Christianity: The First Three Thousand Years (44 page)

Arabia was a society very conscious of the ecological disaster caused by the failure of the dam at Marib (see p. 245). Travellers in the south-west of the peninsula could see for themselves a dying society apparently unable to save itself, after centuries of wealth and fame throughout the region. Religious conflict, ancestral pride in Mecca, the compromised state of the Jerusalem sacred site, God's judgement and power over his people: all were there for a sensitive mind and a poetic genius to contemplate and sculpt into a single message. To appreciate this historical context makes it easier to understand the effect and character of Muhammad's proclamation of Islam (a word meaning 'submission'), but it does not explain the man himself or his revelations, any more than the historian can give a satisfactory explanation of the story of Jesus Christ's resurrection. What remains for scholars of Islam to achieve is the equivalent of Western Christian culture's patientanalysis of the documents at the heart of Christian faith, to gain a clearer picture of the society and thought-world in which the Qur'an was created.
²

Muhammad's revelations of words from God only began for him in middle age, in 610, while he was on one of his regular expeditions to a cave outside Mecca, to retreat from his daily cares into meditation. As revelations continued, he would dictate the words he had heard to an ever-growing body of disciples, through years of struggle in which he and his followers (Muslims) saw their fortunes transformed. At first they were a beleaguered group suffering oppression and expulsion - their moment of withdrawal ('Hijra') from Mecca to Yathrib (Medina) in 622 CE has become the basis of Islamic dating. Within Muhammad's lifetime - he is generally said to have died in 632 CE - Muslims in Mecca had become a victorious and self-confident community which now needed regulation for its life. Both these experiences are reflected in pronouncements which, during the next century and a half, came to be a fixed and written text - still known despite its written form as 'that which is to be recited', or
Qur'an
. In contrast to the similar transition in fortunes for the followers of Christ witnessed in the Gospels, Acts and Epistles of the New Testament, the Muslims from their earliest days won their survival at least partly by physical force of arms, another phase in the struggles which had convulsed the peninsula over the past century, and their subsequent extraordinary expansion was inseparable from military conquest. Little more than half a century after the first convulsions in Mecca, the Dyophysite Patriarch Henanisho I had the courage to point this out to 'Abd al-Malik, then Islamic caliph (that is, the leader who claimed to be successor to Muhammad). The Caliph asked him to give his opinion of Islam. The Patriarch replied, 'It is a power that was established by the sword and not a faith confirmed by divine miracles, like Christianity and like the old law of Moses.'
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This is not the whole story - in fact forced conversions were not at all the rule in early Islam, even while it was extending its reach by military campaigns. At the centre of Muhammad's achievement was the extraordinary poetry which enshrined his revelations. Muslim sources have often ascribed the Qur'an's power to its exceptional beauty in the Arabic language, and the Qur'an does not translate well, particularly into English. Conversion to Islam can therefore be a deeply felt aesthetic experience that rarely occurs in Christian accounts of conversion, which are generally the source rather than the result of a Christian experience of beauty. It is perhaps for that reason that from the beginning Islam has set its face against any further representation of the divine in pictures, since the divine beauty is already represented in the words of the Qur'an. It has often been said that the Qur'an plays the role in Islam which the incarnate Son has traditionally done in Christianity: a final revelation of God. It is nevertheless in the nature of poetry to send out resonances of meaning beyond the capacity of prose, and for that reason the proclamation of the finality of the Qur'an has always been qualified by the possibility of multiple meanings in its text. It has become as subject to the possibility of intricate reinterpretation and meditation as its predecessors in sacred scripture - all the more because, in most forms, Islamic societies have not developed the equivalent of the Christian hierarchy of clergy who might champion a single meaning.

The Qur'an is strikingly preoccupied with the two monotheisms which Muhammad had known from his boyhood, Judaism and Christianity. He was concerned to proclaim a new unity of religion through '
the
God' (
al-ilah
, subsequently abbreviated as Allah) who had been the focus of the shrine cult at Mecca, but otherwise Muhammad spoke contemptuously of Arabian traditional cults, and he was very aware of the sacred books which had previously spoken of one God, the Tanakh and the Christian New Testament. His concern for them, and indeed stringent criticism of their content and their over-credulous readers, is particularly evident in the early suras (sections) of the Qur'an. In its present arrangement, after an initial proclamation of God, who is given the titles of mercy and compassion traditional in Arabian religion, the Qur'an passes to a long sura which takes its name of 'The Cow' from its references to stories of Moses and the Children of Israel in their Exodus from Egypt. The name of Mary, the mother of Jesus, occurs almost twice as often in the Qur'an as in the New Testament, and she gives her name to one of its suras. By contrast, there is one silence in the Qur'an which is startling once it is noticed: the name of Paul of Tarsus. Such naming and silence may have been the emphases of the Jewish 'Ebionite' Christians long before (see p. 107); and that provokes interesting reflection.

Far from speaking of a new message, Muhammad proclaimed Islam as the original truth which later centuries had obscured. Christian apologists in the second century had made the same claim for their message in relation to Judaism. His theme of oneness is a clear contrast with the Christian quarrels about the nature of Christ which Chalcedon had failed to heal. In a much-discussed and not conclusively understood verse of the Qur'an, God is represented as telling the Christians 'believe in God and his messengers and do not speak of a "Trinity" . . . God is only one God, He is far above having a Son.'
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There is much in modern Muslim practice which would have been familiar to seventh-century Christians, and which is likely to have been borrowed from the Christian practice which Muhammad observed: the fast of Ramadan has the intensity of early Christian observance of Lent, and the characteristic prostration of Muslim prayer was then normal in the Christian Middle East, where it still survives in some traditional Christian communities. Prayer mats, still one of the most familiar features of the mosque today, were extensively used by Christian monks as far apart as Syria and Northumbria or Ireland before the coming of Islam, and they are reflected in the aptly nicknamed 'carpet' pages of intricate interlace and geometry to be found in great manuscripts of the early West such as the Lindisfarne Gospels.
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We have already observed that the pillar-dwellers of Syriac Christianity may have inspired the minaret (see p. 208). Saints proliferated in fourth- to seventh-century Christianity. Many of them were taken straight over by Islam and remain the focus of Islamic cults to the present day, while Islam in most of its manifestations over the centuries has delighted in celebrating new holy men with similar honours of festival and pilgrimage.
⁶

Reading the Qur'an quickly makes it apparent that Muhammad's relationship with Judaism was more conflicted than his relationship with Christianity, perhaps because it was more intimate.
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It is possible to interpret his image of himself and his destiny as the last in the succession of Hebrew prophets, and his initial mission as a resolve to restore a monotheism concentrated on the Jerusalem Temple, which Christians had compromised. To begin with, Muhammad instructed his followers to pray facing Jerusalem, and he only altered the direction of prayer to Mecca after a murderous disagreement with the Jews of Medina. From that moment, the possibility of a united movement of Jews and followers of Muhammad ended and the Muslims formed their own single community (
ummah
).
⁸
That concept of a united
ummah
has survived all subsequent divisions in Islam, including the great and so far permanent rupture between Sunni and Shi'a, but alongside it has been the concept of various People of the Book. These were the faiths which, unlike adherents of traditional Arabian cults formerly rivalling the Meccan cult of
al-ilah
, were to be allowed to persist in their flawed but genuine understanding of God's truth: 'The [Muslim] believers, the Jews, the Christians, and the Sabians [an Arabian monotheism] - all those who believe in God and the Last Day and do good - will have their rewards with the Lord'.
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This was of great importance for the future as Muslims began to make an astonishing series of conquests in the decades after Muhammad's death. The Prophet had not apparently envisaged or provided for this eventuality, even though his own career had been full of conflict, in which Muhammad had been a much more aggressive participant than had Jesus when facing violence in his own ministry. Muslims now occupied much of the world that over the previous six centuries had become Christian, including its earliest historic centres, and they have continued to occupy it ever since. In the end that decisively moved the centre of Christian gravity westwards. The military crisis caused by the late-sixth-century wars between the Byzantine and Sassanian empires, and the short-sighted destruction by those war-locked empires of the various Christian buffer states along their borders (see pp. 253-4), gave a perfect opportunity for the armies to sweep first north out of Arabia, then east and west into Byzantine and Sassanian territory. Christianity's internal divisions made the task easier: there were plenty of Miaphysite or Dyophysite Christians who had no especial affection for the Chalcedonian rulers in Constantinople, and equally, plenty of Christians who had little time for Zoroastrian Sassanians, and who did not defend them against the new masters. In Egypt, for example, excavations at one of its greatest international Christian shrines, that of St Menas at Abu Mina, have revealed how suddenly Greek documents disappeared from the life of the community when the Muslim armies arrived. The last Greek receipts for the wine harvest scribbled on pottery are precisely for the invasion year of 641, and from then on the Coptic Church was entirely in charge at the shrine.
¹⁰

The Muslim conquerors did little to explain their faith to their new subjects or to convert them to it. It might have been possible for Christians initially to regard these newcomers as a peculiar sort of Arian Christian sect, while Dyophysites would note with approval that they gave honour to the Virgin Mary without tolerating a cult of her. So the sudden irruption of the Muslims might be a catastrophe, but it could be endured for the time being, particularly if it brought quieter times than the campaigns of Heraclius. The result was one of the most rapid shifts of power in history.
¹¹
Between 634 and 637, three battles crippled the armies of Byzantium and the Sassanians. In February 638, only eight years after the Emperor Heraclius had triumphantly restored the True Cross to Christian Jerusalem, the city fell to Muslim forces after a year's siege; it was in any case a shadow of its former self, devastated only a quarter-century earlier by the Sassanian Shah Khusrau II. Sophronios, the Melchite or Chalcedonian Patriarch of Jerusalem, insisted on making the surrender in person to the Caliph Umar.

Umar entered the city in deliberate humility in plain robes, riding on a camel, and he treated the new conquest with equally deliberate forbearance. He knew that he was fulfilling the design of the Prophet in doing so, because the conquest of Jerusalem was no incidental military victory. Umar signified the triumph of Islam on the vacant site of the Temple by building a mosque above the ruins. In doing so, the Caliph achieved what the Emperor Julian the Apostate (see p. 217) had planned long before: to restore honour and splendour to this long-desecrated sacred site which Christians had deliberately spurned, and whose memory had been so vital for Muhammad. In the early 690s the Caliph 'Abd al-Malik outdid Umar's first monument with an extraordinary domed structure, now often called the Mosque of Umar - a double error, since it was built neither as a mosque nor by Umar. The function of this 'Dome of the Rock' seems originally to have been to mark the victory of Muhammad's revelation over Christianity, by creating a building which would be as impressive as anything that Christianity had put up - the Caliph would have known the reputation of the Church of Hagia Sophia in Constantinople, then already a century and a half old (see pp. 429-31). The Dome of the Rock bears the earliest datable set of texts from the Qur'an, including the famous rebuke to those who worship the Trinity, and it exhibits the earliest datable use of the word 'Muslim'. Even though it reversed Christian mistreatment of the Temple, it was probably built by Christian craftsmen, and its architectural forms are derived from those of Byzantium.
¹²

Really this was logical. What the Dome of the Rock proclaimed was the arrival of a new empire which would replace the surviving Christian empire of the Byzantines; the city of Constantinople was now the goal of what seemed an unstoppable programme of conquest. Islam did not succeed in this ultimate aim - yet. In 678, after five years of repeated attacks, the Byzantine Emperor Constantine IV finally repulsed the besiegers, but other Islamic armies pressed on to the furthest coasts of North Africa. From their conquest of Alexandria and all Egypt by 641, they took a half-century of hard fighting to reach the Straits of Gibraltar, but then they went on to seize virtually the entire Iberian peninsula: they were checked in their advance northwards only in central France at a battle near Poitiers in 732 or 733. The two Christian victories at Constantinople and in France between them preserved a Europe in which Christianity remained dominant, and as a result the centre of energy and unfettered development and change in the Christian world decisively shifted west from its old Eastern centres. By contrast, a crushing Islamic victory over Chinese armies in what is now Kyrgyzstan in 751 laid open Central Asia to Islam, bringing eventual ruin to the Church of the East.