Do not look for a fight with the enemy. Beg God for peace and security. But if you do end up facing the enemy, then show endurance, and remember that the gates of Paradise lie in the shadow of the sword.

Saying of Muhammad, as recorded by Salih Muslim

I

INTRODUCTION

I shall include in my narrative only those things by which first we ourselves, then later generations, may benefit.

Eusebius, The History of the Church

The degree of authority one can give to the evangelists about the life of Christ is relatively small. Whereas for the life of Muhammad, we know everything more or less. We know where he lived, what his economic situation was, who he fell in love with. We know a great deal about the political circumstances and the socio-economic circumstances of the time.

Salman Rushdie

1

KNOWN UNKNOWNS

Between Two Worlds

Yusuf As’ar Yath’ar, an Arab king celebrated for his long hair, his piety and his utter ruthlessness, had been brought to defeat. Leaving the reek of the battlefield, he rode his blood-flecked white charger down to the very edge of the Red Sea. Behind him, he knew, Christian outliers would already be advancing against his palace—to seize his treasury, to capture his queen. Certainly, his conquerors had no cause to show him mercy. Few were more notorious among the Christians than Yusuf. Two years previously, looking to secure the south-west of Arabia for his own faith, he had captured their regional stronghold of Najran. What had happened next was a matter of shock and horror to Christians far beyond the limits of Himyar, the kingdom on the Red Sea that Yusuf had ruled, on and off, for just under a decade. The local church, with the bishop and a great multitude of his followers locked inside, had been put to the torch. A group of virgins, hurrying to join them, had hurled themselves on to the flames, crying defiantly as they did so how sweet it was to breathe in “the scent of burning priests!”¹ Another woman, “whose face no one had ever seen outside the door of her house and who had never walked during the day in the city,”² had torn off her headscarf, the better to reproach the king. Yusuf, in his fury, had ordered her daughter and granddaughter killed before her, their blood poured down her throat, and then her own head to be sent flying.

Martyrdoms such as these, fêted though they were by the Church, could not readily be forgiven. A great army, crossing from the Christian kingdom of Ethiopia, had duly landed in Himyar. The defenders had been cornered, engaged and routed. Now, with the shallows of the Red Sea lapping at his horse’s hooves, Yusuf had come to the end of the road. Not all his obedience to the laws granted to God’s chosen prophet had been sufficient to save him from ruin. Slowly, he urged his horse forwards, breasting the water, until at last, weighed down by his armour, he disappeared beneath the waves. So perished Yusuf As’ar Yath’ar: the last Jewish king ever to rule in Arabia.

The collapse of the kingdom of the Himyarites in AD 525 is not, it is fair to say, one of the more celebrated episodes of ancient history. Himyar itself, despite having prospered for some six centuries until its final overthrow under Yusuf, lacks the ready brand recognition today of a Babylon, or an Athens, or a Rome. Unsurprisingly so, perhaps: for southern Arabia, then as now, was firmly peripheral to the major centres of civilisation. Even the Arabs themselves, whom the peoples of more settled lands tended to dismiss as notorious brutes—“of all the nations of the earth, the most despised and insignificant”³—might look askance at the presumed barbarities of the region. The Himyarites, so one Arab poet reported in shocked tones, left their women uncircumcised, “and do not think it disgusting to eat locusts.”⁴ Behaviour that clearly branded them as beyond the pale.

Yet, it is not only in terms of its geography that Himyar seems to lie in shadow. Similarly obscure is the period in which the death of Yusuf occurred. The sixth century AD defies precise categorisation. It seems to stand between two ages. If it looks back to the world of classical civilisation, then so also does it look forward to the world of the Crusades. Historians categorise it, and the centuries either side of it, as “late antiquity”: a phrase that conveys a sense of lengthening shadows, and the Middle Ages soon to come.

For anyone accustomed to thinking of history as a succession of neatly defined and self-enclosed epochs, there is something vaguely unsettling about this. Rather like the scientist in the classic horror film The Fly, who ends up a mutant combination of human and insect, the world of late antiquity can seem, from our own perspective, peculiarly hybrid. Far beyond the borders of Yusuf’s Himyarite kingdom, empires raised on fabulously ancient foundations still dominated the Near East and the Mediterranean, as they had done for centuries. Yet, their very age served only to highlight how profoundly they were coming to slip the moorings of their past. Take, for instance, the region immediately to the north of Arabia: the land we know today as Iraq. Here, across mudflats that had witnessed the dawn of urban civilisation, loyalty was owed to a king who was, just as his predecessor had been a whole millennium previously, a Persian. His dominions, like those of the Persian Empire that had existed a thousand years before, stretched eastwards to the frontiers of India, and deep into Central Asia. The splendours of the court over which he presided, the magnificence of its rituals, and the immodesty of his pretensions: all would have been perfectly familiar to a king of Babylon. That this was so, however, had been almost forgotten by the people of Iraq themselves. A spreading amnesia was blotting out memories that had endured for millennia. Even the Persians, far from venerating the truth about their glorious imperial heritage, had begun to obscure and distort it. The legacy of Iraq’s incomparable history lived on—preserved in the Persians’ fantasies of global rule and in the many glories that lent such fantasies credence—but increasingly it wore the look, not of ages departed, but of something new.

Other superpowers were less neglectful of their pasts. The great cities of the Mediterranean, built of stone and marble rather than the mud-bricks favoured by the people of Iraq, were less prone to crumbling into dust. The empire that ruled them likewise wore, in 525, a veneer of venerable indestructibility. Even to the Persians, Roman might appeared something primordial. “God so arranged things,” they would occasionally acknowledge, albeit through gritted teeth, “that the whole world was lit up from the beginning by two eyes: namely, by the wise rulers of the Persian realm, and by the powerful empire of the Romans.”⁵ Nevertheless, the Romans themselves, although certainly never averse to flattery, knew better. Rather than believing that their empire had existed since the dawn of time, they knew perfectly well that all its greatness had evolved from nothing. To trace the course of that evolution might therefore be to fathom the secrets of its success. Even as Yusuf was vanishing into the Red Sea, plans were being laid in the Roman capital for an immense ransacking of libraries and archives, an unprecedented labour of scholarship whose goal was the preservation for all eternity of the empire’s vast inheritance of laws. This was no arid, merely antiquarian project. History, no less than armies or gold, had come to function as one of the sinews of the Roman state. It offered the empire reassurance that it was precisely what it claimed to be: the model of human order. How, then, was the prestige of Caesar to be maintained, if not by a perpetual trumpeting of Rome’s triumphant antiquity?

The challenge for Roman policy-makers, of course, was that the glories of the past did not necessarily provide them with a reliable guide for the future. Indisputably, the empire remained what it had been for almost a millennium: the most formidable superpower of all. Wealthier and more populous than its great Persian rival, its hold over the eastern Mediterranean, always the richer half, appeared secure. From the mountains of the Balkans to the deserts of Egypt, Caesar ruled them all. Nevertheless, it was clearly an embarrassment, to put it mildly, that what had once been the western half of Rome’s empire had ceased, by 525, to be Roman at all. Over the course of the previous century, an immense swath of her holdings, like a sandcastle battered by the waves of an incoming tide, had crumbled utterly away. Britain had been lost as early as 410. Other provinces, over the succeeding decades, had followed. By the end of the century, the entire western half of the empire, even Italy, even Rome itself, had gone. In place of the venerable imperial order there was now a patchwork of independent kingdoms, all of them—with the exception of a few in western Britain—ruled by warrior elites from beyond the limits of the former empire. The relationship that existed between the natives and these “barbarian” newcomers varied from realm to realm: some, like the Britons, fought the invaders tooth and nail; others, like the Italians, were given to hailing them as though they were Caesars. Yet, in every case, the empire’s collapse resulted in the forging of new identities, new values, new presumptions. These, over the long term, would lead to the establishment of a radically new political order in western Europe. Rome’s abandoned provinces would never again acknowledge a single master.

Time would see both the great empires of the age—the Persian as well as the Roman—go the way of Nineveh and Tyre. Not so the states established in Rome’s western provinces, some of which still commemorate in their modern names the intrusions back in late antiquity of barbarian war bands. Small wonder, then, that European historians have traditionally seen the arrival of the Franks in the land that would eventually become France, and of the Angles in the future England, as events of far greater long-term significance than the activities of any Caesar or Persian king. We know now, as their contemporaries did not, that ruin was stalking both the rival empires. A century on from the collapse of the Himyarite kingdom, and the two superpowers were staring into the abyss. That the Persian Empire would end up toppled completely while that of the Romans was left as little more than a mangled trunk, has traditionally served to mark them as dead-ends, bed-blockers, dinosaurs. How tempting it is to presume, then, that they must have perished of decrepitude and old age. The lateness of late antiquity, to those who trace in it only a calamitous arc of decline and fall, has the quality of dinner guests who refuse to get their coats once the party is over.

Except that the empires raised by the peoples of the age were not solely of this earth. Radiant though a Caesar might appear to his subjects, awesomely though his palaces and citadels might tower above the common run, and remorselessly though his array of soldiers, and bureaucrats, and tax-collectors might serve his will, yet even he was merely a mortal, in a cosmos governed by a celestial king. There was only one universal monarch—and that was God. This presumption, by the time that Yusuf was brought to bay early in the sixth century AD, was one virtually unchallenged across the entire sweep of the Near East—and it affected almost every aspect of geopolitics in the region. When Yusuf clashed with the Ethiopian invaders, far more was at stake than the petty ambitions of squabbling warlords. The interests of heaven as well had been intimately involved. Between those fighting in the Jewish cause and those in the name of Christ, the differences were so profound as to be irreconcilable. Confident though both sides were that the god they worshipped was the only god—monos theos in Greek—this shared conviction only rendered them all the more implacably opposed. Not just in southern Arabia, but across the entire span of the civilised world, devotion to a particular understanding of the divine had become an emotion that defined the lives of millions upon millions of people. In an age when realms might crest and fall like the spume of a wave, and even great empires totter, there was certainly no earthly power that could command such allegiance. Identity was coming to be defined, not by the kingdoms of this world, but by various conceptions of the One, the Only God: by “monotheisms.”

This development signalled a transformation of human society with incalculable consequences for the future. Of all the various features of the modern world that can be traced back to antiquity—alphabets, democracy, gladiator films—none, perhaps, has been more globally influential than the establishment, for the first time in history, of various brands of monotheism as state religions. At the start of the third millennium since the birth of Christ, some three and a half billion people—over half the population of the world—identify themselves with one or other of the various religions that assumed something approaching their modern form in the 250 years either side of Yusuf’s death. The period of late antiquity, then, unfamiliar though it may be in comparison to other epochs of history, is no less pregnant with relevance for that. Wherever men or women are inspired by a belief in a single god to think or to behave in a certain way, they demonstrate its abiding influence. The impact of the revolution that it witnessed still reverberates today.

It is the ambition of this book to trace the origins and the progress of that same revolution. How was it that the patterns of people’s thought, over the course of only a few centuries, came to be altered so radically and so enduringly? The story is a richly human one, replete with vivid drama, extraordinary characters and often riotous colour. Yet, it is also one that imposes peculiar demands upon the historian: for much of it takes place in a dimension beyond the physical. It features kings, but also angels; warlords, but also demons. Consequently, not every event in the pages that follow can be explained purely in terms of material self-interest or political calculation. Shadowing the often brutally vivid world of mortal affairs is a dimension that is heaven-lit and damnation-haunted. Certainly, when Yusuf’s contemporaries analysed his downfall, they were not naïve in their analysis. They recognised that complex issues of trade policy and the rivalries of the two distant superpowers had been lurking in the background. Yet they never doubted that the sands of Arabia had become the stage for an authentically celestial drama. The forces of heaven and hell had met and clashed. It was a matter of opinion whether Yusuf was on the side of the angels or the demons; but neither Jews nor Christians had any doubt that what had happened had derived ultimately from God. This was the core presumption of the age; and a history of late antiquity that neglects to pay due acknowledgement to it is a history that has failed.

The beliefs of the period must therefore be treated with both seriousness and empathy. Yet this does not mean that their claims should be taken wholly at face value. Back in the early fourth century, a Palestinian bishop by the name of Eusebius wrote a history of the early Church. In it, he initiated a tradition of historical enquiry that explained the past as the tracing of patterns upon time by the forefinger of God. This presumption, although stupendously influential, and not merely among Christian authors, fell out of fashion in the West several centuries ago. Whatever their personal religious convictions may be, modern historians do not generally explain past events as the workings of divine providence. All aspects of human society—even beliefs themselves—are now presumed to be products of evolution. Nor is this a uniquely modern perspective. Eusebius himself, fifteen hundred years before Darwin, had recognised in it a pernicious and peculiarly threatening heresy. Nothing was more alarming to him than the notion propagated by the enemies of his faith that it was something upstart and contingent, a mere distorted echo of more venerable traditions. His history, far from tracing changes in the doctrines and institutions of the Church, aimed to demonstrate that they had never changed in the slightest. And Christianity itself? Christianity, Eusebius presumed, had existed since the dawn of time: “For, obviously, we must regard the religion proclaimed in recent years to every nation through Christ’s teaching as none other than the first, the most ancient, and the most primitive of religions.”⁶

To many of us today, familiar as we are with Neanderthal burial sites and Cro-Magnon cave art, this claim does not seem obvious at all. Nevertheless, its underlying presumption—that religions have some mysterious and fundamental essence, immune to the processes of time—remains widely taken for granted. In large part, this is due to Eusebius and others like him. The great innovation of late antiquity was to fashion, out of what might otherwise have been an inchoate blur of beliefs and doctrines, individual templates for individual religions, and then to establish them as definitive. How this was accomplished is a fascinating and remarkable tale—for it touches upon the highest politics and the profoundest human emotions. The clash of great empires and the wretchedness of slaves; the shimmering of mosaics and the stench of plague pits; the clamour of teeming cities and the silence of empty deserts: all must feature. Beginning in a world recognisably ancient and ending in one medieval, it ranks as a transformation as momentous as any in history.

Yet the story is, for all that, a treacherous one to tell. Partly, this is due to the inevitable gaps and contradictions in the sources that bedevil all periods of ancient history. Take, for example, the story of Yusuf’s death. There are some accounts which describe him as falling in the heat of battle, rather than riding out into the sea. More problematic still is the bias in our sources—almost all of which are Christian.^a Even the chronology is a muddle, with some historians dating Yusuf’s death, not to 525, but to 520. All these, it might be thought, are mere problems of detail—except that there is an additional, and much greater, complication. Any history tracing the development of rival monotheisms cannot help but use such words as “Christian” and “Jew”; and yet, as the story of Yusuf suggests, these did not necessarily mean in late antiquity what they have come to mean today. A narrative that features the persecution of veiled Christian women in Arabia by a Jewish king is clearly one set in a world at some remove from our own.

It is for this reason that the story of late antiquity is altogether stranger and more surprising than might at first appear. Indeed, it is precisely the measure of those who shaped it to such stupefying effect that they succeeded so well in veiling their own astounding creativity. In every period, of course, there are those who labour to redraft the past in the service of the present; but none, perhaps, has done it so potently, or to such enduring effect, as the historians of late antiquity. The supreme achievement of the Jewish and Christian scholars of the age was to craft a history of their respective faiths that cast themselves as its rightful and inevitable culmination, and left anything that might have served to contradict such an impression out of the story altogether. Whoever Moses might truly have been, and whether he even existed, most Jews’ understanding of him today has been incalculably influenced by the rabbis of late antiquity: brilliantly learned and ingenious men who devoted entire centuries of effort to demonstrating that their greatest prophet—no matter how far removed from them in time—had in fact been someone very much like themselves. Similarly, whatever Jesus might truly have believed himself to be, the Christian understanding of his mission and divinity, as taught by the vast majority of today’s Churches, bears witness to the turbulent ebb and flow of late Roman politics: to the exhaustive efforts of bishops and emperors to fashion a creed that could unite all of God’s people as one. The essential architecture of Judaism and Christianity, no matter how far back in time its ultimate origins may stretch, was designed in late antiquity.

Only faith—or the lack of it—can ultimately answer the great questions that lie at the heart of these religions: whether the Jews are truly God’s Chosen People; and whether Jesus did in reality rise from the dead. Much the same, however, could be said of other puzzles too: how and why the Jewish belief in a single god first evolved; and what might have been the full range of doctrines in the early Church. Some of the sparks that first ignited the flames of Jewish and Christian practice can be glimpsed by the historian; but many more cannot. We see through a glass, darkly—and that glass, by and large, was fashioned by the men and women who are the protagonists of this book.

Granted, it was hardly a novel paradox that veneration of a primordial past might lead to its being masked, or even obliterated altogether. Many a wealthy patron in the ancient world flaunted his piety by erecting a colossal edifice over a modest shrine. The Jewish and Christian scholars of late antiquity, however, by the sheer force of their labours, succeeded in performing an infinitely more enduring feat of renovation. Their ultimate achievement was to craft an interpretation not only of their own various forms of monotheism but of religion itself: an interpretation that billions of people now take for granted as the supreme influence affecting both their behaviour on this earth, and the eternal destiny of their souls. It is this that makes the project of sifting through the writings of late antiquity for evidence of what might actually have happened so sensitive—and so fascinating as well.

Such a project, it goes without saying, is not one to be undertaken lightly. Nor, the complexity and ambiguity of these sources being what they are, can the story that is this book’s theme be narrated without a prior explanation of how and why it is being told in the way it is.

That is why, before I embark on telling it, I pause, to tell something quite else: the making of a story.

The Greatest Story Ever Told

Winners were the favourites of heaven. Even Christians—whose god had died as a convicted criminal, nailed to a wooden cross—might succumb to this presumption. Eusebius certainly took it for granted. How could he not have done, when he had the spectacle before him of a Roman state that for centuries had been gore-streaked with Christian blood miraculously transformed into a bulwark of the Church? No need for the Caesar who had first bowed his head before Christ to wait for death to receive his due reward. Eusebius, who combined the talents of an instinctive polemicist with a profound streak of hero-worship, wrote an entire biography of the emperor, just to ram the point home. “So dear was he to God, and so blessed, so pious and so fortunate in all he undertook, that with the greatest facility he obtained authority over more nations than any who had preceded him—and yet retained his power, undisturbed, to the very close of his life.”⁷

Confidence in this formula—that faith in Christ would lead to earthly glory—would take a number of knocks over the course of the succeeding centuries. Awkwardly, the more Christian the Romans became, the more their empire’s frontiers seemed to contract. Theologians devised various explanations for this puzzling phenomenon—explanations which Christians, who had only to study the gospels to learn Jesus’s views on the earthly and the overweening, might well find perfectly persuasive. Nevertheless, the core equation so lovingly dwelt upon by Eusebius—that worldly greatness was bestowed by God upon those who pleased Him—appeared altogether too plausible simply to be dismissed out of hand. Instead, the more the Romans found themselves locked in a desperate struggle for survival, so the more it came to be appropriated by a new and quite startlingly upstart imperial people. The identity of these same conquerors, who had not only deprived the Romans of their wealthiest provinces but had crushed the Persians underfoot altogether, could hardly have come as more of a shock to the defeated. Indeed, so unexpected was what had happened, so utterly jaw-dropping, as to appear self-evidently miraculous. What else but the hand of God could possibly explain the conquest of the world by a people previously scorned as the ultimate in savagery and backwardness: the Arabs?

Half a millennium on from the time of Eusebius, at the start of the ninth Christian century, and the close identification made by the learned between piety and worldly power still enjoyed spectacular traction. Christians themselves might have grown uncomfortable with the notion; but not so the Arabs, who rejoiced in a rampant conviction that all their astounding victories were owed directly to the favour of God. Two centuries previously, so they believed, heaven had graced their ancestors with a stream of supernatural revelations: a dispensation that trumped those of the Jews and the Christians, and had set those who subjected themselves to it upon a road to global empire. Indeed, eight hundred years after the birth of Christ, it was as “Muslims”—“those who submit to God”—that most Arabs had come to identify themselves. The vast agglomeration of territories won by the swords of their forefathers, stretching from the shores of the Atlantic to the fringes of China, served as the ultimate monument to what God had demanded of them: their submission. “Islam,” they called it—shorthand for what had become, by the early ninth century, an entire civilisation.

It was not only the Arabs themselves, however, who had been granted a rare new dignity by the coming of Islam. So too had their language. It was in Arabic, so Muslims believed, that God had climactically, and for all time, revealed His purposes to humanity. What was good enough for the Almighty, it went without saying, was good enough for mortals. By AD 800, so redeemed was Arabic from the contempt in which it had once been held that its sound had come to rank as the very music of power, and its cursives as things of pure beauty, refined to a rare and exquisite perfection by the art of its calligraphers. Among the Arabs, the written word was on the verge of becoming a mania. One scholar, when he died in 822, left behind him a library that filled a whole six hundred trunks. Another was said to have been flattened to a pulp when a tower of books collapsed on top of him while he was drunk. The story does not seem wholly implausible. One volume of Arab history, it is claimed, stretched to almost eighty thousand pages—which would have made for a crushing weight, to be sure. Clearly, then, a people who could boast of such titanic literary endeavours were far removed from an age that had scorned them as barbarians—as the Arabs themselves delighted in pointing out.

The sense of compulsion they brought to the study of their past was hardly surprising. The yearning to understand the reason for the spectacular upsurge in their fortunes, to clarify the process by which it had been brought about, and to elucidate what it revealed about the character of their god, never ceased to gnaw. Just as Eusebius, five hundred years previously, had sought answers to very similar questions in the life of a Roman emperor, so now did Ibn Hisham—a scholar originally from Iraq who by the early ninth century had settled in Egypt—likewise turn to biography in order to fathom the purposes of heaven. “Sira,” he termed his chosen genre: “exemplary behaviour.” It was less what his subject had done that concerned Ibn Hisham than how he had done it. There was an urgent reason for this. The hero of Ibn Hisham’s biography, so Muslims believed, offered the ultimate in role models. God had chosen him to serve as His mouthpiece. It was through him that the All Merciful had revealed His wishes to the Arabs, and graced them with those same revelations that had then inspired them, two centuries before the time of Ibn Hisham, to erupt from their deserts and tear the world’s superpowers to pieces. “We are God’s helpers and the assistants of His prophet, and will fight men until they believe in God; and he who believes in God and His prophet has protected his life and property from us; and he who disbelieves we will fight in God unceasingly, and killing him will be a small matter to us.”⁸ This, according to Ibn Hisham, was the swaggering manifesto promoted by Arab warriors on the eve of their conquest of the world.

But who, precisely, was this “prophet?” Ibn Hisham’s aim was to provide the answer. Sitting in Egypt, surrounded by the ruins of forgotten and superseded civilisations, he regarded his sira not merely as a biography but as a record of the most momentous revolution in history. Its subject was a man who had died only two years before the dismemberment of the Roman and Persian empires had begun: an Arab by the name of Muhammad. Aged forty, and with a moderate career as a merchant behind him, he had experienced—if Ibn Hisham were to be believed—history’s most epochal mid-life crisis. Restless and dissatisfied, he had begun to roam the wilderness which stretched beyond his home town, “and not a stone or tree that he passed by but would say, ‘Peace be unto you, O prophet of God.’ ”⁹ Muhammad, understandably enough, had been left most unsettled. Voices were rarely heard in the places where he chose to wander, on his lonely quest after spiritual enlightenment. Mecca, the nearby town, stood in the depths of the Arabian desert: the ring of mountains that surrounded it, baked black by the pitilessly broiling sun, rose barren, wind-lashed and empty. Yet, it was on the slope of one of those same mountains, lying at night inside a cave, that Muhammad heard the most startling voice of all. He felt it at first as a vice tightening around his body: the grip of some terrifying supernatural entity. Next came a single command: “Recite!”^b Then, as though his words were a desperate, violent exhalation of air, Muhammad himself started to gasp out whole lines of verse:

               Recite: in the name of your Lord!

               He Who created!

               He created man from a blood clot.

               Recite! Your Lord is most bountiful.

               He taught with the pen.

               He taught man what he knew not.¹⁰

Muhammad was speaking, but the words were not his own. Then whose? Muhammad himself, it is said, initially suspected a jinn, a spirit of the deserts and winds. Perhaps this was not surprising. Mecca was, according to Ibn Hisham, a hag-ridden, demon-haunted place. Right in the centre of the city there stood a shrine built of stone and mud—the Ka’ba, or “Cube”—in which there squatted a whole host of fearsome gods, totems of such sinister power that men from across Arabia would gather there to pay their respects. On top of these, every household in Mecca had its own private idol: there to be rubbed against for luck before a journey. So inveterately pagan were the Meccans that they even offered sacrifices to boulders: among which were a couple of one-time lovers who had dared to have sex in the Ka’ba, and promptly been turned to rock. It was only natural, then, in a city so eerie, so perfumed by blood and magic, that clairvoyants should have been a common sight, rolling about in the dirt of its narrow streets, vomiting up revelations, possessed by jinn in the depths of their guts. So overwhelming was Muhammad’s dread that he might now be suffering an identical fate that he thought to take his life. Rising to his feet, he left the cave and stumbled out into the night. Up the side of the mountain he hurried. Heading for the summit, he prepared to hurl himself from the peak, to dash himself on to the rocks.

But now the voice returned: “O Muhammad! Thou art the apostle of God and I am Gabriel.” Could it really be so? Gabriel was a mighty angel, the messenger of the one God worshipped by the Jews and the Christians, who back in ancient times—or so it was said—had revealed visions to the Prophet Daniel, and told the Virgin Mary that she was to bear a son. Looking up to the heavens, Muhammad saw the figure of a man, his “feet astride the horizon”:¹¹ who else but the angel himself? Returning down the mountain, seeking comfort from his wife, reflecting upon the shattering trauma he had been through, Muhammad dared to contemplate a truly awesome possibility: that the voice had spoken the truth. He would not hear it again for another two years—but when at last Gabriel returned, and the silence was broken, Muhammad had no doubt that he was hearing, courtesy of the angel, the authentic words of a god. And not just any god, but the one God, the true God, the indivisible God. “There is no god but He, Creator of all things.”¹²

Here, in this uncompromising assertion that there existed only a single divinity, lay the key to a starkly new vision of the universe: monotheism in the raw. With each successive revelation, Muhammad’s understanding of God’s oneness—and of what was owed to Him as a result—was burnished to an ever more awesome sheen. The people of Arabia—with their idols of stone, or wood, or dates mixed with rancid butter—were merely repeating what had been, since the dawn of time, humanity’s greatest delusion: that the heavens and the earth were thronged with a whole teeming mob of gods. So Muhammad, ordered by his voice to “proclaim aloud”¹³ God’s revelations, began to preach. Again and again, he warned, mankind had succumbed to the one sin that could not be forgiven:shirk—the belief that God can be associated with other beings. Again and again, however, because He was all merciful, the “Lord of the Worlds”¹⁴ had sent prophets to open the eyes of people to their folly, and summon them back to the primordial way of truth. Noah and Abraham, Moses and Jesus: all had preached the one identical message, a call for submission to God. Now, it appeared, with revelations being granted to Muhammad in ever increasing length and number, there had arisen, six centuries after Jesus, a new prophet. Indeed—the very “Seal of Prophets.”¹⁵ As the years passed and the divine continued to speak through him, so Muhammad and his growing band of followers came to realise that he was the recipient of the ultimate in messages: the definitive revelation of God.

Not that everyone concurred. “Prophecy,” as Ibn Hisham would sagely observe, “is a troublesome burden. Only strong, resolute messengers can bear it by God’s help and grace, because of the opposition which they meet from men in conveying God’s message.”¹⁶ Which was putting it mildly. Muhammad’s fellow townsmen regarded him first as a diversion; then as a provocation; and finally as a mortal danger. Particularly outraged by his uncompromising message were the members of his own tribe, “Quraysh” as they were known: a consortium of clans who had long enjoyed a peculiar respect among the scattered tribes of Arabia.¹⁷ The prestige they enjoyed as a “People of God” reflected the lucrative role that the Quraysh had grasped for themselves as the guardians of theKa’ba, and its multitude of idols: a role that Muhammad, with his wild talk of there being only a single god, seemed determined to sabotage.^c The unsurprising consequence was that Mecca grew increasingly hot for the Prophet and his followers. By AD 622, twelve years after the first revelation had descended from the heavens, the threat was directly to their lives. One night, Gabriel appeared to the Prophet and warned him that the Quraysh were plotting to murder him in his bed: the time had come to leave. Following in the footsteps of his followers, many of whom had already abandoned Mecca, Muhammad obediently slipped out from the city and vanished into the night. The moment had been long anticipated: what the Prophet had now embarked upon was not some aimless flight into the wilds of the desert, but rather a meticulously planned migration—a hijra.

An escape that would come to be seen, in due course, as having transformed the entire order of time. The year in which it took place still serves Muslims, to this day, as Year One. Dates in their calendar continue to be defined as AH, or “Anno Hegirae: In the Year of the Hijra.” To Ibn Hisham, the central episode of Muhammad’s life was not his first revelation, but his departure from Mecca. No longer simply a preacher, he was now embarked upon a spectacular series of exploits that would see him emerge, in due course, as the leader of an entire new political order. His destination, an oasis to the north of Mecca known as Yathrib, stood in desperate need of a guiding hand. The tribes who lived there, an uneasy mixture of Jewish and Arab settlers, had long been great enthusiasts for savage feuding; but increasingly, as the violence spiralled ever more out of control, there were many weary of the perpetual bloodshed. Pressure was building in Yathrib to find a peacemaker. Someone neutral, someone trustworthy, someone authoritative. Someone, perhaps—just perhaps—with a channel direct to God. In short, between Muhammad, a prophet in need of a refuge, and Yathrib, a city in need of a prophet, there could hardly have been a more perfect fit. A match made literally in heaven, as Ibn Hisham would choose to cast it.

It is the measure of what Muhammad ultimately achieved in Yathrib that its very name would end up erased from the map. It was the fate, and the undying glory, of the oasis that had offered him sanctuary to be commemorated as “The City of the Prophet,” or “Madinat an-Nabi”—Medina. Muhammad would spend the rest of his life there, building a society that has served as the model for Muslims ever since. Angry and clear was the reproach delivered by the Prophet to those who lived by the murderous ethics of the desert. To love gold “with a love inordinate,”¹⁸ to steal from orphans and squander their inheritance, and to dispose of unwanted daughters by burying them alive in the sands, was, so Muhammad warned, to be bound for eternal fire. “Account is demanded of those who oppress people and commit transgression on earth, unjustly. To them there is painful torment.”¹⁹ Before the awesome infinitude of God, enthroned upon His judgement seat, even the haughtiest or most rumbustious clan chief was but the merest speck of dust. The squabbling tribes of Yathrib, overwhelmed by the floodtide of Muhammad’s revelations, increasingly found their old antagonisms, and their old loyalties, dissolving amid the urgency and grandeur of his message. Yet the Prophet, even as he tamed their addiction to the more traditional pleasures of chauvinism, did not think to deny them all sense of community. On the contrary. Although Muhammad would certainly succeed in bringing peace to his oasis refuge, just as he had been invited to do, peace was hardly the limit of what he brought. Something more, very much more, was on offer to the people of Yathrib: a radically new identity, forged out of the whirling atoms of their pulverised tribal order. An identity as a single people—as the members of a singleUmma.

“Seal of the Prophets” Muhammad may have been—but he did not disdain to found an earthly state. God continued to speak to him. His self-confidence did not dim. Obstacles in his path were swept aside or else trampled down. When the gap between rich and poor—which offended Muhammad to the core of his being—refused to narrow, he summarily outlawed usury and established an equitable taxation system. When the Jews of Yathrib, disconcerted by the transformation of their hometown into the “City of the Prophet,” presumed to manoeuvre against him, they were variously expelled, enslaved or massacred. When the Quraysh, informed that Muhammad was planning to raid one of their caravans, sent a military escort out into the desert, it was met by the Prophet and his tiny band of followers beside a watering hole named Badr, and put humiliatingly to rout. Angels, “white turbans flowing behind them,”²⁰ shimmered in the sky above the battlefield, flashing their fiery swords, and sending Qurayshi heads flying.

Most spectacular and irrefutable sign of God’s favour, however, was the transformation of Muhammad, in no more than a decade, from refugee to effective master of Arabia. He led twenty-seven campaigns in all, according to Ibn Hisham; and if occasionally there was a defeat, and if the angels, by and large, chose not to fight as they had done at Badr, but rather to serve him as a reserve, then perhaps his ultimate triumph could be considered only the more extraordinary for it. By 632, the traditional date of his death, paganism in Arabia had everywhere been put in shadow. Sweetest moment of all had been the conquest, two years previously, of Mecca itself. Riding into his hometown, Muhammad had ordered the Ka’ba stripped of its gods. A great bonfire had been lit. The toppled idols had been consigned to its flames. The Devil, summoning his progeny around him, had cried out in woe: “Abandon all hope that the community of Muhammad will ever revert to shirk after this day of theirs!”²¹ Well might he have yowled. The venerable sanctuary, that pre-eminent bastion of paganism, had been brought at last to a due submission: to “Islam.” This consecration of Mecca to the service of the One True God, however, was far from an innovation. What Muhammad had done, so he revealed to his followers, was restore the shrine to its primordial, pristine state. “God made Mecca holy the day He created heaven and earth. It is the holy of holies until the resurrection day.”²²

This assurance, even in the bleak days following Muhammad’s death two years later, offered the faithful much comfort. It suggested to them that they had not been abandoned by God. Despite the loss of their Prophet, Arabia remained transfigured by the sacred still. Nor was it only Mecca, “the holy of holies,” that still endured upon the face of the earth. So too did the Umma—and to the greater glory of all that the Prophet had taught. Over the succeeding years, the succeeding decades, the succeeding centuries, the Muslim people would serve to make of the entire world a Ka’ba: conquered, cleansed and sanctified. By the time that Ibn Hisham sat down to write his biography, it was not only Arabs who faced Mecca as they prayed. Strange peoples of whom the Prophet had possibly never even heard—Visigoths and Berbers, Sogdians and Parthians—could all be seen treading the sands of Arabia: pilgrims bound for the Ka’ba. Although Ibn Hisham himself did not touch upon this phenomenon in his sira, there was no shortage of other scholars eager to relate the extraordinary conquests, far beyond the limits of Arabia, that had followed the death of the Prophet. Such relish was hardly surprising. Back in the wild days of their paganism, nothing had delighted the Arabs more than a spot of loud-mouthed boasting, be it about some heroic feat of arms, some stirring deed of banditry, or some glorious humiliation forced upon a rival. Now, when they blew their own trumpets, it was all in the cause of God. From Badr to the ends of the world, the story of Islam had been one of storming military triumph. Cities infinitely greater than Mecca had been captured; peoples infinitely mightier than the Quraysh obliged to bow their necks. The scale of these victories, won in the teeth of ancient empires and venerable religions, surely furnished all the proof that anyone might need of the truth of the Prophet’s claims. “This is a sign that God loves us,” as one exultant Arab put it, “and is pleased with our faith, namely that He has given us dominion over all peoples and religions.”²³

And yet, all the while, there was anxiety. Even amid the wealth and splendour of a great empire, vast on a scale beyond anything that Muhammad would have imagined possible, the Muslim people could not shake off an uncomfortable sense of their own decay. A generation after Ibn Hisham had completed his biography, and the scholar who would end up crushed to death beneath his toppled books, an astounding polymath by the name of Al-Jahiz, could view the entire triumphant course of Islam’s history as embodying nothing but a dying fall. There had been only the one truly golden age. Those who had heard the Prophet actually talk, who had ridden by his side, who had served him as his Sahabah, or “Companions”: they alone could be reckoned to have practised “the authentic monotheism.” Hence, of course, their astounding success. It was their generation, fresh from the burial of the Prophet, which had first embarked upon the conquest of the world—and achieved it, what was more. The men who had presided over this glorious victory charge, a sequence of leaders known as “Caliphs,” or “Successors” of the Prophet, had all of them been noted intimates of Muhammad. The first, a grizzled veteran by the name of Abu Bakr, had been his companion during the perilous flight to Medina, and the father of his favourite wife; the second, Umar, had been his brother-in-law; the third, Uthman, had been married to one of his daughters. The fourth, Ali ibn Abi Talib, had rejoiced in the most splendid pedigree of all: the first male ever to convert to Islam, a step he had taken at the precocious age of nine, he was also the Prophet’s cousin, before finally graduating to become, just for good measure, his son-in-law as well.^d These four men had reigned for just thirty years in total, but already, by the time that Al-Jahiz was putting pen to paper, they were well on their way to being enshrined by the vast majority of Muslims as veritable paragons—ar-Rashidun, or “the Rightly Guided.” Not, of course, that their period in power could quite compare with Muhammad’s at Medina; but still, as a golden age, it came in a glorious second. “For at that time,” as Al-Jahiz put it wistfully, “there was nothing in the way of offending action or scandalous innovation, no act of disobedience, envy, rancour or rivalry.”²⁴ Islam had been pristinely Islamic still.

But after every summer there must be a winter; and after every golden age an age of iron. In 661, the era of the Rashidun was brought to a bloody and tragic end. The Caliph Ali was murdered. Then, two decades later, his son was cut down in battle; lips that had kissed the Prophet were prodded mockingly by a conqueror’s stick. By now, a dynasty of Qurayshi despots, the Umayyads, had dug their claws deep into the Caliphate and made it their own—to the scandal of the God-fearing. The new Caliphs drank wine; they kept pet monkeys; they termed themselves, not the Prophet’s Successors, but “the deputies of God.” Monstrous behaviour such as this was bound to tempt the wrath of heaven; and sure enough, in 750, the Umayyads were toppled, forced to flee, and systematically hunted down by vengeful death squads. Nevertheless, the blots and stains of their near century in power were not so easily erased. No matter that the dynasty that succeeded them to the caliphal throne, the Abbasids, claimed descent from the uncle of Muhammad himself—the golden age of the Rashidun was not restored. Instead, no less than in the dark days that had preceded the coming of the Prophet, novelty and division seemed rife. Rival sects proliferated—and rival Caliphs too. Meanwhile, beyond the palaces in which the Successors of the Prophet dressed in silks and ate from plates of gold, the poor found themselves as oppressed as they had ever been by the arrogance of the powerful, the wealthy, the cruel. Remorselessly, the question nagged: how had it all gone wrong? And even more remorselessly: how was it best to be set right?

Two centuries on from the hijra, and the last man to have seen the Prophet alive was long since departed from the face of the world. Nevertheless, confronted as they were by the splintering of the times, most Muslims knew that there could be no true solution to any problem that lacked the sanction of their beloved prophet. “In the Messenger of God,” the Almighty Himself had informed the faithful, “you have an excellent example to follow.”²⁵ To sketch him was therefore to sketch the ultimate in role models: a pattern of behaviour fit to serve all mankind, and all eternity. As the years went by, and ever more biographies were written in ever more extensive detail, so the Prophet came to be ever more venerated. That his birth had been marked by incontrovertible wonders, whether the appearance of strange stars in the sky or the whisperings of jinn in the ears of clairvoyants, foretelling a new age to come, had been well known to Ibn Hisham; but time would radically improve on this record of miracles. Fresh evidence—wholly unsuspected by Muhammad’s earliest biographers—would see him revered as a man able to foretell the future, to receive messages from camels, and palm trees, and joints of meat, and to pick up a soldier’s eyeball, reinsert it, and make it work better than before. The result was one yet additional miracle: the further in time from the Prophet a biographer, the more extensive his biography was likely to be.

Not that it required a whole book to spell out a lesson from the life of Muhammad. A single anecdote, a single phrase, would do. Hadiths, these snatches of biographical detail were termed—and already, a bare century after the time of Ibn Hisham, they existed in their tens, perhaps their hundreds, of thousands. Anyone with a taste for lists could consult one of a number of vast compilations, arranged neatly by subject. There was barely a topic, it seemed, on which Muhammad had not opined. Should the God-fearing wish to know whether they could marry demons, or why most of the damned in hell were women, or how an orgasm during procreation would affect the appearance of the resulting child, then a hadith would provide the answer. Scraps from Muhammad’s biography they might have been; but they were also a record, preserved for the edification of later generations, of the Prophet’s entire outlook on life. What could possibly be more precious to the Muslim people than that? Taken together, as the hadiths increasingly were, they constituted something infinitely more significant than a mere anthology of quotations. What they embodied was a quite exceptional body of law, one that touched upon every conceivable facet of human existence and left almost nothing unregulated, almost nothing to chance: “Sunna,” as hadith scholars termed it. Here, then, was yet another of the glories of the Muslim people. Not for them laws dredged up from the sump of worldly custom or invention—their laws, they proudly boasted, derived directly from heaven. It was the Sunna, by instructing the faithful in their duties towards the poor, and by prescribing for them with great precision how to pray, where to go on pilgrimage, what to eat, and when to fast, that had succeeded in taming the instincts of previously savage societies, and granting them a glimpse of what a civilised community of human beings might truly become. Those who lived by its tenets viewed this as an accomplishment so miraculous that they never doubted its divine origin. As one renowned hadith-master put it, with a triumphant show of logic, “It was brought to the Prophet by Gabriel, and Gabriel was sent from God.”²⁶

So it was, during the ninth and tenth Christian centuries, that episodes from the life of Muhammad came to be woven imperishably into the fabric of Muslim life. The age of the Prophet and his companions was not forgotten. Those who laboured, generation after generation, to preserve its memory never doubted the full, revolutionary implications of their undertaking. It was not enough to provide the vast mass of the faithful with codes and standards of behaviour; the appetites of the rich, and of the powerful, and of the well-fed, those whose flaunting of the dictates of social justice had so provoked the anger of the Prophet in the first place, had to be tamed as well. “No man is a believer who fills his stomach while his neighbour goes hungry.”²⁷ Here, and in the multitude ofhadiths like it, were maxims calculated to unsettle anyone who had grown fat on the pickings of empire. Indeed, to an elite rotten with oppression and greed, Muhammad’s indignation at the inequities of human society, preserved in the record of his sayings, was bound to appear chilling in the extreme. No wonder, then, that the scholars of the Caliphate, justly suspicious of the ambitions and appetites of their rulers, should have toiled to authenticate the hadiths. The Muslim people could be left in no doubt about their veracity—no matter how challenging they might be. Here, for the jurists and the biographers, the historians and the religious scholars of Islam, was yet another prodigious task. The links that bound their own world to the time of the Prophet had to be certified as proven—and to the satisfaction of all.

The stakes, then, could hardly have been higher. Establish the hadiths as genuine, and the present would be grappled impregnably to the past. Naturally, it was essential that the struts and supports deployed for this purpose—the “isnads,” as they were termed in Arabic—be strong enough to hold firm across the centuries. Only an unbroken succession of authorities, each traceable to the next across the generations, culminating in a personal report of the Prophet himself, could be fit for purpose. Fortunately, there was no shortage of such chains of transmission. The links of the isnads held true. Five hundred years on from the death of Muhammad, and it seemed to many Muslim scholars that there was barely an aspect of human life that had not, thanks to all their titanic efforts, been safely secured and fettered to some salutary hadith. There was now not the slightest risk that the faithful might lose sight of the Prophet’s example. Just the opposite: the moorings that bound past to present could hardly have been rendered any the more secure. Theisnads, like a tracery of filaments forged across time, seemed as infinite as they were unbreakable. Far from receding out of view, Muhammad’s life had been preserved in an almost pointillist depth of detail.

Nor, of course, was that the limit of the legacy left by the Prophet to the faithful. No matter all the many wonders and prodigies increasingly attributed to him by his biographers, the Muslim people knew, deep down in their hearts, that there had been only the one transcendent miracle. “We have made the Book to descend upon you, a clear explanation for all things.”²⁸ So God had assured Muhammad. The “Book” was, of course, the sum of all the many revelations granted to the Prophet over the course of his life; and these, written down by his followers, had then, after his death, been assembled to form a single “recitation”—a “qur’an.” Quite how and by whom this great project of memorialisation had been undertaken would subsequently be much debated; but it gradually came to be accepted that the man responsible had been Uthman, the third of the Caliphs. As a result, the word of God, which had first been gasped out by the Prophet all those years before in the cave outside Mecca, was preserved in written form, to the eternal benefit of mankind: “a mercy and a remembrance to those who have faith.”²⁹ To the Muslim people, this “recitation” was a prize beyond compare. Not a word of it, not a letter, but it was touched with the fire of God. Undimmed, undimmable, the Qur’an offered to all those who dwelt on earth something infinitely precious: nothing less than a glimpse of the radiance of heaven.

A prize such as this, it seemed to many, could only ever have existed uncreated, beyond the dimensions of time and space: for to imagine that God might somehow be distinct from His word was, of course, to commit the mortal offence of shirk. Quite how this insight was to be reconciled with the undoubted fact that Muhammad had received his revelations over a period of several years was a question requiring much delicate and ingenious investigation: not surprisingly, many centuries would pass before the problem was finally resolved to everyone’s satisfaction. Deep waters—and only a Muslim whose entire life had borne witness to his piety, wisdom and learning could presume so much as to dip his toe into the infinitude of such an ocean. If the writing of a commentary on the Qur’an—“tafsir,” as it was known—ranked as the most praiseworthy activity known to scholarship, then so also was it easily the most hedged about by danger. No Muslim, but he knew that “torment upon torment” awaited those who “obstructed the path to God.”³⁰Peril awaited the unwary student of the Qur’an at every step. The consequences of error might be fatal indeed.

And yet the challenge, over the centuries, did succeed in being met—and gloriously so. A whole ornate scaffolding of commentary, rising in ever more spreading detail, came to be constructed around the luminous core that was the Qur’an itself. One particularly notable achievement was the identification of the process by which the Prophet, step by step, had received the word of God: no simple matter, to be sure. The divine purpose, after all, had been to send a message to humanity—not to scatter clues around for the benefit of Muhammad’s biographers. As a result, allusions to the life of the Prophet within the holy text were so opaque as to verge on the impenetrable. Muhammad himself, for instance, was mentioned by name a bare four times.³¹ The places associated with him received only fleeting and ambiguous reference. Not even the most dramatic episodes in his career—his confrontation with the Quraysh, his flight to Medina, his purification of the Ka’ba—received direct corroboration. Far from providing a roadmap of the Prophet’s life, the Qur’an was so dense, so allusive, so elliptical, as to require almost a roadmap itself. Fortunately for the Muslim people, however, it was precisely such a roadmap that the tafsirs were able to provide. Armed with these, the faithful could trace what would otherwise have been untraceable: the precise stages by which the Qur’an had been received by Muhammad. Only by reading the holy text with a commentary was it possible, for instance, to distinguish between the various revelations given in Mecca, and those given in Medina; to identify the precise verses that had followed the Battle of Badr; to recognise allusions to the Prophet’s concealment in a cave during the course of the hijra, or to his villainous uncle, or to the domestic arrangements of his wives. Authentication, as with all the other fruits of Muslim scholarship, was provided by unimpeachable witnesses. Isnads stretched back resplendent to the moment of each original recitation. Proofs bristled everywhere. Immortal and uncreated the Qur’an may have been; but it had also been firmly tethered to the bedrock of the human past. God had spoken to Muhammad—and Muhammad had belonged to the world. Islam was to be regarded both as eternal, and as born of a specific moment in time, a specific place, a specific prophet.

“The believers were done a favour,” so the Qur’an informed its readers, “when God sent among them a messenger, of their number, reciting to them His verses, purifying them and teaching them the Book and Wisdom, when before they had been in manifest error.”³² Here, in this ringing assertion, lay the very essence of how the Muslim people saw the origins of their faith. Origins that were to be interpreted not merely as a matter of historical record, but as indubitable and irrefutable proof of the shaping hand of God Himself.

Airy Nothings

It was hardly surprising that the great labour of fashioning the Sunna took Muslim scholars so long. Such was the compendious quantity of sayings attributed to the Prophet that only in the eleventh Christian century, some four hundred years after his death, could jurists plausibly claim to have bagged the lot. Even then, however, they could not relax. An even greater challenge awaited them: defining precisely what it was that God, speaking through His Prophet, had bestowed upon the Muslim people. Naturally, fathoming the purposes of an omnipotent and omniscient deity was no simple matter. As one ninth-century scholar, in a tone of awed defeatism, had put it: “Imagination does not reach Him, and thinking does not comprehend Him.”³³ In the event, it would take six hundred long years of bitter and occasionally murderous argument before scholars of the Sunna could finally be brought to agree on the nature of the Qur’an: that it was eternal, not created, and divine, not a reflection of God. There were certain problems altogether too critical, too sensitive, too awkward to be rushed.

Muslim theologians were not the first to wrestle with the implications of this. Long before the words of God manifested themselves in the mouth of Muhammad, Christians too had struggled to explain how a deity who transcended time and space might conceivably have descended from heaven to earth. That they identified this intrusion of the divine into the realm of the mortal with a person rather than a book had done nothing to lessen the challenge. Indeed, Christians had wrangled over the nature of Christ for quite as long as Muslim scholars would go on to debate the nature of the Qur’an. Admittedly, in the early years of the Christian faith, these arguments had hardly been such as to disturb the councils of nations; but during late antiquity, when emperors and kings started to wrestle with them too, whole empires were transformed by the arcana of such debates. Just as the civilisation of Islam would be transfigured by the musings of philosophers, so would Christendom. East and west, much of the world was destined to bear witness to what had been, perhaps, the most startling discovery of late antiquity: that pondering how God might have manifested Himself on earth could serve to transform the way entire peoples behaved and thought.

Nevertheless, while Muslims and Christians faced very similar knots, their respective attempts to unravel these set them on radically different courses. Clearly, if God were to be identified with words in a book, then those words were bound to defy all attempts at rational analysis. Even to contemplate such a project was blasphemy. Devout Muslims were no more likely to question the origins of the Qur’an than devout Christians were to start ransacking Jerusalem for the skeleton of a man with holes in his hands and feet. This was because the nearest Christian analogy to the role played in Islam by the Prophet’s revelations was not the Bible but Jesus—the Son of God. The record of Christ’s life, for all that it lay at the heart of the Christian faith, was not considered divine—unlike Christ Himself. Although Christians certainly believed it to be the word of God, they also knew that it had been mediated through eminently fallible mortals. Not only were there four different accounts of Christ’s life in the Bible, but it contained as well a whole host of other books, written over a vast expanse of time, and positively demanding to be sifted, compared and weighed the one against the other. As a result, the contextualising of ancient texts came to be second nature to scholars of the Bible, and the skills required to attempt it hard-wired into the Christian brain.

And in due course, into brains that were barely Christian at all. By the eighteenth century, the Church had long ceased to hold the monopoly on subjecting its holy texts to scholarly enquiry. The model of history promoted by Eusebius—which traced in the past the working of the purposes of God—had started to devour itself. In his massive account of the decline and fall of the Roman Empire, the English historian Edward Gibbon subjected some of the most venerated compositions of late antiquity to a pathologist’s scalpel: “The only defect of these pleasing compositions is the want of truth and common sense.”³⁴ So he dismissed, with his customary solemn sneer, the writings of one prominent saint. Yet his tone of irony was to prove a mere presentiment of the far more naked scepticism that would increasingly, from the nineteenth century onwards, see almost every tenet of the Christian faith subjected to the most merciless dissection. The shock, to a still devout European public, was seismic. In 1863, when a lapsed seminarian by the name of Ernest Renan presumed to publish a biography of Jesus that treated its subject not as a god, but as a man like any other, it was condemned in horrified terms by one critic as nothing less than a “new crucifixion of Our Lord.”³⁵ The book promptly became a runaway bestseller. Scandalous it may have been, but the European public, it appeared, was not entirely averse to being scandalised.

Of course, it was not only the life of Christ that was being put under the microscope. Four years before the publication of Renan’s tome, Charles Darwin had brought out his epochal study On the Origin of Species—with devastating implications for any notion that the biblical account of the Creation might somehow embody a literal truth. The genie of scepticism was now well and truly out of the bottle. Time would demonstrate that there was to be no going back, in the Christian West, on the habit of subjecting to scientific enquiry what had for millennia been regarded as the sacrosanct word of God. Throughout the nineteenth century, in the hushed and sombre libraries of German theology departments, scholars would crawl and teem over the pages of the Bible, gnawing away at the sacred text like termites. Its first five books, they demonstrated, far from having been written by Moses, as had always traditionally been taught, seemed instead to have been stitched together from multiple sources.^e Not only that, but these same sources had almost certainly been written centuries after the events that they purported to describe. Moses, it appeared, had been made into a mouthpiece for laws that he might very well never have pronounced—if, that was, he had even existed in the first place. Here was an unravelling of the scriptural tapestry so destructive that even some scholars themselves began to fret over the implications. “It is to suspend the beginnings of Hebrew history,” as one German theologian noted grimly, “not upon the grand creations of Moses, but upon airy nothings.”³⁶

Meanwhile, as scholars in Europe were busy prodding and yanking at the mighty fabric of their ancestral scriptures, their counterparts in the Islamic world had attained a whole new plateau of complacency. Back in the eighteenth century, at around the same time as Gibbon was embarking on his great history of Rome, Muslim jurists were concluding that they had at last learned every lesson to be gleaned from the example of the Prophet, and that the “gate of interpretation”³⁷ was therefore closed. Even Gibbon, the inveterate sceptic, had been impressed by the reams of evidence that the would-be biographer of Muhammad seemed able to draw upon. To him, and to other European scholars, the depth and detail of Muslim writings on the origins of Islam came as a revelation; nor did they ever doubt that Muhammad’s career and character could authentically be known. “It is not the propagation but the permanency of his religion that deserves our wonder,” Gibbon wrote. “[T]he same pure and perfect impression which he engraved at Mecca and Medina, is preserved, after the revolutions of twelve centuries, by the Indian, the African, and the Turkish proselytes of the Koran.”³⁸ In comparison with the great figures of the Bible, Muhammad seemed possessed of a striking and enviable solidity. As Renan—a diligent Arabist when not putting the cat among Christian pigeons—memorably put it: “Islam was born, not amid the mystery which cradles the origins of other religions, but rather in the full light of history.”³⁹ Ibn Hisham could not have put it any better.

Except that there was the hint, just the nagging hint, of a problem. Like the tiniest patch of dry rot, it was not, perhaps, immediately apparent; and even those who did spot it were content, in the main, to turn a blind eye. When Gibbon, in a discreet footnote, coyly acknowledged that none of the historians he had consulted for his biography of Muhammad was a writer “of the first century of the Hegira,”⁴⁰ he chose not to pursue the implications of this striking confession. A hundred years on, however, and in the wake of all the exacting criticism to which the origins of Judaism and Christianity had been subjected, the realisation was starting to dawn on certain scholars that Islam too, just perhaps, might have its own issue with its sources. The particular focus of their attentions was that vast network of struts and supports which underpinned the Sunna, and with it, most Muslims’ understanding of their Prophet: the hadiths. Perhaps this was only to be expected. In an age when Jewish and Christian scholars had presumed to question the most fundamental tenets of their own faiths, those among them who turned their gaze to Islam were almost bound to raise an eyebrow at the sheer volume of sayings posthumously attributed to Muhammad. The question they asked was a simple one, but no less devastating for that: were the hadiths actually genuine?

Now, as it happened, a number of towering Muslim scholars had fretted over the same identical issue a full millennium before. Their researches had been exacting, and their conclusions notably severe. They had freely acknowledged that innumerable hadiths had been faked; that Caliphs, lawyers and heretics had invented them willy-nilly to serve their various purposes; that many hadiths contradicted one another. Nevertheless, Muslim scholars had insisted, there did remain gold, priceless gold, out there amid the dross. Accordingly, concerned to identify which sayings of the Prophet could be enshrined as genuine and authoritative, and which were to be junked, they had toured all the various lands of the Umma, collecting hadiths wherever they could find them, and then subjecting each and every one to the most rigorous examination. Of al-Bukhari—the most proficient and celebrated hadith hunter—it was said that he had collected 600,000 supposed sayings of the Prophet, and dismissed all but 7225. His collection of hadiths—along with those of five other great scholars—was, in effect, what constituted the Sunna. As a result, to question their value was to question the entire basis of Islamic law. It was also, in the ultimate reckoning, to question the truth of the portrait of the Prophet himself. The risk of heresy was palpable. Unsurprisingly, then, the vast majority of Muslims had always dreaded to take such a scandalous, such a blasphemous step.^f

But this, of course, was hardly a consideration fit to rein in the exacting scepticism of the modern West. Beginning in 1890 and continuing to the present day, a succession of scholars have delivered a series of body-blows to the credibility of the hadiths as a record of what Muhammad himself might truly have said. Even the greatest collectors, even al-Bukhari himself, had failed to spot the clues. Heroic though all their efforts at panning for gold had undoubtedly been, yet their rigour had been largely in vain—for the ability to distinguish a fake will invariably require a certain measure of distance, both of sympathy and time. Modern scholars have been in a position to recognise, as al-Bukhari was not, how even the most seemingly authentic hadiths wear a glitter that is all too often that of fool’s gold. Far from bearing witness to the opinions of Muhammad, they in truth bear the unmistakable stamp of controversies that were raging two whole centuries after the hijra. Over and again, the Prophet had been made to serve as the mouthpiece for a whole host of rival, and often directly antagonistic, traditions. Many of these, far from deriving from Muhammad, were not even Arab in origin, but originated instead in the laws, the customs, or the superstitions of infidel peoples. What the jurists of the early Caliphate had succeeded in pulling off, by means of “a fiction perhaps unequalled in the history of human thought,”⁴¹ was the ultimate in lawyers’ tricks: a quite breathtaking show of creativity and nerve. Stitching together a whole new legal framework for the infant empire, it had become the habit of these ingenious scholars to attribute their rulings, not to their own initiative or judgement, but rather to that ultimate in authorities: the Prophet. The dry rot of fabrication, in short, was endemic throughout the Sunna. Joseph Schacht, a German professor schooled in the severest tradition of Teutonic textual criticism, and who in 1950 wrote a groundbreaking study of how precisely the hadith collections had come to be manufactured, was blunt in spelling out the implications. “We must abandon the gratuitous assumptions,” he declared flatly, “that there existed originally an authentic core of information going back to the time of the Prophet.”⁴² In other words—as a source for the origins of Islam, the hadiths were worse than useless.

What about the “supports”—the “isnads”—that had been deployed with such care and attention to buttress the sayings of the Prophet? Their function was, of course, precisely to stamp the hadiths as genuine: to provide the Muslim people with tested chains of transmission, grappling hooks cast back across the tumult and upheaval of the centuries, anchors that could serve to moor them to the lifetime of the Prophet. Yet if the statements were fakes, then so too, it went without saying, were the isnads. Nor was that the worst. Even supposing that a hadith had authentically derived from the time of Muhammad, its value to any would-be biographer of the Prophet was unlikely to be much enhanced by the fact. Context, for the historian, is all—and no Muslim scholar or lawyer who quoted the Prophet ever had the slightest interest in establishing what the original context of his sayings might authentically have been. To brandish a hadith was to take for granted that the advice contained within it was timeless and universal. That Muslims in the heyday of the Caliphate were living under circumstances that would have been unimaginable to Muhammad himself never so much as crossed their minds. As a result, where the isnads were not being deployed to disguise a blatant fabrication, they were serving to obliterate all memory of the setting in which the Prophet’s sayings had first been delivered. Rather as in an Agatha Christie novel, where it is invariably the suspect with the most ornate alibi who proves to be the murderer, so similarly, in the field ofhadith studies, it turned out that there was no surer mark of fraud or distortion than a really exacting attention to detail. As Schacht, with the knowing disillusion of a Poirot, put it: “The more perfect the isnad, the later the tradition.”⁴³ The lavish name-dropping of references, in anything affecting to cite the Prophet, was a mark, not of reliability, but of precisely the opposite.

Here, then, for anyone committed to believing that what Muslim tradition taught about the origins of Islam might actually have been the literal truth, was a most unsettling possibility. “If all Hadith is given up,” as a noted Pakistani liberal, Fazlur Rahman, reflected a decade after Schacht’s momentous study, “what remains but a yawning chasm of fourteen centuries between us and the Prophet?”⁴⁴ His tone of anguish was hardly surprising. Rahman well appreciated that it was not only the lawyers of the early Caliphate who had sought to bridge the “yawning chasm” between themselves and the age of Muhammad through the promiscuous deployment of isnads. Historians had done so as well. How, for instance, had Ibn Hisham been able to substantiate his story of the spectacular contribution made by angels to Muhammad’s victory at Badr? He was certainly not the first to write about it. Indeed, he positively gloried in his plagiarism, freely acknowledging that his whole book was a reworking of a biography written half a century earlier by a man named Ibn Ishaq—a child of the grandchildren of the generation of the Prophet. But that, of course, merely begs a further question: how had Ibn Ishaq obtained his own information?

“Remember when you prayed fervently to your Lord,” it was written in the Qur’an, “and He answered you: ‘I shall reinforce you with a thousand angels, coming in waves.’ ”⁴⁵ This, Muslim scholars had settled, could only have been an allusion to the Battle of Badr. Eye-witnesses too, their testimony copied by Ibn Hisham from Ibn Ishaq’s book, had confirmed this verdict. “If I were in Badr today and had my sight,” one of them was said to have reminisced, “I could show you the glen from which the angels emerged. I have not the slightest doubt on the point.”⁴⁶ Here, then, surely, was sufficient evidence to satisfy even the most hardened sceptic? And yet, and yet … Both proofs relied on isnads. It was an isnad which confirmed that the verse in the Qur’an did actually refer to the victory at Badr; it was an isnad that confirmed the testimony of the veteran. Remove them, and there was no evidence at all. No wonder, then, that Fazlur Rahman should so have dreaded the “yawning chasm” that he saw the bleak and ravening scepticism of the West as opening up before his faith. “In the vacuity of this chasm not only must the Qur’an slip from our fingers … but even the very existence and integrity of the Qur’an and, indeed, the existence of the Prophet himself become an unwarranted myth.”⁴⁷

His forebodings were well founded. Over the past forty years, the reliability of what the Muslim historical tradition can tell us about the origins of Islam has indeed come under brutal and escalating attack—to the degree that many historians now doubt that it can tell us anything much of value at all. To be sure, there are still those who will recount the Battle of Badr as though it were an episode as rooted in history as, say, the Battle of Waterloo, carefully analysing Muhammad’s strategy, calculating the size of his forces, and illustrating his tactics with arrows on maps.⁴⁸ Yet this, to many others, appears a spectacular misreading of the evidence, a confusion of history with something very different: literature. “Clientship and loyalty, plunder and pursuit, challenges and instances of single combat”:⁴⁹ these were the themes of Ibn Hisham in his account of the Battle of Badr, just as they were similarly the themes that the Greek poet Homer, a millennium and a half earlier, had explored in his great epic of warfare, the Iliad. The one features angels; the other gods. Why, then, should we believe that the account of the Prophet’s first great victory is any more authentic than the legend of the siege of Troy?

Certainly, it can come as a jolt to discover that, with a single exception, we have no extant descriptions of the Battle of Badr that date from before the ninth century AD. We do not even have Ibn Ishaq’s original biography of Muhammad—only revisions and reworkings. As for the material on which Ibn Ishaq himself drew upon for his researches, it has long since vanished. Set against the triumphal hubbub raised by Arab historians in the ninth century, let alone the centuries that followed, the silence is deafening and perplexing. The precise state of play bears spelling out. Over the course of almost two hundred years, the Arabs, a people never noted for their reticence, and whose motivation, we are told, had been an utterly consuming sense of religious certitude, had set themselves to conquering the world—and yet in all that time, they composed not a single record of their victories, not one, that has survived into the present day. How could this possibly have been so, when even on the most barbarous fringes of civilisation, even inBritain, even in the north of England, books of history were being written during this same period, and copied, and lovingly tended? Why, when the savage Northumbrians were capable of preserving the writings of a scholar such as Bede, do we have no Muslim records from the age of Muhammad? Why not a single Arab account of his life, nor of his followers’ conquests, nor of the progress of his religion, from the whole of the near two centuries that followed his death?

Even the sole exception to the rule—a tiny shred of papyrus discovered in Palestine and dated to around AD 740—serves only to compound the puzzle.⁵⁰ Reading it is like overhearing a game of Chinese whispers. Over the course of only eight lines, it provides something truly startling: a date for the Battle of Badr that is not in the holy month of Ramadan. Why should this come as a surprise? Because later Muslim scholars, writing their learned and definitive commentaries on the Qur’an, confidently identified Badr with an otherwise cryptic allusion to “the day the two armies clashed”⁵¹—a date that fell in Ramadan. Perhaps, then, on this one point, the scholars were wrong? Perhaps. But if so, then why should they have been right in anything else that they wrote? What if the entire account of the victory at Badr were nothing but a fiction, a dramatic just-so story, fashioned to explain allusions within the Qur’an that would otherwise have remained beyond explanation? A battle on a valley’s edge won against terrifying odds; angels swooping down to strike at infidel necks; plunder seized from routed caravans: the holy text certainly alludes to all these things. Yet, aside from a single name-check, Badr itself is never mentioned.⁵² There is certainly no confirmation that a great battle—such as the one described by Ibn Hisham—was ever fought there. Whatever else it may be, the Qur’an is no work of history. Startlingly, were it not for all the commentaries elucidating its mysteries, all the biographies of the Prophet, and all the sprawling collections ofhadiths—none of which, in the form we have them, pre-dates the beginning of the third century after the hijra—we would have only the barest reason to associate it with a man named Muhammad at all.

That the coming of Islam was one of the supreme revolutions of world history is evident enough. All the more devastating to realise, then, that of written evidence composed before AD 800, the only traces we possess are either the barest shreds of shreds, or else the delusory shimmering of mirages.⁵³ No empire can be raised amid a silence, of course; but what we chiefly hear now of the founding of the Caliphate is the merest sound and fury, tales told centuries later, and signifying, if not nothing, then very little. The voices of the Arab warriors who dismembered the ancient empires of Persia and Rome, and of their sons, and of their sons in turn—let alone of their daughters and grand-daughters—have all been silenced, utterly and for ever. Neither letters, nor speeches, nor journals, if they were ever so much as written, have survived; no hint as to what those who actually lived through the establishment of the Caliphate thought, or felt, or believed. It is as though we had no eye-witness accounts of the Protestant Reformation, or the French Revolution, or the two World Wars. No wonder, then, that a leading historian of the process by which Islam, in the ninth and tenth Christian centuries, finally came to construct an accepted past for itself, and to make sense of its rise to global power, should have lamented the “loss of the tradition’s earliest layers,” and pronounced it “nothing short of catastrophic.”⁵⁴ Far from Islam having been born in the full light of history, its birth was shrouded in what has appeared, to an increasing number of scholars, an almost impenetrable darkness.

To be sure, there are very few scholars who would go so far as to claim that the Prophet never existed.⁵⁵ Someone by the name of Muhammad does certainly appear to have intruded upon the consciousness of his near-contemporaries. One Christian source describes “a false prophet”⁵⁶ leading the Saracens in an invasion of Palestine. This was written in AD 634—just two years after the traditional date of Muhammad’s death. Another, written six years later, refers to him by name. Over the succeeding decades, a succession of priests and monks would write of an enigmatic figure whom they described variously as “the general,” “the instructor” or “the king” of the Arabs. Yet these cryptic allusions—not to mention the fact that they were all made by infidels—merely highlight, once again, the total absence of any early Muslim reference to Muhammad. Only in the 690s did a Caliph finally get around to inscribing the Prophet’s name on a public monument; only decades after that did the first tentative references to him start to appear in private inscriptions;⁵⁷ and only around 800, of course, did biographies come to be written of Muhammad that Muslims took care to preserve. What might have happened to earlier versions of his life we cannot know for certain; but one possibility is strongly hinted at by none other than Ibn Hisham. Much that previous generations had recorded of the Prophet, he commented sternly, was either bogus, or irrelevant, or sacrilegious. “Things which it is disgraceful to discuss; matters which would distress certain people; and such reports as I have been told are not to be accepted as trustworthy—all these things have I omitted.”⁵⁸ As well he might have done. What was at stake, in Ibn Hisham’s devout opinion, was not merely his status as a reputable historian, nor even his good name as a Muslim, but something infinitely more precious to him: the fate of his soul.

Here, then, at least, is terra firma. What we can know with absolute confidence is that by the early ninth century, the precise details of what Muhammad might have said and done some two hundred years previously had come to provide, for vast numbers of people, a roadmap that they believed led straight to heaven. God had seized personal control of human events. The world had been set upon a novel course. To doubt this conviction was to risk hellfire. Given this perspective, it is scarcely surprising that any ambition to write history or biography as we might understand it should have paled into nothingness compared to the infinitely more pressing obligation to trace in the pattern of the Prophet’s life the wishes and purposes of the Almighty. That is why, in leaving the age of Ibn Hisham behind, and venturing back into the heaving ocean of uncertainty and conjecture that is the early history of Islam, today’s historians can find it such a struggle to identify reliable charts. Adrift amid the shadowy vastness, what prospect of finding landfall? There is always the Qur’an, of course—and yet the holy text itself, once stripped of all its cladding, all the elaborate scaffolding of commentaries built up around it with such labour and devotion from the ninth century onwards, can seem only to add to the voyager’s sense of being lost upon a darkling ocean. “It stands isolated,” one scholar suggests, “like an immense rock jutting forth from a desolate sea, a stony eminence with few marks on it to suggest how or why it appeared in this watery desert.”⁵⁹Or even, most shockingly, when. After all, if the entire colossal edifice of Muslim tradition depends upon isnads for its veracity, and if the isnads cannot be trusted, then how can we know for sure that the Qur’an dates from the time of Muhammad? How can we know who compiled it, from what sources, for what motives? Can we even be sure that its origins lay in Arabia? In short, do we really know anything at all about the birth of Islam?

Scholarship, like nature, abhors a vacuum. A number of historians, over the past forty years, have responded to the eerie silence that seems to shroud the origins of Islam by rewriting them in often unsettlingly radical ways. It has been argued that the wellspring of the Qur’an lay not in Arabia but in Iraq; that it was written originally not in Arabic but Syriac, the lingua franca of the Near East at the time; that “Muhammad” was originally a title referring to Jesus.⁶⁰ By and large, when a book attempts to redraft the origins of a major world religion on quite such a jaw-dropping scale, the cover will feature a picture of the Knights Templar or the Holy Grail. A sensational argument, however, need not necessarily be an exercise in sensationalism. Far from aping Dan Brown, most of the scholars who have explored Islam’s origins seem to pride themselves on making their prose as dense with obscure vocabulary, and obscurer languages, as they possibly can. As a result, their speculations have rarely impinged on the public consciousness. Despite the fact that Western interest in Islam, over the past decade or so, has soared to unprecedented heights, the mood of crisis currently convulsing the academic study of its origins has received notably little airtime. Like some shadowy monster of the seas, it only ever rarely breaks for the surface, preferring instead to lurk in the deeps.

Nor is the inherent complexity of the subject the only reason for this. Just as Darwin was physically prostrated by anxiety over how his theories might be received by his family and friends, there are many today no less nervous about causing offence to people whose whole lives are grounded in their faith. For a non-believer to claim that the Qur’an might have originated outside of Arabia, or derived from Christian hymns, or been written in Syriac, is liable to be no less shocking to Muslims than has the Muslim denial of Jesus’s divinity always been to Christians. Unlike in nineteenth-century Europe, where it was disillusioned seminarians and the sons of Lutheran pastors who led the way in subjecting the origins of their ancestral religion to the full pitiless glare of historical enquiry, the contemporary Islamic world has not, it is fair to say, shown any great inclination to follow suit. No equivalent of Ernest Renan has emerged, to scandalise and titillate the Muslim faithful. The authorship of the Qur’an has not been questioned by the disillusioned offspring of imams. Those few Muslims who have sought to follow the trail originally blazed by nineteenth-century European scholars have generally opted to publish under pseudonyms—or have suffered the consequences. In the Arab world, at any rate, to doubt the traditional account of Islam’s origins has been to risk death threats, prosecution for apostasy, or even defenestration.⁶¹

As a result, inevitably but regrettably, questioning the traditional narrative of Islam’s origins remains largely what it has always been: the preserve of Western scholars. Some of these, it is true, are themselves Muslim—and one of them, a professor at the University of Münster, has proved himself such a chip off the old Teutonic scholarly block that he too, like some of his more radical infidel colleagues, has gone on record as claiming Muhammad to be a figure of myth.⁶² None of which, unhappily, has done much to allay the suspicions of other Muslims that the probing of their most sacred traditions is not all some sinister conspiracy, most likely cooked up by Mossad, or perhaps the Vatican, or else American evangelicals. That the methods currently being deployed by Western scholars to place the Qur’an in its historical context were first honed upon the Bible has dented this conviction not a whit. One appalled Muslim scholar has argued that “even the crusaders’ fury pales to nothing” in comparison with modern academics’ “iconoclastic attack.”⁶³ Implicit in this bellow of indignation is the presumption that non-believers have no business poking their noses into Islam’s origins. As one Saudi professor sternly tells his co-religionists, “Only the writings of a practising Muslim are worthy of our attention.”⁶⁴

Taken to its logical extreme, of course, this would mean that only worshippers of Jupiter could legitimately write about the Romans, and only Odinists about the Vikings. Nevertheless, it is hardly necessary to be a Saudi theologian, or even a Muslim at all, to find something profoundly destabilising in the thesis that the stories told by Islam about its own origins might obscure as much as they reveal. The faithful, after all, are not alone in having a massive stake in the veracity of their inherited traditions. So too do plenty of non-Muslim historians. Whole centuries’ worth of scholarship have been founded on the presumption that the sources for early Islam can be trusted. To this day, they continue to be recycled endlessly, whether in popular biographies of Muhammad or in academic texts.⁶⁵ It still tends to be taken for granted that they remain, for anyone wishing to construct a narrative of Islam’s origins, the only real building blocks to hand. Unsurprisingly, then, over the past century—and particularly over the past few decades—many scholars of early Islam have conducted an aggressive rearguard action to save these sources from total redundancy. Despite the increasingly widespread acknowledgement among historians of the period that it is “exceedingly difficult to know much about Islamic origins,”⁶⁶attempts to shore up the foundations continue. The building blocks fashioned by Ibn Hisham and his successors have certainly not been abandoned yet.

Paradoxically, however, these attempts to repair the damage done to the mighty edifice of Muslim tradition do more than anything else to highlight the full scale of the paradigm shift that is afflicting it. Clearly, when two scholars can devote their entire careers to studying the same languages and sources, and yet arrive at wholly contradictory conclusions, it is no longer possible to presume that there is anything remotely self-evident about the birth of Islam. Forty years ago, any querying what Muslim tradition taught about its own origins might have been dismissed as mere crankish trouble-making: one that no more merited a response from heavyweight experts than did, say, the attempt to ascribe Shakespeare’s plays to Francis Bacon or the Earl of Oxford. Nowadays, it is hard to think of any other field of history so riven by disagreement as is that of early Islam. One of the world’s leading Qur’anic scholars has gone so far as to speak of a “schism.” “The controversy about the Qur’an,” she has lamented—whether it is an authentic record of the Prophet’s utterances or an anthology, stitched together from various different sources—“permeates the entire field of Qur’anic studies.”⁶⁷ Yet, even to speak of “schism” may be overly optimistic. The reality, perhaps, is even messier. In truth, it can often seem—the fragmentary nature of the evidence being what it is, not to mention the complexity and sensitivity of the issues at stake—that there are as many different interpretations of Islam’s origins as there are experts writing about it.⁶⁸

All of which, in a non-specialist, can tend to inspire a peculiarly lurching sense of dizziness: the kind that might afflict someone studying a trompe-l’oeil in a hall of mirrors. No wonder, then, that it should sometimes feel tempting to back away from the problem altogether, to close one’s eyes to it, to pretend that it does not exist. Rehash the traditional Muslim sources, and follow the path of least resistance. After all, as one prominent hadith scholar has cheerily admitted, the entire “isnad debate” is not merely “long” but “tedious.” Nevertheless, as he then reminds the faint-hearted, “it is one in which scholars of Islamic origins must participate. There is no ignoring the debate in order to forge ahead with more important or more intriguing issues.” To avoid it is “at best naïve and at worst negligent.”⁶⁹ History, unlike faith, cannot be built upon foundations of sand.

But where is solid bedrock to be found? When I first embarked on the project of writing this book, I had no idea that locating it would prove so problematic. My initial state of ignorance being what it was, I had vaguely assumed, based on my reading of numerous biographies of the Prophet, that I would find a whole wealth of sources dating from his lifetime just waiting to be quarried. It was therefore a bit of a blow to discover that the bulk of what we have constitutes, in the memorable formulation of one historian, “a monument to the destruction rather than the preservation of the past.”⁷⁰ The same questions that have been confronting scholars of early Islam for the past forty years were now staring me full in the face. How, if the underpinnings of Muslim tradition are so unstable, is it possible to write anything at all about Islam’s origins? What hope, if the isnads and all the many writings that depend upon them are unreliable, of ever explaining the birth of one of the world’s great civilisations? Can it really be the case that the lack of a story is the only story?

Fortunately, amid all the confusion and obscurity, of one thing at least we can be confident: Islam did not originate in a total vacuum. Of the world into which Muhammad was born, with its rival superpowers and its formidable array of monotheisms, we are most decidedly not ignorant. To compare the would-be universal dominions of Persia and Rome with the empire that the Caliphate became, or to trace echoes of Jewish and Christian writings in the Qur’an, is to recognise that Islam, far from spelling the end of what had gone before, seems in many ways to have been its culmination. Even the belief to which Muslims have long subscribed, that the Prophet received his revelations not by means of human agency, but courtesy of an angel, in fact hints at just how deeply rooted are the doctrines of Islam within the subsoil of the ancient Near East. From where precisely does the tradition of Muhammad’s first terrifying encounter with Gabriel in a cave derive? There is no reference to it in the Qur’an; nor to the Prophet’s initial agony when receiving the revelations; nor even to the hearing of any supernatural voice. Across the lands conquered by the Arabs, however, it had long been taken for granted that angels visited those particularly favoured by God—and that the experience was often agonising. Coincidence? It seems most unlikely. Rather, it surely reflects the unique circumstances of the world that the Arabs, building on the foundations laid by the Persians and the Romans, had made their own: a world in which the yearning to fathom the purposes of a single god had become universal, and Gabriel a name on everybody’s lips.

All of which, to anyone pondering how a Near East divided between two venerable empires might have ended up Muslim, opens up an intriguing and suggestive line of enquiry. Is it possible that Islam, far from originating outside the mainstream of ancient civilisation, was in truth a religion in the grand tradition of Judaism and Christianity—one bred of the very marrow of late antiquity?

The Sectarian Milieu

Gabriel—or Jibril, as he is called in Arabic—is not entirely absent from the Qur’an. One verse confirms him as the agent who has been bringing down revelations into the heart of God’s chosen messenger; a second, somewhat bathetically, describes him as primed to intervene in a domestic squabble between the Prophet and two of his wives.⁷¹ Clearly, then, wherever and whenever the Qur’an may have been composed, its target audience was perfectly familiar with the most celebrated angel in the Bible. Clinching proof of this is provided by the detailed coverage given by the Prophet to what, for Christians, had always ranked as the ultimate in annunciations: Gabriel’s visitation to Mary, the mother of Christ. The episode is given a notably starry role as well in the Qur’an—where it is retold not once, but twice. Mary was evidently a person much on the Prophet’s mind. Not only is she the one woman in his revelations to be mentioned by name, but she features as well in a whole range of incidents quite aside from the Annunciation. Details left unrecorded by the New Testament—for instance, that she went into labour beneath a palm tree, where her son, speaking from within her womb, encouraged her to snack on a date or two—are given pride of place in the Qur’an. Gratifying evidence, so it appeared to Muslims contemptuous of the Christian scriptures, that they were far better informed about the life of Jesus than were those who, in their folly and delusion, presumed to worship him as a god.

But how had the Prophet come by these various stories? To Muslims, of course, the question was a waste of breath. Muhammad had been visited by the divine. Just as Christians believed that Mary, by giving birth to her son, had delivered what they termed theLogos, or the “Word,”⁷² so Muhammad’s followers knew that his revelations, gasped out with “the sweat dripping from his forehead,”⁷³ were the veritable speech of God. Muslims were no more likely to ask whether the Prophet had been influenced by the writings of other faiths than were Christians to wonder whether Mary had truly been a virgin. What the stiff-necked Jews and the obdurately blinkered Christians had failed to realise, in the opinion of the Muslim faithful, was that every single prophet mentioned in the Bible had actually been a follower of Islam. Hence the starring roles granted to so many of them, from Adam to Jesus, in the Qur’an. And to Mary too, of course. That stories of the Virgin being succoured by a friendly palm tree had actually been a Christian tradition for centuries, and seem in turn to have derived from a legend told by the pagan Greeks, was blithely ignored—as, of course, it was bound to be.⁷⁴ No Muslim scholar could possibly have countenanced a notion that the Prophet might have been in the business of filching anecdotes from infidels. The Qur’an, after all, did not derive from outside sources. Rather, it was the Jews and the Christians, by allowing their holy books to become corrupted, who had ended up with distorted, second-hand scriptures. Only in the Qur’an had the awful purity of the divine revelation been properly preserved. Every last word of it, every last syllable, every last letter, came directly from God, and from God alone.

Perhaps it was only to be expected, then—despite the profoundly ambiguous testimony of the holy text itself—that a tradition should gradually have grown up, which in due course hardened into orthodoxy, that Muhammad himself had been illiterate.^g Even had the Prophet wished to curl up with an infidel book or two, in other words, it would have been beyond him to decipher them. Yet reassuring a reflection though this certainly provided to the faithful, it still did not rank, perhaps, as the surest evidence that the Qur’an had truly descended from the celestial heights. Even more infallible a proof was witnessed by the circumstances of Muhammad’s upbringing. Mecca, after all, had been inhabited by pagans, not Jews or Christians—and it stood right in the middle of an enormous and empty desert. The ancient capitals of the Near East, which for more than four thousand years had served as the cockpits of civilisation, immense petri-dishes teeming with peoples of every conceivable faith, dense with temples, and synagogues, and churches, were a colossal distance away. Even to the borders of Palestine, where Abraham had built his tomb, and Solomon reigned, and Jesus been crucified, it was a full eight hundred miles. What likelihood, then, the Muslim faithful demanded to know, that a prophet born and raised so far from such a milieu could conceivably have been influenced by its traditions and doctrines and writings? The sheer prophylactic immensity of the desert that surrounded Mecca, impenetrable to outsiders as it was, appeared to render the answer obvious. Just as it was the blood and muscle of Mary’s virgin womb that had, in the opinion of Christians, nurtured the coming into the world of the divine, so likewise, in the opinion of Muslims, was it the spreading sands of Arabia which had served to preserve the word of God, over the course of its protracted delivery, in a fit condition of untainted purity.

But the emptiness into which Islam had been born was more than physical. The void had been a spiritual one as well. Muslim scholars termed it Jahiliyyah—the “Age of Ignorance.”⁷⁵ The Arabs, who had drunk, and stolen, and brawled, and thought nothing of burying unwanted children in the sands, nor of practising the most unspeakable sexual abominations, nor of conducting the most interminable feuds, had been lost, it appeared to their heirs, in that pitchest blackness which was the lack of knowledge of God; and this it was that had made the coming of the Prophet all the brighter, all the more dazzling and refulgent a dawn. The contrast between Islam and the age that had preceded it was as clear as that between midday and the dead of night. Yet, it was not only Arabia that had been lost in darkness. The whole world had laboured in the shadows of jahl—“ignorance.” God, however, was great. The old order had been gloriously toppled, and a Caliphate established in its place. Everything had been brought to change. The white radiance of Islam, blazing beyond the borders of Arabia to the limits of the globe, had served to bring all humanity into a wholly new age of light.

This, however, was to redraft history in a quite stunningly radical way. Never before had the past been dismissed with such utter and imperious disdain. Even to Christians, the cycles of time redeemed by the birth of Christ had served as a preparation for the coming of the Messiah. To Muslims, however, everything that had preceded the revelations of their Prophet, all its manifold splendours and achievements, had been the merest phantom show, a shirk-haunted wasteland, to which Islam owed precisely nothing. The effect of this presumption was to prove incalculable. To this day, even in the West, it continues to inform the way in which the history of the Middle East is interpreted and understood. Whether in books, museums or university departments, the ancient world is invariably presumed to have ended with the coming of Muhammad. It is as though everything that had made antiquity what it was came to a sudden and crunching halt around AD 600. The inherent implausibility of this is rarely considered. Instead, at a time when most historians are profoundly suspicious of any notion that great civilisations might emerge from nowhere, owing nothing to what went before, and transforming human behaviour in the merest blinking of an eye, Islam continues to be portrayed as somehow exceptional: lightning from a clear blue sky.

Clearly, if the Qur’an did descend from heaven, then there is no problem in explaining why the stories it tells of Mary, say, should contain such palpable trace-elements of Christian folklore and classical myth. All things, after all, are possible to God. Yet even on the presumption that what Islam teaches is correct, and that the midwife of the faith was genuinely an angel, it is still pushing things to imagine that the theatre of its conquests might suddenly have been conjured, over the span of a single generation, into a set fromThe Arabian Nights. Just because histories written by pious Muslims two hundred years later can serve to give us such an impression does not mean that they are right. The Near East of the Caliphate at the peak of its power and glory was decidedly not that of its foundation two centuries before. To presume otherwise is not merely to perpetuate the notion of the Arab conquests as the sudden dropping of a guillotine onto the neck of everything that preceded them, but to risk enshrining bogus tradition as historical fact. To understand the origins of Islam, and why it evolved in the way that it did, we must look far beyond the age of Ibn Hisham. We must explore the empires and religions of late antiquity.

And if we do, then the landscape through which the first Arab conquerors rode does not seem so very different from landscapes elsewhere in the one-time Roman Empire. Landscapes marked by the seismic shock of superpower collapse; by the desperate struggle of erstwhile provincials to fashion new lives, and new security, for themselves; and by the depredations of foreign invaders, speaking strange languages and adhering to peculiar creeds. What the Arab conquest of formerly Roman provinces such as Palestine and Syria served to demonstrate was that the rising tide beneath which the western half of the empire had vanished was now rolling in across its eastern possessions.

“I took from you at Herakleopolis sixty-five sheep. I repeat—sixty-five and no more, and as an acknowledgement of this fact, we have made the present confirmation.”⁷⁶ This was the receipt issued by an Arab war band in 642 to the city fathers of Herakleopolis, a somnolent backwater in what only two years previously had still ranked as the Roman province of Egypt. The seamless fusion of extortion and bureaucracy contained in the document would have been nothing unfamiliar to the elites of other abandoned provinces—whether in North Africa or Spain, Italy or Gaul. The security of Rome’s empire had gone—and gone for good. Compromise with barbarian overlords, in an age of Roman retreat and diminishment, had become the name of the game.

Granted, the Arabs who had come swaggering into Herakleopolis do seem to have been uniquely self-possessed. Fastidiously, they logged the date of their transaction with the city elders: in Greek, as “the thirtieth of the month of Pharmouthi of the first indiction,” and in their own language, as “the year Twenty-Two.” To us, with the benefit of hindsight, it is the latter detail that leaps out. Redeemed from a provincial rubbish tip, it constitutes something truly momentous: the earliest mention on any surviving datable document of what would end up enshrined as the Muslim calendar. Clearly, then, it was something more than merely a greed for mutton that had brought the Arabs to Herakleopolis. But what? Some sense of a new beginning, of a new order, self-evidently. Yet whether their beliefs and ambitions were equivalent to what we would recognise today as Islam is altogether less clear. It is noteworthy, for instance, that the conquerors are described on the back of the receipt, not as Muslims, but as something altogether more enigmatic: Magaritai. What precisely this might have meant, and how it was to be linked to the unfamiliar dating system employed by the newcomers, and whether, if at all, it had been inspired by some novel understanding of God, the document does not reveal. Instead, it is the motives of those who are being screwed for livestock, the city fathers of Herakleopolis, that are the more readily transparent. How else, after all, save by attempting to patch together an accommodation with their unwanted guests, were they to salvage anything of the status quo? If there was much from the past that would necessarily have to be junked, then so too was there much that might be redeemed. In what had once, two centuries before, been the western half of the empire, the ghosts of Rome’s vanished order still haunted the barbarian kingdoms that had been founded upon its grave. In the East as well, judging from the receipt issued at Herakleopolis, the old order did not change overnight, yielding place to new. Its legacy endured.

Of course, it was not only Roman ghosts who haunted the dominion established by the Arabs in the seventh century. In the lowlands of Mesopotamia and the uplands of Iran, there was the spectre of the empire of the Persian kings. This dominion had in turn been raised upon the foundations of still older monarchies, sediment upon sun-baked sediment: for imperialism, in the East, reached back to the dawn of time. Dimly, in the scriptures of the Jews and the Christians, this was remembered: that there had once been such things as pharaohs and great towers raised up on the banks of the Euphrates to the sky. Yet their sense of this rarely served to oppress them: for if the landscapes of Egypt and Mesopotamia could not help but bear witness to their disorientingly ancient pasts, then so also, in the East, had it become the practice of its peoples to look fixedly to the future. The Jews awaited their messiah; the Christians the return of Christ. Others too shared in what had become the common presumption of the age: that the patterns of human affairs were being traced directly by the finger of God. There were the followers of the Persian prophet Zoroaster, who saw the world as divided into warring factions of good and evil; and the Samaritans, who proclaimed in their creed how there was no god but God, and the Gnostics, who believed that it was possible for a revelation of the divine to descend via angels to chosen mortals; and all the other numerous heretics, and cultists, and sectarians that the Near East had long seemed effortlessly to breed. Prodigious the number of empires sprung from its soil might well have been—and yet not half so prodigious as the number of gods. And this was the soil, the very soil, from which were destined to sprout the pillars of the Caliphate: a dominion that proclaimed itself to be both a universal state and the instrument of heaven’s purpose.

Given all this, how can it possibly make sense to explain the emergence of Islam with reference to Islam alone? That Muslim tradition attributes the origins of the Qur’an and the Sunna to an illiterate man living in a pagan city in the middle of a desert is a problem, not a solution. Perhaps, had the revelations of the Prophet materialised in some other period and place, then the fact that the presumptions of the late antique Near East are shot through them like letters through a stick of rock would indeed appear an authentic miracle. As it is, the distance between Mecca and the lands of the Roman and Persian empires to the north suggests a mystery of the kind that perplexed early cartographers when they mapped Africa and South America, and observed that the eastern and western coasts of the Atlantic Ocean seemed to match like the pieces of a gigantic jigsaw puzzle. Any notion that continents might have been drifting around the globe appeared too ludicrous to contemplate. Only in the 1960s, with the theory of plate tectonics, did a convincing solution finally emerge. A remarkable coincidence turned out not to have been a coincidence at all.

The close fit between the religion that came to be known as Islam and the teeming melting-pot of the late antique Near East would seem to suggest an identical conclusion. Indisputably, the order established by the Arabs in the century following the hijra was something novel. But originality alone does not tell the whole story. Prototype of every subsequent Islamic empire that it certainly was, the Caliphate founded in the seventh century was also something very much more: the last, the climactic, and the most enduring empire of antiquity. Such is the claim that this book aims to prove. Yet it is as well to admit, at the outset, that such a task is far from easy. Certainty, on a whole range of issues, is impossible. There can only ever be speculation. Cosmologists speak of “singularities”—warpings of time and space where the laws of physics do not apply. The puzzle of Islam’s origins might be viewed in a similar way—as a black hole sucking in a great spiralling swirl of influences before casting them back out in a radically different form. The career of Muhammad, traditionally cast as the pivotal episode in the entire history of the Middle East, serves both as the climax of my narrative of the collapse of Roman and Persian power, and as the point where that narrative fragments and breaks down. Does the Qur’an really date from the Prophet’s lifetime? Where, if not in Mecca, might he have lived? Why are the references to him in the early Caliphate so sparse, so enigmatic, and so late? The answers I have given to these questions are all of them unashamedly provisional—as I believe they have no choice but to be. That said, my ambition has been to sift and weigh the awesomely complex sources, to try and take account of all the many gaps and inconsistencies that exist within them, and then, albeit tentatively, to marshal them into something resembling a narrative. The context for this attempt, however, is not the traditional one, derived from the works of Muslims who lived whole centuries after Muhammad’s death, but rather from those who inhabited the world into which he was born: the empire-shadowed, God-haunted world of late antiquity.

Of the full dazzling colour, variety and complexity of this age, the chronicles written by Muslim historians give barely a hint. Infidels, when they appear at all, are made to speak and act precisely as though they were Arabs.⁷⁷ Roman emperors are transformed into mirror-images of Caliphs; Jewish scholars and Christian saints become straw men, shadowy and faceless.^h Fortunately, though, our understanding of the extraordinary melting-pot of imperial and religious traditions that provided the context for Islam’s evolution does not depend solely on Muslim chronicles. Far from it. While seventh-century sources are threadbare to the point of non-existent, those from the preceding two centuries offer sumptuous riches. We have, for the last time, narratives composed by writers who self-consciously regarded themselves as the heirs of the great historians of classical Greece; we have collections of letters, and digests of laws, and compilations of speeches; we have a gazetteer written by a merchant, and a work of anthropology written by a barbarian, and a seeming infinitude of works of Christian piety, from histories of the Church to lives of fabulously self-mortifying saints. In fact, by the standards of other periods of ancient history, we have an almost miraculous volume of evidence—something that historians of antiquity, like magpies flocking above a cache of diamonds, have seized upon with glee. As a result, over the past few decades, the study of the period has been revolutionised. A civilisation previously dismissed as exhausted, sterile and decaying has been comprehensively rehabilitated. What scholars emphasise now is less its decrepitude, more its energy, its exuberance, its inventiveness.

“We see in late antiquity,” as one of its foremost historians has put it, “a mass of experimentation, new ways being tried and new adjustments made.”⁷⁸ What emerges in the century or so after Muhammad as the religion called Islam is one consequence of this “mass of experimentation”—but there are a whole multitude of others too. The most significant of all these, of course, are Judaism and Christianity: faiths that by the time of Muhammad had taken on something like the form they wear today, but that had once themselves been swirls of beliefs and doctrines no less unformed than those professed by the Arabs in the first century of their empire. The story of how Islam came to define itself, and to invent its own past, is only part of a much broader story: one that is ultimately about how Jews, Christians and Muslims all came by their understanding of religion. No other revolution in human thought, perhaps, has done more to transform the world. No other revolution, then, it might be argued, demands more urgently to be put in proper context.

That is why a history of Islam’s origins cannot be written without reference to the origins of Judaism and Christianity—and why in turn a history of the origins of Judaism and Christianity cannot be written without reference to the world that incubated them both. The vision of God to which both rabbis and bishops subscribed, and which Muhammad’s followers inherited, did not emerge out of nowhere. The monotheisms that would end up established as state religions from the Atlantic to central Asia had ancient, and possibly unexpected, roots. To trace them is to cast a searchlight across the entire civilisation of late antiquity. From the dental hygiene of Zoroastrian priests to the frontier policy of Roman strategists; from fantasies about Alexander the Great in Syria to tales of buried books of spells in Iraq; from Jews who thought Christ the messiah to Christians who lived like Jews: all are pieces in the jigsaw. It would certainly make little sense to trace the course of the revolution that would climax with the forging of the Caliphate by starting with the revelations of the Muslim Prophet. Accordingly, we begin not in Mecca, nor even in Jerusalem, but in a land that was the wellspring for two incalculably fruitful convictions: that a human empire might be global; and that the power of an all-good god might be universal.

We begin in Persia.

^a We have three brief but contemporary inscriptions giving the Himyarite side of the story. Unsurprisingly, perhaps, these accuse the Christians of Najran of what today might be described as terrorism.

^b Or perhaps “Read!” According to Ibn Hisham, the recitation appeared before Muhammad in the form of writing on a brocaded coverlet.

^c This thesis, that Muhammad’s religion was a threat to the trade of the Quraysh as guardians of the Ka’ba, is nowhere explicitly mentioned in Muslim tradition, but is almost universally taken for granted in modern, Western biographies of the Prophet.

^d In some traditions, he is cast as the Prophet’s brother: Aaron to Muhammad’s Moses.

^e That Moses could not possibly have been the author of the first five books of the Bible was a conclusion that had first been drawn as far back as the eleventh century, by a Jewish physician employed at a Muslim court in Spain.

^f Not all Muslims have accepted the authenticity of the great collections of the Sunna: some, back in the past, rejected them out of hand, and some, still today, have collections of their own. Other Muslims, as early as the ninth century, rejected the reliability of hadiths altogether, arguing—rather in the manner of modern-day Western scholars—that they were all unreliable and fabricated.

^g Two verses, Qur’an: 7.157 and 29.48, are used to adduce the theory of Muhammad’s illiteracy. 7.157 refers to him as “ummi”: a word conventionally translated as “unlettered,” but which could also mean “lacking a scripture,” in the sense of being neither Jewish or Christian. Adding to the uncertainty is the fact that the Qur’an frequently refers to itself as a kitab, a book, while in 25.4–6, it is strongly implied that Muhammad could indeed read. Even more suggestively, Ibn Hisham has reports which imply that Muhammad could not merely read, but write.

^h It is only fair to point out that Christian historians were identically partisan. Just as infidels tended to be invisible in Muslim histories, so were pagans, back in the fourth and fifth centuries, no less invisible in histories written by Christians.