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”53 was 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.
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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.