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 alclass="underline" 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 that hadiths 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.