III

HIJRA

Once the world of ideas has been transformed, reality cannot hold out for long.

Georg Wilhelm Friedrich Hegel

6

MORE QUESTIONS THAN ANSWERS

When?

Those who anticipated that Heraclius’s triumph would provide only a temporary lull in the surge and swirl of great events were to be proved quite spectacularly correct. A bare three decades after the conclusion of the terrible war between Iranshahr and the New Rome, the balance of power that for centuries had divided the Fertile Crescent into two rival spheres of influence was no more. In the East, Persian rule had collapsed utterly. All the glory of the House of Sasan had been trampled into the dust. TheShahanshahhimself had perished squalidly in the wilds of Khorasan, murdered, so it was said, by a local miller for his gold. His son, the heir of Ardashir and Khusrow the Great, was now a fugitive in China. Such an outcome, it might have been thought, was all that generations of Caesars had ever dreamed of achieving; and yet the overthrow of Iranshahr had certainly not been due to any triumph of Roman arms. A new people had risen to greatness; and these conquerors aimed at the conquest of Constantinople no less than they had Ctesiphon. The Roman Empire, unlike that of the Persians, still stood defiant; but only just. As in the darkest days of the war against Iranshahr, so now, nothing but a rump remained to the New Rome of her dominions. Syria, Palestine and Egypt had all been lost. Even in Anatolia, the front line was being held only through desperate and blood-sodden effort.

Stupefied onlookers, in their attempts to make sense of these astounding convulsions, naturally turned to scripture for elucidation. Was it possible, they began to ask themselves, that the fourth beast seen by Daniel was not, as had long been presumed, the empire of the Romans, after all? It had certainly never been more manifest that God, for His own inscrutable reasons, was redrawing the affairs of men in a wholly startling manner. Global rule had passed into the hands of those previously scorned descendants of Ishmael, the bastard offspring of Abraham, the children of the slave-girl Hagar: the Arabs. “And behold, a fourth beast, terrible and dreadful and exceedingly strong; and it had great iron teeth; it devoured and broke in pieces, and stamped the residue with its feet.”¹ Already, by the 660s, there were many prepared to revise their understanding of what Daniel had meant by this vision. “He is saying,” so a chronicler in Armenia suggested, “that this fourth beast, which arises from the south, is the kingdom of the sons of Ishmael.”²

As the decades and then the centuries passed, and still the empire won by the Arabs endured, this reading became ever more accepted among Christians and Jews alike. The Arabs themselves, of course, would have bristled at any notion that they were something bestial; but they too, as they surveyed with pride the awesome sweep of their dominions, never doubted for a moment that their conquests were indeed the expression of the will of the heavens. How else to explain their astonishing dismemberment of what had once been the two greatest empires in the world? “We went to meet them with small abilities and weak forces, and God made us triumph, and gave us possession of their territories.”³ By the tenth Christian century, when this self-satisfied assertion was penned, the defeat of the Persians and the Romans had come to be interpreted as something even more epochal than the replacement of two superpowers by a third. The lands won by “the sons of Ishmael” were no longer defined as an Arab empire but as the Dar al-Islam—the “House of Islam.” The first generation of conquerors, even though they had called themselves “believers” or “emigrants”—Muhajirun—had come to be designated by a quite different word: “Muslims.”⁴ The collapse of Persian and Roman power was attributed, not to the agonies of plague and war that had racked the Near East for decades, but to the revelation of the word of God to His Prophet in far-off Mecca. “When you encounter the unbelievers, blows to necks it shall be until, once you have routed them, you are to tighten their fetters.” So Muhammad, serving as the mouthpiece of God, had informed his followers. “Thereafter, it is either gracious bestowal of freedom or holding them to ransom, until war has laid down its burdens.”⁵

The notion that a people might be entrusted by the heavens with a charge to spare the vanquished and to overthrow the haughty was hardly original to the Qur’an, of course. Back in the heyday of Roman greatness, Virgil had articulated a very similar sense of mission. What had changed, however, and to seismic effect, was people’s understanding of what the sanction of the heavens might actually mean. Just as Constantine had discovered in Christ an infinitely more potent patron than Athena or Artemis had ever been, so those who turned to the pages of the Qur’an found revealed there a celestial monarch of such limitless and terrifying power that there could certainly be no question of portraying Him—as the Christians did with their own god—in human form. Nothing, literally nothing, was beyond Him. “If He wishes, O mankind, He can make you disappear and bring others in your stead.”⁶ To a deity capable of such a prodigious feat of annihilation, what was the overthrow of an empire or two? Remarkable though it certainly was that theDar al-Islam had been raised upon the rubble of Persian and Roman power, no explanation was needed for this, so Muslim scholars taught, that did not derive from an even more awesome and heart-stopping miracle: the revelation to the Prophet of the Qur’an. What surprise that a fire lit far beyond the reach of the ancient superpowers should have spread to illumine the entire world, when that fire was the Word of God?

And it is here, of course, in any interpretation of Islam’s origins as an intrusion of the divine into the sweep of earthly events—as a lightning strike from heaven, owing nothing to what had gone before—that history must needs meet and merge with faith. Almost fourteen centuries on from the lifetime of Muhammad, the conviction that he was truly a prophet of God continues to move and inspire millions upon millions of people around the globe. As a solution to the mystery of what might actually have taken place in the early seventh-century Near East, however, it is unlikely to strike those historians raised in the traditions of secular scholarship as entirely satisfactory. By explaining everything, it runs the risk of explaining nothing much at all. Nevertheless, it is a measure of how potently an aura of the supernatural has always clung to the Qur’an, and to the story of its genesis, that historians have found it so difficult to rationalise its origins. Mecca, so the biographies of the Prophet teach us, was an inveterately pagan city, devoid of any Jewish or Christian presence, situated in the midst of a vast, untenanted desert: how else, then, are we to account for the sudden appearance there of a fully fledged monotheism, complete with references to Abraham, Moses and Jesus, if not as a miracle? In a sense, the entire history of secular enquiry into the origins of Islam has been an attempt to arrive at a plausible answer to this question. Muslims, understandably sensitive to any hint that the Prophet might have been a plagiarist, have always tended to resent the inevitable implications of such a project; and yet, once God is discounted as an informant, it is surely not unreasonable to wonder just how it came to be that so many characters from the Bible feature in the Qur’an. Perhaps, so it has been suggested, Muhammad absorbed Jewish and Christian influences during his business trips to Syria.⁷ Or perhaps, despite what the Muslim sources tell us, there were in fact thriving colonies of Jews, Christians, or both in Mecca.⁸ Or perhaps there was a crisis of capitalism among the Quraysh, one that saw successful merchants and financiers growing ever more obscenely rich, even as those on the breadline were left “searching for a new spiritual and political solution to the malaise and disquiet in the city,”⁹ and finding it—somehow, in some unspecified manner, in the spirit of the age.

Yet all these explanations run up against a familiar stumbling block. Given that the Prophet’s earliest biographers were writing almost two centuries after his death, how far can we legitimately accept their presumption that seventh-century Mecca was genuinely a place of great significance and wealth—the “Mother of Cities”?¹⁰ It is plausible enough that it might have been a centre of pilgrimage for the local pagans, but that it ranked as the Dubai of its day, a prosperous and cosmopolitan trading hub brought to flourish in the depths of the desert, is most certainly not. What incentive could there possibly have been for anyone with an eye for a profit to base himself in a barren valley many hundreds of miles from the nearest consumerist fleshpot? Even the few camel-trains that still plodded northwards from Himyar, heading for a Roman market that had long since lost its appetite for incense, went by a road that bypassed Mecca altogether.¹¹ A merchant from Alexandria might cheerfully discourse about the trading opportunities in entrepôts as far afield as India, and never even so much as allude to Mecca—on his doorstep though it effectively was.¹² In gazetteers written by Muhammad’s contemporaries—whether diplomats, geographers or historians—mentions of it are notable by their glaring absence.¹³Even in the Qur’an itself, the word appears just once. “In the belly of Mecca, it was God who held their hands back from you”¹⁴—an allusion that might as well be to a valley as to a city. Otherwise, in all the vast corpus of ancient literature, there is not a single reference to Mecca—not one.¹⁵ Only in 741, more than a hundred years after the Prophet’s death, does it finally crop up on the pages of a foreign text—and even then the author locates it in Mesopotamia, “midway between Ur and Harran.”¹⁶ Clearly, then, whatever else Mecca might have been in the early seventh century, it was no multicultural boom-town.

So how is it, in a book supposedly composed there in Muhammad’s lifetime, that the monotheisms of the far-distant Fertile Crescent should have been given such a starring role? It is all very mysterious; and made even more so by the fact that Mecca is not alone in seeming to have had a spectrally low profile in the early decades of the Arab Empire. So too did the Qur’an itself. As with the reputed birthplace of the Prophet, so with the compendium of his revelations: there is not a single mention of it in writings of the period. In the first flush of the Ishmaelite takeover, the Patriarch of Antioch assumed that his new masters’ holy book was the Torah.¹⁷ Such a presumption, of course, might well have reflected nothing more than wilful blindness—except that it was far from being confined to bishops. More than a century after the death of Muhammad, Muslims—as they were now starting to call themselves—might betray a very similar ignorance. Even as Christian bureaucrats, tracking the peculiar beliefs of their Arab overlords, began to note the existence of various “frivolous tales”¹⁸ composed by Muhammad, Muslim scholars, in their concern to identify precisely what the Prophet might have taught, were still perfectly capable of overlooking the Qur’an altogether. How, for instance, did God wish adulterers to be punished? To this question, hadith after hadith provided the same unyielding answer as was to be found in the Torah: He wished them to be stoned. Yet this was not at all what was taught in the Qur’an. There, it could be read that God, “ever-compassionate,” merely wished adulterers to be given “a hundred lashes.”¹⁹ How to explain such a discrepancy? If the Qur’an truly originated in the lifetime of Muhammad, and had been preserved and cherished by his followers ever since as the unchanging word of God, why was it that so many Muslim jurists—and prominent ones at that—had disregarded it as a source for their rulings? The mystery seems only compounded by the complete absence of any commentaries on the Qur’an prior to the ninth Christian century, and by the fact that even then different communities of the faithful preserved different versions of the holy text.^aPerhaps it is hardly surprising, then, that many a scholar today, confronted by the dogma which teaches that the Qur’an derives unaltered and immaculate from the lifetime of Muhammad, should be tempted to raise an eyebrow, at the very least.

How far is such scepticism justified? Much, of course, hangs on the answer. Nothing better illustrates the extreme sensitivity of the issues at stake than the fate of a cache of Qur’ans that were found some forty years ago in Sana’a—capital of what was once the Jewish Kingdom of Himyar and is now the Muslim Republic of Yemen. Uncovered by workmen in the ceiling of the city’s oldest mosque, stuffed into seventeen rough hessian sacks and preserved from oblivion only by the sharp eyes of the Yemeni antiquities chief, the great mass of parchment contained fragments of what are almost certainly the oldest Qur’ans in existence. Four decades on from their discovery, however, these precious manuscripts remain shrouded in mystery. Only two researchers, both German, have been permitted to study them. When one of these, an expert in Arabic palaeography by the name of Gerd-Rüdiger Puin, publicly asserted that the fragments demonstrated that the Qur’an, no less than the Bible, had evolved over time and was a veritable “cocktail of texts,”²⁰ the Yemeni authorities reacted with fury. To this day, the Qur’anic fragments in Sana’a remain unpublished—nor have any further Western scholars been permitted to study them. As a result, their true significance remains opaque.

But not wholly so. Granted that Puin’s researches do indeed seem to suggest that words, spellings and even the order of verses in the Qur’an were perfectly capable of being misread and miscopied, it is apparent as well that these alterations were only ever involuntary errors. There is not a hint of deliberate fabrication in any of the Sana’a fragments. Phrases may vary substantially from manuscript to manuscript, but entire passages never do. At no point, it seems, was the Qur’an ever the equivalent of a collection ofhadiths—something to be added to upon the whim of some Caliph or scholar. In fact, nothing better testifies to the dread and reverence with which every last word of it, every last letter, was patently regarded than the fact that jurists were prepared to swallow even a glaring embarrassment such as its ruling on adultery. Wriggle though they might—with some claiming that stoning was actually prescribed in the Qur’an as the original penalty for the offence, but that the relevant verse had been devoured by a hungry goat—no attempt was ever made to improvise something new. Even the earliest Sana’a fragments reveal an awed sense on the part of those responsible for them that something of profound and terrible holiness was being put to paper, far transcending human invention. If, as both Puin and his colleague have argued, these earliest fragments are to be dated to the beginning of the eighth century, it would suggest that their ultimate origins must lie well before that time.²¹ The daring thesis floated some decades back, by a few venturesome scholars, that the Qur’an might have been the product of protracted evolution, and that it arrived at something like its current state only at the end of the eighth Christian century, seems to have been conclusively disproved.²² Irrespective of all the revisions and variations Puin has traced in the Sana’a fragments, the bedrock of the Qur’an appears hewn out of solid granite.

This, however, begs any number of questions in turn. How was it that a book so revered should simultaneously have been neglected for so long by so many Muslim jurists? What, precisely, was the prehistory of the Qur’an prior to its first appearance in the written record in the early eighth century? Does the fact that every man who ever copied it appears to have done so in the unshakable conviction that he was transcribing words of unparalleled holiness mean that we can trust the Muslim traditions that explain how it came into being, after all? Perhaps. But a familiar problem, like a nagging headache, persists. It remains the case, and disconcertingly so, that the earliest surviving biographies of the Prophet were written whole generations after his death—and that their accounts of the origins of the Qur’an are such as cannot possibly be taken for granted. Just how yawning, then, just how much of a rupture, might the gap between the traditional date of the holy book’s composition and the first commentaries on it actually have been? The Qur’an, as it disarmingly acknowledges in one of its own verses, contains no lack of “ambiguous”²³ material: there are contradictions, abrupt shifts in voice, topic and tone, and baffling allusions. That brilliant intellects, from the ninth century onwards, should have devoted themselves to the immense task of clarifying these same ambiguities does not necessarily mean that they had inherited authentic information as to what the holy text had originally meant.

In fact, it might mean just the opposite. Long before the coming of Islam, scholars labouring over other works of scripture had inadvertently demonstrated an unsettling truth: the greater the sense of awe with which a text was regarded, the more complete might be the amnesia as to the original circumstances of its composition. Back in the Iranshahr of Peroz, the Zoroastrian priests, resolved as they were to adapt their inheritance of ancient scriptures to the political requirements of their Church, had shown not the slightest hesitation in shifting the birthplace of Zoroaster to Media. The Talmud, of course, was nothing if not a project to demonstrate that Moses would have been perfectly at home in the yeshivas of Sura and Tiberias. Christian scholars, keen to establish the primal antiquity of their own faith, wrote whole reams of commentaries on the Tanakh, proving that what they termed the “Old Testament” was in fact a foreshadowing of Christ. If adherents of the evolving religion of Islam, confronted by a scripture of indubitable holiness, but rife all the same with passages that they could barely understand, did set themselves to the elucidation of its mysteries, not as historians but rather as men concerned to comprehend the workings of God, then they would have been doing nothing thatmowbeds, or rabbis, or bishops had not already set themselves to achieve.

To establish when the Qur’an might have been composed, therefore, and whether it does indeed provide us with an authentic source for the Prophet’s life and times, it is essential first to strip away the great cladding of commentary that has been woven tightly around the holy text since the early ninth century, and make an attempt, at the very least, to see it naked and unadorned. This is no easy task, however. The same ambiguities that prompted Muslim scholars to compose their immense array of commentaries and biographies of the Prophet still render it challenging, to put it mildly, to read the Qur’an in the light of the Qur’an alone. Unlike the Bible, which name-checks any number of conveniently datable rulers—from Cyrus to Augustus—the Qur’an betrays what is, to any historian, a most regrettable lack of interest in geopolitics. Those who are named in its pages tend to be angels, demons or prophets. There are the four mentions of Muhammad himself, of course. Then there is an enigmatic figure called Zayd, who seems to be both the ex-husband of one of the Prophet’s wives and his adopted son: tradition would subsequently identify him as a one-time slave who died in battle as an early martyr for Islam. Finally, there is an unbeliever by the name of Abu Lahab, who appears in the biographies of the Prophet as his uncle, and who is condemned, together with his wife, to “burn in the Flaming Fire.”²⁴ No other contemporaries of Muhammad are mentioned by name in the holy text. The focus of the Qur’an is fixed implacably, not on the personal, but on the divine. Before the awful dimension of such a radiance, in which God’s omnipotence can be experienced as something both intimate and cosmic, as a presence that is simultaneously closer to the believer than his own “jugular vein”²⁵ and more remote than the most distant star in the universe, what is any mere mortal? The voices that feature in the Qur’an are those of God Himself and His prophet: no one else gets much of a hearing.

Which is not to say that there is no sense of dialogue in the Qur’an—for in truth it is a most disputatious book. Always, however, those who are being variously scorned, chided and refuted by the Prophet lurk off-stage—their voices unheard, their beliefs unaired.Mushrikun, they are called—“those who are guilty of shirk.” Such an offence—the belief that supernatural beings might be partnered with God as fit objects of worship—would end up enshrined by Islam as the most unforgivable of sins, of course; and so perhaps it is no surprise that the presumption should have grown up among Muslim scholars that the Mushrikun had been rank idolators and pagans, worshippers of stock and stone. This, however, is not at all what the Qur’an itself implies.²⁶ Indeed, based purely on the evidence contained in the holy text, the Mushrikun seem to have shared a whole range of beliefs with Jews and Christians—not to mention the Prophet himself. That the world was created by a single god; that this god would listen to those who approached him, whether through prayer or pilgrimage; that he ruled as lord of the angels: all this, it is clear enough, was common ground between Muhammad and his opponents. So too was familiarity with characters from the Bible—something taken wholly for granted in the Qur’an. Where the Mushrikun erred, however, according to the Prophet, was in their adherence to a truly shocking notion: that God had fathered the angels, and would listen to any prayers that might be raised to Him through their agency. Even worse, in a world where no man ever doubted his superiority over women, the Mushrikun actually presumed “to turn the angels, servants of the All-Merciful, into females”!²⁷

Whether this was actually what the Mushrikun had done is, of course, a rather different matter. “They follow nothing, those who worship partners apart from God—they follow nothing but conjecture; they utter nothing but lies.”²⁸ Hardly, it is fair to say, the most nuanced cataloguing of what the Mushrikun might actually have believed. The Prophet was clearly no encyclopedist: he lacked the insatiable passion of an Epiphanius for cataloguing the precise details of his opponents’ follies. Whoever or whatever theMushrikunmay have been, it is impossible to glimpse them save through a swirling fog-bank of polemic. Certainly, there is nothing in the mere fact of their existence that helps us to pinpoint when they flourished.

It is fortunate, then, that the Qur’an does not float entirely free of history’s moorings. Among its 114 chapters—or “suras”—there are just a few scattered clues to its likeliest date of composition. Of one thing, at least, we can be certain: its final form long post-dates the implosion of the Thamud, that large confederation of Arab tribes employed by the Romans, and who are commemorated by the Prophet as the exemplification of worldly greatness brought low. Time was, he reminds their ghosts, when God “granted you mastery over the earth, when you seized its plains to build your mansions, and carved houses from the mountains”²⁹—until, as payback for straying off the straight and narrow, they were dispatched by a scream so terrible that it left them withered, like dry straw. If this name-checking of the Thamud appears to imply a certain familiarity on the part of the Prophet with the workings of Roman imperialism, then it is dramatically confirmed by another verse—the only one in the entire Qur’an to name a contemporary power. “The Romans,” it is reported, “have been defeated in a nearby land, and yet, after their defeat, they shall be victorious—in a few years.”³⁰ It is hard to know to what this might conceivably be alluding, if not the loss of Palestine to Khusrow II. The prophecy might appear brief, and almost throwaway—but its implications are momentous. So terrible was the great war between Persia and the New Rome, and so devastating its impact, that even in the very throne-room of the heavens its reverberations were being felt. No other earthly conflict, after all, had served to prompt a long-range forecast from the Lord of Worlds Himself.

All of which, for the historian, suggests a most welcome and promising conclusion. Compared to the bogs and quicksand of other sources for the life of the Prophet, the book of his revelations does authentically appear to offer us something precious: something almost like solid ground. Unlike the witness provided by the hadiths, or the biographies of Muhammad, or the commentaries on the Qur’an, the text of the Qur’an itself does seem to derive authentically from the Prophet’s lifetime. That makes it, a few other brief and enigmatic documents aside, our only primary source for his career. Such a resource is, in consequence, beyond compare: one that positively demands to be sifted for clues to the Prophet’s career and background. Identify these, and it may then be possible to find reflected in the Qur’an glimpses, not merely of the Prophet’s personal circumstances but of something even more suggestive: the broader context of the age.

Take, for instance, the verse that prophesies which of the two great imperial peoples will emerge victorious from their terrible war. In its presumption that God favours the cause of the Romans, and that their fate has been graced with a literally cosmic significance, there is nothing incompatible with the Romans’ own perennial self-conceit. Elsewhere in the Qur’an, too, there can be detected just the faintest echo of Heraclius’s blowing on the embattled empire’s war-trumpet. “They ask you,” God tells Muhammad, “about ‘The Two-Horned One’ ”³¹—Dhu’l Qarnayn, in Arabic. This, so the Qur’an goes on to reveal, was the title of a great ruler who journeyed to the ends of the earth, where he built gates of iron faced with bronze, and thereby imprisoned the surging hordes ofGog and Magog. To the apocalypse-haunted Roman people, this biography would have suggested only one man—and during the reign of Heraclius, especially so. Alexander the Great, conqueror of the Persians, and gaoler of Gog and Magog, had lately become the name on every Christian’s lips. Amid the humiliations and triumphs of the great war against Iranshahr, Roman propagandists repeatedly invoked his memory. Then, in 630, with Khusrow finally toppled and Heraclius about to enter Jerusalem, a fabulous story had begun to circulate in Syria, clearly written in honour of the moment, and featuring Alexander.³² The great conqueror, it appeared, had not only reached the setting of the sun and walled up Gog and Magog—he had also delivered a prophecy, foretelling how, at the end of days, the sway of the Christian empire would be extended to the limits of the world. Reassuring news for Heraclius—and sure enough, just to ensure that no one missed the point, Alexander was shown in the story vowing to head for Jerusalem, and to take with him a silver throne, “so that when the Messiah comes from heaven, He may sit upon this kingly throne, for His kingdom lasts for ever.”³³ Not the most subtle parallel with Heraclius’s own shouldering of the True Cross, perhaps—but ringing enough, to be sure. In fact, it is a measure of just how effective the story was as a celebration of the emperor’s entry into Jerusalem that the tale of Dhu’l Qarnayn in the Qur’an appears to have been modelled directly upon it. Plot, imagery, even the hero’s distinctive horns—all are identical.³⁴ Here, then, if anywhere, it is possible to pin a precise date upon a segment of the Qur’an. And yet, despite this, the tale told of Dhu’l Qarnayn betrays barely a trace-element of its genesis in the Roman propaganda of 630. Certainly, nothing remains in it of Alexander’s prophecy that the New Rome will inherit the world, and that Christ will then come again. Instead, its vision of the End Days—complete with the surging like waves of Gog and Magog and the dramatic materialisation of hell—has a quality of the utmost timelessness: nothing overtly Christian, and certainly nothing overtly Roman.

Nor, in a book positively obsessed by the prospect of the world’s annihilation, are all the numerous other predictions of the End Days any different.

               When the sky disintegrates;

               When the stars are strewn;

               When the seas are made to erupt;

               When graves are dispersed,

               Each soul will know what it did,

               And what it failed to do.³⁵

There is nothing here, in the terrifying power of such a vision, to suggest that it might have been prompted by any specific mood of crisis. Just the opposite: the clear and fearsome message of the Qur’an—that the wicked stand in the shadow of eternal punishment, and that those who have oppressed the weak will answer to God for their crimes upon “a day of resurrection”³⁶—possesses an all-too-universal resonance. Nevertheless, the sheer urgency with which the Prophet hammers home his warnings and tells his followers to prepare for the hour of judgement suggests that he had good reason to dread its imminence. Muhammad, as his familiarity with Heraclius’s propaganda demonstrates, was not oblivious to the firestorm sweeping through the Near East. The cloud of ash that had hung dark over mowbeds in Ctesiphon, monks in Constantinople and rabbis in Tiberias had the Prophet in its shadow, too. Far from reaching him as distant rumours, the terrors and upheavals of the age seem to have been sufficiently close to ring in his ears. The Qur’an, haunted as it is by a dread of the wrath of God, and of the puniness of mankind before an omnipotence that can convert the entire world into dust, is no less of its time for having a perspective that disdains to focus on specific events—whether a plague that had recently wiped out a third of the population of the Near East or a war that had been raging for decades.

“For every nation there is an appointed span of time; when their time arrives, they can neither delay it nor bring it forward, even for an instant.”³⁷ Viewed from this perspective, the calamities that were even then convulsing the empires of Persia and the New Rome were nothing exceptional. The gaze that Muhammad brought to the agonies of his own generation was one that distinguished in the rise and fall of great powers merely the ceaseless gusting of grains of sand upon desert winds. Ever since the moment of creation, what had mattered to humanity was not the vagaries of history but rather a question as eternal as it was urgent: how best to choose between good and evil. This is why, in the pages of the Qur’an, it is not kings or emperors who feature, but prophets. Muhammad was, of course, only one in a long succession of messengers sent by God to summon people to repentance. What need, then, when the truths that they revealed were unchanging, to specify where or when they might have lived? To God, and to God alone, belongs “the knowledge of all that is hidden in the heavens and earth.”³⁸ Figures from even the recent past were of interest to Muhammad only once they had been bleached of all context, all individuality. So, for instance, when the seven sleepers of Ephesus are introduced into the Prophet’s revelations, to be praised by him as “youths who believed in their Lord,”³⁹ he does not mention Ephesus, nor that there were seven of them, nor even that they were Christians. As with “the Two-Horned One,” so with “the People of the Cave,” threads drawn from the rich tapestry of Roman fantasy have been woven into a very different pattern.

Not, of course, that every filament drawn from the past could be reworked in such a manner. The world, as Muhammad well knew, was a various and error-ravaged place. It behoved the Believers to stand on their guard. A stern and awful warning—and one that the Prophet would never tire of issuing. Here, in the fretful consciousness that there existed only the One True God, but that many different faiths claimed to understand Him, was the authentic neuralgia of the age. No less than a rabbi fretting over the minim, or a bishop sniffing anxiously after heretics, Muhammad was both appalled and transfixed by the sheer variety of peoples with different beliefs who filled the world. The adherents of some of these—such as the Mushrikun and the fire-worshipping devotees of Zoroaster—clearly lay beyond the pale.⁴⁰ But what of the Jews, say, or the Christians? “Who so disbelieves in God, His angels, His Books, His messengers and the Last Day has strayed far in error.”⁴¹ By this measure—as Muhammad himself seems to have been uncomfortably aware—there was precious little to separate a rabbi or a monk from a mu’min’: a “believer.” Indeed, to some extent, all the Prophet’s many pronouncements on the Jews and the Christians, scattered throughout the pages of the Qur’an, resemble nothing so much as a protracted twisting in the wind. At times, the Torah and the Gospel might be hailed as “Guidance to mankind,”⁴² sent down from heaven, and those who reverence them as the Ahl al-Kitab—the “People of the Book.” At other times, the Jews might be damned with blood-curdling ferocity for their treachery, and the Christians for ascribing a son to God. Such tension was nothing new: it echoed the same mingling of fascination and loathing that had characterised Jewish and Christian attitudes to one another in the first few centuries after Christ. Perhaps, had a Christian written a book that gave a voice to Ebionites and Marionites in the years before the Council of Nicaea, it would have spanned the same extremes of tolerance and hostility towards the Jews that are found in the Qur’an. Muhammad, in his struggle to decide where precisely to draw the frontier between his own teachings and those of the “People of the Book,” and how high to raise the barriers and watchtowers, was wrestling with a problem many centuries older than himself.

Nor, it seems, was he wholly oblivious to the fact. On one level, it is true, the Qur’an records a very specific moment in history: a moment that internal evidence, as well as tradition, identifies with the early decades of the seventh Christian century. Muhammad, in his concern to define for the Believers the troublesome border zone that separated them from the Jews and the Christians, was perfectly capable of doing so in a manner that any pious Caesar would have recognised. Just as Justinian had prescribed swingeing financial penalties for “all those who do not rightly worship God,”⁴³ so was it decreed in the Qur’an that Jews and Christians should pay a special tithe, the jizya—and in such a manner as to render their inferiority manifest to all.⁴⁴ Taxation combined with triumphalism: here was bullying in the grand tradition of the Roman state. That it was Christians who now faced fiscal penalties for belonging to a superseded faith, rather than imposing the fines themselves, only compounded the irony, of course. The Prophet, insofar as he did care to offer specific policy recommendations to his followers on the patrolling of religious diversity, was very much a man of his age.

And yet, in truth, his gaze was only partially fixed upon the present. In the Qur’an, the pretensions of the Jews and Christians are presumed to be something timeless. As with great empires, so with great religions: the precise parabola of their evolution was as nothing to the Prophet. The stirring events that had shaped the imperial Church no more intruded upon his consciousness than did the wars of the Caesars. Of the great councils, of the anguished disagreements between Chalcedonians and Monophysites, of all those emperors, bishops and saints who, over the centuries, had struggled with such passion and such earnestness to arrive at a consensus as to the nature of Christ—of these, in the Qur’an, there is not so much as a hint. In fact, there are no Christians at all in its pages that the contemporary Church would have acknowledged as its own, save for the monks of the desert—and even these are so shadowy a presence that the Prophet can never quite decide whether to laud them as models of humility or condemn them as monsters of greed.⁴⁵ So, when Muhammad spoke of Christians, whom did he have in mind? A clue, perhaps, lies in the unexpected word he uses to describe them: Nasara. The name would have meant very little to the vast majority of seventh-century Christians. Only the learned—scholars familiar with the works of Jerome and Epiphanius, perhaps—might have pricked up their ears. The Nazoreans—those curious heretics who held to the Law of Moses and believed that the Holy Spirit was Christ’s mother—had long since vanished from their ancient Palestinian heartland. Yet, in the Qur’an—composed a full two centuries after Jerome had noted the Nazoreans as a mere fading curiosity—not only is their name used by the Prophet as shorthand for all the “People of the Gospel,”⁴⁶ but their doctrines provoke some of his bitterest contempt. “ ‘Did you really say to people,’ ” God is shown asking of Jesus, “ ‘Take me and my mother as two gods, instead of God?’ ”⁴⁷ An indignant Jesus volubly protests his innocence. As well he might have done—for the charge being laid against him was the mortal charge of shirk.

Now, it is true, of course, that the Qur’an was labouring here under an almost grotesque misapprehension: orthodox Christians, despite what the Nazoreans may have believed, had absolutely no notion of any “God the Mother.” Nevertheless, the Prophet had not wholly got the wrong end of the stick. By accusing the Christians of shirk, he had ripped the bandage off a very ancient sore. For six hundred years, the issue of how the relationship between God and Jesus was properly to be defined had been an itch that few Christians had been able to leave alone. For half of this span, admittedly, ever since the Council of Nicaea, it had pleased the leaders of the Catholic Church to imagine that there did exist a definitive answer to the problem, approved by Caesar, and sanctioned by the heavens. In reality, of course, as the Arian loyalties of the Ostrogoths and Vandals had shockingly served to demonstrate, the garden of Christian orthodoxy had never been totally cleared of weeds. A heresy, if it could manage to put down roots beyond the reach of the imperial Church, might still enjoy a certain, late-flourishing bloom. What, then, to make of the references in the Qur’an to the mysterious Nasara? That Arianism had long been able to prosper amid the bogs and forests of the North suggests that the Nazoreans might very plausibly have endured in the deserts of the South. The implications of this, nevertheless, are more than a little disorienting. The origins of the Nazoreans, after all, stretched far beyond the time of Jerome—right back to the origins of the Christian Church. The questions posed by their doctrines struck at the heart of what Christianity, in the wake of Nicaea, had evolved to become. What, precisely, did it mean to say that Jesus was the Son of God? How might the Trinity best be defined and explained? Were Jews and Christians doomed to eternal mutual hatred, or were they better regarded as children of the same book?

Certainly, if the Nasara are indeed to be equated with the Nazoreans, then it might help to explain why the Qur’an, despite clearly having attained something like its final form early in the seventh Christian century, should seem haunted as well by the whispers of some very ancient ghosts. The one-sided debate to be found in its pages on the nature of Christ—one which firmly rejects the Trinity and affirms that Jesus himself was only ever a man—has a breath about it that seems to rise from an eerily distant age. Older than Nicaea, let alone Chalcedon, it had raged most bitterly back when there was no single Church, merely a multiplicity of sects. “They killed him not,” the Prophet declares, “nor did they crucify him, but so it was made to appear to them.”⁴⁸ Such a notion had not been heard for many centuries. What was it, after all, if not the very argument of the long-scotched Gospel of Basilides?

The voice we hear is not necessarily that of Basilides himself, of course. Nevertheless, the echoes of long-muted Christian heretics—of Gnostics and Nazoreans—are sufficiently loud in the Qur’an to make one wonder from where, if not from God, they might possibly have come. This issue is rendered all the more haunting because vanished gospels are not the only traces of an often fabulously distant past to be found in the verses of the holy text. Like a mighty cliff-face compounded of different layers of sediment, in which, just occasionally, fossils are to be glimpsed, exposed by rock-falls and weathering, the Qur’an hints at entire aeons that have been and gone, and yet endure contained within itself. Many of these same hints, not surprisingly, have always been regarded by commentators as somewhat of a puzzle. Just as fossils, prior to a proper understanding of the earth’s geology, provoked many a furrowed brow among those who found them, there are phrases and even entire passages in the Qur’an that have always perplexed the learned. What, for instance, might one make of a short sura that takes as its theme the punishment of wrongdoers known as “the People of the Trench”?⁴⁹ Over the course of the centuries, numerous attempts have been made to explain this enigmatic phrase. Perhaps, so one early scholar suggested, it referred to the servants of a king who fired Abraham into a burning trench by means of a catapult. Or perhaps it related to the atrocities perpetrated by Yusuf against the Christians of Najran.⁵⁰ But what if it were not original to the Qur’an at all, but derived instead from another written source—specifically, one of those mysterious, ancient Jewish texts that occasionally cropped up in the wilds of the desert beyond Jerusalem in late antiquity? The discovery in more recent times of an entire cache of such manuscripts—the so-called “Dead Sea Scrolls”—has led a number of scholars to suspect a link between their teachings and those of the Qur’an.⁵¹ What should be a designation for hell in the Dead Sea Scrolls, for instance, if not “the Trench”? And what should be the fate of the damned on the Day of Judgement if not to be consigned to that Trench’s fires? Could this, then, be a possible source for the mysterious and much-debated phrase in the Qur’an—a vision of the End Days preserved from a distant Jewish past?

Certainly, it is notable, throughout the course of his revelations, that the Prophet returns again and again to a notion that few of his contemporaries in either synagogue or monastery would have thought to dispute: that the will of God can indeed be fathomed through the written word.

               With Him are the keys of the Unseen; none but He has knowledge thereof.

               He knows all that is on land and on sea;

               Not a leaf falls but He knows it.

               Not a seed in the darkness of earth,

               Not anything, fresh or dried,

               But it is inscribed in a Manifest Book.⁵²

This, rather in the manner of the Talmud, is to cast the whole of creation as a scripture; but elsewhere, the Prophet is more explicit in his praise of the truths to be found in “ancient scrolls.” By these, he hurriedly goes on to specify, he means “the scrolls of Abraham and Moses”⁵³—and yet the sheer wealth of allusions, echoes and remembrances in the Qur’an, enriching it and yet never overwhelming it, drawn from a bewilderingly eclectic array of sources, and yet made triumphantly, inimitably its own, serves to suggest that Abraham and Moses were not, perhaps, alone in having influenced the Prophet. From the propaganda of Roman emperors to tales of Christian saints, from long-vanished Gnostic gospels to ancient Jewish tracts: traces of all these writings have been convincingly identified in the Qur’an. Just as Muhammad claimed to be the Seal of the Prophets, so did his revelations contain within themselves, as a revenant and spectral presence, hints of how other peoples, back in the often distant past, had similarly had experience of the divine. Even gods that were ancient when Alexander was born are not wholly absent from its pages: for what are the horns that Dhu’l Qarnayn sports, after all, if not the ram horns of Amun? Some would go further yet, and claim that the very visions of paradise contained within the Qur’an, complete with eternally boyish cup-bearers, handsome “like hidden pearls,”⁵⁴ who are bestowed upon the Believers when they ascend to heaven, and beauteous, “wide-eyed maidens,”⁵⁵ shimmer with the primordial glamour of the banished gods of Greece and Rome. Certainly, it would seem a striking coincidence otherwise that Zeus, the pagan Lord of Olympus, should have had as his cup-bearer an exquisitely pearl-like youth and that his queen, Hera, the goddess of marital bliss, should have been famed for her seductively large eyes. Muslim scholars would certainly find themselves both perplexed and unsettled by the Prophet’s insistence that celestial maidens had “wide eyes,” believing it a description better suited to cows. Their twitchiness would hardly have been improved if they had known that Hera, in the poetry of the pagan Greeks, was invariably hailed as “ox-eyed.”⁵⁶ The Olympians might have been long toppled from their thrones—and yet, in the pages of the Qur’an, the golden halls of their palace still blaze with a brilliant after-glow.

Yet if this is the case, and if the revelations of the Prophet do draw for at least some of their power upon visions of the sacred that elsewhere, in the Christian empire of the Romans, had long since been driven underground, then the mystery of their origins seems only to deepen. Even more far-fetched than the portrait of Mecca as a bustling city of merchant princes, after all, is any likelihood that it might once have been teeming with Gnostics, Roman propagandists and enthusiasts for Homer and Virgil. Yet if the Qur’an, with all its rich and haunting sophistication, did not originate in Mecca, then from where did it come?

If we are to attempt an answer to that question, there is only one place to look: within the pages of the Qur’an itself.

Where?

Muhammad is most unlikely to have realised it, but his claim to be setting a seal on the revelations of earlier prophets was not, in fact, original to him.⁵⁷ “Wisdom and deeds have always from time to time been brought to mankind by the messengers of God.”⁵⁸So it had been declared, some three and a half centuries prior to the composition of the Qur’an, by a man who had aspired, and with great self-consciousness, to write the ultimate in holy books.

Mani, more than anyone before him, positively revelled in the blending of rival faiths. Born near Ctesiphon in 216, shortly before the city fell to Ardashir, he grew up within a Christian sect that, just like the Nazoreans, practised circumcision, held the Holy Spirit to be female, and prayed in the direction of Jerusalem. Such an upbringing clearly imbued in Mani a pronounced taste for the multicultural by 240, when he appeared before the newly crowned Shapur I, he had already successfully fused Jewish, Christian and Zoroastrian teachings into a spectacular new whole, while also claiming, just for good measure, to be the heir of the Buddha. Although Shapur himself, while intrigued by Mani’s teachings, had failed to be converted by them, the self-proclaimed prophet’s disciples spread to the limits of West and East and fashioned out of their master’s teachings an authentically global faith. From Carthage to China, there had come to exist cells of Manichaeans “in every country and in every language.”⁵⁹ They were even to be found, it may be, in Arabia: for the “Sabaeans,” a mysterious people who feature in the Qur’an alongside the Jews and Christians as one of the three “Peoples of the Book,” were, so it has plausibly been argued, none other than Manichaeans.⁶⁰

If that identification is correct, though, they were, at most, a tiny and beleaguered sect. Manichaeism, despite the best efforts of Mani himself, never managed to capture the loyalty of a Shahanshah, let alone a Caesar. As a result, by the lifetime of Muhammad, the two great empires of the age had forced its adherents into a desperate and bloody retreat. In Iranshahr, the prophet himself had ended up martyred on the personal orders of Shapur’s heir. Meanwhile, the Roman authorities, even prior to Constantine’s conversion, regarded his teachings with the utmost suspicion—as a perfidious Persian attempt to corrupt their “innocent and modest”⁶¹ citizens. The Christian empire, naturally enough, had inherited and refined this hostility, so that Manichaeism, by the time of Justinian’s death, had effectively been extirpated from the entire sweep of Constantinople’s dominions. The most bitter and implacable opposition to Mani’s doctrines had come, however, not from monarchs but from the leaders of rival faiths: bishops, mowbeds and rabbis. To them, the upstart prophet’s claims were doubly monstrous. It was not simply that Mani had cast their own scriptures as superseded revelations—although that, of course, was offensive enough. Even more loathsome, in their opinion, was the manner in which he had served as bawd to any number of rival faiths, forever mating and cross-breeding them, until, brought to life out of all the endless miscegenation, there had emerged the deformed hybrid that was his own sinister compound of teachings. Steeled by this perspective, both the Roman and the Persian authorities were confirmed in a fundamental presumption. The blurring and merging of beliefs, such as once had been common across the Fertile Crescent, was an offence that stank to the highest heavens. The no-man’s land that stretched between the various faiths was on no account to be trespassed upon. What the faithful needed, as a synod of Nestorian bishops expressed it in 554, were “high walls, impregnable fortresses, protecting their guardians against danger.”⁶² Divided though Christians, and Zoroastrians, and Jews might be, yet on one thing they could all agree: the prospect of a second Mani was a horror not to be borne.

War served only to deepen this conviction. Across the mangled provinces of Iranshahr and the New Rome, the horrors of the age saw an increasingly violent and desperate scrabbling by rival communities of monotheists for the patronage of God. Whether it was by Christians lamenting the rape of Jerusalem, or by Zoroastrians mourning the extinguished Fire of the Stallion, or by Jews bewailing the rumours of forced conversions, barricades were being raised, and trenches dug, on an ever more formidable scale. In such a world, where the borders of faith had come to be trammelled and patrolled as never before, what best enabled a religion to thrive was reach, and organisation, and scale: much the same advantages, in short, as made for military muscle. Any sect unable to command such resources was doomed to suffer a lethal rate of attrition.

By the start of the seventh century, monotheism’s triumph throughout the two rival empires was almost total. Of the ancient habits of pagan worship that had once been so universal, only a few scattered outposts still held out. In Khorasan, for instance, all the empire-building efforts of the Zoroastrian priesthood had failed to topple Mihr—that awful and sleepless avenger of injustice—from his mountainous and dawn-illumined throne. In Harran, too, which had long relied on its position midway between Rome andIranshahr to perpetuate its venerable cult of Sin, the majority of the inhabitants still persisted in defying their nominal lord in Constantinople and refused to worship Christ. Nevertheless, the future for the Lord of the Moon looked bleak. Under Maurice, a particularly officious bishop had been appointed to the city’s see, charged with scouring it clean of demon worship once and for all. Secret pagans in high places had been exposed, put to death, and gibbeted in the high street. For the worshippers of the Moon, then, occupation by Khusrow II’s forces had come in the nick of time. The Persians had been far too preoccupied with their conquest of the world to concern themselves with the cult of Sin. By 629, however, with the conclusion of peace and the evacuation of the Persians from Harran, a restoration to Roman control was imminent. The writing now really did seem to be on the wall for the city’s idols.

Pagans and Manichaeans, Jewish Christians and Christian Jews: persecution had been the common fate of all. There was no secure refuge from the imperial authorities to be found anywhere in the Fertile Crescent, save where it had always been: along its margins. For centuries, whether as a sanctuary or as a place of exile, the immense wilderness to the south of the two great empires had played host to beliefs that elsewhere had faded away, like ink on a crumbling scroll. To cross the frontier and head into the desert was therefore to step back in time. Only in Arabia, beyond the reach of monarch, bishop or mowbed, did the ancient promiscuity of cults endure. That Jews and Christians were to be found among the Arabs was certainly true—but not so that either could be confident of dominating the other. Even in Himyar, where first a Jewish king and then a Christian invader had seized power, neither regime had done much to dispel Arabia’s ancient reputation as a breeding ground for heresy. By posing as the heir of David, Yusuf had indulged in precisely the kind of showmanship fit to appal most rabbis, while in Najran, the name given to the great shrine raised in honour of those martyred for Christ—the Ka’ba—bore unmistakable witness to the relish of the pagan Arabs for reverencing cubes. Nor, indeed, had Himyar ever been securely fire-proofed as a Christian realm. In the last years of Khusrow I’s reign, a Persian-sponsored coup had terminated the Ethiopian occupation, and within a couple of decades Ctesiphon had established direct rule over the kingdom. The merchant from Iranshahr, “adorned with ear-rings, and with a Persian twang to his speech,”⁶³ had become an ever more familiar figure to the Arabs; and with him, in his wake, he had brought the worship of Ohrmazd. One more religion added to all the others in the teeming seedbed.

Meanwhile, far to the north of Himyar, on the margins of the Fertile Crescent—and especially along the margins of Palestine—there was even greater scope for cross-pollination. Nowhere else in the entire Near East had so many varieties and shades of faith survived intact. There were Jews, whose appeal to the Arabs of the desert had been noted long previously by Sozomen; and monks, those unyielding defenders of Chalcedonian orthodoxy; and the Monophysite warriors of the Banu Ghassan. Samaritans too, despite the calamitous failure of their revolt against Justinian, had continued to dash themselves against the rock of Roman power, and then, in the wake of the inevitable defeat and repression that followed, to stream in broken misery out into the neighbouring deserts. By abandoning the Holy Land, they were merely following paths already well-trodden by others: by Ebionites, by Nazoreans, by any number of Christian heretics. Not, it went without saying, that every pattern in the mosaic of belief to be found in northern Arabia was fashioned out of materials that were brought across the Roman frontier. The pagan traditions that had prompted Mundhir to wet al-’Uzza’s altar stones with the blood of four hundred virgins and the Nabataeans to worship the black Ka’ba of Dushara had never—in contrast to those of the Fertile Crescent—suffered active repression. If even the Christians of Najran had preserved, in the name they gave to their great shrine, evidence of their ancestors’ reverence for worshipping rocks, then it suggests that elsewhere too in Arabia, wherever the faiths and customs of outsiders met with those native to the Arabs themselves, the scope existed not merely for conflict but for that ultimate nightmare of the imperial authorities: the cross-breeding of rival beliefs.

And this, by the time of the great war, was a nightmare becoming reality. Mutant habits of worship were indeed being spawned in Arabia. In these hybrid cults was provided alarming evidence of what might emerge in consequence of a free market in faiths. What, for instance, were rabbis or monks to make of a community that acknowledged a single god to be the creator of the world, freely confessed his omnipotence, and had a thoroughgoing knowledge of Moses and Jesus—yet offered up prayers to al-’Uzza? Here, so its bitterest critic fulminated, was nothing but the filthiest and most degraded example of shirk. But the man levelling this accusation was no Jew or Christian. To Muhammad, the Mushrikun were not unfathomable aliens but something altogether more unsettling: men and women forged in the identical crucible that had steeled his own message. The Prophet, although implacably contemptuous of his adversaries’ reverence towards al-’Uzza—and to other names summoned from the shadows of Arabian idol worship, those of al-Lat “and the third one, Manat”—never actually accuses the Mushrikun of worshipping this trinity of “females.”⁶⁴ The word “goddess” does not appear once in the Qur’an; nor does the Prophet so much as mention the existence of pagan sanctuaries or shrines. Idols too, despite all the triumphant smashing of images that the Prophet is supposed to have got up to at Mecca, are notable by their absence from his revelations—as also they are from the archaeological record.⁶⁵ So, if the Mushrikun did not think of al-’Uzza as a deity, what did they believe her to be? No sooner has the Prophet name-checked her than he makes sure to provide the answer: “Those who deny the life to come give the angels female names.”⁶⁶ Here was the record of a signal demotion. No longer a goddess, al-’Uzza had become merely a daughter of God: one of those many messengers of the Almighty whose beating wings, a brilliant gold amid the darkness of the age, were being heard in increasing numbers across the span of an anguished and desperate world.

Muhammad was hardly the first to insist that those who, like the Mushrikun, claimed to be monotheists, and yet directed prayers to angels, were hardly to be reckoned monotheists at all. Christians, ever since the time of Paul, had done exactly the same.⁶⁷ “To call upon the angels by name, and to organise their worship, is strictly forbidden.” Such was the stern admonition of a Church Council held shortly after the death of Julian, at a time when bishops had particular reason to warn the faithful off practices that might smack of the pagan. “Anyone who is apprehended devoting himself to this concealed idolatry, let him be cursed.”⁶⁸ Muhammad himself could hardly have put it any better. How easy it was for human beings, even those who devoutly believed themselves to be servants of the One True God, to remain in thrall to shirk. Time and again, it was the dread of a veiled paganism—a pretended monotheism—that most unsettled and outraged the Prophet. The offences of the Mushrikun were not only rank but insidious. Just as bishops in the time of Justinian, touring the hinterlands of their dioceses, had been appalled to discover the abiding relish of Christian peasants for the rituals that had been practised by their unbaptised forefathers, so was the Prophet no less obsessed by what one eminent scholar has termed “minor malpractices regarding the use of farm animals.”⁶⁹ It was not only by the worship of angels, he charged, that the Mushrikun insulted the Almighty. They did it as well by slitting the ears of their livestock, by exempting certain cattle from ever having to pull a plough or carry a load, and by sometimes refusing to utter the name of God in an abattoir.⁷⁰ Offences as heinous as these, the Prophet sternly warned, would see the guilty “consigned to Hell.”⁷¹

None of which, it is fair to say, would come to feature prominently in his biographies. If a concern to regulate the behaviour of agriculturalists seems to square awkwardly with the far more dramatic and crowd-pleasing accounts told centuries later of his activities at Mecca, then that is because it so plainly does. It is hard to know which is the more perplexing: the complete lack of evidence in the Qur’an for any idol smashing on the part of Muhammad, or its portrait of the Mushrikun as owners of great herds of oxen, cows and sheep. Mecca, a place notoriously dry and barren, is not, most agronomists would agree, an obvious spot for cattle ranching—just as the volcanic dust that constitutes its soil is signally unsuited to making “grain grow, and vines, fresh vegetation, olive trees, date palms, luscious gardens, fruit and fodder.”^b Yet God, according to the Prophet, had furnished the Mushrikun with all of these blessings. Nothing, of course, is impossible for the Almighty—but it would indeed have been a miracle had Mecca truly been adorned with spreading “gardens of vines, olives, and pomegranates.”⁷² These, if they were to be found in seventh-century Arabia at all, would have been confined to oases, or else to Nabataea and the Negev, where the desert, by the lifetime of the Prophet, had been made to bloom, and agriculture was flourishing as never before amid the desolate bleakness of the sands.^c Such a redemption of the wilderness, secured as it had been only on the back of quite astounding ingenuity and effort, was, of course, an achievement fit to give any community a certain thrill of pride. Perhaps, then, it is telling that the Prophet, amid all the other charges he levelled against the Mushrikun, accused them of both ingratitude and conceit: of believing that it was they, and not the Almighty, who had made the dead land come to life. “Consider the seeds you sow in the ground—is it you who make them grow, or We?”⁷³

Here, then, is one yet further puzzle, to add to all the many others. No less than the report to be found in the Qur’an of a Roman defeat in “a nearby land,” or its precise echoing of a tale told in Syria about Alexander the Great, or its fascination with the Thamud, the extensive details revealed by the Prophet as to how his opponents made their living would appear to suggest something rather unexpected: a context for Muhammad’s revelations well to the north of Mecca. A far-fetched notion, perhaps—were it not for a striking fact. As with politics, so with topography: the gaze of the Prophet was fixed on horizons infinitely beyond the local. That is why, in the entire Qur’an, there are only nine places actually named. Of these, in turn, only two can be securely identified from the records of the time: Mount Sinai and Yathrib, the oasis settlement that would subsequently become known as Medina. It is true that a third location, Badr, where the Qur’an indicates a battle was fought, had been mentioned a hundred years previously by a poet praising a particularly nifty camel—but the only clue he had given to its location was that it stood somewhere in the middle of an enormous desert.⁷⁴ Another five places, including Mecca itself, appear for the first time in the Qur’an, and might as well have been anywhere, for all the detail about them that the holy book provides.^d Most enigmatic of all, though, is the final site to be name-checked in the Qur’an: a “House” at a place called Bakka. Muslim scholars, puzzled by this allusion, and with a show of some considerable ingenuity, sought to demonstrate that here was merely an alternative name for Mecca—as well they might have done, for Bakka, in the Qur’an, is identified as a site of primal and incomparable holiness.^e “Pilgrimage to the House,” so the Prophet declares, “is a duty owed to God.”⁷⁵ No wonder, then, that the attempt to establish the precise location of this awesome site should have inspired commentators to pile speculation upon speculation. That Bakka was Mecca, and that Mecca stood in the Hijaz, were propositions taken wholly for granted by Ibn Ishaq and his heirs. Yet the unsettling fact remains that not a shred of backing for either exists within the pages of the Qur’an itself. Moreover, the texts in which they first appeared were separated from the lifetime of Muhammad by several generations. The suspicion must be, then, that they are no more likely to reflect authentic tradition than did the nose of Palestinian landowners for previously forgotten biblical landmarks, back in the first flush of Christian tourism to the Holy Land.

A murk such as this spreads impenetrably. Where precisely Muhammad believed Bakka to have stood it is surely now impossible to say. Such evidence as might once have existed has long since been lost. Clues remain, but they are all of them ambiguous and fragmentary in the extreme. The ancient Greeks told the story of a robber named Procrustes, who would tie his victims to a bed, and then either stretch or mutilate them until they had been made to fit it: a methodology that the historian of early Islam often has little choice but to follow. Speculation as to where Bakka may originally have stood must perforce be procrustean—but since this caveat applies as surely to theories that would identify it with modern-day Mecca as to those that would not, there seems no need to apologise for it. Some mysteries are doomed forever to defy solution.

That said, it is possible to hazard a speculation. It is surely significant, at the very least, that Arabs in the wilds beyond Palestine had a pronounced taste for the appropriation of biblical settings. No less than Jews or Christians, they had long flocked to the sanctuary at Mamre: the very place—or maqom—where Abraham “had stood before the Lord.” Furthermore, they had achieved what no other people beyond the limits of the Christian empire had even thought to obtain: a convincing claim upon the authentic bloodline of Abraham. The right of the Arabs to the title of “Ishmaelites,” by virtue of their descent from Hagar, Abraham’s concubine and Ishmael’s mother, was freely acknowledged across the Fertile Crescent; and if the faintest hint of a sneer might occasionally linger when someone from beyond the deserts brought up the name, then the Arabs themselves were perfectly capable of a matching snobbery all of their own. Far from feeling embarrassed at having had a slave-girl in the family, those who were aware of their Hagarene lineage had come to revel in it. In the 660s, some two centuries after Theodoret had first reported the Ishmaelites’ pride in their ancestry, a Nestorian chronicler on the Persian border with Mesopotamia alluded to the existence of a mysterious domed sanctuary, supposedly founded by Abraham and sacred to the Arabs. “Indeed,” the chronicler added, “it is nothing new for the Arabs to worship there—for, from the beginning, from their earliest days, they have shown reverence to the father of the head of their nation.”⁷⁶ A most arresting detail—for this is almost identical to what is reported in the Qur’an. There, in the passage on the House at Bakka, the Prophet identified the man who founded it as having been none other than Abraham himself. Is it possible, then, that the sanctuary praised in the Qur’an as the primal, the “blessed place,”⁷⁷ was the same identical one known as far afield as Persia as “the Dome of Abraham”?

Muslim scholars, in their understandable efforts to identify Bakka with Mecca, went to great and often fantastical lengths to explain how a patriarch who, according to venerable tradition, had been promised Canaan by God, and not Arabia, might conceivably have ended up in Mecca. Some had him abandoning Hagar and Ishmael there during the course of an extended road-trip; others, rather startlingly, described him as being guided by the Shekhinah—the name applied by the rabbis to the divine presence on earth. Such theories—floated in contradiction to both the Bible and an entire millennium of obsessive elaboration upon the story of Abraham and his bloodline—seem to have been wholly original to the Muslim scholars themselves.^f Certainly, if any contemporaries of Muhammad believed that Abraham had been active in Mecca, there is no record of it. That Abraham had settled in Canaan, and that Hagar and Ishmael had taken refuge in one of the various stretches of wilderness that neighboured it, remained in the Prophet’s lifetime what it had always been: something that everyone took utterly for granted.

Nor, in fact, is there anything in the Qur’an itself that would serve to contradict this universal presumption. Just the opposite, in fact. The Bakka described by the Prophet shimmers with the same numinous aura that had long attached itself to another sanctuary: Mamre. “It is the place where Abraham stood to pray”:⁷⁸ so the Prophet describes Bakka. Of what, then, can this conceivably be an echo, if not the maqom? Certainly, between the Hebrew word for “place” and its Arabic equivalent, there was a manifest resonance. “Take as your place of prayer,” it is recorded in the Qur’an, “the place where Abraham stood”⁷⁹—the Maqam Ibrahim. In time to come, with Mecca enshrined once and for all as the site of Islam’s holiest sanctuary, Muslim scholars would identify thisMaqam Ibrahim with a stone that stood just to the north of the Ka’ba—an explanation that gives little hint as to its far more likely origins, many hundreds of miles to the north.⁸⁰

That the Prophet repeatedly echoes the traditions associated with Mamre in his accounts of how the House at Bakka came to be built does not mean, of course, that the two shrines were one and the same thing—but it does suggest, to haunting and potent effect, a very particular context for his revelations. The Qur’an is a work manifest with distinctive habits of worship. Again and again, throughout its pages, the Prophet is insistent that these derive, not from his own invention but from the deepest wellsprings of monotheism. The ground he treads, he and the Mushrikun both, is stamped with the footprints of Abraham, and of Ishmael, the patriarch’s son, and of Lot, his nephew, as well. Why, then, the Prophet demands, do his opponents not read the lessons that are written for them in such a landscape? “Lot too was a messenger,” he reminds the Mushrikun:

               Remember when We delivered him and all his household,

               Except for an old woman, who was left behind.

               Then We destroyed the others.

               You pass by them morning and night; will you not understand?⁸¹

The allusion is to the petrified remains of the Sodomites—and it could hardly be any clearer in its implications. Wherever the Prophet’s audience may have been settled, it was evidently at no great remove from what the Arabs themselves called the Bahr Lut, the “Sea of Lot”—what we know today as the Dead Sea.

And if the Qur’an is to be trusted, and if Muhammad’s opponents did indeed live within an easy journey of the ruins of Sodom and Gomorrah, then the significance of the sanctuary at Bakka would hardly have been confined to the dimension of the heavenly alone. Back in the reign of Justinian, when a Roman ambassador had reported on the great desert shrine where “even the wild beasts live in peace with men,” he had included another intriguing detail: that it was sacred to “a majority of the Saracens.”⁸² Could this desert shrine have been Bakka? The ambassador’s description is so vague that it is impossible to say for sure. Nevertheless, a particularly intriguing detail among the Prophet’s many revelations does seem to echo the Roman report. The Qur’an reveals that Abraham and Ishmael raised a prayer to God as they laboured to build the House at Bakka: “Make our descendants into a community devoted to you.”⁸³ Which was, of course, to cast those descendants, the Ishmaelites, as something rather more than the sum of their parts. Fragmented into various tribes they might have been, and yet they were to be regarded, so it would seem from the Qur’an, as a single people—a “community.” Bound by a unity of purpose, and joined by a common ancestry, what would they therefore share in, if not a God-sanctioned partnership—a shirkat?

Except that God, in the wilds beyond Palestine, was not the only patron of such partnerships. Behind the Thamud—and every confederation of Arab tribes since—had lurked Roman interests and Roman influence. It was only to be expected—in an age when proxy-fighting between the two superpowers cast a longer shadow over Arabia than ever before, extending as far south as distant Himyar—that the provincial authorities in Palestine should have shown themselves grimly determined not to drop their guard an inch. It was this, in the decades prior to the great war with Persia, that had encouraged a major recruitment drive on the part of Roman strategists, as they sought to compensate for their relative lack of manpower along the frontier by hiring Arabs to patrol it in depth. This, in turn, encouraged mass emigration from all over Arabia, with entire tribes drifting steadily northwards from the Hijaz towards Palestine. The concern of the provincial authorities to control and regulate this movement was evident in the care with which they sought to catalogue the newcomers. Exotic names duly flourished on the roster of foederati. Not an ethnic grouping between Palestine and the Hijaz, but the provincial authorities had sought to sponsor it. Never before, perhaps, had the tribal make-up of Arabia quite so pressingly held the interest of Roman strategists.

And yet, in every register of the age, there is one intriguing absence. As with Mecca, the city in which the Prophet supposedly grew up, so with the Quraysh, the tribe to which Muhammad supposedly belonged—all is deafening silence. Once again, it is not until a century and more after the Prophet’s death that the name makes its first, fleeting appearance in a datable text—and even then it is not entirely clear what is meant by the allusion.⁸⁴ This is doubly puzzling: for not only were the Quraysh, according to Muslim tradition, the dominant power in the Hijaz, renowned far and wide across Arabia, but Muhammad’s own ancestor, an adventurer named Qusayy, is supposed to have seized power in Mecca only after Qaysar—“Caesar”— “had extended him aid.”⁸⁵ Why, then, should the Romans appear never to have heard of the Quraysh? Such a group of people certainly did exist: they are described in four tantalising verses of the Qur’an as embarking on winter and summer journeys, and receiving both provisions and security from God. Yet, even eminent Muslim scholars might confess themselves puzzled by the precise meaning of the word “Quraysh.” Perhaps, they mused, it derived from the name of a prominent travel guide, or else a breed of camel, or perhaps a type of shark? The truth was, however, that no one—not two centuries on from the Prophet’s death—really knew any more. The derivation of “Quraysh” had long since been forgotten.

There was nothing particularly unusual about this. Back in the fourth century, when the Romans had started to refer to the Arabs as “Saracens,” few of them had appreciated that the name might well have derived from a word in the Arabs’ own incomprehensible tongue: shirkat. So perhaps it is not a total coincidence that Quraysh itself should seem to echo the same identical concept of “partnership”—but in Syriac. Qarisha, in the language that had increasingly come to be the Fertile Crescent’s readiest lingua franca, meant “collected together”—“confederated.”⁸⁶ Is this, then, to what “Quraysh” had originally referred—those tribes brought together in a common partnership, as foederati of the New Rome? It is telling, certainly, that the Ghassanid kings—and doubtless other Arab commanders—spoke at least a smattering of Syriac as a matter of course.⁸⁷ The word qarisha, duly Arabised, might well then have been used far beyond the imperial frontier: a convenient shorthand for all those tribes that had grown fat on Roman patronage.

All of this is speculation, of course. Nevertheless, it would imply, if true, that the mention of “Quraysh” in the Qur’an does not refer to a specific people in a specific place, but rather to an entire confederation of peoples; that the lands where they were to be found ranged from the Negev to the northern Hijaz; and that the sustenance and security provided them by God was mediated by Caesar. If so, then it would certainly explain why tidings of Roman defeat “in the nearby land” should have been broadcast even in the Qur’an itself. After all, the Arabs beyond the frontier were not far distant from the earthquake that convulsed the lands of the Fertile Crescent; rather, they were directly and intimately affected by it. By shattering the Roman hold on Syria and Palestine, the Persian onslaught severed for good what the Arab foederati had always previously taken for granted: the supply of gold from their imperial sponsors. Not, perhaps, that this would necessarily have spelled total disaster: for the Persian occupiers would have been desperate for the same leather, provisions and provender that Arab merchants had previously supplied to the Romans. Moreover, on the evidence of the Qur’an, the Mushrikun could provide these items to order. It is telling that trade, no less than agriculture, appears to have obsessed the Prophet, with even God being cast by him as a merchant: one who accepts the souls of mortals as pledges for their debts and remorselessly keeps track of their deeds in “an unblotted ledger-book.”⁸⁸ Telling as well, no doubt, is the Prophet’s evident familiarity with what appear to have been lengthy business trips—across the sea as well as the land. Perhaps here, then, in the need to travel by ship during the summer, and with pack animals during the winter, is an explanation for the two ventures made annually by the Quraysh.⁸⁹As for the Prophet himself, more than a century before Ibn Hisham’s biography, in the 690s, and it was already being recorded by a Christian chronicler in Edessa that “Muhammad travelled for the purposes of trade to the lands of Palestine, Arabia and Syria.”⁹⁰ A tantalising snippet of detail—and if authentic, one that would suggest a record of business dealings at the height of the Persian occupation. “No offence,” as the Qur’an itself puts it, “to seek some bounty from your Lord.”⁹¹ War, after all, will often provide scope for those on its margins to coin a profit.

But also for much more: reflections upon the mutability of all things, and the evils of the age, and the pettiness of human doings when compared to the omnipotence of God. “Have they not travelled the world,” the Prophet asked the unbelievers, “and seen how those before them met their end?”⁹² All that is human can totter: a lesson fit for the age. The Prophet’s revelations may have been haunted by ancient cities abandoned to encroaching sands, but they also contained hints of other, more recent monuments to human vanity. Traces of the decaying imperial frontier are manifest in the very language of the Qur’an: the words for roads, forts and even legionaries’ painted shields—transliterated from the original Greek and Latin—all have spectral presences in the Prophet’s revelations.⁹³ When, for instance, in the opening sura of the Qur’an, the prayer was raised to God, “Guide us to the straight path,”⁹⁴ it represented a dazzlingly audacious act of appropriation. The great military roads—the strata—that for centuries had girded the eastern frontier, and served as both emblems and tools of Roman might, were being brought to fade before the radiance of a celestial sirat—a road eternally straight.

This vision, of a truth so blinding that earthly empires were as nothing before it but shadows, was hardly novel, of course. Even the candlelit golds of Hagia Sophia, even the fires in the three holiest temples of Iranshahr, blazed as the merest reflections of the effulgence of God. This, in the barren desert beyond Palestine, far from the cockpits of worldly power, was a truth that had long been appreciated. Not only in the souls of the fugitive and the penitent, but as words inscribed on manuscripts, many of them centuries old, the experience of the divine had taken many forms and left many marks. Whether they were otherwise forgotten gospels, or ancient Jewish writings discovered in caves, or copies of pagan epics that had been stashed in libraries for would-be lawyers to use, books as well as people might speak of the yearning to understand heaven. “Those who disbelieve say: ‘This is nothing but fables of the ancients.’ ”⁹⁵ That the Prophet was sensitive to this particular accusation is evident enough from his repeated efforts, made throughout the Qur’an, to rebut it.⁹⁶ Yet, never did he veer to the opposite extreme, and proclaim the novelty of his message. “It is indeed a revelation from the Lord of the Worlds, brought down by the Trustworthy Spirit, upon your heart, so that you may be a warner, in manifest Arabic speech—but it is also in the Books of the ancients.”⁹⁷ Just as Jews might cast the Talmud as a record of eternity, and Christians see an image of the immutable order of the heavens in the Church, so did the Prophet—ever a man of his time—insist upon the timelessness of his message. Well might he have proclaimed “the straight path” to God with such boldness and conviction. When set against such a highway, what were the rutted and weed-covered strata, long since left in a state of chronic disrepair by Justinian’s budget cuts? One was eternal; the others were already returning to the desert sands.

And just as roads might crumble, so might confederations. Compared with a community of believers faithful only to God, what was a ragbag of mercenaries in hock to a foreign power? The Thamud had long since fallen, and so too, God willing, would their heirs. “We conferred guidance upon them—but they chose blindness over guidance.”⁹⁸ The Prophet’s opponents were doubly Mushrikun: for not only did they partner angels with God as fit objects of worship, but they themselves were bound in a shared subservience as associates in a Roman-sponsored shirkat. They were not only blasphemers but collaborators. Naturally, it was the offence against God that stank most noxiously to the heavens—but there were hints as well, in the Qur’an, of more earthly crimes and follies. Remorselessly, the Prophet casts his followers as the mirror-image of the foederati. Just as whole tribes had long been emigrating northwards, eager for Caesar’s bounty, so in a similar manner, but now in the cause of God, were the Believers to rank as emigrants—as the Muhajirun. A manoeuvre of genius. Service was being offered to a monarch infinitely greater than either Caesar or Shahanshah. An entire pattern of mass-movement was being reconfigured and set in spectacular reverse. “Whoso leaves his home as an emigrant to God and His Messenger and is overtaken by death, his reward falls upon God, and God is All-Forgiving, Compassionate to each.”⁹⁹

Not that one necessarily had to die before being rewarded for joining the Muhajirun. If it was the pleasures of heaven—the ox-eyed maidens and the pearl-like cup-bearers—that shimmered most deliciously before the gaze of the Believers, then earthly profits as well were far from being disdained. “They ask you about booty.” So begins one sura, in bald and ringing terms. “Say: ‘Booty belongs to God and His Messenger.’ ”¹⁰⁰ Here, at a time of global calamity, was a message calculated to appeal to anyone feeling the economic pinch. Well and good as were the profits to be had from flogging leather to the Persians, these were hardly likely to compensate, even in small part, for the loss of subsidies from Caesar’s agents. The Arab tribes who had emigrated northwards on the scent of Roman gold—and who had relied on their paymasters’ lucre for decades—had grown much impoverished. Well, then, might the message proclaimed by the Prophet—that he had a licence from God to plunder unbelievers—have met with an enthusiastic up-take. “Remember a time when you were few in number and held to be weak on earth, when you feared men would tear you to pieces. He gave you refuge and aided you with His victory; and He bestowed His bounties upon you.”¹⁰¹ Bounties that once, perhaps, Muhammad’s followers would have been content to receive from the Roman authorities—but not anymore. A wellspring that had run dry was no longer a wellspring at all.

Here, then, was a crisis, and an attempt to resolve it, bred thoroughly of its time. The arc of its parabola can still just about be traced, discernible despite all the thick overlay applied centuries later by pious biographers and commentators. The Qur’an, far from standing at some fantastical remove from the currents and convulsions of the age, is the supreme monument to them. It is the record of a man living through an unprecedented period of upheaval, alert, in every way he can be, to the word of God, and betraying a sensibility, even as he contemplates the ruin of the universe itself, that is decidedly bookish. “That will be the Day,” so God says at one point, in a description of the looming End Times, “when We roll up the sky, as a writer rolls up his scrolls.” Such images, which occur throughout the Qur’an, suggest a man who was the polar opposite of illiterate, and who, even as he laid claim to traditions of divine inspiration that were immeasurably venerable, knew full well what he was doing. Such it was to be the Seal of the Prophets: “a herald of good tidings, a bearer of warning.”¹⁰² The good tidings provided a solution to humanity’s troubles that did not depend upon mortal agency; the warning explained what would happen to those who closed their ears to it.

But it was not enough for the Prophet’s message to be inscribed simply upon the souls of his audience. The evils of the time were as political as they were spiritual, and as economic as they were moral. Like the rabbis of Mesopotamia and Tiberias, like Justinian and his great team of jurists, the Prophet appreciated that not only individuals but society itself required moulding to the purposes of God. This was why, it seems, he set himself to the founding of a state—first among the Mushrikun, and then, in the wake of their rejection, among the Muhajirun. And its capital? Here, at any rate, there is no contradiction between the Qur’an and the great spider’s web of subsequent Islamic tradition. A battle fought against overwhelming odds, “a violent wind and invisible forces”¹⁰³ sent by God against the Prophet’s enemies, a glorious victory snatched from the jaws of defeat: all this, so the Qur’an records, occurred at a place that, for once, it actually names. Yathrib, that fertile oasis in the northern Hijaz, was indeed, it would appear, ’Madinat an-Nabi—the “City of the Prophet.” Medina, just as tradition records, ranked as the very first bridgehead of the heavenly established by Muhammad on earth.

Does that mean, then, that the story told of a single, dramatic flight there, a hijra, is similarly based on fact? It is notable, certainly, that the word itself does not appear anywhere in the Qur’an; and, as with so many details of his biography, all references to the Prophet’s escape to Yathrib are frustratingly late in origin.¹⁰⁴ Reason enough, then, perhaps, to be suspicious—and to wonder whether the whole notion of “emigration” might possibly have had a significance for the Prophet and his followers that subsequent tradition has obscured. Memorable the story of the hijra may be—and yet there seems to lurk behind it the hint of something much more seismic. In the Qur’an, emigration is cast as a duty incumbent upon all believers—no matter their circumstances, no matter their location. Far from alluding to a single journey into exile—whether to Yathrib or to anywhere else—it seems to imply a call to arms that is all-embracing, universal and unbounded by time or place. “Anyone who migrates for God’s cause will find many a refuge and great plenty in the earth.”¹⁰⁵ Nothing could conceivably have sounded more radical or terrifying to the Prophet’s audience. Abandoning family and tribe was the most stomach-churning prospect imaginable for any Arab. And yet, if the Qur’an is to be trusted, this was precisely the commitment that the Prophet was demanding—and not just of his own people but of all the various descendants of Ishmael, wherever they might live, across the entire sweep of Arabia. The successful planting of his banner in Yathrib, set against the backdrop of the apparent breaking of the world, was to be only the start. All those with the courage—or perhaps the sheer desperation—to accept the Prophet’s challenge and embark on a new beginning were invited to join him on a journey that might lead God alone knew where.

And to be sure—whether they were tempted by heaven, plunder, or both—there was clearly no lack of Arabs who were prepared to answer the summons. “You are the best community ever brought forth among mankind, commanding virtue and forbidding vice, and believing in God.” So the Prophet hailed the Muhajirun: as a band of warriors who had it within them not only to found a whole new order of society but to inherit, as their reward for doing so, the earth itself.

A claim that was to be proved, and in short order, quite spectacularly correct.

Why?

Early in AD 634, alarming news reached Caesarea, the handsome city on the coast of Palestine that had long served as the hinterland’s capital. A war band of Saracens, trespassing directly on Roman territory, had crossed into the Negev, and was now aiming northwards for the rich fields and villages of Samaria. A most tiresome intrusion—and one that the provincial authorities were naturally anxious to nip in the bud. No matter that the Roman military, in the wake of plague and war, remained extremely stretched: a task force of infantry, summoned hurriedly to arms, marched out into the open, and swung briskly south.¹⁰⁶ At their head, resplendent in the white uniform that marked him out as a personal favourite of the emperor, rode a patrician by the name of Sergius.¹⁰⁷ He had particular cause to relish the challenge ahead. Already, he had been looking to replenish the finances of the exhausted province by restricting the profits that Saracen merchants were permitted to take back across the frontier. Now, with the barbarians seemingly provoked to open larceny by this measure, it was time to reacquaint them with the brute facts of Roman might. The region’s ancient mistress, after her temporary absence, was back.

Sergius and his small army met the invaders in the afternoon of 4 February, some twelve miles east of Gaza.¹⁰⁸ The result was utter debacle. The infantry were ambushed and Sergius himself, having reputedly fallen three times from his horse, was taken prisoner. His fate, according to one report, was a peculiarly unpleasant one: sewn up inside a freshly flayed camel hide, he was suffocated to death as the stinking skin dried out. Further calamities quickly followed. The Saracens, with devilish cunning, turned out to have launched a pincer movement against Palestine. The second war band, crossing the eastern frontier even as the first was rampaging through the Negev, joined exultantly in the scouring of the province. Over fields thick with thistles, weed-covered highways and crumbling walls they swept. “Saracens,” Roman strategists had always asserted with imperious complacency, “are by nature unable to conduct sieges”¹⁰⁹—but now, to the horror of the authorities, this reassurance was proving a worthless one. If it was cities, with their dense populations and rat-infested byways, that had always proved most vulnerable to the scythings of the plague, then the distinction between town and countryside, after whole decades of visitations, was one that had come increasingly to be blurred. Sheep grazed amid toppled pillars, while cattle, tethered against the depredations of bandits, spent their nights in abandoned shops and foundries. If the average city of Palestine was not yet wholly a ghost town, then it certainly had one foot in the grave.¹¹⁰Unsurprisingly, then, in the wake of Sergius’s defeat, and with Roman field armies nowhere to be seen, ambassadors from settlement after settlement sought to follow the path of least resistance, and buy off the invaders.

Not that many could seriously have thought that the Saracens would be around for long. As with Samaritan uprisings, so with incursions from the desert: the imperial authorities had seen it all before. Inveterately barbarian as the Saracens were, perhaps it was only to be expected that they would once in a while turn rogue. Back in 582, for instance, when Ghassanid resentment at the exile of their king had provoked the foederati into open revolt, they had inflicted a crushing defeat on an imperial army in open battle and then ranged at will across Syria. A couple of centuries before that, an Arab queen named Mavia, “long celebrated in song by the Saracens,”¹¹¹ had launched a series of devastating raids that had taken her all the way to Egypt. The Roman response, on both occasions, had been the time-honoured one of dazzling the barbarians with bribes. Both Mavia and the Ghassanids, despite the undoubted scares that they had given the provincial authorities, had been successfully pacified with a whole range of exotic gewgaws. Golden furnishings and fancy titles had, as ever, proved their worth. No reason, then, for Heraclius to feel particularly perturbed by the defeat outside Gaza. Alarming though the swift return of warfare to Palestine clearly was, the Saracens hardly rivalled the Persians as foes. After all, if history had taught Roman officials anything, it was that the wolves of Arabia, no matter how much of a passing threat they might be on occasion, could always be muzzled in the end.

This latest invasion would prove very different, though. The Saracens did not content themselves with the extortion of subsidies and silken cloaks. Rather than wait to be graced with treasure from the hands of Caesar, they aimed instead to rip it brutally from his grasp. With Palestine effectively secured, they immediately flung themselves against the defences of Syria. Fifty years later, a monk writing in Sinai would record what ensued: two terrible battles, one at the Ghassanid camp city of Jabiya, and the other a few miles to the west, on the Golan Heights above the River Yarmuk.¹¹² The details are slight—and it is the measure of how impossible it has proved for historians to agree on the actual progress of the Arab invasion, and the struggle of the Romans to resist it, that not a single earlier reference to these fateful clashes exists in either Arabic or Greek.^g The dates, the details and the course of the Syrian campaign—all are veiled by contradiction and confusion.¹¹³ Nevertheless, if the particulars of what happened during the campaigning have defied repeated attempts to arrive at a consensus, then not so the result. “For the Roman army,” as the monk in Sinai would note with bleak finality, “it proved a defeat as fatal as it was terrible.”¹¹⁴ By late 636, with the campaigning season drawing to a close, Heraclius seems to have bowed to the inevitable. Burning villages and fields as he withdrew, he abandoned the very provinces that he had moved heaven and earth to retake just a few years previously. “Peace be upon you, Syria!” he is said to have cried, as he paused for one last yearning look back. “What a rich country is this for the enemy!”¹¹⁵

Yet others were richer still. Across the desert from Syria, where the humiliating collapse of the House of Sasan into debilitation and factionalism had brought a beardless king by the name of Yazdegird to the throne, Iranshahr itself was no less exhausted and divided than its royal family. The marks of the Roman invasion still scarred the landscape. The River Tigris, having burst its banks in AD 629, had swept away an immense swath of irrigation works and left Kavad’s great canal silted up. Parthian warlords, snarling and snapping as ever, now threatened the entire fabric of the imperial high command with disintegration. Never—not even in the dark days following the death of Peroz—had the empire been so enfeebled; and the Arabs, alert as they were to the scents of weakness, well knew it. Either a few weeks or a few years after the Roman defeat at the Yarmuk—the sources, as usual, are at sixes and sevens—a similarly decisive battle was fought on Iranshahr’s desert flank.¹¹⁶ Qadisiyya was a small, palm-fringed town just to the south of the one-time Lakhmid capital of Hira. Now, it would be the scene of an epically terminal disaster for Iranshahr. After fighting that spanned several days, and the failure of elephants as well as the Persian heavy cavalry to turn the tide, the Arabs emerged triumphant. Their women, stalking the palm groves, were said to have busied themselves slitting the throats of those of the enemy still left there alive. Meanwhile, the exultant Arab army, pursuing the remnants of their defeated foes across canals and pontoon bridges, caught up with the fugitives amid the ruins of Babylon and briskly wiped them out. Iranshahr had been decapitated, “for all the leading nobles were killed.”¹¹⁷ Ctesiphon, a bare hundred miles to the north, now lay directly in the Arabs’ path. Its fall, with the flower of the empire’s chivalry left blackened and rotting in the killing fields of the south, was only a matter of time. Sure enough, despite bitter resistance that seems to have lasted almost a year, the great city was duly stormed. Yazdegird himself, amid much confusion, managed to escape his doomed capital, zigzagging across the mudflats in a desperate effort to evade his pursuers. He finally reached the relative security of the Iranian uplands and his ancestral hometown of Istakhr, from which Ardashir, five centuries previously, had embarked on his own great project of conquest; but the royal regalia and the imperial treasury, all were lost. So too was Mesopotamia—which the invaders, in imitation of the Persians, knew by the name of “Iraq.”

That Arab fingers could prod at the crown worn by Khusrow the Great; that Arab feet could tread on carpets from the royal palace woven with gold and adorned with precious stones; that Arab prayers could be heard in the great throne room of Ctesiphon, from the sides of which statues of Yazdegird’s ancestors gazed out stern and impassive, oblivious to the ruin that had engulfed the House of Sasan: all this, in the opinion of the Arabs themselves, taught a lesson so edifying that they would never tire of repeating it. The coin of contempt dealt them for so long by Caesar and Shahanshah alike had been richly, deliciously, repaid. Two and a half centuries on from Qadisiyya, by which time the Muslims ruled an empire even vaster than Khusrow the Great’s, their pride in having scorned superpower dazzle could still rank for them as the surest measure of their dignity. “In the past, those of us who came to you were obedient to you, they humbled themselves before you, they sought what was in your hands.” So one Arab, as pious as he was lacking in personal hygiene, was supposed to have told the silken Persians on the eve of the great battle. “But now we no longer come to you looking for the things of this world. Our desire and aspiration is for paradise.”¹¹⁸

Hairy, badly dressed, and stinking of camel as he was, this ambassador to the perfumed tents of the Persian high command would be commemorated in histories of the conquest as the heroic embodiment of Muslim brotherhood. “God loves not the swaggering and the conceited.”¹¹⁹ So the Prophet had taught. Even though, if tradition is to be trusted, Muhammad died in 632, two whole years before the first rubbing of a superpower nose in the dirt, it was his revelations, of a God who humbles the proud, and slaughters them in battle, and permits them to be despoiled of all their goods, that had given the Arabs the courage and sheer self-confidence to go eyeball to eyeball with their former masters.¹²⁰ Riding in to meet Roman or Persian officials, their ambassadors were said to have made a point of trampling down their cushions and stabbing with spears at their carpets. The conquest of the world, and the scorning of its seductions: such, it seemed to Muslim historians writing centuries later, had been the supreme achievement of the generation that had known Muhammad.

It had one supreme exemplar. Umar bin al-Khattab had ranked as the most formidable and domineering of all the Prophet’s companions, the leader under whose guidance both Syria and Iraq had been won, the veritable sword arm of the Prophet. Tradition would commemorate him not merely as a great Amir—“commander”—but as something very much more: as a Muslim so flame-lit by his knowledge of God’s will that several Qur’anic verses were said to have been revealed purely to provide his opinions with some heavenly back-up. Even Muhammad, according to certain traditions, had acknowledged that Umar was the better Muslim of the two. “When people differ on any issue,” one celebrated ruling declared, “look for Umar’s doing and abide by it.”¹²¹ Like the Qur’an itself, then, the character of the second Caliph was a book in which might be read the lessons of God’s will. Mighty warrior and mighty ascetic; quick to draw his sword and no less quick to trample down in righteous scorn the luxuries won by that same sword; a man who from his mud-brick home in Medina could direct the overthrow of mighty empires, and yet who, if he saw his lieutenants dressed in silks and brocade, would leap down from his saddle and pelt them with stones: such, in the opinion of Muslim scholars, was the man who had secured the world for Islam.

A plausible characterisation? Certainly, as with Muhammad, so with Umar—his historicity is beyond dispute. An Armenian bishop, writing a decade or so after Qadisiyya, described Umar in a brief, throwaway sentence much as Muslim historians would subsequently do: as a mighty potentate coordinating the advance of “the sons of Ishmael” from the depths of the desert.¹²² Nor is that all. There do indeed seem to be found, preserved in the traditions that Muslims would record of the Sahabah, the “Companions,” of Muhammad, authentic echoes of the God-haunted and strife-torn age that had witnessed the Futuh—the “Conquest.” If there seems no reason to doubt that Umar, that model of ferocious piety, was directly inspired by the awesome thunder of the Prophet’s revelations, then so too is it evident that the Prophet himself, in his summoning of the Arabs to holy war, was perfectly in accord with the spirit of the times. “In truth,” he informed his followers, “the punishment of those who make war against God and His Messenger, and roam the earth corrupting it, is that they be killed, or crucified, or have their hands and feet amputated, alternately, or be exiled from the land.”¹²³ Such a message was all the more resonant, no doubt, for being delivered direct from the Almighty Himself; and yet, the sentiments informing it would have been instantly recognisable to anyone familiar with the workings of Roman power. Whether it was Justinian breaking the rebellious Samaritans, or Saint Simeon incinerating Mundhir with a fireball, or Heraclius bringing ruin to the fire-temples of the Persians, examples were hardly lacking of spectacular violence committed in the cause of God. Umar, turning the pretensions of the Christian empire back upon itself, seemed to those he conquered, as well as to those he commanded, a warlord of a thoroughly recognisable kind. What added incomparably to his prestige, however, and did truly suggest something novel, was that his earth-shaking qualities as a generalissimo were combined with a most distinctive cast of virtue. Rather than ape the manners of a Caesar, as the Ghassanid kings had done, he drew on the example of a quite different kind of Christian. Umar’s threadbare robes, his diet of bread, salt and water, and his rejection of worldly riches would have reminded anyone from the desert reaches beyond Palestine of a very particular kind of person. Monks out in the Judaean desert had long been casting themselves as warriors of God. The achievement of Umar was to take such language to a literal, and previously unimagined, extreme.

Just like the Qur’an itself, then, the heroic stories that were told of the second Caliph seem to reach back to a specific place and moment: to the fringes of Palestine, and that terrifying period of superpower conflict when it appeared that the world itself stood in the shadow of the End Days. That war might be waged in the name of God, and that a contempt for earthly pleasures too was a form of warfare: these twin presumptions, which Umar embodied in a supremely radical way, were nevertheless far from being original to him. Naturally, the truth of this cannot help but be obscured by histories that locate his beginnings, like those of the Prophet himself, in a desert backwater many hundreds of miles from the Fertile Crescent. Composed centuries later, by men of intense piety who could feel God nearer to them than their jugular veins, it is no wonder that such narratives, like sandstone shaped by ceaseless weathering, should have been transformed out of recognition over the course of the generations. Hence, in trying to explain how a state came to be forged in the depths of Arabia formidable enough to subdue the Fertile Crescent, the perennial frustration. The aftermath of the conquests masterminded by Umar could hardly be more manifest—but not so the course, and still less the cause, of the original eruption.

Which said, despair need not be total. There has been preserved, embedded within the vast corpus of subsequent writings on the Prophet, at least a single lump of magma sufficiently calcified to have stood proof against all erosion. The “Constitution of Medina,” it has been termed: a series of eight brief treaties concluded between the Muhajirun and the natives of Yathrib, and which—not least because they refer to the emigrants as “Believers” rather than “Muslims”—are accepted by even the most suspicious of scholars as deriving from the time of Muhammad. Here, in these precious documents, it is possible to glimpse the authentic beginnings of a movement that would succeed, in barely two decades, in prostrating both the New Rome and Iranshahr. That the Prophet consciously aimed at state-building; that it was his ambition to forge his own people and the local Arab tribes into a single Umma; that this confederation was to fight “in the path of God”:¹²⁴ these brief details, the veritable building blocks out of which all the much later stories of Muhammad’s life would be constructed, do authentically seem rock solid. What the Constitution of Medina does not tell us, however, is where the Muhajirun had originally come from; nor does it reveal precisely whom they felt called upon by God to fight. Most regrettably of all, it sheds no light on how an alliance stitched together in a remote oasis might conceivably have expanded to embrace the whole of Arabia, and then to take on the world. Nevertheless, its very existence would seem to suggest that the hard core of Muslim tradition may truly derive from the time of Muhammad, and have stood proof, after all, against the weathering effects of time. Conflict between the upstart Umma and the Quraysh; eventual compromise on both sides, and the agreement between them of a treaty; a brutal crushing by the new confederation of any Arab tribes bold enough to stand in its way: such a process of state-building seems, at the very least, plausible.

And if accurate, then it would imply that there may perhaps be other clues, preserved in the stories told centuries later of the Prophet’s career, as to how and why, as if from the blue, the imperial authorities in both Syria and Iraq were overwhelmed by precisely the kind of Arab federation that hitherto had always been theirs to sway. Even though Muslim tradition would cast the conflict between Muhammad and the Quraysh as a struggle for control of Mecca, this tradition itself contains hints of a suggestively alternative one. Particularly striking, for instance, is the number of leading Qurayshi dynasts who, despite supposedly being based in Mecca, are said to have purchased estates in Syria during the Prophet’s lifetime: an example of long-distance property speculation which, if genuinely conducted from the Hijaz, would have had no precedent in the entire span of Roman history. Previously, whether along the Rhine or in Armenia, the only barbarians who owned land on either side of the imperial frontier were those who directly bordered it.¹²⁵ All of which would seem to imply a rather awkward conundrum. Either the Quraysh truly came from Mecca, in which case they could not have owned property in Roman territory—or else they owned property in Roman territory, in which case they are most unlikely to have come from Mecca.

Of these two alternatives, it is clear that the second is the likelier. Even on the evidence of Muslim tradition itself, the obsession of the Prophet with securing the border zone south of Palestine is manifest. With the single exception of Mecca itself, all the targets of his campaigning, all the objects of his military ambitions, are said to have lain in this region: the stretches of desert that the Romans’ Arab allies had always traditionally patrolled. If the Quraysh did go from attempting to strangle the Prophet’s infant confederation in its cradle to allying themselves with it—and there seems no reason to doubt it—they would obviously have been putting their stake in any imperially sanctioned order in serious jeopardy. This, however, at a time when the supply of gold from Caesar had long since dried up, seems to have struck them as a gamble well worth taking. The winnings on offer, after all, were potentially dazzling. It was not only the plunder promised them by Muhammad’s terrifyingly omnipotent god that would have glimmered in the imaginings of the Qurayshi leaders. So too would something even more seductive: the prospect of toppling the Ghassanids, of laying claim to the heritage of the Lakhmids, of fashioning a whole new shirkat, with themselves as the region’s top dogs. What the new confederation of Muhajirun and Quraysh appears initially to have aimed at, as their primary strategic goal, was the mastery of the Syrian desert. That it ended up conquering Syria itself, and Mesopotamia too, may well, then, have come as big a surprise to its leaders as it did to the Romans and Persians themselves.

It certainly seems no coincidence that the invaders’ two most decisive victories were won on the doorsteps of two places that had long featured prominently in Arab dreams. For generations, the tales told of the courts of Jabiya and Hira, and the songs sung of their splendours, had haunted the imaginings of the desert tribes. Now, with the defeat of the Romans at the Yarmuk, calamity had overwhelmed their Ghassanid clients as well—just as the shattering of the Persian monarchy at Qadisiyya had spelled doom for all those local desert chieftains with fantasies of sitting on the vacant throne of the Lakhmids. The likelihood is, in fact, that both imperial armies, as they sought to stem the Saracen onslaught, consisted themselves in large part of Arab tribesmen. Muslim historians, not surprisingly, would take an exultant delight in emphasising the immensity of the manpower available to the toppled empires: of how their troops numbered in the hundreds of thousands, and of how their blood, when it was spilled, had flowed in such prodigious quantities as to turn the wheels of local water-mills.¹²⁶ Contemporaries knew better, though. They understood the true condition of anaemia that had afflicted both superpowers. Heraclius, as one bishop bluntly put it, “could raise no more troops to oppose the Ishmaelites.”¹²⁷ Given the absence of regular troops, he had no alternative but to rely on foederati to defend Roman territory. The Ghassanids, and all the other tribes allied to them, repaid Heraclius’s trust with fierce loyalty; but it ensured, when the Muhajirun first appeared across the Syrian desert, that the Roman military itself was reduced to something of a sideshow.¹²⁸ Almost a century of pestilence, and whole decades of war: these, in their combined effects, had left the emperor with no clothes.

So it was that Syria and Palestine slipped away a second time from the grasp of the New Rome, and those Qurayshis who had previously held estates under the sufferance of the imperial authorities now took possession of entire provinces. But they were not alone, of course, in claiming title deeds to the Holy Land—as the defeated Christians, in their bewilderment and demoralisation, were all too bitterly aware. Torn between blaming the calamities that had overwhelmed them on either their own sinfulness or the machinations of the Jews, many, not surprisingly, plumped for the latter option. Was it any coincidence, they wondered, that “the horror of the invasion of the Ishmaelites”¹²⁹ should have followed so fast upon Heraclius’s campaign of forced baptisms? Dark rumours began to swirl: of how Jewish refugees from this decree had fled to Arabia; of how, upon their arrival in the desert, they had turned the head of the Saracens with honeyed talk of their shared descent from Abraham; of how Muhammad, looking to claim their birthright, had duly set off at their head to conquer Palestine. Stories such as these, of course, were prone only to grow wilder with the telling; and yet the wildest rumours of all, perhaps, were the very earliest. Back in 634, with Sergius freshly entombed in his shroud of camel skin, fabulous reports of a Saracen prophet had swept through Caesarea. By Christians, of course, he had been scorned as the rankest impostor—“for since when did prophets come armed with a sword?” Among the Jews of the city, however, the reaction had been very different. Delight, no doubt, would have been their response to any Roman defeat; but their joy, in that spring of 634, had been blended with a fierce and familiar hope. “People were saying that the prophet had appeared, coming with the Saracens.” And his message? “They say that he is proclaiming the advent of the Anointed One—the Christ who is to come.”¹³⁰

It was exactly twenty years since Nehemiah, amid a similar groundswell of excitement, had sought to rebuild Jerusalem’s Temple, and promptly been impaled for his pains. To the Jews of Palestine, though, the Ishmaelites must have seemed altogether more promising agents of deliverance than the Persians had ever been. They might have been wild asses among men—but they were at least distant cousins. Then there was the fact that the Prophet himself, or so it would seem, had chosen Moses as his particular role model. “O people, enter the holy land which God has marked out for you, and do not go back to your old ways, only to end up as losers.”¹³¹ Any Jews, hearing Muhammad attribute this exhortation to their greatest prophet—the original rabbi, the man who had led them out of bondage and back to the Promised Land—might well have pricked up their ears. Indeed, some might well have done a good deal more than that. Such, at any rate, is the evidence of the Constitution of Medina. Muhajirun and local Arabs, it seems, were not alone in having ranked as original members of the Umma. Also listed as Believers, and graced with a starring role in the founding document of their state, had been some other, perhaps rather more unexpected enthusiasts for the Prophet: whole quantities of Jews.

Later Muslim historians, clearly discombobulated by this, would attempt to explain them away as members of three Jewish clans supposedly native to Medina, who were said initially to have given their backing to the Prophet, and then, after turning fractious, to have been variously driven into exile or massacred and dumped into pits. Yet there are serious difficulties in accepting this tradition as true. It is not simply that the three Jewish clans mentioned by the historians do not feature anywhere in the Constitution of Medina. There is also another, and familiar, problem: that our only sources for the annihilation of these Jews are all suspiciously late. Not only that, but they date from the heyday of Muslim greatness: a period when the authors would have had every interest in fabricating the sanction of the Prophet for the brusque slapping down of uppity infidels.¹³² Certainly, if it were truly the case that entire communities of Jews had been expelled into the desert or else wiped out by Ishmaelites in a bloodbath, then no contemporary seems to have noted it. This, at a time when Jews, just like Christians, had never been more alert to the propaganda value of martyrs, is most peculiar. So peculiar, in fact, as to appear downright implausible. Far likelier, it would seem, is that the compact recorded in the Constitution of Medina, between the Muhajirun and assorted bands of Jewish warriors, had held firm—and that it had culminated in the conquest of Palestine. Christians, when they fingered their old enemies as the tutors of Muhammad, were undoubtedly indulging themselves in a familiar paranoia—but less so, perhaps, when they accused “the sons of Israel” of joining with the Arabs “to form a large army.”¹³³ Venerable the scorn of the Jews for the Ishmaelites may have been; but it was nothing like so savage as their loathing for the Romans. “Do not fear, son of man”: So an angel was supposed to have reassured a twitchy rabbi. “The Almighty only brings the kingdom of Ishmael in order to deliver you from the wicked ones.”¹³⁴

In the first disorienting flush of the Ishmaelite occupation, such a reassurance might well have seemed a perfectly convincing one. How else, after all, was the humiliation of Heraclius to be interpreted, if not as a deliverance ordained of God? Unsurprisingly, then, in the wake of the Jews’ redemption from the threat of forced baptism, their enthusiasm for the new order seems to have flared with some flamboyance—and to have had a familiar focus. Jerusalem, that perennial object of Jewish longing, had been lost to the Romans along with the rest of the Holy Land. The Arabs—who, in a curious show of antiquarianism, insisted on calling it Iliy’a, after its old pagan name of Aelia Capitolina—were quick to mark it with their own stamp. To Christian horror, the ancient ban on Jews entering the city’s sacred limits—which dated back to the heyday of the pagan empire and which Heraclius had pointedly renewed—was revoked. Work also began on clearing rubble and refuse from the holiest Jewish spot of all—the Temple Mount. No surprise, then, that Umar, “the second king who arises from Ishmael,” and the man who had given the order, should have been hailed in breathless tones by one rabbi as “a lover of Israel.”¹³⁵ As the work continued, first with the levelling of the bedrock, and then with the cannibalisation of the Kapitolion, the temple of Jupiter, there were some Jews who dared to go even further and dream that it was the Temple itself being rebuilt. No prospect could possibly have been more dazzling. With the Temple restored, after all, there would arise a new Israel. Inevitably, then, the excited rumours prompted by the defeat of Sergius at Gaza, of the Messiah’s imminent arrival, continued to swirl.

Time, it was true, would prove this optimism sorely misplaced. The more extravagant hopes of the Jews were destined, as ever, to be disappointed. The Temple was not restored. The Messiah did not appear hot on the heels of the Ishmaelites’ prophet. Nevertheless, there was, in the febrile speculations of the Jews, something more than mere wishful thinking. Those who sensed in the Ishmaelites a particular obsession with the Promised Land were surely not mistaken. Just as Jabiya and Hira had been the initial objects of the conquerors’ strategic ambitions, Palestine had clearly blazed in their imaginings as a prize that transcended mere earthly considerations. Although it had been a simple matter for them to cross the undefended frontier into what the Prophet had termed the “Holy Land,” ease of access had hardly been the primary consideration. God had promised Palestine to the descendants of Abraham—and so it had come to pass. No wonder, then, in the immediate wake of the conquest, that Muhajirun as well as Jews appear to have indulged in any number of wild surmises. Indeed, on occasion, it might be hard to tell them apart. Amid the general fracturing of the times, old identities and old certainties had the potential to warp very quickly. When Jews, praising Umar for his scouring of the Romans from Jerusalem, and his cleansing of the Temple Mount, hailed him as the Messiah, there were certain Muhajirun who did not think to scorn the notion. Instead, caught up in the mood of excitement, they surrendered to it. Umar, so it was boldly proclaimed, ranked as none other than al-Faruq—“the Redeemer.”¹³⁶ Such, it appeared, was the true potency of the Temple Mount: that it could persuade Arabs to share in the fantasies of Jews.

And perhaps, had the Muhajirun rested content with their conquest of the Holy Land, and not set their horizons far wider, then their faith might ultimately have mutated into something truly messianic—a Jerusalem-haunted blurring of Jewish beliefs and the Prophet’s revelations. Yet already, even as Umar’s workmen set to work on clearing the rubbish from the Temple Mount, it was apparent that Palestine, no matter how awesome a prize, provided far too small a stage for the evolving pretensions of the conquerors. What value the Promised Land, after all, when God had graced the Muhajirun with so much more besides? A question fit, perhaps, to perplex the conquerors themselves. Certainly, there had been nothing in the Prophet’s revelations to forewarn them that they might end up the masters of the world. Muhammad himself, when reporting God’s assurance that He would settle the Muhajirun “in a good abode,” had seemed to take for granted that this same “good abode” was merely their inheritance from Abraham.¹³⁷ The limits of his ambitions, it would appear, had been Arabia and Palestine. Yet both, in the event, had provided merely stepping-stones. As too, in due course, would the entire glittering sweep of Syria and Iraq. Fabulous a prize though the Fertile Crescent was, infinitely beyond the dreams of previous generations of Arabs, it ultimately served only to whet the appetite of the Muhajirun for more. The world lay all before them—and God, it seemed, intended them to take it.

So it was, in late 639, that a tiny war band of Arabs, following the high road that led south from Gaza, crossed into Egypt. The bread-basket of Constantinople, most precious of all the various territories retrieved by Heraclius from Persian occupation, the province had been back under imperial rule for a decade—but not contentedly so. The return of Roman administrators had seen the return as well to the determinedly Monophysite province of a Chalcedonian patriarch. Heraclius, no less determined than Justinian had been to secure the unity of the Church, had sponsored a programme of increasingly repressive bullying. The Copts, digging in their heels, had responded by embracing every opportunity to pose as martyrs. The brother of the Monophysite patriarch, for instance, despite having his flanks griddled over a fire and his teeth pulled out, proved so obdurate in his defiance that the Chalcedonians, giving up on their attempts to convert him, had him dumped out at sea. Or so the story went. Certainly, the fact that so many Monophysites could swap such a rumour, and believe it to be true, reflected a groundswell of hostility to Constantinople that would ultimately prove fatal to Roman rule. Imperial exhaustion, Arab self-confidence and the studied neutrality of the vast majority of the native population all contributed to the Muhajirun winning their most glittering prize yet. In September 642, after the expiration of an eleven-month armistice and a wholesale evacuation of the province by the Roman forces, the new lords of the Nile entered Alexandria. The disaster, so a Monophysite bishop piously declared, had been entirely due “to the wickedness of the emperor Heraclius, and his persecutions.”¹³⁸ If so, then God had exacted a high price. There were to be no more grain ships sailing from Alexandria to Constantinople.

Meanwhile, the demand slapped on the city fathers of Herakleopolis for sixty-five sheep was an early indication of what the toppling of Roman rule might mean for those Christian officials left behind in Egypt. The Magaritai—the Muhajirun—still thought instinctively, as their ancestors had ever done, in terms of plunder and rustled livestock. Even when clattering down marble-paved high streets, past palaces and cathedrals, they retained instincts bred of the desert. Great cities such as Alexandria and Ctesiphon, for all the fabulous wealth that they promised, were viewed with dark suspicion—as breeding grounds of pestilence and black magic. Just as their forefathers had done when making their own hijra northwards from the depths of Arabia to serve Caesar orShahanshah, the Muhajirun preferred to settle amid open fields, where they could live among their own kind and graze their sheep. Above all, they aimed to revel in the pleasures and the profits that war, by venerable tradition, had most honourably provided the Arabs. No wonder, then, that the settlements in which they congregated should fast have developed the character of garrison towns.

In Iraq, where the unconquered uplands of Iran beckoned tantalisingly, two particularly large cities of tents and reed huts were soon sprouting among the mudflats. One, Basra, lay in the far south, near where the Tigris and Euphrates met with the sea. The other, Kufa, stood across the palm groves from the God-blessed site of Qadisiyya. Regularly, in the decade that followed the fall of Alexandria, Muhajirun from these two bases would ride out eastwards, embarked upon a fresh, and far more challenging, project of conquest. Persia, in marked contrast to Egypt, was a land of mountains and defiant citadels. Unremitting in a way that none of the previous campaigns of the Muhajirun had been, the subjugation of the Sasanian heartlands was to prove a brutal one. Although certainly marked by some lucrative gains—including the capture of yet more royal treasure and the body of the prophet Daniel, no less—it was only in 650, after a grinding, five-year campaign, that Istakhr was finally stormed. Although Yazdegird, once again, made good his escape, the rest of the population were not so lucky. Forty thousand in all were put to the sword, and the monuments and fire temples of Ardashir’s city left as smoking rubble. No such calamity had been visited upon Persia since the time of Alexander, and the burning of Persepolis.

And in truth, with triumphs everywhere being recorded for Arab arms, the prospect shimmered before the victors of winning an empire even more vast than Alexander’s. Yet greatness, for all the plunder and the glory that it had brought the Muhajirun, was not without its challenges. That God had favoured them, and humbled their enemies, was obvious enough to everyone—conquerors and conquered alike. That God fully intended the Muhajirun to enjoy the profits of their victories was also—to the Muhajirun themselves, at any rate—no less self-evident. Even as the tide of warfare and ready plunder rolled ever onwards, to the limits of East and West, the extortion of tribute ensured that the already-subjugated lands would continue to turn a profit. It was true, of course, that such a pension scheme was bound to depend upon skills that were not readily associated with warriors on camels; but bureaucrats, as the town fathers of Herakleopolis had efficiently demonstrated, were hardly lacking in the conquered territories. Indeed, so remorseless had been the tax machines of both the New Rome and Iranshahr that despairing Christians had long taken for granted that it would take the return of Christ to ease their exactions. By that reckoning, at any rate, the arrival of the Ishmaelites did not presage the End Days. Officials of the two decapitated superpowers, seasoned as they were in the arts of extortion, and eager to maintain their positions of authority, had every incentive to work hard for their new masters. Vast and implacable, like a kraken of the deep undisturbed by storms raging across the ocean surface, the apparatus of empire still coiled its prodigious tentacles, ready to flex and squeeze its victims tightly, as it had ever done.

Such was the beast that had served Justinian, the beast that had served Khusrow the Great. What more awesome proof of God’s power and mercy, then, than that He should have delivered it up into the hands of a leader such as Umar—a man so contemptuous of worldly rank that on inscriptions he might very well be name-checked without any title at all?¹³⁹ Naturally, as Amir of the Faithful—their “Commander”—he was due their obedience; but hardly their grovelling. The stern message of the Prophet, that all his followers were brothers, made a mockery of any notion, such as the people of the conquered territories were prone to take for granted, that Umar might rank as their king. His right to all the prodigious wealth won by the Muhajirun lay precisely in the fact that he so palpably scorned it. What is virtue? So the Prophet had insistently demanded. Umar, conqueror of the known world though he might be, never disdained to illustrate the answer.

               Who dispenses money, though dear, to kinsmen, orphans, the needy, the traveller, the beggars and for ransom;

               Who performs the prayer and pays the alms;

               Who fulfil their contracts when they contract;

               Who are steadfast in hardship, calamity and danger;

               These are the true believers.

               These are truly pious.¹⁴⁰

Yet, as the years passed, and the expanse of sword-won lands continued to increase, so memories of the Prophet, inevitably, grew less immediate, and the value of his example more problematic. In 644, ten years into the great adventure of the Arab conquests, Umar was murdered by a deranged Persian slave, and the Faithful, in their search for a new commander, found themselves torn two ways. Their eventual choice, a man named Uthman, might have seemed the perfect continuity candidate: for tradition—and there seems no reason to doubt it—identifies him as one of the Prophet’s earliest and most pious companions. Yet, he also had the unmistakable whiff of a dynast: a man sprung from a family that was perfectly at ease with power and wealth. The Umayyads, according to Muslim historians, were Qurayshis who had made a fortune trading with the Romans, and had then invested it in Syrian real estate: a tradition that would seem to indicate an origin, not in the depths of Arabia, but somewhere along the imperial frontier. Certainly, they had enjoyed a track record of success during the conquest of the region that might well have suggested local knowledge: one brother, Yazid, is said to have ranged with a war band far and wide across the province, while another, Mu’awiya, had captured Caesarea, and been appointed governor of Syria by Umar. Uthman not only confirmed him in this role but also, in a blatant display of nepotism, made sure to promote other members of his family to similarly lucrative posts.

Understandably, then, the Umayyads fast gained a reputation for quite spectacular greed. One nephew, a smooth opportunist by the name of Marwan, developed a particular name for insatiability: no sooner had he been graced with a hundred thousand silver coins by Uthman than he was off to North Africa, where he proved as effective at screwing the natives out of their wealth as he was shameless in monopolising the plunder. A second Umar he most decidedly was not.

None of which, it went without saying, reflected well on the new Amir himself. Yet there was worse. Uthman, unlike Umar, was not content to divide up the loot of empires in the time-honoured manner of a bandit chieftain sharing out plunder after a successful raid. The Arabs, so it seemed to the new Amir, had moved on from that. The conquerors, if they were to make best use of the defeated superpowers’ bureaucracies, would themselves have to accept certain disciplines: a centralised administration, not least, and a clear-cut chain of command. Precisely the marks of slavery, in short, that the desert Arabs had always derided. No wonder, then, as Uthman sat in Medina and struggled to fashion his immense agglomeration of provinces into a properly imperial administration, that God, in the words of an Armenian bishop, “should have sent a disturbance among the armies of the sons of Ishmael, so that their unity was split.”¹⁴¹ In 656, a band of Muhajirun in Egypt, resentful of a newly appointed place-man, travelled back to Arabia to complain to the Amir in person. Uthman, taken by surprise, pretended to meet their grievances, but was then caught red-handed going back on his assurances. The Egyptians, outraged by his double-dealing, laid siege to his house, stormed it, and hacked him to death.

Here, after all the noble talk of brotherhood that had animated the Muhajirun since their first emigration to Medina, was an abrupt reversion to a far more primordial way of conducting affairs. Uthman’s widow, so tradition had it, dispatched her husband’s bloodstained robe to Mu’awiya in Syria, together with a pointed quotation from the Prophet: “Fight the oppressors until they submit to God’s command.”¹⁴² In truth, though, it needed no divine revelation to prompt the Umayyads to seek vengeance. Nothing, to an Arab warlord, came more instinctively than a blood feud. That the Prophet had sternly warned against precisely such brawling seems to have inhibited Mu’awiya not in the slightest. In Syria, the sense of community that had supposedly obliterated all distinctions between the Quraysh and the Muhajirun was glaring by its absence. There, in contrast to Iraq and Egypt, there had been no great influx of settlers, no sudden rash of garrison towns. Even Jabiya, the original tent city, had been left largely abandoned after a particularly devastating visitation of the plague in 639. Mu’awiya, and other Qurayshi warlords like him, had not the slightest intention of sharing what they regarded as their patrimony with ragged newcomers from the desert. Syria was theirs: a private fiefdom to be ruled in the manner less of the Prophet than of a Ghassanid.

That is not to say that Muhammad’s teachings were wholly cast aside. Back in Medina, his original capital, leaders of the state that he had founded were desperately struggling to hold together his legacy. Even as the empire palpably began to fragment—with banners of revolt raised in Iran as well as Syria, and a host of Arabs in Egypt rumoured to have accepted “belief in Christ”¹⁴³—a new Amir was succeeding the murdered Uthman. Ali ibn Abi Talib could hardly have been more intimately associated with golden memories of the Prophet. At once both the cousin and the son-in-law of Muhammad—or so tradition reports—he also had a fierce commitment to the primal values of the Umma: of egalitarianism and brotherhood. As a result, to his admirers, he ranked as a veritableimam: a father to his people, and a Lion of God. Far from disdaining emigrants from the desert, Ali regarded them—no matter how hairy or stinking—as his natural constituency. Determined that the Muhajirun should retain their grip on the empire, he opted to abandon Medina and make Kufa his new capital. From there, with the energy of the seasoned general that he was, Ali set himself to stamping his authority on all the Umma. In order to secure his rear, he first routed an army of rebels outside Basra. Buoyed by this success, he then led the Muhajirun of Kufa up the line of the Euphrates, with the aim of taming Syria. A great battle was fought, Mu’awiya brought to peace negotiations, and victory claimed. Ali, returning to Kufa, naturally made sure to trumpet the news as loudly as he could. The unity of the Umma, so his propaganda ran, had been triumphantly restored. The fitna—the “time of trial”—was at an end.

Except that it was not. Mu’awiya, withdrawing from the Euphrates, coolly began to proclaim a message of victory identical to that of his rival. Even more threatening to Ali’s position, however, there were many now in his own ranks who likewise refused to accept him as Amir. His opening of negotiations with Mu’awiya, and his patching together of a treaty, was behaviour that smacked, in their opinion, less of an “imam” than of some arrogant and self-serving monarch. A true Believer, so they argued, would have trusted his fate, not to diplomacy, but to ongoing warfare and the will of God. The charge was a crippling one. All very well for the Umayyads to pose as the heirs of the Ghassanid kings; but Ali was a blood relative of Muhammad. Nothing, then, could have been more damaging to his prestige than to be dismissed as merely a latter-day Lakhmid—“the Amir of Hira.”¹⁴⁴

As Ali made his way back to Kufa, many of his soldiers seem simply to have melted away. Kharijites, these deserters were called—“those who go out.” What they were decidedly not, however, were deserters from the teachings of the Prophet. Instead, it was Ali whom the Kharijites condemned as the unbeliever, as the man who had strayed from the Straight Path. The fact that he was Muhammad’s nephew only confirmed them in the militancy of their egalitarianism: that the true aristocracy was one of piety, and not of blood. Even a Companion of the Prophet, if he did not pray until he developed marks on his forehead “comparable to the calluses of a camel,”¹⁴⁵ if he did not look pale and haggard from regular fasting, if he did not live like a lion by day and a monk by night, ranked, in the opinion of the Kharijites, as no better than an apostate. “Those who reject God after believing in Him,” so the Prophet had warned, “and open their hearts to disbelief, will have the wrath of God upon them, and a grievous punishment awaiting them.”¹⁴⁶ Here was a ruling that the Kharijites were more than willing to help enforce. So it was, for instance, that a band of them, meeting an aged Companion of the Prophet outside Basra, were said to have demanded that he renounce his loyalty to Ali; and when the Companion refused, they butchered him over the carcass of a pig, slit open the belly of his pregnant concubine, and murdered her three attendants. Other Kharijites, so it was reported, might “go out with their swords into the markets while people would stand around not realising what was happening; they would shout ‘no judgement except God!’ and plunge their blades into whomever they could reach, and go on killing until they themselves were killed.”¹⁴⁷ A militant devotion to the Prophet’s teachings indeed; and fit for that reason, in the opinion of many of their fellow Muhajirun, profoundly to be admired. But not in the opinion of Ali. Abandoning his attempt to bring Mu’awiya to heel, he made it his priority instead to extirpate the Kharijites. In 658, he won a victory over them as crushing as it was to prove pyrrhic: for all he had done, in effect, was to fertilise the soil of Iraq with the blood of their martyrs. Three years later, and there came the inevitable blowback: a Kharijite assassin struck him down while he was praying in Kufa.^hThe Prophet’s dream of brotherhood, of a shared community of believers, seemed dealt a fatal blow, too.

Into the breach, with great smoothness, stepped Mu’awiya. With Ali gone, no one in Iraq now had the resources to oppose him. Even Hasan, Ali’s eldest son and his obvious heir as imam, was persuaded to retract his claim and retire on a pension to Medina. With him too went his younger brother, Husayn—who as a boy, so it was said, had been a particular favourite of the Prophet, and been dangled lovingly on his knee. True, the removal from Kufa of the two grandsons of Muhammad did not neutralise all opposition to Mu’awiya. The Kharijites, on principle, remained obdurately opposed to Umayyad rule. So too did many Kufans, who preserved a ferocious loyalty to their murdered Amir. Yet Mu’awiya, who had not the slightest intention of basing himself in Kufa, could afford to ignore both the Kharijites and the Shi’a—or “Party”—of Ali. Annoyances they might be—but only in the manner of distantly buzzing wasps. The gaze of Mu’awiya was fixed, not upon a scurvy ragbag of desert Arabs, but upon altogether worthier opponents.

Even though the last hint of resistance from the House of Sasan had been crushed back in 651, with the murder of Yazdegird in that great eastern stronghold of his dynasty, Merv, the Romans, despite all their losses, still stood defiant. Mu’awiya, looking to keep the Muhajirun busy, duly renewed the onslaught against the Christian empire with a vengeance. In 674, he even sponsored a siege of Constantinople itself. In the event, after a blockade of four years, the effort to capture the New Rome had to be abandoned; yet what was striking, perhaps, was not its failure but how close it had come to success. Certainly, there could be no denying that Mu’awiya—in the scope and sweep of his achievements, in the awesome scale of his authority, and in the radiant splendour of his name—was patently a favourite of God.

But which God, precisely? Shrewd and calculating as he was in all his dealings with mortal powers, Mu’awiya seems to have practised a certain opportunism in his dealings with the heavens, too. Although he termed himself “Commander of the Faithful,” in succession to Umar and Uthman, his definition of who actually ranked as members of the “Faithful” was altogether more subtle and ambiguous than theirs had been. Rather than gathering to hail his accession at Medina, the Arabs had assembled in the shadow of the Temple Mount: for Mu’awiya had “refused to go to the seat of Muhammad.”¹⁴⁸ Not even Umar, the Amir whose attentions to the sacred rock had seen him hailed by Jews as their “redeemer,” had thought to demonstrate to quite such flamboyant effect the abiding status of Jerusalem as the holiest city in the world. Mu’awiya, however, in providing this reassurance, was concerned principally to woo, not his Jewish but his Christian subjects. That the Arabs, in their original assault upon Palestine, had fought in alliance with Jews was now, to the new “King of the Holy Land,” something of an embarrassment. Both his tax base and his bureaucracy, after all, were composed primarily of Christians. The Jews could hardly compare. So it was, in addition to receiving the submission of the Arabs, that he had made sure to mark his investiture as Commander of the Faithful by going on pilgrimage around Jerusalem in the footsteps of Christ—“and he went up and sat down on Golgotha, and prayed there.”¹⁴⁹ Evidently, that the Prophet had declared the crucifixion a fraud bothered Mu’awiya not a bit.

In fact, there is precious little evidence that Mu’awiya paid much attention to the Prophet at all. Nowhere in his inscriptions, nor on his coins, nor in any of the documents preserved from his reign, is there so much as a single mention of Muhammad. Nor, despite the much later tradition that would attribute the compilation of the Prophet’s revelations to Uthman, are there any Qur’ans—or even fragments of Qur’ans—datable to Mu’awiya’s lifetime either. Records of the words spoken by Muhammad—“twigs of the burning bush, aflame with God”¹⁵⁰—must surely have been preserved by those who still tended the light of his memory: the Muhajirun of Kufa, the Shi’a of Ali, the Kharijites. But the flame was guttering. Like Mani and Mazdak before him, Muhammad was a prophet whose memory had begun to fade before the encroaching shadow of the years. What value the example of his makeshift desert state, after all, to the ruler of an empire that had swallowed up the world? It was not the Prophet whom Mu’awiya cast as the interpreter of God to man, but himself. “Let the faithful profit by him”¹⁵¹—such was the prayer raised by his servants. Christians too, and Jews, and Samaritans, and Manichaeans: all of them, in Mu’awiya’s opinion, were to be ranked as “the faithful,” and all of them duly joined in the praise. Savagely though Mu’awiya prosecuted his wars against the Romans, yet his subjects, no longer trampled by rival armies, no longer divided by hostile watchtowers, knew only peace at last. Perhaps it is hardly surprising, then, that they seem not to have begrudged the Amir his immodest claim to stand between humanity and God. “Justice flourished in his time, and there was great peace in the regions under his control. He allowed everyone to live as they wanted.”¹⁵²

Such, it must have seemed, was to be the future: a globe-spanning empire of many faiths, and none of them any longer with the whip-hand.

^a A Muslim scholar of the tenth century, Ibn Mujahid, established what subsequently became the orthodoxy: that there were seven, equally valid qira’at—“readings”—of the Qur’an. The modern, widely held notion that there is one single text was established only in 1924, with the publication in Cairo of an edition of the Qur’an that went on to become the global standard.

^b Qur’an: 80.27–31. The traditional accounts of Mecca’s rise to greatness also imply that the city, as a teeming hub of international trade, must have had a substantial agricultural hinterland. The patent impossibility of this has led some historians to propose that grain was imported from Syria and Egypt: a case of the mountain coming to Muhammad, if there ever was one.

^c Although vines and pomegranates would have been grown in oases such as Yathrib, the cultivated olive would not. In late antiquity, it was indigenous to the Mediterranean region.

^d Hunayn—which, like Badr, is clearly identified in the Qur’an as the site of a battle—features in biographies of the Prophet as the location of a decisive Muslim victory. Safa and Marwa are identified by Muslim tradition as small hills in the immediate vicinity of the Ka’ba, while Arafat is equated to a mountain that lies some twelve miles outside Mecca.

^e Most scholars distinguished Bakka from Mecca by identifying the former specifically with the Ka’ba and the latter with the surrounding area, although some suggested the opposite.

^f The composition of Genesis, the book of the Bible in which Abraham appears, is generally dated to the seventh or sixth century BC. The implications of this for the historicity of Abraham are, of course, not themselves without significance.

^g A few lines scribbled in Syriac on the fly-leaf of a gospel allude to a battle fought at Jabiya. From internal evidence, this source seems to be almost contemporaneous with the battle, but its date cannot be definitively established. Fredegar, a chronicler writing in Gaul some twenty years after the Arab invasion of Syria, refers to Heraclius’s army being “smitten by the sword of God: 52,000 of his men died where they slept”—valuable evidence for the probable scale of the Roman defeat.

^h The date of Ali’s assassination derives from Muslim historians, but it is typical of the general murk of the sources for the period that a near-contemporaneous Christian chronicle, written in Syria, dates it to 658.