A Concise History of the Arabs E-Book

John McHugo

• Herausgeber: Saqi Books
• Kategorie: Geisteswissenschaft
• Sprache: Englisch

Seitenzahl: 577

Veröffentlichungsjahr: 2013

Beschreibung

The key to understanding the Arab world today is unlocking its past. In this authoritative account, John McHugo takes the reader through the political, social and intellectual history of the Arabs from the Roman Empire right up to the present day. Going beyond the headlines, he describes in vivid detail a series of key turning points in Arab history - from the mission of the Prophet Muhammad and the expansion of Islam to the region's interaction with Western ideas and the rise of Islamism. Now fully updated to cover the tumultuous years since the Arab Spring, this lucidly told history reveals how the Arab world came to have its present form and illuminates the choices that lie ahead.

Leseprobe

John McHugo

ACONCISEHISTORYOF THEARABS

SAQI

A CONCISE HISTORY OF THE ARABS

To Diana

CONTENTS

List of Maps

Glossary of Arabic Terms and Words

Preface

ONE     When History Changed Direction

TWO    Growing Apart

THREE  The West Takes Control

FOUR    Sharing an Indigestible Cake

FIVE     Secularism and Islamism in Egypt

SIX       The West Seems to Retreat

SEVEN   The Six Day War and its Consequences

EIGHT   Iraq, Israel, Militancy and Terrorism

NINE     The Age of the Autocrats and the Rise of Islamism

Conclusion: Something Snaps – The Arab Spring and Beyond

Acknowledgements

Notes

Bibliography

Suggestions for Further Reading

Index

LIST OF MAPS

Western Arabia with the Byzantine and Persian Empires onthe Eve of the Arab Conquests

The Arab Conquests under the Rashidun and the Umayyads

The Crusader States and the Mongol Conquests

The Ottoman Empire at its Maximum Extent

The Arab World in 1914

The League of Nations Mandates for theArabic-speaking Ottoman Provinces

The Partition of Palestine and the 1949 Armistice Lines

The Arab World at the Beginning of 1967

The Arab World on the Eve of the Arab Spring

GLOSSARY OF ARABIC TERMS AND WORDS

Banu (or Bani): ‘sons’ or ‘children’, often part of the name of a tribe

Bey: an Ottoman title

Fellah (pl. fellahin): peasant

Fiqh: the process of reasoning in Islamic law, often translated as ‘jurisprudence’. The scholar or jurist who engages in the reasoning is a faqih

Fitna: civil disturbance or discord

Hadith: the sayings or traditions ascribed to the Prophet Muhammad

Halal: permissible for Muslims according to the teaching of Islam. In everyday speech it often approximates to ‘moral’ but the concept is distinct. There may be nothing immoral as such about eating at noon during the fasting month of Ramadan, but for a Muslim it is not halal.

Haram: forbidden for Muslims according to the teaching of Islam. The word is not used for ‘forbidden’ in other contexts. Parking your car in breach of traffic regulations may be forbidden, but it is not haram.

Hijra: emigration

‘ibaadaat: the religious practices in Islam by which God is worshipped

Ijtihad: independent judgement, especially in a legal or theological context

Imam: a religious leader. Depending on context, the word may mean no more than a prayer leader or preacher but for Shi’ites the word is used for the divinely inspired and infallible teacher whom all Muslims are bound to follow.

Jahiliyya: literally, ‘the age of Ignorance’, the age before the preaching of Islam.

Jihad: see the discussion of this term at the end of section III of Chapter 2

Majlis: a place, or occasion, of sitting. A majlis can also be a hall or large room where guests are received.

Mamluk: a slave soldier usually brought as a boy from a distant country and brought up to be a member of a military elite

Maslaha: literally, ‘benefit’ or ‘good’. In Islamic law it means a principle whereby Sharia should be interpreted in the way most beneficial way to humanity.

Millet: a religious sect or denomination

Mu’aamalaat: acts of behaviour or conduct towards others

Mufti: a religious scholar of sufficient eminence to give opinions on questions of Islamic law which it is reasonable for other Muslims to decide to follow

Mujahid: literally, ‘someone who struggles’ or ‘someone who fights in a jihad’ but can also be used in a secular context

Mukhabarat: the intelligence or security services of a modern Arab state

Muwaatinoon: citizens or nationals of a country

Pasha: an Ottoman title, generally superior to a bey; also used in the Egyptian, Iraqi and Jordanian monarchies in the twentieth century

Rashidun: the first four caliphs, Abu Bakr, Umar, Uthman and Ali, who are accepted by Sunni Muslims

Salaf: ancestors, predecessors

Salafi: adjective from salaf; in the twentieth and twenty-first centuries the word is used to indicate a devout Muslim who believes Muslims should rigidly emulate the conduct of the Prophet and his companions down to the tiniest details of behaviour

Sharia: the religious, or canonical, law of Islam.

Shaykh: literally, ‘old man’. The term denotes respect and is used of a tribal or religious elder or leader. A man who learns the entire Qur’an by heart is automatically a shaykh whatever his age.

Shi'ite: a follower of Shi’ite Islam, the second largest Muslim sect

Shirk: polytheism, idolatry; the antithesis of tawheed

Sunna: habitual practice or custom, specifically that of the Prophet Muhammad which came to be regarded as legally binding precedent

Sunni: a follower of Sunni Islam, the largest Muslim sect

Taabi’oon: followers

Takfir: declaring another Muslim to have betrayed the faith by apostasy and therefore to be worthy of death

Tawheed: the affirmation of the oneness of God; the antithesis of shirk

Umma: ‘community’, especially (but not necessarily) the Community of Muslims

Velayat-e faqih: literally, ‘government by the Sharia jurist’. The teaching formulated by the Ayatollah Khomeini under which a supreme judicial authority will oversee the acts of the government and vet all legislation to ensure that it complies with Islam

Wasta: literally ‘intermediary-ness’. A colloquial expression used to refer to the reciprocal trading of favours up and down hierarchies of power, wealth and influence.

PREFACE

I

The upheavals now known as the Arab Spring cannot be understood unless they are put in the context of the long history of the Arabs. What are the origins of the confusions and complications that afflict our ‘Western’ understanding of the Arab world? How did this distinction we constantly draw between ‘East’ and ‘West’ begin, and how valid is it? Whose fault is it that things so often went wrong? Will the Arab Spring exorcise any of the demons that have come between us? These are just some of the questions this book seeks to answer.

The Arab Spring found Arab autocrats complacent and in denial, despite their fearsome intelligence services with supposedly all-seeing eyes. It is therefore unsurprising that it caught European and American strategists, experts and commentators on the hop as they observed demonstrators in Arab countries calling for fair elections and human rights, the freedoms that we enjoy as a matter of course. But Europe and the USA had strategic interests to consider and cold calculations to make. As President Hosni Mubarak tottered in Egypt, there were fears about the Suez Canal. The price of oil became a worry once Libya descended into civil war, while Europeans feared uncontrolled immigration as thousands desperately took to the sea to escape from the turmoil. And what if the unrest eventually spread to Saudi Arabia, far and away the world’s largest oil exporter? Six Arab countries are among the top fifteen oil-exporting states, making the Arab region as a whole vital for the rest of the world. These were merely extra worries for policy-makers in the West, who already suffered headaches caused by the region’s unresolved baggage. It was where the seeds of Islamist terrorism had germinated in the late twentieth century. Chaos and instability would give networks like al-Qa‘ida the opportunity to reorganise and expand. There were also two major international issues which refused to go away: the unfinished business between Israelis and Arabs which had been a destabilising factor for decades, and the ambitions of non-Arab Iran to project its influence across the region.

Hope has therefore been tinged with nervousness and bafflement as governments across the world respond inconsistently to events in each country, and one crisis follows another. Revolutions have a life of their own. They can descend into civil war. This happened in Syria when the regime learned the lessons of Tunisia and Egypt and refused to relinquish control. The best organised forces, not necessarily the most popular or democratic ones, often triumph in the end. None of the uprisings started in the name of Islam, but Islamist politicians seemed to be the beneficiaries of the first truly democratic elections held in Arab countries for decades. Even before 9/11, there had been loose talk of a ‘clash of civilisations’.1 For many people, this put Islam – and therefore the Arab world – in existential opposition to the democracies of the West.

We are now going to find out, once and for all, whether this clash really exists. I believe that history shows that it does not. Civilised cultures influence and benefit each other. If they do not, they are quite simply not civilised. The expression ‘clash of civilisations’ has come to be used almost as a slogan. The ‘clash’ has a resonance for people with a certain attitude of mind – and a certain view of history. It has become an intellectually lazy way of helping them believe what they want to believe, of confirming their prejudices, and explaining things away without making an effort to understand them properly.

Since at least the October 1973 War between Israel and its Arab neighbours, the USA has been the predominant power in the Middle East. After the collapse of the Soviet Union, it enjoyed near hegemony. Yet imposing its will has been at a huge cost, which has often been self-defeating. The intrusion of domestic politics on its freedom of action in foreign affairs has made it like a drunken man playing with a Rubik’s Cube. However hard it tries, however much energy it exerts, the coloured squares obstinately refuse to line up, and it periodically loses its concentration. The problem is that, as with Britain and France in an earlier period, American good intentions are regularly sacrificed on the altar of political expediency.

The reasons behind this failure are not hard to find. All too frequently, Europeans and Americans have created their own image of the Arabic-speaking countries of the Middle East and Islam. They have then proceeded to deal with the image rather than the reality. Memory distorts the pictures it builds, but we normally do our best to correct those pictures once we become aware of the distortion. Yet sometimes emotion plays a trump card and the mind finds ways to reject whatever conflicts with the ideal we have constructed. The Arab world and Islam are contentious issues in Western cultural wars, and narratives of history are built accordingly. In some circles, the attitudes somebody displays to the Arab world and to Islam may be seen as a litmus test about his or her view of Western civilisation itself. There are even people for whom a negative or hostile picture of Arabs and Muslims seems to have become necessary for their own positive image of the West.

This book is intended to introduce Western readers who are unfamiliar with the topic to the history of the Arabs for the first time. It assumes no background knowledge and is written with a non-specialist audience in mind. It is a concise, not a definitive, history. I have therefore had to take difficult decisions about what to leave out. Some suggestions for further reading are included at the end.

It aims to show that what has happened over the decades – and, indeed, the centuries – is not a clash of civilisations but a concatenation of historical events, misguided policies and wilful ignorance which have opened an ever-deepening rift between Europe and the USA on one side, and the Arab world on the other. As a result, the door has sometimes been opened to a moral nihilism in which dubious means have been used to achieve the desired result. When this has happened, cycles of deepening hostility have been created. It is therefore vital to understand how the Arab world has arrived where it is today, and that can only be done by learning about its history. If we do not do so, we cannot heal the rifts between us.

The Arabs originally came from the Arabian Peninsula which is now divided into the sovereign states of Saudi Arabia, Yemen, Oman, the United Arab Emirates (the UAE), Qatar, Bahrain and Kuwait. Yet in many ways it is Egypt (the Arab world’s most populous country) and the lands of the Fertile Crescent (Iraq, Syria, Lebanon, Jordan and what was Palestine before the Arab–Israeli War of 1947–9) that have formed the historic centre of the Arab world. I have concentrated on the political history of these central Arab lands because of their key role in the early history of Islam and the Middle Ages as well as in the encounter with the West in the modern era. This has inevitably meant saying less about other parts of the Arab world. Arabic is spoken all the way along the Mediterranean coast to the Atlantic Ocean and deep into the Sahara. It is the language of the majority of people in Morocco, Algeria, Tunisia, Libya and Sudan, and of many people in Mauritania and Tchad. I regret that I have been unable to devote much space to these countries (or to the countries of the Arabian Peninsula) except when developments in them are essential for the book’s argument.

There are other matters about which I have not had the space to say very much. There are many ethnic minorities scattered across the Arab world. I have only been able to deal with them when it has been necessary for my wider purpose. Thus, a few words have been included about the Kurds of Iraq and Syria but almost nothing about the Amazigh, or Berbers, of North Africa who are particularly numerous in Morocco and Algeria, or the Nubians who are split between Egypt and Sudan. These are proud ancient peoples. It is important to acknowledge the existence of their separate identities, which are likely to become more important in the future.

It must also be stressed that this is not a history of Islam or of Muslims, although it would be ridiculous to try to tell the story of the Arabs without explaining what Islam is and its relationship to Christianity and Judaism. Material about Islam is therefore presented with these aims in mind. The history of Islam in other parts of the world, including Iran and other areas conquered by the Arabs but where Arabic did not eventually become the native tongue, is not covered. Nor is this book a cultural or sociological history. When I touch on cultural or sociological matters (such as the position of women), it is in order to explain a particular point.

The history of the Arabs has not been made by the Arabs alone. Some chapters of this book therefore include material concerning non-Arab actors. Elements of the history of Ottoman Turkey are included in Chapters 2 and 3 while the Arab encounter with the West from 1798 onwards dominates many of the subsequent chapters. It is no accident that almost all the boundaries of modern Arab states were first drawn by officials in Paris, London and (to a lesser extent) Istanbul (when it was Constantinople) and Rome. The major exceptions are in the Arabian Peninsula, where many boundaries were only drawn for the first time after the end of the colonial era. Since 1948, there has also been a non-Arab state situated in the heart of the Arab world. This book is not a history of Israel and the Zionist project, but aspects of the history of Israel are mentioned in some detail because they are essential to understanding the modern Arab world today.

Some Notes on Terminology

I find the concept ‘fundamentalism’ confusing when applied to Islam, and the word occurs just once in this book, whilst ‘fundamentalist’ does not appear at all. When I refer to Muslims who rely on the literal meaning of a sentence from the Qur’an without accepting that it needs to be considered in the light of the context in which it occurs or the traditional methodologies of interpretation developed by Muslim scholars, I speak of ‘literalists’ and ‘literalism’. By ‘Islamist’, I mean anyone who has a political agenda purportedly based on Islam. ‘Islamist’ thus includes those who advance such an agenda by exclusively peaceful and democratic means, as well as those who believe it may be advanced by violence. ‘Extremist’ and ‘extremism’ require no comment. The meaning of ‘terrorism’ is discussed in Chapter 8. When I speak of ‘secularism’ or use the word ‘secular’, I am referring to the idea that religious affiliations should be irrelevant. I do not use these words to refer to ideologies that are hostile to religion as such, which I describe as ‘atheistic’ (although not all atheists are hostile to religion).

By ‘Greater Syria’ I intend the entire area from the Sinai desert up to Cilicia in modern Turkey. It consists of the areas east of the Mediterranean, south of the Taurus Mountains and north and west of the deserts and steppes of the Arabian Peninsula. Today, this essentially means modern Syria, Lebanon, Israel, the Occupied Palestinian Territory and Jordan, as well as an area which has remained inside Turkey. Use of the expression ‘Greater Syria’ helps prevent discussion of this area being obscured by political divisions which were only established in the twentieth century.

John McHugo

January, 2013

CHAPTER ONE

WHEN HISTORY CHANGED DIRECTION

I

To try to reach the spot where sunrise or sunset occurs is as futile as chasing the rainbow, since our movement towards it makes its location change. ‘West’ and ‘East’ should always be seen as relative terms. Universal creeds like Christianity and Islam therefore do not – or should not – conceive of themselves as Western or Eastern. How and why, then, have so many of us in Europe and North America come to see ourselves as ‘Western’, and decided that Arabs and Muslims are ‘Eastern’ in a way that, for far too many people, establishes a crude pair of irreconcilable opposites called ‘us’ and ‘them’? A fault line has appeared, so it is scarcely surprising if it occasionally triggers earthquakes.

Let us begin at the beginning, before either the Arab world or the West existed. For Westerners today there is something unique about the central lands of the Middle East which are now predominantly Arabic-speaking: Egypt, Greater Syria and Iraq. This is because the origins of the West can be traced back to these countries. They gave us writing, mathematics, architecture, science, the seven-day week and much else. A European who visits the ruins of pagan sites such as Palmyra and Ba’lbek, or Christian ones like Qala’at Sima’an and Qalb Lozeh, sees architecture which seems familiar. It reminds him of Greece and Rome, and is closely related to his own heritage. The same might almost be said of the porticoes, columns and urns weirdly hewn from the multi-coloured rock of Petra. There was a unity of design and ornamentation in the architecture, statuary and mosaics of the Graeco-Roman world which stretched from York in the province of Britannia to Palmyra in the Syrian desert. Nothing similar would be seen throughout the Mediterranean until Western styles, which themselves were largely based on classical models, began to reappear in cities on its southern and eastern shores in the nineteenth century.

Columns and capitals, colonnades and domes, were similar everywhere. Mosaics showing scenes from Graeco-Roman mythology and statues with their easily recognisable classical drapery could be found all around the Mediterranean. Every self-respecting city had its own amphitheatre. The now ruined basilica of St Simeon Stylites in the hills outside Aleppo and the Umayyad Mosque in Damascus – which owes the architecture of the basilica a considerable debt – show how Syrians have as much justification as anyone for claiming their country was where Romanesque architecture originated, even though today we think of Romanesque as the glory of early medieval Europe and the forerunner of Gothic, that quintessentially European style. How many Europeans today are aware that soldiers from Greater Syria once served on Hadrian’s Wall and the Roman forts along the Rhine? Or that both Greater Syria and North Africa gave Rome emperors and popes, that Egypt and Tunisia provided Rome with its wheat, and that Constantine, who built the new Roman capital of Constantinople – now Istanbul – was first proclaimed emperor in York?

As the central Arabic-speaking lands of today were once part of what was to become the West, they hold a special place in the Western psyche. After all, Judaism and Christianity both originated in Palestine. Yet what we think of today as ‘the West’ only came into being long after Christianity had conquered the Mediterranean world, which itself only occurred after Judaism had also spread across it. We think of our ancestors, the Greeks and the Romans, as ‘Westerners’ because of subsequent history. In many respects the Romans were more interested in the rich provinces they acquired to their east than in the uncouth Celts and Germans who lived to the north and west where the heartland of Western civilisation would later emerge. They even identified themselves as descendants of Trojan refugees who had fled their home in Asia Minor.

WESTERN ARABIA WITH THE BYZANTINE AND PERSIAN EMPIRES ON THE EVE OF THE ARAB CONQUESTS

The greatest dangers the Romans faced were not in the east but on the Rhine and Danube. It was Alaric the Visigoth, a European barbarian, who sacked Rome in AD 410. Even when the Sasanian Persians unsuccessfully besieged Constantinople in 626, it was their Avar allies from the Danube valley who surrounded the city walls on the landward side. By that time, the Roman Empire had ceased to exist in the West, but its eastern half, which today we usually call the Byzantine Empire, survived until the fifteenth century.

That Persian attack in 626 did not change the course of history. What did change it was the sudden emergence of Islam from the Arabian Peninsula a few years later. Western Christendom, which would still use Latin as its principal written language for a thousand years after the Western Roman Empire fell to pieces, was left staring fearfully and suspiciously at a new world facing it in the Mediterranean and extending far beyond.

II

Muhammad was born in about AD 570 and grew up in the remote oasis city of Mecca in the deserts of western Arabia. Mecca was of little interest to the Byzantine Empire which still ruled the eastern and southern Mediterranean, or to Persia, which included what is now Iraq as well as Iran. The Christian Byzantines disdainfully tolerated Judaism but not the ancient, pagan cults of Greece and Rome. The state religion of the Persian Empire was Zoroastrianism, but Christianity and Judaism were also well represented in its territories, and there was hope among Byzantines that it would eventually be converted to Christianity.

The tribal confederations that lived in and around Mecca prospered from their trade with Greater Syria to the north and Yemen to the south. Mecca’s dominant tribe of the Koreish also had a second source of wealth: religion. Although belief in one God was understood and people were at least vaguely familiar with Christianity and Judaism, the focal point of Arab religion was the Ka’aba, a black, cube-shaped shrine in Mecca, of which the Koreish were official guardians. Three hundred and sixty idols surrounded the Ka’aba, and others had been placed inside. The individual deities were essentially local and concerned themselves with particular needs. Thus, the god Hubal, whose name the Koreish called upon in battle, was also the god of rain. Mecca was the destination for an annual pilgrimage from many parts of Arabia which coincided with an important market and helped fill the city’s coffers. The followers of the cults of Mecca and western Arabia put up considerable resistance to Muhammad’s new religion, which shows that the old ways still had some appeal.

Muhammad was from the Koreish, but not from a leading family. He lost his mother when he was 6, while his father had already died before he was born. He was brought up by his grandfather and then by his uncle, Abu Talib. As a young man he is said to have made his living as an agent taking caravan trains to Syria, and married one of his clients, Khadijah, a wealthy lady who was noticeably older than himself but bore him several children. One of these, his daughter Fatima, gave him grandchildren and passed on his bloodline. He had a reputation for honesty and fairness in his commercial dealings, as well as an ability to defuse disputes. He was also charismatic and energetic but at the same time had a reflective and solitary side. One night, he was meditating in a cave on a mountain outside Mecca when he had a vision in which a figure he subsequently believed to be the angel Gabriel appeared and terrified him out of his wits. The figure said:

Recite in the name of your Lord who created –

Created humanity from a blood clot;

Recite – your Lord is most generous.

He it was who taught with the pen –

Taught humanity what it did not know.1

As has been the case with many other visionaries, Muhammad’s experience filled him with confusion. He feared diabolical possession and questioned his sanity. Nevertheless, he came to accept the revelations, which were to continue for the rest of his life, and soon had an unshakeable conviction that he was the Prophet of God and a determination to carry out the task appointed for him: to impart God’s message to humanity. These revelations make up the Qur’an which was compiled as a single volume after his death.

Muhammad lived for about twenty-three years after that first occasion when he believed Gabriel visited him. After some years preaching, initially to family and friends and then more publicly, he was still making only a small impact in Mecca. His teaching threatened the existing order and the wealth the city gained from pilgrims to the Ka’aba. He suffered ridicule, ostracism and the risk of assassination. Those of his followers who lacked the protection of a powerful tribe which would avenge them if they were killed or injured were in very real danger. In 622, he therefore took up an invitation to go to Yathrib, a large oasis over two hundred miles to the north, where he would use his skill at settling disputes to arbitrate between the local tribes. He set out to establish a new society there which would be based on his new religion. The city’s name was changed to Medina, an abbreviation of al-madinah al-munawwarah: the illuminated, or enlightened, city.

Once Muhammad had settled down in Medina, a new set of problems emerged. There were five tribes in the oasis. The two main ones, the Aws and the Khazraj, converted to Islam. Although some conversions were enthusiastic and zealous, others were only superficial and expedient. Moreover, although the tribal leaders had accepted Islam at least outwardly, ultimate political power remained with them. Insincere conversions had never occurred while Muhammad was still in Mecca. The loyalty of the munafiqun, the ‘Dissemblers’ or ‘Hypocrites’, as the insincere converts came to be called, was suspect. They were likely to conspire with his Meccan enemies who could be expected to do their utmost to destabilise the polity he was now setting up.

The same applied to the other three tribes in the oasis. These were Jewish Arabs, the Nadir, the Qaynuqa‘ and the Qurayzah. They were under the protection of the Aws or Khazraj, and thus bound by the agreements those tribes had reached with Muhammad. A number of individuals converted, but for the most part they followed their rabbis in rejecting the new religion. Although Muhammad accepted that their religion was a true path to God, they were among the factions opposed to him and were potential traitors to his new polity. In due course, two of the tribes were exiled. The Qurayzah, the third tribe, suffered a worse fate. It was believed to have planned to betray Medina at a crucial moment in the struggle with Mecca which could have led to the fall of the oasis. The adult males, except for two who opted to convert to Islam, were executed and the women and children made slaves.

The struggle with Mecca had developed a military element soon after Muhammad’s arrival in Medina. This started with an initiative by Muhammad and his followers who began raiding Meccan trading caravans. He and his followers had lost their property in Mecca, and on one level this military element may just have been customary tribal raiding. Nevertheless, it also indicated that Muhammad believed the Meccans were determined to extinguish his new faith or at least stop it spreading, and that armed conflict with them was therefore inevitable.

The first major encounter was the battle at the wells of Badr. In early 624, Mecca learned that a raiding party from Medina was trying to intercept an important caravan returning from Syria. Although the caravan changed its route and escaped, a relief force from Mecca met a much smaller Muslim army and battle was joined. Despite their superiority in numbers, the Meccans were roundly defeated. The victory of Badr marked the start of the Muslim martial tradition, and Muhammad received a revelation that he and his followers were aided by legions of angels. Politically, it greatly enhanced his prestige and at the same time laid down a challenge to the Meccans, who now had to avenge their defeat and crush Muhammad. To Muslims ever since, Badr has been an inspiration when they are at war.

The Meccans had partial revenge at the battle of Uhud the following year. Muhammad himself was wounded and feared dead at one point. The defeat strengthened the reputation of the Meccans, but it did not lead to the dissolution of Muhammad’s new polity. The Meccans needed to make one final push and assembled a vast coalition to do so.

The third and final battle is known as the battle of the Ditch, or the Trench (al-khandaq). Having some idea of the size of the forces that might be marching against him, Muhammad and his followers prepared for a siege. Defensive ditches were dug at various points around the oasis to make it impossible for cavalry to cross. The tactic worked, and the Muslims were able to repel the assaults. When the weather turned cold and wet, the Meccan coalition broke up due to supply problems and discontent among tribes which had come in the hope of pillage when Medina fell.

Muhammad now seems to have had the upper hand. He announced that he wished to perform the pilgrimage to the sanctuary of the Ka’aba which, according to local tradition, Abraham had originally built with the help of his son Ishmael as a temple to the one true God. After negotiations, it was agreed that Muhammad and the Muslims would postpone their pilgrimage by one year, but that the following year the Meccans would evacuate the city for three days in order to enable the Muslims to enter without fear of strife. The postponement involved an additional painful concession by Muhammad who agreed to return any Meccans who came to him as converts to Islam during this intervening period. He needed all his authority and charisma to persuade some of his followers to accept what looked like a setback, but he was skilful in the negotiations.2 Soon after the Muslims had made their pilgrimage to Mecca, he took advantage of a breach of the armistice by the Koreish. When he marched on Mecca, opposition collapsed and he was able to enter the city in triumph.

Arabian polytheism was now suppressed and the Ka’aba cleansed of its idols. Shrines in neighbouring towns were also dismantled, sometimes after resistance. Muhammad’s conditions for capitulation always involved the adoption of the new faith. Armies and emissaries from Medina persuaded tribal confederacies and rulers over most of Arabia to recognise him as the Prophet of God, although they often had no clear idea of what this entailed. Medina remained his capital, but his reform of the pre-Islamic pilgrimage rites had ensured that Mecca would be the focal point of the new religion. In 632, the last year of his life, he performed the pilgrimage with a large gathering of his followers. He was ageing, and may have been conscious that he did not have long to live. If this was the case, it is striking that he made no universally accepted arrangements for the community after his death.

III

The new religion lay broadly within ‘the same universe of thought’3 as Christianity and Judaism. All three faiths share core beliefs such as the transcendence and oneness of God, the forgiveness of sins following true repentance, the Last Judgement, the resurrection of the body, Heaven and Hell. As Sidney Griffith has recently written, the Qur’an itself:

in its origins obviously participated in a dialogue of the scriptures, with the Torah, the Psalms, the Prophets and the Gospel named in the Qur’an as the partners of record in the conversation. . . . [It] presumes in its audience a familiarity with biblical narratives, as well as with other aspects of Jewish and Christian lore, faith and practice. In short, the Qur’an and early Islam are literally unthinkable outside the Judeo-Christian milieu in which Islam was born and grew to its maturity.4

The influence of both Christianity and Judaism on Islam is immense. This is not just a question of the many hidden borrowings, such as teachings from the Gospels and the Torah restated in the Qur’an and Sunna, which Muslims see as instances in which the revelation to Muhammad confirmed earlier revelations. There are also openly acknowledged borrowings from Christian and Jewish sources. Christian monks seem to have been held in particularly high esteem by Muslim scholars, who often quoted their spiritual insights with approval. Some monks may have reciprocated this. Sections of the pastoral writings of Ghazali, the great twelfth-century Muslim theologian, were adapted by monks for Christian audiences.5

Nevertheless, despite the very considerable overlap of its teachings with the two religions which are ancestral to the modern West, Islam is not always easy for a Westerner to understand. Many non-Muslims who approach the Qur’an in a genuine spirit of enquiry find it a difficult text, particularly if they can only read it in translation. As is the case with the Bible, it is intended to be listened to or read by people who already accept it as divine revelation, and who therefore do so in a spirit of reverence, opening their hearts and accepting whatever it may say to them.

Because for Muslims the Qur’an is the Eternal Word of God, its compilers deliberately made the minimum editorial amendment to the text, and merely arranged the chapters in order of length after a brief opening prayer, the Fatiha. This means that it does not really have a beginning, middle or end. But it has refrains and cadences that are repeated, unifying it and making it sink into the reader’s heart on a subliminal level. These cannot be conveyed in translation. The tone can change abruptly. Irshad Manji, the Muslim gad-fly and would-be reformer, has written about the shifts of mood in the text of the Qur’an, something that any Christian or Jew who is familiar with the Psalms should be able to understand. But the core of its message is already implicit in the earliest verses to be revealed: God is One, the Creator of all. Passage after passage in the Qur’an shows loathing of polytheism, which the Qur’an calls the sin of shirk, ‘the attributing of partners to God’. Nothing exists except through God, and humanity’s task is to submit (islam) to His decrees by following the message He revealed to Muhammad.

The God we meet in the Qur’an is thus like the God of the Bible. He created everything from nothing, and ‘There is not like Him any thing’.6 The gods of the Arabian pantheon could thus only be figments of the imagination or beings created by God. Muhammad’s hostility towards them is no different from St Paul’s loathing for Diana of the Ephesians or Elijah’s hatred for the cult of Baal, which led him to put its priests to death. The Arabian gods were dangerous distractions from the faith of the believer. Worshipping them was delusional, selfish and perverted, as well as bound to incur God’s wrath.

The Qur’an calls upon Muslims to live a life of honesty, generosity and fairness in a way that the old paganism did not. Cruel practices which pagan custom tolerated were unacceptable. The Qur’an, like the Bible, uses fear of God to instil a moral system that is more caring and scrupulous than what went before. Thus, it uses understated menace to attack the practice of burying unwanted baby girls by parents who had hoped for a son:

When the buried baby girl is asked

For what sin she was killed ...

Each soul will know what it has presented.7

Fear of the Lord lies at the root of all monotheism. The Qur’an – again, like the Bible – balances this by its emphasis on God’s unlimited mercy. Every chapter of the Qur’an except one opens with the words ‘In the name of God, the Compassionate, the Merciful’. God’s compassion and mercy are stressed repeatedly, and realisation of this percolates into the listener or reader at a deep level. Humanity is called to live according to the laws God lays down. This involves putting trust in Him (rather than, say, asking the Meccan god Hubal to conjure rainfall), and implies solidarity among believers and care for one’s neighbour, not merely an obligation towards the members of one’s own tribe and those under its protection, as had been the case before. This solidarity seems to have been something new, in fact revolutionary, in terms of seventh-century Arabia, although Islam would not displace tribalism from Arabian society.

There are no sayings attributed to Muhammad similar to those of Jesus in the Gospels which led Christians to conclude that Jesus was God incarnated in Man. Muhammad claimed he had an extraordinary mission, but was otherwise an ordinary mortal who sinned and repented like anyone else. When the Meccans were left in possession of the battlefield of Uhud, they mutilated some of the Muslim dead. Hind, the wife of Abu Sufyan, the Meccan leader, even ate a piece of the liver of Hamza, the prophet’s slain uncle, in order to fulfil a vow of revenge for her kinsfolk slain at Badr. Furious beyond measure, Muhammad swore to mutilate the corpses of thirty Meccan dead in retaliation the next time God granted him a victory over them. Yet shortly thereafter he received a revelation that this would be wrong. He therefore renounced his oath, repented and forbade the mutilation of corpses. It should not be forgotten that he was also a political leader. Although he very often showed mercy to opponents – something which it was generally expedient to do – there were executions of a man who had abandoned Islam and a satirist who had mocked him after he took Mecca.

After the establishment of the polity in Medina, Qur’anic passages were revealed which increasingly regulated the lives of the believers. These were amplified by Muhammad’s edicts and everyday practice. After his death, the memory of the community began to fade as the immediate descendants of those who had contact with him gradually passed away. It became necessary to establish a guiding tradition so that the community could emulate the way he lived his life. This tradition has been preserved in the sayings attributed to him or his companions, which came to be known as his Sunna, or custom. The Sunna includes what we would consider legal topics, such as the rules of marriage, divorce and inheritance, the validity of contracts, and punishments prescribed for crimes. It also includes other topics which most Westerners would not necessarily consider to be ‘legal’, such as the rules for the ways devotions are to be performed, dietary and hygiene requirements, and dress codes.

Like the God of Christians and Jews, the God of Muslims sees into our hearts. He will judge believers according to the sincerity with which they perform their actions, and will always show mercy to those who sincerely repent and try to make amends for their misdeeds. Nevertheless, Islam is not solely a private matter for a believer. The main rituals of Muslim worship intrude into the public domain in a very obvious fashion. Muslims are enjoined to carry out brief, formal prayers five times a day at specified times: dawn, noon, mid-afternoon, dusk and after dinner. These must be said facing the direction of the Ka’aba at Mecca. There is ritual purification beforehand, and the body moves through the postures of standing, bowing, kneeling and touching the ground with the forehead. The sight of men praying in the street at midday on Friday is so common in Arab countries that it is unremarkable. Throughout Muslim history, this mass congregating on Fridays has provided a dangerous moment for unpopular governments. This is still so, as recent developments in Arab countries have shown.

The fast of Ramadan involves total abstinence from food, drink and sexual activity from dawn to dusk for a whole month, although children, the sick, pregnant women and travellers are exempt and fasting can be postponed if there is an overriding need. In a predominantly Muslim society, Ramadan turns life upside down, especially when the month falls during a roasting Middle Eastern summer. The discipline of the fast is stern and disrupts the natural cycle of life. The Muslim year consists of twelve lunar months, eleven days less than a solar year. Ramadan, the feast days and time of pilgrimage revolve through the seasons approximately three times a century – that is, perhaps two and a half times in an average life span. During this topsy-turvy month night is almost turned into day, and is a time for feasting and jollity. It is the season for families and, above all, for making a fuss of children. Like other forms of worship which have a communal element, the fast is intended to bring believers closer to each other as well as to God.

Another key element of Muslim religious ritual is the Hajj, the pilgrimage to Mecca. The rites centre on the Qur’anic account of the story of God’s command to Abraham to sacrifice his son. Muslims see the Qur’an as restoring the original truth of God’s revelations to earlier prophets such as Abraham, Noah, Moses and Jesus, and therefore consider Islam not to so much a new religion as the correction and perfection of Judaism and Christianity. The simple pilgrimage garbs which are prescribed for male and female pilgrims underline the overarching equality of all believers before God, despite the different status Sharia (the religious law of Islam) gives to free men, free women and slaves. The fact that the rituals can only be performed on five prescribed days in the Muslim month of Dhu’l-Hijjah adds an extra rhythm to the Muslim year.

In a sense the Hajj also adds a rhythm to the life of a Muslim, since all able-bodied believers who can afford to do so – and who can also arrange for their families to be looked after while they are away – must perform it at least once. Today, thanks to air travel and modern organisation, some three million believers congregate to perform it every year. Throughout history, it has provided a huge coming together for Muslims, a focus of unity and brotherhood that has no true parallel in Christianity or Judaism. It also gives the ruler who controls the Holy Places immense prestige.

IV

Although the Muslims built an empire within decades of Muhammad’s death, they did not achieve his hope that they would live together as brothers. Once the Prophet was in his grave, many tribes assumed that they were now at liberty to revert to their old ways. Sometimes they had not even made the formal profession of faith to convert to the new religion, and their treaty relations with Medina had been entered into by one faction of the tribe despite the opposition of others. Abu Bakr, who was acknowledged as the leader of the Muslim community after Muhammad’s death, had the task of bringing them back into the fold. He was the khalifa, or ‘caliph’, a word which can mean either successor or deputy. The title thus had a certain ambiguity. Although the caliph was not a prophet, he was the ruler of the community and had a spiritual authority.

Abu Bakr had been a friend of Muhammad before his revelations began and was one of the first converts. After the death of the Prophet’s wife Khadijah, Abu Bakr’s daughter Aisha was betrothed to the Prophet as a child and went on to become his best known and most influential wife, many of whose wise sayings have been cherished by Sunni Muslims ever since. Abu Bakr showed the steely firmness not altogether unusual in people with a gentle disposition who are nevertheless convinced that what they have to do is right and necessary. He was also practical, and turned to those in the community with proven military expertise.

This often meant that Meccans who had converted to Islam rather late in the day, like Khalid Ibn al Waleed who had led the successful Meccan cavalry charge against the Muslims at Uhud, played leading roles in putting down the insurrections that followed Muhammad’s death and the great conquests that followed. Bloody vengeance was exacted on the ringleaders of insurgencies, although in most cases ordinary tribesmen were treated more leniently. With the rebellions crushed, Abu Bakr sent the armies further afield. He ruled for two years and lived just long enough to hear of the first major victories against the Byzantines and Persians.

Umar Ibn al Khattab, another early convert, was chosen by the Prophet’s companions as his successor. Umar had a very different temperament from Abu Bakr. He was hot-headed and obstinate, but as devoted to Muhammad as his predecessor. When he was assassinated in 644 by an angry prisoner who had been sold as a slave, the Persian Empire had been virtually destroyed and its core provinces occupied. Greater Syria and Egypt, which at that time were overwhelmingly Christian countries, had also been snatched from Byzantium.

The Byzantines had not had a chance to consolidate their position in these territories after they expelled the Persian invaders at the end of an exhausting conflict which had removed them from Byzantine control for a generation. That war had only ended a few years before the Arab conquerors arrived. Greater Syria had already suffered an economic decline and seen its population severely reduced by bubonic plague before the Persian invasion. The emperor Heraclius who had now regained this important province did not give it up lightly. But after Damascus had fallen to the Arabs, very possibly for the second time, and two large field armies had been destroyed in battle, he had little alternative to retiring behind the natural frontier of the Taurus mountains in the east of Anatolia.

The emissaries sent by the Arab armies offered three choices when they came to a new province or town. These were acceptance of Islam, acknowledgement of Muslim rule and payment of tribute, or war to the death. Few took the option of conversion, but people were always free to convert at a later stage. Acknowledgement of Muslim rule meant that the local Christian and Jewish population would be free to continue worshipping in their own way. They would retain their existing churches and synagogues, although they often lost the right to build new ones. They would pay extra taxes, were generally not allowed to bear arms and needed to recognise the superiority of Muslims. The status of those who submitted was similar to that which the Byzantines themselves accorded to religious minorities.

The choice between these three options did not compare unfavourably with what would have been on offer from other conquerors. The Byzantine Empire itself paid tribute to marauders when occasion demanded, and its taxes were higher than those of the new conquerors. Throughout antiquity, the Middle Ages and until considerably later, everyone knew that a city which resisted an invader would be delivered over to slaughter, rape and pillage if it fell to an assault. During the Persian invasion of Byzantine territory most cities had surrendered on terms, and a bloody example had been made of Jerusalem in 614 when it resisted. The Arabs replaced the Byzantines as rulers and often seemed an improvement. Nevertheless, the importance of booty for many of the conquerors should not be overlooked, nor should it be forgotten that there were areas, such as the province of Fayoum in Egypt, in which the Arabs were reported as behaving as savagely as any other barbarian invaders.

In some places, the surrender terms granted the Muslims the right to use part of a church for prayer, sharing it with the Christian worshippers. In Homs, a quarter of the church of St John was set aside for Muslim prayers, while a veil was placed down the middle of Damascus cathedral so that Christians and Muslims would worship on separate sides of it.8 Over time, the number and proportion of Muslims gradually increased. Sixty years after the taking of Damascus, when the city had become the capital of the vast Arab empire, the caliph decided the city needed a main mosque as its focal point. The Christians had to surrender their cathedral, but in return they were compensated and the future of other churches was guaranteed. Christians were involved in building the mosque, and the Byzantine emperor sent craftsmen to decorate it with mosaics in the kind of courteous gesture rulers have shown to each other throughout history.

When the Arab warriors of the caliphs invaded Greater Syria in the 630s, it is far from certain that their Byzantine opponents initially realised they were dealing with a new religion. A few years before, Heraclius had used Christianity as a rallying cry against the Persian foe. Yet there is no indication from the admittedly sparse historical sources that he did the same against the Muslims.9 Very possibly the idea did not even seem worthwhile. A number of Arab Christian tribes joined in the conquests, not seeing why they should miss out on the opportunities for plunder. Although many of them were later to convert to Islam, others did not. There are also stories from the Arab chronicles which, if true, suggest the invaders received assistance from local Christian and Jewish communities. At first, Islam was viewed by many Christians as a heresy, and was still being listed as such by the great Christian theologian St John of Damascus approximately a century after the Arab conquest of Syria.

St John wrote in Greek, the language of the Byzantine elite in Greater Syria and Egypt, but it was not spoken by the bulk of the population. Coptic was the language of the people of Egypt, and was a simplified version of the tongue of the Pharaohs. In the nineteenth century, Jean-François Champollion’s knowledge of Coptic would play a key role in enabling him to decipher the Rosetta Stone and unlock the secrets of the Ancient Egyptian hieroglyphs. To this day Egypt’s ancient Christian community are known as Copts – the name is a variant of ‘Egyptian’ – and they trace the establishment of their church back to St Mark, the Gospel writer, who preached in Alexandria. Syriac was the native language throughout Greater Syria and much of Iraq. In the seventh century the speakers of this language were predominantly Christian but many of them followed forms of Christianity deemed heretical by Constantinople, as did the Copts. It was in vain that Heraclius worked with the ecclesiastical authorities to devise formulations of faith which he hoped would reconcile all his Christian subjects. If he was trying to build a shared, Christian-based identity with which they could jointly confront the Arab invaders, it was a conspicuous failure.

Although Christian writers in the conquered lands refer to Islam as the religion of the Beast in the Book of Revelations, those who were not Orthodox did not necessarily see the state-imposed religion of the Byzantines as much better. Monks writing in their cells looked forward to an apocalyptic end to Muslim rule which would be brought about by divine intervention. They saw the victories of the Arabs as divine punishment for the sins of the Byzantines. Once the conquests had been consolidated, local Christian writers praised individual Muslim rulers whose reigns brought peace and who treated the Christians well.

V

The first two caliphs lived a simple lifestyle in Medina, despite the fabulous riches that were their share of the plunder and tribute from the conquered territories. They did not spend this on themselves but used it for purposes of state. There are stories of messengers stopping to ask directions from an old man walking along the road in the dust or dozing under a palm tree in the afternoon heat. They needed to find out where the caliph was so they could inform him of a great victory or deliver a chest of priceless jewels as his prescribed share of war booty. It was only later, when they were ushered into the presence of the caliph, that they realised he was the same old man. Abu Bakr continued to milk his family’s goats, whilst Umar had a penchant for spending his evenings personally delivering sacks of flour to poor widows when there was a famine. He was also prepared to listen to complaints from soldiers against their leaders. If he suspected wrongdoing, he was prepared to remove them from power. In this way, he may have unwittingly encouraged a culture of insubordination.

Yet if the caliphs maintained an example worthy of a radical new religion, the same did not apply to all the army. Abu Bakr had forbidden tribesmen who had tried to secede after the death of the Prophet from taking part in the raiding into Syria and Iraq which evolved into the campaigns of conquest. Umar reversed this policy. His decision worked wonders for the manpower needs of the conquering armies, but was yet another step away from the purity of the original Muslim community which had defied pagan Mecca. Because Christian tribes joined in, the conquests were not even entirely Muslim. And what of the majority of the conquerors who were Muslims? Where did the urge to spread the faith, desire for glory and greed for plunder lie in the order of motives of the conquerors? According to later Arab chroniclers, vast wealth was accumulated by some leading Muslims as a result of the conquests. There was also another major factor behind the conquests: the need to preserve the unity of the new Muslim polity. This required that the traditional raiding which Arab tribes had conducted against each other should now be directed against outsiders.

By the time of the accession of the third caliph, Uthman, in 644, a mere twenty-two years after Muhammad’s emigration to Medina and twelve years after his death, tensions in the highly successful Muslim empire were increasing to the point at which they threatened to tear it apart. These may have been aggravated by temporary reverses on the battlefield. Uthman was from the Bani Umayya, the branch of the Koreish tribe that was senior to the Bani Hashim from which the Prophet had come, and was wealthy in his own right. Despite his piety – remembered today because he ordered the editing of the canonical text of the Qur’an – he had to cope with resentment at the fact that so much of the leadership of the community was now drawn from the Koreish.

Until Muhammad’s triumphant entry into Mecca, Uthman’s uncle, Abu Sufyan, who was the leader of the Koreish oligarchy, had strongly opposed Muhammad. Yet after Mecca opened its gates to the Prophet, both Abu Sufyan and his wife Hind converted and were treated well. Abu Sufyan was made governor of Yemen, while Hind lived to cheer on the Muslim warriors at the battle of the Yarmouk, the key battle in the conquest of Greater Syria, just as she had cheered on the Meccans at Uhud. Their son Mu’awiya, who was Uthman’s cousin, became the Prophet’s secretary. Umar appointed him as governor of Syria. Many early converts noted the rapid promotion for the son of people who had loathed the Prophet up to the moment when their own cause was lost.

Uthman’s answer to the increasing tensions and indiscipline was to try to centralise administration, not least by establishing more effective financial control over the conquered provinces. Umar’s policy had been to link seniority in the new elite to the time at which Muslims had originally converted to the new faith, and to how close they had been to the Prophet. Uthman, perhaps inevitably as the original community began to age, reverted to traditional methods of clan rule under the leadership of his own tribe, Koreish. This caused resentment, especially as it meant many Muslims who had taken part in the first waves of conquests were likely to lose out. His appointment of members of his family to key positions would have been unremarkable for any other ruler at that time, yet it seemed to go directly against the spirit of the new faith, which had seemed to promise the equality of believers.

Grievances in the army increased in Egypt and the military cantonments of Kufa and Basra in Iraq. Only Syria, under Mu’awiya, remained quiet. Disaffected soldiers began to meet and confer. Eventually groups of mutineers from Egypt went to Medina to demand the caliph satisfy their grievances. Under pressure, Uthman yielded. While the mutineers were returning home, they captured a messenger who overtook them. He was allegedly carrying a letter from Uthman asking the governor of Egypt to deal with them severely. The group went angrily back to Medina and besieged Uthman in his house. He denied writing or giving instructions for the writing of the letter and refused to resign. Eventually, a group in which a son of the deceased caliph Abu Bakr was involved stormed the house and killed him.

This was a ‘loss of innocence’ moment if ever there was one. Not only had the successor of the Prophet been murdered by mutineers from among his own people, but it seemed that none of the companions of the Prophet in Medina had been prepared to stand up to them, not even Ali ibn Abi Talib, the Prophet’s cousin and son-in-law who was one of the very first converts. There were questions which sprang immediately to mind as news of the murder spread. Were the companions indifferent to Uthman’s fate? Did they secretly desire it? And were they – or some of them – secretly in league with the mutineers? History cannot give us conclusive answers to these questions.

VI

The chaos that followed led to civil wars which might well have broken up the new empire had it not been for Mu’awiya. He was already arguably the most powerful player on the stage, and demanded what no one could deny was his right: justice for the murder of his kinsman, Uthman. Ali ibn Abu Talib was elected caliph by the now elderly surviving companions of the Prophet, but there was a weakness in his position. He risked being perceived as sympathetic to the mutineers, some of whom were among his strongest supporters, and from whom it was virtually impossible for him to withdraw his protection. He was also associated with groups such as the Ansar, the devout Muslims of Medina who had loyally supported the Prophet and fought for him, but did not have the same interests as Koreish and had been largely overlooked by the new elite that was now governing the empire. When Ali requested that Mu’awiya offer him allegiance, the latter refused. This left Ali with no practical alternative to preparing an army to send against him. At the same time, a revolt broke out under the leadership of two companions of the Prophet who were backed by powerful moral support from the Prophet’s widow Aisha, though Ali was able to defeat it.