The close fit between the religion that came to be known as Islam and the teeming melting-pot of the late antique Near East would seem to suggest an identical conclusion. Indisputably, the order established by the Arabs in the century following the hijra was something novel. But originality alone does not tell the whole story. Prototype of every subsequent Islamic empire that it certainly was, the Caliphate founded in the seventh century was also something very much more: the last, the climactic, and the most enduring empire of antiquity. Such is the claim that this book aims to prove. Yet it is as well to admit, at the outset, that such a task is far from easy. Certainty, on a whole range of issues, is impossible. There can only ever be speculation. Cosmologists speak of “singularities”—warpings of time and space where the laws of physics do not apply. The puzzle of Islam’s origins might be viewed in a similar way—as a black hole sucking in a great spiralling swirl of influences before casting them back out in a radically different form. The career of Muhammad, traditionally cast as the pivotal episode in the entire history of the Middle East, serves both as the climax of my narrative of the collapse of Roman and Persian power, and as the point where that narrative fragments and breaks down. Does the Qur’an really date from the Prophet’s lifetime? Where, if not in Mecca, might he have lived? Why are the references to him in the early Caliphate so sparse, so enigmatic, and so late? The answers I have given to these questions are all of them unashamedly provisional—as I believe they have no choice but to be. That said, my ambition has been to sift and weigh the awesomely complex sources, to try and take account of all the many gaps and inconsistencies that exist within them, and then, albeit tentatively, to marshal them into something resembling a narrative. The context for this attempt, however, is not the traditional one, derived from the works of Muslims who lived whole centuries after Muhammad’s death, but rather from those who inhabited the world into which he was born: the empire-shadowed, God-haunted world of late antiquity.
Of the full dazzling colour, variety and complexity of this age, the chronicles written by Muslim historians give barely a hint. Infidels, when they appear at all, are made to speak and act precisely as though they were Arabs.77 Roman emperors are transformed into mirror-images of Caliphs; Jewish scholars and Christian saints become straw men, shadowy and faceless.h Fortunately, though, our understanding of the extraordinary melting-pot of imperial and religious traditions that provided the context for Islam’s evolution does not depend solely on Muslim chronicles. Far from it. While seventh-century sources are threadbare to the point of non-existent, those from the preceding two centuries offer sumptuous riches. We have, for the last time, narratives composed by writers who self-consciously regarded themselves as the heirs of the great historians of classical Greece; we have collections of letters, and digests of laws, and compilations of speeches; we have a gazetteer written by a merchant, and a work of anthropology written by a barbarian, and a seeming infinitude of works of Christian piety, from histories of the Church to lives of fabulously self-mortifying saints. In fact, by the standards of other periods of ancient history, we have an almost miraculous volume of evidence—something that historians of antiquity, like magpies flocking above a cache of diamonds, have seized upon with glee. As a result, over the past few decades, the study of the period has been revolutionised. A civilisation previously dismissed as exhausted, sterile and decaying has been comprehensively rehabilitated. What scholars emphasise now is less its decrepitude, more its energy, its exuberance, its inventiveness.
“We see in late antiquity,” as one of its foremost historians has put it, “a mass of experimentation, new ways being tried and new adjustments made.”78 What emerges in the century or so after Muhammad as the religion called Islam is one consequence of this “mass of experimentation”—but there are a whole multitude of others too. The most significant of all these, of course, are Judaism and Christianity: faiths that by the time of Muhammad had taken on something like the form they wear today, but that had once themselves been swirls of beliefs and doctrines no less unformed than those professed by the Arabs in the first century of their empire. The story of how Islam came to define itself, and to invent its own past, is only part of a much broader story: one that is ultimately about how Jews, Christians and Muslims all came by their understanding of religion. No other revolution in human thought, perhaps, has done more to transform the world. No other revolution, then, it might be argued, demands more urgently to be put in proper context.
That is why a history of Islam’s origins cannot be written without reference to the origins of Judaism and Christianity—and why in turn a history of the origins of Judaism and Christianity cannot be written without reference to the world that incubated them both. The vision of God to which both rabbis and bishops subscribed, and which Muhammad’s followers inherited, did not emerge out of nowhere. The monotheisms that would end up established as state religions from the Atlantic to central Asia had ancient, and possibly unexpected, roots. To trace them is to cast a searchlight across the entire civilisation of late antiquity. From the dental hygiene of Zoroastrian priests to the frontier policy of Roman strategists; from fantasies about Alexander the Great in Syria to tales of buried books of spells in Iraq; from Jews who thought Christ the messiah to Christians who lived like Jews: all are pieces in the jigsaw. It would certainly make little sense to trace the course of the revolution that would climax with the forging of the Caliphate by starting with the revelations of the Muslim Prophet. Accordingly, we begin not in Mecca, nor even in Jerusalem, but in a land that was the wellspring for two incalculably fruitful convictions: that a human empire might be global; and that the power of an all-good god might be universal.
We begin in Persia.
a We have three brief but contemporary inscriptions giving the Himyarite side of the story. Unsurprisingly, perhaps, these accuse the Christians of Najran of what today might be described as terrorism.
b Or perhaps “Read!” According to Ibn Hisham, the recitation appeared before Muhammad in the form of writing on a brocaded coverlet.
c This thesis, that Muhammad’s religion was a threat to the trade of the Quraysh as guardians of the Ka’ba, is nowhere explicitly mentioned in Muslim tradition, but is almost universally taken for granted in modern, Western biographies of the Prophet.
d In some traditions, he is cast as the Prophet’s brother: Aaron to Muhammad’s Moses.
e That Moses could not possibly have been the author of the first five books of the Bible was a conclusion that had first been drawn as far back as the eleventh century, by a Jewish physician employed at a Muslim court in Spain.
f Not all Muslims have accepted the authenticity of the great collections of the Sunna: some, back in the past, rejected them out of hand, and some, still today, have collections of their own. Other Muslims, as early as the ninth century, rejected the reliability of hadiths altogether, arguing—rather in the manner of modern-day Western scholars—that they were all unreliable and fabricated.
g Two verses, Qur’an: 7.157 and 29.48, are used to adduce the theory of Muhammad’s illiteracy. 7.157 refers to him as “ummi”: a word conventionally translated as “unlettered,” but which could also mean “lacking a scripture,” in the sense of being neither Jewish or Christian. Adding to the uncertainty is the fact that the Qur’an frequently refers to itself as a kitab, a book, while in 25.4–6, it is strongly implied that Muhammad could indeed read. Even more suggestively, Ibn Hisham has reports which imply that Muhammad could not merely read, but write.