Yet in one sense, despite the failure of Mu’awiya’s assault on al-Qustantiniyya, his pretensions had already surpassed those of the Caesars. Not even Justinian at his most megalomaniacal had presumed to pose as an intercessor between the great toiling mass of humanity and God Himself. Clearly, then, in Mu’awiya’s precocious conception of monarchy, there were influences coming to bear that owed nothing to Roman example. Was it mere coincidence, for instance, that he should have cast himself in a relationship to God so similar to that played by angels in the prayers of the Mushrikun? Assuredly, a ready supply of building materials was far from the limit of what the Fertile Crescent had to offer invaders. Richer as well than anything to be found in the West was its immense array of faiths. Theoderic—keen to distinguish himself from the emperor in Constantinople and from his own Roman subjects—had lived and died an Arian. Mu’awiya—the lord of Chalcedonian and Monophysite Christians, of Jews and Samaritans, of Zoroastrians and Manichaeans—had far more options available to him. Above all, in the swirl of beliefs that was his inheritance as an Arab, he possessed something formidably precious: an assurance of God’s favour that owed nothing to Rome or to any other earthly power. That he was perfectly content to pray at the site of the crucifixion, or to restore Edessa’s cathedral after it had been toppled by an earthquake, or to have the odd public inscription on a bath-house adorned with a cross, implied, not that he was a Christian, but rather that he shared in that respect for Jesus, and for the Jewish prophets too, which had once united Muhammad and the Mushrikun.8 Whatever the precise doctrines in which Mu’awiya put his trust, though, they were certainly not supported by anything that could compare with the massive buttressing that rabbis, bishops and mowbeds, over the course of the centuries, had erected around their faiths. Nothing as yet had been fashioned out of the various teachings and traditions held sacred by the Arab conquerors that a Christian would have recognised as a religio: a “religion.” Instead, like blazing points of fire scattered by a starburst, there was a whole shimmering flamescape of sects. For a global monarch such as Mu’awiya, this was opportunity on a scale that not even Constantine had enjoyed. In his determination to understand why God had graced him with the rule of the world—and what best might be done to ensure that rule’s perpetuation—he could toy with beliefs and doctrines that were still very much up for grabs.
Mu’awiya, nevertheless, was not alone in seeking to capitalise on this opportunity. In Iraq, at a safe distance from both his direct authority and the gravitational pull of the Holy Land, the urgent question of what, precisely, God wanted from His people had prompted a quite bewildering array of responses. The Kharijites, as militant as ever in their loathing for anything that smacked of monarchy, had retreated from Kufa to the deserts around the Persian Gulf, where they had founded a series of tiny, terrorist republics. Meanwhile, their old adversaries, the Shi’a of Ali, still clung to their own passionately held convictions. There were some partisans of Muhammad’s murdered cousin, taking a leaf out of the Sasanian book, who had even begun to claim that only under the command of a leader who shared directly in his bloodline could the world of men hope to know true order, and be assured of the favour of God. Others went further still and proclaimed themselves prophets. One of these, an illiterate tailor who claimed to be the heir of both Jesus and Muhammad, and to have a book from heaven that proved it, was eventually cornered by an imperial task force and vanished into a hole that mysteriously opened in the side of a mountain. Finally, aged but hedged about still by the numinous, there were the last remaining Sahabah: the Companions of Muhammad. The most celebrated of these, a Qurayshi aristocrat by the name of Abdullah ibn al-Zubayr, had been just eight years old when the Prophet had died, but his admirers still revered him as a living link to a more heroic and God-touched age. Certainly, his disdain for the Umayyads knew no bounds. For some twenty years, his response to the blasphemy of Mu’awiya’s reign had been to remain in Medina, in a pious and ostentatious sulk, and lovingly tend the flame of the Prophet’s memory.
Among people who believed themselves graced by the most sensational revelation imaginable, of a direct intrusion into the fabric of human history by God Himself, such rivalries were only to be expected, perhaps. The struggle to make sense of such a mystery, as the prodigious appetite for factionalism of the early Christians had shown, was bound to be a gruelling one. Unlike the Church, however, the Muhajirun had not had to wait three long centuries before seizing the commanding heights of a mighty empire. They had captured theirs in a matter of decades. As a result, disagreements between the Umayyads and their opponents—although no less fixated on the purposes of God than the conflicts between Marcion and the Ebionites had been—had an extra, and ominously geopolitical, dimension. When Mu’awiya, corpulent and near death, proclaimed that his son—a notorious playboy by the name of Yazid—was God’s choice as his successor, the result was not merely widespread shock at the blasphemy but a jolting lurch towards civil war. It was bad enough, in the opinion of the pious, that Yazid himself was “a sinner in respect of his belly and his private parts”9 and kept a monkey as a pet; more truly shocking was any notion that all the upheavals of the previous sixty years, all the struggles and the stupefying triumphs, might have had as their only object the installation of a dynasty such as the Umayyads upon the throne of the world.
As news travelled in April 680 of Mu’awiya’s death, something else was abroad as well. The baleful spectre of fitna had returned to stalk the Arabian Empire. Syria, unsurprisingly, held firm for Yazid—but Arabia and Iraq did not. First to raise the banner of rebellion was Husayn, the youngest and by now only surviving grandson of the Prophet. Middle-aged and long since retired from the bear pit of the Fertile Crescent, he made for an improbable warrior. Sure enough, when he led his small band of followers on a sudden dash from Medina to Kufa, the local Umayyad agent found it a simple matter to block their approach. Holed up in a flea-bitten village called Karbala, frustrated in his expectation of support from the Muhajirun of Kufa, and increasingly tormented by thirst, Husayn decided to trust his fate to the will of God. Charging the large army that had boxed him in, he and his pathetic retinue were hacked down amid the unforgiving sands. A squalid end for a grandson beloved of the Prophet; and although in the long run his death at the hands of Umayyad heavies would do wonders for his standing as a martyr, in the short term it ensured that Iraq, however precariously, remained under Yazid’s control.