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 outside Antioch 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 regarded slavery 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?