Such was the beast that had served Justinian, the beast that had served Khusrow the Great. What more awesome proof of God’s power and mercy, then, than that He should have delivered it up into the hands of a leader such as Umar—a man so contemptuous of worldly rank that on inscriptions he might very well be name-checked without any title at all?139 Naturally, as Amir of the Faithful—their “Commander”—he was due their obedience; but hardly their grovelling. The stern message of the Prophet, that all his followers were brothers, made a mockery of any notion, such as the people of the conquered territories were prone to take for granted, that Umar might rank as their king. His right to all the prodigious wealth won by the Muhajirun lay precisely in the fact that he so palpably scorned it. What is virtue? So the Prophet had insistently demanded. Umar, conqueror of the known world though he might be, never disdained to illustrate the answer.
Who dispenses money, though dear, to kinsmen, orphans, the needy, the traveller, the beggars and for ransom;
Who performs the prayer and pays the alms;
Who fulfil their contracts when they contract;
Who are steadfast in hardship, calamity and danger;
These are the true believers.
These are truly pious.
140
Yet, as the years passed, and the expanse of sword-won lands continued to increase, so memories of the Prophet, inevitably, grew less immediate, and the value of his example more problematic. In 644, ten years into the great adventure of the Arab conquests, Umar was murdered by a deranged Persian slave, and the Faithful, in their search for a new commander, found themselves torn two ways. Their eventual choice, a man named Uthman, might have seemed the perfect continuity candidate: for tradition—and there seems no reason to doubt it—identifies him as one of the Prophet’s earliest and most pious companions. Yet, he also had the unmistakable whiff of a dynast: a man sprung from a family that was perfectly at ease with power and wealth. The Umayyads, according to Muslim historians, were Qurayshis who had made a fortune trading with the Romans, and had then invested it in Syrian real estate: a tradition that would seem to indicate an origin, not in the depths of Arabia, but somewhere along the imperial frontier. Certainly, they had enjoyed a track record of success during the conquest of the region that might well have suggested local knowledge: one brother, Yazid, is said to have ranged with a war band far and wide across the province, while another, Mu’awiya, had captured Caesarea, and been appointed governor of Syria by Umar. Uthman not only confirmed him in this role but also, in a blatant display of nepotism, made sure to promote other members of his family to similarly lucrative posts.
Understandably, then, the Umayyads fast gained a reputation for quite spectacular greed. One nephew, a smooth opportunist by the name of Marwan, developed a particular name for insatiability: no sooner had he been graced with a hundred thousand silver coins by Uthman than he was off to North Africa, where he proved as effective at screwing the natives out of their wealth as he was shameless in monopolising the plunder. A second Umar he most decidedly was not.
None of which, it went without saying, reflected well on the new Amir himself. Yet there was worse. Uthman, unlike Umar, was not content to divide up the loot of empires in the time-honoured manner of a bandit chieftain sharing out plunder after a successful raid. The Arabs, so it seemed to the new Amir, had moved on from that. The conquerors, if they were to make best use of the defeated superpowers’ bureaucracies, would themselves have to accept certain disciplines: a centralised administration, not least, and a clear-cut chain of command. Precisely the marks of slavery, in short, that the desert Arabs had always derided. No wonder, then, as Uthman sat in Medina and struggled to fashion his immense agglomeration of provinces into a properly imperial administration, that God, in the words of an Armenian bishop, “should have sent a disturbance among the armies of the sons of Ishmael, so that their unity was split.”141 In 656, a band of Muhajirun in Egypt, resentful of a newly appointed place-man, travelled back to Arabia to complain to the Amir in person. Uthman, taken by surprise, pretended to meet their grievances, but was then caught red-handed going back on his assurances. The Egyptians, outraged by his double-dealing, laid siege to his house, stormed it, and hacked him to death.
Here, after all the noble talk of brotherhood that had animated the Muhajirun since their first emigration to Medina, was an abrupt reversion to a far more primordial way of conducting affairs. Uthman’s widow, so tradition had it, dispatched her husband’s bloodstained robe to Mu’awiya in Syria, together with a pointed quotation from the Prophet: “Fight the oppressors until they submit to God’s command.”142 In truth, though, it needed no divine revelation to prompt the Umayyads to seek vengeance. Nothing, to an Arab warlord, came more instinctively than a blood feud. That the Prophet had sternly warned against precisely such brawling seems to have inhibited Mu’awiya not in the slightest. In Syria, the sense of community that had supposedly obliterated all distinctions between the Quraysh and the Muhajirun was glaring by its absence. There, in contrast to Iraq and Egypt, there had been no great influx of settlers, no sudden rash of garrison towns. Even Jabiya, the original tent city, had been left largely abandoned after a particularly devastating visitation of the plague in 639. Mu’awiya, and other Qurayshi warlords like him, had not the slightest intention of sharing what they regarded as their patrimony with ragged newcomers from the desert. Syria was theirs: a private fiefdom to be ruled in the manner less of the Prophet than of a Ghassanid.
That is not to say that Muhammad’s teachings were wholly cast aside. Back in Medina, his original capital, leaders of the state that he had founded were desperately struggling to hold together his legacy. Even as the empire palpably began to fragment—with banners of revolt raised in Iran as well as Syria, and a host of Arabs in Egypt rumoured to have accepted “belief in Christ”143—a new Amir was succeeding the murdered Uthman. Ali ibn Abi Talib could hardly have been more intimately associated with golden memories of the Prophet. At once both the cousin and the son-in-law of Muhammad—or so tradition reports—he also had a fierce commitment to the primal values of the Umma: of egalitarianism and brotherhood. As a result, to his admirers, he ranked as a veritable imam: a father to his people, and a Lion of God. Far from disdaining emigrants from the desert, Ali regarded them—no matter how hairy or stinking—as his natural constituency. Determined that the Muhajirun should retain their grip on the empire, he opted to abandon Medina and make Kufa his new capital. From there, with the energy of the seasoned general that he was, Ali set himself to stamping his authority on all the Umma. In order to secure his rear, he first routed an army of rebels outside Basra. Buoyed by this success, he then led the Muhajirun of Kufa up the line of the Euphrates, with the aim of taming Syria. A great battle was fought, Mu’awiya brought to peace negotiations, and victory claimed. Ali, returning to Kufa, naturally made sure to trumpet the news as loudly as he could. The unity of the Umma, so his propaganda ran, had been triumphantly restored. The fitna—the “time of trial”—was at an end.