7

THE FORGING OF ISLAM

God’s Deputy

In 679, almost twenty years after Mu’awiya had sat and prayed at Golgotha, a Frankish bishop named Arculf arrived in Jerusalem for his own tour of the city’s sites. The stresses and convulsions of the age had failed to fracture one of Christianity’s most innovative presumptions: that pilgrimage to its holy places was as much for those who lived on the edge of the world as it was for locals. Even though Jerusalem’s tourist trade was greatly diminished from what it had been in its heyday, the city still seemed to the wide-eyed bishop to be positively heaving with “crowds of all different peoples.” With beasts of burden too—and in such numbers that Arculf found himself clutching his nose, and sloshing uncomfortably through “the filth from their discharges, which spreads everywhere across the streets.”¹ Not, of course, that a pilgrim hardened by a gruelling journey from Gaul was likely to be thrown off his stride by a few droppings—and sure enough, Arculf proved himself a tireless enthusiast for the city’s many wonders. The highlight, inevitably, was the Church of the Resurrection: a shrine unimpaired in its magnificence, the bishop was delighted to discover, since the time of Constantine. Indeed, to an out-of-towner such as Arculf, it might have seemed that Roman rule had never ended. Thetravel documents issued to him were written in Greek. The coins in his purse were weighted according to standards set by the mints of Constantinople. Many of them were even stamped with that ultimate symbol of the Christian empire—a cross. Power, in the Holy Land, still sported a decidedly Roman look.

Naturally, Arculf was not oblivious to the recent changing of the guard. News of the calamities afflicting the New Rome had circulated to sensational effect in Gaul. It was widely reported that the Saracens had laid waste entire provinces, “as was their habit.”²Even Jerusalem, that incomparable city of churches, was branded with the stamp of their rule: “In the celebrated place where once the Temple arose in its magnificence,” Arculf noted, “the Saracens now have a quadrangular prayer house.”³ He was almost certainly describing the building begun by Umar, and still unfinished in the early years of Mu’awiya’s reign: a mosque—or “place of prostration”—as the Arabs termed it. That they might apply this designation to any place of worship had certainly done little to lower Christian hackles: for it was clear enough, whatever else the “prayer house” might be, that it was no church. The supreme blasphemy of its location, of course, only heightened Christian anxiety—as did the fact that there were still Jews, ever optimistic, who clung to the hope that the Arabs were actually restoring “the walls of the Temple.”⁴ An infernal project, then, it seemed to most Christians—and sure enough, one monk, taking a peek at the building site, reported seeing the workforce accompanied in their labours by a whole crack squad of demons.⁵

Notwithstanding this supernatural assistance, however, the end result did seem rather jerry-built. That, at any rate, was the verdict of Arculf himself. Despite being large enough to accommodate some three thousand worshippers, the building did not impress the bishop: “They put it up roughly,” he complained, “by erecting upright boards and great beams on some ruined remains.”⁶ Perhaps, however, it took a Frank to notice such things. The barbarians of the West had certainly had a good deal of practice in the art of cannibalising Roman monuments. Indeed, as Theoderic had demonstrated to notable effect, the entire labour of state-building amid the wreckage of the crumbled empire might easily rank as precisely such a project writ large. Perhaps, then, that is why Arculf, although dismissive of the Saracens’ mosque, seems not to have been greatly startled by it—nor by their presence in Jerusalem. Although Mu’awiya had risen to become incomparably mighty, yet the difference between him and Arculf’s own king, back in Gaul, was one of quality, not of kind. Saracens and Franks both lived like squatters amid the splendours of a vanished greatness. No matter that this inheritance from the past was immeasurably richer and more imposing in the East than in the West—the helplessness of the Saracens to improve upon it seemed no less than that of the Franks. Patched together as it was out of brick and wood, Mu’awiya’s palace inspired eye-rolling paroxysms of condescension in Roman ambassadors. “The ceiling will do for birds,” one sniffed, “and the walls will do for rats.”⁷ Even the great ambition of Mu’awiya’s life—the capture of Constantinople—spoke of cultural cringe. Fuelling it was an unspoken acknowledgement of the Romans’ own perennial conceit—that a man could truly rule the world only from the city of Constantine.

Yet in one sense, despite the failure of Mu’awiya’s assault on al-Qustantiniyya, his pretensions had already surpassed those of the Caesars. Not even Justinian at his most megalomaniacal had presumed to pose as an intercessor between the great toiling mass of humanity and God Himself. Clearly, then, in Mu’awiya’s precocious conception of monarchy, there were influences coming to bear that owed nothing to Roman example. Was it mere coincidence, for instance, that he should have cast himself in a relationship to God so similar to that played by angels in the prayers of the Mushrikun? Assuredly, a ready supply of building materials was far from the limit of what the Fertile Crescent had to offer invaders. Richer as well than anything to be found in the West was its immense array of faiths. Theoderic—keen to distinguish himself from the emperor in Constantinople and from his own Roman subjects—had lived and died an Arian. Mu’awiya—the lord of Chalcedonian and Monophysite Christians, of Jews and Samaritans, of Zoroastrians and Manichaeans—had far more options available to him. Above all, in the swirl of beliefs that was his inheritance as an Arab, he possessed something formidably precious: an assurance of God’s favour that owed nothing to Rome or to any other earthly power. That he was perfectly content to pray at the site of the crucifixion, or to restore Edessa’s cathedral after it had been toppled by an earthquake, or to have the odd public inscription on a bath-house adorned with a cross, implied, not that he was a Christian, but rather that he shared in that respect for Jesus, and for the Jewish prophets too, which had once united Muhammad and the Mushrikun.⁸ Whatever the precise doctrines in which Mu’awiya put his trust, though, they were certainly not supported by anything that could compare with the massive buttressing that rabbis, bishops and mowbeds, over the course of the centuries, had erected around their faiths. Nothing as yet had been fashioned out of the various teachings and traditions held sacred by the Arab conquerors that a Christian would have recognised as a religio: a “religion.” Instead, like blazing points of fire scattered by a starburst, there was a whole shimmering flamescape of sects. For a global monarch such as Mu’awiya, this was opportunity on a scale that not even Constantine had enjoyed. In his determination to understand why God had graced him with the rule of the world—and what best might be done to ensure that rule’s perpetuation—he could toy with beliefs and doctrines that were still very much up for grabs.

Mu’awiya, nevertheless, was not alone in seeking to capitalise on this opportunity. In Iraq, at a safe distance from both his direct authority and the gravitational pull of the Holy Land, the urgent question of what, precisely, God wanted from His people had prompted a quite bewildering array of responses. The Kharijites, as militant as ever in their loathing for anything that smacked of monarchy, had retreated from Kufa to the deserts around the Persian Gulf, where they had founded a series of tiny, terrorist republics. Meanwhile, their old adversaries, the Shi’a of Ali, still clung to their own passionately held convictions. There were some partisans of Muhammad’s murdered cousin, taking a leaf out of the Sasanian book, who had even begun to claim that only under the command of a leader who shared directly in his bloodline could the world of men hope to know true order, and be assured of the favour of God. Others went further still and proclaimed themselves prophets. One of these, an illiterate tailor who claimed to be the heir of both Jesus and Muhammad, and to have a book from heaven that proved it, was eventually cornered by an imperial task force and vanished into a hole that mysteriously opened in the side of a mountain. Finally, aged but hedged about still by the numinous, there were the last remaining Sahabah: the Companions of Muhammad. The most celebrated of these, a Qurayshi aristocrat by the name of Abdullah ibn al-Zubayr, had been just eight years old when the Prophet had died, but his admirers still revered him as a living link to a more heroic and God-touched age. Certainly, his disdain for the Umayyads knew no bounds. For some twenty years, his response to the blasphemy of Mu’awiya’s reign had been to remain in Medina, in a pious and ostentatious sulk, and lovingly tend the flame of the Prophet’s memory.

Among people who believed themselves graced by the most sensational revelation imaginable, of a direct intrusion into the fabric of human history by God Himself, such rivalries were only to be expected, perhaps. The struggle to make sense of such a mystery, as the prodigious appetite for factionalism of the early Christians had shown, was bound to be a gruelling one. Unlike the Church, however, the Muhajirun had not had to wait three long centuries before seizing the commanding heights of a mighty empire. They had captured theirs in a matter of decades. As a result, disagreements between the Umayyads and their opponents—although no less fixated on the purposes of God than the conflicts between Marcion and the Ebionites had been—had an extra, and ominously geopolitical, dimension. When Mu’awiya, corpulent and near death, proclaimed that his son—a notorious playboy by the name of Yazid—was God’s choice as his successor, the result was not merely widespread shock at the blasphemy but a jolting lurch towards civil war. It was bad enough, in the opinion of the pious, that Yazid himself was “a sinner in respect of his belly and his private parts”⁹ and kept a monkey as a pet; more truly shocking was any notion that all the upheavals of the previous sixty years, all the struggles and the stupefying triumphs, might have had as their only object the installation of a dynasty such as the Umayyads upon the throne of the world.

As news travelled in April 680 of Mu’awiya’s death, something else was abroad as well. The baleful spectre of fitna had returned to stalk the Arabian Empire. Syria, unsurprisingly, held firm for Yazid—but Arabia and Iraq did not. First to raise the banner of rebellion was Husayn, the youngest and by now only surviving grandson of the Prophet. Middle-aged and long since retired from the bear pit of the Fertile Crescent, he made for an improbable warrior. Sure enough, when he led his small band of followers on a sudden dash from Medina to Kufa, the local Umayyad agent found it a simple matter to block their approach. Holed up in a flea-bitten village called Karbala, frustrated in his expectation of support from the Muhajirun of Kufa, and increasingly tormented by thirst, Husayn decided to trust his fate to the will of God. Charging the large army that had boxed him in, he and his pathetic retinue were hacked down amid the unforgiving sands. A squalid end for a grandson beloved of the Prophet; and although in the long run his death at the hands of Umayyad heavies would do wonders for his standing as a martyr, in the short term it ensured that Iraq, however precariously, remained under Yazid’s control.

Meanwhile, back in Medina, an altogether more dangerous adversary had been biding his time. Ibn al-Zubayr, as grim and austere as ever, had very publicly refused to take the oath of allegiance to the new Amir. As a result, he, rather than any relative of Ali, had emerged as the most prominent opponent of the Umayyads. Tempers in Medina were not helped by the fact that Yazid’s representative in the oasis was none other than the fabulously venal and slippery Marwan. The locals’ mistrust of their new governor ran particularly deep. Rumours abounded that it was he, back in the last calamitous days of Uthman’s rule, who had advised his uncle to double-cross the Egyptian war band that had come to visit the Amir, and thereby goaded it into becoming a lynch-mob. Nothing Marwan had done since, during all the years of his tenure as governor of the Hijaz, had helped to improve his reputation for double-dealing. Negotiations between Ibn al-Zubayr and the Umayyads grew increasingly fractious. By 683 they had broken down for good. Ibn al-Zubayr damned the new Amir as a usurper. As Marwan fled Medina for Syria, Yazid sent a task force in the opposite direction. The rebels made frantic efforts to gird their oasis with fortifications, but their defiance was doomed to prove no more effective than had been that of Husayn at Karbala. Despite some brave resistance, Yazid’s army stormed the makeshift ditches and ramparts, wiped out the defenders, and seized the city. The stories of what happened next grew ever more blood-bolstered with the telling. The City of the Prophet, it is said, was put to the sword for three days; and nine months on from the sack, over a thousand babies were born.

Ibn al-Zubayr, however, was not among the dead. Implacable in his piety, and “full of threats against the Syrians, whom he claimed were transgressors of the law,”¹⁰ he had resolved to make a stand that would truly challenge his opponents to do their worst. Accordingly, rather than wait in Medina to confront Yazid’s strike-force, he had headed for a spot that was even more redolent of holiness: the “House of God.”¹¹ Muslim historians, writing more than a century after the fact, would take for granted, of course, that such a sanctuary was to be identified with Mecca; but nowhere in the writings of contemporaries is this actually said. Instead, all is studied indeterminacy. “He came to a certain locality in the South where their sanctuary was, and lived there.”¹² So wrote one Christian chronicler about Ibn al-Zubayr. Evidently, then, the precise location of the Arabs’ desert shrine remained as much a puzzle to outsiders as it had ever been. Nevertheless, there were certain suggestive clues. It was noted by one bishop, for instance, that the Muhajirun of Iraq, when they bowed to pray, did so towards the West—“towards the Ka’ba, the primordial wellspring of their race”—while those in Alexandria turned to the East.¹³ Muslim tradition too, rather startlingly, recorded something very similar. The founder of the first mosque in Kufa, so it was said, had fired an arrow to determine the qibla—the direction of prayer—and it had landed not to the south of the mosque, in a line with Mecca, but somewhere to its west. So, although no contemporary tells us explicitly where Ibn al-Zubayr took refuge, the weight of evidence would suggest a location to the north of the Hijaz, midway between Kufa and Alexandria. Since this is precisely the region with which Muhammad himself appears to have been most familiar, and since Ibn al-Zubayr was consciously aiming to defend the Prophet’s legacy, the likelihood must surely be that the House of God in which he barricaded himself stood not in Mecca but between Medina and Palestine: in that “blessed place” named by the Prophet himself as Bakka.

Yet whether all the Arabs, a full half-century on from his death, would necessarily have revered it is another matter. The notion inherited from Jews and Christians—that a single shrine might be possessed of a holiness so awesome as to merit pilgrimage from every corner of the world—competed in their minds with a radically opposed tradition. All very helpful of a bishop to identify the sanctuary of the Muhajirun as “the Ka’ba”—except, of course, that there were Ka’bas reaching from Nabataea to Najran. To glimpse the sacred in a feature even as relatively mundane as a spring, or a well, or an oddly coloured stone was a time-hallowed instinct among the Arabs; and yet, while this indisputably spoke of a sensitivity to the numinous, it also betrayed a certain cavalier attitude towards the status of specific shrines. Over the course of the generations, sanctuaries had repeatedly been staked out as hallowed—haram—and then just as abruptly been abandoned. Even the Prophet, while trying to define the direction in which his followers should pray, had been capable of the occasional volte-face: “The foolish people will say, ‘What has turned them away from the prayer direction they used to face?’ ”¹⁴ What the original qibla might have been, and what its replacement, the Prophet had not thought to specify—but that one sanctuary had been promoted, and at the expense of another, was clear enough.^a No wonder then, descending upon the House of God, that Ibn al-Zubayr should have been concerned to make “his voice heard from a distance.”¹⁵ After all, with time passing by, with those who could remember the Prophet slipping into oblivion, and with the double-dealing Umayyads preening themselves amid the magnificent and seductive monuments of Christian Jerusalem, who was to say how long the memory—let alone the primacy—of Bakka could be kept alive?

In the event, two accidents would serve to boost Ibn al-Zubayr in his ambitions for the site. The first of these, paradoxically, might have seemed to spell its doom. In the summer of 683, with Yazid’s army camped out before the House of God, the Ka’ba, it is said, caught fire and burned to the ground. Some blamed this calamity on torches hurled by the Syrians, others on Ibn al-Zubayr’s own clumsiness; but all are agreed on the ruinous extent of the damage. And so, perhaps, the sanctuary might well have been left, as nothing but blackened rubble—had not the second accident then intervened. Yazid, back in Syria, keeled over and died. The news, when it reached the task force, left them abruptly shiftless. With Yazid’s death, they felt themselves doubly bereft: not only of their imam but of the favour of God. Not so Ibn al-Zubayr, of course. He, with his great enemy dead, could now feel even more soaringly justified in all his pretensions. When Yazid’s army, scouting around for a new Amir, promised him their loyalty if he would only accompany them to Syria, Ibn al-Zubayr indignantly refused. He had higher things by far on his mind.

As the Syrians drifted aimlessly away from their siege, Ibn al-Zubayr set about constructing a sanctuary that could serve, without any further compromise or ambiguity, as a fit object for the veneration of all the Faithful. Taking a pick in his own hands, it is said, he levelled what remained of the incinerated shrine and raised an entirely new one in its place. The whiff of paradox in this was palpable, even by the standards of the Arabs—a people who traditionally had always been perfectly content to abandon sanctuaries with barely a second thought. A question as obvious as it was unsettling shadowed Ibn al-Zubayr’s labours: how precisely could his new House of God be reckoned timeless when it had only just been erected? His propagandists, it would appear, had not stinted in providing answers. Centuries on from Ibn al-Zubayr’s great building project, fantastical stories of the discoveries that were made during the course of the excavations would still be lovingly repeated. It was said that the original foundations, laid down by Abraham, had been miraculously brought to light. A mysterious text had been found, guaranteeing divine favour for all who visited the sanctuary. Most sensationally of all, when a black stone had been dug up, the whole sanctuary had begun to tremble. On this stone, so some reported, had been stamped the very name and title of God: “I am Allah, the Lord of Bakka.”¹⁶

And as with the House of God, so with the great empire beyond: Ibn al-Zubayr aimed to set it on new foundations. Just as fire had left the Ka’ba a crumbling ruin, fitna had come to ravage the world. In Syria, Yazid had been succeeded by his son—an infant so sickly that he had died after only a couple of months on the throne. Amid the resulting power vacuum, the Arabs had once again begun to turn upon themselves. Partisans of Ali, in mourning for Husayn, vented their sense of mingled grief and shame upon the garrisons of the hated Umayyads. Kharijite war bands, fanning out across southern Iraq, renewed their campaign of shadowy and calculated terror. In Kufa, a charismatic figure whom posterity would damn as “Mukhtar the Deceiver” seized the city’s treasury, distributed its entire reserve of nine million coins to the poor, and urged a revolution in which all men were to be equal, “claiming he was a prophet.”¹⁷ He provoked particular excitement by parading a brocade-draped chair, which his enemies ridiculed as a piece of junk looted from Ali’s attic, but which enthusiasts, taking a leaf out of a thoroughly Jewish book, hailed as a manifestation of the presence of God Himself: the Shekhinah. The presence of this fabulous totem on campaign, either carried on a grey donkey or borne aloft into battle by litter-bearers, proved, not surprisingly, a potent boost to Mukhtar’s record as both a general and a prophet. It helped as well that Mukhtar himself, whenever he charged his enemies, was said to be accompanied by a bodyguard of angels mounted on horses of flame.

In the face of such wild and competing enthusiasms, the frameworks of governance just lately restored by Mu’awiya began once again to buckle. The antagonisms unleashed by the fitna proved relentless, the hatreds bewildering, the violence exhausting and savage. Much, after all, was at stake. To the venerable thrill of tribal rivalries—still potent as these were among the various Arab emigrants—had been added whole new dimensions of chauvinism. Factionalists, when they chose an imam or a prophet to follow, were choosing as well what their fate in the next world was to be—and so it was, when they fought, that they would invariably do so to the death. Once again, as in the time of the great war between Heraclius and Khusrow, or that of the first coming of the Arabs, the sense was palpable of a conflict in which more, very much more, was at stake than mere earthly ambitions.

Even those whose fate it was to cower as impotent bystanders before the agonies of the age were alert to this. War was far from being the only expression of God’s anger. Plague too had returned to Iraq, strewing roads with the dead and polluting the canals and rivers with corpses. Pestilence, in turn, led to famine: children with limbs “like dry sticks of wood” would graze on withered grass, while mothers, it was darkly rumoured, might feed on their own babies. “Worst of all were the looters, from whom no one could escape—for they wandered about everywhere, following their prey like gleaners, hauling them out of hidden places and stripping them of their belongings, and leaving them naked.”¹⁸ It could be hard to tell the difference between such bandits, the Kharijites and Mukhtar’s “cudgel-bearers.”¹⁹ Humanity, like monsters of the deep, was preying on itself. Events, once again, appeared to be portending the end of days.

Certainly, whether such an eventuality were imminent or not, it was the divinely appointed duty of Ibn al-Zubayr, as Commander of the Faithful, to prepare the world for it. “Nearer to mankind their reckoning draws, and yet in heedlessness they turn away.”²⁰ So the Prophet had lamented. Ibn al-Zubayr, in harkening to this ominous warning, made sure to take decisive steps. Doing as Umar and Uthman had done, and directing the affairs of the world from the depths of the desert, he sent his brother, Mus’ab, to bring order to Iraq. Mus’ab undertook this seemingly thankless commission with efficiency and relish. Mukhtar, that preacher of an unsettlingly radical egalitarianism, was briskly defeated, cornered in the governor’s palace, and put to death. His severed hand, a trophy for the faithful to admire on their way to prayers, was nailed to the side of Kufa’s mosque, while his holy chair was consigned to a bonfire. Simultaneously, across the south of Iraq, the far bloodier and more exhausting task of suppressing the Kharijites inspired Mus’ab to launch a troop surge that reached as far as the Persian uplands.

It was not only through a counter-insurgency campaign, however, that Ibn al-Zubayr aimed to bring order to a tottering world. Not every message was to be delivered on the point of a sword. “Judgement,” so the Kharijite slogan ran, “belongs to God alone.”²¹Ibn al-Zubayr and his lieutenants, while certainly not disputing this message, aimed to refine it: by stating with the utmost clarity just how and when it was that the judgement of God had been made known. So it was, in either 685 or 686, as the fitna continued to rage in Iraq, that one of his lieutenants minted a coin in Persia with a novel and fateful message. “Bismallah Muhammad rasul Allah,” it ran—“In the name of God, Muhammad is the Messenger of God.”²²

The potency of this slogan, amid the carnage and confusion of the times, was self-evident. Ibn al-Zubayr’s genius was to recognise, as Constantine had recognised long before him, that any lord of a great empire who claimed God’s favour must ensure that the basis of that favour stood rock solid. Military action alone would never serve to bring the fitna to an end. Only a framework of doctrines that all the combatants could accept as authentic and bestowed of God had any hope of achieving that. Hence the supreme value of the example of the Prophet. Whereas Constantine at Nicaea had been obliged to depend upon fractious and fallible bishops to stamp a particular brand of his chosen faith as orthodox, Ibn al-Zubayr had identified a far less troublesome sanction: for not only had Muhammad claimed to be a medium for divine revelation, but he was also safely dead. Ram home the point that he had authentically been a Messenger of God, and anything that could be attributed to him would perforce have to be accepted by the faithful as a truth descended from heaven. “Those who offend the Prophet,” so it had been revealed to Muhammad, “are cursed by God in this life and in the hereafter.”²³ Here, for any warlord looking to damn his enemies, was a literal godsend. This was why, with Ibn al-Zubayr and his henchmen increasingly alert to its potential, they made ever more play with their new message: that Muhammad had truly been the Prophet of God. Far more effectively than any troop surge in Iraq, it seemed to promise them the rule of the world.

There was, however, a problem. Ibn al-Zubayr was not the only self-proclaimed Commander of the Faithful to have spotted the uses to which such a slogan might be put. Widely though he had established his authority, across Arabia, Iraq and Persia, Syria still stood defiant. There, the Umayyad cause, though scotched, had not been killed. Conditions in the wake of Yazid’s death, chaotic as they were, had been ideally suited to the talents of a schemer such as Marwan. At a tribal assembly convened at the old Ghassanid capital of Jabiya in the summer of 684, held to debate whether Ibn al-Zubayr should be acknowledged as Amir, he proposed putting the whole issue to a vote—and so finessed the proceedings that, to much astonishment, “it was his own name that came up.”²⁴Marwan, a man grown old in his pursuit of power, would have only nine months to enjoy his triumph; but already, by the time he died in the spring of 685, he had done enough to ensure that Syria, at any rate, would remain Umayyad. His successor, hailed enthusiastically by the Syrians as Amir, was also his son: a man in his forties, notorious for his golden dentures and the foul quality of his halitosis, named Abd al-Malik.

The new Amir had talents that extended far beyond an ability to slay flies with a single breath. Abd al-Malik was very much a chip off the Umayyad block. Brutality was seamlessly fused in him with ambition, intelligence and vision. The same man who could leash a political rival, lead him around like a dog and then straddle his chest to hack off his head was also a man who could swallow his own pride sufficiently to pay tribute to the Romans in an effort to secure his northern border, and lurk patiently in Syria, leaving it to Mus’ab to crush the Kharijites and the Shi’a. Only in 689, four years after he had succeeded his father as Amir, did Abd al-Malik finally go on the offensive, doing as Julian had done long before him, and snatching after global empire by invading northern Iraq. Unlike Julian, however, he was to secure fabulous success. In early 691, beneath fluttering banners and swirling dust, he succeeded in bringing Mus’ab to defeat and death:

               The tribesman saw clearly

               the error of their ways,

               And he straightened out the smirk

               upon their faces.²⁵

Yet Abd al-Malik, even as he trampled down the corpse of his rival, did not neglect to heed the lessons of Mus’ab’s earlier triumphs in Iraq. Smirks had to be straightened out—but so too, if the conquerors of the far-flung empire were ever to be unified as a single people, did their sense of what they owed to God. Abd al-Malik, having wrenched Iraq from Ibn al-Zubayr’s grasp, did not hesitate to purloin his slogan as well. Even as the last embers of opposition to Umayyad rule were being stamped out in Basra, new coins were starting to circulate in the city: “In the name of God,” they proclaimed, “Muhammad is the Messenger of God.”

The assertion was no less potent for appearing on the coins of an Umayyad. Startling though the sudden emphasis on the Prophet’s role must have appeared to those in the markets and counting-houses of Basra, there is no reason to doubt Abd al-Malik’s personal sincerity. Not only had he grown up in Medina—where memories of Muhammad were uniquely vivid and cherished—but his reputation for austere godliness rivalled that of Ibn al-Zubayr. Nevertheless, it is clear as well that his abrupt parading of Muhammad’s name—something that no other member of his dynasty had ever thought to do—was prompted by self-interest as well as piety. Concerned as Abd al-Malik was to spike Ibn al-Zubayr’s pretensions, he also had an eye fixed on a second adversary. Despite the expediency of the tribute that he had paid to Constantinople, it still rankled as a bitter humiliation, and one that he aimed to wipe clean. What better way, then, than by striking directly at the heart of Roman conceit? Mu’awiya, despite his unwearying appetite for dyeing the Christian empire with blood, had never thought to dispute with his adversaries the truth of their faith. Abd al-Malik, however, suffered from no such inhibition. Not for him a respectful pilgrimage to Golgotha. Rather than soothing Christian sensibilities by professing a vague brand of monotheism, he sought to rub Roman noses in the obvious inferiority of their superstitions. As surely as Mu’awiya had sought the annihilation of Constantinople’s worldly power, Abd al-Malik aimed to shred her claim to a special relationship with God. A radical—and far from easy—step to take. Just as the strategy of challenging the Romans by sea had required the building of entire fleets from scratch, disputing the highway to heaven with them would demand truly formidable feats of innovation. Out of the scattered flotsam and jetsam of beliefs left scattered by the great floodtide of Arab conquests, something coherent—something manifestly God-stamped—would have to be fashioned: in short, a religion.

And if the enshrining of Muhammad as its founder was a start, then it was only that—a start. No better way to appreciate the full scale of what remained to be done than to visit the city where Abd al-Malik, like Mu’awiya before him, had first been saluted asAmir: Jerusalem. There, where the radiance of candles in the churches burned so bright that, by night, the entire city and the hills that surrounded it appeared as one great dazzling blaze of light, the splendour of Christianity, and the heft of its antiquity, remained intimidating things. Well might Abd al-Malik, “noting the scale of the dome of the Church of the Resurrection and its magnificence, have been moved lest it dazzle the minds of the Faithful.”²⁶ Yet the possession of Jerusalem, although certainly a challenge, presented an opportunity, too. Even as Abd al-Malik was leading his armies to victory in Iraq, workmen on the Temple Mount were busy labouring to secure him an equally brilliant triumph. The ramshackle mosque sniffed at so disdainfully by Arculf had been demolished, and was now being replaced in sumptuous style. A wall was being built around the limits of the rock, to mark it out as haram, and gates set in the wall opened on to upgraded roads. Most stupefying of all, however, and most wondrously beautiful too, was an octagonal building of such prominence as to put even the Church of the Resurrection in the shade. That this was a deliberate ploy could hardly have been made any more emphatic. Not only did the dimensions of the new structure exactly replicate those of Constantine’s great church, but its piers were to be surmounted, when completed, by a vast gilded cupola. Yet, what really served to fling back in the teeth of Christians all their arrogance and their pretensions was the deliberate positioning of this same “Dome of the Rock.” Enclosed within it, its surface unadorned and bare, was the perforated expanse of stone over which the Roman authorities had permitted a ragbag of sobbing Jews to blow their rams’ horns each year. Just as the rabbis had identified this spot with theShekhinah—the immanence of the divine on earth—Abd al-Malik and his architects attributed to it a no less awesome role. At the beginning of time, they believed, with the universe just completed, God had stood upon the rock and then ascended into heaven—leaving behind an imprint of His foot.^b The end of time too would see the rock transfigured: for on the Day of Judgement all the faithful, and all the mosques across the world, and even the Ka’ba itself, were destined to travel to Jerusalem, “so that the people will cry, ‘Hail to you, who come as pilgrims, and hail to her to whom the pilgrimage is made.’ ”²⁷

Perhaps, given the seeming imminence of the End Days, it was only to be expected that Abd al-Malik should have wished to raise a monument appropriate to the climactic role in them that the Rock was destined to play. Only to be expected as well—with the “House of God” still in the hands of Ibn al-Zubayr—that he should have been reluctant to wait for the Day of Judgement before promoting it as a site of pilgrimage. He even went so far as to furnish it with souvenirs of Abraham. As a result, the local Muhajirun had no need to travel into the desert to wonder at relics of their august forefather. Instead, they could journey to the Dome of the Rock and see hanging there the desiccated horns of the ram that Abraham had supposedly offered up in sacrifice on the very spot. Sure enough, among his immediate subjects, Abd al-Malik’s grand projet proved a quite stunning success. “All the rough Arabs of Syria,” so a Kharijite sneered, “go to it on pilgrimage.”²⁸ What was the Dome of the Rock, so locals might boast, if not “the holiest spot on earth”?²⁹

Yet there was in this same vaunt a nagging irony. Flattering to Abd al-Malik it may have been—but it also had the potential to be lethal to the broader sweep of his ambitions. It was all very well for inscriptions repeated across the Dome of the Rock to echo the slogan on his coins and proclaim that Muhammad was the “Messenger of God”—but it begged a most awkward question. Since the Prophet had never stepped foot in Jerusalem, how could any notion of the Temple Mount as “the holiest spot on earth” be squared with Abd al-Malik’s simultaneous promotion of Muhammad as the founder of his infant religion? Inexorably though the years had slipped by, and hazy though memories of the Prophet had become, yet there could be no forgetting that he had dwelt beyond the limits of Palestine. Clearly, then, Abd al-Malik could not afford to do as the Roman and Persian authorities had done, and simply leave the depths of the desert well alone. He had no option but to go after Ibn al-Zubayr. His rival’s continued hold upon the holy places where the Prophet had received his revelations affronted not only Abd al-Malik’s authority but that of the heavens themselves. Jerusalem on its own would never be adequate to the full purposes of his mission. He urgently needed Arabia as well. Otherwise, without it, what prospect of fashioning what Abd al-Malik devoutly believed himself set on earth to complete: the authentic “Religion of Truth”?³⁰

In the autumn of 691, an army of some two thousand men duly set off from Kufa into the desert. Abd al-Malik, whose eye for talent was not a whit inferior to all his many other capabilities, had appointed his most trusted servant as its commander: a youthful former schoolteacher by the name of Al-Hajjaj. Not for nothing was this brilliantly able young man known as “Little Dog”; ugly and diminutive he may have been, but his nose for a scent was outstanding, and his teeth were razor sharp. By the spring of 692, he had cornered his quarry. Once again, Ibn al-Zubayr found himself holed up inside a “house of worship.”³¹ This time, though, there was to be no reprieve. Al-Hajjaj blockaded the old man for six months, pulverising his defences with catapults to such lethal effect that by autumn the entire sanctuary had once again been reduced to rubble and left littered with corpses—one of which was Ibn al-Zubayr’s. The whole of Arabia was finally Abd al-Malik’s.

Two years later, the Amir himself journeyed through the desert on an ostentatious pilgrimage. Already lord of the Temple Mount, where the Dome of the Rock had been completed in the same year as the defeat of Ibn al-Zubayr, he now also claimed dominion over a site equally awesome and sacred. “To us,” as a court poet wrote in celebration of his glittering achievement, “belong two Houses: the House of God, of which we are the governors, and the revered House on the mount of Jerusalem.”³²

Yet here, once again, was a telling ambiguity. No mystery as to the location of the Dome of the Rock, of course—but where precisely was the enigmatic “House of God”? The poet did not think to specify. Nor did any of his contemporaries. Perhaps, however, this was only to be expected. Literate people, after all, did not tend to live in the desert—or visit it either. Even if the habit of going on pilgrimage to Arabia had become well established before the time of Abd al-Malik—and there is no evidence that it had—then the mounting anarchy of the times would surely have halted the practice. As a result, among those believers sufficiently educated to put pen to parchment, the precise details of the distant desert sanctuary, even down to its very name, appear to have been a blur. The surest pointers to its location were to be found, not in poetry, or in chronicles, or in gazetteers, but in stone. The years that followed Abd al-Malik’s pilgrimage to Arabia saw workmen tinkering with the layout of numerous mosques. From the busiest stretch of the Nile to the loneliest corner of the Negev, qiblas that had previously pointed east were painstakingly reoriented to the south. Meanwhile, in Kufa, the west-facing qibla was carefully angled in an identical direction.³³ The House of God no longer seemed to stand where it had previously—between Medina and Palestine. Rather, if the calculations of the mosque renovators were to be trusted, it lay much further to the south, at a site in the depths of the Hijaz. A site that can only have been the one place: Mecca.

Naturally, such a change did not go unnoted. There were opponents of Abd al-Malik, a full sixty years on, who still damned him as the man who had “destroyed the sacred House of God.”³⁴ Already, however, even in the immediate aftermath of his conquest of Arabia, confusion as to what might actually have happened, and what constituted “the sacred House of God,” was rife, and escalating. Umayyad propagandists, while not denying the destruction wrought by Al-Hajjaj, insisted that the true vandal had been Ibn al-Zubayr, and that Abd al-Malik had merely restored the Ka’ba to its original, pristine condition. Few Arabs thought to dispute this claim: the conviction that a sanctuary might be demolished and reconstructed, not once but several times, and still somehow remain numinously the same, was widely held. In due course, Abd al-Malik and Ibn al-Zubayr would take their places on a long list of people who had supposedly either repaired the House of God or rebuilt it from scratch: luminaries as heavyweight as Muhammad, Abraham and Adam. The future of the Ka’ba was one that would see it enshrined as both a marker of Adam’s tomb and the pivot of the cosmos itself. If there was an echo, in this sensational array of attributes, of the traditions that Christians, in the wake of Helena’s discovery of the True Cross, had attributed to the rock of Golgotha, then that was surely no coincidence. Just as it had taken Constantine to establish, once and for all, the site of Jesus’s crucifixion, so likewise, perhaps, had it needed a ruler such as Abd al-Malik—an autocrat no less visionary, self-confident or domineering—to define for his own religion the eternal heartbeat of the world.

None of which, of course, solves the mystery of why an obscure and barren spot a thousand miles from the centre of Umayyad power should have been chosen for such an honour. Clearly, though, Abd al-Malik must have had reasons that far transcended the merely opportunistic. Just as he would never have promoted Muhammad as the founder of his religion without truly believing that the Prophet had been an authentic medium for the words of God, so would he never have gone on pilgrimage to a site that lacked any aura of the sacred. Long before his arrival there, a Ka’ba must surely have stood on the spot. Perhaps, like the one at Bakka, it also had some association with Muhammad. If not, then the Umayyads would certainly have had both motive and opportunity for promoting it as the shrine named in the Prophet’s revelations as Mecca. Mu’awiya, based as he had been throughout his reign in Syria, had made a conscious effort to tighten his grip on Arabia. Any plot of land capable of supporting crops had been ruthlessly appropriated; its water supplies diverted; its settlements commandeered. In Medina, the intrusion of Umayyad henchmen into the oasis had only compounded the family’s unpopularity and precipitated Ibn al-Zubayr’s coup. But further south, in the Hijaz, the policy had reaped notably greater success. Indeed, Mu’awiya’s investment in the region had been so substantial that its summer capital, a flourishing oasis named Ta’if, was said to have migrated there from Palestine. Abd al-Malik’s links to the town were probably even closer. Not only had his father, Marwan, served as its governor, but his most trusted lieutenant, Al-Hajjaj, had grown up in the oasis. Both, then, would surely have been intimately familiar with the shrine that stood a mere sixty miles to the north-west, behind a wall of wind-scoured, black-baked mountain, and which Abd al-Malik himself, in 694, made a point of honouring as the House of God: the shrine that posterity would commemorate as the Ka’ba of Mecca.

So it was that a second sanctuary—paired with the Dome of the Rock—came to be enshrined once and for all as a fit object of pilgrimage for the faithful. This much seems clear enough. Beyond that, however, everything is obscurity and murk. Was Abd al-Malik the first Amir to renovate the site, or did he follow in the footsteps of Ibn al-Zubayr? Where had the sanctuary demolished by Al-Hajjaj stood—at Bakka or at Mecca? What had it been more important for the victor to establish—continuity with the past or a clean break? Certainly, more than a century after the time of Abd al-Malik, a vague sense still lingered that the House of God might not always have stood rooted to the spot in Mecca. “At the time of the Prophet, may God save him and give him peace, our faces were all turned in one direction—but after the death of the Prophet, we turned ourselves hither and thither.”³⁵ So one Muslim scholar would recall. Others, in the reports given of Mecca itself, might betray similar anxieties. It was not only the Ka’ba, in these stories, that was forever being demolished and rebuilt—so too was the mosque that enclosed it. A sacred well was lost and then miraculously rediscovered on no less than two separate occasions. Most bewildering of all, perhaps, was the sheer range of sacred stones associated with the holy site, and which were forever being shifted or discovered. There was the Maqam Ibrahim, for instance, which had been carried along by a flood. Then there was the rock uncovered by Ibn al-Zubayr, and which had been stamped with the name of God. Finally, and perhaps most enigmatically of all, there was the much-venerated “Black Stone,” which enjoyed a prominent position in the wall of the Ka’ba. Some claimed that Adam had found it, whereupon it had gobbled up the parchment on which was written his contract with God. Others insisted that it was Abraham who had excavated it, and that he and Ishmael had then lugged it all the way to Mecca. Still others claimed that Ibn al-Zubayr had placed it in an ark, of the kind used by Moses to transport the Torah around the desert. The Black Stone, it seemed, was not only fabulously ancient—it was surprisingly mobile as well.

And as such, hardly unique. For any ruler who wished to veil the parvenu status of a recent foundation behind a sheen of class, a talisman like the Black Stone had long been an essential prerequisite. Antiquity, after all, spelled class. This was why Constantine—if the story that had him pilfering the Palladium from Rome were to be trusted—had brought to his upstart capital a touch of antique Troy. It was also why the mowbeds, back in the reign of Peroz, had no sooner lit the Fire of the Stallion amid the desolate peaks of Media, than they were insisting that its flames were, in fact, eternal and had originally roamed the world. The claim, within a mere couple of generations, had worked a spectacular magic. Zoroastrians appalled by Heraclius’s destruction of the Temple had certainly had no idea that it might have been in existence for a mere century and a half. The past attributed to a sanctuary, especially if a lonely one, might bear witness, not to the preservation of authentic customs, of authentic traditions, of authentic memories, but to the polar opposite: bold innovation.

And certainly, in his determination to shape the world as he saw fit, Abd al-Malik was nothing if not a revolutionary. Even before his final victory over Ibn al-Zubayr, he had been plotting how to stamp his vast empire as he had already stamped Jerusalem: as hallowed by the authentic religion of God. In 691, the coins that had given Arculf the reassuring delusion that Palestine still belonged to a Christian order had been re-minted with images that owed nothing to Constantinople: a spear in a prayer niche, Abd al-Malik himself girt with a whip. Meanwhile, in Iraq, a matching programme of reform saw the erasure from the coinage of every last trace of the House of Sasan. Nothing or no one was permitted to obstruct this policy. All the coins were to be standardised, and all were to promote the authority of Abd al-Malik’s new religion. “Long have you pursued a course of faction and followed the path of waywardness—but now, by God, I will beat you as one does a camel not of the herd at the watering-hole.”³⁶ So thundered Al-Hajjaj, following his appointment to the governorship of Iraq in 694. The warning was issued to a crowd of rebellious Basrans, but it might as well have been delivered to the Greek- and Persian-speaking elites. Unsettling though they had found Abd al-Malik’s initial reforms, far worse was brewing. An even more outright declaration of war against the past was about to be delivered. In 696, a radically new style of coin began to be minted, one that featured no images at all, but only writing—and Arabic writing, at that. Nothing, to bureaucrats long accustomed to regard the language as a marker of barbarism, could possibly have been more shocking. The world, however, as Abd al-Malik did not stint in emphasising, had been turned upside down. Coins were not the only expression of the new linguistic dispensation. So too were passports, and tax returns, and contracts, and laws, and receipts: everything, in short, that made for the running of a global empire.

To functionaries who suddenly found themselves with no prospect of employment unless they spoke or wrote in their master’s language, this was an upheaval that shook the foundations of their entire world. To Abd al-Malik himself, of course, it was something much more. Arabic, in his devout opinion, was the proper language of empire because it was also the language of God. Adorning the walls of the Dome of the Rock, fashioned out of cubes of brilliant gold, inscriptions proclaimed the core tenets of the Amir’s faith: the prophethood of Muhammad, and the sheer folly of believing, as did the Christians in their blindness, that God might conceivably be Three. Much of what was written consisted of excerpts patched together from the Prophet’s own revelations: the earliest surviving examples of phrases from the Qur’an. Posterity would claim that it was Uthman, decades previously, who had first collected and pieced these together, to compile what was from that moment on a fully formed scripture—but the snatches of verse patched together by Abd al-Malik on the Dome of the Rock suggest something rather different. So too, of course, does the resounding lack of even a single Qur’anic inscription dating from the reigns of his predecessors; and so too do the scattered hints from contemporaries. Christian scholars, noting for the first time the existence of writings attributed to Muhammad, described them not as a single book but rather as a jumble of fragments with such titles as “The Cow,” “The Woman” and “God’s She-Camel.”^cIf true, then who might have been tracking down these various scraps of text, and piecing them together? Certainly, that Abd al-Malik’s reign had indeed seen the Qur’an subjected to a state-sponsored makeover was something that no Muslim scholar would subsequently think to deny. In the vanguard of this editing process, as of so much else, was Al-Hajjaj. Peerless warrior, formidable governor, he would also enjoy a splendid posthumous reputation as a proof-reader of the Qur’an. Some traditions, however, would ascribe to him a role infinitely more intriguing. Rejecting the presumption that God, in the wake of Muhammad’s death, no longer permitted His purposes to be known through the agency of mortals, Al-Hajjaj is said to have retorted, “I work only by inspiration!”³⁷ Ever the loyal servant, though, he always emphasised that his own role in collecting, collating and distributing the revelations of Muhammad—heaven-sanctioned though it might be—was as nothing compared to that of Abd al-Malik. In fact, so Al-Hajjaj declared flatly, his master “stood higher in God’s view than did the angels and prophets.”³⁸

An opinion that the Commander of the Faithful himself, never a great one for modesty, did not think to dispute. The age of the prophets might have ended—but that did not mean, in the opinion of Abd al-Malik, that God had no further need of a chosen agent on earth. Deploying his favourite medium of coinage, he made sure to broadcast to the world precisely how he saw his role: as the Khalifat Allah, or “Deputy of God.” Just as Muhammad had been chosen to reveal the divine word, Abd al-Malik had been appointed to interpret it and broadcast it to humanity—and who was to say which one had been allotted the graver responsibility? Certainly, the title of “Caliph”—introduced to the public gaze for the first time by Abd al-Malik’s agents in the imperial mints—implied a dominance over realms that were no less supernatural than earthly. If it was upon the command of Abd al-Malik that roads were built and dams constructed, then it was also through his person that people might “pray for rain.”³⁹ Formidably though his warriors stood guard upon the frontiers of the empire, yet they were not so formidable as the Caliph himself, who stood guard upon the highway that led to heaven. A “beater of skulls,” he was also the ultimate “imam of guidance.”⁴⁰

These vaunting claims were not mere idle propaganda. The breathtaking scope of Abd al-Malik’s ambition was matched only by the sheer drive and creative brilliance with which he sought to fulfil it. By the time of his death in 705, a ramshackle patchwork of conquests that only two decades previously had been on the verge of utter disintegration had been reconstituted as a state no less brutally efficient than had been its toppled predecessors. Even more awesomely, it had been consecrated to a vision of the due owed by humanity to the divine that brooked very little contradiction. “Religion, in God’s eyes, is submission.”⁴¹ So Muhammad had declared. Featured on the Dome of the Rock, however, the meaning of the verse had been subtly altered. The “submission” demanded by God had come almost to serve as a proper noun. The faith proclaimed by Abd al-Malik, lord of an empire that reached from the rising to the setting of the sun, had been given a name. The slogan stamped on the Dome of the Rock had become one fit for the entire world.

“Religion, in God’s eyes,” so it declared, “is Islam.”

Sunna-Side up

An ancient city, like a battle-scarred veteran, might often wear the marks of long-concluded wars. In Syria, no city was more ancient than Damascus. Indeed, the fame of its delights—from its climate to its plums—reached so far back in time that there were some rabbis prepared to rank it as a gateway to paradise. A whole century after its conquest by the Arabs, and four centuries after the reign of Constantine, Damascus had still not sloughed off every last mark of its pagan past. High and massive above the sprawl of the teeming markets, there loomed the walls of what might have seemed, to the first-time visitor, a particularly brooding citadel, but was in truth the outer shell of what had once been the city’s most domineering temple. Worship on the site was as old as Damascus itself—and as continuous. Although Jupiter, the deity in whose honour the sanctuary had originally been erected, no longer sat enthroned within the vast building, the walls themselves had been spared demolition by the triumphant Christians, and consecrated anew to the service of their own god. Now, however, 715 years on from the birth of Christ, a new faith had laid claim to the shrine. Not a trace remained of the cathedral that only a decade previously had nestled within the temple walls. In its place, marble-lined and mosaic-adorned, there had been raised a stupefyingly beautiful new monument: one so lavishly adorned that a train of eighteen camels, it was claimed, had been required merely to take away the builders’ receipts. And the new owners? An inscription emblazoned on one of the walls left no one in any doubt. “Our lord is God alone,” it proclaimed, “our religion is Islam, and our prophet is Muhammad, may God incline unto him and give him greeting.”⁴²

A bare two and a half decades earlier, when Abd al-Malik had commissioned the Dome on the Rock, he had done so with a wary eye on Jerusalem’s great churches, and made a point of using its walls to rubbish the doctrine of the Trinity. Walid—Abd al-Malik’s eldest son, and the Caliph responsible for the sumptuous new mosque in Damascus—was altogether more self-assured in the practice of his faith. Rather than keep glancing over his shoulder at the ludicrous errors of the Christians, he simply ignored them. It was through his identity as someone who submitted to God, as a “Muslim,” that Walid defined himself—and certainly not in relation to some lesser and superseded faith. Such self-confidence was hardly surprising. The splendours of Walid’s mosque bore stunning witness to the full range of blessings that had been showered by an approving deity upon the followers of Islam. The fire of jewels quarried from the highest mountains, the shimmer of pearls harvested from the depths of the oceans, the columns plundered from demolished cathedrals and the mosaics crafted by the most brilliant artists of the age: all served to demonstrate the unrivalled reach of the Khalifat Allah. Well might visitors to the mosque have reported, and believed, a rumour that one of its pillars had been fashioned out of the “magnificent throne”⁴³ of the Queen of Sheba. Just as Islam contained within itself all that was best and most noble in other faiths, the great mosque of Damascus enclosed within its towering walls any number of treasures garnered from vanished dominions: detritus reconfigured in the cause of a new and universal empire.

“There is hardly a tree or a notable town that has not been pictured on those walls.”⁴⁴ So wrote one admirer, in the assurance that the images he could see portrayed on them, from winged plants to hippodromes, were nothing if not a reflection of the many lands—extending infinitely beyond Damascus—that had been brought beneath the sway of Islam. By 715, when Walid declared his great mosque open, Arab armies had long since swept far beyond the limits of the crumbled empires ruled from Ctesiphon and the New Rome. In the East, they had advanced into the one-time kingdom of the Hephthalites, passing not only the abandoned red wall of Gurgan but an even mightier barrier, the River Oxus: a natural frontier so immense and fast flowing that the Arabs would come to define the whole vastness of Central Asia simply as “Transoxania.” Meanwhile, in the West, with Carthage and the long coastal strip of North Africa already subdued, they had crossed the sea in pursuit of fresh conquests. In 711, a tiny Arab raiding party had landed on Gibraltar. Within the course of only a few months, this venturesome war band had succeeded in defeating the Visigoths in battle, killing their king and seizing their capital of Toledo, deep in the vitals of Spain. An achievement such as this, secured on the outermost edge of the world, appeared so astounding to the Arabs as to verge on the fantastical. Stories of the conquest, told back in Damascus, cast Spain as a land of mysteries and wonders, where statues spoke, locked rooms contained miraculous visions of the future, and cities were made of bronze. So astounding had the scope of Arab triumphs become that they no longer seemed wholly real.

Which said, the proofs of Muslim conquests were a simple enough matter for anyone in Damascus to track down. Leave behind the courtyard of Walid’s mosque, with its gleaming marble and delicately ornamented fountains, and there in the city’s markets, penned amid their own filth and misery, were to be found human cattle corralled from every corner of the world. The stories told of Spain might have been conjured from a realm of fantasy—but not so the coffle of thirty thousand prisoners brought back to Syria by the conquerors of the Visigoths. Nothing had served more violently to rub the noses of the vanquished in the brute fact of the Arabs’ might than the depredations of their slavers. “Annually,” one monk recorded, “their robber bands went to distant parts and to the islands, bringing back captives from all the peoples under the heavens.”⁴⁵ Of course, there was nothing particularly novel about this expression of superpower status. The Romans had never shown the slightest hesitation in selling off inveterate rebels such as the Samaritans, while the presumptions governing the Persians’ treatment of their prisoners-of-war had been evident in the fact that ansahrig—their word for “slave”—had originally meant “foreigner.” Now, though, the boot was very much on the other foot. Wretches harvested from the former provinces of the Christian empire toiled on the estates or in the mines of great Arab landowners—and although it was not unknown for the odd prayer to be heard, and the occasional slave-driver to be felled by some miraculous act of the Virgin Mary, most could only lament that they had been abandoned by the heavens. “Why does God allow this to happen?”:⁴⁶ such was the cry that had gone up back in the time of Umar, when a band of Arab slavers had raided a festival held in the hills outsideAntioch in celebration of Saint Simeon’s sojourn on his pillar. It was not only Christians who might ask the question. The terrible violence that marked the conquest of the Sasanian heartlands had seen the markets of Kufa and Basra flooded with a quite staggering number of Persian captives, while even on the easternmost frontiers of Iran—where Arab control was altogether more precarious—a tribute of slaves was the very least that might be demanded by the conquerors. Typical was the fate of Zaranj, a great fortress that commanded the approaches to the Hindu Kush, whose inhabitants had agreed as a term of their surrender to deliver annually a thousand of their most beautiful boys, each one holding in his hands a golden cup: a delicious foretaste for pious Muslims of the delights of paradise.

Like the blades of a giant plough, then, the Arab armies sliced apart families, scattered communities far and wide, churned up and mingled peoples who might otherwise never have met. Not since the first coming of Rome to the Near East eight hundred years earlier, when the conquest of the region by the legions had reputedly seen ten thousand slaves sold daily in a single entrepôt, had there been transplantation of human livestock on anything like such a scale. Naturally, for the Arabs themselves, there was peril as well as profit in this trade. Just as Italy, back in the distant days of the Roman Republic, had repeatedly been racked by slave revolts, so too, in times of fitna, had the heartlands of the Caliphate. Amid the chaos that followed the death of Mu’awiya, for instance, an army of prisoners-of-war had broken free and made a stronghold of Nisibis, so that “dread came upon all the Arabs.”⁴⁷ Nor dread alone—spluttering indignation as well. “Our slaves are rebelling against us!” So the warlords of Kufa had exclaimed in outrage. “But they are our booty—granted us by God!”⁴⁸

To the rebels themselves, however, it was far from self-evident that God did intend them to rank as booty. Presumptions that had underpinned the Roman slave trade back in its heyday were not all they once had been. Over the course of the centuries, callousness had grown ever less innocent. Among Christians, for instance, in an empire that had learned to take seriously Saint Paul’s injunction that there was neither slave nor free in Christ, the habit of regarding human chattels as mere walking machines had become increasingly problematic. “If God does not enslave what is free,” as one bishop sternly enquired of his slave-owning flock, “then who is he that sets his own power above God’s?”⁴⁹ In Iranshahr too, the communism preached by Mazdak had anticipated a golden age of universal brotherhood, when every class, so it was trusted, would be as one. It was true, of course, that Mazdak’s followers had ended up buried head-first in Khusrow’s flower-beds, and true as well that most Christian scholars, although they certainly regardedslavery as a damnable thing, tended to presume that it would endure until the end of days. Nevertheless, the logic of a faith that claimed all human beings, without exception, to have been created by a loving God ensured that increasingly, in pious Christian circles, the freeing of slaves was regarded less as charity than as a pressing obligation. Similarly, dutiful Muslims—if they only paid close attention to the awesome conception of their responsibilities as articulated by the Prophet—could hardly dispute that even the very lowest of the low might be a brother. “What will explain to you what the steep path is?” So Muhammad—slave-owner though he reputedly was himself—had demanded of his followers, before supplying his own answer. “It is to free a slave, to feed at a time of hunger an orphaned relative or a poor person in distress, and to be one of those who believe and urge one another to steadfastness and compassion.”⁵⁰

Which was all very well—except that there were plenty of Arabs who had not the slightest intention of sharing their god with foreigners. Right from the earliest days of their empire, they had been all too painfully aware of the danger of being swallowed up by the vast, amorphous mass of their subjects. This was why, in Iraq, they had founded entirely new cities on the margins of the desert, and it was why, in Syria and Palestine—where the Arabs had opted to settle directly among the natives—they had introduced a whole host of petty regulations in order to establish clear water between themselves and their inferiors. Christians, to their horror, found themselves subjected to laws originally designed by the Roman authorities to keep Jews in their place. Forbidden as they were to dress or speak like Arabs, to sit in the presence of an Arab, to wear swords or to ride on a saddle, the chasm of difference that separated them from their overlords could hardly have been more humiliatingly emphasised.⁵¹ “It was God who made you inherit their lands, their homes and their wealth.”⁵² So Muhammad had assured his followers. Well, then, might the Arabs, living off the fat of their conquests and revelling in their possession of a God-granted empire, have been protective of their winnings. Much, after all, was potentially on offer to those who could legitimately claim a descent from Ishmael. A couple of generations on from the defeat of the perfumed Romans and Persians, the taste for luxury of some Arabs would have given Umar apoplexy. Anxious though they were to differentiate themselves from the common run of their subject peoples, they did not have the slightest hesitation in aping the manners of the toppled ruling classes. In Syria, the furnishings of high-end properties owed nothing to Medina and everything to the Roman relish for wine, nude sculptures and mosaics. In Iraq, the peacock tastes of the Persian aristocracy were enthusiastically adopted by wealthy Arab warlords, who delighted in parading through the streets of Kufa or Basra arrayed in silken flares and shimmering robes of many colours, with their beards dyed a startling shade of yellow or red. Who, then, were the foreign slaves who escorted them on such processions, or kept their golden goblets polished back in their palaces, or toiled in chains on their fields, to imagine that they too might have a stake in such an inheritance?

Yet, in truth, any prospect of fashioning for the Arabs a religion comparable to that of the Jews—a legacy of faith borne on the bloodline of Abraham—had already long since been dissolved upon the swirl and clamour of their dazzling conquests. When Al-Hajjaj, in 702, founded a new city named Wasit to stand sentinel between Kufa and Basra, and posted guards upon its gates, to ensure that only Arabs could settle there, he was closing the doors of a stable from which the horse had long since bolted. How could there be any prospect of affirming the purity of an Ishmaelite descent when the streets of Wasit, and of every other garrison city too, were filled with slaves uprooted from every corner of the world, deprived of their families, their homes, their native lands, and with no consolation save the glimpse of heaven provided them by the faith of their masters? These captives were not only to be found in the streets: they were in the conquerors’ bedrooms, too. The right to sleep with “such slaves as God has assigned to you as war-booty”⁵³was one that Muslims could enjoy on the say-so of the Prophet himself—and plenty of them had duly capitalised upon it with relish. The slave markets of the Caliphate were so glutted with female flesh that wealthy Arabs might debate the various merits of the merchandise as though evaluating the pedigree of bloodstock. Abd al-Malik himself was a noted connoisseur. “He who wishes to take a slave girl for pleasure,” the great Caliph sagely advised, “let him take a Berber; he who wishes to take one as a domestic servant, let him take a Roman; and he who wishes to take one to produce a child, let him take a Persian.”⁵⁴ In Iraq, however, where the markets were particularly well stocked with women plundered from Iran, Persian girls’ value was boosted by more than mere fecundity. Daughters from Zoroastrian families, each of whom was expected to kneel three times a day before her husband and humbly beg of him his desires, were famously well conditioned to obedience. At the absolute top end of this market were princesses of the House of Sasan: one raised the fabulous sum of fifty thousand gold pieces, while another, a granddaughter of Khusrow II himself, was installed in a specially built palace in Basra that supposedly had a thousand gates. The children of such mothers, it went without saying, were hardly likely to rest content with a status as the inferiors of anyone.

Nor, when slaves and their offspring looked around them at the insolent pride and squandered riches of their masters, could they fail to prick up their ears at the teachings of the Prophet:

               You do not honour the orphan,

               Nor urge one another to feed the poor.

               You consume an inheritance to the last mouthful,

               And you love wealth with a love inordinate.⁵⁵

Here was a vision fit to inspire even the most downtrodden. Slaves might resent their masters, after all, and yet find fuel for that same resentment in the fecund range of their masters’ beliefs. The rebels who seized control of Nisibis, for instance, had claimed to be followers of Mukhtar—and they were duly massacred as such. Others sought inspiration in the relish of the Shi’a for tyrant-hatred. Then—with the ending of the fitna and the great labour of forging performed by Abd al-Malik upon the half-fashioned doctrines and recollections of the Arabs—fresh opportunities for damning those who would scorn the wretched began to present themselves. Inadvertently, by their very public promotion of Muhammad as a Messenger of God, the Umayyads provided those dismissed by the Arab warrior elite with a potent means of opposing their own continued subordination. With the likes of Al-Hajjaj enthroned behind gates and towers like latter-day Shahanshahs, those consigned to the stinking slums of Kufa or Basra might ponder the scorn of the Prophet for the arrogant and the over-mighty, and fashion a very different understanding of Islam to that of the Caliph and his lieutenants.

Meanwhile, beyond the ramparts of the great garrison cities of Iraq, others had also begun to observe the religion of the Arabs with a mixture of envy and fascination. After all, the Caliphate’s subjects hardly needed to be sold into slavery to feel the sting of their own inferiority. As Arab rule increasingly came to be identified with Abd al-Malik’s vision of Islam, so natives eager to join the society of their masters rushed to embrace the embryonic religion. Predictably, the Arabs, far from welcoming these converts as brothers, placed as many roadblocks as they could on the “straight path.” Those who wished to convert faced a whole host of indignities. It was not enough to submit to God. Only by submitting to an Arab patron as well might a Persian, or an Iraqi, or a Syrian come to be ranked as a Muslim. Here, for those with so much as a trace of snobbery, was a humiliation, perhaps, too far. Even for those habituated to tutelage, the path to Islam was rarely straightforward. During the reign of Abd al-Malik, for instance, when bands of Iraqi peasants converted en masse and took themselves off to the fleshpots of Basra, Al-Hajjaj’s response was iron-fisted. Far from delighting in a victory secured for Islam, he rounded up the renegades and returned them to the estates of their masters. Arab rule, as it had ever done, depended on the vanquished knowing their place.

By the time of Walid and his successors, conversions to Islam were coming to threaten not merely the exclusivity of the conquerors but the stability of the tax base. Abd al-Malik’s reforms, by transforming the toppled empires’ bureaucracies into something more acceptably Arabic, had given their extortions a tone that was increasingly Islamic, too. Taxes were coming to be demanded, not as dues of the kind that conquerors had always levied as a matter of course, but as something subtly different: a fine on unbelief. The Prophet might not have anticipated that his followers would subdue the whole world, but he had still given them helpful tips on how Jews and Christians should properly be exploited. That God wished infidels to pay a poll-tax—the jizya—to their Muslim masters, and to feel humiliated while doing so, was recorded in the Qur’an itself, after all. Granted, the precise form that this humiliation should take was something much disputed by commentators. Indeed, it was a mark of just how profoundly the chasm yawned between the compilation of the Prophet’s revelations into a single book and the original revelations themselves that the meaning of the Arabic phrase that specified how the jizya should be paid had ended up quite forgotten.⁵⁶ Fortunately, though, despite the inadequacy of all the frantic efforts to make good this embarrassing amnesia, the underlying message of the verse remained clear enough: Jews and Christians, if they wanted the right to live unmolested, would have to pay for it. Tolerance might be theirs—but only at a price.

Yet in truth, what made this protection racket viable was less the say-so of the Qur’an than presumptions forged over many centuries among Jews and Christians themselves. That the “Peoples of the Book” might be defined as such for taxation purposes was ringing and climactic affirmation of just how successful had been generations of rabbis and bishops in the construction of impregnable barriers around their respective faiths. In Iraq, certainly—where the Sasanian authorities had long categorised their subjects in religious, rather than ethnic, terms—Jews and Christians saw nothing remotely untoward in the weight-throwing of their new Muslim masters. Not, of course, that this made them any the keener to cough up taxes—and Christians, in particular, were often adept at evading them. One bishop in northern Iraq, for instance, managed to secure a tax exemption for his clergy by the dramatic expedient of casting out demons from the local governor’s daughters. Meanwhile, a second governor granted rebates to a monastery in the Zagros Mountains after a hermit living there had healed his horse. No Christians, however, nor Jews, ever thought to dispute the right of the Muslim authorities to tax them. Protection, in a world that had repeatedly been trampled down by contending war bands, was usually held to be well worth the price. In general, then, to the Jews and Christians of Iraq, the coming of Islam had represented less a dramatic upheaval than the final institutionalising of what they had always rather assumed was simply the way of the world.

The followers of Zoroaster, however, saw the convulsions of the age in a quite different light. To pious worshippers of Ohrmazd, the collapse of Sasanian power—and the conquest of Iranshahr—was a calamity beyond their darkest nightmares. “The faith was ruined and the Shahanshah slain like a dog.” So, in numbed terms, the catastrophe would always be commemorated by the mowbeds. “The world passes from us.”⁵⁷ Toppled as it had been into the dust from its former position of privilege and power, the Zoroastrian Church would never again enjoy the ear of kings. Instead, denied by the Qur’an even the pallid status enjoyed by rabbis or monks as “Peoples of the Book,” the mowbeds found their beloved religion of truth and light being treated with brutal contempt.^d In the eastern reaches of Iran—where Arab rule was most sketchy and dependent for such authority as it possessed upon treaties signed with still formidable Parthian dynasties such as the Karin—fire temples might continue to blaze as they had ever done; but elsewhere, only payment of extortionate bribes could stave off their demolition. In Iraq, they had fast been obliterated altogether. Their scorched ruins were abandoned to weeds and black ravens: birds of ill-omen that everyone knew were really demons.

Many worshippers of Ohrmazd, witnessing fire temples lost to such darkness, found their faith in the Lord of Light mortally shaken. Under the House of Sasan, such apostasy would have been punishable by death; but no longer. Instead, where previously all had been checks and restrictions, Iraq had come to provide, in the first decades following the implosion of Sasanian authority, something that it had not done for centuries: a free market in faiths. So where were the orphaned of Ohrmazd to go? Most, seeking shelter behind the most solid ramparts they could find, had turned in their misery to the Nestorian Church. As a result, Christians, far from being diminished by the Arab conquest of Iraq, rapidly became the majority. Under the strong and paternalistic rule of the Umayyads, they would enjoy a golden age. Across the northern reaches of Iraq, now far removed from the front line with the Romans, churches flourished as never before. Nisibis, especially, blazed with a particular brilliance. The city’s scholars, who were as familiar with the classics of Greek philosophy as they were with those of their own faith, soon re-established it as the foremost centre of learning in the entire Fertile Crescent, and far beyond. Meanwhile, outpacing even the advance of the Arab armies, Christian missionaries had begun to fan out from Iraq, treading the roads that stretched eastwards to the fabulous kingdoms of India and China. In time, the head of the Nestorian Church would plan a bishopric “for the peoples of Tibet,”⁵⁸ and the nomads of Mongolia adopt a version of the Syriac script. To many Christians, then, it appeared self-evident that the future of Asia belonged to them.

Except that there lay open as well, for bewildered refugees from the Zoroastrian Church, the pathway to a very different faith: one as newly-sprung and as yet unformed as Christianity was venerable and massy of structure. A hundred years on from the Arab conquest, it was a common complaint among the ruling elite of the Caliphate that Zoroastrian converts to Islam “have not become Muslims seriously, but only to escape the poll-tax.”⁵⁹ But this was sorely to underestimate the appeal of their prophet’s revelations. Tax-dodge though conversion certainly provided, yet it might represent as well something very much more. To the troubled, to the heaven-shadowed, to the seeker after truth, the awesome proofs that God had spoken to Muhammad were often irresistible. “Guide us to the straight path: the path of those You have blessed, those who incur no anger and who have not gone astray.”⁶⁰ How could the one-time mowbed who for the first time spoke these words, words that had supposedly proceeded from God Himself, not feel redeemed from the many errors to which his previous faith had been prey? Yet he could know as well, even as he set off along the straight path, that the road ahead still had to be cleared and mapped. The revelations of Muhammad, unlike those of Zoroaster, had been in circulation for barely a century. Among the followers of Islam, there was nothing to compare with the ancient legacy of hymns, commentaries and laws that had descended down the millennia to the Zoroastrian Church. Rather, in the great project of clarifying what precisely the Prophet’s message might have been, and the full scope of his intentions, there were roles a-plenty for those, like former mowbeds, with an aptitude for scholarship. As a result, in mosques and courtyards across Iraq, converts from the Zoroastrian Church began to join the descendants of the Arabs’ slaves, and meet with them in their urgent striving to define what a properly Muslim society should be.

Observing this process with some interest was a rabbi named Rav Yehudai. Living just a short distance from Kufa, in the great Talmudic school of Sura, he was well placed to note an intriguing development. The hearts of those mowbeds who had “converted to the religion of the Ishmaelites,” so he reported, were still not entirely clear of the trace of their former beliefs, even down to the third generation: “for part of their original religion still remains within them.”⁶¹ What evidence might the rabbi have had for making such a claim? Converts from the Zoroastrian Church did often, it was true, bring with them into Islam notions that might have seemed distinctively their own: that apostates should be executed, for instance, or that prayers should be offered up five times a day, or that it was a singular mark of piety to use a toothbrush.^e Certainly, there was no direct support in the Qur’an for any of these presumptions: hell, not execution, was the fate that it prescribed for apostates; prayers were mandated, not at five, but “at three times of day”;⁶²while of toothbrushes there was no mention at all. How strange it might have seemed, then, and how striking a coincidence, that Muslims, when dictating what the penalty for apostasy should be, or how many times a day they should pray, should increasingly have opted to side with Zoroastrian proscriptions and ignore the Qur’an altogether. What was more, they had developed a positive craze for dental hygiene.

“Whenever the Prophet got up at night, he used to clean his mouth with a toothbrush.”⁶³ A most intimate detail—and one fit to gladden the heart of any former mowbed, certainly. But how, when some other Zoroastrian convert might simply have made it up, could he, and the Muslim people as a whole, be sure that it was actually true? Such a question was more than mere idle nit-picking. The subjects of Abd al-Malik—who almost overnight had found themselves being informed every time they pulled out a coin or received an official document that Muhammad was the Prophet of God—had not been slow to grasp the implications. Only establish that an opinion had truly been voiced by this same Prophet of God, and it would immediately come to possess the full terrifying force of eternal law. Here, for the restless and ever-growing number of Muslims who were unable to trace their origins back to the first generation of the conquest, who were resentful of the haughty Arab elite and who yearned to fathom the true purposes of God, was a truly golden opportunity. Nevertheless, their way ahead was challenging. Unlike the Caliph, they could hardly claim to be God’s deputies, graced by the heavens with a direct responsibility for defining and regulating the Muslim realm. Only by compiling the sayings of the Prophet could they possibly hope to trump the forbidding authority of the Khalifat Allah. If a Sunna—a body of law capable of taming the extravagances and injustices of the age—were indeed to be fashioned without reference to the Caliph, then its origins would need to be grounded, and very publicly so, in the life and times of the Prophet himself. No other source, no other wellspring, would possibly do. But how to authenticate Muhammad’s sayings? Such was the question, a century on from the death of the Prophet, that confronted the first generation of a whole new class of scholars: legal experts whom Muslims would come to know as the ulama.

Fortunately for them, just across the mudflats from Kufa—where the yearning to forge a new understanding of Islam was at its most turbulent and intense—the perfect role models were ready to hand. The rabbis of Sura, after all, had been labouring for many centuries to solve precisely the sort of problem that now confronted the ulama. The secret Torah, so it was recorded in the Talmud, “had been received at Sinai by Moses, who communicated it to Joshua, who communicated it to the elders, who communicated it to the prophets”⁶⁴—who, in turn, had communicated it to a long line of rabbis, right down to the present. Nowhere in the world, in consequence, were there scholars better qualified to trace the chains of transmission that might link a lawyer and the sayings of a prophet than in the yeshivas of Iraq. Was it merely coincidence, then, that the earliest and most influential school of Islamic law should have been founded barely thirty miles from Sura? It was in Kufa, at around the same time as Walid, far distant in Damascus, was building his great mosque, that Muslim scholars first began to explore a momentous proposition: that there existed, alongside the Prophet’s written revelations, other, equally binding revelations that had never before been written down. Initially, in the manner of rabbis citing their own masters, members of the ulama were content to attribute these hitherto unrecorded doctrines to prominent local experts; then, as time went by, they began to link them to the Prophet’s companions; finally, as the ultimate in authorities, they fell to quoting the Prophet himself directly. Always, however, by bringing these previously unrecorded snatches of the past—these hadiths—to light, Muslim scholars were following a trail that had been blazed long before. Islamic though theisnads were, they were also more than a little Jewish.

The rabbis of Sura and Pumpedita, immured within their famous yeshivas, had spoken of their ambition to “build a fence around the Torah.”⁶⁵ And so they had done—a thoroughly impregnable one. Yet some of them, hearing as a faint roar the tumult of debate and enquiry that was filling the streets of nearby Kufa, might just have felt a touch of claustrophobia—and even envy. The mosques of Iraq were coming to offer what no synagogue, or church, or fire temple had done for centuries: a venue for enquiry into the nature of God where the terms of debate had not already long since been set in stone. More than that—in the teeming warrens of Kufa and Basra, people from various religious backgrounds were free to meet, and collaborate, and merge their perspectives in a way that had never previously been possible. There were the conquerors: the Arab elite, with their language, their venerable traditions and their burnished memories of the age of Muhammad. Then there were the slaves and the descendants of slaves: all impatient to apply to the wrongs of an unjust society the austere and chilling message of the Prophet. Finally, there were ever-increasing numbers of converts. “Part of their original religion still remains within them.” So Rav Yehudai, the rabbi of Sura, had observed of those mowbeds who turned to Islam. But what of those Muslims who had once been rabbis—was the same to be observed of them? If so, that would certainly help to explain why the Sunna—just like the Torah—aimed to regulate every dimension and aspect of human existence; why it should have forged for itself chains of transmission such as rabbis, and only rabbis, had ever previously deployed; and why, in direct contradiction of the Qur’an, it prescribed death as the punishment for adultery rather than whipping. As it had been written in the Torah by Moses himself: “They shall bring out the young woman to the door of her father’s house, and the men of her city shall stone her to death with stones, because she has wrought folly in Israel by playing the harlot in her father’s house.”^f

Such a ruling, once it had been reworked by Muslim lawyers, was no less authoritative for having been garnered from another—and infinitely more ancient—source. Rather, like Walid’s great mosque, the Sunna was a monument to just what could be achieved by fashioning old fragments into something new and extraordinary. Shards gleaned from the Torah, and from Zoroastrian ritual, and from Persian custom: all featured in the edifice pieced together by the ulama. The consequence of their labours, taking on an ever more clearly delineated form as the decades of Umayyad rule slipped by, was a guide to the wishes of God of quite astounding potency: one that even the most chauvinistic governor might learn to ignore at his peril.

Indeed, as a check upon the appetites and arrogance of an imperial elite, it was perhaps the most remarkable that a defeated people has ever devised. The ulama, whether descended from prisoners-of-war, or Zoroastrians, or Jews, were overwhelmingly comprised of the victims of the conquest. Yet they had won for themselves, by their collective efforts, a rare and impregnable dignity. It was they, not their ostensible masters, who had become the arbiters of the will of God. The jumble of beliefs and doctrines carried by bands of overwhelmingly illiterate warriors from the desert had been transformed, over the course of barely a century, into a religion of lawyers. Such an achievement, secured in the face of such odds, was a truly astounding one.

Yet it was an achievement as well, by its very nature, that could never be acknowledged. Although the Sunna was recognisably a product of its place of birth—a world where legally minded intellectuals, of whatever faith, had long endeavoured to frame God’s purposes—it could only ever hope to flourish by denying its roots in such a seedbed. Not a hadith, but there was a pressing obligation to derive it from the innermost bowels of Arabia. As a result, there could be no question of doing as the rabbis of the yeshivas had done, or the jurists at the court of Justinian, and revelling in the antiquity of the laws that it was their ambition to marshal. Quite the contrary: no matter how venerable a snatch of legal opinion might be, it could never have the force of law unless it had first been demonstrated to have emerged from the lifetime of Muhammad. Consequently, the Sunna was founded upon a paradox: the more the ulama of Iraq, in their eagerness to fashion a just society, drew upon the incomparable legacy of those who had laboured in a similar cause for millennia, the more did they identify the source of that wisdom with a barren and peripheral desert. Experience of the perfect society, so they taught, had been granted to one single place, and to one single period of history: Medina, in the lifetime of the Prophet. The role of the Sunna, and its supreme glory, was to serve the Muslim people as a signpost: one that could point them the way—the shariah—back to paradise lost.

And yet the way to paradise already had its guardians, of course. To the Umayyads the pretensions of the ulama constituted something altogether more menacing than a simple affront. What role, if the Prophet were to end up enshrined as the ultimate authority for the Muslim people, did this conceivably leave for the rival claims of the Caliph? Much, of course, was at stake. It was not merely the right of Abd al-Malik and his heirs to their privileged status as “deputies of God” that risked being undermined. The entire legitimacy of their regime was grievously threatened too. Cast the Prophet as the only acceptable wellspring for Islam, after all, and everything that had followed him was bound to seem a decline and fall. Indeed, how could the empire ruled from Damascus, when compared to the seductive vision of a primal and unspotted Islamic state, not appear a tyranny? The Umayyads risked appearing, not as the bulwarks and sponsors of Islam but as the opposite: deviants and usurpers, blotting the purity of the Sunna.

The Caliph and the lawyers, then, for all that they might not initially have realised it, were locked in mortal conflict. At stake was not merely the shape of the future but how the past would come to look as well. In the great and ongoing struggle between autocrats and clerics for God’s favour, one that long pre-dated both Caliphate and ulama, a new and potentially decisive battle had been joined.

The nature of Islam itself, and much more besides, would hang upon its outcome.

The House of Islam

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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