Yet there remained something strangely pallid about her, and Dushara too, and all the various gods of the desert. Many, to their worshippers, were little more than names. Loyalty, as a result, was rarely a feature of Arab devotions. A deity who failed a tribe in battle, or neglected to keep it in food, or scared away the camels, would be dumped without a moment’s hesitation. Many were the oases where there stood altars “old in years, bearing inscriptions in ancient letters of unknown tongues,”84 raised to gods whose very names had been forgotten. Temples would cheerfully be used to pen goats.85 To Christian scholars—whose dread of demons such as Artemis was often a form of reluctant tribute paid to their inherent glamour—the Arabs’ gods seemed reassuringly dull. Even attempts to condemn them risked making them more interesting than they were. When Epiphanius, the same energetic cataloguer of heresies who had condemned the Ebionites, turned his beady eye on Dushara, he reported that the god’s worshippers, in a blasphemous parody of Christian belief, believed the deity to have been born of a virgin—a ka’iba. The bishop, however, had misheard: Dushara was not a god of a ka’iba but of a ka’ba—a “cube.” The allusion was to the stone, black and uncarved, that the Nabataeans worshipped as an incarnation of the god, somewhere in a shrine to the south of the Dead Sea.86 Dushara certainly had nothing so sophisticated as a virgin mother.
Meanwhile, many Arabs were turning to the worship of a god who did. Nabataean cities had grown crowded with churches; and even in the wilds of the desert, beyond the reach of either emperor or bishop, whole tribes were turning to Christ. There was often a fair degree of opportunism in this: for it was well known that the Romans would only ever bestow their patronage upon Arabs who ranked as fellow Christians. Yet, the Ghassanids—and Arethas especially—were the decided opposite of lukewarm. They refused, on principle, to abandon the distinctively Monophysite character of their faith. They built, resplendently solid amid the tents of their encampment at Jabiya, a massive church. They paraded, in their ongoing vendetta against the Lakhmids, a devotion to Christ that was quite as militant as Mundhir’s loyalty to al-’Uzza. Granted, the Ghassanids did not think to offer up virgins in sacrifice—but neither did they ever doubt, as they hacked down their pagan adversaries, that their swords were touched by the authentic fire of heaven.
And who was to say that they were wrong? Time was when any notion that the Saracens might have been blessed by the particular favour of God would have been greeted with hilarity—but lately, in the bringing of the desert tribes to Christ, there had been hints, just perhaps, of the workings of some broader, more mysterious providence. Many were the wonders, after all, that had assisted with their conversion. The presence in the desert of so many saints, so many Spirit-charged men of God, had certainly helped to deliver a steady stream of miracles to the Saracens. Their barren had been given children, and their sick had been restored to health: a record of medical achievement that no pagan could begin to rival. Stylites were particularly popular; and many were the tribes who would gather to gawp at them and their austerities in wide-eyed stupefaction. To Christians, most of whom had been brought up to loathe and dread the Saracens, the spectacle of desert nomads smashing idols before the pillar of a saint, pledging themselves loudly to Christ and even, in the ultimate act of renunciation, “vowing to forgo the flesh of donkey and camel,”87 might be cause for considered reflection. One such, a bishop from Antioch by the name of Theodoret, had been brought to conclude that the Saracens, despite their illiteracy and their taste for slumming it in tents, were “endowed with an intelligence lively and penetrating, and a judgement fully capable of discerning truth and refuting falsehood.”88 He had seen whole crowds of them gathered before the pillar of the original stylite, Saint Simeon the Elder himself—and had marked the effect. To a people wild and free such as the Saracens prided themselves on being, the show of a man prostrating himself before God, as Simeon had done, over and over again, might at first have appeared demeaning; but not after they had watched him persist with it for days and nights at a time. In submission, so the spectacle had taught them, lay the surest path to God. Saracens, even Saracens, might be brought to grasp that truth.
But there was an additional, and more haunting, reason why scholars such as Theodoret should have taken a particular interest in the Saracens: they were the only barbarians who featured in the Bible. Isaac had not been Abraham’s sole son; nor Sarah his sole bed-partner. Prior to the dramatic appearance of the Almighty at Mamre, the barrenness of the patriarch’s wife had prompted him to take as a concubine her maid, an Egyptian by the name of Hagar. Sure enough, the slave-girl had borne Abraham a son; but Sarah, bitter and jealous, had driven the mother and her newborn baby out into the desert. There an angel had appeared to Hagar and told her that Ishmael, her child, was destined to prove “a wild ass of a man, his hand against every man and every man’s hand against him”89—and the father of a great people. But which people? The answer to that, the clues being as glaring as they were, was self-evident. The Children of Ishmael, that “wild ass of a man”: who were these, if not the Arabs? Certainly, such an identification had long been accepted as fact.90 And the potential implications of this Hagarene bloodline? They, by and large, had been left to hang. Perhaps, however, they should not have been. Like Isaac, so it was recorded in Holy Scripture, Ishmael had been circumcised by Abraham’s own hand; and, like Jacob, he had fathered twelve sons. Suggestive markers of the favour of God, surely? That, at any rate, was what numerous Saracens had begun to ask. Theodoret himself had cited the example of the nomads who roamed the wilds east of Antioch: “for, in that desert live those who are proud to derive their descent from their ancestor Ishmael.”91
Other Arabs, though, were not so sure. Hagar hardly ranked as the classiest of ancestors, after all. A slave-girl and a brood-mare, she had been a refugee to boot: driven not once but twice into exile by a resentful Sarah. The second occasion had followed the birth of Isaac, when Ishmael and his hapless mother had been obliged to take up residence “in the wilderness of Paran.”92 The location of this particular desert was much debated, with some scholars, including Saint Paul himself, identifying it with the Sinai. The overwhelming consensus, however, was that it could only have been the Negev. No other wilderness stood closer to the sites most associated with Abraham: Mamre, and the Church of Saint Lot, and Hebron, where the patriarch lay buried in a cave with Isaac and Jacob. Certainly, the Arabs of the Negev, when they accepted baptism, appear to have had a particular enthusiasm for naming themselves “Abraham”—as though to remind their fellow Christians that they, unlike other converts, had been blessed by the marks of God’s favour long before the time of Christ.93 Yet this pedigree, even so, was a potentially awkward one for them to flaunt. How, after all, were the Arabs to lay claim to a primal inheritance from Abraham without also acknowledging their descent from a slave-girl? A measure of embarrassment, perhaps, was only natural. So much so, in fact, that it seems to have led one scholar, a contemporary of Theodoret’s by the name of Sozomen, to offer a particularly ingenious explanation for the origin of the word “Saracen.” “Mortified by the servile character of Hagar,” he explained, “the Ishmaelites decided to conceal the opprobrium of their origin by adopting a name which would imply that they were descended instead from Sarah, the wife of Abraham.”94