Catastrophe: An Investigation Into the Origins of the Modern World (11 page)

Amr’s role in saving his people earned his family increased status. He was referred to by the poet Matrud as “the Lofty One,” and by others as one of “those who make mighty.”

It is probable that Amr’s high reputation, gained in the crucible of the 530s famine, helped to cement the social standing of his descendants—including ultimately his great-grandson Muhammad.

A
nother climatically triggered destabilizing factor in mid-sixth-century Arabia was the plague. Evidence from Ibn Ishaq, the Koran, and an inscription suggests that in the 540s Yemen and possibly other areas of the Arabian Peninsula were racked by the depredations of bubonic plague. The identification of the disease as plague is made more secure by the date, for the 540s is the exact period when one would have expected the plague to afflict Yemen, having arrived there en route from East Africa to the Mediterranean.

An early reference to what appears to have been plague in Yemen is from one of the earliest parts of the Koran itself. Viewing the plague as an affliction from on high, and the dark skin boils as “baked clay” dropped by God-sent “flying creatures,” the Koran describes what befell an army from Yemen that was threatening Mecca around 550.

Hast thou not seen how thy Lord dealt with the [enemy],

Did He not bring their stratagem to naught.

And send against them swarms of flying creatures

Which pelted them with stones of baked clay.

And made them like green crops devoured [by cattle].

Ibn Ishaq expanded on this by recording that as the army withdrew, “they were continually falling by the wayside, dying miserably by every water-hole.”

[The enemy leader] was smitten in his body, and as they took him away his fingers fell off one by one.

Where the fingers had been, there arose an evil sore exuding pus and blood.

They allege that as he died, his heart burst from his body.
⁶

And lastly, an inscription discovered by archaeologists at Marib records that repair work on the dam there had to be delayed in the 540s because the workforce had been decimated by plague.

The collapse of the Marib Dam (and no doubt the destruction of countless other smaller irrigation systems) and the onslaught of the plague were two of the key factors that appear to have led to the demise of Yemeni power from the mid-sixth century onward. Yemen had been the principal indigenous power within Arabia for at least a thousand years. Indeed, its people had comprised half the population of the entire Arabian Peninsula, and its fall must have created a huge power vacuum there. Certainly within two generations the focus of geopolitical power within Arabia had shifted, with Muhammad’s help, to the oasis of Medina, a central Arabian town dominated until then by Arabian Jewish tribes.

But it wasn’t just a power vacuum that gave Muhammad the opportunity to flourish. Other factors were at work in shaping the environment from which Islam emerged.

T
he key factor that led to the emergence of Islam was almost certainly the unique political and theological situation existing in the wider world at the very time that Muhammad was developing his religious ideas.

The earliest parts of his religious philosophy were first formulated, committed to memory, and then written down, in the form of the early sections of the Koran, in the period
A
.
D
. 610–620—the very decade in which everybody, in Arabia and in the world at large, fully expected to witness the demise of the Roman Empire, the imperial system that had dominated the Mediterranean world for eight hundred years. It was as if the entire world political system was about to collapse—and many if not most people would have regarded that apparently imminent catastrophe not just in purely political and military terms but also in religious and cosmic terms.

Christian and Jewish communities both inside and outside the Roman Empire had long apocalyptic traditions in which the broad outline of human history was seen as a divinely preordained chronological structure that one day would end with the resurrection of the dead, the Day of Judgment, the dissolution of the mortal world, and its replacement by an everlasting Kingdom of God in which the righteous would live forever. According to both Jewish and Christian prophetic traditions, the end of the world would come in three distinct stages—the rule of the Devil and the barbarian invasions, the coming of the Messiah and the defeat of the Devil, and the resurrection of the dead and the Last Judgment. The whole sequence was seen as God’s plan for the denouement of human history.

Both Jews and Christians certainly saw the Persian War of 605–630 in more starkly cosmic terms than previous conflicts. And at the time, many would have viewed the apparently imminent collapse of the empire in 610–620 (precisely the time of the emergence of Muhammad) as heralding the coming of the Messiah and the end of the world. Indeed, when the Persians captured Jerusalem in 614, it was said that “the assembled angels,” unwilling to “oppose the will of God,” deserted the Holy City because the Almighty had given it to the enemy, Christian sin having “exceeded God’s grace.” A Christian prophecy purporting to have been written before the Persian War (but, in fact, written just after it) said that soon “the day without evening” would arrive for Mankind and “there will be an end to earthly power.”
⁷

That prophecy stated in more precise terms the apocalyptic views aired by the Christian John of Ephesus during a comparatively early stage of the Avar wars, which racked the Roman Empire between 570 and 626. He had written in c. 580 of the “devastation and slaughter which has occurred in our times” so that “for the knowledge of future generations, if indeed the world is to last longer,” we may “expound and make known these things which Christ teaches, warns and shows to us about the time of the conclusion of the world.”

Jewish opinion also saw the events of the time in cosmic terms—probably more so than at any time since the Jewish revolts against Rome in the first and second centuries
A.D.,
the very period out of which Jesus Christ himself had emerged.

The so-called
Book of Zerubabel,
written by a rabbi of that name in Persian-ruled Babylon in the first quarter of the seventh century
A.D.,
prophesied the coming of the Jewish Messiah (and his mother) and their defeat of the Christian Roman monster—an emperor/pope called Armilus, the son of Satan.
⁸
Furthermore, a Palestinian Jew called Jacob, who had been forcibly baptized by the Romans in Carthage, described the empire in typically apocalyptic terms as “the fourth beast,” which was being “torn in pieces by the nations, [so] that the ten horns may prevail and Hermolaus Satan [the Devil] the Little Horn may come.”
⁹

The Jews viewed the apparently imminent collapse of the Roman Empire in the first quarter of the seventh century as evidence that the “beast” (the formerly pagan but now Christian empire) was doomed, that the Devil in the guise of the last Roman emperor or Christian pope would be killed by the coming Messiah. They saw the Persians (and a few years later, the Arabs) as the agents who would help destroy the “Roman beast.” Violent and often Messianic Jewish revolutionary attitudes had been spreading and increasing in fervor throughout the second half of the sixth century and went into overdrive as the empire began to totter in the first quarter of the seventh. In Antioch in 608, Christian attempts at forced conversion, as the Persians threatened the city, triggered a major revolt in the Jewish quarter. At first the Jewish rebels were successful, and their community’s archenemy, the city’s powerful Christian patriarch, Anastasius, was captured, killed, and mutilated. But the revolt was soon put down, and the eight-hundred-year-old Antiochan Jewish community was almost totally extinguished.

At the fall of Jerusalem and the siege of Edessa (modern Urfa in Turkey), Jewish anti-Roman, anti-Christian participation was equally violent and determined. And after the birth of Islam, as the early Muslims began to humble the Roman Empire, Jewish communities—oppressed and waiting for Messianic deliverance—were overjoyed. Some Jews thought that Muhammad was obviously a prophet who had come to prepare the way for the Messiah.

“The
candidatus
[a Roman official] has been killed [by the Arabs] and we Jews had great joy. And they say that a prophet [Muhammad] has appeared [among the Arabs] and proclaims the coming of the [Messiah],” said the Jews of Sycaminum in Palestine in 634.
¹⁰

Certainly Islam was a creed ideally suited to its time—new religion that emerged directly out of the apocalyptic atmosphere of the period. The early surahs (chapters) of the Koran have an overwhelmingly apocalyptic flavor.
¹¹
Muhammad, described as a messenger of God, is said to have come to warn mankind of what lies ahead at and beyond the Day of Judgment. In the Koran, seen by Muslims as the word of God, the expression
“yaum al-qiyama”
(the Day of Resurrection) occurs no fewer than seventy times, while an alternative word for that event,
al-sa’a
(the hour) occurs a further forty times. The last day and the Day of Judgment itself are cited forty-five and twenty-two times, respectively. Other expressions such as
“yaum al-hisab”
(the Day of Reckoning) also occur frequently.

In a historically vital surah of the Koran, dating from a year or two after the Persian seizure of Jerusalem as the Persians closed in on Constantinople, Muhammad was told by God that “the Romans have been defeated” and “know only some appearance of the life of the world and are heedless of the Hereafter.”
¹²

“Evil was the consequence of those who dealt in evil because they deny the revelations of Allah and made a mock of them,” says the Koran a few verses later, referring to both the Romans and the Persians.
¹³
“And in the day when the hour riseth, the unrighteous will despair.”

The destiny of nonbelievers and evildoers is quite clear throughout the Koran. They will be “assembled on the Day of Resurrection” and “their habitation shall be Hell”; whenever the fire abates, “we shall increase the flame.” On the Day of Resurrection, “when the trumpet is blown,” God shall “assemble the guilty white-eyed with terror.”
¹⁴

“He who turneth away from remembrance of Me [God], his life will be a narrow life and I shall bring him blind to the assembly on the Day of Resurrection,” says the Koran.
¹⁵

“Thus do We reward him who is prodigal and believeth not the revelation of his Lord and verily the doom of the Hereafter will be sterner and more lasting.”
¹⁶

The Koran never says exactly when the end of the world will come, but its imminence is hinted at in surah 7. “The Destined Hour [the Day of Judgment] is heavy in the heavens and the earth,” says verse 187, echoing earlier non-Muslim apocalyptic texts in which metaphorically the pregnant (heavy) cosmos gives birth to the events of the last days.

I
ncreased interest and belief in the end of the world—indeed, in its fairly imminent arrival—were to a large extent prerequisites for both the emergence and the spread of Islam.

It was—and, arguably, is again today—a religion ideally suited to the political and popular theological mood of the time. But although it is clear why Islam emerged and flourished, one key question demands an answer: How were these apocalyptic and monotheistic ideas—traditionally associated with the Jewish and Christian religions—transmitted to the deserts of Arabia?

Certainly both Judaism and Christianity had a strong presence in Arabia. There were Christian tribes and statelets on the northern fringes of Arabia, and there had been a Christian presence in the south (Yemen) as well. Jewish influence had also been widespread in Yemen and was most substantial in northwest Arabia, particularly in Medina—the very city (along with Mecca) in which Muhammad had family connections and which he used as his main power base following negotiations with the Medinans in 621.

Although the apocalyptic atmosphere of the early sixth-century Mediterranean and Middle Eastern world was probably the key element in the birth of Islam, it was only one of the factors that allowed the new religion to flourish.

The Persian War weakened the ability of both empires to exercise political influence in Arabia and helped accentuate the power vacuum that had been developing since the demise of Yemeni influence in the previous century. The war also reduced the two empires’ ability to defend themselves against third parties, and this created new opportunities for Arab aggression in the form of raiding and territorial expansion.

This explosion of external opportunities was the key factor that initiated, then drove the pace of, political change internally within the Arabian Peninsula. Indeed, the seventh-century series of Arab raids into Roman territory started (in a small way) before Islam had begun to play any role in them at all. The first major Arab attack of the period took place in 612. “The Arabs raided Syria, destroyed towns and many houses and then withdrew,” wrote the eighth-century Roman historian Theophanes, who was almost certainly quoting from a now-lost seventh-century source.