Against the backdrop of such prophecies, defenders of the House of Islam came to cast the empire of Constantinople, and all the Christian realms beyond it, as a ghoul-like doppelgänger: hellish, predatory, undead. Against such an adversary, it was not only warriors who were needed, but lawyers: men who could advise the faithful on how best to secure and maintain the favour of God. By 740, the year of the disastrous defeat at Acroinum, men whose truest proficiency lay in a library rather than on the battlefield were becoming a common sight on the Roman front.73 Such scholars, it was true, hardly lacked for martial courage: one, Ali ibn Bakkar, when slashed across his belly, cheerfully used his turban to stop his entrails from spilling out and then went on to kill no fewer than thirteen enemy soldiers, while his idea of relaxation, when away from the battlefield, was to make pets out of the dreaded lions of Cilicia. Yet the true value to the Muslim cause of these scholars lay neither on the battlefield nor in the field of pest control. Rather, what they contributed to the great death-struggle with the House of War was something even more precious: an assurance to the faithful that they were indeed, by taking up arms against the unbelievers, performing the will of God.
Standing in the shadow of the Taurus Mountains, it was not enough for the frontier guards of the Caliphate merely to construct fortifications out of the plundered rubble of abandoned Roman cities. Far more urgent was the need to fashion, along the border with the House of War, a dimension that could rank as authentically, purely and impregnably Islamic. This was why the frontiersmen’s word for a fortified stronghold—ribat—was also applied to the particular brand of pious activity associated with the ulama: a determination to permit nothing to the faithful that did not derive directly from the Prophet. “He was the one who taught the inhabitants of the frontier region how to behave.” So it was recorded of one lawyer, a Kufan by the name of Abu Ishaq. “He instructed them in the Sunna and used to command and prohibit. Whenever a man inclined to innovation entered the frontier region, Abu Ishaq would throw him out.”74
Yet there was, in the presence of such figures amid all the dangers and deprivations of Cilicia, an awkward paradox. When Abu Ishaq risked a whipping to upbraid a local commandant, when Ali ibn Bakkar wept until he went blind, when other scholars fasted, or ate dust, or wore rags, or refused to wash, they were not following the example of Muhammad. Rather, they were aping Syria’s famously ascetic monks. This, in the context of the interminable war with the Christians, could hardly help but appear a mounting embarrassment. How could Islam ever hope to scour the world of unbelief, when there still lurked in the souls of its own shock troops a lingering taint bred of their foes? Fortunately for the ulama, however, the solution to this problem—an increasingly tried and tested one—lay ready to hand. “The words of our Prophet have reached us—a correct and truthful statement.”75 So declared Ibn al-Mubarak, a Turk whose relish for fighting the Rum had led him to travel to the Taurus all the way from far distant Khorasan, and who would come to rank as perhaps the most formidable of all the warrior-scholars. The “imam of the Muslims,” as he was admiringly hailed, he possessed not only a rare aptitude for defeating Romans in single combat, but a familiarity with hadiths so detailed and passionate that he was known to discourse on them even in the heat of battle. Who better, then, to reassure the Muhajirun that the mortifications required of them on the frontier had in fact been authentically Islamic all along, and owed nothing to the example of infidels? Why, the Prophet himself, so it suddenly appeared from a flurry of hadiths brandished to triumphant effect by Ibn al-Mubarak, had given Muslims explicit instructions not to copy monks. “Every community has its monasticism—and the monasticism of my comunity is jihad.”76
Quite what was being suggested by this word remained, however, in Ibn al-Mubarak’s own lifetime, something very much up for grabs. Its literal meaning was “struggle,” and in the Qur’an reference to the jihad required of believers was as likely to imply a good argument with the Mushrikun, or the giving of alms, or perhaps the freeing of a slave, as it was any commitment to pious violence. With warrior-scholars such as Ibn al-Mubarak desperate to claim the Prophet as their exemplar, however, the word came increasingly to take on a much narrower connotation: warfare in the cause of God. Riding to the frontiers of the embattled House of Islam and slaughtering stiff-necked Christians was cast not merely as an option for dutiful Muslims, but as a positive obligation. To one battle-shy friend who had boasted of his pilgrimages to Mecca and Medina, Ibn al-Mubarak gave a blistering retort. “Were you to see us,” he lectured, “you would realise your worship is mere play. For you the fragrance of spices, but for us the fragrance of dust, and dirt, and blood flowing down our necks—which is altogether more pleasant.”77
And certainly, a hundred years and more after the death of the Prophet, evidence for this robust approach to the essentials of Islamic worship was coming to be marshalled in impressive quantities. Ibn al-Mubarak himself compiled an entire book of hadiths devoted to the single topic: jihad. Other scholars, turning to the Qur’an and finding themselves puzzled by the alternation of passages that urged perpetual warfare with others that seemed to urge the precise opposite, sought to organise the verses in what they trusted was a chronological manner—with one in particular, targeted originally at treaty-breaking Mushrikun, being placed right at the end of the Prophet’s life. “Kill them, seize them, besiege them, wait for them at every lookout post”78—maxims with an obvious value for those with a taste for fighting Romans. It was therefore crucial for such scholars to establish that the verse was indeed revealed to the Prophet late in his career: for only so could it plausibly be demonstrated to have superseded other, less bellicose passages. As a result, it was not only hadith collections that were starting to be shaped by the martial enthusiasms of the ulama, but details of the Prophet’s biography. For scholars such as Ibn al-Mubarak, the stakes could hardly have been higher. Fail to demonstrate that they were following Muhammad’s example, and not only their increasingly complex doctrine of jihad but all their suffering amid the killing fields of Cilicia would effectively rank as worthless. Render the Prophet satisfyingly in their own image, however, and the prize would be a truly fabulous one. Not only would the past of Islam be theirs—its future would as well.