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”;62 while 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.