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.