne, and disappeared through assassination, or flight, or an abnormally natural death. Provinces, even cities, declared their independence of a central government no longer able to rule. In 634 the crown was given to Yezdegird III, scion of the house of Sasan, and son of a Negress.69

In 632 Mohammed died after founding a new Arab state. His second successor, the Caliph Omar, received in 634 a letter from Muthanna, his general in Syria, informing him that Persia was in chaos and ripe for conquest.70 Omar assigned the task to his most brilliant commander, Khalid. With an army of Bedouin Arabs inured to conflict and hungry for spoils, Khalid marched along the south shore of the Persian Gulf, and sent a characteristic message to Hormizd, governor of the frontier province: “Accept Islam, and thou art safe; else pay tribute. … A people is already upon thee, loving death even as thou lovest life.”71 Hormizd challenged him to single combat; Khalid accepted, and slew him. Overcoming all resistance, the Moslems reached the Euphrates; Khalid was recalled to save an Arab army elsewhere; Muthanna replaced him, and, with reinforcements, crossed the river on a bridge of boats. Yezdegird, still a youth of twenty-two, gave the supreme command to Rustam, governor of Khurasan, and bade him raise a limitless force to save the state. The Persians met the Arabs in the Battle of the Bridge, defeated them, and pursued them recklessly; Muthanna re-formed his columns, and at the Battle of El-Bowayb destroyed the disordered Persian forces almost to a man (624). Moslem losses were heavy; Muthanna died of his wounds; but the Caliph sent an abler general, Saad, and a new army of 30,000 men. Yezdegird replied by arming 120,000 Persians. Rustam led them across the Euphrates to Kadisiya, and there through four bloody days was fought one of the decisive battles of Asiatic history. On the fourth day a sandstorm blew into the faces of the Persians; the Arabs seized the opportunity, and overwhelmed their blinded enemies. Rustam was killed, and his army dispersed (636). Saad led his unresisted troops to the Tigris, crossed it, and entered Ctesiphon.

The simple and hardy Arabs gazed in wonder at the royal palace, its mighty arch and marble hall, its enormous carpets and jeweled throne. For ten days they labored to carry off their spoils. Perhaps because of these impediments, Omar forbade Saad to advance farther east; “Iraq,” he said, “is enough.”72 Saad complied, and spent the next three years establishing Arab rule throughout Mesopotamia. Meanwhile Yezdegird, in his northern provinces, raised another army, 150,000 strong; Omar sent against him 30,000 men; at Nahavand superior tactics won the “Victory of Victories” for the Arabs; 100,000 Persians, caught in narrow defiles, were massacred (641). Soon all Persia was in Arab hands. Yezdegird fled to Balkh, begged aid of China and was refused, begged aid of the Turks and was given a small force; but as he started out on his new campaign some Turkish soldiers murdered him for his jewelry (652). Sasanian Persia had come to an end.




BOOK II


ISLAMIC CIVILIZATION


569–1258



CHRONOLOGICAL TABLE FOR BOOK II


570–632:

Mohammed


610:

Mohammed’s vision


622:

His Hegira to Medina


630:

Mohammed takes Mecca


632–4:

Abu Bekr caliph


634–44:

Omar caliph


635:

Moslems take Damascus


637:

and Jerusalem & Ctesiphon


641:

Moslems conquer Persia & Egypt


641:

Moslems found Cairo (Fustat)


642:

Mosque of Amr at Cairo


644–56:

Othman caliph


656–60:

Ali caliph


660–80:

Muawiya I caliph


660–750:

Umayyad caliphate at Damascus


662:

Hindu numerals in Syria


680:

Husein slain at Kerbela


680–3:

Yezid I caliph


683–4:

Muawiya II caliph


685–705:

Abd-al-Malik caliph


691–4:

Al-Aqsa Mosque and Dome of the Rock at Jerusalem


693–862:

Moslem rule in Armenia


698:

Moslems take Carthage


705–15:

Walid I caliph


705f:

Great Mosque of Damascus


711:

Moslems enter Spain


715–17:

Suleiman I caliph


717–20:

Omar II caliph


720–4:

Yezid II caliph


724–43:

Hisham caliph


732:

Moslems turned back at Tours


743:

The Mshatta reliefs


743–4:

Walid II caliph


750:

Abu’l-Abbas al-Saffah founds Abbasid caliphate


754–75:

Al-Mansur caliph; Baghdad becomes capital


755–88:

Abd-er-Rahman I emir of Cordova


757–847:

The Mutazilite philosophers


760:

Rise of the Ismaili sect


775–86:

Al-Mahdi caliph


786f:

Blue Mosque of Cordova


786–809:

Harun al-Rashid caliph


780–974:

Idrisid dynasty at Fez


803:

Fall of the Barmakid family


803f:

Al-Kindi, philosopher


808–909:

Aghlabid dynasty at Qairuan


809–10:

Moslems take Corsica and Sardinia


809–77:

Hunain ibn Ishaq, scholar


813–33:

Al-Mamun caliph


820–72:

Tahirid dynasty in Persia


822–52:

Abd-er-Rahman II emir of Cordova


827f:

Saracens conquer Sicily


830:

“House of Wisdom” at Baghdad


830:

Al-Khwarizmi’s Algebra


844–926:

Al-Razi, physician


846:

Saracens attack Rome


870–950:

Al-Farabi, philosopher


872–903:

Saffarid dynasty in Persia


873–935:

Al-Ashari, theologian


878:

Mosque of Ibn Tulun at Cairo


909f:

Fatimid caliphate at Qairuan


912–61:

Abd-er-Rahman caliph at Cordova


915:

fl. al-Tabari, historian


915–65:

Al-Mutannabi, poet


934–1020:

Firdausi, poet


940–98:

Abu’l Wafa, mathematician


945–1058:

Buwayhid ascendancy in Baghdad


951:

d. of al-Masudi, geographer


952–77:

Ashot III and 990–1020: Gagik I: Golden Age of Medieval Armenia


961–76:

Al-Hakam caliph at Cordova


965–1039:

Al-Haitham, physicist


967–1049:

Abu Said, Sufi poet


969–1171:

Fatimid dynasty at Cairo


970:

Mosque of el-Azhar at Cairo


973–1048:

Al-Biruni, scientist


973–1058:

Al-Ma’arri, poet


976–1010:

Al-Hisham caliph at Cordova


978–1002:

Almanzor prime minister at Cordova


980–1037:

Ibn Sina (Avicenna), philosopher


983f:

Brethren of Sincerity


990–1012:

Mosque of al-Hakim at Cairo


998–1030:

Mahmud of Ghazna


1012:

Berber revolution at Cordova


1017–92:

Nizam al-Mulk, vizier


1031:

End of Cordova caliphate


1038:

Seljuq Turks invade Persia


1038–1123:

Omar Khayyam, poet


1040–95:

Al-Mutamid, emir and poet


1058:

Seljuqs take Baghdad


1058–1111:

Al-Ghazali, theologian


1059–63:

Tughril Beg sultan at Baghdad


1060:

Seljuq Turks conquer Armenia


1063–72:

Alp Arslan sultan


1071:

Turks defeat Greeks at Manzikert


1072–92:

Malik Shah sultan


1077–1327:

Sultanate of Roum in Asia Minor


1088f:

Friday Mosque at Isfahan


1090:

“Assassin” sect founded


1090–1147:

Almoravid dynasty in Spain


1091–1162:

Ibn Zohr, physician


1098:

Fatimids take Jerusalem


1100–66:

Al-Idrisi, geographer


1106f:

fl. Ibn Bajja, philosopher


1107–85:

Ibn Tufail, philosopher


1117–51:

Sanjar, Seljuq sultan


1126–98:

Ibn Rushd (Averroës), phil’r


1130–1269:

Almohad dynasty in Morocco


1138–93:

Saladin


1148–1248:

Almohad dynasty in Spain


1162–1227:

Jenghiz Khan


1175–1249:

Ayyubid dynasty


1179–1220:

Yaqut, geographer


1181f:

Alcazar of Seville


1184–1291:

Sa’di, poet


1187:

Saladin defeats Crusaders at Hattin & takes Jerusalem


1188:

fl. Nizami, poet


1196:

Giralda tower at Seville


1201–73:

Jalal-ud-Din Rumi, poet


1211–82:

Ibn Khallikan, biographer


1212:

Christians defeat Moors at Las Navas de Toledo


1218–38:

Al-Kamil sultan at Cairo


1219:

Jenghiz Khan invades Transoxiana


1245:

Mongols take Jerusalem


1248f:

The Alhambra


1250–1517:

Mamluk rule in Egypt


1252:

Moorish rule in Spain confined to Granada


1258:

Mongols sack Baghdad; end of Abbasid caliphate


1260:

Mamluks repel Mongols at Ain-Jalut


1260–77:

Baibars Mamluk sultan



CHAPTER VIII


Mohammed


570–632


I. ARABIA*

IN the year 565 Justinian died, master of a great empire. Five years later Mohammed was born into a poor family in a country three quarters desert, sparsely peopled by nomad tribes whose total wealth could hardly have furnished the sanctuary of St. Sophia. No one in those years would have dreamed that within a century these nomads would conquer half of Byzantine Asia, all Persia and Egypt, most of North Africa, and be on their way to Spain. The explosion of the Arabian peninsula into the conquest and conversion of half the Mediterranean world is the most extraordinary phenomenon in medieval history.

Arabia is the largest of all peninsulas: 1400 miles in its greatest length, 1250 in its greatest width. Geologically it is a continuation of the Sahara, part of the sandy belt that runs up through Persia to the Gobi Desert. Arab means arid. Physically Arabia is a vast plateau, rising precipitously to 12,000 feet within thirty miles of the Red Sea, and sloping through mountainous wastelands eastward to the Persian Gulf. In the center are some grassy oases and palm-studded villages, where water can be reached by shallow wells; around this nucleus the sands stretch in every direction for hundreds of miles. Snow falls there once in forty years; the nights cool down to 38 degrees Fahrenheit; the daily sun burns the face and boils the blood; and the sand-laden air necessitates long robes and head-bands to guard flesh and hair. The skies are almost always clear, the air “like sparkling wine.”1 Along the coasts an occasional torrent of rain brings the possibility of civilization: most of all on the western littoral, in the Hejaz district with the cities of Mecca and Medina; and southwest in the district of Yemen, the home of the ancient kingdoms of Arabia.

A Babylonian inscription of approximately 2400 B.C. records the defeat of a king of Magan by the Babylonian ruler Naram-Sin. Magan was the capital of a Minaean kingdom in southwest Arabia; twenty-five of its later kings are known from Arabian inscriptions that go back to 800 B.C. An inscription tentatively ascribed to 2300 B.C. mentions another Arabian kingdom, Saba, in Yemen; from Saba or its North Arabian colonies, it is now agreed, the Queen of Sheba “went up” to Solomon about 950 B.C. The Sabaean kings made their capital at Marib, fought the usual wars of “defense,” built great irrigation works like the Marib dams (whose ruins are still visible), raised gigantic castles and temples, subsidized religion handsomely, and used it as an instrument of rule.2 Their inscriptions—probably not older than 900 B.C.—are beautifully carved in an alphabetical script. The Sabaeans produced the frankincense and myrrh that played so prominent a role in Asiatic and Egyptian rituals; they controlled the sea trade between India and Egypt, and the south end of the caravan route that led through Mecca and Medina to Petra and Jerusalem. About 115 B.C. another petty kingdom of southwest Arabia, the Himyarite, conquered Saba, and thereafter controlled Arabian trade for several centuries. In 25 B.C. Augustus, irked by Arabian control of Egyptian-Indian commerce, sent an army under Aelius Gallus to capture Marib; the legions were misled by native guides, were decimated by heat and disease, and failed in their mission; but another Roman army captured the Arab port of Adana (Aden), and gave control of the Egypt-India route to Rome. (Britain repeated this procedure in our time.)

In the second century before Christ some Himyarites crossed the Red Sea, colonized Abyssinia, and gave the indigenous Negro population a Semitic culture and considerable Semitic blood.* The Abyssinians received Christianity, crafts, and arts from Egypt and Byzantium; their merchant vessels sailed as far as India and Ceylon; and seven little kingdoms acknowledged the Negus as their sovereign.† Meanwhile in Arabia many Himyarites followed the lead of their king Dhu-Nuwas and accepted Judaism. With a convert’s zeal, Dhu-Nuwas persecuted the Christians of southwest Arabia; they called to their coreligionists to rescue them; the Abyssinians came, conquered the Himyarite kings (A.D. 522), and replaced them with an Abyssinian dynasty. Justinian allied himself with this new state; Persia countered by taking up the cause of the deposed Himyarites, driving out the Abyssinians, and setting up in Yemen (575) a Persian rule that ended some sixty years later with the Moslem conquest of Persia.

In the north some minor Arab kingdoms flourished briefly. The sheiks of the Ghassanid tribe ruled northwestern Arabia and Palmyrene Syria from the third to the seventh century as phylarchs, or client kings, of Byzantium. During the same period the Lakhmid kings established at Hira, near Babylon, a semi-Persian court and culture famous for its music and poetry. Long before Mohammed the Arabs had expanded into Syria and Iraq.

Aside from these petty kingdoms of south and north, and to a large extent within them, the political organization of pre-Islamic Arabia was a primitive kinship structure of families united in clans and tribes. Tribes were named from a supposed common ancestor; so the banu-Ghassan thought themselves the “children of Ghassan.” Arabia as a political unit, before Mohammed, existed only in the careless nomenclature of the Greeks, who called all the population of the peninsula Sarakenoi, Saracens, apparently from the Arabic sharqiyun, “Easterners.” Difficulties of communication compelled local or tribal self-sufficiency and particularism. The Arab felt no duty or loyalty to any group larger than his tribe, but the intensity of his devotion varied inversely as its extent; for his tribe he would do with a clear conscience what civilized people do only for their country, religion, or “race”—i.e., lie, steal, kill, and die. Each tribe or clan was loosely ruled by a sheik chosen by its leaders from a family traditionally prominent through wealth or wisdom or war.

In the villages men coaxed some grains and vegetables from the unwilling soil, raised a few cattle, and bred some fine horses; but they found it more profitable to cultivate orchards of dates, peaches, apricots, pomegranates, lemons, oranges, bananas, and figs; some nursed aromatic plants like frankincense, thyme, jasmine, and lavender; some pressed itr or attar from highland roses; some cupped trees to draw myrrh or balsam from the trunks. Possibly a twelfth of the population lived in cities on or near the west coast. Here was a succession of harbors and markets for Red Sea commerce, while farther inland lay the great caravan routes to Syria. We hear of Arabian trade with Egypt as far back as 2743 B.C.;3 probably as ancient was the trade with India. Annual fairs called merchants now to one town, now to another; the great annual fair at Ukaz, near Mecca, brought together hundreds of merchants, actors, preachers, gamblers, poets, and prostitutes.

Five sixths of the population were nomad Bedouins, herdsmen who moved with their flocks from one pastureland to another according to season and the winter rains. The Bedouin loved horses, but in the desert the camel was his greatest friend. It pitched and rolled with undulant dignity, and made only eight miles an hour; but it could go without water five days in summer and twenty-five in winter; its udders gave milk, its urine provided hair tonic,* its dung could be burned for fuel; when it died it made tender meat, and its hair and hide made clothing and tents. With such varied sustenance the Bedouin could face the desert, as patient and enduring as his camel, as sensitive and spirited as his horse. Short and thin, well-knit and strong, he could live day after day on a few dates and a little milk; and from dates he made the wine that raised him out of the dust into romance. He varied the routine of his life with love and feud, and was as quick as a Spaniard (who inherited his blood) to avenge insult and injury, not only for himself but for his clan. A good part of his life was spent in tribal war; and when he conquered Syria, Persia, Egypt, and Spain, it was but an exuberant expansion of his plundering razzias or raids. Certain periods in the year he conceded to the “holy truce,” for religious pilgrimage or for trade; otherwise, he felt, the desert was his; whoever crossed it, except in that time, or without paying him tribute, was an interloper; to rob such trespassers was an unusually straightforward form of taxation. He despised the city because it meant law and trade; he loved the merciless desert because it left him free. Kindly and murderous, generous and avaricious, dishonest and faithful, cautious and brave, the Bedouin, however poor, fronted the world with dignity and pride, vain of the purity of his inbred blood, and fond of adding his lineage to his name.

On one point above all he brooked no argument, and that was the incomparable beauty of his women. It was a dark, fierce, consuming beauty, worth a million odes, but brief with the tragic hasty fading of hot climes. Before Mohammed—and after him only slightly less so—the career of the Arab woman passed from a moment’s idolatry to a lifetime of drudgery. She might be buried at birth if the father so willed;5 at best he mourned her coming and hid his face from his fellows; somehow his best efforts had failed. Her winsome childhood earned a few years of love; but at seven or eight she was married off to any youth of the clan whose father would offer the purchase price for the bride. Her lover and husband would fight the world to defend her person or honor; some of the seeds and fustian of chivalry went with these passionate lovers to Spain. But the goddess was also a chattel; she formed part of the estate of her father, her husband, or her son, and was bequeathed with it; she was always the servant, rarely the comrade, of the man. He demanded many children of her, or rather many sons; her duty was to produce warriors. She was, in many cases, but one of his many wives. He could dismiss her at any time at will.

Nevertheless her mysterious charms rivaled battle as a theme and stimulus for his verse. The pre-Moslem Arab was usually illiterate, but he loved poetry only next to horses, women, and wine. He had no scientists or historians, but he had a heady passion for eloquence, for fine and correct speech, and intricately patterned verse. His language was closely kin to the Hebrew; complex in inflexions, rich in vocabulary, precise in differentiations, expressing now every nuance of poetry, later every subtlety of philosophy. The Arabs took pride in the antiquity and fullness of their language, loved to roll its mellifluous syllables in oratorical flourishes on tongue or pen, and listened with tense ecstasy to the poets who, in villages and cities, in desert camps or at the fairs, recalled to them, in running meters and endless rhymes, the loves and wars of their heroes, tribes, or kings. The poet was to the Arabs their historian, genealogist, satirist, moralist, newspaper, oracle, call to battle; and when a poet won a prize at one of the many poetry contests, his whole tribe felt honored, and rejoiced. Every year, at the Ukaz fair, the greatest of these contests was held; almost daily for a month the clans competed through their poets; there were no judges but the eagerly or scornfully listening multitudes; the winning poems were written down in brilliantly illuminated characters, were therefore called the Golden Songs, and were preserved like heirlooms in the treasuries of princes and kings. The Arabs called them also Muallaqat, or Suspended, because legend said that the prize poems, inscribed upon Egyptian silk in letters of gold, were hung on the walls of the Kaaba in Mecca.

Seven such Muallaqat, dating from the sixth century, survive from those pre-Islamic days. Their form is the qasida, a narrative ode, in elaborately complex meter and rhyme, usually of love or war. In one of them, by the poet Labid, a soldier returns from his campaigns to the village and home where he had left his wife; he finds his cottage empty, his wife gone off with another man; Labid describes the scene with Goldsmith’s tenderness, and with greater eloquence and force.6 In another the Arab women prod their men to battle:

Courage! courage! defenders of women! Smite with the edge of your swords! … We are the daughters of the morning star; soft are the carpets we tread beneath our feet; our necks are adorned with pearls; our tresses are perfumed with musk. The brave who confront the foe we will clasp to our bosoms, but the dastards who flee we will spurn; not for them our embraces!7

Unabashedly sensual is an ode by Imru’lqais:

Fair too was that other, she the veil-hidden one, howdahed how close, how guarded! Yet did she welcome me.

Passed I twixt her tent-ropes—what though her near-of-kin lay in the dark to slay me, blood-shedders all of them.

Came I at the mid-night, hour when the Pleiades showed as the links of seed-pearls binding the sky’s girdle.

Stealing in, I stood there. She had cast off from her every robe but one robe, all but her night-garment.

Tenderly she scolded: What is this stratagem? Speak, on thine oath, thou mad one. Stark is thy lunacy.

Passed we out together, while she drew after us on our twin track, to hide it, wise, her embroideries,

Fled beyond the camp-fires. There in security dark in the sand we lay down far from the prying eyes.

By her plaits I wooed her, drew her face near to me, won to her waist how frail-lined, hers of the ankle-rings.

Fair-faced she—no redness—noble of countenance, smooth as of glass her bosom, bare with its necklaces.

Thus are pearls yet virgin, seen through the dark water, clear in the sea-depths gleaming, pure, inaccessible.

Coyly she withdraws her, shows us a cheek, a lip, she a gazelle of Wujra; ….

Roe-like her throat slender, white as an ariel’s, sleek to thy lips uplifted—pearls are its ornament.

On her shoulders fallen thick lie the locks of her, dark as the date-clusters hung from the palm-branches….

Slim her waist—a well-cord scarce has its slenderness. Smooth are her legs as reed-stems stripped at a water-head.

The morn through she sleepeth, muck-stream in indolence, hardly at noon hath risen, girded her day dresses.

Soft her touch—her fingers fluted as water-worms, sleek as the snakes of Thobya, tooth-sticks of Ishali.

Lighteneth she night’s darkness, ay, as an evening lamp hung for a sign of guidance lone on a hermitage.8

The pre-Islamic poets sang their compositions to musical accompaniment; music and poetry were bound into one form. The flute, the lute, the reed pipe or oboe, and the tambourine were the favored instruments. Singing girls were often invited to amuse male banqueteers; taverns were equipped with them; the Ghassanid kings kept a troupe of them to ease the cares of royalty; and when the Meccans marched against Mohammed in 624 they took with them a bevy of singing girls to warm their campfires and prod them on to war. Even in those early “Days of Ignorance,” as Moslems would call the pre-Moslem period, the Arab song was a plaintive cantilena that used few words, and carried a note so tenaciously along the upper reaches of the scale that a few verses might provide libretto for an hour.

The desert Arab had his own primitive and yet subtle religion. He feared and worshiped incalculable deities in stars and moon and the depths of the earth; occasionally he importuned the mercy of a punitive sky; but for the most part he was so confused by the swarm of spirits (jinn) about him that he despaired of appeasing them, accepted a fatalistic resignation, prayed with masculine brevity, and shrugged his shoulders over the infinite.9 He seems to have given scant thought to a life after death; sometimes, however, he had his camel tied foodless to his grave, so that it might soon follow him to the other world, and save him from the social disgrace of going on foot in paradise.10 Now and then he offered human sacrifice; and here and there he worshiped sacred stones.

The center of this stone worship was Mecca. This holy city owed none of its growth to climate, for the mountains of bare rock that almost enclosed it ensured a summer of intolerable heat; the valley was an arid waste; and in all the town, as Mohammed knew it, hardly a garden grew. But its location—halfway down the west coast, forty-eight miles from the Red Sea—made it a convenient stopping point for the mile-long caravans, sometimes of a thousand camels, that carried trade between southern Arabia (and therefore India and Central Africa) and Egypt, Palestine, and Syria. The merchants who controlled this trade formed joint-stock companies, dominated the fairs at Ukaz, and managed the lucrative religious ritual that centered round the Kaaba and its sacred Black Stone.

Kaaba means a square structure, and is one with our word cube. In the belief of orthodox Moslems, the Kaaba was built or rebuilt ten times. The first was erected at the dawn of history by angels from heaven; the second by Adam; the third by his son Seth; the fourth by Abraham and his son Ishmael by Hagar … the seventh by Qusay, chief of the Quraish tribe; the eighth by the Quraish leaders in Mohammed’s lifetime (605); the ninth and tenth by Moslem leaders in 681 and 696; the tenth is substantially the Kaaba of today. It stands near the center of a large porticoed enclosure, the Masjid al-Haram, or Sacred Mosque. It is a rectangular stone edifice forty feet long, thirty-five wide, fifty high. In its southeast corner, five feet from the ground, just right for kissing, is embedded the Black Stone, of dark red material, oval in shape, some seven inches in diameter. Many of its worshipers believe that this stone was sent down from heaven—and perhaps it was a meteorite; most of them believe that it has been a part of the Kaaba since Abraham. Moslem scholars interpret it as symbolizing that part of Abraham’s progeny (Ishmael and his offspring) which, rejected by Israel, became, they think, the founders of the Quraish tribe; they apply to it a passage from Psalm cxviii, 22-3: “The stone which the builders rejected is become the head of the corner; this is Yahveh’s doing”; and another from Matthew xxi, 42-3, in which Jesus, having quoted these strange words, adds: “Therefore the Kingdom of God shall be taken away from you, and shall be given to a nation bringing forth the fruits thereof”—though the virile Moslems would hardly claim to have fulfilled the ethics of Christ.

Within the Kaaba, in pre-Moslem days, were several idols representing gods. One was called Allah, and was probably the tribal god of the Quraish; three others were Allah’s daughters—al-Uzza, al-Lat, and Manah. We may judge the antiquity of this Arab pantheon from the mention of Al-il-Lat (al-Lat) by Herodotus as a major Arabian deity.11 The Quraish paved the way for monotheism by worshiping Allah as chief god; He was presented to the Meccans as the Lord of their soil, to Whom they must pay a tithe of their crops and the first-born of their herds. The Quraish, as alleged descendants of Abraham and Ishmael, appointed the priests and guardians of the shrine, and managed its revenues. An aristocratic minority of the tribe, as descendants of Qusay, controlled the civil government of Mecca.

At the beginning of the sixth century the Quraish were divided into two factions: one led by the rich merchant and philanthropist Hashim; the other by Hashim’s jealous nephew Umayya; this bitter rivalry would determine much history. When Hashim died he was succeeded as one of Mecca’s chiefs by his son or younger brother Abd al-Muttalib. In 568 the latter’s son Abdallah married Amina, also a descendant of Qusay. Abdallah remained with his bride three days, set out on a mercantile expedition, and died at Medina on the way back. Two months later (569) Amina was delivered of the most important figure in medieval history.


II. MOHAMMED IN MECCA: 569–622*

His ancestry was distinguished, his patrimony modest: Abdallah had left him five camels, a flock of goats, a house, and a slave who nursed him in his infancy. His name, meaning “highly praised,” lent itself well to certain Biblical passages as predicting his advent. His mother died when he was six; he was taken over by his grandfather, then seventy-six, and later by his uncle Abu Talib. They gave him affection and care, but no one seems to have bothered to teach him how to read or write;12 this feeble accomplishment was held in low repute by the Arabs of the time; only seventeen men of the Quraish tribe condescended to it.13 Mohammed was never known to write anything himself; he used an amanuensis. His apparent illiteracy did not prevent him from composing the most famous and eloquent book in the Arabic tongue, and from acquiring such understanding of the management of men as seldom comes to highly educated persons.

Of his youth we know almost nothing, though fables about it have filled ten thousand volumes. At the age of twelve, says a tradition, he was taken by Abu Talib on a caravan to Bostra in Syria; perhaps on that journey he picked up some Jewish and Christian lore. Another tradition pictures him, a few years later, as going to Bostra on mercantile business for the rich widow Khadija. Then suddenly we find him, aged twenty-five, marrying her, aged forty and the mother of several children. Until her death twenty-six years later Mohammed lived with Khadija in a monogamous condition highly unusual for a Moslem of means, but perhaps natural in their recipient. She bore him some daughters, of whom the most famous was Fatima, and two sons who died in infancy. He consoled his grief by adopting Ali, the orphan son of Abu Talib. Khadija was a good woman, a good wife, a good merchant; she remained loyal to Mohammed through all his spiritual vicissitudes; and amid all his wives he remembered her as the best.

Ali, who married Fatima, fondly describes his adoptive father at forty-five as

of middle stature, neither tall nor short. His complexion was rosy white; his eyes black; his hair, thick, brilliant, and beautiful, fell to his shoulders. His profuse beard fell to his breast…. There was such sweetness in his visage that no one, once in his presence, could leave him. If I hungered, a single look at the Prophet’s face dispelled the hunger. Before him all forgot their griefs and pains.14

He was a man of dignity, and seldom laughed; he kept his keen sense of humor under control, knowing its hazards for public men. Of a delicate constitution, he was nervous, impressionable, given to melancholy pensiveness. In moments of excitement or anger his facial veins would swell alarmingly; but he knew when to abate his passion, and could readily forgive a disarmed and repentant foe.

There were many Christians in Arabia, some in Mecca; with at least one of these Mohammed became intimate—Khadija’s cousin Waraqah ibn Nawfal, “who knew the Scriptures of the Hebrews and the Christians.”15 Mohammed frequently visited Medina, where his father had died; there he may have met some of the Jews who formed a large part of the population. Many a page of the Koran proves that he learned to admire the morals of the Christians, the monotheism of the Jews, and the strong support given to Christianity and Judaism by the possession of Scriptures believed to be a revelation from God. Compared with these faiths the polytheistic idolatry, loose morality, tribal warfare, and political disunity of Arabia may have seemed to him shamefully primitive. He felt the need of a new religion—perhaps of one that would unify all these factious groups into a virile and healthy nation; a religion that would give them a morality not earth-bound to the Bedouin law of violence and revenge, but based upon commandments of divine origin and therefore of indisputable force. Others may have had similar thoughts; we hear of several “prophets” arising in Arabia about the beginning of the seventh century.16 Many Arabs had been influenced by the Messianic expectations of the Jews; they, too, eagerly awaited a messenger from God. One Arab sect, the Hanifs, already rejected the heathen idolatry of the Kaaba, and preached a universal God, of whom all mankind should be willing slaves.17 Like every successful preacher, Mohammed gave voice and form to the need and longing of his time.

As he approached forty he became more and more absorbed in religion. During the holy month of Ramadan he would withdraw, sometimes with his family, to a cave at the foot of Mt. Hira, three miles from Mecca, and spend many days and nights in fasting, meditation, and prayer. One night in the year 610, as he was alone in the cave, the pivotal experience of all Mohammedan history came to him. According to a tradition reported by his chief biographer, Muhammad ibn Ishaq, Mohammed related the event as follows:

Whilst I was asleep, with a coverlet of silk brocade whereon was some writing, the angel Gabriel appeared to me and said, “Read!” I said, “I do not read.” He pressed me with the coverlets so tightly that methought ’twas death. Then he let me go, and said, “Read!” … So I read aloud, and he departed from me at last. And I awoke from my sleep, and it was as though these words were written on my heart. I went forth until, when I was midway on the mountain, I heard a voice from heaven saying, “O Mohammed! thou art the messenger of Allah, and I am Gabriel.” I raised my head toward heaven to see, and lo, Gabriel in the form of a man, with feet set evenly on the rim of the sky, saying, “O Mohammed! thou art the messenger of Allah, and I am Gabriel.”18

Returning to Khadija, he informed her of the visions. We are told that she accepted them as a true revelation from heaven, and encouraged him to announce his mission.

Thereafter he had many similar visions. Often, when they came, he fell to the ground in a convulsion or swoon; perspiration covered his brow; even the camel on which he was sitting felt the excitement, and moved fitfully.19 Mohammed later attributed his gray hairs to these experiences. When pressed to describe the process of revelation, he answered that the entire text of the Koran existed in heaven,20 and that one fragment at a time was communicated to him, usually by Gabriel.21 Asked how he could remember these divine discourses, he explained that the archangel made him repeat every word.22 Others who were near the Prophet at the time neither saw nor heard the angel.23 Possibly his convulsions were epileptic seizures; they were sometimes accompanied by a sound reported by him as like the ringing of a bell24—a frequent occurrence in epileptic fits. But we hear of no tongue-biting, no loss of prehensile strength, such as usually occurs in epilepsy; nor does Mohammed’s history show that degeneration of brain power which epilepsy generally brings; on the contrary, he advanced in clarity of thought and in confident leadership and power until his sixtieth year.25 The evidence is inconclusive; at least it has not sufficed to convince any orthodox Mohammedan.

During the next four years Mohammed more and more openly announced himself as the prophet of Allah, divinely commissioned to lead the Arab people to a new morality and a monotheistic faith. Difficulties were many. New ideas are welcomed only if promising early material advantage; and Mohammed lived in a mercantile, skeptical community, which derived some of its revenues from pilgrims coming to worship the Kaaba’s many gods. Against this handicap he made some progress by offering to believers an escape from a threatened hell into a joyous and tangible paradise. He opened his house to all who would hear him—rich and poor and slaves, Arabs and Christians and Jews; and his impassioned eloquence moved a few to belief. His first convert was his aging wife; the second his cousin Ali; the third his servant Zaid, whom he had bought as a slave and had immediately freed; the fourth was his kinsman Abu Bekr, a man of high standing among the Quraish. Abu Bekr brought to the new faith five other Meccan leaders; he and these became the Prophet’s six “Companions,” whose memories of him would later constitute the most revered traditions of Islam. Mohammed went often to the Kaaba, accosted pilgrims, and preached the one god. The Quraish heard him at first with smiling patience, called him a half-wit, and proposed to send him, at their own expense, to a physician who might cure him of his madness.26 But when he attacked the Kaaba worship as idolatry they rose to the protection of their income, and would have done him injury had not his uncle Abu Talib shielded him. Abu Talib would have none of the new faith, but his very fidelity to old ways required him to defend any member of his clan.

Fear of a blood feud deterred the Quraish from using violence upon Mohammed or his freemen followers. Upon converted slaves, however, they might employ dissuasive measures without offending tribal law. Several of these were jailed; some were exposed for hours, without head covering or drink, to the glare of the sun. Abu Bekr had by years of commerce saved 40,000 pieces of silver; now he used 35,000 to buy the freedom of as many converted slaves as he could; and Mohammed eased the situation by ruling that recantation under duress was forgivable. The Quraish were more disturbed by Mohammed’s welcome to slaves than by his religious creed.27 Persecution of the poorer converts continued, and with such severity that the Prophet permitted or advised their emigration to Abyssinia. The refugees were well received there by the Christian king (615).

A year later an event occurred which was almost as significant for Mohammedanism as the conversion of Paul had been for Christianity. Omar ibn al-Khattab, hitherto a most violent opponent, was won over to the new creed. He was a man of great physical strength, social power, and moral courage. His allegiance brought timely confidence to the harassed believers, and new adherents to the cause. Instead of hiding their worship in private homes they now preached it boldly in the streets. The defenders of the Kaaba gods formed a league pledged to renounce all intercourse with members of the Hashimite clan who still felt obligated to shield Mohammed. To avert conflict, many Hashimites, including Mohammed and his family, withdrew to a secluded quarter of Mecca, where Abu Talib could provide protection (615). For over two years this separation of the clans continued, until some members of the Quraish, relenting, invited the Hashimites to return to their deserted homes, and pledged them peace.

The little group of converts rejoiced, but the year 619 brought triple misfortune to Mohammed. Khadija, his most loyal supporter, and Abu Talib, his protector, died. Feeling insecure in Mecca, and discouraged by the slow increase of his followers there, Mohammed moved to Taif (620), a pleasant town sixty miles east. But Taif rejected him. Its leaders did not care to offend the merchant aristocracy of Mecca; its populace, horrified by any religious innovation, hooted him through the streets, and pelted him with stones until blood flowed from his legs. Back in Mecca, he married the widow Sauda, and betrothed himself, aged fifty, to Aisha, the pretty and petulant seven-year-old daughter of Abu Bekr.

Meanwhile his visions continued. One night, it seemed to him, he was miraculously transported in his sleep to Jerusalem; there a winged horse, Buraq, awaited him at the Wailing Wall of the Jewish Temple ruins, flew him to heaven, and back again; and by another miracle the Prophet found himself, the next morning, safe in his Mecca bed. The legend of this flight made Jerusalem a third holy city for Islam.

In the year 620 Mohammed preached to merchants who had come from Medina on pilgrimage to the Kaaba; they heard him with some acceptance, for the doctrine of monotheism, a divine messenger, and the Last Judgment were familiar to them from the creed of the Medina Jews. Returning to their city, some of them expounded the new gospel to their friends; several Jews, seeing little difference between Mohammed’s teaching and their own, gave it a tentative welcome; and in 622 some seventy-three citizens of Medina came privately to Mohammed and invited him to make Medina his home. He asked would they protect him as faithfully as their own families; they vowed they would, but asked what reward they would receive should they be killed in the process. He answered, paradise.28

About this time Abu Sufyan, grandson of Umayya, became the head of the Meccan Quraish. Having been brought up in an odor of hatred for all descendants of Hashim, he renewed the persecution of Mohammed’s followers. Possibly he had heard that the Prophet was meditating flight, and feared that Mohammed, once established in Medina, might stir it to war against Mecca and the Kaaba cult. At his urging, the Quraish commissioned some of their number to apprehend Mohammed, perhaps to kill him. Apprised of the plot, Mohammed fled with Abu Bekr to the cave of Thaur, a league distant. The Quraish emissaries sought them for three days, but failed to find them. The children of Abu Bekr brought camels, and the two men rode northward through the night, and through many days for 200 miles, until, on September 24, 622, they arrived at Medina. Two hundred Meccan adherents had preceded them in the guise of departing pilgrims, and stood at the city’s gates, with the Medina converts, to welcome the Prophet. Seventeen years later the Caliph Omar designated the first day—July 16, 622—of the Arabian year in which this Hegira (hijra—flight) took place as the official beginning of the Mohammedan era.


III. MOHAMMED IN MEDINA: 622–30

The city hitherto called Yathrib, later renamed Medinat al-Nabi or “City of the Prophet,” was situated on the western edge of the central Arabian plateau. Compared with Mecca it was a climatic Eden, with hundreds of gardens, palm groves, and farms. As Mohammed rode into the town one group after another called to him, “Alight here, O Prophet! … Abide with us!”—and with Arab persistence some caught the halter of his camel to detain him. His answer was perfect diplomacy: “The choice lies with the camel; let him advance freely”;29 the advice quieted jealousy, and hallowed his new residence as chosen by God. Where his camel stopped, Mohammed built a mosque and two adjoining homes—one for Sauda, one for Aisha; later he added new apartments as he took new wives.

In leaving Mecca he had snapped many kinship ties; now he tried to replace bonds of blood with those of religious brotherhood in a theocratic state. To mitigate the jealousy already rampant between the Refugees (Muhajirin) from Mecca and the Helpers (Ansar) or converts in Medina, he coupled each member of the one group with a member of the other in adoptive brotherhood, and called both groups to worship in sacred union in the mosque. In the first ceremony held there he mounted the pulpit and cried in a loud voice, “Allah is most great!” The assembly burst forth in the same proclamation. Then, still standing with his back to the congregation, he bowed in prayer. He descended the pulpit backward, and at its foot he prostrated himself thrice, while continuing to pray. In these prostrations were symbolized that submission of the soul to Allah which gave to the new faith its name Islam—“to surrender,” “to make peace”—and to its adherents the kindred name of Muslimin or Moslems—“the surrendering ones,” “those who have made their peace with God.” Turning then to the assembly, Mohammed bade it observe this ritual to the end of time; and to this day it is the form of prayer that Moslems follow, whether at the mosque, or traveling in the desert, or mosqueless in alien lands. A sermon completed the ceremony, often announcing, in Mohammed’s case, a new revelation, and directing the actions and policies of the week.

For the authority of the Prophet was creating a civic rule for Medina; and more and more he was compelled to address his time and inspirations to the practical problems of social organization, daily morals, even to intertribal diplomacy and war. As in Judaism, no distinction was made between secular and religious affairs; all alike came under religious jurisdiction; he was both Caesar and Christ. But not all Medinites accepted his authority. A majority of the Arabs stood aside as “the Disaffected,” viewed the new creed and its ritual skeptically, and wondered whether Mohammed was destroying their traditions and liberties, and involving them in war. Most of the Medina Jews clung to their own faith, and continued to trade with the Meccan Quraish. Mohammed drew up with these Jews a subtle concordat:

The Jews who attach themselves to our commonwealth shall be protected from all insults and vexations; they shall have an equal right with our own people to our assistance and good offices; they … shall form with the Moslems one composite nation; they shall practice their religion as freely as the Moslems…. They shall join the Moslems in defending Yathrib against all enemies…. All future disputes between those who accept this charter shall be referred, under God, to the Prophet.30

This agreement was soon accepted by all the Jewish tribes of Medina and the surrounding country: the Banu-Nadhir, the Banu-Kuraiza, the Banu-Kainuka….

The immigration of two hundred Meccan families created a food shortage in Medina. Mohammed solved the problem as starving people do—by taking food where it could be had. In commissioning his lieutenants to raid the caravans that passed Medina, he was adopting the morals of most Arab tribes in his time. When the raids succeeded, four fifths of the spoils went to the raiders, one fifth to the Prophet for religious and charitable uses; the share of a slain raider went to his widow, and he himself at once entered paradise. So encouraged, raids and raiders multiplied, while the merchants of Mecca, whose economic life depended on the security of the caravans, plotted revenge. One raid scandalized Medina as well as Mecca, for it took place—and killed a man—on the last day of Rajab, one of the sacred months when Arab morality laid a moratorium on violence. In 623 Mohammed himself organized a band of 300 armed men to waylay a rich caravan coming from Syria to Mecca. Abu Sufyan, who commanded the caravan, got wind of the plan, changed his route, and sent to Mecca for help. The Quraish came 900 strong. The miniature armies met at the Wadi* Bedr, twenty miles south of Medina. If Mohammed had been defeated his career might have ended there and then. He personally led his men to victory, ascribed it to Allah as a miracle confirming his leadership, and returned to Medina with rich booty and many prisoners (January, 624). Some of these, who had been especially active in the persecution at Mecca, were put to death; the rest were freed for lucrative ransoms.31 But Abu Sufyan survived, and promised revenge. “Weep not for your slain,” he told mourning relatives in Mecca, “and let no bard bewail their fate…. Haply the turn may come, and ye may obtain vengeance. As for me, I will touch no oil, neither approach my wife, until I shall have gone forth again to fight Mohammed.”32

Strengthened by victory, Mohammed used the customary morality of war. Asma, a Medinese poetess, having attacked him in her rhymes, Omeir, a blind Moslem, made his way into her room, and plunged his sword so fervently into the sleeping woman’s breast that it affixed her to the couch. In the mosque the next morning Mohammed asked Omeir, “Hast thou slain Asma?” “Yes,” answered Omeir, “is there cause for apprehension?” “None,” said the Prophet; “a couple of goats will hardly knock their heads together for it.”33 Afak, a centenarian convert to Judaism, composed a satire on the Prophet, and was slain as he slept in his courtyard.34 A third Medinese poet, Kab ibn al-Ashraf, son of a Jewess, abandoned Islam when Mohammed turned against the Jews; he wrote verses prodding the Quraish to avenge their defeat, and enraged the Moslems by addressing love sonnets to their wives in premature troubadour style. “Who will ease me of this man?” asked Mohammed. That evening the poet’s severed head was laid at the Prophet’s feet.35 In the Moslem view these executions were a legitimate defense against treason; Mohammed was the head of a state, and had full authority to condemn.36

The Jews of Medina no longer liked this warlike faith, which had once seemed so flatteringly kindred to their own. They laughed at Mohammed’s interpretations of their Scriptures, and his claim to be the Messiah promised by their prophets. He retaliated with revelations in which Allah charged the Jews with corrupting the Scriptures, killing the prophets, and rejecting the Messiah. Originally he had made Jerusalem the qibla—the point toward which Moslems should turn in prayer; in 624 he changed this to Mecca and the Kaaba. The Jews accused him of returning to idolatry. About this time a Moslem girl visited the market of the Banu-Kainuka Jews in Medina; as she sat in a goldsmith’s shop a mischievous Jew pinned her skirt behind her to her upper dress. When she arose she cried out in shame at her exposure. A Moslem slew the offending Jew, whose brothers then slew the Moslem. Mohammed marshaled his followers, blockaded the Banu-Kainuka Jews in their quarter for fifteen days, accepted their surrender, and bade them, 700 in number, depart from Medina, and leave all their possessions behind.

We must admire the restraint of Abu Sufyan, who, after his unnatural vow, waited a year before going forth to battle Mohammed again. Early in 625 he led an army of 3000 men to the hill of Ohod, three miles north of Medina. Fifteen women, including Abu Sufyan’s wives, accompanied the army, and stirred it to fervor with wild songs of sorrow and revenge. Mohammed could muster only a thousand warriors. The Moslems were routed; Mohammed fought bravely, received many wounds, and was carried half unconscious from the field. Abu Sufyan’s chief wife Hind, whose father, uncle, and brother had been slain at Bedr, chewed the liver of the fallen Hamza—who had slain her father—and made anklets and bracelets for herself from Hamza’s skin and nails.37 Thinking Mohammed safely dead, Abu Sufyan returned in triumph to Mecca. Six months later the Prophet was sufficiently recovered to attack the Banu-Nadhir Jews, charging them with helping the Quraish and plotting against his life. After three weeks’ siege they were allowed to emigrate, each family taking with it as much as a camel could carry. Mohammed appropriated some of their rich date orchards for the support of his household, and distributed the remainder among the Refugees.38 He considered himself at war with Mecca, and felt justified in removing hostile groups from his flanks.

In 626 Abu Sufyan and the Quraish resumed the offensive, this time with 10,000 men, and with material aid from the Banu-Kuraiza Jews. Unable to meet such a force in battle, Mohammed defended Medina by having a trench dug around it. The Quraish laid siege for twenty days; then, disheartened by wind and rain, they returned to their homes. Mohammed at once led 3000 men against the Banu-Kuraiza Jews. On surrendering, they were given a choice of Islam or death. They chose death. Their 600 fighting men were slain and buried in the market place of Medina; their women and children were sold into slavery.

The Prophet had by this time become an able general. During his ten years in Medina he planned sixty-five campaigns and raids, and personally led twenty-seven. But he was also a diplomat, and knew when war should be continued by means of peace. He shared the longings of the Refugees to see their Meccan homes and families, and of both Refugees and Helpers to visit again the Kaaba that had in their youth been the hearth of their piety. As the first apostles thought of Christianity as a form and reform of Judaism, so the Moslems thought of Mohammedanism as a change and development of the ancient Meccan ritual. In 628 Mohammed sent the Quraish an offer of peace, pledging the safety of their caravans in return for permission to fulfill the rites of the annual pilgrimage. The Quraish replied that a year of peace must precede this consent. Mohammed shocked his followers by agreeing; a ten years’ truce was signed; and the Prophet consoled his raiders by attacking and plundering the Khaibar Jews in their settlement six days’ journey northeast of Medina. The Jews defended themselves as well as they could; ninety-three of them died in the attempt; the rest at last surrendered. They were allowed to remain and cultivate the soil, but on condition of yielding all their property, and half their future produce, to the conqueror. All the survivors were spared except Kinana, their chieftain, and his cousin, who were beheaded for hiding some of their wealth. Safiya, a seventeen-year-old Jewish damsel, betrothed to Kinana, was taken by Mohammed as an added wife.39

In 629 the Medina Moslems, to the number of 2000, entered Mecca peacefully; and while the Quraish, to avoid mutual irritations, retired to the hills, Mohammed and his followers made seven circuits of the Kaaba. The Prophet touched the Black Stone reverently with his staff, but led the Moslems in shouting, “There is no god but Allah alone!” Meccans were impressed by the orderly behavior and patriotic piety of the exiles; several influential Quraish, including the future generals Khalid and Amr, adopted the new faith; and some tribes in the neighboring desert offered Mohammed the pledge of their belief for the support of his arms. When he returned to Medina he calculated that he was now strong enough to take Mecca by force.

The ten years’ truce had eight years to run; but Mohammed alleged that a tribe allied with the Quraish had attacked a Moslem tribe, and thereby voided the truce (630). He gathered 10,000 men, and marched to Mecca. Abu Sufyan, perceiving the strength of Mohammed’s forces, allowed him to enter unopposed. Mohammed responded handsomely by declaring a general amnesty for all but two or three of his enemies. He destroyed the idols in and around the Kaaba, but spared the Black Stone, and sanctioned the kissing of it. He proclaimed Mecca the Holy City of Islam, and decreed that no unbeliever should ever be allowed to set foot on its sacred soil. The Quraish abandoned direct opposition; and the buffeted preacher who had fled from Mecca eight years before was now master of all its life.


IV. MOHAMMED VICTORIOUS: 630–2

His two remaining years—spent mostly at Medina—were a continuing triumph. After some minor rebellions all Arabia submitted to his authority and creed. The most famous Arabian poet of the time, Kab ibn Zuhair, who had written a diatribe against him, came in person to Medina, surrendered himself to Mohammed, proclaimed himself a convert, received pardon, and composed so eloquent a poem in honor of the Prophet that Mohammed bestowed his mantle upon him.* In return for a moderate tribute the Christians of Arabia were taken under Mohammed’s protection, and enjoyed full liberty of worship, but they were forbidden to charge interest on loans.41 We are told that he sent envoys to the Greek emperor, the Persian king, and the rulers of Hira and Ghassan, inviting them to accept the new faith; apparently there was no reply. He observed with philosophic resignation the mutual destruction in which Persia and Byzantium were engaged; but he does not seem to have entertained any thought of extending his power outside of Arabia.

His days were filled with the chores of government. He gave himself conscientiously to details of legislation, judgment, and civil, religious, and military organization. One of his least inspired acts was his regulation of the calendar. This had consisted among the Arabs, as among the Jews, of twelve lunar months, with an intercalary month every three years to renew concord with the sun. Mohammed ruled that the Moslem year should always consist of twelve lunar months, of alternately thirty and twenty-nine days; as a result the Moslem calendar lost all harmony with the seasons, and gained a year upon the Gregorian calendar every thirty-two and a half years. The Prophet was not a scientific legislator; he drew up no code or digest, had no system; he issued edicts according to the occasion; if contradictions developed he smoothed them with new revelations that sternly superseded the old.42 Even his most prosaic directives might be presented as revelations from Allah. Harassed by the necessity of adapting this lofty method to mundane affairs, his style lost something of its former eloquence and poetry; but perhaps he felt that this was small price to pay for having all his legislation bear the awesome stamp of deity. At the same time he could be charmingly modest. More than once he admitted his ignorance. He protested against being taken for more than a fallible and mortal man.43 He claimed no power to predict the future or to perform miracles. However, he was not above using the method of revelation for very human and personal ends, as when a special message from Allah44 sanctioned his desire to marry the pretty wife of Zaid, his adopted son.

His ten wives and two concubines have been a source of marvel, merriment, and envy to the Western world. We must continually remind ourselves that the high death rate of the male among the ancient and early medieval Semites lent to polygamy, in Semitic eyes, the aspect of a biological necessity, almost a moral obligation. Mohammed took polygamy for granted, and indulged himself in marriage with a clear conscience and no morbid sensuality. Aisha, in a tradition of uncertain authority, quoted him as saying that the three most precious things in this world are women, fragrant odors, and prayers.45 Some of his marriages were acts of kindness to the destitute widows of followers or friends, as in the case of Omar’s daughter Hafsa; some were diplomatic marriages, as in the case of Hafsa—to bind Omar to him—and the daughter of Abu Sufyan—to win an enemy. Some may have been due to a perpetually frustrated hope for a son. All his wives after Khadija were barren, which subjected the Prophet to much raillery. Of the children borne to him by Khadija only one survived him—Fatima. Mary, a Coptic slave presented to him by the Negus of Abyssinia, rejoiced him, in the last year of his life, with a son; but Ibrahim died after fifteen months.

His crowded harem troubled him with quarrels, jealousies, and demands for pin money.46 He refused to indulge the extravagance of his wives, but he promised them paradise; and for a time he dutifully spent a night with each of them in rotation; the master of Arabia had no apartment of his own.47 The alluring and vivacious Aisha, however, won so many attentions out of her turn that the other wives rebelled, until the matter was settled by a special revelation:

Thou canst defer whom thou wilt of them, and receive of them whom thou wilt; and whomsoever thou desirest of those whom thou hast set aside, it is no sin for thee; that is better, that they may be comforted and not grieve, and may all be pleased with what thou givest them.48

Women and power were his only indulgence; for the rest he was a man of unassuming simplicity. The apartments in which he successively dwelt were cottages of unburnt brick, twelve or fourteen feet square, eight feet high, and thatched with palm branches; the door was a screen of goat or camel hair; the furniture was a mattress and pillows spread upon the floor.49 He was often seen mending his clothes or shoes, kindling the fire, sweeping the floor, milking the family goat in his yard, or shopping for provisions in the market.50 He ate with his fingers, and licked them thriftily after each meal.51 His staple foods were dates and barley bread; milk and honey were occasional luxuries;52 and he obeyed his own interdiction of wine. Courteous to the great, affable to the humble, dignified to the presumptuous, indulgent to his aides, kindly to all but his foes—so his friends and followers describe him.53 He visited the sick, and joined any funeral procession that he met. He put on none of the pomp of power, rejected any special mark of reverence, accepted the invitation of a slave to dinner, and asked no service of a slave that he had time and strength to do for himself.54 Despite all the booty and revenue that came to him, he spent little upon his family, less upon himself, much in charity.55

But, like all men, he was vain. He gave considerable time to his personal appearance—perfumed his body, painted his eyes, dyed his hair, and wore a ring inscribed “Mohammed the Messenger of Allah”;56 perhaps this was for signing documents. His voice was hypnotically musical. His senses were painfully keen; he could not bear evil odors, jangling bells, or loud talk. “Be modest in thy bearing,” he taught, “and subdue thy voice. Lo, the harshest of all voices is that of the ass.”57 He was nervous and restless, subject to occasional melancholy, then suddenly talkative and gay. He had a sly humor. To Abu Horairah, who visited him with consuming frequency, he suggested: “O Abu Horairah! let me alone every other day, that so affection may increase.”58 He was an unscrupulous warrior, and a just judge. He could be cruel and treacherous, but his acts of mercy were numberless. He stopped many barbarous superstitions, such as blinding part of a herd to propitiate the evil eye, or tying a dead man’s camel to his grave.59 His friends loved him to idolatry. His followers collected his spittle, or his cut hair, or the water in which he had washed his hands, expecting from these objects magic cures for their infirmities.60

His own health and energy had borne up well through all the tasks of love and war. But at the age of fifty-nine he began to fail. A year previously, he thought, the people of Khaibar had served him poisonous meat; since then he had been subject to strange fevers and spells; in the dead of night, Aisha reported, he would steal from the house, visit a graveyard, ask forgiveness of the dead, pray aloud for them, and congratulate them on being dead. Now, in his sixty-third year, these fevers became more exhausting. One night Aisha complained of a headache. He complained of one also, and asked playfully would she not prefer to die first, and have the advantage of being buried by the Prophet of Allah—to which she replied, with her customary tartness, that he would doubtless, on returning from her grave, install a fresh bride in her place.61 For fourteen days thereafter the fever came and went. Three days before his death he rose from his sickbed, walked into the mosque, saw Abu Bekr leading the prayers in his stead, and humbly sat beside him during the ceremony. On June 7, 632, after a long agony, he passed away, his head on Aisha’s breast.

If we judge greatness by influence, he was one of the giants of history. He undertook to raise the spiritual and moral level of a people harassed into barbarism by heat and foodless wastes, and he succeeded more completely than any other reformer; seldom has any man so fully realized his dream. He accomplished his purpose through religion not only because he himself was religious, but because no other medium could have moved the Arabs of his time; he appealed to their imagination, their fears and hopes, and spoke in terms that they could understand. When he began, Arabia was a desert flotsam of idolatrous tribes; when he died it was a nation. He restrained fanaticism and superstition, but he used them. Upon Judaism, Zoroastrianism, and his native creed he built a religion simple and clear and strong, and a morality of ruthless courage and racial pride, which in a generation marched to a hundred victories, in a century to empire, and remains to this day a virile force through half the world.


CHAPTER IX


The Koran


I. FORM

THE word qur’ân means a reading or discourse, and is applied by Moslems to the whole, or to any section, of their sacred scriptures. Like the Jewish-Christian Bible, the Koran is an accumulation, and orthodoxy claims it to be in every syllable inspired by God. Unlike the Bible, it is proximately the work of one man, and is therefore without question the most influential book ever produced by a single hand. At various times in the last twenty-three years of his life Mohammed dictated some fragment of this revelation; each was written upon parchment, leather, palm-leaves, or bones, was read to an assembly, and was deposited in various receptacles with preceding revelations, with no special care to keep them in logical or chronological order. No collection of these fragments was made in the Prophet’s lifetime; but several Moslems knew them all by heart, and served as living texts. In the year 633, when many of these qurra had died and were not being replaced, the Caliph Abu Bekr ordered Mohammed’s chief amanuensis, Zaid ibn Thabit, to “search out the Koran and bring it together.” He gathered the fragments, says tradition, “from date leaves and tablets of white stone, and the breasts of men.” From Zaid’s completed manuscript several copies were made; but as these had no vowels, public readers interpreted some words variously, and diverse texts appeared in different cities of the spreading Moslem realm. To stop this confusion the Caliph Othman commissioned Zaid and three Quraish scholars to revise Zaid’s manuscript (651); copies of this official revision were sent to Damascus, Kufa, and Basra; and since then the text has been preserved with unparalleled purity and reverential care.

The nature of the book doomed it to repetition and disorder. Each passage taken separately fulfills an intelligible purpose—states a doctrine, dictates a prayer, announces a law, denounces an enemy, directs a procedure, tells a story, calls to arms, proclaims a victory, formulates a treaty, appeals for funds, regulates ritual, morals, industry, trade, or finance. But we are not sure that Mohammed wanted all these fragments gathered into one book. Many of them were arguments to the man or the moment; they can hardly be understood without the commentary of history and tradition; and none but the Faithful need expect to enjoy them all. The 114 chapters (“suras”) are arranged not in the order of their composition, which is unknown, but in the order of their decreasing length. Since the earlier revelations were generally shorter than the later ones, the Koran is history in reverse. The Medina suras, prosaic and practical, appear first; the Mecca suras, poetic and spiritual, appear last. The Koran puts its worst foot forward, and should be begun at the end.

All the suras except the first take the form of discourses by Allah or Gabriel to Mohammed, his followers, or his enemies; this was the plan adopted by the Hebrew prophets, and in many passages of the Pentateuch. Mohammed felt that no moral code would win obedience adequate to the order and vigor of a society unless men believed the code to have come from God. The method lent itself well to a style of impassioned grandeur and eloquence, at times rivaling Isaiah.1 Mohammed used a mode of utterance half poetry, half prose; rhythm and rhyme are pervasive in it, but irregular; and in the early Meccan suras there is a sonorous cadence and bold sweep of style that are completely felt only by those familiar with the language and sympathetic with the creed. The book is in the purest Arabic, rich in vivid similes, and too florid for Occidental taste. By general consent it is the best, as well as the first, work in the prose literature of Arabia.


II. CREED*

A religion is, among other things, a mode of moral government. The historian does not ask if a theology is true—through what omniscience might he judge? Rather he inquires what social and psychological factors combined to produce the religion; how well it accomplished the purpose of turning beasts into men, savages into citizens, and empty hearts into hopeful courage and minds at peace; how much freedom it still left to the mental development of mankind; and what was its influence in history.

Judaism, Christianity, and Islam assumed that the first necessity for a healthy society is belief in the moral government of the universe—belief that even in the heyday of evil some beneficent intelligence, however unintelligibly, guides the cosmic drama to a just and noble end. The three religions that helped to form the medieval mind agreed that this cosmic intelligence is one supreme God; Christianity added, however, that the one God appears in three distinct persons; Judaism and Islam considered this a disguised polytheism, and proclaimed with passionate emphasis the unity and singleness of God. The Koran devotes a whole sura (cxii) to this theme; the Moslem muezzin chants it daily from a hundred thousand minarets.

Allah is, first of all, the source of life and growth and all the blessings of the earth. Says Mohammed’s Allah to Mohammed:

Thou seest the earth barren; but when We send down water thereon, … it doth thrill and swell and put forth every lovely kind (xxii, 5)…. Let man consider his food: how We pour water in showers, then split the earth in clefts, and cause the grain to grow therein, and grapes and green fodder, and olive and palm trees, and garden closes of thick foliage (lxxx, 24-30)…. Look upon the fruit thereof, and upon its ripening; lo, herein, verily, are portents for a people who believe (vi, 100).

Allah is also a God of power, “Who raised up the heavens without visible support, … and ordereth the course of the sun and moon, … and spread out the earth, and placed therein firm hills and flowing streams” (xiii, 2-3). Or, in the famous “Throne Verse”:

Allah! There is no God save Him, the living, the eternal! Neither slumber nor sleep overtaketh Him. Unto Him belongeth whatsoever is in the earth. Who is he that intercedeth with Him save by His leave? He knoweth that which is in front of them and that which is behind them … His throne includeth the heavens and the earth, and He is never weary of preserving them. He is the Sublime, the Tremendous (ii, 255).

But along with His power and justice goes everlasting mercy. Every chapter of the Koran except the ninth, like every orthodox Moslem book, begins with the solemn prelude (called bismillah from its first words): “In the name of God the Compassionate, the Merciful”; and though Mohammed stresses the terrors of hell, he never tires of praising the infinite mercy of his God.

Allah is an omniscient deity, and knows our most secret thoughts. “Verily We created man, and We know what his soul whispereth to him, for We are nearer to him than the vein in his neck” (1, 15). Since Allah knows the future as well as the present and the past, all things are predestined; everything has been decreed and fixed from all eternity by the divine will, even to the final fate of every soul. Like Augustine’s God, Allah not only knows from eternity who will be saved, but “sendeth whom He will astray, and guideth whom He will” (xxxv, 8; lxxvi, 31). As Yahveh hardened Pharaoh’s heart, so Allah says of unbelievers: “We have thrown veils over their hearts lest they should understand the Koran, and into their ears a heaviness; and if thou bid them to the guidance, yet even then they will never be guided” (xviii, 58). This—doubtless intended as a spur to belief—is a hard saying in any religion, but Mohammed thrusts it down with more than Augustinian thoroughness: “Had We pleased,” says Allah, “We had certainly given to every soul its guidance. But true shall be the word that has gone forth from Me—I will surely fill hell with jinn [demons] and men together” (xxxii, 13). Once, says a tradition ascribed to Ali, “we were sitting with the Prophet, and he wrote with a stick in the ground, saying: ‘There is not one among you whose sitting place is not written by God whether in fire or in paradise.’”2 This belief in predestination made fatalism a prominent feature in Moslem thought. It was used by Mohammed and other leaders to encourage bravery in battle, since no danger could hasten, nor any caution defer, the predestined hour of each man’s death. It gave the Moslem a dignified resignation against the hardships and necessities of life; but it conspired with other factors to produce, in later centuries, a pessimistic inertia in Arab life and thought.

The Koran fills out its supernatural world with angels, jinn, and a devil. The angels serve as Allah’s secretaries and messengers, and record the good and wicked deeds of men. The jinn are genii, made out of fire; unlike the angels, they eat, drink, copulate, and die; some- are good, and listen to the Koran (lxxii, 8); most are bad, and spend their time getting human beings into mischief. The leader of the evil jinn is Iblis, who was once a great angel, but was condemned for refusing to pay homage to Adam.

The ethic of the Koran, like that of the New Testament, rests on the fear of punishment, and the hope of reward, beyond the grave. “The life of the world is only play, and idle talk, and pageantry” (lvii, 20); only one thing is certain in it, and that is death. Some Arabs thought that death ends all, and laughed at theories of an afterlife as “naught but fables of the men of old” (xxiii, 83); but the Koran vouches for the resurrection of body and soul (lxxv, 3-4). Resurrection will not come at once; the dead will sleep till Judgment Day; but because of their sleep, their awaking will seem to them immediate. Only Allah knows when this general resurrection will take place. But certain signs will herald its coming. In those last days faith in religion will have decayed; morals will be loosened into chaos; there will be tumults and seditions, and great wars, and wise men will wish themselves dead. The final signal will be three trumpet blasts. At the first blast the sun will go out, the stars will fall, the heavens will melt, all buildings and mountains will be leveled with the earth and its plains, and the seas will dry up or burst into flame (xx, 102f). At the second blast all living creatures—angels or jinn or men—will be annihilated, except a few favored of God. Forty years later Israfel, the angel of music, will blow the third blast; then dead bodies will rise from the grave and rejoin their souls. God will come in the clouds, attended by angels bearing the books of all men’s deeds, words, and thoughts. The good works will be weighed in a scale against the bad, and each man will so be judged. The inspired prophets will denounce those who rejected their message, and will intercede for those who believed. The good and bad alike will move out upon the bridge al-Sirat, which—finer than a hair and sharper than the edge of a sword—is suspended over the chasms of hell; the wicked and unbelievers will fall from it; the good will pass over it safely into paradise—not through their own merits, but only through the mercy of God. The Koran, like the Fundamentalist forms of Christianity, seems more concerned with right belief than with good conduct; a hundred times it threatens with hell those who reject Mohammed’s appeal (iii, 10, 63, 131; iv, 56, 115; vii, 41; viii, 50; ix, 63, etc.). Sins being diverse in degree and kind, there are seven levels in hell, each with punishments adjusted to the offense. There will be burning heat and biting cold; even the most lightly punished will wear shoes of fire. The drink of the damned will be boiling water and filth (lvi, 40f). Perhaps Dante saw some of his visions in the Koran.

Unlike Dante’s, Mohammed’s picture of heaven is as vivid as his description of hell. Good believers will go there, and those who die for Allah’s cause in war; and the poor will enter 500 years before the rich. Paradise is in or above the seventh astronomic heaven; it is one vast garden, watered with pleasant rivers and shaded with spreading trees; the blessed there will be dressed in silk brocades, and be adorned with gems;3 they will recline on couches, be served by handsome youths, and eat fruit from trees bowing down to fill their hands; there will be rivers of milk, honey, and wine; the saved will drink wine (forbidden on earth) from silver goblets, and will suffer no aftereffects.4 By the mercy of Allah there will be no speeches at these heavenly banquets (lxxviii, 35); instead there will be virgins “never yet touched by man or jinn, … in beauty like the jacinth and coral stone, … with swelling bosoms but modest gaze, with eyes as fair and pure as sheltered eggs,”5 and bodies made of musk, and free from the imperfections and indignities of mortal flesh. Each blessed male will have seventy-two of these houris for his reward, and neither age nor weariness nor death shall mar the loveliness of these maidens, or their comrades’ bliss (xliv, 56). Since pious and believing women will also enter paradise, some confusion might result, but such difficulties would not be insuperable to men accustomed to polygamy. To these sensual pleasures Mohammed added certain spiritual delights: some of the saved will prefer to recite the Koran; and all of them will experience the supreme ecstasy of beholding Allah’s face. “And round about them shall go children, never growing old.”6

Who could reject such a revelation?


III. ETHICS

In the Koran, as in the Talmud, law and morals are one; the secular is included in the religious, and every commandment is of God. Here are rules not only for manners and hygiene, marriage and divorce, and the treatment of children, slaves, and animals, but also for commerce and politics, interest and debts, contracts and wills, industry and finance, crime and punishment, war and peace.

Mohammed did not disdain commerce—he was its graduate; even in his sovereign Medina days, says a tradition, he bought wholesale, sold retail, and made profit without qualm; sometimes he acted as auctioneer.7 His language was rich in commercial metaphors; he promised worldly success to good Moslems (ii, 5), and offered heaven as a bargain for a little belief. He threatened hell to lying or cheating merchants; denounced monopolists, and speculators who “keep back grain to sell at a high rate”;8 and bade the employer “give the laborer his wage before his perspiration dries.”9 He prohibited the taking or giving of interest (ii, 275; iii, 130). No reformer ever more actively taxed the rich to help the poor. Every will was expected to leave something to the poor; if a man died intestate his natural heirs were directed to give a part of their inheritance to charity (iv, 8). Like his religious contemporaries he accepted slavery as a law of nature, but did what he could to mitigate its burdens and its sting.10

In like manner he improved the position of woman in Arabia while accepting her legal subjection with equanimity. We find in him the usual quips of the male resenting his enslavement to desire; almost like a Father of the Church he speaks of women as man’s supreme calamity, and suspects that most of them will go to hell.11 He made his own Salic law against women rulers.12 He allowed women to come to the mosque, but believed that “their homes are better for them”;13 yet when they came to his services he treated them kindly, even if they brought suckling babes; if, says an amiable tradition, he heard a child cry, he would shorten his sermon lest the mother be inconvenienced.14 He put an end to the Arab practice of infanticide (xvii, 31). He placed woman on the same footing with man in legal processes and in financial independence; she might follow any legitimate profession, keep her earnings, inherit property, and dispose of her belongings at will (iv, 4, 32). He abolished the Arab custom of transmitting women as property from father to son. Women were to inherit half as much as the male heirs, and were not to be disposed of against their will.15 A verse in the Koran (xxxiii, 33) seemed to establish purdah: “Stay in your houses, and do not display your finery”; but the emphasis here was on modesty of dress; and a tradition quotes the Prophet as saying to women, “It is permitted you to go out for your needs.”16 With regard to his own wives he asked his followers to speak to them only from behind a curtain.17 Subject to these restrictions, we find Moslem women moving about freely and unveiled in the Islam of his time, and a century thereafter.

Morals are in part a function of climate: probably the heat of Arabia intensified sexual passion and precocity, and some allowance should be made for men in perpetual heat. Moslem laws were designed to reduce temptation outside of marriage, and increase opportunity within. Premarital continence was strictly enjoined (xxiv, 33), and fasting was recommended as an aid.18 The consent of both parties was required for marriage; that agreement, duly witnessed, and sealed with a dowry from bridegroom to bride, sufficed for legal marriage, whether the parents consented or not.19 A Moslem male was allowed to marry a Jewish or Christian woman, but not an idolatress—i.e., a non-Christian polytheist. As in Judaism, celibacy was considered sinful, marriage obligatory and pleasing to God (xxiv, 32). Mohammed accepted polygamy to balance a high death rate in both sexes, the length of maternal nursing, and the early waning of reproductive powers in hot climes; but he limited the number of permitted wives to four, allowing himself a special dispensation. He forbade concubinage (lxx, 29-31), but held it preferable to marriage with an idolatress (ii, 221).

Having allowed the male so many outlets for desire, the Koran punished adultery with a hundred stripes on each sinner (xxiv, 2). But when, on flimsy grounds, Mohammed’s favorite wife, Aisha, was suspected of adultery, and gossip persistently besmirched her name, he had a trance and issued a revelation requiring four witnesses to prove adultery; moreover, “those who accuse honorable women, but bring not four witnesses, shall be scourged with eighty stripes, and their testimony shall never again be accepted” (xxiv, 4). Accusations of adultery were thereafter rare.

Divorce was permitted to the male by the Koran, as by the Talmud, on almost any ground; the wife might divorce her husband by returning her dowry to him (ii, 229). While accepting the pre-Islamic liberty of divorce for the male, Mohammed discouraged it, saying that nothing was so displeasing to God; arbiters should be appointed “one from his folk and one from hers,” and every effort made at reconciliation (iv, 35). Three successive declarations, at monthly intervals, were required to make a divorce legal; and to compel careful thought about it, the husband was not allowed to remarry his divorced wife until after she had been married and divorced by another man.20 The husband must not go in to his wife during her periods; she was not to be considered “unclean” at that time, but she must purify herself ritually before resuming cohabitation. Women are “a tilth” to man—a field to be cultivated; it is an obligation of the man to beget children. The wife should recognize the superior intelligence and therefore superior authority of the male; she must obey her husband; if she rebels he should “banish her to a bed apart, and scourge her” (iv, 34). “Every woman who dieth, and her husband is pleased with her, shall enter paradise” (iv, 35).

Here as elsewhere the legal disabilities of women barely matched the power of their eloquence, their tenderness, and their charms. Omar, the future caliph, rebuked his wife for speaking to him in a tone that he considered disrespectful. She assured him that this was the tone in which his daughter Hafsa, and the other wives of Mohammed, spoke to the Prophet of Allah. Omar went at once and remonstrated with Hafsa and another of Mohammed’s wives; he was told to mind his business, and he retired in dismay. Hearing of all this, Mohammed laughed heartily.21 Like other Moslems he quarreled now and then with his wives, but he did not cease to be fond of them, or to speak of women with becoming sentiment. “The most valuable thing in the world,” he is reported to have said, “is a virtuous woman.”22 Twice in the Koran he reminded Moslems that their mothers had carried them with pain, brought them forth with pain, nursed them for twenty-four or thirty months.23 “Paradise,” he said, “is at the foot of the mother.”24


IV. RELIGION AND THE STATE

The greatest problems of the moralist are first to make co-operation attractive, and then to determine the size of the whole or group with which he will counsel pre-eminent co-operation. A perfect ethic would ask the paramount co-operation of every part with the greatest whole—with the universe itself, or its essential life and order, or God; on that plane religion and morality would be one. But morality is the child of custom and the grandchild of compulsion; it develops co-operation only within aggregates equipped with force. Therefore all actual morality has been group morality.

Mohammed’s ethic transcended the limits of the tribe in which he was born, but was imprisoned in the creedal group which he formed. After his victory in Mecca he restricted, but could not quite abolish, the plundering raids of tribe against tribe, and gave to all Arabia, implicitly to all Islam, a new sense of unity, a wider orbit of co-operation and loyalty. “The believers are naught else than brothers” (xlix, 10). Distinction of rank or race, so strong among the tribes, was diminished by similarity of belief. “If a negro slave is appointed to rule you, hear and obey him, though his head be like a dried grape.”25 It was a noble conception that made one people of diverse nations scattered over the continents; this is the glory of both Christianity and Islam.

But to that transcendent love, in both religions, corresponded an astringent antagonism to all who would not believe. “Take not the Jews and the Christians for friends…. Choose not your fathers nor your brothers for friends if they take pleasure in disbelief rather than in faith” (v, 51, 55; ix, 23). Mohammed interpreted these principles with some moderation. “Let there be no violence in religion. If they embrace Islam they are surely directed; but if they turn their backs, verily to thee belongs preaching only.”26 “Give a respite to the disbelievers. Deal thou gently with them for a while” (xxxvi, 17). But against Arab unbelievers who did not peaceably submit Mohammed preached the jihad or holy war, a crusade in the name of Allah. After the war with the Quraish had begun, and when the “sacred months” of truce were past, enemy unbelievers were to be killed wherever found (ix, 5). “But if any of the idolaters seeketh thy protection, then protect him that he may hear the word of Allah. … If they repent and establish worship” (accept Islam), “then leave their way free” (ix, 5-6). “Kill not the old man who cannot fight, nor young children, nor women.”27 Every able-bodied male in Islam must join in the holy war. “Lo, Allah loveth those who battle for His cause…. I swear by Allah … that marching about, morning and evening, to fight for religion is better than the world and everything in it; and verily the standing of one of you in the line of battle is better than supererogatory prayers performed in your house for sixty years.”28 This war ethic, however, is no general incitement to war. “Fight in the way of Allah against those who fight against you, but begin not hostilities. Allah loveth not aggressors” (ii, 90). Mohammed accepts the laws of war as practiced by the Christian nations of his time, and wages war against Quraish unbelievers holding Mecca precisely as Urban II would preach a crusade against Moslems holding Jerusalem.

The inevitable gap between theory and practice seems narrower in Islam than in other faiths. The Arabs were sensual, and the Koran accepted polygamy; otherwise the ethic of the Koran is as sternly puritan as Cromwell’s; only the uninformed think of Mohammedanism as a morally easy creed. The Arabs were prone to vengeance and retaliation, and the Koran made no pretense at returning good for evil. “And one who attacks you, attack him in like manner…. Whoso defendeth himself after he hath suffered wrong, there is no way” (of blame) “against them” (ii, 194; xlii, 41). It is a virile ethic, like that of the Old Testament; it stresses the masculine, as Christianity stressed the feminine, virtues. No other religion in history has so consistently tried to make men strong, or so generally succeeded. “O ye who believe! Endure! Outdo all others in endurance!” (iii, 200). Thus also spake Nietzsche’s Zarathustra.

Revered to the edge of idolatry, copied and illuminated with loving skill and care, used as the book from which the Moslem learned to read, and then again as the core and summit of his education, the Koran has for thirteen centuries filled the memory, aroused the imagination, molded the character, and perhaps chilled the intellect, of hundreds of millions of men. It gave to simple souls the simplest, least mystical, least ritualistic, of all creeds, free from idolatry and sacerdotalism. Its message raised the moral and cultural level of its followers, promoted social order and unity, inculcated hygiene, lessened superstition and cruelty, bettered the condition of slaves, lifted the lowly to dignity and pride, and produced among Moslems (barring the revels of some caliphs) a degree of sobriety and temperance unequaled elsewhere in the white man’s world. It gave men an uncomplaining acceptance of the hardships and limitations of life, and at the same time stimulated them to the most astonishing expansion in history. And it defined religion in terms that any orthodox Christian or Jew might accept:

Righteousness is not that ye turn your faces to the East or to the West, but righteousness is this: whosoever believeth in God, and the Last Day, and the angels, and the Book, and the Prophets; and whosoever, for the love of God, giveth of his wealth unto his kindred, unto orphans, and the poor, and the wayfarer, and to the beggar, and for the release of captives; and whoso observeth prayer … and, when they have covenanted, fulfill their covenant; and who are patient in adversity and hardship and in the times of violence: these are the righteous, these are they who believe in the Lord! (ii, 177).


V. THE SOURCES OF THE KORAN

As the style of the Koran is modeled on that of the Hebrew prophets, so its contents are largely an adaptation of Judaic doctrines, tales, and themes. The Koran, which excoriates the Jews, is the sincerest flattery they have ever received. Its basic ideas—monotheism, prophecy, faith, repentance, the Last Judgment, heaven and hell—seem Jewish in proximate origin, even in form and dress. It deviated from Judaism chiefly in insisting that the Messiah had come. Mohammed frankly reports contemporary accusations that his revelations were “nothing but a fraud which he hath fabricated, and other people have helped him therein,… dictating to him morning and evening” (xxv, 5; xvi, 105). He generously accepts the Hebrew and Christian Scriptures as divinely revealed (iii, 48). God has given man 104 revelations, of which only four have been preserved—the Pentateuch to Moses, the Psalms to David, the Gospel to Jesus, the Koran to Mohammed; whoso rejects any one of these is, in Mohammed’s view, an infidel. But the first three have suffered such corruption that they can no longer be trusted; and the Koran now replaces them.29 There have been many inspired prophets—e.g., Adam, Noah, Abraham, Moses, Enoch, Christ, but last and greatest, Mohammed. From Adam to Christ Mohammed accepts all the narratives of the Bible, but occasionally amends them to save the divine honor; so God did not really let Jesus die on the cross (iv, 157). The Prophet alleges the agreement of the Koran with the Bible as proof of his divine mission, and interprets various Biblical passages30 as predicting his own birth and apostolate.

From the Creation to the Last Judgment he uses Jewish ideas. Allah is Yahveh; Allah is a contraction of al-llah, an old Kaaba god; a kindred word was used in various forms in divers Semitic languages to express divinity; so the Jews used Elohim, and Christ on the cross appealed to Eli. Both Allah and Yahveh are gods of compassion, but they are also stern and warlike deities, capable of many human passions, and resolved to have no other god besides them. The Shema’ Yisrael of the Jewish ritual, affirming the unity of God, is repeated in the first article of Moslem belief—“There is no god but Allah.” The Koranic refrain that Allah is “gracious and compassionate” echoes the same frequent phrase in the Talmud.31 The designation of Allah as Rahman, the merciful, recalls the rabbinical use of Rahmana for Yahveh in the Talmudic age.32 The Talmud loves to say, “The Holy One, Blessed be He”; Moslem literature follows with the oft-repeated words, “Allah” (or “Mohammed”), “Blessed be He.” Apparently the Jews who acquainted the Prophet with the Bible also gave him snatches of the Talmud; a hundred passages in the Koran echo the Mishna and the Gemaras.33 The teachings of the Koran about angels, the resurrection, and heaven follow the Talmud rather than the Old Testament. Stories that make up a fourth of the Koran can be traced to haggadic (illustrative) elements in the Talmud.34 Where the Koran narratives vary from the Biblical accounts (as in the story of Joseph) they usually accord with variations already existing in the haggadic literature of the pre-Moslem Jews.35

From the Mishna and halakah—the oral law of the Jews—Mohammed seems to have derived many elements of ritual, even minute details of diet and hygiene.36 Ceremonial purification before prayer is enjoined, and the hands may be washed with sand if no water can be had—precisely the rabbinical formula. The Jewish institution of the Sabbath pleased Mohammed; he adopted it with a distinction in making Friday a day of prayer for the Moslems. The Koran, like the Mosaic Law, forbids the eating of blood, or the flesh of swine or dogs, or of any animal that has died of itself, or has been killed by another animal, or has been offered to an idol (v, 3; vi, 146); the Koran, however, allows the eating of camel’s flesh, which Moses forbade, but which was sometimes the only flesh food available in the desert. The Moslem method of fasting followed the Hebrew model.37 The Jews were bidden by their rabbis to pray thrice daily, facing toward Jerusalem and the Temple, and to prostrate themselves with forehead to the ground; Mohammed adapted these rules to Islam. The first chapter of the Koran, which is the basic prayer of Islam, is essentially Judaic. The lovely greeting of the Hebrew—Sholom aleichem—parallels the noble “Peace be with you” of Islam. Finally, the Talmudic heaven, like the Koranic paradise, is one of frankly physical, as well as ecstatically spiritual, delights.

Some of these elements in creed and practice may have been a common heritage of the Semites; some of them—angels, devils, Satan, heaven, hell, the resurrection, the Last Judgment—had been taken by the Jews from Babylonia or Persia, and may have gone directly from Persia to Islam. In Zoroastrian, as in Mohammedan, eschatology, the resurrected dead must walk upon a perilous bridge over a deep abyss; the wicked fall into hell, the good pass into a paradise where they enjoy, among other dainties, the society of women (houris) whose beauty and ardor will last forever. To Jewish theology, ethics, and ritual, and Persian eschatology, Mohammed added Arab demonology, pilgrimage, and the Kaaba ceremony, and made Islam.

His debt to Christianity was slighter. If we may judge from the Koran, he knew Christianity very imperfectly, its Scriptures only at second hand, its theology chiefly in Persian Nestorian form. His earnest preaching of repentance in fear of the coming Judgment has a Christian tinge. He confuses Mary (Heb. Miriam) the mother of Jesus with Miriam the sister of Moses, and—misled by the rising worship of Mary in Christendom—thinks that Christians look upon her as a goddess forming a trinity with the Father and Christ (v, 116). He accepts several uncanonical legends about Jesus and the Virgin Birth (iii, 47; xxi, 91). He modestly acknowledges the miracles of Jesus, while making no claim to such powers for himself (iii, 48; v, 110). Like the Docetists, he thinks that God put a phantom in Christ’s place on the cross, and drew Him up to heaven unhurt. But Mohammed stopped short of making Jesus the Son of God. “Far is it removed from Allah’s transcendent majesty that He should have a son” (iv, 171). He begs “the people of the Scripture” to “come to an agreement between us and you, that we shall worship none but Allah” (iii, 64).

All in all, despite deprecating intimacy with them, Mohammed was well disposed toward Christians. “Consort in the world kindly with Christians” (xxxi, 15). Even after his quarrel with the Jews he counseled toleration toward the “people of the Book”—i.e., the Jews and the Christians.* Mohammedanism, though as fanatic as any faith, concedes that others than Moslems may be saved (v, 73), and requires its followers to honor the “Law” (the Old Testament), the Gospel, and the Koran as all constituting “the Word of God”; here was a refreshing breadth of view. Mohammed adjures the Jews to obey their Law, Christians to obey the Gospel (v, 72); but he invites them to accept also the Koran as God’s latest pronouncement. The earlier revelations had been corrupted and abused; now the new one would unite them, cleanse them, and offer all mankind an integrating, invigorating faith.

Three books made and almost filled the Age of Faith: the Bible, the Talmud, the Koran—as if to say that in the rebarbarization of the Roman Empire only a supernatural ethic could restore order to society and the soul. All three books were Semitic, and overwhelmingly Judaic. The drama of medieval history would be the spiritual competition of these Scriptures and the bloody conflict of their creeds.


CHAPTER X


The Sword of Islam


632–1058


I. THE SUCCESSORS: 632–60

MOHAMMED had appointed no successor to his power, but he had chosen Abu Bekr (573–624) to conduct the prayers in the Medina mosque; and after some turmoil and rivalry this mark of preference persuaded the Moslem leaders to elect Abu Bekr the first Caliph of Islam. Khalifa (“representative”) was at first a designation rather than a title; the official title was amir al-muminin, “Commander of the Faithful.” Ali, cousin and sonin-law of Mohammed, was disappointed by the choice, and for six months withheld allegiance. Abbas, uncle of both Ali and Mohammed, shared this resentment. From this inaugural disagreement came a dozen wars, an Abbasid dynasty, and a sectarian division that still agitates the Moslem world.

Abu Bekr was now fifty-nine; short, thin, and strong, with scanty hair, and white beard dyed red; simple and abstemious, kindly but resolute; attending personally to details of administration and judgment, and never resting till justice was done; serving without pay till his people overruled his austerity; and then, in his will, returning to the new state the stipends it had paid him. The tribes of Arabia mistook his modest manners for weakness of will; only superficially and reluctantly converted to Islam, they now ignored it, and refused to pay the tithes that Mohammed had laid upon them. When Abu Bekr insisted, they marched upon Medina. The Caliph improvised an army overnight, led it out before dawn, and routed the rebels (632). Khalid ibn al-Walid, the most brilliant and ruthless of Arab generals, was sent out to bring back the turbulent peninsula to orthodoxy, repentance, and tithes.

This internal dissension may have formed one of the many conditions that led to the Arab conquest of western Asia. No thought of so extended an enterprise seems to have occurred to the Moslem leaders at Abu Bekr’s accession. Some Arab tribes in Syria rejected Christianity and Byzantium, stood off the imperial armies, and asked for Moslem help. Abu Bekr sent them reinforcements, and encouraged anti-Byzantine sentiment in Arabia; here was an external issue that might weld internal unity. The Bedouins, tired of starvation and used to war, enlisted readily in these apparently limited campaigns; and before they realized it the skeptics of the desert were dying enthusiastically for Islam.

Many causes produced the Arab expansion. There were economic causes: the decline of orderly government in the century before Mohammed had allowed the irrigation system of Arabia to decay;1 the lowered yield of the soil menaced the growing population; hunger for arable land may have moved the Moslem regiments.2 Political causes operated: both Byzantium and Persia, exhausted by war and mutual devastation, were in a tempting decline; in their provinces taxation rose while administration lapsed and protection failed. Racial affinities played a part: Syria and Mesopotamia contained Arab tribes that found no difficulty in accepting first the rule, then the faith, of the Arab invaders. Religious considerations entered: Byzantine oppression of Monophysites, Nestorians, and other sects had alienated a large minority of the Syrian and Egyptian population, even some of the imperial garrisons. As the conquest proceeded, the role of religion mounted; the Moslem leaders were passionate disciples of Mohammed, prayed even more than they fought, and in time inspired their followers with a fanaticism that accepted death in a holy war as an open sesame to paradise. Morale factors were involved: Christian ethics and monasticism had reduced in the Near East that readiness for war which characterized Arab custom and Moslem teaching. The Arab troops were more rigorously disciplined and more ably led; they were inured to hardship and rewarded with spoils; they could fight on empty stomachs, and depended upon victory for their meals. But they were not barbarians. “Be just,” ran Abu Bekr’s proclamation; “be valiant; die rather than yield; be merciful; slay neither old men, nor women, nor children. Destroy no fruit trees, grain, or cattle. Keep your word, even to your enemies. Molest not those religious persons who live retired from the world, but compel the rest of mankind to become Moslems or pay us tribute. If they refuse these terms, slay them.”3 The choice given the enemy was not Islam or the sword; it was Islam or tribute or the sword. Finally, there were military causes of the invasion: as the triumphant Arab armies swelled with hungry or ambitious recruits, the problem arose of giving them new lands to conquer, if only to provide them with food and pay. The advance created its own momentum; each victory required another, until the Arab conquests—more rapid than the Roman, more lasting than the Mongol—summed up to the most amazing feat in military history.

Early in 633 Khalid, having “pacified” Arabia, was invited by a nomad frontier tribe to join it in raiding a neighboring community across the border in Iraq. Restless in idleness or peace, Khalid and 500 of his men accepted the invitation, and in conjunction with 2500 tribesmen invaded Persian soil. We do not know if this adventure had received the consent of Abu Bekr; apparently he accepted the results philosophically. Khalid captured Hira, and sent the Caliph enough booty to elicit from him the famous phrase: “Surely the womb is exhausted. Woman will no more bear a Khalid!”4 Woman had now become a substantial item in the thought and spoils of the victors. At the siege of Emesa a young Arab leader fired the zeal of his troops by describing the beauty of the Syrian girls. When Hira surrendered, Khalid stipulated that a lady, Kermat, should be given to an Arab soldier who claimed that Mohammed had promised her to him. The lady’s family mourned, but Kermat took the matter lightly. “The fool saw me in my youth,” she said, “and has forgotten that youth does not last forever.” The soldier, seeing her, agreed, and freed her for a little gold.5

Before Khalid could enjoy his victory at Hira a message came to him from the Caliph, sending him to the rescue of an Arab force threatened by an overwhelmingly superior Greek army near Damascus. Between Hira and Damascus lay five days’ march of waterless desert. Khalid gathered camels, and made them drink plentifully; en route the soldiers drew water from slain camels’ bellies, and fed their horses on camels’ milk. This commissary was exhausted when Khalid’s troops reached the main Arab army on the Yarmuk River sixty miles southwest of Damascus. There, say the Moslem historians, 40,000 (25,000?) Arabs defeated 240,000 (50,000?) Greeks in one of the innumerable decisive battles of history (634). The Emperor Heraclius had risked all Syria on one engagement; henceforth Syria was to be the base of a spreading Moslem empire.

While Khalid was leading his men to victory a dispatch informed him that Abu Bekr had died (634), and that the new caliph, Omar, wished him to yield his command to Abu Obeida; Khalid concealed the message till the battle was won. Omar (Umar Abu Hafsa ibn al-Khattab) (582–644) had been the chief adviser and support of Abu Bekr, and had earned such repute that no one protested when the dying Caliph named him as successor. Yet Omar was the very opposite of his friend: tall, broad-shouldered, and passionate; agreeing with him only in frugal simplicity, bald head, and dyed beard. Time and responsibility had matured him into a rare mixture of hot temper and cool judgment. Having beaten a Bedouin unjustly, he begged the Bedouin—in vain—to inflict an equal number of strokes upon him. He was a severe puritan, demanding strict virtue of every Moslem; he carried about with him a whip wherewith he beat any Mohammedan whom he caught infringing the Koranic code.6 Tradition reports that he scourged his son to death for repeated drunkenness.7 Moslem historians tell us that he owned but one shirt and one mantle, patched and repatched; that he lived on barley bread and dates, and drank nothing but water; that he slept on a bed of palm leaves, hardly better than a hair shirt; and that his sole concern was the propagation of the faith by letters and by arms. When a Persian satrap came to pay homage to Omar he found the conqueror of the East asleep among beggars on the steps of the Medina mosque.8 We cannot vouch for the truth of these tales.

Omar had deposed Khalid because the “Sword of God” had repeatedly tarnished his courage with cruelty. The invincible general took his demotion with something finer than bravery: he put himself unreservedly at the disposal of Abu Obeida, who had the wisdom to follow his advice in strategy and oppose his ferocity in victory. The Arabs, ever skillful horsemen, proved superior to the cavalry, as well as the infantry, of the Persians and the Greeks; nothing in early medieval armament could withstand their weird battle cries, their bewildering maneuvers, their speed; and they took care to choose level battle grounds favorable to the tactical movements of their mounts. In 635 Damascus was taken, in 636 Antioch, in 638 Jerusalem; by 640 all Syria was in Moslem hands; by 641 Persia and Egypt were conquered. The Patriarch Sophronius agreed to surrender Jerusalem if the Caliph would come in person to ratify the terms of capitulation. Omar consented, and traveled from Medina in stately simplicity, armed with a sack of corn, a bag of dates, a gourd of water, and a wooden dish. Khalid, Abu Obeida, and other leaders of the Arab army went out to welcome him. He was displeased by the finery of their raiment and the ornate trappings of their steeds; he flung a handful of gravel upon them, crying: “Begone! Is it thus attired that ye come out to meet me?” He received Sophronius with kindness and courtesy, imposed an easy tribute on the vanquished, and confirmed the Christians in the peaceful possession of all their shrines. Christian historians relate that he accompanied the Patriarch in a tour of Jerusalem. During his ten days’ stay he chose the site for the mosque that was to be known by his name. Then, learning that the people of Medina were fretting lest he make Jerusalem the citadel of Islam, he returned to his modest capital.

Once Syria and Persia were securely held, a wave of migration set in from Arabia to north and east, comparable to the migration of Germanic tribes into the conquered provinces of Rome. Women joined in the movement, but not in numbers adequate to Arab zeal; the conquering males rounded out their harems with Christian and Jewish concubines, and reckoned the children of such unions legitimate. By such industry and reckoning the “Arabs” in Syria and Persia were half a million by 644. Omar forbade the conquerors to buy or till land; he hoped that outside of Arabia they would remain a military caste, amply supported by the state, but vigorously preserving their martial qualities. His prohibitions were ignored after his death, and almost nullified by his generosity in life; he divided the spoils of victory eighty per cent to the army, twenty per cent to the nation. The minority of men, having the majority of brains, soon gathered in the majority of goods in this rapidly growing Arab wealth. The Quraish nobles built rich palaces in Mecca and Medina; Zobeir had palaces in several cities, with 1000 horses and 10,000 slaves; Abd-er-Rahman had 1000 camels, 10,000 sheep, 400,000 dinars ($1,912,000). Omar saw with sorrow the decline of his people into luxury.

A Persian slave struck him down while Omar led the prayers in the mosque (644). Unable to persuade Abd-er-Rahman to succeed him, the dying Caliph appointed six men to choose his successor. They named the weakest of their number, perhaps in the hope that they would rule him. Othman ibn Affan was an old man of kindly intent; he rebuilt and beautified the Medina mosque, and supported the generals who now spread Moslem arms to Herat and Kabul, Balkh and Tiflis, and through Asia Minor to the Black Sea. But it was his misfortune to be a loyal member of that aristocratic Umayyad clan which in early days had been among Mohammed’s proudest foes. The Umayyads flocked to Medina to enjoy the fruits of their relationship to the old Caliph. He could not refuse their importunity; soon a dozen lucrative offices warmed the hands of men who scorned the puritanism and simplicity of pious Moslems. Islam, relaxing in victory, divided into ferocious factions: “Refugees” from Mecca vs. “Helpers” from Medina; the ruling cities of Mecca and Medina vs. the fast-growing Moslem cities of Damascus, Kufa, and Basra; the Quraish aristocracy vs. the Bedouin democracy; the Prophet’s Hashimite clan led by Ali vs. the Umayyad clan led by Muawiya—son of Mohammed’s chief enemy Abu Sufyan, but now governor of Syria. In 654 a converted Jew began to preach a revolutionary doctrine at Basra: that Mohammed would return to life, that Ali was his only legitimate successor, that Othman was a usurper and his appointees a set of godless tyrants. Driven from Basra, the rebel went to Kufa; driven from Kufa, he fled to Egypt, where his preaching found passionate audience. Five hundred Egyptian Moslems made their way to Medina as pilgrims, and demanded Othman’s resignation. Refused, they blockaded him in his palace. Finally they stormed into his room and killed him as he sat reading the Koran (656).

The Umayyad leaders fled from Medina, and the Hashimite faction at last raised Ali to the caliphate. He had been in his youth a model of modest piety and energetic loyalty; he was now fifty-five, bald and stout, genial and charitable, meditative and reserved; he shrank from a drama in which religion had been displaced by politics, and devotion by intrigue. He was asked to punish Othman’s assassins, but delayed till they escaped. He called for the resignation of Othman’s appointees; most of them refused; instead of resigning, Muawiya exhibited in Damascus the bloody garments of Othman, and the fingers that Othman’s wife had lost in trying to shield him. The Quraish clan, dominated by the Umayyads, rallied to Muawiya; Zobeir and Talha, “Companions” of the Prophet, revolted against Ali, and laid rival claims to the caliphate. Aisha, proud widow of Mohammed, left Medina for Mecca, and joined in the revolt. When the Moslems of Basra declared for the rebels, Ali appealed to the veterans at Kufa, and promised to make Kufa his capital if they would come to his aid. They came; the two armies met at Khoraiba in southern Iraq in the Battle of the Camel—called so because Aisha commanded her troops from her camel seat. Zobeir and Talha were defeated and killed; Aisha was escorted with all courtesy to her home in Medina; and Ali transferred his government to Kufa, near the ancient Babylon.

But in Damascus Muawiya raised another rebel force. He was a man of the world, who privately put little stock in Mohammed’s revelation; religion seemed to him an economical substitute for policemen, but no aristocrat would let it interfere with his enjoyment of the world. In effect his war against Ali sought to restore the Quraish oligarchy to the power and leadership that had been taken from them by Mohammed. Ali’s reorganized forces met Muawiya’s army at Siffin on the Euphrates (657); Ali was prevailing when Muawiya’s general Amr ibn al-As raised copies of the Koran on the points of his soldiers’ lances, and demanded arbitration “according to the word of Allah”—presumably by rules laid down in the sacred book. Yielding to the insistence of his troops, Ali agreed; arbitrators were chosen, and were allowed six months to decide the issue, while the armies returned to their homes.

Part of Ali’s men now turned against him, and formed a separate army and sect as Khariji or Seceders; they argued that the caliph should be elected and removable by the people; some of them were religious anarchists who rejected all government except that of God;9 all of them denounced the worldliness and luxury of the new ruling classes in Islam. Ali tried to win them back by suasion, but failed; their piety became fanaticism, and issued in acts of disorder and violence; finally Ali declared war upon them and suppressed them. In due time the arbitrators agreed that both Ali and Muawiya should withdraw their claims to the caliphate. Ali’s representative announced the deposition of Ali; Amr, however, instead of making a similar withdrawal for Muawiya, proclaimed him Caliph. Amid this chaos a Kharijite came upon Ali near Kufa, and pierced his brain with a poisoned sword (661). The spot where Ali died became a holy place to the Shia sect, which worshiped him as the Wali or vicar of Allah, and made his grave a goal of pilgrimage as sacred as Mecca itself.

The Moslems of Iraq chose Ali’s son Hasan to succeed him; Muawiya marched upon Kufa; Hasan submitted, received a pension from Muawiya, retired to Mecca, married a hundred times, and died at forty-five (669), poisoned by the Caliph or a jealous wife. Muawiya received the reluctant allegiance of all Islam; but for his own security, and because Medina was now too far from the center of Moslem population and power, he made Damascus his capital. The Quraish aristocracy, through Abu Sufyan’s son, had won their war against Mohammed; the theocratic “republic” of the Successors became a secular hereditary monarchy. Semitic rule replaced the dominance of Persians and Greeks in western Asia, expelled from Asia a European control that had lasted a thousand years, and gave to the Near East, Egypt, and North Africa the form that in essence they would keep for thirteen centuries.


II. THE UMAYYAD CALIPHATE: 661–750

Let us do Muawiya justice. He had won his power first through appointment as governor of Syria by the virtuous Omar; then by leading the reaction against the murder of Othman; then by intrigues so subtle that force had seldom to be used. “I apply not my sword,” he said, “where my lash suffices, nor my lash where my tongue is enough. And even if there be one hair binding me to my fellow men I do not let it break; when they pull I loosen, and if they loosen I pull.”10 His path to power was less incarnadined than most of those that have opened new dynasties.

Like other usurpers, he felt the need to hedge his throne with splendor and ceremony. He took as his model the Byzantine emperors, who had taken as their model the Persian King of Kings; the persistence of that monarchical pattern from Cyrus to our time suggests its serviceability in the government and exploitation of an unlettered population. Muawiya felt his methods justified by the prosperity that came under his rule, the quieting of tribal strife, and the consolidation of Arab power from the Oxus to the Nile. Thinking the hereditary principle the sole alternative to chaotic struggles for an elective caliphate, he declared his son Yezid heir apparent, and exacted an oath of fealty to him from all the realm.

Nevertheless, when Muawiya died (680), a war of succession repeated the early history of his reign. The Moslems of Kufa sent word to Husein, son of Ali, that if he would come to them and make their city his capital, they would fight for his elevation to the caliphate. Husein set out from Mecca with his family and seventy devoted followers. Twenty-five miles north of Kufa the caravan was intercepted by a force of Yezid’s troops under Obeidallah. Husein offered to submit, but his band chose to fight. Husein’s nephew Qasim, ten years old, was struck by one of the first arrows, and died in his uncle’s arms; one by one Husein’s brothers, sons, cousins, and nephews fell; every man in the group was killed, while the women and children looked on in horror and terror. When Husein’s severed head was brought to Obeidallah he carelessly turned it over with his staff. “Gently,” one of his officers protested; “he was the grandson of the Prophet. By Allah! I have seen those lips kissed by the blessed mouth of Mohammed!” (680).11 At Kerbela, where Husein fell, the Shia Moslems built a shrine to his memory; yearly they reenact there the tragedy in a passion play, worshiping the memory of Ali, Hasan, and Husein.

Abdallah, son of Zobeir, continued the revolt. Yezid’s Syrian troops defeated him, and besieged him in Mecca; rocks from their catapults fell upon the sacred enclosure and split the Black Stone into three pieces; the Kaaba caught fire, and was burned to the ground (683). Suddenly the siege was lifted; Yezid had died, and the army was needed in Damascus. In two years of royal chaos three caliphs held the throne; finally Abd-al-Malik, son of a cousin of Muawiya, ended the disorder with ruthless courage, and then governed with relative mildness, wisdom, and justice. His general Hajjaj ibn Yusuf subdued the Kufans, and renewed the siege of Mecca. Abdallah, now seventy-two, fought bravely, urged on by his centenarian mother; he was defeated and killed; his head was sent as a certified check to Damascus; his body, after hanging for some time on a gibbet, was presented to his mother (692). During the ensuing peace Abd-al-Malik wrote poetry, patronized letters, attended to eight wives, and reared fifteen sons, of whom four succeeded to his throne; his cognomen meant Father of Kings.

His reign of twenty years paved the way for the accomplishments of his son Walid I (705–15). The march of Arab conquest was now resumed: Balkh was taken in 705, Bokhara in 709, Spain in 711, Samarkand in 712. In the eastern provinces Hajjaj governed with a creative energy that equaled his barbarities: marshes were drained, arid tracts were irrigated, and the canal system was restored and improved; not content with which the general, once a schoolmaster, revolutionized Arabic orthography by introducing diacritical marks. Walid himself was a model king, far more interested in administration than in war. He encouraged industry and trade with new markets and better roads; built schools and hospitals—including the first lazar houses known—and homes for the aged, the crippled, and the blind; enlarged and beautified the mosques of Mecca, Medina, and Jerusalem, and raised at Damascus a still greater one, which still exists. Amid these labors he composed verses, wrote music, played the lute, listened patiently to other poets and musicians, and caroused every second day.12

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