Except that God, in the wilds beyond Palestine, was not the only patron of such partnerships. Behind the Thamud—and every confederation of Arab tribes since—had lurked Roman interests and Roman influence. It was only to be expected—in an age when proxy-fighting between the two superpowers cast a longer shadow over Arabia than ever before, extending as far south as distant Himyar—that the provincial authorities in Palestine should have shown themselves grimly determined not to drop their guard an inch. It was this, in the decades prior to the great war with Persia, that had encouraged a major recruitment drive on the part of Roman strategists, as they sought to compensate for their relative lack of manpower along the frontier by hiring Arabs to patrol it in depth. This, in turn, encouraged mass emigration from all over Arabia, with entire tribes drifting steadily northwards from the Hijaz towards Palestine. The concern of the provincial authorities to control and regulate this movement was evident in the care with which they sought to catalogue the newcomers. Exotic names duly flourished on the roster of foederati. Not an ethnic grouping between Palestine and the Hijaz, but the provincial authorities had sought to sponsor it. Never before, perhaps, had the tribal make-up of Arabia quite so pressingly held the interest of Roman strategists.
And yet, in every register of the age, there is one intriguing absence. As with Mecca, the city in which the Prophet supposedly grew up, so with the Quraysh, the tribe to which Muhammad supposedly belonged—all is deafening silence. Once again, it is not until a century and more after the Prophet’s death that the name makes its first, fleeting appearance in a datable text—and even then it is not entirely clear what is meant by the allusion.84 This is doubly puzzling: for not only were the Quraysh, according to Muslim tradition, the dominant power in the Hijaz, renowned far and wide across Arabia, but Muhammad’s own ancestor, an adventurer named Qusayy, is supposed to have seized power in Mecca only after Qaysar—“Caesar”— “had extended him aid.”85 Why, then, should the Romans appear never to have heard of the Quraysh? Such a group of people certainly did exist: they are described in four tantalising verses of the Qur’an as embarking on winter and summer journeys, and receiving both provisions and security from God. Yet, even eminent Muslim scholars might confess themselves puzzled by the precise meaning of the word “Quraysh.” Perhaps, they mused, it derived from the name of a prominent travel guide, or else a breed of camel, or perhaps a type of shark? The truth was, however, that no one—not two centuries on from the Prophet’s death—really knew any more. The derivation of “Quraysh” had long since been forgotten.
There was nothing particularly unusual about this. Back in the fourth century, when the Romans had started to refer to the Arabs as “Saracens,” few of them had appreciated that the name might well have derived from a word in the Arabs’ own incomprehensible tongue: shirkat. So perhaps it is not a total coincidence that Quraysh itself should seem to echo the same identical concept of “partnership”—but in Syriac. Qarisha, in the language that had increasingly come to be the Fertile Crescent’s readiest lingua franca, meant “collected together”—“confederated.”86 Is this, then, to what “Quraysh” had originally referred—those tribes brought together in a common partnership, as foederati of the New Rome? It is telling, certainly, that the Ghassanid kings—and doubtless other Arab commanders—spoke at least a smattering of Syriac as a matter of course.87 The word qarisha, duly Arabised, might well then have been used far beyond the imperial frontier: a convenient shorthand for all those tribes that had grown fat on Roman patronage.
All of this is speculation, of course. Nevertheless, it would imply, if true, that the mention of “Quraysh” in the Qur’an does not refer to a specific people in a specific place, but rather to an entire confederation of peoples; that the lands where they were to be found ranged from the Negev to the northern Hijaz; and that the sustenance and security provided them by God was mediated by Caesar. If so, then it would certainly explain why tidings of Roman defeat “in the nearby land” should have been broadcast even in the Qur’an itself. After all, the Arabs beyond the frontier were not far distant from the earthquake that convulsed the lands of the Fertile Crescent; rather, they were directly and intimately affected by it. By shattering the Roman hold on Syria and Palestine, the Persian onslaught severed for good what the Arab foederati had always previously taken for granted: the supply of gold from their imperial sponsors. Not, perhaps, that this would necessarily have spelled total disaster: for the Persian occupiers would have been desperate for the same leather, provisions and provender that Arab merchants had previously supplied to the Romans. Moreover, on the evidence of the Qur’an, the Mushrikun could provide these items to order. It is telling that trade, no less than agriculture, appears to have obsessed the Prophet, with even God being cast by him as a merchant: one who accepts the souls of mortals as pledges for their debts and remorselessly keeps track of their deeds in “an unblotted ledger-book.”88 Telling as well, no doubt, is the Prophet’s evident familiarity with what appear to have been lengthy business trips—across the sea as well as the land. Perhaps here, then, in the need to travel by ship during the summer, and with pack animals during the winter, is an explanation for the two ventures made annually by the Quraysh.89 As for the Prophet himself, more than a century before Ibn Hisham’s biography, in the 690s, and it was already being recorded by a Christian chronicler in Edessa that “Muhammad travelled for the purposes of trade to the lands of Palestine, Arabia and Syria.”90 A tantalising snippet of detail—and if authentic, one that would suggest a record of business dealings at the height of the Persian occupation. “No offence,” as the Qur’an itself puts it, “to seek some bounty from your Lord.”91 War, after all, will often provide scope for those on its margins to coin a profit.
But also for much more: reflections upon the mutability of all things, and the evils of the age, and the pettiness of human doings when compared to the omnipotence of God. “Have they not travelled the world,” the Prophet asked the unbelievers, “and seen how those before them met their end?”92 All that is human can totter: a lesson fit for the age. The Prophet’s revelations may have been haunted by ancient cities abandoned to encroaching sands, but they also contained hints of other, more recent monuments to human vanity. Traces of the decaying imperial frontier are manifest in the very language of the Qur’an: the words for roads, forts and even legionaries’ painted shields—transliterated from the original Greek and Latin—all have spectral presences in the Prophet’s revelations.93 When, for instance, in the opening sura of the Qur’an, the prayer was raised to God, “Guide us to the straight path,”94 it represented a dazzlingly audacious act of appropriation. The great military roads—the strata—that for centuries had girded the eastern frontier, and served as both emblems and tools of Roman might, were being brought to fade before the radiance of a celestial sirat—a road eternally straight.