Just like the Qur’an itself, then, the heroic stories that were told of the second Caliph seem to reach back to a specific place and moment: to the fringes of Palestine, and that terrifying period of superpower conflict when it appeared that the world itself stood in the shadow of the End Days. That war might be waged in the name of God, and that a contempt for earthly pleasures too was a form of warfare: these twin presumptions, which Umar embodied in a supremely radical way, were nevertheless far from being original to him. Naturally, the truth of this cannot help but be obscured by histories that locate his beginnings, like those of the Prophet himself, in a desert backwater many hundreds of miles from the Fertile Crescent. Composed centuries later, by men of intense piety who could feel God nearer to them than their jugular veins, it is no wonder that such narratives, like sandstone shaped by ceaseless weathering, should have been transformed out of recognition over the course of the generations. Hence, in trying to explain how a state came to be forged in the depths of Arabia formidable enough to subdue the Fertile Crescent, the perennial frustration. The aftermath of the conquests masterminded by Umar could hardly be more manifest—but not so the course, and still less the cause, of the original eruption.
Which said, despair need not be total. There has been preserved, embedded within the vast corpus of subsequent writings on the Prophet, at least a single lump of magma sufficiently calcified to have stood proof against all erosion. The “Constitution of Medina,” it has been termed: a series of eight brief treaties concluded between the Muhajirun and the natives of Yathrib, and which—not least because they refer to the emigrants as “Believers” rather than “Muslims”—are accepted by even the most suspicious of scholars as deriving from the time of Muhammad. Here, in these precious documents, it is possible to glimpse the authentic beginnings of a movement that would succeed, in barely two decades, in prostrating both the New Rome and Iranshahr. That the Prophet consciously aimed at state-building; that it was his ambition to forge his own people and the local Arab tribes into a single Umma; that this confederation was to fight “in the path of God”:124 these brief details, the veritable building blocks out of which all the much later stories of Muhammad’s life would be constructed, do authentically seem rock solid. What the Constitution of Medina does not tell us, however, is where the Muhajirun had originally come from; nor does it reveal precisely whom they felt called upon by God to fight. Most regrettably of all, it sheds no light on how an alliance stitched together in a remote oasis might conceivably have expanded to embrace the whole of Arabia, and then to take on the world. Nevertheless, its very existence would seem to suggest that the hard core of Muslim tradition may truly derive from the time of Muhammad, and have stood proof, after all, against the weathering effects of time. Conflict between the upstart Umma and the Quraysh; eventual compromise on both sides, and the agreement between them of a treaty; a brutal crushing by the new confederation of any Arab tribes bold enough to stand in its way: such a process of state-building seems, at the very least, plausible.
And if accurate, then it would imply that there may perhaps be other clues, preserved in the stories told centuries later of the Prophet’s career, as to how and why, as if from the blue, the imperial authorities in both Syria and Iraq were overwhelmed by precisely the kind of Arab federation that hitherto had always been theirs to sway. Even though Muslim tradition would cast the conflict between Muhammad and the Quraysh as a struggle for control of Mecca, this tradition itself contains hints of a suggestively alternative one. Particularly striking, for instance, is the number of leading Qurayshi dynasts who, despite supposedly being based in Mecca, are said to have purchased estates in Syria during the Prophet’s lifetime: an example of long-distance property speculation which, if genuinely conducted from the Hijaz, would have had no precedent in the entire span of Roman history. Previously, whether along the Rhine or in Armenia, the only barbarians who owned land on either side of the imperial frontier were those who directly bordered it.125 All of which would seem to imply a rather awkward conundrum. Either the Quraysh truly came from Mecca, in which case they could not have owned property in Roman territory—or else they owned property in Roman territory, in which case they are most unlikely to have come from Mecca.
Of these two alternatives, it is clear that the second is the likelier. Even on the evidence of Muslim tradition itself, the obsession of the Prophet with securing the border zone south of Palestine is manifest. With the single exception of Mecca itself, all the targets of his campaigning, all the objects of his military ambitions, are said to have lain in this region: the stretches of desert that the Romans’ Arab allies had always traditionally patrolled. If the Quraysh did go from attempting to strangle the Prophet’s infant confederation in its cradle to allying themselves with it—and there seems no reason to doubt it—they would obviously have been putting their stake in any imperially sanctioned order in serious jeopardy. This, however, at a time when the supply of gold from Caesar had long since dried up, seems to have struck them as a gamble well worth taking. The winnings on offer, after all, were potentially dazzling. It was not only the plunder promised them by Muhammad’s terrifyingly omnipotent god that would have glimmered in the imaginings of the Qurayshi leaders. So too would something even more seductive: the prospect of toppling the Ghassanids, of laying claim to the heritage of the Lakhmids, of fashioning a whole new shirkat, with themselves as the region’s top dogs. What the new confederation of Muhajirun and Quraysh appears initially to have aimed at, as their primary strategic goal, was the mastery of the Syrian desert. That it ended up conquering Syria itself, and Mesopotamia too, may well, then, have come as big a surprise to its leaders as it did to the Romans and Persians themselves.
It certainly seems no coincidence that the invaders’ two most decisive victories were won on the doorsteps of two places that had long featured prominently in Arab dreams. For generations, the tales told of the courts of Jabiya and Hira, and the songs sung of their splendours, had haunted the imaginings of the desert tribes. Now, with the defeat of the Romans at the Yarmuk, calamity had overwhelmed their Ghassanid clients as well—just as the shattering of the Persian monarchy at Qadisiyya had spelled doom for all those local desert chieftains with fantasies of sitting on the vacant throne of the Lakhmids. The likelihood is, in fact, that both imperial armies, as they sought to stem the Saracen onslaught, consisted themselves in large part of Arab tribesmen. Muslim historians, not surprisingly, would take an exultant delight in emphasising the immensity of the manpower available to the toppled empires: of how their troops numbered in the hundreds of thousands, and of how their blood, when it was spilled, had flowed in such prodigious quantities as to turn the wheels of local water-mills.126 Contemporaries knew better, though. They understood the true condition of anaemia that had afflicted both superpowers. Heraclius, as one bishop bluntly put it, “could raise no more troops to oppose the Ishmaelites.”127 Given the absence of regular troops, he had no alternative but to rely on foederati to defend Roman territory. The Ghassanids, and all the other tribes allied to them, repaid Heraclius’s trust with fierce loyalty; but it ensured, when the Muhajirun first appeared across the Syrian desert, that the Roman military itself was reduced to something of a sideshow.128 Almost a century of pestilence, and whole decades of war: these, in their combined effects, had left the emperor with no clothes.