Fields of Blood (35 page)

Muhammad’s confederacy broke up after his
death in 632, and his “
successor” (
khalifa
),
Abu Bakr, fought the defecting tribes to prevent Arabia from sliding back into chronic warfare. As we have seen elsewhere, the only way to stop such infighting was to establish a strong hegemonic power that could enforce the peace. Within two years, Abu Bakr succeeded in restoring the
Pax Islamica, and after his death in 634,
Umar ibn al-Khattab (r. 634–44), the second caliph, believed that peace could be preserved only by an outwardly directed offensive. These campaigns were not religiously inspired: there is nothing in the Quran to suggest that Muslims must fight to conquer the world. Umar’s campaigns were driven almost entirely by the precarious economy of Arabia. There could be no question of establishing a conventional agrarian empire in Arabia, because there was so little land suitable for cultivation. The Quraysh’s modest market economy clearly could not sustain the entire peninsula, and the Quran forbade members of the Islamic confederacy to fight one another. How, then, could a tribe feed itself in times of scarcity? The ghazu, the acquisition raid against neighboring tribes, had been the only way to redistribute the meager resources of Arabia, but this was now off-limits. Umar’s solution was to raid the rich settled lands beyond the Arabian Peninsula, which, as the
Arabs knew well, were in disarray after the
Persian-
Byzantine wars.

Under Umar’s leadership, the Arabs burst out of the peninsula, initially in small local raids but later in larger expeditions. As they expected, they met little opposition. The armies of both the great powers had been decimated, and the subject peoples were disaffected.
Jews and
Monophysite
Christians were sick of harassment from Constantinople, and the Persians were still reeling from the political upheaval that had followed
Khosrow II’s assassination. Within a remarkably short period, the Arabs forced the Roman army to retreat from
Syria (636) and crushed the depleted Persian army (637). In 641 they conquered
Egypt, and though they had to fight some fifteen years to pacify the whole of
Iran, they were eventually victorious in 652. Only Byzantium, now a rump state shorn of its southern provinces, held out. Thus, twenty years after the
Battle of Badr, the Muslims found themselves masters of
Mesopotamia, Syria,
Palestine, and Egypt. When they finally subdued Iran, they fulfilled the dream that had eluded both the Persians and Byzantines and re-created Cyrus’s empire.
⁴⁵

It is hard to explain their success. The Arabs were accomplished raiders
but had little experience of protracted warfare and had no superior weapons or technology.
⁴⁶
In fact, like the Prophet, in the early years of the conquest period, they gained more territory by diplomacy than by fighting: Damascus and
Alexandria both surrendered because they were offered generous terms.
⁴⁷
The Arabs had no experience of state building and just adopted
Persian and Byzantine systems of land tenure, taxation, and government. There was no attempt to impose
Islam on the subject peoples. The people of the book—Jews, Christians, and Zoroastrians—became
dhimmis
(“protected subjects”). Critics of Islam often denounce this arrangement as evidence of Islamic intolerance, but Umar had simply adapted
Khosrow I’s Persian system: Islam would be the religion of the Arab conquerors—just as
Zoroastrianism had been the exclusive faith of the Persian
aristocracy—and the dhimmis would manage their own affairs as they had in Iran and pay the
jizya,
a poll tax, in return for military protection. After centuries of forcible attempts by the Christian Roman Empire to impose religious consensus, the traditional agrarian system reasserted itself, and many of the dhimmis found this Muslim polity a relief.

When Umar conquered
Jerusalem from the Byzantines in 638, he immediately signed a charter to ensure that the Christian shrines were undisturbed and cleared the site of the Jewish temple, which had been left in ruins since its destruction in 70 and was used as the city’s garbage dump. Henceforth this holy site would be called the Haram al-Sharif, the “Most Noble Sanctuary,” and become the third-holiest place in the Muslim world, after
Mecca and Medina. Umar also invited Jews, who had been forbidden permanent residence in
Judea since the
Bar Kokhba revolt, to return to the City of the Prophet Daud (David).
⁴⁸
In the eleventh century, a Jerusalem rabbi still recalled with gratitude the mercy God had shown his people when he allowed the “Kingdom of Ishmael” to conquer
Palestine.
⁴⁹
“They did not inquire about the profession of faith,” wrote the twelfth-century historian
Michael the Syrian, “nor did they persecute anybody because of his profession, as did the
Greeks, a
heretical and wicked nation.”
⁵⁰

The Muslim conquerors tried at first to resist the systemic oppression and violence of empire. Umar did not allow his officers to displace the local peoples or establish estates in the rich land of
Mesopotamia. Instead, Muslim soldiers lived in new “garrison towns” (
amsar,
singular:
misr
) built in strategic locations:
Kufah in
Iraq, Basra in Syria,
Qum in
Iran, and Fustat in
Egypt; Damascus was the only old city to become a misr. Umar believed that the ummah, still in its infancy, could retain its integrity only by living apart from the more sophisticated cultures. The Muslims’ ability to establish and maintain a stable, centralized empire was even more surprising than their military success. Both the Persians and the Byzantines imagined that after their initial victories, the Arabs would simply ask to settle in the empires they had conquered. This, after all, was what the
barbarians had done in the western provinces, and they now ruled according to Roman law and spoke Latin dialects.
⁵¹
Yet when their wars of expansion finally ceased in 750, the Muslims ruled an empire extending from the
Himalayas to the
Pyrenees, the largest the world had yet seen, and most of the conquered peoples would convert to Islam and speak Arabic.
⁵²
This extraordinary achievement seemed to endorse the message of the
Quran, which taught that a society founded on the Quranic principles of justice would always prosper.

Later generations would idealize the Conquest Era, but it was a difficult time. The failure to defeat
Constantinople was a bitter blow. By the time
Uthman, the Prophet’s son-in-law, became the third caliph (r. 644–56), Muslim troops had become mutinous and discontented. The distances were now so vast that campaigning was exhausting, and they were taking less plunder. Far from home, living perpetually in strange surroundings, soldiers had no stable family life.
⁵³
This disquiet is reflected in the
hadith
(plural:
ahadith
) literature, in which the classical doctrine of
jihad began to take shape.
⁵⁴
The
ahadith
(“reports”) recorded sayings and stories of the Prophet not included in the Quran. Now that he was no longer with them, people wanted to know how Muhammad had behaved and what he had thought about such subjects as warfare. These traditions were collected and anthologized during the eighth and ninth centuries and became so numerous that criteria were needed to distinguish authentic reports from the obviously spurious. Few of the ahadith date back to the Prophet himself, but even the more dubious ones throw light on attitudes in the early ummah as Muslims reflected on their astounding success.

Many ahadith saw the wars as God’s way of spreading the faith. “I have been sent to the human race in its entirety,” the Prophet says; “I have been commanded to fight the people until they bear witness: ‘There is no god but
Allah.’ ”
⁵⁵
Empire building works best when soldiers believe that they are benefiting humanity, so the conviction that they had a divine mission would cheer flagging spirits. There is also contempt for the “laggers”
who “stayed at home”; these soldiers probably resented those Muslims who benefited from the conquests but did not share their hardships. Thus in some ahadith, Muhammad is made to condemn settled life: “I was sent as a mercy and a fighter, not as a merchant and a farmer; the worst people of this ummah are the merchants and the farmers, [who are] not among those who take religion [
din
] seriously.”
⁵⁶
Other reports emphasize the hardships of the warrior who lives daily with death and “has built a house and not lived in it, who has married a woman and not had intercourse with her.”
⁵⁷
These warriors were beginning to dismiss other forms of jihad, such as caring for the poor, and saw themselves as the only true jihadis. Some ahadith claim that fighting was the Sixth Pillar or “essential practice” of Islam, alongside the profession of faith (
shehadah
), almsgiving, prayer, the
Ramadan fast, and the
hajj. Some said that fighting was far more precious than praying all night beside the
Kabah or fasting for many days.
⁵⁸
The ahadith gave fighting a spiritual dimension it had never had in the Quran. There is much emphasis on the soldier’s intentions: Was he fighting for God or simply for fame and glory?
⁵⁹
According to the Prophet, “The
monasticism of Islam is the jihad.”
⁶⁰
The hardship of military life segregated soldiers from civilians, and as Christian monks lived separately from the laity, the garrison towns where Muslim fighters lived apart from their wives and observed the fasts and prayers assiduously were their monasteries.

Because soldiers constantly faced the possibility of an untimely death, there was much speculation about the afterlife. There had been no detailed end-time scenario in the Quran, and paradise had been described only in vaguely poetic terms. But now some ahadith claimed that the wars of conquest heralded the
Last Days
⁶¹
and imagined Muhammad speaking as a doomsday prophet: “Behold! God has sent me with a sword, just before the Hour.”
⁶²
Muslim warriors are depicted as an
elite vanguard fighting the battles of the end time.
⁶³
When the end came, all Muslims would have to abandon the ease of settled life and join the army, which would not only defeat Byzantium but complete the conquest of Central Asia,
India, and
Ethiopia. Some soldiers were dreaming of
martyrdom, and the ahadith supplemented with Christian imagery the Quran’s brief remarks about the fate of those who die in battle.
⁶⁴
Like the Greek
martus,
the Arabic
shahid
meant “one who bears witness” to Islam by making the ultimate surrender. Ahadith list his heavenly rewards: he would
not have to wait in the grave for the
Last Judgment like everybody else, but would ascend immediately to a special place in paradise.

As a reward for his hard life in the army, the martyr will drink wine, wear silk clothes, and bask in the sexual delights he had forsaken for the
jihad. But other Muslims, who were not so wedded to the new military ideal, would insist that any untimely death was a martyrdrom: drowning, plague, fire, or accident also “bore witness” to human finitude, showing that there was no security in the human institutions in which people put their trust but only in the illimitable God.
⁶⁶

It was probably inevitable that, as Muslims made their astonishing transition from a life of penury to world rule, there would be disagreements about leadership, the allocation of resources, and the morality of empire.
⁶⁷
In 656
Uthman was killed during a mutiny of soldiers backed by the Quran reciters, the guardians of Islamic tradition who were opposed to the growing
centralization of power in the ummah. With the support of these malcontents, Ali, the Prophet’s cousin and son-in-law, became the fourth caliph; a devout man, he struggled with the logic of practical politics, and his rule was not accepted in
Syria, where the opposition was led by Uthman’s kinsman
Muawiyyah, governor of Damascus. The son of one of the Prophet’s most obdurate enemies, Muawiyyah was supported by the wealthy
Meccan families and by the people of Syria, who appreciated his wise and able rule. The spectacle of the Prophet’s relatives and companions poised to attack one another was profoundly disturbing, and to prevent armed conflict, the two sides called for arbitration by neutral Muslims, who decided in favor of Muawiyyah. But an extremist group refused to accept this and were shocked by Ali’s initial
submission. They believed that the ummah should be led by the most committed Muslim (in this case, Ali) rather than a power seeker like Muawiyyah. They now regarded both rulers as apostates, so these dissidents withdrew from the ummah, setting up their own camp with an independent commander. They would be known as
kharaji,
“those who go out.” After the failure of a second arbitration, Ali was murdered by a Kharajite in 661.