Marwan’s relatives too were systematically tracked down. The death squads were grimly efficient. Of the entire Umayyad brood, the only one who managed to evade capture was a grandson of the miserly Hisham, who fled to Spain, where he set himself up as Amir. Otherwise, Islam’s founding dynasty was finished. The last wretched gaggle of survivors, hauled before the Abbasid Caliph, were butchered, laid side by side, covered by a carpet, and used as a banqueting table by honoured guests: “And those who were present at the scene,” it is said, “ate while the death-rattle still sounded in the throats of the expiring victims.”
An atrocity fit to stand as a gruesome coda to a revolution beyond compare, manifest in pages of divine revelations, and capacious systems of law, and incomparably beautiful buildings, and whole new cities, and would-be global empires, and entire habits of thought transformed. In the most literal and bloody way imaginable, the slaughter of the Umayyads served to illustrate what had been—for half a millennium or more—the supreme theme of the age: the raising of a new order upon the ruins of the old.
a Muslim scholars would identify this verse as referring to a change in the direction of prayer from Jerusalem to Mecca—a tradition for which, of course, there is absolutely no evidence within the Qur’an itself.
b In due course, this tradition would become an embarrassment to Muslim theologians, since it implied that God had a body. In the eleventh century, an alternative explanation for the construction of the Dome of the Rock was enshrined: that it commemorated the ascension into heaven not of God but of Muhammad, who was supposedly transported from Mecca to Jerusalem specifically for the purpose.
c A monk in Iraq, writing in the early eighth century, alludes to a “Qur’an” but also to other writings by Muhammad, including a “Book of the Cow.” John of Damascus, a high-ranking civil servant in the last years of Abd al-Malik’s reign who took a deep interest in his master’s faith, also refers to a “Book” composed by Muhammad, together with various other texts that had supposedly been written by him. “The Cow” ended up as the title of a sura in the Qur’an; “The Woman” seems to be the same text as the sura that appears under the title “Women” in the Qur’an; “God’s She-Camel,” despite scattered references throughout the holy book to such a beast, bears no resemblance to any existing Qur’anic sura.
d In the long run, a majority of Muslim jurists would decide that Zoroastrians were in fact a “People of the Book.”
e The toothbrush was called a siwak and comprised a twig of the arak tree.
f Deuteronomy: 22–21. In fact, as was invariably their way, the rabbis appended so many qualifications to the biblical proscriptions that they effectively abolished the death penalty in Jewish society. For instance, it could be enforced only if the adultery had been committed before two valid witnesses, and even then only after multiple warnings had been delivered.
ENVOI
PLUS ÇA CHANGE?
Dinner parties hosted on corpses were hardly the limit of Abbasid achievement. In 762, on the banks of the Tigris, where the Garden of Eden had once stood, the construction began of a capital designed to serve as an image of paradise. Baghdad, “the City of Peace,” would certainly prove to be, if not a vision of heaven, then a place of superlatives. A mere couple of generations on from its founding, it was already the largest, the richest and the most beautiful city in the world. Damascus, that abandoned showcase for Umayyad power, was decisively eclipsed. So too was everywhere else. The universe, as even ambassadors from Constantinople might reluctantly acknowledge, had a whole new crossroads.
No denying, then, the talent of the Abbasids for clearing decks. Their founding from scratch of a city as incomparable as Baghdad was on a par with their incineration of the exhumed corpses of the Umayyad Caliphs, or their murder in 755 of Abu Muslim, the overmighty subject who had first helped them to the Caliphate: a demonstration that rivals were on no account to be brooked. Yet nowhere as dazzling and sophisticated as the Abbasids’ new capital could possibly have shimmered as hypnotically as it did by merely repudiating the past. “The people of every age and era acquire fresh experiences, and have knowledge renewed for them, in accordance with the decree of the stars.”1 So wrote the court astrologer, in the earliest days of Baghdad’s splendour. What he could see, mirage-like beyond the palaces and spreading suburbs of the freshly minted capital, were the phantoms of other global cities that had also once glittered amid the mudflats: Ctesiphon, and Seleucia, and Babylon. It was certainly no diminution of Baghdad’s own glory to see the new city as the culmination of such a line of descent. The Abbasids, by restoring the capital of the world to Iraq, were consciously laying claim to traditions that would burnish, not diminish, their own prestige. If there was in this more than a hint of how Ardashir, arriving in Mesopotamia from Iran, had established a capital beside the Tigris while still retaining the name of a Persian, then it did not go unnoted by shrewd observers.2 Despite the descent claimed by the Abbasids, the family they most closely resembled was not that of the Prophet but the House of Sasan. Increasingly, the comparison of a Caliph to a Shahanshah was no blasphemy, but a statement of the obvious. When the Commander of the Faithful sat in majestic inaccessibility upon his throne, or staggered in his silken robes beneath the weight of his jewels, or strolled through his gardens past cooling fountains and leopards, he was no less the lord of a Persian empire for claiming descent from an Arab.
It might have seemed, then, when Haroun al-Rashid—the Abbasid immortalised in The Arabian Nights as the cynosure of Caliphs—rode out to war against the Romans, that very little in the world had actually changed. In 806, while heading for the frontier, he and his troops clattered along almost the identical road that Kavad, some three centuries before, had followed when embarking on his own campaign against the Rum. Anyone emulating the seven sleepers of Ephesus, and jolting awake after a three-hundred-year-long snooze, would have experienced a palpable sense of déjà vu. Just as the Shahanshah had ended up bogged down in a protracted siege of Amida, so now, in his own attempt to force the frontier, did the Commander of the Faithful find himself camped out for weeks around a Roman stronghold—and not all the wild scenes of rejoicing when the fortress finally fell could alter the fact that it might just as well have been left well alone. The Romans barely noticed the loss. The Caliph certainly won no long-term advantage. The face-off between the great empires of East and West—those “twin eyes of the world”—continued much the same as it had ever done. It was as though entire centuries had never been.
And yet, in truth, of course, all was changed—changed utterly. If history might sometimes appear to be repeating itself on the banks of the Tigris, it was also—literally—being made. Ibn Ishaq, whose biography of the Prophet would go on to be reworked by Ibn Hisham, was only one of numerous scholars to be attracted, moth-like, to the bright lights of the Abbasids’ infant capital. Over the succeeding decades, the work done by the ulama of Baghdad would set the seal on how pious Muslims, from that time forward, would understand the origins of their religion. Even as Haroun al-Rashid was squandering gold and men in the wilds of the Taurus, so scholars were compiling the first biographies of the Prophet to have survived into the present, the first commentaries on the Qur’an, and the first collections of hadiths. The impact of their labours would prove to be infinitely more enduring than the capture of a few border forts. Over the centuries, they would serve to neutralise the pretensions of the Caliphs themselves. The compilers of the Sunna—who regarded the Abbasids with scarcely more enthusiasm than they had the Umayyads—remained implacable in their determination to geld the Khalifat Allah. What served to complete this protracted operation was the acceptance by everyone, even the Caliph himself, of a version of Islam’s beginnings that gave no scope for anyone to rule as a Deputy of God. The ulama, by tightly controlling what went into the history books, were able to propagate an understanding of their own dazzlingly rich and complex civilisation that attributed almost every single thing of value within it to the Prophet, and the Prophet alone. There was no question of acknowledging the momentous roles played in the forging of Islam by countless others—be they autocrats such as Abd al-Malik or scholars such as themselves. Submission to God was definitively cast as submission to the Sunna. By 1258, when Baghdad was flattened by the Mongols, and the heir of Haroun al-Rashid, wrapped up in a carpet, was trampled to death by horses, the victory of the ulama had long since been secured. For centuries, Caliphs had played no more than an ornamental role. The death of the last Abbasid to rule in Baghdad had no effect whatsoever on the fortunes of the ulama. Just as Christianity had survived the collapse of Roman power, so Islam, it appeared, could flourish perfectly well without a Caliphate.