Texts in Context:
The Surrender
By Gabriel Blanchard
Into the established dichotomies of the Græco-Roman West and the Syro-Persian East, suddenly, out of the south, something new leapt forth like a thunderbolt.
The Heraclian Dynasty
After Justinian, the dynasty named for him had clung to power for the rest of the century. In 602, a military commander, Phocas, usurped the throne and had the former emperor and his family (a wife and six children) murdered not long thereafter. This was all ordinary enough in New Rome, and Phocas might have gone on to found a dynasty—but he proved not only ruthless, which was an acceptable trait in an emperor, but incompetent, which was not. In 610, he in turn was overthrown by the son of the Exarch of Africa,1 who now became the Emperor Heraclius.
The first half of Heraclius’ reign was occupied by a war with Sasanian Persia. This too was business as usual; the Roman-Persian rivalry was as old as the hills. But something genuinely new occurred in 614: Jerusalem fell to Shah Khosrow II. The Sasanians not only held the Levant for more than ten years, but removed the relics of the True Cross from the city, devastating the Romans. Weakened financially and militarily, Heraclius was forced to debase the coinage and to spend considerable time nursing the Empire’s strength; finally, in 622, he departed on Easter Sunday to bring the war to the Sasanians. The campaign lasted six years. Despite reversals in both directions—including a siege of New Rome in 626—in 628, between two minor succession crises within months of each other, the Persians accepted terms of peace. Heraclius toured his realm, rejoicing the people with the recovered relics of the Cross, which he ultimately brought back to Jerusalem. (According to the Legenda Aurea,2 Heraclius abruptly found the relics too heavy to carry when he attempted to bring them into Jerusalem—until he dismounted from his horse and removed the imperial diadem from his head, that is.)
Further south, the year 622 was equally memorable, for a very different reason.
بِسۡمِ ٱللَّه i3
Twelve years before, near the Red Sea coast of Arabia, an elderly Christian priest4 named Waraqah ibn Nawfal had been approached by his cousin Khadijah on her husband’s behalf. This husband was a successful tradesman from the city of Makkah, and belonged to the Hashemite clan,5 a sept of the respected and powerful Quraysh tribe; but he did not want to speak with his wife’s cousin about trade or politics. Instead, he wanted Waraqah’s advice as an ascetic, someone who rejected the idol-worshiping customs of contemporary Arabia, who instead practiced a strongly ethical monotheism associated with Abraham. Such a person was referred to in Arabic as a ḥanīf. Some ḥanīfs, like Waraqah, were or became Christians; others investigated Christianity and its parent faith, Judaism, but were satisfied with neither, and chose to await something else. Khadijah’s husband, whose name was Muhammad, was a ḥanīf himself, but inexperienced, and anxious for advice. In recent weeks, he had had an alarming encounter while praying alone on a mountain: a strange being had appeared to him in a cave and commanded him, “Recite!” It had only pressed him more terribly when he protested that he could not even read, until at last it relented and spoke aloud five lines of text for him to commit to memory:
Recite! In the name of thy Lord, the Creator,
who created man from a clot of blood;
Recite! and thy Lord is most generous,
who taught by the pen,
taught man what he knew not.
He was worried he had been attacked and perhaps deluded by a hostile jinn.6 Yet when he had described his experience, the aged priest told Muhammad that the being he had met was no jinn, but the dread angel Gabriel, and that he had been called to be a prophet. Waraqah died mere days after this, but Khadijah soon became the first to believe firmly in her husband’s message, the Surrender (i.e. to God), or in Arabic ٱلْإِسْلَام [al-Islām]; and those lines were the first of its collection of texts, now called the Recitation, or ٱلْقُرْآن [al Qur’an]. (They are now the beginning of its ninety-sixth chapter.)
Soon, Muhammad had begun to preach the oneness of God, the falsehood of idols, and the duties of justice and compassion. But by 622, hostility from fellow Quraysh had become intolerable; the Quraysh made a pretty penny from pilgrims’ donations at a stone shrine in Makkah, then full of splendid idols, which was called “the Cube” (ٱلْكَعْبَة [al Ka’ba]), and they did not appreciate the new prophet’s opposition. That year, Muhammad was invited by the people of Madīnah to become something like the city’s chief justice. He oversaw the safe departure of his followers from Makkah, and at last left himself: the Disownment, or الهجرة [hijrah]. Its date is “Year One” for the Muslim calendar to this day.
The Rashidun Caliphate
The details of Muhammad’s last ten years need not detain us, and for the moment we may postpone an outline of Islamic faith and practice.7 We turn instead to what happened when the Rashidun Caliphate, “the State of the Righteous Successors,” broke upon the world. Below is a map of the Near East and its environs at the accession of Muhammad’s first successor in the year 632 (thus, two or three years after Heraclius returned the True Cross to Jerusalem).
The Mediterranean, Near East, and West Asia ca. 632. Green represents
the Caliphate, purple represents Byzantium, and gold represents Persia.
The Fear of the Lord, that is the beginning of wisdom ... the power that comes out of the wilderness and rides the whirlwind and breaks the gods of stone; the power before which the nations of the east are prostrate like a pavement ...
Before the Hijrah, the Arabians had not even constituted one polity. Now, the peninsula was united—though admittedly most of the territory it claimed was depopulated; there were probably as many people in the Byzantine provinces of Egypt or Syria as there were in all Arabia! Incidentally, here is a map, not quite thirty years later, of the same region. It has a differently-shaped, much bigger Rashidun Caliphate, and its Persia seems to have been mislaid:
The Meiterranean, Near East, and West Asia, ca. 661.
Green represents the Caliphate, purple represents Byzantium.
Why the inexperienced Rashidun Caliphate enjoyed such stunning success over warriors as ancient as Ctesiphon and New Rome is hard to answer—though at least part of the answer is, as Chesterton pointed out,8 that empires do not wage war at all, any more than they quarrel with their siblings or sleep late on weekends. Human beings wage war: in that respect the playing field is always level. And by 661, the Rashidun Caliphs had built an empire to rival those of Alexander and Augustus. Ah, but …
Ali and the First Fitna
Unfortunately for Islam, it was around this time that they began to fracture. In 656, the third Rashidun Caliph was assassinated. A fourth was now chosen, Ali ibn Abu Talib. He had remarkable credentials: a cousin of Muhammad, he had converted to Islam at the ripe old age of ten, and had gone on to save the prophet’s life during the Hijrah and become his son-in-law. However, his election was disputed because the murder had not been avenged. A’isha, the youngest of the prophet’s widows and a prominent theologian in her own right, sided against Ali; so did Mu’awiya, governor of Syria, who was both a relative of the murdered caliph and Muhammad’s brother-in-law. What resulted was the First Fitna, or Islamic civil war, which raged throughout Ali’s reign (656-661) for a rather curious reason.
A’isha was defeated in battle late in 656; Mu’awiya proposed peace talks the next year. Ali accepted. But at this, several thousand partisans of Ali were outraged. In their eyes, enemies of the Caliphate were enemies of God, and God’s enemies must either repent—which they were free to do at any time—or else be fought by Muslims: they were not to be negotiated with. When Ali refused to repent, this faction reclassified Ali and Mu’awiya alike as their enemies. It may be from this rejection of Ali that they got their name, الخوارج [al-Khawārij] or “Kharijites,” a difficult word to parse; it might give them a military designation: “the deserters.”
In any case, the Kharijites were determined to rid the community of this fallen leader—even after he first trounced them in battle (Nahrawan, 658) and then gave amnesty to the sect’s survivors. One January morning in 661, while Ali was in Kufah9 leading the local community in morning prayer, a Kharijite assassin entered the mosque and stabbed him with a poisoned blade. Ali lingered for two days, and died. (You may have heard before now that Shia Islam is “the party of Ali” and considers him a martyr; we will return to this in another post.7)
The Umayyads
The ultimate winner of the First Fitna proved to be Mu’awiya. After a short struggle with Ali’s two sons, Mu’awiya was recognized as caliph, and became the founder of the Umayyad dynasty, which ruled the Muslim world for nearly a century. It conquered much more of West and Central Asia (the region colloquially called “the Stans”: Afghanistan, Kazakhstan, etc.), the remainder of Roman Africa, and Visigothic Spain. It even made its way into southern Gaul—but there, the course of history changed.
1An exarch was a provincial governor (and his province, an exarchate). The Exarchate of Africa at this time consisted roughly in modern Tunisia, Corsica and Sardinia, coastal Libya, and adjacent parts of Algeria. Recovered from the Vandals in 534, Africa was a major source of grain for New Rome.
2The Legenda Aurea or “Golden Legend” is a collection of one hundred and fifty-three saints’ lives compiled by Jacobus de Voragine, a bishop of Genoa.
3This Arabic phrase is often treated as one word in English, transcribed Bismi’llah or similar; it means “In the name of God.” (This is true both for Muslims and Christians: Allah—originally al-Ilah, related to the Hebrew Elohim—is Arabic for “God” or “the Deity,” not a name per se). Each chapter of the Quran begins Bismi’llah al-Rahman al-Rahim, or “In the name of God, the Compassionate, the Merciful.”
4Waraqah ibn Nawfal belonged to the Church of the East, a largely Syro-Persian tradition (today associated mostly with the Assyrian people). Though Nicene, it broke with the rest of the Church after the Council of Ephesus in 431: Ephesus deposed and condemned the bishop Nestorius for rejecting the Marian title “Mother of God” (an act held to deny the Incarnation); the Church of the East received him with sympathy. It has been called “Nestorian” since, though its members do not use the term.
5Jordan, or in full the Hashemite Kingdom of Jordan, has the Hashemites for its ruling dynasty. They also reigned over the Hejaz, Iraq, and Syria at various times from 1916 to 1958.
6In Arabian folklore, jinn are similar to humans in free will and rationality, but with air-like bodies which allow them shapeshifting and invisibility. They are sometimes confused with demons; however, though a given jinn might be malicious for its own reasons, they are not evil by nature. “Fae” or “elfin” captures their character better. They are mostly unconcerned with humans.
7The author wishes to draw notice to the fact that we have given no real outline of Islam. An important, undesirable side-effect which all histories risk is that of propping up the fallacy that because a thing’s development has been described, ipso facto, its nature has also been understood.
8“Our history is stiff with official documents which tell us nothing … Governments fight for colonies or commercial rights … It seems sufficient to answer that governments do not fight at all. Why do the fighters fight? Nobody who knows anything of soldiers believes the silly notion that millions of men can be ruled by force. … In any case no man will die for practical politics, just as no man will die for pay.” (The Everlasting Man, I.7.)
9Kufah was in what is now central Iraq, and served as the political capital of the Caliphate at the time.
Gabriel Blanchard is CLT’s editor-at-large. He lives in Baltimore, MD.
This post is part of our Texts in Context series, which explores the historical background of the many books and people on our Author Bank. If you’d like to begin that series from the beginning, our three-part introduction can be found at these links to “How to History,” “The Crocodile of Chronology” (which is, moreover, shaped like itself), and “History & Its Discontents“; indices of broad periods can be found in our timelines of the Stone and Bronze Ages, the Early Iron Age, and Classical Antiquity (in two parts).
Published on 2nd December, 2024. Page image of the Kaaba (pronounced kà-bä), the holiest site in Islam; photograph by Richard Mortel, used under a CC BY 2.0 license (source).
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