Such, it must have seemed, was to be the future: a globe-spanning empire of many faiths, and none of them any longer with the whip-hand.
a A Muslim scholar of the tenth century, Ibn Mujahid, established what subsequently became the orthodoxy: that there were seven, equally valid qira’at—“readings”—of the Qur’an. The modern, widely held notion that there is one single text was established only in 1924, with the publication in Cairo of an edition of the Qur’an that went on to become the global standard.
b Qur’an: 80.27–31. The traditional accounts of Mecca’s rise to greatness also imply that the city, as a teeming hub of international trade, must have had a substantial agricultural hinterland. The patent impossibility of this has led some historians to propose that grain was imported from Syria and Egypt: a case of the mountain coming to Muhammad, if there ever was one.
c Although vines and pomegranates would have been grown in oases such as Yathrib, the cultivated olive would not. In late antiquity, it was indigenous to the Mediterranean region.
d Hunayn—which, like Badr, is clearly identified in the Qur’an as the site of a battle—features in biographies of the Prophet as the location of a decisive Muslim victory. Safa and Marwa are identified by Muslim tradition as small hills in the immediate vicinity of the Ka’ba, while Arafat is equated to a mountain that lies some twelve miles outside Mecca.
e Most scholars distinguished Bakka from Mecca by identifying the former specifically with the Ka’ba and the latter with the surrounding area, although some suggested the opposite.
f The composition of Genesis, the book of the Bible in which Abraham appears, is generally dated to the seventh or sixth century BC. The implications of this for the historicity of Abraham are, of course, not themselves without significance.
g A few lines scribbled in Syriac on the fly-leaf of a gospel allude to a battle fought at Jabiya. From internal evidence, this source seems to be almost contemporaneous with the battle, but its date cannot be definitively established. Fredegar, a chronicler writing in Gaul some twenty years after the Arab invasion of Syria, refers to Heraclius’s army being “smitten by the sword of God: 52,000 of his men died where they slept”—valuable evidence for the probable scale of the Roman defeat.
h The date of Ali’s assassination derives from Muslim historians, but it is typical of the general murk of the sources for the period that a near-contemporaneous Christian chronicle, written in Syria, dates it to 658.
7
THE FORGING OF ISLAM
God’s Deputy
In 679, almost twenty years after Mu’awiya had sat and prayed at Golgotha, a Frankish bishop named Arculf arrived in Jerusalem for his own tour of the city’s sites. The stresses and convulsions of the age had failed to fracture one of Christianity’s most innovative presumptions: that pilgrimage to its holy places was as much for those who lived on the edge of the world as it was for locals. Even though Jerusalem’s tourist trade was greatly diminished from what it had been in its heyday, the city still seemed to the wide-eyed bishop to be positively heaving with “crowds of all different peoples.” With beasts of burden too—and in such numbers that Arculf found himself clutching his nose, and sloshing uncomfortably through “the filth from their discharges, which spreads everywhere across the streets.”1 Not, of course, that a pilgrim hardened by a gruelling journey from Gaul was likely to be thrown off his stride by a few droppings—and sure enough, Arculf proved himself a tireless enthusiast for the city’s many wonders. The highlight, inevitably, was the Church of the Resurrection: a shrine unimpaired in its magnificence, the bishop was delighted to discover, since the time of Constantine. Indeed, to an out-of-towner such as Arculf, it might have seemed that Roman rule had never ended. The travel documents issued to him were written in Greek. The coins in his purse were weighted according to standards set by the mints of Constantinople. Many of them were even stamped with that ultimate symbol of the Christian empire—a cross. Power, in the Holy Land, still sported a decidedly Roman look.
Naturally, Arculf was not oblivious to the recent changing of the guard. News of the calamities afflicting the New Rome had circulated to sensational effect in Gaul. It was widely reported that the Saracens had laid waste entire provinces, “as was their habit.”2 Even Jerusalem, that incomparable city of churches, was branded with the stamp of their rule: “In the celebrated place where once the Temple arose in its magnificence,” Arculf noted, “the Saracens now have a quadrangular prayer house.”3 He was almost certainly describing the building begun by Umar, and still unfinished in the early years of Mu’awiya’s reign: a mosque—or “place of prostration”—as the Arabs termed it. That they might apply this designation to any place of worship had certainly done little to lower Christian hackles: for it was clear enough, whatever else the “prayer house” might be, that it was no church. The supreme blasphemy of its location, of course, only heightened Christian anxiety—as did the fact that there were still Jews, ever optimistic, who clung to the hope that the Arabs were actually restoring “the walls of the Temple.”4 An infernal project, then, it seemed to most Christians—and sure enough, one monk, taking a peek at the building site, reported seeing the workforce accompanied in their labours by a whole crack squad of demons.5
Notwithstanding this supernatural assistance, however, the end result did seem rather jerry-built. That, at any rate, was the verdict of Arculf himself. Despite being large enough to accommodate some three thousand worshippers, the building did not impress the bishop: “They put it up roughly,” he complained, “by erecting upright boards and great beams on some ruined remains.”6 Perhaps, however, it took a Frank to notice such things. The barbarians of the West had certainly had a good deal of practice in the art of cannibalising Roman monuments. Indeed, as Theoderic had demonstrated to notable effect, the entire labour of state-building amid the wreckage of the crumbled empire might easily rank as precisely such a project writ large. Perhaps, then, that is why Arculf, although dismissive of the Saracens’ mosque, seems not to have been greatly startled by it—nor by their presence in Jerusalem. Although Mu’awiya had risen to become incomparably mighty, yet the difference between him and Arculf’s own king, back in Gaul, was one of quality, not of kind. Saracens and Franks both lived like squatters amid the splendours of a vanished greatness. No matter that this inheritance from the past was immeasurably richer and more imposing in the East than in the West—the helplessness of the Saracens to improve upon it seemed no less than that of the Franks. Patched together as it was out of brick and wood, Mu’awiya’s palace inspired eye-rolling paroxysms of condescension in Roman ambassadors. “The ceiling will do for birds,” one sniffed, “and the walls will do for rats.”7 Even the great ambition of Mu’awiya’s life—the capture of Constantinople—spoke of cultural cringe. Fuelling it was an unspoken acknowledgement of the Romans’ own perennial conceit—that a man could truly rule the world only from the city of Constantine.