The World

The Muhammad Dynasty

FAMILY FEUD

The boy’s father Abdullah died before he was born, his mother Amina died when he was young, so Muhammad bin Abdullah was brought up by his legendary elephant-vanquishing grandfather, Abdul Muttalib. Whitestreak and his sons al-Abbas and Abu Talib led caravans of spices and perfumes from Yemen and on to Gaza and Damascus. Before his death at eighty-one, Whitestreak ordered his son Abu Talib to raise Muhammad, who was nurtured by an Ethiopian nurse and a retinue of slaves. Abu Talib took young Muhammad on caravans to Syria.

Yet the family was divided into the two branches, descended from conjoined twins Umayya and Hashem, who had supposedly been cut apart with a sword. Hashem was Abdul Muttalib’s father, Muhammad’s great-grandfather. With Whitestreak gone, the Umayya clan pushed out Muhammad’s Hashemites. The two lineages fell out over the Kaaba shrine and caravan revenues, but later it became a battle for power, a family feud that still divides the Arab world today.

As Muhammad grew up in Mecca, Arabia was changing radically and the African kings of Yemen had reason to regret their attack on Mecca. Khusrau, informed by King Amr the Burner, his Arab ally, of an appeal by the Yemenites for help against the Ethiopians, sent a force down to Yemen that expelled these African Christians and annexed the kingdom. Here was a pretext for war if Emperor Justin needed one.

While Khusrau and Justin were still fighting their bipolar war, another people who would change the world were galloping across the steppes to their north. The Turks were nomadic horse archers from the borderlands of Mongolia/Manchuria, who, displaced by the turmoil in China, gradually moved westwards, sparking a stampede migration. Justin dispatched delegations to encourage the Turks to attack Khusrau, and he ceased his Persian payments. The Turks would open a northern front. But when the war started, Khusrau the Immortal, vigorous at sixty, took the Roman fortress of Dara, while the Turks never showed up. The humiliation drove Justin mad.

THE EMPEROR WHO CROWED LIKE A COCK AND BARKED LIKE A DOG: THE MADNESS OF JUSTIN

Justin tried to throw himself out of windows. Then he thought he was a shopkeeper hawking his wares around the Mega Palation: ‘Who’ll buy my pans?’ Next he started biting his eunuchs. Finally he just ‘barked like a dog, bleated like a goat, mewed like a cat and crowed like a cock’. The only things that quietened him were being wheeled fast by breathless eunuchs on a mini-wagon conveying his throne while listening to organ music – or hearing the threat that the Arab king ‘Al-Harith is coming.’ Empress Sophia took over, saying, ‘The kingdom came through me, and has come back to me’ – a true niece of Theodora. But the madness undermined the family. Sophia planned to give the throne to a Justinian cousin but, faced with raids by nomadic Avars in the Balkans and Persian advances in the east, Justin adopted a general, Tiberius. As commander-in-chief, Tiberius II, emperor from 578, selected an ex-clerk and his count of the Excubitors, Maurice, who, despite having no military experience, managed to hold off the Avars and halt the Persians. But Maurice struggled to control his flamboyant Arab ally al-Mundhir: in 581, the two of them just failed to take Ctesiphon. Maurice had the Arab king arrested. Their fallout would play a role in destabilizing the bipolar Roman-Persian world. In 582, on his deathbed, Tiberius married his daughter to Maurice, who started his own reign as emperor with a stroke of luck.

Shah Khusrau II arrived in Roman territory. The grandson of the Immortal, he was just twenty when a coup against his inept father brought him to the throne, but he had already shown his mettle running Iranian Armenia. His father was blinded then strangled by his voracious uncles, but as generals bid for power, young Khusrau escaped, accompanied by Shirin, his ‘extremely beautiful’ Christian queen,^* and aided by her fellow Christian, the Arab king al-Numan. Once in Roman territory, the boy shah proclaimed himself supplicant of Maurice, who adopted him as a son and, in return for western Armenia, lent him an army: in 591, Khusrau retook Ctesiphon.

Maurice and Khusrau both now terminated their unreliable Arab allies. Al-Mundhir’s Arabs, infuriated by Maurice’s arrest of their king, looted Palestine. Maurice ended their subsidies. Khusrau wanted to marry the daughter of his Arab ally al-Numan III, who refused this ‘vile abomination’. Arab and Iranian mutual disdain is ancient. ‘Aren’t the cattle of The Darkness [females of Iran] enough for him,’ replied al-Numan, ‘or does he have to have Arab women as well?’ Khusrau had al-Numan trampled to death by elephants. The defiant Arabs fought the shah in the War of the Camel’s Udder. On both sides of the desert, the monarchs had cut the Arabs loose. Amid a strange atmosphere of apocalyptic expectation, the World Game started to spin in unpredictable ways.

Khusrau remained loyal to his ‘father’ Maurice until 602, when the emperor, who had driven his troops too hard, was overthrown by a mutiny led by Phocas, a centurion. Phocas made Maurice watch the beheading of his six sons before he was killed himself – later followed by his wife and three daughters – an atrocity that shocked the bishops of Rome in a west that still revered the Roman emperors.

It was now in a benighted Rome, neglected by its distant ruler Phocas, ruined by Justinian’s wars, decimated by the plague, repelled by Constantinopolitan murders, that a bishop started almost by default to assume a sacred importance. The bishops of Rome – not yet called popes – were chosen informally by other bishops, Roman magnates and the emperors of Constantinople. Now a pious, charismatic aristocrat, Gregory, by then aged fifty, who as prefect (mayor) of Rome had made his name by feeding the poor, became the bishop who laid the foundations of the papacy, and of western family values. The west was dominated by Frankish and Lombard kings who were Christian but openly practised polygyny, keeping many concubines as well as a main wife, while marrying cousins and nieces to keep property and power within their clans. Gregory called this incest and banned it, the start of the Church’s obsessive multi-century campaign to promote a new vision of marriage. Simultaneously, he launched a mission to convert northern pagans.

In 597 Gregory sent an envoy called Augustine to Kent. Britannia had already been converted to Christianity once – by Constantine – but in 410, when Roman troops left, Roman luxury and Christianity vanished in some places, endured in others. The loss of running water, hot baths and villas with glass windows was dramatic, but in some towns mosaic floors were still being laid in villas decades after the Romans had gone. The Christianity of the Britanno-Romans was frayed if not erased by pagan invaders, Angles and Saxons, who arrived from Germany. They slaughtered, raped and looted, their depredations recorded by the monkish historian Bede. Yet DNA reveals that the invaders also by force or affection had families with the Britanno-Romans and settled. While north-western Britannia remained defiantly Celtic under the kings of Strathclyde and others, the east – known as Anglia – was colonized by Angles, the south by Saxons, who founded their own kingdoms. The Saxon king of Kent, Aethelberht, was married to queen Bertha, daughter of the Frankish king of Paris, who had brought her own bishop with her. Gregory ordered Augustine to assert papal control.

Aethelberht acquiesced, and Augustine became the first bishop of Canterbury. Although it was much less dramatic than advertised, Gregory trumpeted the ‘conversion of Britannia’. The rise of the papacy was further boosted by what happened next in Constantinople.

When Khusrau learned of the assassination of his adoptive father Emperor Maurice, he went to war. The shah had much to prove: everything had to be gigantic. He would sit enthroned in the colossal iwan – throne room – of his grandfather in glittery jewel-infested robes on a 1,000-square-foot carpet called the Shah’s Spring depicting his gardens. Sporting gold-trimmed armour, he would ride a towering black stallion named Midnight at the head of an army of cataphracts, knights and horses, while his tiger-skin banner, 130 feet long, fluttered overhead. But he wanted more than pomp. He wanted the world.

Khusrau planned a multifront offensive, unleashing Khoream, a Parthian princeling married to the shah’s sister who revelled in the title Shahbaraz or Royal Boar, against Armenia, then against Syria. Phocas was out of his depth, his legions breaking before Royal Boar’s cataphracts. But the Romans turned to a competent young nobleman, Heraclius, son of the exarch of Africa, who was ready to step up. Heraclius sailed for Constantinople, killed Phocas, seized the throne and tried to stop Royal Boar. But the empire was collapsing.

RECITE! I CANNOT RECITE! RECITE! THE REVELATION OF MUHAMMAD

The Persians swept west. Royal Boar took Damascus and Jerusalem, sparking apocalyptic fervour among the Jews, whom he delivered from centuries of Christian persecution. In Antioch his soldiers castrated the Christian patriarch and threw his genitals in his face. Khusrau restored Jerusalem to the Jews, who ruled there for a few years – the last time before 1967 – while Royal Boar tortured that city’s patriarch until he handed over the relic of the True Cross, which was then sent to Queen Shirin.

Emperor Heraclius was chastened. The fall of Jerusalem seemed to herald the End of Days – not just to Christians but to pagan Arabs too: in Mecca, the merchant Muhammad, now in his forties, heard of these astonishing Roman defeats which signalled a new era, a new revelation. ‘Rome has been vanquished in a land nearby,’ he reflected. Admired for his decency, geniality and serenity, he was nicknamed al-Amin – the Reliable. He had travelled into Roman lands, first visiting Syria with his uncle, then being sent there by an older female merchant, Khadija, when he was twenty-five. She was wealthy, the personification of female independence. Muhammad’s conduct on this trip earned him another nickname, al-Sadiq – the Truthful – and afterwards, he married Khadija, who was still young enough to have six children. The boys died young, but Fatima and three other daughters survived. Along with their own children, Muhammad’s cousin Ali (son of his guardian Abu Taleb) was brought up in the household, together with a boy named Zayed who had been kidnapped and enslaved before being freed and adopted by Muhammad. Muhammad lived happily with Khadija for twenty-five years.

At forty, he was meditating in a cave at Hira when he felt strange, feverish and limp. Engulfed in humming sounds, sweat pouring from him, he believed he was visited by the Archangel Gabriel, who told him he was God’s Messenger and Prophet. ‘Recite!’ ordered Gabriel.

At first Muhammad told no one except his wife Khadija, then he disclosed the visitation to a small coterie led by a friend, Abu Bakr. His message, incanted in mesmeric rhyming Arab poetry that dazzled its listeners, was universal and lucid, yet often expressed in the obscure language expected of sacred texts. Muhammad knew the Bible, partly from his travels in Palestine and Syria, partly from the many Jews and Christians in Arabia. His teachings co-opted and commandeered the prophecies and prophets of the Jews and Christians that bestowed ancient, sacred legitimacy on a new message. At its heart was a creed of pure monotheism, shorn of Jewish ritual and exclusivity and the Christian worship of a man and his image with its tangled concept of the Trinity. ‘There is no god but God,’ recited Muhammad, in the earliest version of the shahada, and this God had no son. The only path was submission – Islam – living according to the rules of worship in a religion that welcomed everyone, regardless of class, gender or nation, offering moral universality, the incentive of afterlife, and easily understood rituals and rules. Unlike Christianity Islam allowed polygamous marriage, permitting up to four wives and multiple concubines.

Anyone could join Islam. One of his first followers was an enslaved African, Bilal ibn Rabah known as al-Habashi – the Abyssinian. All the People of the Book – Jews and Christians – were welcomed: Muhammad called them ‘the Believers’. He would form a community, the ummah, of faithful believers to spread his message: the apocalypse – the Hour – was imminent. That could take place only in Jerusalem; he had dreamed that he visited the city in what is known as the Night Journey. When he prayed, he turned towards the Holy City, an orientation later called the qibla. But God had withdrawn his blessing from Jews and Christians: the Jews had lost their Temple, Rome was falling before the Persians. The revelation of Islam was the third and last of the revelations.

Muhammad started to criticize the Kaaba, which made him unpopular among his cousins in the Quraysh, led by the wealthy sheikh Abu Sufyan, who ordered his assassination. In 622, taking his followers with him, Muhammad escaped to the oasis of Yatrib further north, where he gathered his Meccans and his devotees, including Jews, in his ummah. He ‘could not write well’, according to Abu Bakr, but his followers wrote down his words, which they called the Recitation – the Quran; other sayings were later compiled in the Hadith.

Yatrib, renamed Medinat un-Nabi – Prophet’s Town, Medina – became a small theocratic state led by Muhammad, who, unlike Jesus, was a political and military leader as well as a religious visionary. Muhammad promoted the manumitted African Bilal to become the first muezzin – caller to prayer – thanks to his resonant voice. But some Jewish tribes in Medina rejected Islam, so Muhammad changed the qibla from Jerusalem to Mecca and, as Allah told him, preferred to ‘overlook their faults with gracious forgiveness’. But power was essential, war fundamental, to the success of every revelation.

At Badr, in 624, Muhammad ambushed a Meccan caravan led by Abu Sufyan. The sheikh counter-attacked. At the battle of the Trench, his ferocious wife, Hind, chanted encouragement to her men:

Our necks are hung with pearls,

And musk is in our hair,

If you advance we’ll hug you,

Or if you flee we’ll shun you.

When Abu Sufyan won, Hind gleefully ate the liver of Muhammad’s uncle Hamza and crafted necklaces from the ears of Muslim dead. It was all the more vicious for its intimacy: another of the Prophet’s uncles, Abbas – who would be important later – fought for the pagan Meccans. In 627, Muhammad punished one tribe of Jews who had colluded with the Meccans: ‘he struck off their heads as they were brought out in batches’ and enslaved the women and children.

His words fell on fertile ground in Arabia not just because he was charismatic but because the world seemed atilt. Empires were rising and falling in astonishing twists of fate; the Arabs had been cut adrift from their patrons; trade was shattered and times were desperate. ‘Nobody was more destitute than us, our religion was: kill one another and raid,’ recalled one of Muhammad’s soldiers. Monotheism, with its consolations of eternal salvation, was more persuasive than al-Uzza with her hunger for human sacrifice. Muhammad was just one of many holy leaders preaching in Arabia – Musaylima, Tuhayla, Aswad, the prophetess Sajah. Muhammad himself, observing the surreal tottering of eastern Rome, felt himself much closer to Christians than to Zoroastrians. ‘After their defeat,’ he predicted, ‘they shall be victorious again.’

* Khusrau fell in in love with Shirin when he saw her bathing – an echo of King David and Bathsheba. Their romance later inspired two classics of Iranian literature, Shahnameh and Khusrau and Shirin.