All of which, for the historian, suggests a most welcome and promising conclusion. Compared to the bogs and quicksand of other sources for the life of the Prophet, the book of his revelations does authentically appear to offer us something precious: something almost like solid ground. Unlike the witness provided by the hadiths, or the biographies of Muhammad, or the commentaries on the Qur’an, the text of the Qur’an itself does seem to derive authentically from the Prophet’s lifetime. That makes it, a few other brief and enigmatic documents aside, our only primary source for his career. Such a resource is, in consequence, beyond compare: one that positively demands to be sifted for clues to the Prophet’s career and background. Identify these, and it may then be possible to find reflected in the Qur’an glimpses, not merely of the Prophet’s personal circumstances but of something even more suggestive: the broader context of the age.
Take, for instance, the verse that prophesies which of the two great imperial peoples will emerge victorious from their terrible war. In its presumption that God favours the cause of the Romans, and that their fate has been graced with a literally cosmic significance, there is nothing incompatible with the Romans’ own perennial self-conceit. Elsewhere in the Qur’an, too, there can be detected just the faintest echo of Heraclius’s blowing on the embattled empire’s war-trumpet. “They ask you,” God tells Muhammad, “about ‘The Two-Horned One’ ”31—Dhu’l Qarnayn, in Arabic. This, so the Qur’an goes on to reveal, was the title of a great ruler who journeyed to the ends of the earth, where he built gates of iron faced with bronze, and thereby imprisoned the surging hordes of Gog and Magog. To the apocalypse-haunted Roman people, this biography would have suggested only one man—and during the reign of Heraclius, especially so. Alexander the Great, conqueror of the Persians, and gaoler of Gog and Magog, had lately become the name on every Christian’s lips. Amid the humiliations and triumphs of the great war against Iranshahr, Roman propagandists repeatedly invoked his memory. Then, in 630, with Khusrow finally toppled and Heraclius about to enter Jerusalem, a fabulous story had begun to circulate in Syria, clearly written in honour of the moment, and featuring Alexander.32 The great conqueror, it appeared, had not only reached the setting of the sun and walled up Gog and Magog—he had also delivered a prophecy, foretelling how, at the end of days, the sway of the Christian empire would be extended to the limits of the world. Reassuring news for Heraclius—and sure enough, just to ensure that no one missed the point, Alexander was shown in the story vowing to head for Jerusalem, and to take with him a silver throne, “so that when the Messiah comes from heaven, He may sit upon this kingly throne, for His kingdom lasts for ever.”33 Not the most subtle parallel with Heraclius’s own shouldering of the True Cross, perhaps—but ringing enough, to be sure. In fact, it is a measure of just how effective the story was as a celebration of the emperor’s entry into Jerusalem that the tale of Dhu’l Qarnayn in the Qur’an appears to have been modelled directly upon it. Plot, imagery, even the hero’s distinctive horns—all are identical.34 Here, then, if anywhere, it is possible to pin a precise date upon a segment of the Qur’an. And yet, despite this, the tale told of Dhu’l Qarnayn betrays barely a trace-element of its genesis in the Roman propaganda of 630. Certainly, nothing remains in it of Alexander’s prophecy that the New Rome will inherit the world, and that Christ will then come again. Instead, its vision of the End Days—complete with the surging like waves of Gog and Magog and the dramatic materialisation of hell—has a quality of the utmost timelessness: nothing overtly Christian, and certainly nothing overtly Roman.
Nor, in a book positively obsessed by the prospect of the world’s annihilation, are all the numerous other predictions of the End Days any different.
When the sky disintegrates;
When the stars are strewn;
When the seas are made to erupt;
When graves are dispersed,
Each soul will know what it did,
And what it failed to do.
35
There is nothing here, in the terrifying power of such a vision, to suggest that it might have been prompted by any specific mood of crisis. Just the opposite: the clear and fearsome message of the Qur’an—that the wicked stand in the shadow of eternal punishment, and that those who have oppressed the weak will answer to God for their crimes upon “a day of resurrection”36—possesses an all-too-universal resonance. Nevertheless, the sheer urgency with which the Prophet hammers home his warnings and tells his followers to prepare for the hour of judgement suggests that he had good reason to dread its imminence. Muhammad, as his familiarity with Heraclius’s propaganda demonstrates, was not oblivious to the firestorm sweeping through the Near East. The cloud of ash that had hung dark over mowbeds in Ctesiphon, monks in Constantinople and rabbis in Tiberias had the Prophet in its shadow, too. Far from reaching him as distant rumours, the terrors and upheavals of the age seem to have been sufficiently close to ring in his ears. The Qur’an, haunted as it is by a dread of the wrath of God, and of the puniness of mankind before an omnipotence that can convert the entire world into dust, is no less of its time for having a perspective that disdains to focus on specific events—whether a plague that had recently wiped out a third of the population of the Near East or a war that had been raging for decades.
“For every nation there is an appointed span of time; when their time arrives, they can neither delay it nor bring it forward, even for an instant.”37 Viewed from this perspective, the calamities that were even then convulsing the empires of Persia and the New Rome were nothing exceptional. The gaze that Muhammad brought to the agonies of his own generation was one that distinguished in the rise and fall of great powers merely the ceaseless gusting of grains of sand upon desert winds. Ever since the moment of creation, what had mattered to humanity was not the vagaries of history but rather a question as eternal as it was urgent: how best to choose between good and evil. This is why, in the pages of the Qur’an, it is not kings or emperors who feature, but prophets. Muhammad was, of course, only one in a long succession of messengers sent by God to summon people to repentance. What need, then, when the truths that they revealed were unchanging, to specify where or when they might have lived? To God, and to God alone, belongs “the knowledge of all that is hidden in the heavens and earth.”38 Figures from even the recent past were of interest to Muhammad only once they had been bleached of all context, all individuality. So, for instance, when the seven sleepers of Ephesus are introduced into the Prophet’s revelations, to be praised by him as “youths who believed in their Lord,”39 he does not mention Ephesus, nor that there were seven of them, nor even that they were Christians. As with “the Two-Horned One,” so with “the People of the Cave,” threads drawn from the rich tapestry of Roman fantasy have been woven into a very different pattern.
Not, of course, that every filament drawn from the past could be reworked in such a manner. The world, as Muhammad well knew, was a various and error-ravaged place. It behoved the Believers to stand on their guard. A stern and awful warning—and one that the Prophet would never tire of issuing. Here, in the fretful consciousness that there existed only the One True God, but that many different faiths claimed to understand Him, was the authentic neuralgia of the age. No less than a rabbi fretting over the minim, or a bishop sniffing anxiously after heretics, Muhammad was both appalled and transfixed by the sheer variety of peoples with different beliefs who filled the world. The adherents of some of these—such as the Mushrikun and the fire-worshipping devotees of Zoroaster—clearly lay beyond the pale.40 But what of the Jews, say, or the Christians? “Who so disbelieves in God, His angels, His Books, His messengers and the Last Day has strayed far in error.”41 By this measure—as Muhammad himself seems to have been uncomfortably aware—there was precious little to separate a rabbi or a monk from a mu’min’: a “believer.” Indeed, to some extent, all the Prophet’s many pronouncements on the Jews and the Christians, scattered throughout the pages of the Qur’an, resemble nothing so much as a protracted twisting in the wind. At times, the Torah and the Gospel might be hailed as “Guidance to mankind,”42 sent down from heaven, and those who reverence them as the Ahl al-Kitab—the “People of the Book.” At other times, the Jews might be damned with blood-curdling ferocity for their treachery, and the Christians for ascribing a son to God. Such tension was nothing new: it echoed the same mingling of fascination and loathing that had characterised Jewish and Christian attitudes to one another in the first few centuries after Christ. Perhaps, had a Christian written a book that gave a voice to Ebionites and Marionites in the years before the Council of Nicaea, it would have spanned the same extremes of tolerance and hostility towards the Jews that are found in the Qur’an. Muhammad, in his struggle to decide where precisely to draw the frontier between his own teachings and those of the “People of the Book,” and how high to raise the barriers and watchtowers, was wrestling with a problem many centuries older than himself.