A Criminal History of Mankind (41 page)

In the time of Justinian, the Arabs like most ancient peoples were pagans who worshipped many gods. It is true that they regarded Allah as the creator of the universe, but they also believed that he was surrounded by a host of minor gods and demons. Some five or six years after the death of Justinian - around 570 A.D. - a boy was born into a poor household in Mecca. His father died before his birth, and the baby was handed to a wet nurse from a nomadic desert tribe - which suggests that his health was giving some concern. (Mecca was regarded as unhealthy.) His mother died when he was six, and the child - whose name was Mahomet (or Muhammad) - fell to the charge of his grandfather, a man who was a hundred years old and who seems to have doted on the handsome and lively boy. But the grandfather died after only two years, and Mahomet was brought up in the household of his senior uncle, Abu Talib, the head of the clan.

Little is known of Mahomet’s early years except that he probably worked as a shepherd. He also accompanied his uncle on trading journeys, and on one of these journeys to Syria, when he was fourteen, is said to have made the acquaintance of ‘Sergius, a Nestorian monk’, who told him something of the Christian religion. He must have been already acquainted with the basic elements of Christianity and Judaism; on the Ka’ba itself there was a portrait of Abraham carrying a bundle of arrows (for divination), and on a column nearby, the Virgin Mary with the child Jesus.

As a young man, Mahomet became the agent and steward of a wealthy woman named Khadijah, who was some fifteen years his senior; when he was twenty-five, he married her. Their married life was a happy one, and it was to last for twenty-five years.

Both Mahomet and Khadijah were deeply religious. During the month of Ramadan, held sacred by the Arabs, they moved into a cave on the edge of the desert and spent the time in prayer and meditation. And when Mahomet was in his fortieth year, he entered a period of inner crisis. We know little about it except that it was a ‘dark night of the soul’, during which he experienced profound depression and believed himself to be possessed by a demon. He told his wife that he saw lights and heard noises - there were sounds like bells and a humming like a swarm of bees. He spent much time alone in a cave on Mount Hara, or wandering on the edge of the desert, calling upon God for help; he was several times tempted to commit suicide by throwing himself from a cliff. In this state, he must have wondered to which of the pagan gods he could turn for aid. And finally, there crystallised out of his torment the conviction that there was only one God, the creator of the universe - that same creator who was proclaimed by Abraham and by Jesus Christ. One day, Mahomet had a vision of a majestic being - whom he later concluded to be the angel Gabriel - who told him: ‘You are the messenger of God.’

He told his wife what he had seen and heard: she believed him. But the rest of his family found it frankly incredible. Only his cousin Ali and his friend Abu Bekr were convinced. For the next three years - from 610 until 613 - Mahomet discussed his beliefs in private. Few were interested, and he made only thirty-nine converts, mostly from the young men of the town, who were impressed by his total conviction and by the force of his personality. He continued to behave like a man in torment. He would become depressed and fatigued, and begin to shiver. He would sweat like a man in a fever. Then he would speak the words he felt rising in his heart, and they were written down by his followers (Mahomet himself could not write). These early
suras
of the Koran came to birth with severe labour - Mahomet said that producing three of them, one after another, had turned his hair grey. In 613 A.D. he began to preach openly, and encountered immediate hostility.

Mahomet’s uncle, Abu Talib, was head of the clan and therefore its protector; if Mahomet was killed, it could mean a blood feud. Some of the leading Meccans went to Abu Talib and offered him the price of Mahomet’s blood; Talib curtly refused. But when, in 619, Abu Talib died, Mahomet found himself without a protector. The new head of the family was hostile. His wife Khadijah died at about this time - his sons had already died. He must have felt himself to be a man under a curse, who brought misfortune to all he cared for. At one point, the angry Meccans besieged Mahomet and his followers in their homes; he was forced to withdraw to a nearby oasis.

And now there came hope from an unexpected direction. The town of Yathrib - later Medina - was three hundred miles to the north. It had a large Jewish population, and the Jews were intolerant of their pagan fellow townsmen; they spoke of the coming of the Messiah who would crush the unbelievers underfoot. In 621, twelve citizens of Yathrib came to Mecca on pilgrimage, heard Mahomet preaching and became Muslims (a word meaning ‘those who submit to God’). Even more came in the following year. There was a suggestion that Mahomet should go to Yathrib; but after ten years of derision and hostility, he was understandably cautious - he was, at least, making slow headway in Mecca. Some of his followers emigrated to Yathrib and were well-received; the inhabitants of the town listened to the message of Islam (meaning ‘surrender’), read the verses of the Koran and decided that they would back the Prophet against the Jewish Messiah. Mahomet’s enemies in Mecca heard that he had been invited to Yathrib and saw their danger; as the dictator of another town (for that is what it amounted to) he could represent a real threat. The situation was desperate enough to make them decide to ignore the prohibition against shedding blood in the sacred city. On the night of 16 July 622 A.D., assassins burst into the Prophet’s house and rushed to his bedroom. They were too late. Mahomet had slipped away earlier and was now heading towards a cave in Mount Thaur, accompanied only by Abu Bekr. His flight to Yathrib - the
hijra
(or hegira) - was the turning point in his life. He arrived there two months later, on 20 September 622.

It must have been a strange and bewildering experience, to be received with interest and enthusiasm instead of angry derision. Mahomet was given a piece of land and had a house built. And he now became aware that the first business of a conqueror is organisation. Legal and other ties were instituted between his followers; he himself contracted a number of marriages for this reason (tradition says ten), one of them to Abu Bekr’s infant daughter. He also realised that one day his followers were going to have to fight for the right to be Muslims and began to think in military terms.

It was clear, for example, that sooner or later there would be a confrontation with Mecca. In his new, aggressive frame of mind, Mahomet decided to provoke one by sending out his followers to raid Mecca caravans returning from Syria. In fact, the year after his arrival in Medina, he himself went out on three such raids. They were unsuccessful, possibly because their movements had been betrayed. So Mahomet sent out a raiding party in the sacred month of Rajab, a time when Arab hostilities were normally suspended; the Muslims intercepted and plundered a caravan coming from Yemen. The Meccans were scandalised at this violation of the sacred month, and prepared for action. A month later, in March 624, Mahomet led a raid on another Meccan caravan; its supporting force of eight hundred men, led by Mahomet’s old enemy Abu Jahl, engaged Mahomet’s force - of around three hundred - at a place called Badr. And the Meccans learned what other armies would learn in the years to come: that men who fight with religious conviction may be outnumbered more than two to one and still win an overwhelming victory. Forty-five Meccans were killed, including Abu Jahl; the Muslims lost only fourteen. Although the engagement was a small one, it was perhaps the most significant in Islamic history, for it convinced the Muslims that Allah was fighting with them. It engendered the confidence that enabled the Arabs to conquer the Mediterranean.

This confidence was shaken, but not badly eroded, the following year, when a force of three thousand Meccans engaged a thousand Muslims at Uhad, near Medina. The Meccans were thrown back, but Mahomet’s forces suffered heavy losses, and neither side could claim a victory. Two years later, a force of ten thousand Meccans besieged Medina, but their cavalry was unable to cross a deep trench dug by the Muslims. After a night of storm, the besiegers lost their enthusiasm and left. It was after this siege that the Muslims turned on the Jewish clan of Qurayzah, suspected of intriguing with the Meccans; the men were all executed and the women and children sold into slavery. In due course, all Jews were ejected from Medina.

Two years later, in 629, Mecca surrendered quietly as Mahomet approached with a force of ten thousand. By that time, many leading Meccans had already deserted to Medina, and Mahomet had smoothed the way to a settlement by marrying the widowed daughter of his chief Meccan opponent, Abu Sufyan. Eight years after leaving Mecca as a fugitive, Mahomet returned as a conqueror.

In the following year, Mahomet led thirty thousand men on a raid on Syria. He was demonstrating to the Arabs that, now they had achieved unity, anything was possible. It was a lesson they had learned well by the time of the Prophet’s death (probably from malaria) in 632.

To understand Mahomet’s achievement we have to grasp that before his time the Arabs of the Hejaz consisted mainly of wandering tribes of Bedouins who spent much of their time raiding one another; it was murderous anarchy. This explains the blood feud; it was the only way of making a man feel that if he killed some of your tribe, some of his own tribe would eventually pay the price. But it was a wasteful method of maintaining some kind of law. It meant that the Arabs stayed permanently divided.

Yet the Arabs were formidable fighters. Both the Romans and the Persians used them as mercenaries. As we have seen, the Roman and Persian Empires had been at each other’s throats since the time of the Seleucids around 200 B.C. And while Mahomet was establishing himself as the despot of Medina and leading raids against Meccan caravans, the new Roman emperor of Constantinople, Heraclius, was at war with the Persian monarch Chosroes II. In 626, the year after the battle of Uhad, the Persians besieged Constantinople but were thrown back. In the following year, Chosroes was murdered by his own troops. His successor soon died of plague, and then for five years there was a mad scramble of pretenders to the throne of Persia and the usual intrigues and murders. History was, of course, repeating itself. And while Romans and Persians wore one another out, the Arabs flourished and grew strong.

History also repeated its now-familiar patterns after Mahomet’s death. When he died, he was master of Arabia. He was succeeded by his disciple Abu Bekr, who became first Caliph of Islam. What do successful conquerors do when they have time to sit down and survey their gains? Again, history provides us with the answer: they either squabble amongst themselves or look for more lands to conquer. The followers of the Prophet proceeded to quarrel. Many felt that Mahomet’s son-in-law Ali - married to his daughter Fatima - was a more suitable candidate for Caliph. The Muslims split into followers of Abu Bekr - the Sunni - and followers of Ali, the Shi’a. Besides, many of the nomad tribes who had offered allegiance to Mahomet felt that his death ended their obligations. So the new Caliph had to go to war. It was a political as well as a religious decision; if Arabia was allowed to split apart again, it would lose its strength. If it lost its strength, then it was no longer an effective force for conquest. And if it ceased to conquer, then there would be no flow of booty back to Mecca and Medina. So there was a bitter struggle that lasted for two years, until the rebel tribes were finally brought to heel. Then Abu Bekr died and was succeeded by another close associate of the prophet, Omar. He was faced with the same alternative: expand or stagnate. He had no hesitation about throwing his energies into expansion.

The obvious enemy was the ‘unbeliever’ - in this case, Rome and Persia. And these two empires were exhausted by war. Omar’s great general, Khalid, known as ‘the Sword of Allah’, defeated the Byzantines near Damascus and took Syria in 635. Jerusalem fell three years later. Iraq - occupied by the Persians - fell in 637, Mesopotamia in 641, Egypt in 642. And after a struggle of sixteen years, Persia itself fell to the Muslims. The citizens of most of the conquered lands welcomed the Arabs; they were tired of paying taxes to a ruler in a distant city; the Arabs at least were neighbours. Their conquest of Alexandria, and its subsequent loss when a Byzantine fleet appeared on the horizon, made the Arabs aware that they also needed ships. So they built their own fleet, and in 655 annihilated the Byzantine fleet.

Now only one major stronghold remained: Constantinople itself. In 673, the Arabian fleet blockaded Constantinople. The walls built by Constantine and his successors proved impregnable, so the Arabs prepared to wait until they had starved the city into submission. Its fall seemed inevitable.

And at this point, a single invention altered the tide of history. It was the brainchild of an architect named Callinicus, who came from Heliopolis, in Syria. He had decided that he preferred the Christian Emperor to the Muslim Caliph, and moved to Constantinople - now ruled by Constantine IV. Callinicus seems to have been interested in chemistry, and in explosives. He discovered that a mixture of saltpetre, bitumen, naphtha, sulphur and quicklime could produce a flame that was almost unquenchable. The secret formula is now lost, but it seems clear that the naphtha, bitumen and sulphur were the inflammables, while the saltpetre provided the oxygen to keep it burning. When water is added to quicklime (calcium oxide), the result is immense heat. This seems to have been the basic secret of the substance that became known as ‘Greek fire’. The startled Arabs found themselves facing ships that came towards them belching fire like dragons. When the fire landed on the water, it went on burning. It could be hurled through the air with catapults, in the form of balls of flax soaked in the chemical, or it could be made to roar from a copper or iron tube like a flamethrower. If Callinicus had stayed in Syria and given his invention to the Caliph, the Arabs would have been invincible. Now the Byzantines used it to scatter the Arab fleet. Men who were struck by the flames writhed in agony as their flesh bubbled and melted. When Greek fire landed on wooden decks, it burned its way through them; water only made it seethe and spit more violently. Gibbon says it could be extinguished by urine, but it is doubtful whether any Arab kept his head enough to try that interesting remedy.